Our Acworth Personal Injury Attorneys Are Here to Help
Choosing to work with an Acworth personal injury attorney is often the first step towards arriving at a satisfying settlement that repays you for damages you have suffered in an accident. Your legal team will provide support and services that include:
- Legal guidance and well-informed strategy throughout your case
- Calculation of all loss of wages, medical costs, and pain and suffering
- Experienced legal representation and extensive resources to investigate your accident
Especially if your case goes to trial, you want a legal representative to fight for you and the compensation you need to recover fully after your accident. Personal injury attorneys focus on collecting and reviewing evidence, constructing a solid claim, filing and communicating between parties, and doing everything else available under the law so that you can maximize your chances of receiving compensation for the full extent of damages you have suffered.
Collecting Evidence
A claim cannot be filed if there is no evidence — both of fault and of the damages suffered. The road to recovery from a personal injury case can be difficult, with multiple doctor appointments, prescriptions for pain medication, surgeries, and physical therapy sessions.
Victims face additional financial burdens when attending to their injuries because of lost working hours, ability to do their work, and miscellaneous costs like hiring a nurse or help at home. These financial hits quickly become burdensome for many families and compromise their financial stability.
Any related medical bills become part of your claim, including future projected medical needs and appointments. It may be difficult to discern the time it will take for a full recovery, but your personal injury attorney will calculate the damages that apply to your case.
An experienced pedestrian accident lawyer is familiar with similar cases and what it takes to make things right. In addition, your attorney will collect medical diagnoses, images, videos, witness statements, and the police report that further details the event that led to your injuries.
Avoiding Partial Liability
Georgia is an at-fault state, meaning that more than one person might be responsible for the accident at hand. Although the victim is faced with a series of injuries and added responsibilities to receive medical attention, they can potentially be at partial fault for what happened.
A perfect example is a car accident, where the victim crashes with someone driving under the influence. Although the other party was drunk, the victim was also speeding, which violates Georgia driving rules and laws, and, therefore, may face partial liability for any damages.
If you are found partially at fault for an accident, you may not request compensation for that percentage of costs. So, if you were found 50% at fault for an accident, you may only claim 50% of the total damages to the negligent party’s insurance company.
Even still, it is vital for your own stake to fully verify the fault and fight any attempts to assign liability to you, in part or in full. Your attorney will help you avoid any reductions in your payout to the extent possible, in other words.
Understanding the Georgia Statute of Limitations
A personal injury claim cannot be filed at any time. In fact, state law indicates that personal injury claims have two years from the accident date to file a case with the court system.
The reason for a limit on the time frame is to prevent cold cases with aging evidence from moving forward in the docket. If, for whatever reason, they do, they can easily be thrown out by the judge.
The statute of limitation is why victims must contact an attorney as soon as possible. Handling a personal injury case comes with its own nuances due to the broad spectrum of legal questions and the need for thorough documentation.
Attorneys will need time to process, evaluate, and prepare a solid claim for compensation from the other party. If both cannot settle immediately after the request for compensation is received, they will require room for negotiations if the amount offered is under what it should be.
Choosing to work with an attorney as soon as possible also allows for all preparations and negotiations to be completed with time to prepare to stand before a judge in a trial if needed. While only a small number of cases proceed to a lawsuit, those that do will require ample time to prepare for the often lengthy trial process.
