From the moment you submit your claim, processes begin that are all meant to identify every possible reason to pin additional fault on you, poke holes in specific line items in your damages, and ultimately pay you less so that the insurance company can save money – money that will be much more helpful in your hands. Trying to take on the insurance company by yourself — especially while you are dealing with trying to recover from your injuries — is an unfair amount of responsibility and stress for you to take on.
Hire a Personal Injury Attorney Through 1-800-Injured Today
1-800-Injured is an attorney and medical referral service. When you are working with a personal injury attorney after a serious injury, you can be confident in their handling of your situation while you are able to focus on your recovery from your injuries, as well as addressing the issues in your personal life that need your attention. A lot will change in your life, either short-term or long-term, following a serious personal injury, and in these early days and weeks, you should be able to concern yourself with these changes without dealing with complicated legal processes and fighting for the money that you deserve.
Take a look below to get a better idea of how a Boca Raton personal injury attorney can help you get the money that you deserve, and contact us as soon as possible for a free consultation and be connected with legal representation today.
What Constitutes a Personal Injury?
The first step in understanding what your options for seeking compensation are is to make sense of your actual situation and understand how your situation falls under torts. If it is determined that your injuries do fall under the umbrella of personal injuries, then you will have a right to seek compensation for your injuries, either through an insurance claim or with direct legal action against the responsible party.
For your injuries to be considered a personal injury, and therefore to be covered under American tort law, the following criteria must be proven:
- The defendant had a “duty of care” owed to the plaintiff
- The defendant failed to uphold their duty of care
- This failure led to an accident
- The plaintiff suffered measurable injuries in the accident
As you can imagine, the following criteria mean that there are a lot of different situations that can qualify as a personal injury. While no two accidents are truly every the same, many can be extremely unique and will require your attorney to go through a lot of work to determine exactly what happened, how it happened, and who is liable.
Common Causes of Personal Injuries
As the previously mentioned set of criteria for defining a personal injury shows, there are a lot of different ways that you can be injured that lead to a personal injury claim. However, the following are just some of the most common ways that people suffer from personal injuries. Whether or not you see your own situation mentioned below, contact us now to be connected with an attorney for a free initial consultation as soon as possible.
Drunk Driving
When someone is intoxicated and decides to get behind the wheel to drive, they are failing their duty of care to all others on the road by engaging in dangerous behavior. If someone drives home drunk and does not cause an accident, or is arrested for DUI without an accident, then a criminal violation has taken place, but there is no personal injury. However, if the drunk driver causes an accident and the victims are injured, then their failure to stay sober while driving opens them up to a personal injury case.
Speeding and other Reckless Driving
As with drunk driving, choosing to ignore traffic patterns, driving signs such as a speed limit, yield, or other important information, and otherwise violating the rules and regulations for the roadway they are driving on, then causing an accident while violating these rules makes them guilty of failing their duty of care. If you are in an accident with someone who was driving recklessly or dangerously, make sure that you inform the officer at the scene of the accident of this behavior so that they can be sure to enter it into the accident report.
Motorcycle Accidents
Florida is, unfortunately, one of the most dangerous states in the country to drive a motorcycle, meaning that every time you head out onto the road you are at an increased risk of getting into an accident and suffering either serious or fatal injuries. There are a lot of different reasons for this increased risk of accidents, which we will not attempt to identify on this site, but the reality is that if you drive or ride on a motorcycle in Boca Raton, it is important to know that there is an easy way to find an attorney after an accident.
Slip and Fall Accidents
Every time you legally enter public, private, or government property that someone else is responsible for maintaining, you have every right to expect that they have taken the appropriate precautions to make sure that your visit will be safe from hazards such as wet floors, faulty stair treads, broken handrails, and other avoidable dangerous situations that could cause you to slip, trip, or fall. If you are hurt on someone else’s property, NEVER sign any sort of document before speaking with an attorney, as the property manager may attempt to have you sign a waiver that will make your claims process much more difficult.
Defective Products
When you purchase a product from a licensed and registered business, it is implicit in the purchase that the product has been rigorously tested through the design and manufacturing phases, given adequate quality control attention, and that the inherent dangers with using this product have been communicated to you, the end consumer. If any of these steps — among others — were either skipped or completed improperly, and you are injured as a result, then you may be able to seek compensation from a variety of participants along the supply chain.
Medical Malpractice
Visiting a licensed medical professional for advice and treatment should be a trustworthy process, where the patient can expect that the professional caring for them is taking the appropriate and widely-accepted approach towards their treatment. There is no way to guarantee a health outcome, so working with a doctor who is unable to cure an illness is not medical malpractice; however, working with a medical professional who fails to diagnose an illness or prescribes dangerous treatment may have committed medical malpractice, and the patient may be entitled to compensation.
Calculating Damages After a Personal Injury in Boca Raton
At the center of a personal injury claim is the question of compensation: how much is the victim entitled to for damages to cover the financial impacts that the actions (or inactions) of the defendant have had on their life. Some damages are much more obvious than others, but when you are working with an experienced and aggressive personal injury attorney in Boca Raton, you can be confident that they are exploring all areas of your life to identify the damages that you have suffered, and are therefore entitled to repayment for.