People sustain a variety of injuries resulting from accidents every day. Your child might fall off a bicycle and get skinned knees, or you may slip in the shower. While unfortunate, this type of accident doesn’t qualify for a personal injury claim.
Other people can cause accidents where you are an unwilling participant, and you can sustain injuries. If someone else is responsible for your accident and injuries, you can possibly receive compensation for these damages.
Consult a personal injury lawyer if you’re not sure that your situation qualifies. We understand Arizona laws pertaining to personal injury accident cases and can assess your claim and advise you of your options.
What Is a Personal Injury Accident?
For your case to qualify for a personal injury claim, the responsible party must owe you a duty of care. This means that that person should act reasonably like other people would to avoid causing harm to others.
The vast majority of personal injury cases involve negligence. To show negligence:
- The party or parties who caused the accident must owe you a duty of care.
- Those responsible failed to provide that duty of care due to negligence.
- You sustained injuries in the accident.
- The guilty party caused the accident and, therefore, your injuries.
If the circumstances of your mishap qualify, you can seek compensation for your damages. In most cases, this process includes liability insurance. While people purchase liability insurance policies to protect themselves financially, insurance companies don’t like paying for damages their policyholders cause.
If you have a personal injury accident, hiring a lawyer can significantly improve your chances of getting reasonable compensation. We aggressively negotiate with these providers and don’t let them take advantage of unwitting accident victims.
What Are Common Personal Injury Cases?
Your attorney can assist you in a variety of personal injury cases. While the circumstances of each accident are different, most fall into one of the following categories.
Auto Accidents
Distracted driving causes many auto accidents. These include accidents involving other vehicles, motorcycles, pedestrians, rideshare services, trucks, and public transportation. A personal injury lawyer can represent your interests in all of these situations.
Distracted driving is anything that takes a driver’s attention and focus away from operating a vehicle. Common types of distracted driving are:
- Texting or other hands-on cell phone uses
- Interacting with passengers in the vehicle
- Daydreaming
- “Rubbernecking” to look at other accidents or roadway situations
- Drinking or eating
- Looking for items in the vehicle
- Putting on makeup, fixing hair, and other similar activities
Every driver has a duty of care to other people to drive safely. Taking attention from the road even for a few seconds can have catastrophic consequences.
Human error while driving occurs in other ways as well. These include:
- Speeding
- Failing to follow traffic laws
- Driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol
- Driving when fatigued
- Reckless driving
Slip-and-Fall Accidents
A slip-and-fall is a type of personal injury accident that falls under premises liability. Property owners and businesses must provide safe places for workers, customers, and other guests or invitees.
If a business or property owner is aware of a dangerous situation, they must take steps to prevent accidents. If it’s impossible to fix the hazard immediately, they should post warning signs and cordon the area to prevent people from entering. Otherwise, they need to correct the problem.
Knowing when a property owner or business manager became aware of a hazardous situation is critical in slip-and-fall injury claims. While it is challenging for you to do so, your personal injury lawyer has the resources and knowledge of how to find crucial evidence.
If you slip on someone else’s property and sustain injuries due to a hazardous condition, consult with a personal injury attorney immediately. Evidence in this type of mishap is easily destroyed, so getting us involved as soon as possible allows us to gather potential proof before it disappears.
Construction Site Accidents
Accidents at construction sites can injure workers and bystanders. Because many different crews often work at a single site simultaneously, determining fault in construction accidents is complicated at times. In addition, a workers’ compensation claim may also be appropriate if a worker suffers injuries.
A personal injury attorney can handle both personal injury accident and workers’ comp claims. Having one lawyer for both cases makes sense.
Dog Bites
In Arizona, dog owners are responsible for paying damages to most dog bite victims. This is true regardless of any previous knowledge of the dog’s viciousness. Trespassers may not receive compensation, and cases of dog bites involving police or military dogs are subject to different liability circumstances.
Medical Malpractice
Physicians and other medical personnel have a high degree of responsibility to provide competent care to their patients. Unfortunately, these professionals can make mistakes like anyone else, and those mistakes can cause further injury, infection, and death.
Common types of medical malpractice cases stem from:
- Inaccurate diagnosis
- Performing surgery on the wrong body part
- Not practicing appropriate safety precautions during surgery
- Incorrect prescriptions
- Nursing home neglect or abuse
- Staff negligence
- Anesthesia mistakes
- Improper treatment
Medical professionals carry malpractice insurance, usually purchasing policies from major insurance companies. Those providers can afford a strong legal team to argue against paying damages, so it’s vital that you have competent legal representation.
Workplace Accidents
Many people sustain injuries on the job. The types of injuries vary by job category, but any can be severe or fatal. Common workplace injuries include those caused by:
- Slip-and-fall accidents
- Equipment or machinery accident
- Struck-by accidents, including falling objects or moving equipment
- Fires
- Transportation accidents
- Violent acts
Other common personal injury accidents that may qualify for compensation are:
- Traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries
- Boating accidents
- Wrongful death
What Damages Can You Receive?
Your personal injury attorney will fight insurance companies to obtain maximum compensation for you. You need to understand that you can unintentionally harm your chances of recovering appropriate damages if you:
- Refuse or stop recommended medical treatments
- Admit to any degree of fault for your accident
- Speak to insurance company representatives without your attorney
- Discuss the details of your case with anyone other than your lawyer
- Post anything on social media
Your lawyer will provide advice about what you do and don’t need to do in the days following your accident and during your recovery and personal injury accident claim process.
The state of Arizona doesn’t have a cap on the amount of monetary compensation you can receive if you are an injured accident victim. The possible damages in a personal injury accident fall into three categories.
Economic Damages
Injured accident victims can face many expenses directly resulting from the accident. You didn’t cause the situation, and you shouldn’t have to pay these expenses yourself. Economic damages can include:
- Bills for medical treatments
- Costs of prescriptions and transportation to and from medical appointments
- Wages lost due to time off from work while dealing with the accident and your injuries
- Property damage
- Caregiver costs
Non-Economic Damages
People can suffer from a personal injury accident in different ways, and not all of them have a monetary value. Non-economic damages are intended to compensate you for things like:
- Physical, mental, and emotional pain and suffering
- Loss of consortium
- Diminished earning capacity
- Permanent disfigurement
- Loss of the ability to enjoy life
- Inconvenience
Because these damages may not be visible to others, it is sometimes challenging to prove that you suffer from them. In most cases, opposing insurance companies will say that you don’t suffer from these damages, or that the impact on your life isn’t severe.
To obtain maximum compensation for non-economic damages, expert testimony from medical personnel and others is sometimes required. The Sargon Law Group can facilitate your examination by these professionals and arrange for them to testify on your behalf.
Punitive Damages
Arizona allows punitive damages for two kinds of personal injury cases:
- The defendant knowingly acted in an unsafe manner, understanding that these actions were likely to harm someone
- The guilty party had malicious intent, purposefully harming the victim
This category of damages intends to punish the guilty party further. Ask your personal injury attorney if your case qualifies for punitive damages.
Do You Need a Lawyer for a Personal Injury Accident?
Personal injury lawyers have access to many resources that you don’t. In addition, we know the law and the personal injury claim process because we handle cases similar to yours every day. We know what evidence to look for and how to find it.
Your personal injury attorney can:
- Advise you of your options
- File necessary paperwork for you
- Speak to insurance company representatives on your behalf
- Speak to witnesses to get their statements
- Obtain copies of surveillance camera videos
- Request pertinent information about the person or people who caused the accident
- Negotiate a maximum settlement to compensate you for your damages
- Litigate your case in court if needed
Although you can attempt to settle with an insurance carrier on your own, these companies have tactics they routinely use in an attempt to pay as little as possible to injured accident victims. Your lawyer has experience with these underhanded tactics and strategies, and we won’t stand for them.
Is Arizona an At-Fault State?
Yes, Arizona is an at-fault state for personal injury accidents. This means that you can receive damages from the party responsible for causing your accident and injuries. Arizona uses pure comparative negligence laws to determine who pays.
Pure comparative negligence means that more than one party can share fault for causing an accident. Your assigned percentage of fault reduces your compensation. If, for instance, you are 20% at fault, the total amount of damages you can receive is reduced by 20%.
Because of the possibility of reduced compensation, it’s vital to prove that you had little or no fault for causing the accident. At the same time, others involved in the accident will attempt to blame you.
In a personal injury accident, your lawyer can find evidence to support your innocence and prove that another party caused your accident. While the causes of some accidents are clear-cut, most involve complicated circumstances with many moving parts. Your lawyer will handle finding evidence so you can concentrate on recovering from your injuries and adjusting to their impact on your life.
When Should You Call a Lawyer After a Personal Injury Accident?
In Arizona, there is a two-year statute of limitations for filing a personal injury claim in almost all instances. However, it’s advisable to call an attorney immediately. The days following an accident are critical; you receive medical treatment, you must file paperwork, insurance company representatives contact you, and you’re likely unable physically or mentally to do everything.
Making a mistake with any of these tasks can reduce the amount of compensation you receive. Your lawyer will advise you of things to do — and things you shouldn’t do — immediately after the accident and during your recovery. This advice is often invaluable.
Hiring a personal injury lawyer quickly has several benefits. We can get started on your case immediately and begin gathering evidence to justify your claim.
Will You Let Sargon Law Group Handle Your Personal Injury Accident Claim?
Sargon Law Group is ideally situated to handle your personal injury accident case competently, serving many cities in Arizona and their surrounding areas. We have vast knowledge about how to navigate these cases, gained from our years of experience.
We understand that people sometimes don’t hire attorneys because they are afraid of fees. You don’t have to worry about that when you hire Sargon Law Group. We want you to have the best legal representation available in your personal injury case, so we work on a contingency basis. That means you won’t pay us unless we obtain compensation for you.
With no risk, calling Sargon Law Group for a free consultation makes sense. You’re under no obligation to hire us, so you won’t lose anything by getting in touch. You can reach us 24/7 by calling (623) 225-5635 or submitting our online request form. Let us provide the help you need.