Queens Car Accident Lawyer
City streets are filled with dangers and any number of potential car accident risks. If you were involved in a car crash in Queens, you could be entitled to claim compensation from the driver who hit you and get your medical bills, pain and suffering, lost wages, and other damages covered through a lawsuit. The Carrion Law Firm’s Queens car accident lawyers may be able to help.
Insurance claims often pay low damages, and insurance companies seek to avoid paying any claims that they can. If you need the help of an experienced attorney, call our Queens car accident lawyer today. We can push strong negotiation tactics and even file a lawsuit if necessary so you can get the compensation you need after a car crash. Call us at (718) 841-0083 for a free case consultation.
Dealing with Insurance Companies After a Queens Car Accident
In New York, you are required to carry no-fault car insurance. This sometimes limits your ability to claim compensation from the other driver directly in a lawsuit and may even limit your right to file a third-party claim with their insurance company. Insurance companies are also notorious for reading into any word you say and using anything that they can against you to reduce how much they have to pay. Even if they do pay a claim, they may offer you only a fraction of your actual damages. Call our Queens car accident lawyers to get help talking to insurance companies.
You should never talk with an insurance company – even your own – without discussing your injury case with a lawyer beforehand. In serious injury cases, the insurance companies are careful to avoid payments, and they often try to pay only a percentage of medical costs and lost wages. Usually, car insurance claims cannot even cover pain and suffering damages, so you will have to take your case to court to get these damages covered at all.
Our attorneys can step in and negotiate with the insurance companies for you to get compensation. If the insurance companies are unable or unwilling to cooperate and offer settlements that cover your injuries, we can take your case to trial to fight to get a judge and jury to award you the financial compensation you need to be paid.
Proving Car Accident Cases in Queens, NYC
When you take a car accident injury case to court, it will be up to you as the plaintiff to prove your case to the jury and judge before they can award you any money. Across the country, car accident cases are typically filed on negligence grounds, which means that you do not need to prove that the defendant did anything wrong on purpose to get damages paid. Instead, you have to prove they committed some negligent act that caused your crash.
Proving Negligence
Negligence in a car accident case often involves simple mistakes and errors behind the wheel that anyone could have committed. The issue in the case comes down to the fact that if these mistakes caused a crash, the driver who committed them is the one who has to pay the damages the crash caused.
Most car accident cases are filed because of dangerous traffic violations like speeding, distracted driving, reckless driving, and drunk driving. These kinds of issues can cause serious injuries, especially if the driver’s mental state makes it harder for them to react to dangers and slow down before the crash. Many high-speed crashes occur on narrow city streets and highways in Queens, leaving victims injured because of avoidable errors.
If there was no traffic violation per se, the defendant may still have committed unreasonable mistakes behind the wheel that put them at fault. Ultimately, the jury will judge many of these mistakes with an objective standard by comparing the case to what an average driver of reasonable prudence would do.
Proving Who Caused the Crash
Once you establish what the negligent act or omission was, you also need to show that it is in fact what caused the crash. In inclement weather, many crashes happen because of the weather, not because of anything any person did. In cases like this, a crash might have been unavoidable, and even if the other driver was breaking the law, they could have been unable to stop the crash. This can throw a wrench into some car accident cases.
More often, the issue with causation is proving who is responsible because multiple drivers might have actually done something wrong. Under New York State law, there is no requirement that a victim be 100% innocent, and you can actually get compensation even if you shared fault for the crash. For example, if you were speeding a bit, but the other driver ran a red light while drunk and T-boned you, most courts would overwhelmingly agree that the other driver was at fault even if you shared a fraction of the blame.
Courts can assign a percentage of the blame to each driver and make them responsible for that proportion of the damages. This means you might lose a percentage of your overall payment based on your percentage of the fault, but our New York City car accident lawyers will work to focus the blame on the at-fault drivers and minimize any losses.
Contact Our Queens Car Accident Lawyers for a Free Consultation on Your Accident
Call The Carrion Law Firm for help with your car accident case. Our Queens car accident lawyers work hard to help our clients and their families get financial compensation from the drivers who hit them and to avoid low settlements from uncooperative car insurance companies. For your free case consultation, call us at (718) 841-0083.