Getting into a car accident can turn your world upside down in an instant. Not only does your vehicle end up damaged, but often you’re facing medical bills and dealing with repair quotes and persistent calls from insurance representatives while trying to heal. If this sounds familiar, you understand the overwhelming nature of this situation and can appreciate just how helpful a Sugar Land car accident attorney can be in helping you with your claim so you can concentrate on recovery and returning to your routine.
How Can a Sugar Land Car Accident Attorney Help My Car Accident Claim?
By Building a Strong Foundation with Evidence
As soon as you try to bring a claim, you face questions about who is at fault and to what degree, how serious your injuries really are, whether the accident caused them, and more. Things can be even more complicated if you are in an accident involving several vehicles. One of the important jobs of your lawyer is to go into these particulars and clarify exactly what happened and what you’ve lost.
Evidence collection means a lot more than just reviewing the snapshots from your phone. A lawyer pursues traffic camera recordings from municipal sources or the Texas Department of Transportation; retrieves phone logs to tell whether the other driver was distracted; analyzes vehicle data recorders for details on speed and braking; talks with witnesses; and possibly even engages accident reconstruction specialists to piece through the evidence and tell precisely what happened.
Without this kind of comprehensive approach, evidence can be lost and things can get murky, particularly if the opposing driver challenges your account. Under Texas’s modified comparative fault system, any partial responsibility attributed to you, such as if you were to be found 20% at fault, reduces your compensation accordingly. A lawyer works diligently to reduce the amount of blame being directed at you and get you all the compensation you’re entitled to.
Through Negotiating with Insurance Providers
The interaction you have with the insurance firm is critical to the overall worth of your claim. You can expect the insurance adjuster to contact you pretty promptly and to seem very empathetic. But don’t forget that their primary goal is to minimize the payout that goes to you. Often, you receive an initial offer that addresses your short-term expenses but overlooks not only long-term problems, like rehabilitation requirements, but also minimizes your pain and mental anguish damages.
A lawyer will be familiar with the common insurer strategies, such as payment delays or injury undervaluation, that are designed to keep them from having to pay you too much and push you to accept a lowball offer. A car accident attorney with lots of experience will have dealt with many insurance companies in these situations and know how to bring negotiation skills to work for you.
Getting You All the Compensation You’re Owed
You probably think right away of getting reimbursed for your medical bills and vehicle repairs, and those are important and foundational to your claim. But there’s a lot more that could be involved, and if you’ve never had to calculate a claim like this before, it can be easy to miss something. You may qualify for reimbursement for lost earnings, and this can mean more than just reimbursement for the hours of work you missed. If you missed overtime opportunities, are no longer eligible for a bonus that you were working towards diligently, or even missed out on vacation days or promotions, this needs to be calculated, too.
You are also allowed to recover non-economic damages, which is the legal term referring to pain and suffering or reimbursement for the emotional and psychological suffering you’ve endured. A lawyer can bring all the medical documentation, physician assessments, witness testimony, payroll evidence, and more to bear to measure your damages precisely.
Coordinating Medical Care and Documentation
As you heal, you’re very likely concerned about getting better and also covering costs. This often moves a victim to do things like delay visiting specialists to avoid a high medical bill, but this involves you in a sort of Catch-22. You’re postponing because you need money, but the insurance company interprets your postponement as an indication that the treatment itself is not really necessary or that the harm to you was not that bad. A lawyer can help you in several ways here.
For one thing, once you have engaged a lawyer, your lawyer can assure healthcare providers that you are in the process of a personal injury settlement. Often, healthcare providers are willing to delay payment in these situations and instead put a lien on your settlement. This just means that they are guaranteed to be paid once the settlement goes through. An experienced personal injury attorney may also have a network of healthcare providers they work with frequently who are willing to defer payment in these situations.
By Managing All Legal Filings and Deadlines
When you have to submit a claim or start a lawsuit, there are always deadlines involved and lots of documentation required. This can be too much for you to do on your own when injured, especially if you’ve never done anything like it before. A lawyer knows exactly what the deadlines are and will make sure everything is submitted properly, on time, and with all necessary documentation and evidence.
Your lawyer will also keep things moving. Insurance companies have been known to stall negotiations in these situations because they are hoping to get past the statute of limitations. Once you get past that deadline, you can no longer bring a lawsuit, no matter how strong your claim is, and if you haven’t reached a settlement by that point, you have virtually no leverage against the insurance company. Your lawyer knows about this tactic and will keep pushing so you don’t lose out.
Addressing Unique Situations
Unlike in certain states, personal injury protection insurance remains optional here in Texas, which means most victims have to rely on the culpable party’s coverage or uninsured motorist provisions. When the responsible driver lacks insurance, your lawyer knows how to explore all alternatives. It’s also possible that you’re facing a hit-and-run situation, and in that case your lawyer may work with investigators to locate these drivers and get them to own up to their responsibilities.
In fatal accidents, a wrongful death action might need to be brought by the victim’s surviving loved ones to pay for burial expenses and other losses, and these have to be handled with special sensitivity. Rideshare accidents introduce new difficulties which an experienced lawyer knows how to work with. Commercial trucking cases involve multiple possible liable parties, federal safety regulations, and often especially serious injuries. Pedestrian or cycling encounters demand knowledge of roadway entitlements; and when you’ve been hit by an impaired driver, there’s the need to establish the extent of the liability, potentially ask for punitive damages, and bring your claim in concert with whatever criminal charges the state may be bringing.
These are just a few ways a personal injury attorney can be very valuable after a car accident. To learn more about how we can help, contact the Law Office of Shane McClelland in Katy, TX, where we serve clients in Katy, Sugar Land, Rosenberg, and Fort Bend County. We also serve clients in Nebraska and Colorado.
