When do you need a Personal Injury Attorney?
By: Sunil Punjabi | Posted: 20th May 2010
Many people visit other people's homes. For the large majority of those visits they are good times between family, friends and neighbors. Nevertheless, what happens if you are injured at someone's home and you are injured bad enough to require medical attention, an ambulance ride or worse? While not every injury at someone else's home needs a Personal Injury Attorney to settle the expenses incurred and possibly pain and suffering.
If it requires medical attention, keeps you from work or requires follow-up treatment, it is a good idea to talk with a Personal Injury Attorney. This applies to any situation on anyone's property and you are injured or harmed. It could be a falling board from a construction site, or the can of chicken broth on the store's floor, and slipped and fell, or slipping on ice on the sidewalk that someone did not shovel. These are all examples of getting injured on someone else's property. Most Personal Injury Attorneys will give you a free consultation and let you know whether they should be retained to negotiate for you and protect your interests in possible litigation.
Imagine that you are at a friend's BBQ and they are having a sort of housewarming for their friends and neighbors in the home they bought a few months ago and have been working on remodeling many parts of the house to restore it to its early 1900s elegance. During a tour of the home, you suddenly fall through the floor and drop 16 feet onto the ground floor. You have two broken legs, a dislocated shoulder a severe concussion and several serious wounds that require emergency rescue to the nearest Emergency Room. After you are stabilized enough to be moved, they fly you off to another medical center that has the specialists you need to try to repair your body and get you back to your old self.
Who is going to pay the bills? What if they cannot get you back to 100 percent healthy? When, if at all, can you return to work to support your family? Who is going to pay the bills? We hope that your friends have a homeowner's insurance policy that will cover the medical and associated costs, but in this case, you need a Personal Injury Attorney to negotiate with the insurance company and maybe others in this situation.
A Personal Injury Attorney will conduct what is called "discovery" that is a search of anything and everything that might have caused the accident. Things like, did the friends know about the weak flooring? Did the previous owners withhold structural damage information? Did the home inspector notice any structural damage or the weak floor in the evaluation required before a real property sale? Has the floor been repaired by someone else in the past? These and many other questions can turn up surprising information that could very well help pay for all the bills, medical costs, attorney fees and much more if found in the discovery phase of your case.
These are things a Personal Injury Attorney is trained in finding and discovering what else could have or should have been done. Your attorney will also try to negotiate any settlements rather than take the chance the jury may rule against the insurance company and be required to pay much more than a possible settlement might produce. So retaining an attorney is a vital step in your recovery and needs to be tended to even if you are in the hospital or laid up at home and not being able to work.
Not every visit to a friend's BBQ or home has accidents such as the one depicted in this scenario. However, accidents like this happen all the time. You may be lighting the BBQ or cut yourself in the kitchen helping prepare the meal and these can be serious enough at times to have your injury have an impact on you physically by laying you up so that you can't go to work and pay the bills. Your Personal Injury Attorney is someone that works for you and will always try to get a settlement that is best for you. So next time you get hurt seriously enough to require a doctor's attention and follow-up, it would be a good idea to call your attorney.
If you require more information, assistance, and guidance on malpractice, Malpractice Lawyers, or need a Personal injury attorney, please do visit our site or contact us - http://www.malpracticelawyer.org/
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Tags: good times, free consultation, family friends, friends and neighbors, elegance, medical attention, emergency room, sidewalk, personal injury attorney, early 1900s, shovel, construction site, chicken broth, concussion, bbq