Car accidents often have significant physical, emotional, and financial consequences for their victims. Some people report feeling unsafe in their own cars after their accident, while others have serious injuries that limit their ability to participate in their normal lives. These accidents also often require medical care, which can be financially burdensome for many families.
Unfortunately, many insurance corporations will do anything in their power to avoid paying for an accident. This puts victims in an even more vulnerable position. If you are in a car accident in Rockdale, Texas, you have rights. By hiring a Rockdale car accident attorney, you can seek reparations and compensation for your damages.
For over two decades, Attorney Brian Gutierrez and his team have been fighting to help Rockdale citizens recover their damages after car accidents. We are dedicated to seeking justice for victims and helping them to recover financially from their tragedy. We know that car accidents are often a low point in a family’s life, and we do everything we can to make this time easier for you.
When you work with our team, you never have to worry about being passed off to another personal injury attorney. Attorney Brian Gutierrez works with you directly, and many of our clients have become lifelong patrons as a result. Our car wreck lawyer and legal team pride ourselves on supporting multiple communities in Rockdale.
Rockdale car accidents can occur in many different ways. Cars can collide with other vehicles, motorcycles, or even surrounding buildings, traffic signs, and landscape elements. As a result, the injuries that come from these accidents look very different. Though individual injuries may vary, common accident injuries include:
Many people also suffer PTSD, depression, or anxiety following their collision. For this reason, it is essential to consult with a Rockdale car accident lawyer as soon as possible after your accident to determine the compensation available for your injuries.
After a car accident, dealing with injuries and the mounting costs of medical care can feel overwhelming. If another driver caused the accident, you have a right to pursue compensation for your losses, but filing and negotiating a personal injury claim is rarely an easy process to handle alone.
Car accident lawyers specialize in helping injured accident victims understand their legal rights and recover full and fair financial compensation. Personal injury claimants recover three and half times more money in their settlements on average when they have a lawyer by their side, according to a study by the Insurance Research Council. There are many good reasons why car accident lawyers provide such significant value.
In most motor vehicle accidents in Texas, the first step in recovering compensation is to file a claim against the other driver’s insurance company. There ensues a period of negotiation with the insurance provider until a suitable settlement is reached.
Insurers usually try to pay out as little as possible, and they sometimes even deny claims altogether. They may employ strategies such as offering lowball settlements, persuading claimants to admit to a degree of contributory negligence, disputing the value of the damages, or delaying the claim procedure in order to make the claimant frustrated or desperate enough to accept a lower payout.
Without full knowledge of your rights, it can be difficult to know how to handle these kinds of tactics. An experienced personal injury attorney deals with difficult insurance companies all day long and knows how to overcome such obstacles, keep a claim moving forward, gather necessary evidence, and fight for the best possible financial outcome.
The laws that apply to car accidents vary from state to state. This is why it’s so important to retain a lawyer who’s familiar with the laws in Texas if you were injured in Rockdale, TX, or somewhere nearby.
It’s also advisable to hire a Rockdale car accident lawyer with legal specialization, rather than a generalist lawyer. Personal injury law is a very different field from family law, tax law, divorce law, or criminal law. A family law practitioner won’t often practice injury law and won’t have been involved with as many car accident cases as a specialist auto accident lawyer.
The intricacies of Texas car accident law also differ from those of other types of personal injuries such as premises liability, medical malpractice, dog bites, or accidents caused by product defects. So if you’ve been injured in a car crash in Texas, the most suitable legal representation will almost always be an experienced Texan car accident lawyer.
With in-depth legal specialization and experience helping many car accident victims just like you, a Rockdale car accident lawyer will be able to offer you the best advice. They’ll be able to evaluate your case and choose the correct course of action more quickly. They’ll also have access to local car accident expert witnesses who may prove invaluable in supporting your claim.
Following an auto accident, you may be fatigued by your injuries and further exhausted by the sudden disruption to your life and finances. On top of it all, the prospect of filing a claim with the other driver’s insurance company may be unpleasant and even rather frightening.
It can be tempting to put the whole claims process off, but this is often an unwise decision. In most personal injury claims, the sooner a personal injury attorney is consulted and hired, the higher the chance of winning a fair payout.
Your Rockdale car accident lawyer can handle all communications with the insurance company for you, taking that pressure away from your shoulders. They can investigate the accident without delay, calculate your damages, file the claim on your behalf, negotiate with the insurer, and deal with all communications and paperwork until your claim is fully resolved.
While your legal representation is handling the insurer, you can rest and recover your health. The relief this gives many accident victims is one enormous benefit to hiring a lawyer.
If you speak to an experienced TX attorney immediately following your accident, they may also be able to help you find suitable medical practitioners. A lawyer can even sometimes advise an injured victim on how best to finance their medical care until a settlement is won. In some circumstances, this might involve deferred payment plans with amenable physicians, which your lawyer could help to arrange.
Attorneys also keep their clients from making costly mistakes while filing a claim or communicating with the insurance provider. Without the guidance of an attorney, claimants often unwittingly diminish the value of their personal injury cases by committing errors during the early stages.
Failing to gather proper evidence from the scene of the accident is one such error. A police officer should always be called, photos and videos should always be taken, and eyewitness details should always be collected, if possible. When an injured victim fails to collect this evidence, proving their claim later on becomes more difficult.
Other mistakes include admitting to a degree of fault for your injuries: either to the other driver at the accident scene or in a statement to the insurance adjuster. Failing to seek immediate medical attention, missing follow-up doctor’s appointments, and not reporting or documenting your symptoms can also hinder your ability to later gain a fair financial payout.
It can also be a mistake to share details online of your injury, claim, or lifestyle following the accident. Perhaps the biggest mistake of all is accepting the very first lowball settlement offer an insurance company puts on the table, which is almost always something a claimant comes to regret.
With a seasoned Rockdale car accident attorney in your corner, you’ll know how to avoid these pitfalls. Your lawyer will handle all case-related communications for you and make sure that no slip-ups inadvertently rob you of a fair settlement amount.
Texas is an at-fault state, meaning that the injured victim may file a claim with the responsible driver’s automobile insurance provider. Successfully recovering compensation from the insurer requires proving beyond reasonable doubt that the other driver was liable for your injuries.
The strength of a claim often hinges on how firmly the claimant can prove the other driver’s negligence. This typically requires a great deal of evidence, including the use of accident reconstruction experts, which Rockdale car accident lawyers can also arrange.
In some automobile accidents, the negligent driver’s liability is clear. If you were stopped at a traffic light, for instance, and another driver rear-ended you because they were distracted or their brakes were poorly maintained, then that driver is clearly at fault.
Sometimes liability is less one-sided, however. If one driver was looking at their phone when the driver in front aggressively slammed on the brakes, they might both share a degree of fault for the collision.
If a first driver had the right of way when a second driver ran a red light, then the second driver is clearly responsible for the resulting accident. But if the first driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, then they might be found to share some responsibility for their own injuries.
When liability is unclear, it’s all the more important to have a good TX personal injury attorney or firm in your corner. Your attorney can unravel the details of the accident and retain various expert witnesses to explain and prove the exact timeline of what occurred.
In especially complex personal injury cases involving multiple vehicles, multiple liable parties, and multiple insurance companies, you’ll certainly need an experienced attorney by your side. Proving liability can also become more difficult in truck accidents where a large trucking company is involved. Corporate defendants tend to have stronger legal teams and more aggressive insurers than individual drivers.
If you’re unsure how complex or challenging your personal injury case is, you can ask a personal injury attorney when you visit their law offices for a free consultation.
The total value of your claim is the sum of all the damages you’re seeking to recover. Without legal guidance, it can be difficult to understand which damages to claim and how much each of your damages is worth.
Even during your initial free consultation with a TX personal injury attorney, you’ll learn a lot about the worth of your personal injury claim. Experienced attorneys can draw upon their prior cases and legal know-how to accurately establish the value of potential damages in any car accident case.
The challenge then comes when trying to prove the value of your damages, which might be disputed by the insurance provider. This also typically requires a good deal of evidence, especially if your damages are extensive.
Medical bills are the most common damages sought in a car accident claim. This may include future medical bills if you’ve suffered serious injuries that will require long-term or life-long treatment.
You might also seek lost wages, which are damages covering any income or work-related benefit you’ve missed because of your injuries. If your ability to work in the future has also been reduced, you may seek damages for lost future wages too. Proving future medical treatment and lost income damages will require a skillful lawyer who may retain medical and vocational experts to help make and support an estimation.
Property damages to vehicles are also common in car accident claims. As are damages for pain and suffering, mental anguish, impairment, disability, loss of enjoyment in life, and any other losses you may have suffered.
When seeking to prove non-economic damages like pain and suffering, you’ll need to provide evidence such as doctor’s records, journal entries, statements from a psychiatrist, and more. Your attorney or law firm can guide you on how best to collect this evidence.
In almost every personal injury case, the first settlement figure offered by the insurance company won’t be the best they can do. Negotiating a better figure is a crucial part of the legal services provided by your legal representation.
Initially, your attorney will send a demand letter to the insurer containing the full damages you wish to recover. The insurer will usually make a counteroffer, and a period of negotiation will begin.
Skillful lawyers or law firms can support your position with robust and indisputable evidence and negotiate doggedly until a fair settlement figure is agreed upon. This negotiation process can be extremely difficult for claimants to handle alone, especially while recovering from a serious injury and under mounting financial pressure, which might cloud your judgment.
When seeking compensation for your injuries, you won’t receive any money until a settlement is finalized and paid. But auto accident cases often take several months to resolve. Sometimes they can even take years.
In the meantime, you need to find a way to pay for your immediate medical expenses. This often requires claiming with your own health insurance, the personal injury protection component of your automobile insurance, disability insurance, worker’s comp insurance, or some other form of insurance.
These initial insurers will often want to take a lien on the money you win from your claim against the person responsible for your injuries. This means they’ll recuperate their money from your settlement once it’s recovered. And as previously mentioned, a medical provider may agree to treat you on a contingency fee basis, which would also often involve a lien on your claim.
It’s wise to take care when arranging liens on your claim because lien holders have first legal rights to the money once it arrives, even before you do. An experienced TX personal injury attorney or law firm can negotiate carefully with any lien holders to ensure that you still receive a full and fair payout that covers all of your losses.
Most Texas personal injury cases involving car accidents settle out of court, but it occasionally becomes necessary to file a lawsuit against the person responsible for your injuries. Even when a lawsuit is filed, the case will usually still be settled with a payout before a judge and jury are required.
However, if the insurance company refuses to agree to a fair payout, you may need to take it to be decided by jury trial. If this occurs, you’ll be facing the insurer’s legal team, so you’ll need an attorney who’s well-versed in the legal process of civil trial law. If you hire an experienced board-certified trial lawyer, they can build a strong case, retain expert witness testimony, and do their best to persuade a jury to award you a fair payout.
Bear in mind that many Texas attorneys don’t practice TX civil trial law. They never need to prepare a case for the courtroom because it’s possible to practice injury law and make a living without ever standing before a jury.
But these legal practitioners are limited in their negotiating power: they can’t effectively threaten to follow through with a lawsuit and have a judge and jury decide the case. A legal practitioner with plenty of experience trying cases in the courtroom, on the other hand, will be more than happy to threaten a lawsuit and carry out their threat if necessary.
While jury trials can be a somewhat stressful affair for the injured plaintiff, an advantage is that any compensation won tends to be much larger when it’s court-awarded. This is the primary reason why insurance companies would usually rather settle things out of the courtroom.
Proving who is at fault after a car accident can be difficult, which is why it often takes insurance companies a great deal of time to reach a payout stage. Your car wreck lawyer can help to prove the other driver’s fault by gathering proof from the scene of the accident. We can help compile evidence like:
Through a combination of these pieces of evidence, a personal injury attorney can create an idea of what happened during the crash. When we present this to the court, it will become clear that you were not at fault and that the other person or their insurance company should pay for the damages.
Your settlement following a car accident varies depending upon the severity of the accident and resulting injuries. Usually, the settlement amount accounts for:
A Rockdale car accident attorney like Brian Gutierrez will be able to help you calculate a more specific sum after reviewing your case. In addition, your attorney should provide an outlook regarding what to expect for your case. The Law Office of Brian Gutierrez is here for you every step of the way.
When looking into potential Texas attorneys, you can do a little background research on every lawyer you talk to. Make sure they’re Texas board certified, which ensures they have substantial relevant experience and can legally claim to be specialists in personal injury law.
Any lawyer you meet should also be in good standing with the State Bar of Texas. You can search for this information at TexasBar.com. You can also see how many reputable legal associations they belong to. This information will usually be displayed on a lawyer’s website.
A few more resources are the legal directories: Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers, and Martindale Hubbell, where you can find out how well-reputed attorneys are with their peers. Once you’ve found a local Texas board-certified lawyer who practices civil trial law, look for testimonials from prior clients on their website. Ideally, they should also have recovered millions of dollars for previous clients in Texas, which you can ask them about if it’s not also on their website.
You might also seek a TX car accident attorney or firm with experience in your particular case type. So if your accident involved truck drivers and a trucking company, the most suitable attorneys will be those with Texas truck accident experience. And as previously mentioned, it’s probably best not to consider generalist Texas lawyers who have more experience helping clients with family law, tax law, or criminal defense law than with car accident cases.
Finally, make sure that you get along well with whoever you choose to represent you. Good attorneys should communicate clearly and help you to understand complex legal matters with ease. This is why it’s important to meet prospective attorneys face to face, ask them plenty of questions, and make sure that you both get along well.
If you’d like an award-winning trial attorney fighting by your side, contact Brian C. Gutierrez today at 979-271-5338 for a free consultation. For the past 15 years, Brian has been helping motor vehicle accident clients in Rockdale and all around Texas win the full and fair compensation they deserve.
If you or someone you love has been in a car accident in Rockdale, Madisonville, Buffalo, or the surrounding areas, time is of the essence. The sooner you begin the legal process, the more convincing the evidence will be and the more likely you are to experience success in your claim. For more information about how we can represent your case, please contact us online.
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