Dillon, SC Personal Injury Lawyer
If you get hurt in an accident, it is up to the person who caused your injuries to pay for the damages they caused you. However, you must prove what happened and how the other person was at fault before courts or insurance companies see to those payments.
Our attorneys can help you gather the evidence you need, build a case, and file your claim. In an insurance claim or a lawsuit, the other side will usually have a lawyer – sometimes provided by their insurance company. This means you should have your own lawyer stand up for you, too.
For a free case evaluation, contact our Florence, SC personal injury attorneys at Burriss Ridgeway Injury Lawyers at (803) 451-4000.
Making a Claim for Personal Injuries in Dillon, SC
When you make a claim for an injury case, you usually have two routes to compensation: insurance claims and lawsuits. Our lawyers will pursue both to the full extent possible until we can reach a settlement. If a reasonable settlement offer never comes, we can continue taking your case to trial.
Insurance Claims
People have insurance to protect them from lawsuits in all sorts of situations. Most injuries can be covered by one or more policies, from homeowners insurance to business liability insurance to car insurance. When you get injured, you can often file a third-party claim with the insurance policy for the person who injured you, and they should pay the claim if you can show sufficient proof that the claim falls under what the policy covers and that their policyholder was at fault.
Our personal injury lawyers should be with you every step of the way to help you talk to the insurance company. Insurance adjusters will often look for any excuse they can find to deny your claim, and getting them all of the evidence and information to prove your claim might be difficult if they are not trying to be cooperative. At the end of the claim, it might be rejected for frankly poor reasons, or the settlement offer might be so low that you cannot cover your damages. Instead, our lawyers can help appeal and negotiate a better settlement.
Lawsuits
Many cases are worth filing in court from the beginning. Suppose we file your lawsuit while taking the parallel track of filing an insurance claim. In that case, the insurance company may be more likely to settle the claim so that they do not have to send their lawyers to court and pay them for every filing and response, as that will quickly raise the ultimate cost of the case on their end. Instead, they might settle quickly to end the case.
In other claims, the insurance company may be unwilling to settle, and the defendant may be unable to afford damages out of pocket, meaning that we will have to continue to trial. However, during the pretrial stages of your case, we will take depositions and exchange evidence, and it may become clear to the defense that they are going to lose the case, spurring a later settlement.
If they still refuse to settle and have not paid your insurance claim, we can go to trial and put the case in the hands of the judge and jury. However, you do not have to make the decisions of when to settle and when to go to trial on your own; our attorneys can assess your case, calculate damages, and guide you through each step of the case, advising you on when a settlement is worth it or not.
What Do You Need to Prove in a Personal Injury Claim in Dillon, SC?
To win an injury case, you must prove to the judge and jury that the defendant was responsible for your injuries. You also need to show how much those injuries cost you – i.e., you need to prove what your damages are.
Proving Fault
Most injury claims deal with negligence – i.e., carelessness or inattention that ended up causing the victim’s injuries. To prove negligence, you have to show that the defendant breached a legal duty they owed you and that that caused your injuries and other damages.
Many cases are based on specific legal violations, such as a traffic violation causing an accident or a building code violation leading to a structural collapse. Others are based on a violation of what is reasonable in the given situation, such as a grocery store failing to mop up a spill or warning customers so they do not fall because of the mess. Many situations do not have someone present who was obviously at fault, requiring research into who owned the property, who was responsible for upkeep, who made a defective product, what doctors failed to provide proper medical care, or who otherwise caused an issue, danger, or defect that led to your injuries.
Proving Damages
You cannot get compensation if you suffered no harm in the accident. Personal injury cases primarily deal with paying the victim back for their medical bills and the other consequences of the accident, all of which fall under the category of “compensatory damages.”
You can prove your medical bills by presenting the bills themselves, and you can prove other “economic” damages like lost wages by providing pay stubs and financial statements. Other expenses brought on by the accident can also be claimed and proven with receipts and other statements.
You can also get compensation for intangible harms like damages for an injury itself or the pain and suffering associated with it. This is where damages for emotional distress are also claimed. Your testimony and testimony from loved ones and care providers can show how serious these “non-economic” damages are, and we can apply various calculation methods to assign a value based on that severity.
Lastly, you may be entitled to “punitive damages” if the defendant did something very bad to cause your injuries. However, the bar is high for these damages, and they are not typically available unless the court is trying to punish a large company for repeat negligence or very dangerous conduct.
Call Our Personal Injury Attorneys in Dillon, SC Right Away
Call (803) 451-4000 for help with your personal injury claim by seeking a free case evaluation from the personal injury lawyers at Burriss Ridgeway Injury Lawyers.
