Can a Fayetteville car accident lawyer make a difference for you? Yes! After a car accident, you are likely left with many questions that an attorney can answer. How will I pay for the damage to my car? How will I pay for my family’s medical bills? What is it going to cost to get treatment for my injuries?
All of these questions and many more are perfectly natural things to wonder about, but if you have never been involved in a car wreck, you likely have no idea how you should proceed.
Calling an experienced personal injury lawyer in Fayetteville will allow you to get answers to your questions and guidance on what you should do moving forward. Call Wade Law today if you have been involved in a car accident and our Fayetteville car accident attorneys will provide you with a free consultation. You will be able to sit down with experienced car accident lawyers, get the answers you need, and begin the process of obtaining the compensation you deserve.
Building a Solid Auto Accident Lawsuit According to Georgia Personal Injury Law
A car accident scene or wreck lawsuit is typically filed weeks or months after a car wreck occurs. Many times a car crash case can be resolved by settlement without ever filing a lawsuit, but in these situations, it can help to seek out the advice of an experienced car accident attorney in Fayetteville, GA.
However, there are situations where it makes sense to file a suit. For instance, there may not be adequate insurance coverage due to multiple car accident claims. It may alternatively be a case where car accidents and the insurance provider company denies that their insured was at fault in the wreck.
Another situation where immediately filing suit makes sense is where the person or at-fault driver who caused the wreck may disappear if a lawsuit is not filed quickly so that they can be served with the lawsuit.
Our accident attorney, Jonathan Wade, has been filing suit to protect victims against at-fault drivers for 30 years. Jon will advise you when and if it is in your best interest to file suit. Keep in mind that disputes can be settled at any time before or even during the trial. Finally, we always need to keep the statute of limitations (generally two years from the time of the wreck) in mind.
An experienced car accident attorney at Wade Law Firm will always file a lawsuit to protect your legal rights from expiring if the statute is looming even while settlement negotiations are ongoing so that your injury rights are protected.
Proving Fault in an Auto Accident
A car accident lawsuit is a type of personal injury lawsuit and requires you as the injured party to prove certain things by introducing evidence under the law. You as at fault party must present enough evidence to prove that all of those factual elements are more likely than not true (preponderance of the evidence).
In the past 30 years, Fayetteville car accident lawyer Jonathan Wade has tried hundreds of car accident lawsuits, before juries and judges throughout Georgia. Jon is thus at home as an experienced car accident lawyer in the courtroom and knows the evidentiary rules to prove your case properly.
Call an experienced car accident lawyer now to make sure that your case is handled properly in the courtroom. The propositions or elements that you must prove, as the injured party, are:
The other driver owed you a “duty of care”
The “duty of care” is a legal responsibility to act or behave in a particular manner. In the context of auto accidents and distracted driving, every driver owes every other driver on the road a “duty of care” and negligent other drivers must drive in a reasonably careful manner.
The other driver’s breach caused you to suffer personal injury
There must be a causal link between your injuries and the behavior and actions of the other driver. If you have suffered injuries that cannot be causally linked to the behavior of the other driver, you will not be able to recover compensation from the car insurance state or that other driver’s insurance company no matter how unreasonable his or her behavior might have been.
Sometimes the issue of causation in an auto accident is clear: a driver runs a red light and strikes you perpendicularly, causing you to sustain bruising and head trauma. Other times, causation can be challenging to prove and may require the expertise of engineers, wreck reconstruction experts, and/or medical experts to demonstrate causation sufficiently.
Fayetteville car accident lawyer Jonathan Wade has many years of experience evaluating car accident cases and working with experts like those. If your case requires such outside experts, Jon knows them and will obtain their assistance to prove your case. Call Jon now to get him started working on your auto accident case the right way.
Dealing With Insurance Companies After an Auto Accident
Insurance companies are increasingly forcing injured victims to jury trials in the auto and car accident claims arena. Lawyers for well-known nationwide auto insurance companies quietly acknowledge that defendants, for the most part, currently have the upper hand in front of juries in automobile and car accident lawyers’ litigation.
Juries, on an average basis, are giving awards that very often are less in dollar amount than the victim was offered to resolve the matter before trial. Statistics compiled by various jury research projects seem to support these observations.
Injured car accident victims should be mindful of several issues that affect the outcome of such trials. Veteran auto accident lawyers have long acknowledged that credibility or “believability” is the absolute foundation of a successful trial. In short, if the twelve jurors believe that the plaintiff/victim is injured and the alleged tort (i.e. accident) was the cause of that injury then a favorable award may be forthcoming.
Victims of auto accidents should remember to NEVER appear to be exaggerating the severity of personal injury cases official accident report any injury. Furthermore, such victims should not forget that juries generally “like” or are more receptive to people who appear to be trying their absolute best to recover from their injuries and get well.
Many other factors, of course, impact the results of an auto accident trial. There is little doubt, however, that the critical issue for any plaintiff in an auto accident suit is credibility.
There is nothing more difficult for a lawyer representing a victim of a car accident claim to deal with than a client who appears to be exaggerating auto car accident claims or injuries or feigning illness/sickness in hopes of “helping” the value of a lawsuit. Such actions are lethal to a case and easily detected by the collective wisdom of twelve jurors.
Settlement or Lawsuit? Car Accident Lawyer Advice
Litigation is defined as a lawsuit, or legal action, including all proceedings therein. To litigate a case means to settle a dispute or seek relief in a court of law. It is a judicial contest, hence, any controversy must be decided upon evidence in a court of law. It means to prosecute or defend by pleadings, evidence, and debate in a court. However, just because you hire a car accident lawyer to help you settle a dispute does not mean you have entered into a car accident lawsuit.
Typically an individual contacts a Fayetteville car accident lawyer when they are unable to resolve a dispute themselves. Once a car accident lawyer has been hired numerous avenues can be used to settle the dispute without the need for litigation.
Typically, car accident lawyers can settle disputes through settlement negotiations. This is true for all types of disputes including, but not limited to, a personal injury claim, domestic relations, business law, contract disputes, debt collection, and many others.
Attorneys are often able to remove the emotions from a situation that causes individuals involved personally to hit unpassable obstacles in solving disputes themselves. Settlement negotiations can continue for various periods, depending on certain factors including the statute of limitations set for your type of dispute.
Most actions are governed by some sort of fixed period in which litigation must commence. These time limits are set by the legislature. It is important to remember that a case can still be settled without the need for a court hearing after the case has been filed.
What to Expect in a Personal Injury Lawsuit
To initiate a lawsuit, a document called a complaint is filed with the Clerk of the Court in the appropriate jurisdiction. At this point, the person filing the lawsuit becomes known as the Plaintiff or Petitioner. The individual being sued becomes known as the Defendant or Respondent.
It is the Plaintiff’s responsibility to ensure that the Defendant is served with the lawsuit. This can be accomplished through the Sheriff’s office, the County Marshall, or by individual process servers who have been appointed by the court.
Once served, legal counsel for the Defendant files an answer, responding to the allegations in the complaint. A period of discovery commences in which law firms on both sides are allowed to develop their case by gathering relevant information that was not accessible to them before the lawsuit was filed.
Once discovery has ended the case is placed on a trial calendar and the parties wait for a trial date to be set. Throughout all of this, a fair settlement can still occur, and the need to go to court can be avoided.
During this period several alternatives can be considered for settling the dispute including mediation and arbitration. Because of the backlog in the court system today, it is often more expedient to have your personal injury case resolved through one of these avenues.
A car accident attorney can help you understand the different ways to resolve your dispute, as well as give you advice on what they believe is the best choice for your situation. If litigation, mediation, or arbitration is necessary to resolve your dispute, a car accident lawyer can help you get the best possible result.
Truck Accidents
As anyone who has been in a wreck involving a large truck or tractor-trailer can tell you, wrecks involving trucks are different. More property damage, more injuries or deaths, and more fear. The carnage and serious injuries suffered by people who have been mowed down by these “highway missiles” are unspeakable.
However, that is not all that is different. The laws are different when a commercial vehicle is involved fatal car accident. Tractor-trailers and other commercial vehicles have special rules that apply to fatal accidents with them, some involving federal and state regulations. This is why car accident attorneys are not like a typical car wreck case. If you or a loved one have been involved in a wreck with a truck, you need a car accident lawyer who has experience handling truck cases successfully.
For example, truck drivers and their companies are required to maintain certain records that are often critical to proving that the truck driver and/or the trucking company were negligent, to pursue compensation, or to increase the value of the damages. (For example, the driver’s logbooks and hours of operation).
However, these records are only required to be kept for a limited period. An experienced truck accident attorney in Fayetteville knows what to request when to ask for it, and how to interpret the data contained in those records.
As a final matter, an experienced, accident attorney along with Wade Law has the financial ability to hire the multiple experts that are often necessary to prove and present the case in its best light to a jury, such as reconstruction engineers, trucking industry compliance specialists, life care planners, economists, and medical experts.
Keep in mind the trucking industry and its insurers have unlimited resources to fight the case, and will “bully” an inexperienced lawyer into accepting a settlement that is not the true value of the case, or will present evidence and witnesses to convince a jury to return a verdict in the truck driver or companies favor.
Again, only an experienced truck wreck attorney has the knowledge, financial backing, and expertise to maximize your chance of recovering the true value of your case.
Do’s and Do Not After a Car Accident
The moments immediately after an auto accident can be difficult to navigate: unless you have been in a car wreck before, you likely do not know what you need to do or what you should avoid doing. Here are some helpful tips:
- Do check on others involved in the wreck if you are physically able to do so and summon law enforcement and medical help.
- Do NOT discuss the wreck with any other driver or say that you are sorry to any other driver.
- Do NOT tell anyone that the wreck was your fault; sometimes even if you privately believe you were at fault, an investigation will prove otherwise.
- Do take down the names and contact information of any witnesses who say they saw the wreck happen or who helped you after the wreck. I cannot tell you how many times witnesses do not wait to speak to the police, or the police do not bother to interview the witnesses. These individuals may need to be subpoenaed if your case goes to trial.
- Do NOT ignore others who are present at the wreck scene or fail to identify those individuals who provide you with first aid or other information about your wreck. Again, get their contact information.
- Write down your recollection of the wreck in as much detail as you can remember as soon as possible after the wreck. Try to avoid any outside influences or descriptions of the wreck when you write down what you remember.
- Do NOT trust your memory to be able to later recall important facts about your case. Your case may not be resolved for several months. By that time, your recollection of your wreck will have faded, and you will be less credible as a witness.
- Do seek prompt medical evaluation and treatment, even if you feel okay.
- Do NOT put off seeing a doctor or medical professional for any pain you experience after an auto accident, no matter how minimal the pain appears to be. It is possible to have suffered serious internal injuries and to manifest very few outward symptoms. Prompt treatment of these injuries is important in minimizing any negative consequences that might develop
- Do NOT speak with the other parties’ insurance companies, but only if you feel comfortable doing so.
- Do NOT sign any statement or provide any recorded statement to any insurance company without first reviewing your statement or the statement provided by your car accident lawyer.
- Do seek out the assistance of a car accident lawyer quickly as you only have a limited time to file your lawsuit.
- Do NOT delay in seeking a car accident lawyer: the longer you wait to hire a car accident lawyer, the more difficult it will be for you to obtain all of the compensation you are entitled to.
How Much Is My Car Accident Case Worth?
To gauge the worth of your car accident case, start by assessing your damages, categorized into economic and non-economic.
Economic Damages
Economic Damages in a car accident refer to the tangible, monetary costs incurred because of the accident. These are direct financial expenses and losses, and typically include:
Medical Expenses: This includes the cost of treatment, medication, hospital bills, ongoing medical care, rehabilitation, and any future medical expenses related to the accident.
Lost Wages: If you’re unable to work due to the accident, you can be compensated for the income you lost during that period. If your capacity to earn is affected in the future, that can also be compensated.
Property Damage: This covers the cost of repairing or replacing your vehicle or any other personal property that was damaged in the accident.
Non-Economic Damages
On the other hand, Non-Economic Damages are intangible losses that don’t have a direct cost but still impact the quality of your life. They’re harder to quantify and can include:
Pain and Suffering: This refers to the physical pain and emotional distress experienced due to the accident.
Emotional Distress: Accidents can cause significant psychological impact, such as anxiety, depression, sleep loss, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Loss of Enjoyment of Life: If the injuries prevent you from enjoying daily activities and hobbies, you could be compensated for this loss.
Loss of Consortium: If the accident and subsequent injuries affect your relationship with your spouse or family, it’s considered non-economic damages.
Both economic and non-economic damages are considered in a personal injury lawsuit to determine the overall compensation that a victim should receive.
Contact An Experienced Fayetteville Car Accident Lawyer
Following this list of dos and don’ts not only helps you have an easier time pursuing compensation but also helps ensure that you do not inadvertently make statements or take actions that can damage your chances of success. One of the biggest mistakes people make is saying something at the scene of the accident that later comes back to cost them their fair compensation.
Contact car accident lawyer Jonathan Wade as soon as possible after your accident, even from the scene, and he will walk you through the entire process, protecting you from all of the pitfalls that you may encounter.
If you are dealing with the aftermath of a car accident, call Wade Law today and receive your risk-free consultation with our experts. Our team will provide experienced and compassionate counsel to you, helping you put the pieces back together. You need to be able to focus on your physical recovery, not fighting with an insurance company.
We take that stress away and will aggressively work to get you the fair compensation you deserve for your damages. We are available 24/7, so call now and speak with our attorneys about your case.
You Pay Nothing Unless We Win Your Case!