Although your personal injury lawyer will take the lead representing you in settlement negotiations with insurance companies or as your plaintiff’s attorney at trial, there are some steps you can take in the aftermath of a slip-and-fall incident that can significantly help your case before your lawyer gets involved.
In this post, we cover actions you can take after a slip-and-fall injury on someone else’s property to help your lawyer present the strongest possible case on your behalf.
If you have recently been injured on the premises of another person, business, or a government agency, call the Stone Rose Law Firm at (480) 498-8998 or contact us here to ask a question or set up a free initial consultation with one of our personal injury lawyers.
Here are the steps you can take if you suffer harm because of an accident on someone else’s property.
Getting medical treatment for injuries suffered because of a slip-and-fall accident is not only prudent for health reasons. It is also part of the evidence-gathering process.
Your medical records of injury diagnosis, treatment plans, physician’s notes, prescriptions, and medical expenses are all important sources of documentary evidence you will need to support not only the existence of your injury claim but how much it is potentially worth in a settlement payout or a judgment award.
Moreover, a medical doctor can also recognize latent harm that you may not experience the symptoms of right away. This is especially important for soft tissue injuries and head trauma, which may not be immediately apparent to you.
Lastly, the sooner you receive medical attention, the less likely it is that the property owner’s insurer will try to claim that you did not suffer serious injuries because of a delay in seeking treatment or that something else caused your injuries.
If you do not already have the property owner’s contact information, you need to make an effort to get it. This will be important for notifying the property owner later.
Also, if anyone witnessed the accident, get contact information from these people, too. Witness statements can be strong persuasive evidence in settlement negotiations or court.
Hazardous conditions can be temporary and may not still exist in the days after the accident. Sometimes, the property owner will remove or correct a hazardous condition after your injury.
Getting visual evidence of what caused your accident and your injuries can be important in establishing a breach of the owner’s duty of reasonable care and helps create an evidentiary record of the harm you experienced for use in settlement or a personal injury lawsuit.
If the property owner was not present when you got into a slip-and-fall accident, then you will need to tell the property owner that the incident occurred.
At the same time, you should request the owner to preserve and retain any recorded information that may have captured the accident, such as security video footage, to reduce the possibility that this visual evidence may be lost.
It is possible, if not likely, that after you notify the property owner of the accident, the owner’s insurance carrier will contact you seeking a statement from you about what happened. You are not required to provide such a statement, and good reasons exist for you not to do so.
Remember that the insurer will have a keen interest in keeping any settlement payout to you as small as possible, and will even be looking for ways to deny your claim. Insurance adjusters are experts at asking questions designed to get you to unknowingly say things that can hurt your case, and if you make an oral or written statement this only increases your risk of giving the insurance company an opening to use against you.
The process of establishing your claim for a slip-and-fall accident case can be complex and, as we have shown above with regard to talking with insurance adjusters or an attorney representing the property owner, potentially risky.
The same goes when it comes to negotiating a settlement of your claim. Insurance companies and defense lawyers are skilled negotiators, and if you take them on by yourself you can easily find yourself at a disadvantage that can significantly reduce what you receive in compensation.
An experienced personal injury attorney, like one you will receive if you engage Stone Rose Law to represent you, will level the negotiating field for you. This is important because in most cases slip-and-fall cases don’t go to trial, so having a skilled negotiator on your side can make all the difference in the outcome you receive.
Having a Stone Rose Law slip-and-fall accident lawyer on your side offers the following additional advantages:
When you hire one of our Phoenix slip-and-fall lawyers at Stone Rose Law, your lawyer will handle all aspects of your settlement, including communicating with the other side’s insurance adjusters and lawyers.
Call us today at (480) 498-8998 or use our contact form to talk with one of our experienced personal injury attorneys.
