Injuries have a way of affecting every aspect of a victim’s life. When a person sustains an injury, not only do they have to deal with physical pain and suffering, but they may also not be able to go to work to earn an income or enjoy their everyday activities. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the negligent or wrongful actions of somebody else in Maricopa County, seek legal assistance from a Chandler personal injury attorney immediately.
At Stone Rose Law, our team is standing by to help if you need a local injury lawyer. We are prepared to deal with aggressive insurance carriers or at-fault parties to ensure that you are treated fairly and receive maximum compensation for your losses.
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Why Trust Stone Rose Law With a Personal Injury Claim?
How Can a Chandler Personal Injury Lawyer Help?
Basic Steps to Take After an Accident
How Much Does Hiring an Attorney Cost?
What Do Personal Injury Attorneys Cover?
What is a Personal Injury Case?
Chandler Personal Injury Cases We Handle
What Damages Are Available in the Average Personal Injury Case?
What is the Time Limit for an Arizona Personal Injury Case?
Contact a Chandler Personal Injury Attorney Today
A qualified injury attorney in Chandler, AZ will be your advocate throughout the entirety of your case. They will have the resources necessary to conduct a full investigation into the incident and obtain any evidence needed to prove liability. This includes statements from eyewitnesses, accident reports, video surveillance, photographic evidence, phone or vehicle data, and more.
Additionally, a personal injury lawyer will have the resources necessary to:
Overall, having an attorney in your corner during a personal injury claim can make the legal process easier for you and more effective at collecting maximum financial compensation for your various losses. You can trust a lawyer to advocate for your best interests while you concentrate on healing and moving forward after an accident.
It is easy to become overwhelmed by the prospect of filing a personal injury claim and dealing with everything that it entails. There are steps that you can take, however, to begin building the foundation of a personal injury claim from the very beginning. This can make the process simpler and more manageable, as well as help you build a stronger claim against a defendant. The following are eight basic steps that can help you protect your legal rights after an accident in Chandler:
An attorney can help you take all of the correct steps after an accident to protect yourself. A lawyer can help you avoid mistakes and missteps – allowing you to bring a stronger claim against one or more defendants. An attorney is contracted to work for you and is legally obligated to protect your rights. You can trust a Chandler car accident attorney to have your best interests in mind through every phase of the recovery process.
At Stone Rose Law, we don’t believe attorneys should ever make more than their clients do on a personal injury case. We founded our firm out of an honest desire to help those in difficult situations – victims with painful, debilitating and expensive injuries. In our pursuit of justice against those who are responsible for accidents, we are also dedicated to maximizing the financial recovery of each client. We understand how important financial stability for the future can be for a family that is picking up the pieces after a traumatic accident.
The Chandler personal injury lawyers at Stone Rose Law operate on a contingency fee basis to keep our legal fees affordable for all injured accident victims. This payment arrangement means that you will not owe us any money upfront; we don’t charge a retainer fee to start working on your case. Instead, we will only bill you if and when we win your case. No financial recovery – meaning no settlement or judgment won on your behalf – means no attorney’s fees, guaranteed. If we do win your case, you will pay our fees as a percentage of the overall amount won, not out of your pocket.
The Chandler personal injury attorneys at Stone Rose Law have vast experience helping clients who have sustained a range of serious injuries. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Our accident lawyer also help clients who have sustained significant emotional and psychological trauma as a result of their injuries. Every personal injury case is unique, and our legal team works diligently to recover damages and hold those responsible for your accident accountable.
Not just any injury in Arizona will give the victim the right to file a personal injury lawsuit. Arizona law only allows a victim to bring a cause of action if the incident involves a tort. This is the legal term for wrongdoing. A tort does not necessarily have to mean a crime. Even if a defendant does not break a law in Arizona, he or she could be held civilly liable for causing bodily harm or death to another person. It is up to the injured accident victim to pursue civil liability by filing a personal injury claim.
The most common grounds for a tort claim in Arizona is negligence. If someone is negligent, it means that he or she has failed to use proper care; the individual or entity has committed an act or omission that a reasonable and prudent person would not have in the same circumstances. You may have grounds to file a personal injury case based on negligence if there is evidence of four key elements:
A duty of care is a legal or ethical obligation not to cause harm to others. Anything a defendant does – or does not do – that falls short of this duty can constitute a breach. Causation is a provable link established between the defendant’s breach of duty and the plaintiff’s injuries or losses being claimed. Damages refer to specific and compensable losses connected to the defendant’s negligence. If you do not have the elements of a negligence claim in Arizona, you may be able to file on other grounds, such as strict liability or breach of warranty. An attorney can let you know if your case has merit.
Personal injury lawsuits in Arizona can arise out of many different types of preventable accidents and incidents. It is important to find an attorney with hands-on experience with your specific type of accident. Our personal injury lawyers in Chandler, AZ regularly help clients who have been injured in the following ways:
If you don’t see your type of accident on this list, we may still be able to help you. This is not a comprehensive view of every single type of case that we accept in Arizona. Schedule a free consultation to discuss your specific incident in more detail with an experienced personal injury attorney.
The purpose of a personal injury lawsuit is to make the injured victim whole again. A successful lawsuit will result in financial compensation (damages) being awarded to the accident victim, with the goal of restoring him or her to the financial position he or she would have been in had the accident never happened. The civil courts permit the recovery of both economic and noneconomic damages in a personal injury claim. You may be eligible for the following damages for personal injuries:
It is important to list all of the losses for which you may be entitled to receive financial compensation on your demand letter as an accident victim in Arizona. Otherwise, you may receive a settlement from an insurance company that is less than you deserve. An attorney from Stone Rose Law can help you understand the value of your claim and combat insurance company tactics that may be used to minimize your payout.
In the state of Arizona, punitive damages can be awarded if the actions of the defendant are found to be grossly negligent or intentional. Punitive damages are not awarded very often, and they are designed to act as punishment to the defendant as well as a deterrent to the type of behavior seen in the case. It is unlikely that punitive damages will be awarded for cases of ordinary negligence. If a defendant took actions that they knew were likely to cause harm to others, it is more likely that punitive damages will be awarded.
Calculating personal injury damages can be challenging, and we strongly encourage you to work with your attorney for every aspect of your claim. An attorney can help gather up all of the needed receipts, bills, estimates, and invoices, and they can speak to trusted medical and economic experts. Calculating damages is crucial and often involves looking a bit into the future to understand how the injuries and recovery process will affect an individual after the settlement or jury verdict has been reached.
Above, we mentioned the types of compensation often recoverable by personal injury victims in the Chandler, Arizona, area. But how are these losses calculated?
We discussed gathering receipts and bills, and this will help with calculating the economic damages associated with the incident. Calculable losses are considered economic damages. This includes medical bills, lost wages, and various other property damage or out-of-pocket expenses involved in the incident. Calculating future economic damages is where this can get challenging, particularly when it is expected that the individual will experience ongoing medical expenses or lost wages caused by the incident. It may be necessary to work with medical experts who can project the most likely future medical expenses.
Calculating non-economic damages, which include the pain and suffering caused by the incident, is more challenging. These types of losses are not as measurable as the economic damages previously discussed. There are not going to necessarily be receipts or bills that can say exactly how much a person has suffered due to the incident. Rather, there are two accepted methods typically used to calculate non-economic damages.
In many states across the country, there are caps in place on the amount of damages allowed. Typically, these caps show up in the realm of non-economic damages, specifically medical malpractice non-economic damages. However, any damage caps on personal injury claims are prohibited under the Arizona constitution. Individuals should be able to recover complete compensation for their economic damages and whatever amount of non-economic damages a jury deems suitable.
If you have any concerns about how much compensation you will receive for your personal injury claim in Chandler, Arizona, we encourage you to have an open and honest conversation with your attorney about the expectations for your case moving forward.
Shared fault could certainly affect a personal injury claim in Chandler. Arizona operates under what is called a pure comparative negligence system. Under this type of system, individuals are able to recover compensation regardless of how much fault they had for an incident, even if they are up to 99% at fault. However, the total amount of compensation they actually receive will be reduced depending on their percentage of fault.
For example, let us suppose that an individual is harmed in a slip and fall incident at a grocery store and sustains $100,000 worth of medical bills and lost wages caused by a brain injury. However, let us also imagine that the slip and fall victim was staring at their phone and did not look up at all. It is likely that the defendant will argue that the injury victim failed to take steps to mitigate the chances of an injury occurring because they were distracted by their phone.
There are any number of ways this type of scenario could play out when it comes to compensation, but let us imagine that a jury determines that the victim was 30% responsible for the incident and the store was 70% responsible for the incident. In this case, the victim would receive 70% of the overall compensation, which would equal $70,000 instead of the full $100,000.
You must act quickly if you believe you are eligible for financial compensation through a personal injury claim in Arizona. Like all 50 states, there is a law in Arizona that sets a strict deadline on the ability to file a lawsuit. This law is called the statute of limitations, and it only has a few exceptions. If you miss Arizona’s statute of limitations, the courts in Chandler will most likely bar you from filing – and recovering any financial compensation.
Personal injury claims in Arizona must be filed within two years of the date of the accident. If it takes you longer to discover your injury or connect it to an accident, the clock won’t start ticking until the date that you discovered (or reasonably should have discovered) the injury. You may have less time to bring a lawsuit, however, if the defendant is a government entity. Claims against the government – any public entity or public employee – must be brought within one year in Arizona.
Arizona law defines wrongful death as a fatality that is caused “by wrongful act, neglect or default.” Wrongful death claims are different from personal injury claims, but they are often filed after the same types of incidents occur. This can include vehicle accidents, medical malpractice, intentional acts of violence, etc. In this state, the surviving spouse, surviving children, surviving parent or guardian, or the personal representative of the estate is allowed to file a wrongful death claim in civil court.
Survival actions are also an option in the state of Arizona, and these are slightly different than a wrongful death claim. This is a type of claim more closely aligned with what a personal injury case would look like had the deceased survived the incident. Survival claims seek to recover compensation for the deceased’s medical bills, lost wages, and other related losses that started from the time the incident occurred until a person passed away.
If you have any questions about wrongful death or survival action claims, we encourage you to reach out to a skilled Arizona wrongful death lawyer as soon as possible.
The vast majority of personal injury claims get resolved through settlements with insurance carriers. However, that is not always the case. There are times when personal injury claims do end up in the courtroom, which means you would have to go to court. This is not the most common way cases are concluded.
Insurance carriers often offer settlements within a few weeks or a few months after an incident occurs. If they do not offer enough compensation, attorneys can negotiate in an attempt to recover a better settlement amount. However, if the insurance carrier or at-fault party still refuses to offer a fair settlement amount, it will become necessary to file a lawsuit in civil court.
Even after a lawsuit gets filed, this does not necessarily mean that you will have to make a court appearance. Filing the lawsuit starts the discovery process, which is when both the plaintiff and the defendant exchange evidence with one another. This is the same time frame where attorneys will take depositions from potential witnesses.
The discovery process can go on for quite some time, and it is not uncommon for one side to examine the evidence and decide that settling is the best bet. In some cases, the case gets dropped. If the two parties are still unable to reach a fair compensation agreement, the last option is to go to a trial by jury. If the case reaches this point, we will indeed have to go to court.
If you or a loved one has sustained an injury caused by the careless or negligent actions of another individual, business, or entity, turn to the team at Stone Rose Law today. Our injury lawyers have decades of experience handling complex personal injury cases throughout Arizona, and we have the resources necessary to fully investigate your claim to determine liability. We are determined to help you recover the compensation you need for your medical bills, lost income, pain and suffering damages, out-of-pocket expenses, and more.
When you need a local personal injury attorney, you can contact us online for a free initial consultation of your case or by calling our law office at (480) 498-8998.
