Injuries can leave you with expensive medical bills, pain and suffering, and even time away from work. These experiences can all be reimbursed with money damages that can pay you back for your expenses and even for the intangible things you experience, like physical pain and mental anguish. However, knowing how to pursue these damages and how much your case is worth can be difficult without a lawyer at your side.
Our attorneys can help you calculate damages in your case, file insurance claims, and file lawsuits to help you recover the compensation you deserve. We can represent you every step of the way and be the point of contact between you, the defendants, and the court.
Call our personal injury lawyers at Leeson & Leeson today at (610) 890-6332 for a free case assessment.
Steps of a Personal Injury Case in Quakertown, PA
Starting on the day of the injury, there are many steps you should take in your case to help lock down evidence, get yourself on the road to recovery, and recover the damages you need. Our personal injury lawyers can help you – and the earlier you call us, the earlier we can help you – through all of these stages:
Reporting the Accident
When you get hurt, you should often report the accident to whatever authorities make sense. This not only creates a record of the date and time of the accident, but it also helps you start getting the medical care you need.
For example, most accidents that involve serious injuries should result in a call to 911 for an ambulance response, at the very least. With car accidents, you should also make a police report.
For accidents that happen at work or on private property – like a slip and fall in a store – police might respond with the ambulance and make a report. However, you might also consider filing an incident report with the store or the business. If the accident happened on a rental property, you may need to inform the property owner as well, such as the property management company or landlord.
Getting Medical Treatment
You should get all of the medical treatment you need as soon as you can after an accident. Your goal is to get better, but you also have a legal responsibility to “mitigate damages” by avoiding any further declines that you could have avoided. Going to the hospital, getting the treatment you need, and following through with the appointments and physical therapy they set you up with is how you recover from an accident.
Additionally, the fact that you needed medical care shows that the injury was serious, and your medical care creates medical records that can be used as part of your case to show the severity of the injuries and what your future outlook/prognosis is.
Gathering Evidence
At the scene of an accident, there is often plenty of evidence to collect if you are well enough to do so. Take pictures of car crashes and slip and fall scenes, get the names and contact details for everyone involved and any witnesses to the accident, get the insurance info for the responsible parties, and note the time, weather, lighting, and other conditions that might have affected the accident. This will be a bit different depending on the specific type of accident involved, but gathering evidence to prove your case is ultimately vital.
Our lawyers can also send out letters to businesses/homes asking to preserve security camera footage that might show the accident and other potential evidence.
Filing Insurance Claims
In some cases, an insurance claim will be your first stop at attempting to get damages. Homeowners, businesses, drivers, and workplaces all have insurance to cover accidents, and Pennsylvania law often expects you to file with insurance if you have limited tort car insurance or you were injured at work and your employer’s Workers’ Compensation policy covers you. However, accepting an insurance payout is not always the best route.
Insurance companies will often pay you far less than you need, and it takes negotiation to get you the full settlement you deserve. Our lawyers can step in, review any settlement offers, and go back to the insurance company with counters and demand letters for full payment.
Going to Court
Many settlement offers are simply too low, and the case needs to be taken to court to have any chance of success. In a lawsuit, we can get a judge and jury to review the facts and set the damages in your case rather than relying on the insurance company to decide against themselves and their own financial interests. In cases where insurance does not cover the accident, we can also go straight to a lawsuit and demand damages from the defendant directly.
In court, the case starts with filings from both sides laying out what the demand is and what grounds you have for a lawsuit. From there, pretrial motions will help narrow the issues, potentially resolving some parts of the case ahead of time. We can also make motions about evidence and try to get controversial or unhelpful evidence thrown out.
If the case proceeds without settling at a fair value, the case will go to trial. There, we can put on your case, call witnesses (including you) to testify about what happened, present additional evidence, and give the decision to the jury.
Just because a case goes to court does not mean that it automatically has to go to trial. Close to 98 or 99% of injury cases are ultimately settled, and this can often drive down the legal costs associated with the case, potentially leaving more money for you at the end of the settlement. However, if the insurance companies and defense lawyers simply refuse to pay you a fair sum, we are prepared to take the steps necessary to go to trial.
Call Our Personal Injury Lawyers in Quakertown, PA Today
Call our personal injury attorneys at Leeson & Leeson today at (610) 890-6332 for a free review of your potential personal injury claim.