Guest personal injury blog post contributed by Alison Mackenzie, for Henry Carus & Associates. Alison is a law student and freelance writer. She enjoys writing about various law topics and cases.
Accidents happen as an ordinary part of life; however, sometimes those accidents should have been prevented before someone got hurt. Whether the accident was due to negligence, lack of attention to safety rules or something else that should have been done by another party but was not, in some cases the best course of action that you as an injured party can take is to seek damages through a personal injury suit.
Ideally, your preparation for a personal injury case should begin as soon as the incident itself takes place. For example, if you were in a car wreck or you were injured by a store’s construction project, your first step should be to receive medical attention as soon as possible for your injuries. Even if you do not believe that your injuries are bad enough to require professional attention, you do need to create an official record of what happened as soon as you can in case you do decide to pursue an injury claim. This helps you to clearly and cleanly link the incident to your injuries, making it more difficult for opposing counsel to allege that actions you took after the incident in question were responsible for the damage to your person.
Once you have created a record of your injuries and have decided that you want to pursue a personal injury case, you need to find a legal representative. Unless you are an attorney and have experience with these kinds of court cases, you should trust in the skills of a professional to see you and your case through until the end. And even if you have little or no income, you can find lawyers who work on a no-win, no-fee policy, meaning that if your case fails you have no legal costs to pay. This can be an ideal arrangement, especially if your injuries have left you with enough bills to pay as it is.
After you have selected a qualified legal representative, you need to work closely with him or her to be sure that you are doing everything you can to improve your odds of success. You should keep careful records of all of your bills and expenses, ensuring that you have solid evidence to show what your injuries have cost you over both the long and the short term. You should have copies of incident reports concerning the event, as well as copies of any reports on your initial injuries from the professionals that treated you at the scene or just after the incident happened.
Of course, even if you do take all necessary precautions, there is no guarantee of the results of this type of suit. If you bring a personal injury case, you have to be very careful to record evidence of all relevant details to give yourself the best possible chance of success. Generally speaking, however, the side that has prepared better and maintained the most impeccable records is most often the one that walks away from a personal injury case as the winner.