What Are Some Common Mistakes People Make After Being Injured?
The biggest mistake people make is not thoroughly treating their injuries. People often just shake off their injuries, whereas they should be going to real physicians and doctors if they have been injured.
Another mistake people make is that they come to us six to seven months after the accident, telling us they were in an auto accident and had tried to treat their injuries with a chiropractor but they had a certain injury for a while which just did not seem to go away. They might have been receiving treatment initially from physical therapists or chiropractors for a period of time, but after we get a hold of them, we send them to an orthopedic doctor so that they could get an image of the damages.
The image would show some damage and then the question would become how to know that the damage was indeed caused by the accident because there would have been a six month gap in time. People should get thoroughly treated and make sure they got examined early.
People end up in the emergency room and the first thing the emergency room would tell them is to follow-up with their treating physician. The person should create a timeline, which would be like a chain of evidence regarding what happened and when. As soon as the person walked out of the ER go see their family physician, they would need to tell them what happened, where things were going, and then develop and follow a treatment plan according to that instead of trying to self-diagnose, self-treat and self-evaluate, because that is where people tend to go wrong.
A lot of times when a client comes in, it would have been six months since their accident, during which time they would not have had any real treatment. They would know that something was wrong but at that point an attorney would almost not even want the case because there would be too many hurdles to overcome.
I have had many bad experiences when a client walked in late and I found out there was evidence of another injury. The medical records would show a different injury in the middle of after the event, which becomes something that we are not able to fight in court. The biggest mistake people make is not treating their injury properly or early enough and then they listen to the advice of people who are not lawyers and who do not know what they are talking about. People should speak to real attorneys and real doctors to get real advice on how to proceed.
What Are The Biggest Misconceptions People Have About Personal Injury?
The biggest misconception people have about personal injury as a whole is regarding the amount of damages that injury would be worth, and the amount of damages they might be awarded. The second thing they usually have misconceptions about is how juries handle personal injuries, because these two things are related.
People think they would be able to get money just because they got hurt, but that is not the way it works. The person should make sure they have insurance coverage and they would need to make sure they have some kind of mechanism in place to pay for the damages they sustained. Another misconception that people commonly have is that their case would always be worth a lot more than they expected because juries can do all kinds of things.
There is a case where a woman got a multi million dollar verdict for her personal injury related to a coffe spill. I worked in the construction business in the 80’s when I was in high school, and one of my jobs was to pick up the coffee in the morning. The company advertised that they have the hottest coffee around and it was always hot, and it was actually just as they had advertised– it was hot. They received many complaints about it being too hot and people getting burned.
In the instance where the woman got all the money, she was able to successfully prove her case to the jury because of all those complaints. In addition to getting the jury to award a substantial amount of money like that, a person would also need to show the jury some kind of physical damage.
Everybody only talks about her getting burned on her lap from the coffee, whereas people do not realize the last part of the story that nobody heard. The woman had third degree burns perlvic area, so she ended up having to have skin grafts to fix that. That was the part that sent the jury over the edge because McDonald’s knew about this for years but still served their coffee scalding hot, and in fact it was hot enough to cause a third degree burn.
Coffee would be just as good if it was very hot, but not scalding. At a certain temperature, things tend to burn skin, so it would not be important to have something at that temperature for it to be good. The jury picked up on this point and used it. Everybody hears about juries giving huge awards, but they do not always do that. Some juries can be extremely reasonable and they usually give what is appropriate. The actual amount in the above case was two days’ worth of total coffee sales for the company.
What Is The Statute Of Limitations For A Typical Personal Injury Case?
Maryland has a three year statute and Pennsylvania has a two year statute of limitations. The statute of limitations would be the time till when the person could sue, because after that time they would be barred from bringing their claim.
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