Suffering a significant injury can create a number of hurdles to overcome, including soaring medical bills, physical pain, lost wages, and property damage. Identifying the best way to recover your damages can be a daunting task, but if someone else’s negligence is to blame for your injuries, you deserve compensation.
Unfortunately, maneuvering through the complexities of insurance claims often turns into an exasperating ordeal for personal injury victims. Despite promises of support, insurance adjusters prioritize their company’s bottom line, which could mean minimizing your settlement or denying your claim entirely.
How can you safeguard your legal rights when a significant injury disrupts your life?
Consult a Forsyth County Personal Injury Attorney Right Away
At the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm, we know how frustrating a personal injury can be.
While you’re in pain and dealing with doctor’s appointments, you may miss work and lose income. At the same time, you could have a flood of new medical bills and sometimes property damage repair estimates.
Meanwhile, the insurance company is most concerned with saving money, and they may find fault with your claim for multiple reasons.
We don’t want anyone to struggle with uncertainty or wonder about their legal rights after a personal injury, so we offer free consultations to anyone with a potential personal injury matter. Our legal experts will review your case, respond to your questions, and discuss the options for recovering compensation.
If you want to move forward with our help, you won’t pay us anything until we win or settle your case, so please contact the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm today to learn more.
Is It a Personal Injury Case or an Unavoidable Accident?
Frequently, injured people struggle with this question. In some situations, the accident victim has a good idea of what happened and who was responsible.
For instance, if another driver rear-ends you in traffic, you will probably assume they are at fault, and while there are occasionally exceptions, it’s usually true that the rear driver is responsible.
But not every accident or injury is this clear. Perhaps you were in an accident at a four-way stop, and now you’re questioning if you remembered the rules of four-way stops correctly.
What if you and the other driver were both confused about who had the right of way? What if you were wrong about having the right of way, but the other driver was distracted by their phone and didn’t notice?
Or, maybe you weren’t in a car accident. Maybe you were walking around a friend’s yard, helping them set up for a yard sale, when you tripped and fell.
Whose fault was that? Did you simply trip over your own feet?
This is a common assumption after slip-and-fall or trip-and-fall accidents, but it’s not always true. Sometimes, a person who believes they were just clumsy actually tripped on some sort of hazard at the location.
If the property owner was aware of the hazard and made no effort to fix or warn you about it, they might have been negligent.
If you have even the slightest doubt about what happened or suspicion that someone else might be at fault, we recommend consulting an attorney to find out more.
How Does Your Lawyer Prove Negligence?
We’ll start by examining the evidence in your case, including the police report if applicable. We may also assign an investigator to search for additional information, and then we look for the four elements of negligence:
- The potentially liable party had a duty of care. Most of the time, we all have a duty to avoid unreasonably negligent behavior that could harm others, but this looks different depending on the situation. A person driving a car has a duty to follow traffic laws and avoid reckless driving, for example. Meanwhile, a property owner has a duty to maintain a relatively safe environment free of significant hazards.
- The duty of care was breached. Let’s say a building manager knows the roof is leaking but does not take steps to collect the leaking water (like a bucket) or warn others about it with a “Wet Floor” sign. In this situation, the building manager may have breached their duty of care.
- This breached duty of care harmed you. One of the most important things we have to show is that the defendant’s behavior not only breached their duty of care but also caused their injuries. Another way to look at it is that your injuries would not have happened but for the other party’s actions.
- Your injuries resulted in damages. You have X amount in medical bills; you lost Y amount in income when you couldn’t work, etc. But damages aren’t only economic—you can also seek compensation for non-economic damages like pain and suffering. However, you still have to show precisely how the breached duty of care caused your injuries.
What if Both Parties Are at Fault?
This happens more often than you might think. Georgia uses modified comparative negligence statutes, which recognize that more than one party can cause or contribute to an accident or injury.
Being partly at fault does not necessarily mean you can’t collect damages.
Georgia employs a “50 percent bar to recovery” rule, which means you can recover damages if you are less than 50 percent responsible. Whatever percentage of fault you have below 50 percent will be deducted from your final settlement.
So, if you have $20,000 in damages and are found to be 15 percent at fault, you would lose $3,000 and recover $17,000.
Like many of our clients, you might wonder who decides an injured person’s percentage of fault. Most of the time, it’s one or more insurance adjusters.
Only in rare cases is the matter resolved by a judge or jury—the majority of personal injury cases are settled before a trial is necessary.
There are several ways an insurance company might take advantage of modified comparative negligence laws:
- Remember, the insurance company doesn’t have to pay anything if you’re over 50 percent at fault. If they estimate your share of responsibility as over 50 percent, they’re off the hook. Sometimes, this estimation might be accurate, but in other cases, the insurance adjuster may have exaggerated the injured person’s contributions.
- An inflated percentage of fault can still be a problem if the estimate is below 50 percent. For example, maybe you were only 10 or 15 percent to blame for an accident, but the insurance adjuster has assigned you 30 percent of the fault. You can collect damages, but depending on how much your total claim is worth, you might lose thousands or tens of thousands to this discrepancy.
- Occasionally, an adjuster may assign some degree of fault to an injured person who did not contribute to the injury. If it’s a relatively small amount, the injured party may accept the insurance company’s decision, but again, they would still lose money.
An experienced personal injury lawyer will review all the evidence and work to develop a realistic picture of how much you contributed to an accident (or if you contributed at all). When we notice the insurance company’s estimate of the client’s culpability is too high, we’ll negotiate for a more reasonable number so they can recover the best settlement possible.
What Is the Last Clear Chance Doctrine?
Sometimes, the at-fault party or their legal team will use the Last Clear Chance doctrine as a defense in a personal injury case. While the party which is all or mainly (over 50 percent) at fault is usually responsible for damages, the Last Clear Chance rule provides one exception.
It states that if the injured party could have used “ordinary care” to avoid the accident or injury, they can’t recover damages.
For example, let’s say that a pedestrian is walking on the sidewalk next to a road. A speeding car jumps the curb and crashes into the pedestrian, injuring them.
In most cases, the reckless driver would be at fault in this scenario. However, if the pedestrian saw the car and had time to move out of the way, they would not be able to recover damages.
Fortunately, this defense can be difficult to execute. It would, for instance, be challenging to prove that a pedestrian could get out of the way of a speeding car quickly enough to avoid being struck. However, in some cases, the negligent party’s lawyer might believe they can make a solid Last Clear Chance argument.
If the defendant in your case attempts to do this, your lawyer will work to demonstrate that you could not have easily avoided your injuries through reasonable care. While these situations can be upsetting for a client who would prefer to have avoided their injuries, an experienced personal injury attorney can often defeat a Last Clear Chance defense.
What Other Issues Might You Run Into With an Insurance Claim?
Disagreements about fault comprise a large percentage of insurance claim issues, but there are other ways an insurance adjuster might cost you money. Another significant problem is undervaluing your claim.
If the insurance adjuster can’t make a cohesive argument that you were somehow at fault, they might instead focus on nitpicking your damages. One example is claiming your injuries were unrelated to the accident the at-fault party caused.
Unfortunately, this argument is more straightforward if the injured person waited several days or weeks to see a healthcare professional about their injuries. We know that people sometimes wait to seek treatment for legitimate reasons—they may not have had pain or symptoms immediately or might have thought their injuries were milder than they were.
However, the insurance adjuster will see an opportunity to deny damages related to the injuries.
We recommend seeking medical care as soon as possible after you suffer an injury, even if it doesn’t seem serious. However, if you do find yourself in this situation, we’ll work to show how the accident caused your injuries, using medical records, expert testimony, and other evidence to support your claim.
In other situations, the adjuster could accept that the accident caused your injuries but refuse to pay for specific treatments, arguing they’re unnecessary or another (usually cheaper) treatment would be sufficient. Again, we’ll fight to get approval for the therapy your doctor believes is necessary.
Aside from economic damages like medical bills, an insurance adjuster may undervalue non-economic damages such as pain and suffering.
Many injured people have no idea how these damages should be valued because they don’t receive an “invoice” for their pain. However, it is still a valid loss, and they deserve fair compensation.
The most common method insurance companies use to calculate pain and suffering is the “Multiplier Method.” In this calculation, the adjuster multiplies the injured party’s economic damages by a number between 1.5 and 5.
Ideally, this number should correlate with the injured party’s level of pain and suffering, but in some cases, the adjuster chooses a lower number, which skews the value of the non-economic damages lower.
Often, people who handle their own insurance claims don’t know if an estimation of pain and suffering is fair and may accept a lower amount than they deserve. However, a knowledgeable personal injury attorney will review the insurance company’s calculations and, if they appear incorrect, negotiate for a better deal.
For all these reasons, we recommend reviewing any insurance company settlement offer you receive with an attorney before making a final decision.
Where Can You Get Help From a Forsyth County Personal Injury Law Firm?
The CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm is ready to assist you with any potential personal injury matter, including car accidents, premises liability, medical malpractice, defective products, and any situation in which another party’s negligence may have harmed you. If you believe you might have a claim, please contact us for a free consultation to learn more about your options.
Attorney Ali Awad founded the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm only a few short years ago, and it is now one of the fastest-growing law firms in the country. With the help of his team, Mr. Awad has recovered millions of dollars in compensation for injured people and their families.
When he’s not hard at work on a case, you can find him on social media, where he posts legal advice for over a million followers. Work with Attorney Awad’s expert team when you call (833) 254-2923.
