Were you seriously injured in a truck accident? Learn what to do after a truck accident and check out these 3 truck accident tips. Call us!
1. Steps After A Truck Accident
The recommended steps after a commercial truck injury are really kind of two-fold. One is to make sure that your medical treatment is being paid for. We would like to make sure that you file your no-fault application promptly to make sure that you are getting your medical paid for, your lost wages, and things like that. The second part of that is doing the investigation. We make sure that we have the names of all witnesses that may have seen the accident. We get written and recorded statements from them. Memories fade over time. It’s not enough that you just got a name and number from somebody; that’s easy. You want to get that person’s recollection of the accident while it’s fresh in their mind. There’s nothing worse than talking to a witness two years after an accident versus a month after an accident, because the recollections are going to be totally different; people’s memories fade, so it’s important to get involved right away and get those people locked in.
2. Choosing a Truck Accident Attorney
After a commercial truck accident, you want to make sure that you get a lawyer involved immediately because the investigation stage of that accident is very important. There could be several different insurance carriers on the line as it relates to a specific truck. The truck itself may be owned by one company. The trailer may be owned by another company. The box that’s being towed by the company may be owned by somebody else. There may be another company that secured the load to the truck. Say the accident happened because a load shifted in a truck; there may be another company involved that was responsible for securing the load to the truck before it got on the road. There are a lot of different moving parts to these types of accidents, so it’s really important to make sure that you get a lawyer involved right away to start pursuing that investigation. That investigation may include making sure that video is secured. If the accident happened on an interstate or something, they may have some video. That could be very important in determining who caused the accident.
3. Truck Accident Case Value
With a commercial truck case, determining the value of your injury is a case-by-case basis. We look at the severity of the injury. Did someone lose a limb? Did they, God forbid, lose their eyesight or something really catastrophic? Those cases are actually somewhat easier to value. It’s the other cases where you may have a neck injury or a back injury that are harder to value. Those injuries may prevent you from working or doing your normal and customary activities. When you have those kinds of cases, making sure you get fully compensated is really important. Sometimes we have to hire experts, because you may have this back injury and you may need future back surgeries, so we need to determine how much medical care you’ll need in the future and what that future care would be. With that, what future household services will you need? Say your injury was such that you need to hire someone to plow your driveway, cut your lawn, things like that. There’s a value to that, and we hire experts to make sure that those values are presented to a jury or an insurance company to make sure you’re fully compensated.
Last but not least, you have your pain and suffering damages and of course that’s a case-by-case basis. Someone who has a serious physical injury at age 20, is going to have a case worth more than someone that may be at age 70, just because of life expectancy. This person that’s 20 has another 60 years of pain and suffering they have to live with, so that could increase the value of their claim.
Were you or a loved one seriously injured in a wreck and have questions about these 3 truck accident tips? Contact a Hamburg truck accident lawyer at Chiacchia and Fleming today for a free confidential consultation and case evaluation. Let our experience work for you.
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