If the victim of a motor vehicle accident elects to work with the insurance company, in order to gain some compensation for any losses or injuries, that same victim will have chosen to forego a valuable opportunity. That is the opportunity to take advantage of the personal injury process.
General advantages to using the personal injury process
It exposes the full extent of the injuries to the driver and any passenger.
It addresses any expectations for future hardships that may face the plaintiff, due to the effects of an accident-caused injury.
What must get accomplished during pursuit of the early part of that process?
• Victim of accident contacts the police.
• Same victim tells his or her insurance company about the accident.
• Same victim gets seen by a physician.
• The patient/victim consults with and hires a personal injury lawyer in Fredericton.
How a personal injury attorney helps with further pursuit of the process?
• Offers assistance with the gathering of evidence.
• Can assign someone to take photographs. That aids collection of pictures of the accident scene, of the damaged vehicles and of the client’s injuries.
• Can work with client to obtain evidence of lost income. If client works for an employer, a pay check stub should suffice. If the client is self-employed, then the client-lawyer team work together on showing how the client’s profits suffered, while recovering from the injury.
• Calls the client’s attention to the existence of the statute of limitations. The client/victim has 2 years in which to file a statement of claim.
Alerts the victim/client to the need to check on the presence of any injuries in any passengers. If any of the passengers were children, they should be seen by their pediatrician or their family doctor.
Warns clients against settling with an insurance company before each injured victim has reached the stage of maximum medical improvement. As long as a claimant refuses to settle, that same person has a right to file an additional claim, if the doctor reports discovery of a new injury.
When clients decide to settle with an insurance company, then they abandon their right to file a claim through a personal injury lawyer. That can put a real hardship on a family in which a child or teenager was harmed in the course of a given accident. The child’s or teen’s injury might go unnoticed, and develop into a serious medical problem.
Once it gets discovered, the doctors might call for an expensive treatment. Who pays for that treatment? If the treated patient’s parents have hired a lawyer, then the defendant’s insurance company must pay for that treatment, and for any added hardships that the treated injury has brought to the affected patient’s life.