If you’ve been injured by someone’s negligence, you do have legal rights that allow you to pursue a claim to get compensation for your losses and damages. A Katy personal injury lawyer can help you to learn more about exactly what your rights are given your specific circumstances and the best way to go about protecting them.
What Are My Legal Rights After Suffering an Injury?
The Right to Get Medical Help
Your first and most basic right is to get the medical help you need after any accident, even if that happens on the job, in a store, or anywhere. If someone else is responsible for the accident, it’s not unheard of for them to discourage an accident victim from going to the hospital if there are no obvious serious injuries, but you should never delay doing this.
Sometimes the adrenaline that flows through us after an accident actually masks the symptoms of an injury, so you need to visit a doctor for your own health. But this visit will also be vital for any legal claim you may end up pursuing in the future. The medical records you get will show the connection between the accident and your injury.
The Right to Gather Evidence
It’s your right to document what happened by taking photos or videos of the scene of the accident, property damage, your injuries, and anything else. If you’re in a car accident, you would want to take photos of any road hazards that might have been in the way. If you’re hurt on someone’s property, you want to take pictures that show any warning signs that may have been up (or lack of them) as well as of the hazard itself.
The Right to Stay Silent
It’s very natural after an accident to feel inclined to talk through what happened with those around you, but you do have the right not to do this, and you should stay silent until you have talked with the lawyer. Anything that you say at this point, even if it’s just something you say to be polite, can be used against you by an insurance company or even in court to claim that you are taking responsibility for the accident or have not been injured very badly.
The Right to a Katy Personal Injury Lawyer
This may be the most important right you have, because exercising this right gives you strong protection for all your other rights. It can be very difficult to deal with insurance companies, most of whom are incentivized to find ways to minimize your claim. There’s also a lot of legality and red tape involved, and a lawyer can help you to get through all of this smoothly and quickly.
Your lawyer will also make sure you’re aware of all your other rights and know exactly what you need to protect them. In some cases, your lawyer may even suggest doing an independent investigation of an accident in order to get the full story and strengthen your claim. Your lawyer will have the resources necessary to conduct that kind of investigation and can also call in an array of experts, such as accident reconstruction professionals, who can help everyone to better understand what happened.
The Right to File a Claim or Lawsuit
If you’ve been injured because someone else was negligent, that person is liable to cover your losses and damages. You have the right to seek compensation from them by filing a claim with the insurance company that covers them, and you also have the right to file a personal injury lawsuit against the responsible party if the insurance company doesn’t cover your losses or there is no insurance coverage.
Both a claim and a lawsuit can help you to recover the financial losses you’ve had due to your medical bills, lost wages, damaged property, and other issues.
Statute of Limitations
If you are considering bringing a claim, you need to be aware of the statute of limitations, because this does limit your right to bring a claim or a lawsuit. Texas only allows two years in most cases of personal injury for you to bring a claim. There are some exceptions to this, but you will need to talk to a lawyer to find out if you qualify for one of those exceptions.
If you don’t bring a claim within this two-year period, in most cases you would then lose the right to bring any claim at all. The purpose of this limit is to protect everyone. It ensures that you bring your claim quickly so that the evidence is clear and it’s relatively easy to determine what happened. The longer you wait to bring a claim, the more the evidence tends to degrade or get lost and the harder it is to prove anything.
Types of Damages
There are generally two types of damages that you may seek in these claims. The first one is called economic damages, and this covers everything tangible for which you would have a receipt or a bill. This will include the damage to your personal property, such as a car, your medical bills – including medical bills projected into the future if you have suffered a long-term injury – and your lost income from being unable to work.
Your non-economic damages include things like pain and suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, or emotional distress. You usually cannot bring an action only for non-economic damages. They are tied to your economic damages, and calculating your non-economic damages usually involves multiplying the total of your economic losses by a number between one and five, depending on how serious your injuries are.
The Right to Privacy
You might not think about privacy as being an issue in these cases, but it really is. When you’re dealing with an insurance company, it’s not uncommon for them to start demanding access to your personal information and medical records far beyond those involved in the immediate accident. You have the right to privacy, however, so you should talk to your lawyer right away before you release any personal records of any kind to make sure they are actually relevant to the accident.
The Right to an Accurate Evaluation of Your Fault
Texas has a modified comparative fault rule that allows anyone who is 50% or less responsible for an accident to seek damages. Anyone 51% or more responsible is unable to bring a claim.
Whatever percentage of fault you hold for the accident, your final settlement will be reduced by that same percentage. This makes it very important that you not be accused of holding more fault than you really do in an accident. One of the most important things that your lawyer will do for you is to assess the full value of your claim, then assess the true extent of your fault, and finally protect you against any unfair accusations of fault.
If you’ve been injured in an accident caused by someone else, you have rights. But it’s not easy to defend these rights on your own in the complicated legal system. Contact us today at the Law Office of Shane McClelland in Katy, TX or Sugarland, TX for a free consultation.