3 Dog Bite Tips

Once somebody’s been bitten by a dog, the first thing that should happen is getting medical care and get immediate follow up. After that, people often wonder, “What is the next thing that I should do?” What I encourage you to do is get a hold of a skilled trial attorney to talk about your situation. Dog bite situations can be surprisingly complex based on where it is, who has the dog, what type of dog it was, and what exactly precipitated the dog bite, if anything. Was it an unprecipitated attack? All those things are important in ultimately evaluating the case. I encourage you to talk to an experienced Idaho trial attorney about your dog bite claim before you talk to the insurance company. It might be the individual’s homeowner’s insurance company or it might be some commercial insurance company that’s involved that deals with the dog bite case.

You want to understand your situation before you get involved with the folks on the other side. The folks on the other side aren’t there to help you. That insurance company who represents the owner of the dog is not there to help you, and they’re not looking for information that will assist you. They’re looking for information to use against you, as a general rule, and you need to be careful about talking to them. You need to be prepared before you talk to them, so before you head down that route, give us a call so we can discuss your situation and make sure that you know what you want to do to move forward with your dog bite case.

Often, one of the problems in a dog bite case is that the owner of the dog doesn’t have insurance. Usually, the insurance that applies to a dog bite case in Idaho will be homeowner’s insurance. If you have a renter who has a dog and who doesn’t have renter’s insurance, or somebody who is just not living in or covered by any homeowner’s insurance, you have this situation where there is no insurance coverage. For a renter, sometimes you can actually get past the renter to the landlord if the landlord had a certain amount of knowledge about the dog or the dog’s propensity or the history of the dog in causing damage to others. It’s often difficult to get there, but sometimes you can get there, and you need an attorney involved in that case to deal with it.

Unless the person who owns the dog and who doesn’t have insurance has some personal assets that you can recover from, there is often no place to actually recover the real damages. These cases can be sad and tough, but we’re happy to talk to you about yours if you want to give us a call.

A natural question in any personal injury claim, including a dog bite claim in Idaho, centers on the value of the claim. What sort of compensation can be expected? What is the settlement going to be, or what would a jury verdict be? The answer to that is it varies based on what the scope of the damages are. How bad did the dog injure you? Is it a simple puncture wound, or is it an attack on the face of a 14-year-old girl that leaves lifelong scarring? Is it a bite on the calf? What are the damages? Those damages will be part of the equation.

There are other parts of the equation involved in the value of a claim. How did it impact you? The same physical injury might cause different emotional injuries or different reactive injuries for different people. Somebody who has just recovered from a surgery, who’s been bedridden, and all of a sudden gets attacked and is bedridden again after a dog attack might have a greater claim for emotional damages than somebody whose dog attack doesn’t really put them down because they start from a position of greater strength than the other person.

All these things are factors that are part of assessing what the value of the case is. There are the issues that are simple, including the economic losses and medical expenses. It’s the non-economic losses— the parts related to the joy of life and the pleasure in living— that are more complex parts of the damages claim that you need to have a good Idaho trial attorney help you evaluate in any specific situation. The way to get that done is to start the process by giving us a call so we can discuss your Idaho dog bite case and see if we can help you move forward with it.