John N. Demas is a personal injury lawyer in Sacramento, California, and a founding partner of Demas & Rosenthal, LLP. He has nearly 20 years of experience representing injured victims, successfully litigating and settling hundreds of personal injury cases. In this article, he explains the steps you should take if you’re injured in an accident.
The first thing anyone should do if they are involved in any type of accident is contact emergency personnel. Even if you don’t immediate feel hurt, it is important to get checked out and make sure nothing is seriously wrong. So obviously, getting checked out by a medical technician is going to be the first thing anyone should do if they have been involved in an accident.
After that, though, much of what you should do depends on how you feel. If you do not need immediate medical attention, then you are going to want to get any information that you can from the scene of the accident. This might include getting contact information from other people who witnessed the accident, taking photographs of the vehicles involved, or taking photographs of the scene itself.
Skid marks and other physical evidence can be especially important in an auto accident, which is why it can pay to be vigilant and get that information right away before it’s gone. This is especially true in cases where it is not immediately clear how the accident initially happened.
When you have been involved in a simple rear end car accident, that might be a fairly easy case to prove. But for accidents where the facts are more complicated and the situation is more complex, then you definitely have reason to do a little research right away and secure as much evidence as possible from the scene of the accident. When I talk about getting evidence, this could mean any number of things. On top of taking photos of the cars involved and any markings on the road, this could also mean talking to investigators.
Obviously, before doing any of that though, you will want to make sure that you got any medical attention you needed. That should always come first and foremost in these situations.
You do not have to call your insurance company from the scene of the accident, necessarily. But you may want to do it relatively soon. You are going to have to tell them what happened and give a basic rundown of the events that transpired.
This sounds basic, but it is still important that people understand it. Auto accidents make up the majority of the cases we see in our firm, which is why I have so much experience in the area.
One thing I always advise clients is to hire a lawyer sooner rather than later after they have been in an accident. The longer you wait to hire a professional, the more chances there are for evidence to disappear. And because we work on a contingency-fee basis, that means we only get paid if our clients settle their cases. So if a client has significant injuries due to an auto accident case, we would rather get involved and begin our investigation earlier rather than later.
Getting started on a case early makes it easier to track down witnesses and preserve evidence; even if a client is too injured to do this himself or herself at the scene of the accident. Evidence can go away. It can disappear. And memories fade. So it is in a victim’s best interest to call an attorney to take over their case sooner rather than later in most cases.
It costs the client the same amount if they hire us the day after the accident or a year after the accident took place, but most of the time we can achieve a better result for our clients the earlier we get involved in their cases.
