If you live in Show Low, and a serious injury keeps you from working and your medical bills are piling up, or if a catastrophic injury leads to the wrongful death of a loved one, where do you turn for legal help?
Stone Rose Law has a team of experienced Show Low personal injury lawyers who are ready to fight for your rights and pursue the compensation available under Arizona law. We provide top-quality legal services to accident victims in Show Low and throughout northern Arizona, achieving outstanding results.
Learn more about how we can help you recover compensation by calling us at (480) 631-3025 or using our online contact form for a free consultation with a Show Low personal injury attorney today.
Our lead attorneys have decades of experience in personal injury law, and our Show Low personal injury lawyers have handled serious injuries arising in the White Mountains region, Navajo County, and across northern Arizona. Our team of trial attorneys provides legal support for a broad range of personal injury claims, including but not limited to:
Arizona law controls whether you have a personal injury claim against a person or a business. To establish your civil litigation legal claim to pursue compensation for a personal injury, you must prove four basic elements:
This duty typically consists of a responsibility to avoid causing harm. Thus, duty can be a duty to act or a duty to refrain from doing something that could lead to harm.
For example, other drivers on the road with you have a duty to you to drive their vehicles safely and in accordance with traffic laws. Your doctor has a duty not to cause you harm while treating you. A business you visit as a customer has a duty to keep its premises safe for your use.
The person who owes you a duty of care must have failed to observe that duty. Returning to our examples above, the other driver in the car accident must have failed to drive safely. That doctor must have caused you harm in treatment. The business’s property owner must have failed to maintain the safety of its premises.
The act of the other person or business, or its failure to act, must have caused the harm you have suffered.
In personal injury cases, the remedy you seek will be measured in money damages. For example, medical bills for your injury treatment are one way to measure in dollars the harm done to you.
Arizona law recognizes three kinds of compensation that can happen to you if someone else’s negligence causes an injury accident: economic damages, non-economic damages, and, in rare cases, punitive damages.
Economic damages compensate you for direct, tangible losses. Examples include:
Compared to economic damages, non-economic damages compensate you for more intangible kinds of harm that do not lend themselves to proof with copies of bills, invoices, or receipts for your out-of-pocket costs. Examples include:
Although non-economic damages can be more challenging to prove than economic damages, they can make up a significant part of any settlement recovery or personal injury judgment award.
In some cases, the behavior of the person or company that caused you to experience personal injury is bad enough that the court will allow an additional damages award on top of compensatory damages.
Not every personal injury award will include punitive damages. Most do not. Punitive damages may be available only where the defendant acted with an ‘evil mind,’ meaning an intent to cause harm or a conscious disregard of a substantial risk of significant harm; gross negligence alone is not enough.
Examples of cases in which Arizona courts have imposed exemplary damages include product liability cases in which the manufacturer knew a defective product would cause harm to consumers, as well as cases involving illegal activities in which the defendant intentionally disregarded others’ safety.
Punitive awards in medical malpractice cases are rare — they are available only where a healthcare provider acted with an “evil mind,” such as intentionally harming a patient or consciously disregarding a substantial risk of significant harm.
Arizona does not impose a fixed cap or ratio on punitive damages. Instead, courts review punitive awards on a case‑by‑case basis under federal due‑process standards, generally considering whether the award is reasonable and proportionate to the defendant’s conduct and the compensatory damages awarded.
Often, accidents that cause personal injury are not entirely the fault of a single person. But sometimes legal fault can be shared. This is called “comparative negligence.”
For example, let’s say that you were involved in an auto accident in which the other driver crossed the centerline, but you were driving faster than the conditions and/or circumstances called for when the accident happened.
The other driver may be mostly at fault, but if your speed contributed to the accident, under Arizona’s pure comparative negligence law, the responsibility will be split between you and the other driver on a percentage basis.
So, for example, if the other driver is 90 percent at fault and you were 10 percent at fault, any money damages you might recover from the other driver will be reduced by 10 percent. Meaning, if you receive a judgment award of $20,000, it would be reduced by $2,000 (10%) to $18,000.
Because Arizona follows pure comparative negligence, you can still recover damages even if you are found up to 99 percent at fault — though your award will be reduced in proportion to your share of the fault.
The statute of limitations period can be much shorter though if a public entity for Show Low, Navajo County, or the state of Arizona is at fault resulting in your injuries; you would have only 180 days to file a notice of claim, and only one year to file your lawsuit.
Arizona law allows you to represent yourself in your own personal injury claim. Under Arizona Supreme Court Rule 31, though, you cannot represent anyone else in Arizona unless you are a licensed attorney in good standing with the State Bar of Arizona.
However, many good reasons exist to have a personal injury attorney with extensive experience and a proven track record on your side, like one of the personal injury lawyers at Stone Rose Law.
To begin with, to prove your claim, the factual investigation of your personal injury claim must be thorough. This includes gathering statements from witnesses, doing an accident scene investigation, gathering any available police reports and your medical treatment records, and, where necessary, securing the availability of expert witnesses.
You must know all the facts you will need to get, where and how to find them, and how to use them to support a compelling personal injury case for settlement, arbitration, or trial.
If you are relying on your insurance company to make a policy-based personal injury claim on your behalf, remember that the lawyer it chooses has the insurance company as a client and will be representing the insurer’s best interests – not yours. How strongly the insurance company lawyer will represent your interests can be substantially less certain.
In some cases, more than one other person may have contributed to your injuries. This can mean more lawyers getting involved, and how they relate to the other parties and to you can make negotiations and case preparation complicated, daunting, and time-consuming.
The ability to negotiate firmly with other attorneys is also important because of the likelihood that attorneys for the party that caused the accident and for insurance adjusters with that person’s insurer can become involved.
Most personal injury claims in Arizona settle out of court, so having an experienced attorney on your side to present the strongest possible case for you can be decisive in obtaining the highest settlement amount.
At Stone Rose Law, personal injury trial advocates represent personal injury clients on a contingency basis. We do not bill you for any legal fees or costs unless we either win your case or reach a settlement acceptable to you.
There is a reason why we work for you on contingency. We have seen too many personal injury cases handled by other law firms in which the injured victim is victimized by the arbitration or litigation process.
If your attorney is billing you by the hour, you could soon find yourself in a situation where affording your legal bills becomes as much of a concern to you as how to pay your medical bills.
A big reason why so many personal injury claims settle before trial, often for much less than what is possible to recover, is that the injury victim runs out of money to pay the lawyers. If you are funding your own personal injury claim, the other side is incentivized to engage in negotiation and pretrial tactics that will maximize your attorney’s billable time in response.
Their goal is to exhaust you financially, or to inflate your tab with your lawyer to the point where he or she will begin to pull back on doing what is needed to best represent your interests, or both.
Because we work on a contingency basis for you, these delaying and cost-inflating tactics by opposing attorneys do not work on us. You cannot be driven to desperation by mounting legal bills, forcing you to settle on unfavorable terms or even to drop your case.
We have every motivation to give you personalized attention and to secure the best possible outcome for your claim, because we are only paid a percentage of the final settlement or judgment award. You carry no financial risk, because we only win if you do.
Stone Rose Law is a dedicated personal injury law firm. Our Show Low personal injury lawyers are well-versed in Arizona personal injury law and have successfully settled, litigated, and resolved hundreds of personal injury cases through the Arizona legal system, including wrongful death cases and other serious injuries.
Our high-quality legal representation can make all the difference in obtaining the best possible outcome for you in a settlement or in a personal injury lawsuit in Arizona.
At our Show Low law office, we put you first throughout the entire process, prioritizing customer service and providing personalized legal strategies. Our team has a proven system that delivers the highest-quality legal representation.
We use a comprehensive approach to prepare your case for the best possible settlement, and if your claim does not settle out of court, that meticulous preparation becomes the foundation to represent you in arbitration or at trial. Here are some of the items on our checklist of steps to take when representing you in a personal injury matter:
From taking over the legal processes on your behalf to connecting you to top doctors in your region where you can get the medical attention you need, our personal injury lawyers will look out for your physical, emotional, and financial well-being.
You can rest, focus on healing, and feel confident that we are handling all the complex and arcane legal tasks on your behalf.
Our personal injury legal team consists of compassionate, dedicated plaintiff’s injury lawyers with decades of experience helping individuals injured by another’s negligence.
Stone Rose Law provides high-quality legal representation to injury victims throughout Show Low, the White Mountains, and the rest of Arizona — working to help clients obtain the maximum amount of compensation under Arizona law for their injuries.
Call us at (480) 631-3025 anytime to speak with a Show Low personal injury attorney. Or use our online contact form to schedule a free initial consultation today.
