Were you injured in a motorcycle crash in Arizona? Read these 3 motorcycle accident tips and contact Gilbert Lawyers at Free Injury Advice.
After a Motorcycle Accident
What do you need to do to protect your rights? In fact, a motorcycle accident victim called our law firm the other day and asked that question of one of our attorneys.
Here’s what our attorney explained. The first thing that you need to do is make sure that your follow up medical care is the best medical care you can get. People are kind of surprised that we emphasized that rather than the legal aspects. We can assist you by making some referrals to doctors who, even if you don’t have health insurance, they’ll see you. They’ll take care of you. You’ll probably need quite a bit of follow up, rehab, physical therapy, things like that. You may need a lot more than that. That’s the first step.
Give us a call. Even if you haven’t decided if you’re going to have us represent you, we’ll still make those referrals because we want you to get the best medical care possible. Then after that you want to make a wise choice for the law firm who’s going to represent you. Sometimes, those law firms claim to focus on motorcycle cases, but we really focus on this. Oftentimes, what they do is, when the injuries are so much more than the insurance, they spend most of their time just negotiating with the hospitals and insurance companies and try to bring the costs down so that at least their client gets a couple thousand or something in their pocket.
Call us early and even if you want to call several firms, that’s fine. Get information early and you’ll get a feel for who’s probably going to do the best job for taking care of your motorcycle injury case. We’re always looking for additional sources of recovery beyond the obvious, the insurance of the driver who caused the accident. One of our favorites is we look at do you own other vehicles? Do people in your household own other vehicles? Do they have full coverage?
If they have full coverage, do they have underinsured motorist coverage? If they do, we can often use that and it has no effect on their insurance rates and it helps you. If they don’t or you don’t, we may be able to bring a claim against your own insurance agent because they probably had a responsibility, especially if you’re a motorcycle rider to make sure that at least one of your vehicles had underinsured motorist coverage. That can be like free money for you.
Common Mistakes After a Motorcycle Accident
If you’ve been a motorcycle accident victim, you’ve heard stories about people that made mistakes that cost them thousands, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars because they didn’t know. We have that question come up fairly often with people contacting our office who have been in motorcycle accidents. Recently they posed that question to one of our attorneys. What the attorney explained is there’s plenty of common mistakes. One of them is just accepting what an insurance adjuster has to say about the accident situation.
Let’s say someone was not wearing a helmet and they had some significant head injuries. It’s very common for an insurance adjuster to say no helmet, no pay. Hopefully at least at that point you will call us, if not before.
Another very common thing is they’re always looking for ways to not pay. They’ll say hey, you want your bike fixed? Of course, you want your bike fixed. They’ll say you’ve got to give me a recorded statement. Do you think they’re taking that for their educational benefit? They’re looking for any way that they can blame you totally or partially for what happened.
They’ll ask you about speed, what you saw before whatever, and you can just answer questions that you think are fairly innocent. Then they have their little accident reconstruction and say look at that. You see? He said he was going 53, not 52. They’ll say he actually contributed to this accident or he could have avoided it. That’s one of their favorite ones. Call us first.
For our clients, we don’t ever have them talk to insurance adjusters and get recorded statements. We say, you want some information? You give us the questions in writing. We’ll give you the answers in writing. That allows us to make sure that they’re not trying to trip you up. Then those things don’t happen to our clients.
Selecting a Motorcycle Accident Attorney in Arizona
How do you choose the right motorcycle injury lawyer? For one, you need an attorney and firm that understand motorcycle riders.
There aren’t that many law firms like that out there, but there’s some that hold themselves out as the go-to motorcycle accident attorneys. Usually what they end up doing is the bills are so much higher than the insurance company limits that most of what they do is just negotiate with hospitals and stuff to try to get the amounts that they have to pay back less so their client ends up with a couple thousand or 3,000 in their pocket so they don’t end up with 0. What we do is we’re looking for insurance that isn’t obvious, so not just the at-fault driver. The attorney explained this the other day when somebody called in in this situation. There’s what’s called underinsured motorist coverage. That can be available when it’s not obvious. As the attorney explained the other day to a motorcyclist that was involved in a serious accident, the other driver only had $25,000. Their medical bills were way more than that. Do you own any other vehicles that have full coverage and might have this uninsured motorist coverage? They did own some other vehicles that had full coverage. Unfortunately, they did not have underinsured motorist coverage, which sometimes we can actually make a claim against the agent who didn’t give them that coverage. That’s kind of a big mistake. We can get an expert to say if they knew they were a motorcycle rider and they have a policy on their truck, I should have had underinsured motorist coverage. If they didn’t, that’s a professional mistake. We can make a claim on the agent’s own insurance policy. There are other ways that we can find additional insurance. Even if you’ve been told that’s all there is, there’s just $25,000 or $50,000 or whatever, call us and let one of our attorneys review that situation and see if we can find some additional insurance coverage. If we do, it’s like free money, found money. Another way, as an example, the attorney explained, is if there’s somebody else in the household, a relative that has a vehicle with full coverage. The motorcyclists may be able to use that coverage and not even affect the insurance rates of their brother or their father or their mother. Then there’s even ways beyond that, but you need to call and let one of our attorneys analyze the situation. We can tell you if that’s a possibility or not. All those things go into just take the easy money, the quick money, and then are they out of there? That’s probably not the motorcycle injury attorney that you want. Can they tell you about situations? We had one where a motorcyclist had a very serious injury. The insurance policy was only $100,000. The person who was at fault had a house that was totally paid off. In addition to the $100,000, we got them to pay several thousands of dollars more on top of that. Is the other law firm willing to do that? Another way that you can tell if you’ve got the right motorcyclist law firm is what do they do if you do get $100,000 or $500,000 or in rare cases $1,000,000? We had a situation where a 20-year-old was riding a motorcycle with a friend and they both got hit by an older lady. She had $100,000 insurance limits. Our client got $100,000 and his friend got $100,000. The difference was we had our clients’ money put into a lifetime annuity, and he’s still getting money today. His buddy, who was riding behind him, blew all of his money in less than a year.
Were you injured in a motorcycle crash in Arizona? Read these 3 motorcycle accident tips and contact Gilbert Lawyers at Free Injury Advice.