Accident Lawyer in Arizona

– In today’s video we’re talking about the eight different mistakes that people will make after they’ve been involved in a car accident when they’re filing a claim with the insurance company.

So you file a claim so that you can be compensated for your loss. To help pay your medical bills, tell to help repair your property and these are some of the mistakes that people will make right after an accident that will hurt their claims process. So let’s run through them so that you understand what they are and you don’t make ’em.

First and foremost, it’s important that you contact the police if you’ve been involved in an accident. Sometimes people will be in an accident, the police will not respond and that is a mistake because the police will come, they’ll write an independent report, they will do at least a rudimentary investigation and they will document a little bit about what happened.

So if you do not call the police, none of those records will be there, we won’t have anything to go and get. Then, when we file a claim or when you file a claim, the insurance company’s going to want to know why the police weren’t involved, why this didn’t happen. People when they’re involved in accidents are supposed to call the police. If they didn’t call police, why not?

Could really adversely impact your claim. Another big one is not getting medical care. So if you’ve been involved in an accident, even a minor one, people will call us and they’ll say, “Look, I wasn’t injured, I was just bumped, “there was no issues there.” Then they’ll call a few days later, they will say, “You know actually, my neck is kind of hurting. “I woke up three days later, my neck, “my back, everything’s sore and stiff.”

Well it’s important that you go get medical care because some of these things will show up three, four days, sometimes a week, 10 days later after the accident and if you don’t go and get medical care right after the accident, now you have a gap in the treatment.

You have an unaccounted for span of a couple days between the accident and the treatment which is unaccounted for and so it is important to go get medical care. Even if you’re watching this video, it’s been a day or two days after the accident, you want to go get checked out.

Even minor accidents, five miles an hour, 10 miles an hour, it’s going to cause some bumping and some jerking. Your brains going to bounce around your head. Your neck muscles are all going to be tweaked and out of alignment and very sore and stiff. You want to get all of that reviewed by a medical professional. We are not medical professionals here.

We are lawyers, but we do have people that we send people to who are extremely well versed in helping people who’ve been involved in accidents. It’s important that they check you out because they know what they’re talking about. I don’t, unless you are a medical professional, you don’t either. So you want to trust them to make sure that you’re okay.

The other big thing, it’s actually completing the medical treatment. So if you go to a medical provider and they say, “Look, you’ve been injured in X, Y and Z ways, “you need to go do these different things in order to heal, “in order for your body to compensate for that damage.”

You need to complete it. If they give you a regimen to go do, you got to do it, otherwise, now it looks like you got medical treatment, they give you a prescription on things that you should do and you didn’t do it. So that’s going to impact your claim.

It’s going to hurt you claim and it’s going to be a mistake. Another thing, giving a recorded statement. So the insurance company’s people are going to want a statement for you, police are going to want statements from you, they’re going to want people to start admitting fault or admitting liability you just want to politely refuse those requests.

You just want to say, “Look, I’ve been advised by an attorney,” tell ’em it’s Robert Gruler with the R&R Law Group if you want, “I’ve been advised not to give any statements.” You’ve got to provide identification and you got to exchange information with the other person who was involved in the accident.

But in terms of giving a statement to the insurance companies, all they’re going to do is try to use that against you. They are trained on how to extract liability where there is none so that they don’t have to pay out.

It’s all about the bottom dollar for many of them, so you want to make sure that you’re not giving a recorded statement. Just go ahead and politely refuse that. Another big one is collecting evidence. You want to make sure that you are collecting evidence, if you’re capable of doing so.

So if you’re involved in an accident and you have the ability to get out of the car, take some pictures, write some notes about what happened, what the weather was like, write a quick summation of what actually happened.

“I was traveling southbound, I made a right hand turn, “a person blew a red light.” Whatever happened, write that down. Document the road conditions, document the weather. Make a contemporary recording of what actually happened.

That’s going to be useful in our case because it’s your version of the events, it’s your version of what happened. Now, if you’re in the back of an ambulance, you can’t do much of that, all right?

But if your friends or family or anybody else in the car is with you, and they can do that stuff, preserve the evidence. It can be very helpful because we don’t know exactly what happened. Remember, your attorney wasn’t there. The insurance adjuster wasn’t there.

So the more that we can use to document this stuff and present it when we’re making our claim, it’s going to be helpful. Not recording, not preserving evidence is also important. If you record all of this stuff and don’t keep it, it’s not any good to anybody.

So make sure that you back it up to the cloud. When you drop your phone in the toilet, make sure that it’s saved somewhere so that we have access to it. Finally, next number six. So posting on social media is a big mistake.

I’ve mentioned this in other videos but people who are injured in accidents, and then go on social media and post pictures of them skiing down the mountain or surfing on the waves, that’s a problem because now it’s sort of showing that your injury may not be as significant as you might otherwise be portraying. So it introduces an element of dishonesty, but it also shows that the reality is that you weren’t really that injured.

If you’re claiming you’ve got stiffness in your neck and back and you’re in a lot of pain, but you’re jumping out of an airplane, well maybe that is… There’s a bit of a disconnect there. So insurance adjusters and defense attorneys who are working for the insurance agencies will look up your social media.

So our general advice, do not post anything on social media. Delete your account if you have to. You’ll get it back, just make sure that you’re not posting on anything, or privatize everything because they are going to get access to it if they can.

Do not post anything on social media. Another important thing to consider is it’s a mistake to accept the first settlement from the insurance company. So accepting the first settlement, it’s almost always their initial low-ball offer. You don’t want to do that. You want to make sure that they’re not trying to close your case out too quickly.

They want to settle it and move on so they can close it, so you relieve them of all liability, you relieve them of any further claims that can be made on your behalf. So they want to settle it quickly. They’ll give you a first offer, close it out and boom, move it out the door.

It’s a mistake to accept that first settlement, unless you’ve met with an attorney and an attorney tells you, “This is a good deal, you should take it. “We’ve done our analysis, “we’ve gone through the medical records, “we’ve done our analysis on liability, “we’ve had multiple conversations “with the adjuster and their boss “and we have a good idea and a good understanding “that these are the risks if we don’t take it, “these are the benefits if we do take it.”

And come up with an analysis that you will understand and be comfortable taking. All right next and finally, biggest mistake ever not contacting an accident lawyer team. That’s us, that’s what we do. People will often think, “I don’t want to get lawyers involved, “lawyers have a lot of stigma that’s associated with them.”

But the reality is, if you get an accident attorney involved in your case, the likelihood of you getting more compensation, getting better medical treatment, getting this resolved more quickly and more favorable increase exponentially. I mean, dramatically increase across the board because this is what we do.

This is what we’re trained to do. We do this every single day. We help a lot of people through these situations and you don’t. So there’s no reason for you not to give us a call. We can help make this process much easier for you, make sure that you get the compensation that you need, and we can do it at no cost to you, no initial upfront cost.

Meaning, you can hire us, and we are not going to collect a fee unless we can help you collect, help you recover, help you be fully compensated. There’s almost nothing for you to lose.

So if you’ve involved in an accident, don’t make any of these mistakes, but most importantly do not make this mistake.

Give us a call.

We’ll schedule a free case evaluation with you, we’ll review all of your paperwork, we’ll have you come in, we’ll make sure sure it’s a good fit between you and myself and our team so that we can help you move forward with this get healed, get healthy and get back on your feet.

We look forward to speaking with you soon, thanks for watching.