Erie, PA Car Accident Lawyers

If you have been seriously injured in an accident and you have reason to believe that another party is at fault for the accident, then I urge you to contact our firm immediately. And there’s several reasons for that. First, it’s necessary to make sure that we gather all relevant evidence to help prove who was at fault in the accident.

A lot of times the police will have investigated an accident, but unless a crime has been committed or the injuries are catastrophic, a lot of times the police investigation is cursory and there might be other evidence that’s necessary to secure in order to determine who was at fault in the accident. Also, we need to be available to deal with the insurance company for the potentially at fault party.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly they will contact you and try to get information from you and in some cases try to make a quick resolution of the case, a quick settlement for you paying you pennies on the dollar of what you’re entitled to. And so, for those reasons it’s very important that you get us involved in the case as soon as you can.

If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

Some injured victims are hesitant to contact us because they didn’t go to the hospital right away and they feel that somehow that’s going to be used against them or somehow that’s evidence that they didn’t actually get hurt in the accident. It’s very common that people don’t go directly to the hospital from the accident scene.

It’s very common that people decline medical care at the accident scene. It’s very common that police reports will indicate that a person was not injured in the accident when actually they were. And that’s because when you’re involved in an accident, the adrenaline flow is so great that you aren’t attending to trying to figure out whether you’ve suffered any injury in an accident.

Well, we’ve had people hop out of a car and walk around and then find out later they had a broken leg. So, don’t hesitate to contact us simply because you didn’t go immediately to the hospital after the accident. That’s very common and it’s surprisingly common for people who have even suffered serious injuries in an accident.

If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

One of the reasons to contact the personal injury lawyers at our firm is when the other driver denies responsibility for the accident. A lot of times people hop out of the car and start blaming other people for an accident. It may be the case that they were responsible for the accident. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction for people to deny responsibility.

And so it’s necessary for us to get involved in a case early on in order to make sure that we have all the evidence necessary to determine who was at fault in the accident. If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

In a personal injury case, it’s necessary to have medical evidence that relates the injury that you’re claiming to the particular accident. And sometimes that can be very complicated because we very frequently meet clients who have pre-existing conditions. They have a bad back or a bad neck. And so sometimes people are hesitant to contact us because they may have injured the part of a body where they had had some prior treatment.

But we also very often see that somebody who has a pre-existing condition, has had a history of a bad back or a bad neck, feels a significant aggravation of that particular problem following an accident, especially in the neck and the back area. And so eventually we will ask your treating physicians or sometimes we use our own expert physicians to evaluate your case and examine you and render an opinion as to whether the particular problem that you’re faced with now was related to the car accident or was it related to a problem that you had before. And very, very often we see that accidents which are severe trauma to the body they have created an aggravation to your pre-existing problem and that is a compensable injury. Just because you had a problem in that particular part of the body before does not mean that the insurance company or the fault party is not responsible for compensating you for the additional harm that this accident has caused you.

If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

Damages is a fancy word we lawyers use for money. The money that you are entitled to recover as a victim of a car accident, include reimbursement of lost income, reimbursement of lost wages, which sometimes can be slightly different from income. For instance, you might be a business owner and you’ve lost income, or you might be a W2 employee and you’ve lost wages.

Any amount of money that you don’t have now that you would have had but for the accident is among the damages that you are entitled to. You’re also entitled to medical expenses that you have had to pay out of pocket and sometimes reimbursement of medical expenses even when they’ve been paid by health insurance and what we call pain and suffering damages.

And that is compensation that you’re entitled to for the change in your life, the change in your lifestyle, the pain that you’ve had to suffer, the lost enjoyment of life, the activities that you are unable to do. People miss a hunting season, they miss a golfing season, they can’t fish anymore, they can’t take their boats out, they can’t play with their kids, they can’t play with their grandchildren.

The change in your lifestyle from before the accident to after the accident, that’s all compensable. And it’s hard to put a dollar figure on that. But one thing we can help you with as experienced personal injury lawyers is to explain to you how insurance companies and other defendants and jurors how they evaluate such claims and what fair compensation to you is as a result of your pain and suffering from the accident.

If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

After you’ve been involved in an accident, you may be contacted by the other driver’s insurance company, and we encourage you uh not to speak with them. Obviously, be polite as you would be polite with anybody in society, but we recommend politely declining the call and contacting us and allowing us to deal with the other side’s insurance company. They’re not your friend.

They’re not on your side. They have one goal in mind and that is to minimize the amount of money that their company has to pay you as a result of the negligent driving of their insured. If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

We’re seeing more and more rideshare accidents. That is accidents involving an Uber or a Lyft. It’s important to get a lawyer involved early on. If you have been injured while a passenger in a rideshare vehicle, one of the things we need to deal with immediately is whose insurance is responsible for your damages for any money that might be owed to you as a result of the injuries you’ve suffered in the accident.

Whether that’s the driver’s personal insurance, if the driver is driving a vehicle owned by somebody else, whether the insurance on the vehicle is what’s responsible, or insurance that the rideshare company, Uber or Lyft or one of the other companies that they have in place. And sometimes they can be pointing at each other about who’s responsible for your damages and you’re left uh holding the bag.

And so it’s very important to get us involved early on in a rideshare case so we can be sure that your interests are protected. If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.

A lot of people contact us and one of their first questions is how long do we have to bring a claim against an insurance company or file a lawsuit. Unfortunately, there’s not a bright line answer to that question. There are time limits that apply to all personal injury claims.

However, those deadlines can be different based on where the accident happened, whether that happened in Pennsylvania or happened in New York or Ohio. We’re here in a tri-state area. Now, the ordinary personal injury claim in Pennsylvania, there’s a 2-year statute of limitations. However, there can be factors that actually reduce that to a shorter period of time if you’re making a certain type of insurance claim.

Can be a longer period of time depending on the type of injury that you’ve suffered or the type of accident that you were in. So, our advice is to contact us as soon as you know that you’ve suffered an injury that is potentially the fault of someone else, and we can help determine exactly how long you have to bring the claim.

We frequently represent people who have been injured as a passenger in an accident. The only particularly unique thing about those types of cases is that you potentially have more than one defendant. You can pursue a claim against the driver of the car in which you were riding, even if that’s a family member and you can pursue a claim against the driver of another vehicle involved in an accident. Sometimes accidents are the fault of more than one driver. Perhaps both drivers should have been more careful. Perhaps it’s an intersection accident or a sideswipe type of accident where maybe both parties cross the center line. And so a passenger in a car potentially has claims against more than one driver.

And that’s just another reason to get our firm involved in a case early on. If you’ve suffered a serious injury in a car accident that you believe is the fault of someone else, please contact us and let us help you.