Broken Arrow Personal Injury Lawyers

If you’ve been injured in an accident, you know just how quickly your life can be turned upside down. You might be out of work, you might have mounting medical bills. You might have limited options, a significant amount of stress, and pain that won’t go away.

You do have legal options, but the personal injury legal process is not one that is designed to be easy for you. There are many obstacles in your way that you must overcome with the help of an experienced attorney.

What Is a Personal Injury Case?

A personal injury case is the legal process that you would follow when you suffered an injury at the hands of another person or an entity. These injuries can cover any type of harm to your body or emotional wellbeing. In most cases, you are dealing with a physical injury. There are other consequences that may go along with a physical injury, which can include depression and PTSD.

When you have been injured by someone else, you need to go through an entire process before you can even get a dollar from them. First, you would need to establish that the other person was to blame for the accident. Second, you must negotiate compensation for your injuries that fully and fairly pays you.

Types of Personal Injury Cases

Personal injury cases can encompass a wide variety of circumstances. You can be hurt any time you leave your home, and even in your home itself. Anytime that you put your trust and wellbeing in someone else’s hands, they may not live up to the duty that they owe you.

Personal injury cases for which you may need an attorney include:

• Car accidents
• Bicycle accidents
• Construction accidents
• Premises liability injuries
• Rideshare accidents
• Pedestrian accidents
• Oilfield accidents
• Medical malpractice
• Motorcycle accidents

No matter what type of case is at issue, you will always benefit from the help of an experienced personal injury lawyer. Otherwise, the insurance company will run roughshod over you in the claims or litigation process.

Potential Defendants in Personal Injury Cases

In most cases, the person who was directly involved in the accident with you would be the one against whom you would file a claim or lawsuit. For example, if you were hurt in a car accident, the other driver may be the one who would be responsible for paying your damages.

In some cases, you may be able to sue a company for the harm that they either caused you directly or through one of their employees. In personal injury law, there is a concept known as respondeat superior. This is a Latin term that is translated to “let the master answer.” When an employee is acting within the scope of their work duties and they injure you through their negligence, their employer has a legal obligation to pay you. Lawsuits against companies could lead to more financial compensation because the company has its own insurance policy and assets to pay for your damages.

Some potential corporate defendants in a personal injury case include:

• Landlords or property management companies
• Store owners in premises liability claims
• Trucking companies
• Hospitals (who are liable for malpractice that their doctors commit)
• Restaurant owners (in premises liability or dram shop cases)
• Product manufacturers

There may even be multiple parties who were to blame for your accident. Then, you should be expansive and sue every possible defendant in your case. You do not want to let anyone who was responsible remain unaccountable.

How Is Fault Determined in Broken Arrow Personal Injury Cases?

No matter what type of personal injury case you file, the thing that you must prove is always the same. You must show that someone else acted wrongfully and it caused your injuries. Most often, the wrongful conduct is negligence.

To be clear, not every accident involves negligence. This is a legal term of art that describes some sort of carelessness or behavior that fails to live up to what is expected of someone in society. Specifically, negligence involves some type of wrongful action or inaction.

There is a four-part test that is used to determine whether someone was negligent in a personal injury lawsuit. Both a jury and insurance company will apply this year when they are determining whether you are entitled to financial compensation. You must prove each and every single element to become eligible for financial compensation.

The four elements are as follows:

• Duty of care. This is a relatively easy test to satisfy. Most people owe another a duty of care when they are in a position where they can injure another. For example, a driver on the road owes a duty of care to everyone else around them on the roadway, including other drivers and their passengers.
• Breach of the duty of care. The other party breached the duty of care by doing something that would be considered unreasonable under the circumstances. In other words, they have acted in a way that the average person would not have through their actions or inactions. For example, if another driver rear-ended your vehicle, they have done something that an average driver would not have done.
• Injury. You must suffer some type of injury to your person or emotions (although you generally cannot sue another party for infliction of emotional distress without some sort of physical injury).
• Causation. You must prove that the other party’s actions were the cause of your injury. If you were to blame for the accident, or you would have been injured anyway, regardless of what the other party did, you may not be able to prove causation.

In a personal injury case, the legal standard is that you must prove your case by a preponderance of the evidence. This standard is lower than the one that a prosecutor must prove to win a conviction in court (it is 51% percent certainty as opposed to 100%).

You must come forward with evidence that shows what happened. You have the affirmative obligation to gather this evidence before you can become eligible for financial compensation. If you do not have the evidence, you would not qualify for a settlement check.

One thing that you need to be careful of is an attempt to blame you for the accident. Texas uses the law of modified comparative negligence in personal injury cases. If you are more than 50% to blame for the accident, you will not be able to qualify for any compensation whatsoever.

Even if you are less than 50% at fault, you will still see your compensation cut by the percentage of fault you bear for the accident. For the insurance company, blaming you is “low-hanging fruit” that they can pick to save themselves some money. They are more likely to use this trick when you do not have a lawyer to protect your interests. When you do have an attorney, they will defend you from any wrongful allegations that can cost you money. You need every single dollar of the settlement to cover your damages in the future.

Compensation in Broken Arrow Personal Injury Cases

The legal concept in a personal injury case is that the responsible party must restore you to the same position that you were in at the moment before the accident, using money for things that they could not physically accomplish. They must pay for the economic and non-economic costs associated with the injury.

Economic costs measure your actual financial losses, and they pay you for things like medical expenses and lost wages (or a reduction in your earnings capacity). Non-economic damages compensate you for the effects of the physical injuries that you have suffered.

Non-economic damages may include:

• Pain and suffering
• Loss of enjoyment of life
• Scarring and disfigurement
• Embarrassment and humiliation
• Emotional distress
• Depression and anxiety

It is naturally very difficult to both value your non-economic damages and to be fully compensated for them. Insurance companies never take your word for anything, and they do not like to compensate you for things that they cannot see on paper in front of them. You must take careful steps to document your non-economic damages because you have the burden of proof to show all of your damages before you can be compensated.

The insurance company is going to make you paltry settlement offers if they accept liability for your claim. They want to put you through an entire negotiation process to wear you down and make you less of a threat to them. Your attorney will review any settlement offer that you receive and let you know whether it is in your best interest to accept it. If the answer is no, your lawyer could either make a counteroffer or they can file a lawsuit in court.

How Nix Patterson’s Broken Arrow Personal Injury Attorneys Can Help

When you are filing a personal injury claim, you are almost always dealing with an insurance company. If you have been hurt in an auto accident, you must face the auto insurance company. If a business was responsible for your injuries, they would have their own liability insurance policy.

Insurance companies all operate using the same principles, no matter what type of insurance they provide. They are notoriously cheap because they know that the payment that they must make to you comes directly out of their own profits. They will use a number of hardball tactics that are aimed at making your claim or lawsuit more difficult.

Insurance companies may do the following:

• Unreasonably deny your claim in the face of evidence that you have presented (or denying the claim when liability is a closer call)
• Try to pin some or all of the blame on you to attempt to evade liability altogether or to reduce the amount of money that they need to pay you
• Delay responding to and dealing with your claim to make you more financially desperate
• Make you settlement offers to either drag out the process or make you more willing to accept the amount of money that they are putting in front of you

Hiring an experienced personal injury lawyer is one way to counter whatever the insurance company may try to do to you. Insurance companies are afraid of attorneys because lawsuits run up their own costs, and lawyers can force them to pay what they owe you. At the same time, you are not equipped to handle your own case, both because of your injuries and lack of knowledge of the legal process.

When you hire one of our personal injury lawyers for your case, they can do the following:

• Investigate the cause of your accident to determine who you may be able to sue
• Gather evidence that shows that someone else was to blame for the accident, establishing your legal right to financial compensation
• Handle all communications with the insurance company on your behalf, keeping them from being able to trap or trick you
• Review your damages to help you learn how much you may be due in compensation
• File the insurance claim or lawsuit on your behalf
• Continue to build your case during the lawsuit process if you have taken your case to court
• Try your case in court if you are unable to reach a settlement agreement

How Much Does a Personal Injury Lawyer Cost?

The good news is that it does not cost you anything out of your own pocket right now to get the lawyer you need for your personal injury case. The personal injury legal system runs in a different way than other types of law. Other lawyers may bill you by the hour, asking you for a retainer upfront before they even begin work on your matter.

A personal injury lawyer is paid in a different way. To be clear, a personal injury attorney does not work for you for free (although they will if you do not win your case). The lawyer is paid when you win your case by receiving a settlement check or jury award. Then, they are paid directly out of the proceeds of your case before the money even hits your account. Thus, you do not write checks to personal injury lawyers.

Statute of Limitations for Personal Injury in Texas

Texas law tries to be fair to both plaintiffs and defendants in various respects. You have legal rights and access to the court system, but they only last for a certain amount of time. Otherwise, the defendant may be sued years in the future when they do not have their own evidence to tell their side of the story. Then, you would have a distinct advantage over a potential defendant, who may have no idea that they will be sued years into the future.

Texas law sets the statute of limitations at two years from the date of your injury to file a claim or lawsuit against the responsible party. If you miss this deadline, you will lose the right to file a claim or lawsuit entirely. There are very few exceptions to the statute of limitations, and they are very strictly construed.

The two years begin to run on the date of your injury or when you should have known that you were injured. If you did not learn that you were injured until weeks after your accident, the statute of limitations would begin to run then. However, you must use reasonable diligence to learn of your injuries, and you cannot pretend that nothing is wrong in the face of obvious potential symptoms.

Contact a Broken Arrow Personal Injury Lawyer Today

If you have been injured in an accident, you need legal help immediately to put you in a stronger legal position. The Broken Arrow personal injury lawyers at Nix Patterson have a long track record of providing exceptional service while obtaining results for our clients. You can schedule a free initial consultation with one of our attorneys by messaging us online or by calling us today at 512-328-5333. And remember, you do not owe us anything at all unless you win your case.