Were you in a crash in Boise and have questions about what to do when injured in a truck accident? Contact our Boise attorneys to get started.
1) Choose the Right Lawyer
Choosing an attorney when you have a truck accident injury in Idaho is a process of investigation. You want an attorney who knows their way around trucking cases. Trucking cases are simply different; they’re not just big car cases. You want a trial lawyer who has experience in trying trucking cases, investigating and preparing trucking cases, and who understands the unique things about trucking cases that make them different. Those unique things include the regulatory system that applies to truckers and whether there is liability above and beyond just for the driver himself. If somebody’s driving their car and runs through a stop sign, they’re responsible for the damage they cause. If that trucker runs through a stop sign, there might be reasons why they got placed in this position where not only are they responsible but their company’s responsible because there’s brokers who put loads on trucks, and they might have liability. There might be enhanced liability issues.
Many things come into play in trucking cases that simply do not come into play when you’re dealing with a straightforward car collision case, so what you want to do is look for a lawyer who understands that. Look for lawyers with accolades on their resumes, who have been reviewed and evaluated by their actual clients online, who have received awards, who’ve worked and had leadership roles in professional organizations like the Trial Lawyers Association, and who work in the world of trucking collision cases.
Spend the time to do a little investigation into your Idaho trucking accident attorney and you’ll find that you’ll be far better off in the long run because, in the area of trucking collisions, getting the right attorney may be as important as it is in any other area of personal law to make sure you have somebody who knows what they’re doing. Don’t pick a generalist— somebody who does divorce work and wills and estates and business organizational stuff. These people are important and do important work, but they won’t know their way around or the first step to take in a trucking collision case.
If you have any questions about a trucking accident case, you want to learn about our backgrounds as attorneys to see if we can help you, give us a call. We’re happy to talk to you.
2) Understand Your Case Value
Determining the value of a personal injury claim, a truck accident injury claim in particular, can be a complex thing. Truck accident injuries often can be perceived as having greater value for the same amount of damages because all of us who are on the roads have special concerns about heavy trucks, semi-trucks, and the dangers that they pose to us and our families, so you want to go through the process of evaluating all the issues.
There are straightforward issues like economic loss, lost income and those types of things that arise from an injury after a semi-truck accident, or things like replacing your car and the property damage that’s incurred. Then, of course, you have your medical expenses and the issues related to what the value of medical expenses are; all in all, however, those economic losses are more straightforward. Given the scope of your injury, those economic losses may become bigger because we have to figure out what the long-term cost of care is for the damage imposed upon you in this Idaho trucking collision case, that you have to incur those costs in the future, and how do you have enough resources set aside from the damages recovered to pay for those costs in the future.
Then, of course, there’s the more complex arena of damages like what’s been taken from you. What have you experienced? What are your losses? If you’ve been injured in a trucking accident collision in Idaho, your friends aren’t going to call you and say, “How much are your medical bills? What are your future medical expenses going to be?” They’re going to ask you the important questions, “How are you? How are you getting along? How’s your family? What’s going on in your recovery and getting back to your ordinary life?” Those are the important damage questions, and there’s no hard and fast calculation that you can use to figure out that value. Those are the things that experience Idaho trucking accident lawyers can bring to bear, is figuring out those things, figuring out what a fair value is and talking to a jury, if a case needs to go to trial, about what they should authorize in compensation and award of damages based on the injuries that you personally have incurred.
Every Idaho trucking accident case needs to be looked at from the perspective of that injured person because that injured person is the one really experiencing the losses, and everybody’s losses can be different. If you want to talk about these things, if you want us to help review and evaluate your case, we’re at the other end of the phone. Just give us a call and any one of us would be happy to do it.
3) Differences Between a Car & Truck Accident
Commercial truck accident injury claims in Idaho and car accident injury claims in Idaho are very different things. It seems like a commercial truck accident case is just a big car collision case – it’s not. The reason for that is there are statutory standards that these drivers and trucking companies have to meet, and that makes sense because they cause so much damage when they are involved in collisions as opposed to cars. Obviously, cars can cause substantial damage, too, but when you have 105,000 pounds of rolling death on the interstate causing a collision, you want to follow up with all the regulatory evaluation. Why the wreck happened is a big question in any trucking collision case, not just did the driver not pay attention but the reason the driver didn’t pay attention.
Professional truck drivers have lots of standards they have to meet. There’s lots of regulations on the safety and the safety of the vehicles themselves and standards that limit what they can carry and how they carry it. We often find that inside one of these large trucking semi-truck collision cases there are things that have happened that raise the culpability of others above and beyond merely the driver. Sometimes, it’s the driver and the owners are just looking the other way while the driver is doing things that are not legal and not allowed, and they’re not allowed because they’re recognized by law as being unsafe. We want to be able to track those things down so all damages and full and fair compensation for your losses can be identified and obtained. As a driver gets beyond merely negligent to reckless or an extreme deviation of standards of behavior, the measures of damages change under Idaho law.
These complexities can only be evaluated by a competent personal injury trial attorney with substantial knowledge and understanding of the differences between trucking collision cases in Idaho and car collision cases in Idaho. We’re happy to consult with you on this and talk to you about the specifics of your situation, and we encourage you to call us sooner rather than later when you’re dealing with a semi-truck collision case in Idaho.
4) Know the Settlement Timeline
Figuring out how long a truck accident collision case in Idaho takes from start to finish can involve complex issues. Because trucking collision cases are more complex than straightforward car collision cases, an accident injury case in Idaho involving a truck might be one that takes longer than you would like it to. Often, they take longer than you would like it to, but that’s the only thing you can do to get full and fair compensation for the injuries that you’ve incurred in this wreck in Idaho with this semi-truck, a commercial vehicle.
You have to go through the process of evaluating not just the damages that have been incurred and what the liability of the driver is, but, as a trial attorney who understands these cases, you want to look at issues underlying like why the collision happened and not merely that the collision did happen, not just the truck driver causing the wreck but why he caused the wreck. Was he overtired? Was he carrying a load he shouldn’t carry? Was he sent to a place he shouldn’t have been sent? Many things need to be looked at, so that can make these cases take longer, when dealing with trucking cases in Idaho, than other ordinary cases.
What you want is somebody who will diligently pursue your case and get a result for you for full and fair compensation for your losses as quickly as reasonably possible. We’re happy to talk to you about these types of things, just give us a call.
Were you in a crash in Boise and have questions about what to do when injured in a truck accident? Contact our experienced Boise Truck Accident Lawyers at Hepworth Holzer today for a free consultation and case evaluation.
We are committed to helping individuals and families throughout Idaho navigate the world of personal injury litigation as quickly and efficiently as possible. Let us get results for you and your family.
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