Lawyers advertise all the time that they want to help injured individuals recover money after a truck accident. What do they mean by that? If you’ve been in a truck accident, how exactly can an experienced truck accident law firm help?
Truck Accidents Turn Your Life Upside Down
Let’s step back and take a look at the damage truck accidents can cause in your life. What will you need help with after getting injured or losing a loved one in a truck accident?
Physical Injury and Tragic Death
Truck accidents often cause severe, life-altering injuries and fatalities. They’re more dangerous and violent than ordinary car accidents. Why? Because trucks are large and heavy. When they collide with other vehicles or fixed objects (like highway overpasses or buildings), they usually cause significant damage. Trucks also carry cargo that may spill during accidents. Depending on what the truck is carrying, spilled cargo can create deadly conditions by obstructing a roadway, releasing toxic chemicals, or exploding. Victims of truck accidents who survive them often face catastrophic injuries, such as:
- Spinal cord injuries and paralysis
- Traumatic brain injuries
- Crushed or traumatically-amputated limbs
- Burns
- Severe bone breaks and other orthopedic injuries
- Lacerations, abrasions, and internal organ damage
Recovering from any of these injuries frequently involves extended hospitalization, multiple surgeries, and agonizing pain. Even maximum recovery might not return a truck accident victim to full health.
Emotional Injury
Truck accidents don’t merely injure the body. They also leave lasting emotional scars. Oftentimes, truck accidents cut a wide swath of destruction on roadways and areas surrounding them. Individuals involved in truck accidents face a higher-than-average probability of witnessing other people suffering from catastrophic or fatal injuries. They see things they can’t un-see.
The psychological trauma of witnessing and being involved in a truck accident can last for years, triggering anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress, and a host of other ailments. Truck accident victims often need years of therapy to recover their mental wellbeing.
Relationship Injury
When one person gets severely hurt or dies tragically in a truck accident, that person’s suffering may also affect family members, friends, and co-workers. The stress and difficulty of hospitalization, uncertain recovery, ongoing therapy, and doubts about the future weigh heavily on personal relationships. Marriages fray. Friendships buckle. Life just doesn’t seem to be able to return to what it once was. The injuries done to relationships during this time can heal, of course, but it takes the sort of patience and empathy that can feel in short supply when every day is a physical and emotional challenge.
Financial Injury
Last, but certainly not least, truck accident injuries and losses inflict massive financial costs on victims and their families. Truck accidents put victims out of work for extended periods, leaving them without the essential income that they need to pay bills and keep a household running. They also take work time away from family members and spouses, who find themselves strained by having to support the victim’s rehabilitation while also having to try and earn a living.
Truck accidents also inflict new expenses on victims and families that likely cannot afford them. If they’re lucky, victims and their families will have insurance that covers medical expenses and ongoing treatment and therapy. But a lot of the time, insurance isn’t enough. There are co-pays to worry about, not to mention the host of expenses that insurance either doesn’t cover or doesn’t cover enough to make affordable.
To take just one example, treating and living with a spinal cord injury typically costs at least $1 million over a person’s lifetime, and often two-to-three times that much. If even a fraction of those costs isn’t covered by insurance, it can break the average family.
A Truck Accident Law Firm Can Help
Lawyer’s aren’t miracle workers. They can’t solve every problem for a victim of a truck accident. But an experienced truck accident law firm can help address some of the largest challenges truck accident victims and their families face. Below we discuss some of the ways.
Helping Truck Accident Victims Recover Money Damages
A truck accident law firm’s first and clearest mission is to recover money for accident victims and their families. Yes, we know (and we agree) that money doesn’t heal injuries and doesn’t bring back a loved one tragically lost to a truck accident. Money is a poor substitute for enjoying life pain-free, having a loved one by your side, or not having to worry about your long-term health. But the reality is, it’s the best (and in many cases only) compensation for those losses that are available for truck accident victims.
An experienced truck accident attorney knows how to give truck accident victims the best shot at recovering maximum financial damages for their injuries and losses after a truck accident. Truck accident law firms can never guarantee success; that’s just not how the American legal system works. But a reputable truck accident lawyer should have the skills, confidence, and resources to do everything possible to investigate, negotiate, and—if necessary—litigate a client’s claims.
Those three tasks—investigation, negotiation, and litigation—represent the core services provided by an experienced truck accident law firm. They’re tasks that most people, let alone most truck accident victims, cannot handle on their own. And they just happen to be the three things you need to be able to do—and do well—if you want to maximize your compensation.
- Investigation involves gathering all of the evidence relevant to a truck accident and a client’s injuries in the accident to determine how the accident happened; what damages the accident inflicted; and who has legal liability and the ability to pay. Truck accidents are complex beasts. They inflict widespread damage, which needs to be analyzed. There are witnesses to interview, police reports to dissect, and physical evidence to collect and have inspected. Truck accident law firms have the know-how and resources to do a thorough job of investigating so that no stone is left unturned in the quest for money damages.
- Negotiation involves making a demand for compensation on the parties who have legal liability and the ability to pay, and then engaging directly with those parties and their representatives to negotiate a fair and reasonable settlement. In lots of cases, truck accident law firms end up dealing directly with insurance adjusters who have a bag of tricks designed to limit their company’s financial exposure. Experienced truck accident lawyers know the ins-and-outs of these tricks and how to avoid them.
- Litigation means using legal processes to claim monetary damages (and other forms of relief). Often, litigation leads back to additional negotiation. Sometimes, when a settlement cannot be reached, the litigation process leads all the way to a courtroom where the truck accident law firm argues its client’s case to a judge and jury.
The aim of all of these steps is to obtain a maximum financial award for victims of truck accidents and their families. No one is better at executing these steps than an experienced truck accident lawyer. In a nutshell, recovering money damages is the biggest way that a truck accident law firm can help you.
Helping Truck Accident Victims Calm the Chaos and Regain Control
An experienced truck accident lawyer gives victims and their families a break from what often feels like unrelenting chaos and uncertainty. Truck accident law firms represent clients going through some extremely difficult times. Part of their job is to develop and communicate a legal strategy to those clients in a way that says: “Hey, it’s going to be okay. We’ve got your back.”
By giving victims and their families a boost of confidence and a sense that the legal side of their lives is under control, truck accident law firms help their clients begin to regain a sense of stability over their own lives. Clients get the time and head-space to deal with the trauma they’ve endured. They receive calm, sensible, plain-English explanations and advice from their lawyers about the progress of their cases and the decisions they need to make.
Helping Truck Accident Victims Return to Work/School/Life
Truck accident lawyers who care don’t just say the words “we’ve got your back,” they mean it. That includes making sure that the injuries and losses suffered by a truck accident victim do not stand in the way of the victim returning, to the greatest degree possible, to work, school, and/or life pursuits. A truck accident might inflict a disability on a victim, but the law protects the victim from being discriminated against for that disability. A truck accident law firm can either help enforce the rights of truck accident clients who face discrimination because of a disability or can help put that client in touch with a lawyer who specializes in providing that kind of legal service.
Helping Truck Accident Victims Answer Questions and Make Decisions
Another word for lawyer is counselor, and there’s a good reason why. Lawyers are duty-bound to act in their clients’ best interests. They are licensed to provide legal advice, but their years of experience helping people face down the most difficult periods of their lives also gives them a wealth of knowledge about how clients can make it through and move forward.
An experienced truck accident attorney welcomes calls from his or her clients’ seeking advice and guidance, not just about purely legal questions, but also about life questions that have a law or law-related component. No, we’re not saying lawyers are guidance counselors or social workers, but they do have lots of experience and a particular skill for helping people find answers to important questions and helping people weigh the pros and cons of difficult decisions.
Find Help From a Truck Accident Law Firm
If you’ve been injured or lost a loved one in a truck accident, then consider seeking the advice and counsel of an experienced truck accident law firm right away. Yes, we understand that when life goes haywire and you or someone you love is suffering, retaining a lawyer might not be the first thought on your mind. But for the reasons we explained above, truck accident law firms can help you confront this difficult time in lots of ways, some of which you might not have even imagined.
There’s another reason to call on an experienced truck accident law firm right away. The sooner you get a lawyer involved in representing you, the better job the lawyer can do for you. Why is that the case? Because:
- Evidence gets harder to obtain with every day that passes after a truck accident. Clean up crews sweep the accident scene. Witnesses’ memories start to fade. First responders move on to their next emergency, and their next one after that, making it more difficult to pin them down on the facts of your accident. When a lawyer can get started investigating right away, that gives them the best shot of obtaining a complete picture of how your accident happened and who owes you money for your injuries.
- Some parties settle with the insurance companies and other parties with legal liability. Truck accidents cause lots of damage, and frequently there’s only a finite amount of money available to pay everyone. You want to get your claim on record as soon as possible if you want to recover maximum compensation. To do that, you need an experienced truck accident law firm on your side.
- If you wait too long, you will lose your rights. The statute of limitations on seeking compensation for your truck accident injuries may be shorter than you imagine. Don’t risk losing out on your right to compensation by waiting to find a truck accident lawyer.
To learn more about how a truck accident law firm can help you, contact an experienced truck accident attorney today.
