Houston Car Accident Lawyers

The aftermath of a car accident in Houston is extremely difficult to navigate for anyone. Notwithstanding the potentially serious physical injuries that you may have suffered, you are also dealing with a myriad of details that can be both challenging and frustrating.

How you handle the days and weeks after a car accident could even determine whether you qualify for financial compensation and how much you may get. The Houston car accident lawyers at Nix Patterson can both make your life easier and fight for you to get every dollar that you deserve in financial compensation.

Causes of Houston Car Accidents

A recent study in Forbes ranked cities in the United States where residents are most likely to get into a car accident. Houston ranked eighth in the entire country, showing exactly how dangerous it is to drive in the city. Houston is known for its tangles of highways and its residents’ tendencies to speed. When there is traffic, Houston drivers focus on their own desire to get where they are going, as opposed to your safety. Surprisingly, Houston’s roads are even more dangerous at night when there are fewer motorists. That time is when drivers can become extremely reckless because they have more space to do so.

Common causes of car accidents in Houston include:

• Speeding
• Drunk driving
• Distracted driving
• Inexperienced drivers
• Fatigued driving
• Failure to check blind spots
• Aggressive or reckless driving
• Improperly maintained cars

In addition, there is a chance that the road itself could be the cause of the accident. The road could be so poorly designed or maintained that it was unreasonably dangerous. This can happen when there is a hodgepodge of highways that see extremely heavy traffic, as there are in Houston.

Your car accident lawyer’s job is to investigate the circumstances of the accident. They will help you determine who you can sue for the accident and then file a claim or lawsuit on your behalf.

Common Houston Car Accident Injuries

Roughly one-third of Houston car accidents will result in some type of physical injury. However, you may not know that you are unharmed for quite sometime after the crash because accident injuries can take some time to show symptoms. You can suffer injuries that are immediately apparent at the scene, or you can begin to feel pain in the days after the car accident.

Common car accident injuries include:

• Broken bones and fractures
• Head and neck injuries
• Soft tissue injuries
• Cuts and lacerations
• Internal injuries
• Spinal cord injuries
• Traumatic brain injuries

Any car accident injury can cost you both financially and physically. Any time you go to a hospital for any type of treatment, you look at a bill that will reach thousands of dollars. If you need surgery, the bill could reach five figures.

Your financial compensation depends on your medical diagnosis and being able to prove the full extent of your injuries. Your physician’s diagnosis will form the basis of your car accident claim.

Why Do You Need a Lawyer After a Car Accident?

You likely have many questions about the legal process after you have been injured in a car accident. You may have a vague idea about your right to financial compensation when someone else caused the accident and you were hurt, but you do not have any idea of the steps that you need to take. At the same time, you are also dealing with an insurance company that could be either a brick wall or actively pressuring you into talking or making mistakes. What is worse is that you may never even know that you made a big mistake until it is too late.

Your car accident lawyer takes on many roles in your case. At first, they are both an explainer and an investigator. They explain the law and your legal situation to you, answering any questions that you may have. The legal process is new to you, and you need to know what to expect.

At the same time, your lawyer will perform a complete investigation of your car accident as the first step toward filing a claim or a lawsuit. They will talk to witnesses and pursue all available leads. There is a sense of urgency here because your case gets harder to prove as more time passes.

You also need a lawyer to maximize the amount of financial compensation you can receive. Study after study shows that car accident victims who hire a lawyer will do better financially than ones who think they can save a few dollars by trying to deal with the insurance company on their own. In reality, you would be costing yourself far more money by trying to handle your own case. What is worse is that you will never even realize it until it is too late (if you ever even know it at all).

Your lawyer gives you the information that you need in a car accident case. Here, the old adage of information being power could not be more true. The insurance company certainly has quite a bit of it. They are loath to share anything with you that can take away the natural advantage that they may have. Instead, they are going to try to leverage any edge that they have to pay you less. Hiring a car accident attorney helps level the playing field.

How Do I Win a Car Accident Case?

Your car accident compensation rests on being able to prove that the other driver involved in the crash was negligent. A driver is not negligent simply because they were in an accident. Negligence has a very specific legal meaning in any personal injury case. Here, it means that you have proven each element of a legal test.

The four elements of the negligence test are as follows:

• The other driver owed you a duty of care
• They failed to uphold their duty of care by doing something that would be considered unreasonable under the circumstances
• You suffered an injury
• You would not have been injured had it not been for the actions of the other driver

You must prove negligence by presenting your own evidence of what happened before the accident. Without this evidence, you cannot carry your own burden of proof. Your lawyer would get to the bottom of your car accident, gathering proof along the way that can be used to support your case.

How Do I Get Compensation in a Car Accident Case?

You have two possible routes towards financial compensation after a car accident injury. First, you are never assured of anything, and you should not take things for granted. Texas car accident laws are more challenging than those used in other jurisdictions. The insurance company may claim that you are ineligible for compensation if you were even 1% to blame for the car accident.

Your first route to financial compensation is to file a claim against the other driver’s insurance policy. Texas law mandates that drivers have a minimum amount of insurance before they get behind the wheel of a car. Once you can prove that the driver was to blame for the crash, their insurance company would be on the hook for your damages up to the amount of the policy limit. If the other driver did not have enough insurance, you can file a claim against your own underinsured motorist coverage.

The second pathway to financial compensation is filing a lawsuit against the other driver in court. This road also goes through the insurance company because they have a legal duty to defend their own policyholder in court. Here, you would still be negotiating a potential settlement with the insurance company. If you do not come to an agreement, it would be the jury who decides whether the other driver was responsible for the accident and how much they must pay you.

Know that most car accident cases will be settled as opposed to litigated. Even if you did file a lawsuit, the insurance company would still likely settle your case before it reached the jury. Both you and the insurance company simply have too much to risk by going to trial. Nonetheless, it may take some negotiation and time to reach the point of settlement.

What to Do After a Car Accident in Houston

It is often said that there are two professionals who you need the most after a car accident — a doctor and a lawyer. Your first major concern is your health, and it is something that you must address. You are always better off when you are as proactive and cautious as possible. If you feel any pain or discomfort, it is an obvious sign that something is wrong with your body. While some car accident injuries may go away and heal over time, you should never take the chance of allowing that process to happen on its own. For every car accident injury that heals, there is one that can grow worse without medical intervention.

Some common car accident injuries, such as whiplash or internal injuries, can lurk beneath the surface for days. The fact that you may not feel anything yet does not mean that you are not injured. If your injuries get worse because you delayed medical care, it may even mean less money for you (or sometimes none at all).

Seeing a doctor is also actually one of the first steps in the legal process. Your doctor will document your condition with medical records and a diagnosis, and these are things that you need to file an insurance claim or lawsuit. You would generally wait to file a claim until the full extent of your injuries are apparent, and you reach the point where further medical treatment would not necessarily improve your condition.

In addition, you also need to contact and hire an experienced car accident lawyer. The first step is to schedule a free initial consultation with a lawyer. This step is not something you can push off until you feel better. If you are not able to call a lawyer yourself, have a family member get the ball rolling for you.

The first days after a car accident are extremely important in several respects:

• You can lose key evidence that can be used to prove your case if you do not take steps to preserve it.
• The other driver’s insurance company may be trying to contact you, and they may attempt to pressure you into giving a statement. This is something that you should never do. If you hire an attorney, the insurance company would need to go through your lawyer to get to you.
• There are numerous other details that you have to handle, including dealing with your own insurance company and potentially negotiating payment with medical providers.

When you hire a Houston car accident lawyer, they could handle many of the details for you. A lawyer will take much of the pressure off you when you are already dealing with difficult circumstances.

Mistakes to Avoid After a Car Accident

You should also be very conscious of mistakes that you could make, which are more likely to happen without a lawyer. These errors, which can prove fatal to your case, include:

• Posting anything on social media or speaking publicly about your case
• Speaking to the other driver’s insurance company
• Signing any document given to you by the other driver’s insurance company without close review by an attorney
• Settling your case for pennies on the dollar without fully exploring the legal process

When you hire an experienced lawyer for your car accident case, they will handle the details and act as your point of contact. Your lawyer would give you legal advice about what to do and not do to help preserve your right to financial compensation.

Call the Houston Car Accident Lawyers at Nix Patterson Today

If you or a loved one have been hurt in a car accident, time is not necessarily on your side. You need to act quickly to call a lawyer, both to begin the legal process and to protect your own legal right to compensation. If you are worried that money is an obstacle — don’t be. You do not need to pay for your case out of your pocket, both for your lawyer’s time and the expenses of your case. Call the experienced Houston car accident attorneys at Nix Patterson to schedule a free initial consultation to discuss your case. We will go to bat for you immediately and go on offense against the insurance company.