COMMON QUESTIONS:
This webpage is not a subtitute for legal advice
This webpage is simply intended to provide some basic information on questions we often receive from persons who are injured in collisions as a result of the negligence of other drivers. However, every case is different and even the most seemingly insignificant fact can change your rights, needs and obligations. If you intend to pursue a personal injury claim it is recommended that you contact an attorney. Walsh and Associates has extensive experience helping hundreds of clients know their rights and obtain full and fair compensation for their injuries and will discuss your case with you for free in an initial consultation.
What should I do if I am involved in a collision?
If you are involved in a collision, it is imperative that you obtain the complete contact information and insurance information for all of the involved vehicles and drivers. Make sure you ask for the other drivers? drivers? license number. It is always advisable to take pictures of the property damage to both vehicles. You should report the collision to all involved insurance companies in a timely manner. Do not agree to give a recorded statement to anyone, even your own insurance company, until you have consulted with a lawyer. You also have an obligation to submit a DMV report within 72 hours if the collision involves more than $ 1,500.00 of property damage or if anyone is injured.
Who will pay for my medical bills?
In Oregon, reasonable and necessary medical bills which are deemed to be related to a car accident are initially processed by your own car insurance company under your Personal Injury Protection (PIP) coverage. All Oregon car insurance policies are required to have this insurance and they are all required to provide at least $15,000.00 in coverage for at least one year after the crash. It does not matter who is at fault for you to be entitled to these PIP benefits, but if the other driver is at fault, your insurance company will seek reimbursement for all their expenses from the negligent driver?s insurance company.
If you need medical care from injuries received in a car accident you need to contact your car insurance company and complete a PIP application form. Your insurance will provide you with a PIP claim number which you will need to provide to any medical provider who treats your injuries. It is important to have your injuries evaluated, treated and documented as soon as possible after a collision.
If your insurance denies any of the bills, you can challenge that decision in a PIP arbitration. Attorneys can offer help with completing any of the forms, sending in the medicals billings, or challenging any denial issued by the PIP carrier.
Who will pay for my wage loss?
All of your loss of income is recoverable from the negligent drivers? insurance. However, it may take some time to settle that claim. In the meantime, to help pay the bills while your claim is pending, your car insurance (PIP) is required to pay you at least 70% of your loss of income up to at least $1,250.00 per month for up to 52 weeks if you have missed 14 days of work.
What damages can I collect as a result of my personal injury?
Compensation, or damages, awarded in personal injury claims vary based upon the type of injury and cause. The most commons forms of compensation include payment for:
- Medical Bills
- Property Damage
- Lost Wages
- Emotional Trauma
- Physical Disability
- Mental Disability
- Pain & Suffering
How do I know what my case is worth?
There was a time when formulas (such as 3-5 times medical bills) were used as a reliable indicator of what an insurance carrier would pay for a case. For many years now the insurance industry has abandoned this approach in favor of a case by case evaluation. Ultimately, your claim is worth whatever a jury decides is fair compensation for your case. To predict what a jury might award in a given case requires a full knowledge of the facts of your case and an extensive knowledge of what juries award in similar cases.
Often reviewing the medical records carefully and making a fair evaluation of the true value of the case is where an experienced attorney can provide the most valuable service to an injured person.
How long do I have to settle my personal injury claim or file a lawsuit?
In Oregon, most car accident cases have a two year statute of limitations, although differing timelines exist for certain cases such as those involving minors, public entities, wrongful death claims or uninsured or underinsured motorist claims. It is important to know the statute of limitation deadline on your claim because all of your rights to seek fair compensation for your injuries will be extinguished if you do not file a lawsuit or settle your claim before the statute of limitations deadline expires. Usually a lawyer can help you determine your statute of limitation during a free initial consultation.
What if I have a death or serious injury claim?
Because of the high stakes involved in death and serious injury claims, the insurance carrier will often invest more resources to hire experts and lawyers on these more high value cases in an attempt to minimize or defeat the claims. This places unrepresented people in an unfair and disadvantaged bargaining position. Attorneys can often help equalize the bargaining positions of the parties and can help injured clients achieve a more fair result that takes into consideration all their injuries and damages.
Serious injury or death cases also often involve a number of other complicating factors including multiple family members, probate issues, unpaid medical bills, hospital, health insurance or Medicaid claims, contractual and statutory liens, calculation and proof of loss of earning capacity claims, and many other issues that lawyers can help sort out and deal with for you during a time when you have to attend to more important matters.
The insurance company says that I only have soft tissue injuries?
The term soft tissue injury is generally used by insurance adjusters to refer to people who have injuries to their muscles, ligaments, and tendons. Soft tissue injuries include strains, strains, backaches, neck pain, shoulder pain, and pulled muscles that are not objectively and clearly verifiable by MRI, X-rays or other irrefutable objective imaging or electrodiagnostic tests.
Often soft tissue injuries last a great deal longer and cause more intense pain than broken bones. However, because of the lack of objective evidence these cases are often valued far less by insurance companies and are often settled for far less than fair value because of the difficulty in proving anything more than a simple 3-5 month strain. This is especially true if the crash caused minimal property damage.
For these reasons, it is especially important for people with serious soft tissue injuries to retain council who have experience in successfully obtaining fair compensation in these types of cases.
At Walsh & Associates we know that each case is unique and even though most soft tissue injuries do resolve soon after a crash, there are always exceptions and that even soft tissue injuries can be devastating. The devastation of these injuries is compounded by insurance adjusters who tell you that you only suffer from a soft tissue injury and seem to challenge the truthfulness of anyone with a long term soft tissue injury.
At Walsh & Associates we know the proving a soft tissue injury is substantially more difficult than proving a broken bone. Nevertheless, at Walsh & Associates we know that there are clients that deserve six figure recoveries on soft tissue injuries because we have seen juries return such verdicts for several of our clients.
What if the responsible driver has no insurance?
If the negligent driver has no insurance, you can usually make a claim against your own insurance company for UM or UIM benefits. Your insurance company can then pursue a claim against the negligent driver to recover their costs.
Uninsured motorist coverage (UM), or under insured motorist coverage (UIM) will generally pay you the same amount of compensation that you could have recovered from the responsible negligent driver for your medical bills and personal injuries if that negligent driver would have purchased insurance in the same amount that you purchased for your car.
The insurance company has just offered me $1,500.00 plus PIP, should I take it?
Often insurance companies will make offers between $500.00 and $1,500.00 shortly after a crash. The offer may seem generous and the insurance carrier may demand very little proof of injury in the hopes of reaching quick settlement on a large number of cases. Insurance carriers know that it is virtually impossible for you to know the future of your injuries (and thus the true value of your claim) shortly after a crash while treatment is still underway. Although sometimes this type of offer may be more than fair for a particular case, if a great number of cases are settled this way, then some moderate and even some large value cases may be settled for far less than full value. For the insurance company it is the settling of these potentially larger cases that can more than make up for the insurance company expenses on the other small cases.
The problem with these quick offer settlements is that there may be a good chance that your case might be more significant and might have a value much higher than the offer.
If the insurance carrier also says they will pay all reasonable and necessary medical billings under PIP this is no guarantee that your future medical billings and wage loss will be paid by PIP. This is because the PIP carrier can still deny a medical bill if they deem it is not reasonable, necessary, or related to the crash or if the medical bills have exceeded the PIP policy limits, or if the treatment is more than a year after the crash. If a medical billing is denied by the PIP carrier after a personal injury settlement has been finalized, it may be very difficult to find a lawyer to undertake the case and appeal the PIP denial. This is because attorney fees usually are not available to resolve the PIP disputes after the underlying claim has been resolved. The difficulty in hiring an attorney to challenge the PIP carrier's denial of a medical bill can place you in a vulnerable position if you need to rely on the PIP carrier to pay future medical bills after you have settled the underlying claim.
How long will this take?
Because it is important to know (not just guess) about the extent and duration of your injuries, it is generally a good idea to wait until you are medically stationary or done treating before settlement discussions are started with the negligent party's insurance company. Only after all the medical treatment is completed will an attorney be able to review all the medical records and fully and fairly evaluate your claim.
For this reason, the duration of the injury and treatment are the most important factors in determining how long the case will last. After you are medically stationary an immediate request for all the updated medical records can be sent out to your medical providers and insurance companies. Only after these records are received can the case be fully evaluated. Once the evidence and injuries are evaluated, your lawyer can then prepare a comprehensive demand letter. Thereafter, the case can be settled for fair value or the case can be litigated.
Why do I need a lawyer to represent me in my personal injury case?
Sometimes, especially on short term injuries where a fair offer is made, you may not need a lawyer to settle your claim. However, often an attorney can offer many services that will often make the process easier and result in a higher net recovery to you to compensate you for your injuries. Some of the services may include the following:
1. Help guide you through the PIP paperwork, and deal with your PIP insurance carrier on medical bills and wage loss issues.
2. Assist and help protect your interests during any recorded statement.
3. Collect known medical records and bills, verify outstanding balances for medical providers that would need to be paid from any recovery.
4. Identify and advise you on any deadlines or applicable statutes of limitations, and identify any need for tort claim notices or other contractual or statutory obligations.
5. Pursue contractual claims for UM or UIM benefits, if applicable.
6. Confer with your doctors to understand and document their medical opinions.
7. Coordinate and assist in the hiring and delegation of tasks to any other experts (such as accident reconstruction or specialized medical experts) that may be needed to help prove your claims.
8. Evaluate and prepare to defend against any adverse insurance medical opinions (IME).
9. Obtain, read, and evaluate all the evidence in the case and form an opinion about the full and fair value of your claim.
10. Write a full demand letter outlining all the claims and the proof for each claim with full documentation.
11. Engage in settlement discussions with the carrier in order to obtain full and fair compensation for all injuries.
12. File any needed litigation, file all appropriate motions, and complete all required discovery including taking the depositions of the negligent driver and protecting and defending you in any deposition requested by the insurance carrier.
13. Participate in any settlement conference of court action prior to trial.
14. Take the case to trial or arbitration if any claims could not be settled.
15. Appeal the case, or defend against an appeal, if necessary.
Why should I hire Walsh & Associates?
Walsh & Associates emphasizes personal injury claims and has extensive experience in handling, settling, and litigating auto injury cases. Our practice area includes the full range of auto injury cases ranging from soft tissue injuries to the severe, catastrophic and death cases. We have successfully handled thousands of cases over the last two decades.
Although most cases settle, Richard Walsh has an exceptional reputation for successfully litigating jury trials in personal injury cases. He has received recognition for his trial techniques and for assisting clients with record breaking or near record breaking verdicts in auto injury cases. He has written continuing legal education papers and has given lectures on auto injury cases to lawyers, doctors, and law students. His article on how to handle Insurance Medical Examiners has been published in the statewide trial lawyer magazine. For a more detailed summary of the bio and accomplishments of all our lawyers at Walsh & Associates please see the lawyer profiles.
Most importantly, we know that every case is unique and that our clients want and deserve to have their case handled by their attorney and not by just paralegals, clerks, or other staff. For that reason we pledge that the lawyers at Walsh & Associates will give each case their personal attention. Your calls will be returned in a prompt and respectful manner and each lawyer at Walsh & Associates will gladly meet with you in person to address your concerns during your case.
|