Not all wrongful acts are criminal offenses, but that does not mean the actor cannot be held accountable. If someone hurt you through their negligent, reckless, or intentional conduct, you may be able to file a personal injury lawsuit that holds them accountable for all damages you have incurred.
A personal injury involves harm or damage to your body, though you might also suffer emotional harms that are compensable. If someone caused you to end up in the hospital, you might have a personal injury case. Personal injury law is a broad field, and our office handles various cases, from car accidents to slip and falls and more. There are also different damages available depending on how you were injured. Most plaintiffs seek damages for medical costs, but you might also seek damages for pain and suffering, lost income, or any other losses you sustained. To hold the defendant liable, we need evidence. Evidence may include anything that shows or suggests the defendant is liable for your injuries, like photos, witness statements, and medical records, and may vary from case to case.
Call The Carrion Law Firm for a free case assessment from our personal injury lawyers at (718) 841-0083.
How to Know if You Have a Personal Injury Case in Corona, NY
People do not always realize they have a personal injury case on their hands. They might brush off their injuries as just another accident when, in reality, they can hold the person who harmed them legally responsible. Our lawyers can help you with your case and determine if you have a cause of action, or reason to file a personal injury lawsuit.
If you are unsure whether you have experienced a personal injury, there are a few points to consider. For example, were you physically harmed? Were you treated at a hospital or doctor’s office for your injuries? Did you have to take time away from work because of your injuries? Were your injuries painful or emotionally traumatic? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you should speak our attorneys about your situation as soon as possible.
When reviewing your case and confirming your cause of action, our personal injury lawyers will ask who was involved in the accident and how exactly you were hurt. While some cases are relatively straightforward, like car crashes involving two drivers, others are not, such as slip and falls in apartment building stairwells. Even if no one else was present and did not seem to directly cause your injuries, like the property owner, they may be liable because they failed to fulfill certain responsibilities, like addressing hazardous conditions in the stairwell.
Victims might be similarly unsure if they have a case after getting hurt while using a product, like any household appliance or piece of equipment. They might wrongly assume user error caused their injuries and not a design or production issue, and our lawyers can review these cases to confirm if victims have claims against negligent product manufacturers.
You might not be sure whether or not you have a case until you consult with our attorneys, which you should not wait to do. The three-year statute of limitations typically starts running on the date of injury, and missing it would bar you from recovery in New York.
Top Personal Injury Cases Our Corona, NY Lawyers Handle
Our personal injury attorneys have experience in multiple areas of personal injury law, enabling us to help victims of various accidents and with different injuries recover damages from liable parties. Whether you were injured in an accident or by someone’s intentional and malicious conduct, you deserve justice and fair compensation.
Motor Vehicle Accident Cases
Our office has handled many personal injury cases involving accidents on the road. Car accidents are common in and around New York City. Motorcycle accidents, bus accidents, truck accidents, Uber and Lyft accidents, and pedestrian accidents also commonly injure victims, making them incur expensive damages. Roads and highways are dangerous places, and other drivers on the road must always drive with reasonable safety. When other drivers are negligent, they might cause serious accidents and injure others.
Motor vehicle accident victims must turn to their personal injury protection insurance for damages unless they meet certain criteria and can file a lawsuit. This is due to the fact that New York is a no-fault state, seeking to limit the quantity of car accident lawsuits for lesser injuries.
By comparing your injuries to New York’s definition of a “serious injury” or seeing if your damages exceed a “basic economic loss,” we can confirm your ability to sue after a motor vehicle accident. This can lead to greater compensation not provided by personal injury protection insurance, like for victims’ pain and suffering.
Premises Liability Cases
We are also very experienced with premises liability cases, which involve suing defendants for accidents or injuries sustained on their property. Your injuries must stem from the property being poorly maintained and hazardous. A common premises liability case is the slip and fall accident. If you slipped and fell on someone’s property because they failed to maintain it (e.g., cleaning up spills, shoveling icy walkways, fixing uneven stairs), you can sue them for your injuries with our attorneys’ help.
Product Liability Cases
A product liability lawsuit is not aimed at another person but usually a business. People injured by defective or dangerously designed products can sue the businesses that sold or manufactured those products for their injuries. This often comes up in cases of faulty power tools or when safety features on vehicles fail. Filing third-party lawsuits against product manufacturers for injuries suffered during workplace or construction site accidents may enable victims to claim greater damages and circumvent Workers’ Compensation being their exclusive remedy.
Damages Available in Corona, NY Personal Injury Lawsuits
When you decide to pursue a personal injury lawsuit, our attorneys can assist you in calculating damages. Damages represent the losses you experienced because of your injuries. These losses might be economic and have come at a monetary cost, or they might be non-economic and come at a physical or emotional cost. Regardless, both economic and non-economic damages are quantifiable. We will estimate your losses before filing your case so our requests for relief are accurate and we appreciate your total damages before engaging in settlement discussions.
Medical Bills
Economic damages in personal injury lawsuits typically include medical bills. After sustaining injuries in a serious car accident, fall, or workplace incident, you might get rushed to the emergency room. If your injuries are less urgent, you might go to see your primary care physician or to a walk-in clinic for help. In any case, the person who caused your injuries should pay for the cost of your medical treatment.
To help ensure this, our lawyers can compile bills from hospitals and providers that not only prove you needed routine medical treatments for your injuries but also how much those treatments cost.
Lost Wages
Another form of economic damages is lost income. When victims are badly injured, they might need to take time off from work to recover from their injuries. In severe cases, injured victims might have to leave their jobs because they cannot return to work for a very long time, if ever. You can claim your lost income and lost future income as part of your economic damages, which our attorneys will calculate according to recent paychecks and input from experts.
Pain and Suffering
Non-economic damages include losses that you feel and experience but do not come at a financial cost. Common examples include physical pain and mental suffering. The excruciating physical agony victims experience after being severely injured in a car crash certainly deserves compensation. Similarly, the emotional and psychological trauma from being injured can last a lifetime and should be compensated.
In addition to using the appropriate equations and methods to calculate your non-economic harms, we can have mental health experts evaluate you and contribute to your claim, supporting our calculations and requests for relief.
Evidence in Personal Injury Lawsuits in Corona, NY
Before your personal injury lawsuit gets to a courtroom, we need to gather evidence to prove the defendant is liable for your injuries. The evidence you need for your specific situation will depend on how you were injured. Our personal injury lawyers have considerable experience identifying relevant evidence and collecting it to help ensure victims’ fair recoveries from liable parties. A good place to start is the accident’s location. Were there any security cameras nearby? Was anybody else present at the scene? Did the defendant leave anything behind at the scene? Answering these questions can help us find the evidence we need.
Photos and Videos
Photos and videos are great ways to prove the defendant is liable. Even if the photos or videos do not depict the defendant, they may shed light on other important details. For example, photos of impact points and vehicle damage can help accident reconstruction experts calculate involved drivers’ speed and direction of travel while also pinpointing which driver initiated the collision.
Preserving video footage of slip and falls is paramount to ensure property owners, who are also the liable parties, do not delete it, and our lawyers can handle this and other aspects of evidence preparation after taking on your case.
Witness Statements
If witnesses were in the area and saw the defendant cause your accident, they can testify about what they saw. The more people who can testify and back you up, the better for your case. If you cannot talk to witnesses and get their names and numbers, we may learn them after getting and reviewing the police report from local law enforcement. Whether you are hurt in a car crash, fall, or workplace accident, do not hesitate to call the police if you need extra assistance. Officers can help document scenes and facilitate us getting eyewitnesses’ information so we can conduct interviews.
Medical Records
Medical records are the concrete evidence that victims have the injuries they claim in their lawsuits. We will handle organizing this information for you as you get treatment. Medical records show the timeline of when you were injured or initially assessed by doctors, when your injuries were confirmed and diagnosed, what specific care you received, such as surgeries, prescription medications, or physical therapy, and doctors’ notes throughout your recovery. Treating physicians may also testify as witnesses in lawsuits that go to trial to confirm what we have presented through victims’ medical records.
Contact Our Corona, NY Attorneys for Help with Your Injury Claim Today
Call The Carrion Law Firm at (718) 841-0083 for a free case review from our personal injury lawyers.