Protecting Your Rights and Preserving Your Arizona Motor Vehicle Accident Claim

If you are involved in a serious motor vehicle accident, you can suffer debilitating injuries that permanently impact your quality of life and earning potential.  You also can incur staggering medical bills.  If you suffer a catastrophic injury like the loss of a limb, a spinal cord injury or a traumatic brain injury, the lifetime costs associated with medical care, rehabilitation and adaptive devices can easily be hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These financial hardships make it imperative that you carefully safeguard your legal rights and remedies.  Tragically, there are many car crash victims that compromise their recovery through acts or omissions made in the aftermath of a serious collision.  Our Phoenix motor vehicle accident attorneys at Ariano and Reppucci PLLC have provided suggestion for ways that accident victims can protect their right to financial compensation.

Do Not Assume Fault: Many people involved in a car accident reach hasty conclusions about fault, which may be reinforced by a traffic citation.  The process of determining who is responsible for causing a traffic collision is complicated, so you should not assume that you are financially responsible even if you receive a ticket, or the police report indicates the crash was your fault.  If you suffer significant injuries in a car crash, you should seek legal advice from an experienced motor vehicle accident lawyer who can review the police report, vehicle damage, medical records and other evidence to determine if you have a viable claim for damages.

Report the Accident & Summon Law Enforcement: If you are involved in a collision, then you should call 911, so police can appear and prepare an accident report.  While you may only notice minor injuries, an accident report will entail a law enforcement investigation so evidence is preserved if you later discover more serious injuries.

Do Not Refuse a Ride to the Hospital or Medical Treatment: There are many types of injuries suffered in motor vehicle collisions that do not immediately manifest significant symptoms.  Minor symptoms that are dismissed as inconsequential by a car accident victim can be key diagnostic indicators of serious injuries.  If you suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI), for example, you may not feel seriously ill even though bleeding inside your skull is causing pressure to build to dangerous levels.  When you decline treatment at the scene of an injury or refuse to accept an ambulance ride to the hospital, this decision can have a negative impact on your prognosis.  The failure to seek medical care promptly also might be used by the other driver’s insurance company to claim that you are overstating the severity of your injuries.  If you obtain immediate medical attention, diagnostic tests can be conducted, such as an MRI, X-rays, CT scan and/or similar diagnostic screening that can be used as evidence of your injuries.

Avoid Admissions of Fault: Many people are shaken and blurt out statements at an accident scene that they later regret.  Sometimes people feel bad for being involved in a collision even though they do not think it was their fault.  When you are involved in a crash, you should never say things at the scene that can be taken out of context to look like you are admitting that you were responsible for causing the collision.  Even a statement as ambiguous as saying you are sorry because someone was injured could later be used to suggest you acknowledged fault.

Preserve and Collect Evidence: If you have a camera on your cell phone, you should take pictures of vehicle damage, injuries, position of the vehicles and relevant physical features of the area.  Injured motorists who do not have camera phones might want to carry a disposable camera in their vehicle.  The names and contact information for witnesses also needs to be collected.

Do Not Trust the Other Driver’s Insurance Adjuster: When your medical bills are mounting and you remain too injured to return to work, the financial pressure can escalate.  These financial hardships can motivate an injury victim to attempt to negotiate directly with the insurance adjuster for the negligent driver.  The adjuster may ask you to sign a release to obtain medical or employment records for purposes of “settling your claim”.  The insurance company may even offer to send you a check.  Motor vehicle accident injury victims should remember that the representative for the insurance company has a financial interest in gathering information to deny or reduce the value of your claim.  The best approach is to let your Phoenix personal injury attorney handle communications with the other party’s insurance company.

Seek Prompt Legal Advice/Representation: There are many ways to compromise your legal claim, which include failing to comply with legal deadlines and procedures to inadvertently making damaging admissions to the other driver’s insurance company.  When you retain counsel promptly, you decrease the risk of such mistakes while allowing your attorney to conduct an investigation of your car crash before witnesses or evidence become hard to locate.  Click on this link for more info.