Accidents happen even to the most careful drivers. However, have you given much thought as to what would happen if you were involved in a car accident, whether it is in Providence, or any other city in Rhode Island?
Would your employer pay you if your injuries required a long stay in a hospital? Or what would happen if you had to spend months at home while you recuperated?
Unless you have plenty of money socked away in the bank, little things like your mortgage, your kids college tuition and any other large expenses need to be paid for. And you’ll need to get paid somehow by your insurance company. So you need to be prepared ahead of time.
1. Keep safe, keep out of the road: If you’ve been involved in a minor automobile accident and don’t have any serious injuries, move your car to the side of the road out of the way of any oncoming traffic as soon as possible. Leaving a car in the middle of a busy intersection can be extremely dangerous for secondary accidents. If the car cannot be moved, you should stay in the car with your seat belts fastened with your hazard lights on until police or medical emergency professionals come on the scene.
2. Exchange driver information: You should give your name, address, insurance company and drivers license number to the owner of each vehicle was involved in the car accident. Write down the description of each car involved, which includes the year, make and model, as well as color. Note the exact location of the crash and write down some notes as to how it occurred.
3. Move to a safer area: This is to ensure that you are not hit by on coming vehicles. If you have reflective emergency triangles or flares, you can set them up to alert approaching vehicles.
4. Check for injuries: After the accident, check to see if anyone is injured. If no one is injured, it’s still a good idea to call the police so that they can write up a comprehensive report that you can give your insurer. Additionally, do not neglect making a hospital visit to ensure there are no internal injuries. Most car accident victims experience an adrenaline rush which might make them think they haven’t suffered any injuries. However, a day or two later, they might start experiencing pain from injuries caused by the accident. This might make it difficult for them to claim extra money from the insurer to cater for hospital bills due to injuries they hadn’t reported initially.
Consider Hiring an Auto Accident Attorney in Providence to Help You with Your Claim
If you’ve recently been injured in an accident in and believe someone else was at fault, you may be considering hiring a Providence auto accident attorney. You want to recover unexpected and expensive damages associated with medical bills, property damage, and other costs that have resulted from your accident, but you may also believe that personal injury attorneys are expensive, will add to the financial burden caused by your accident, or will reduce your settlement.
These myths are largely perpetuated by the insurance industry, which prefers to minimize the involvement of personal injury attorneys in accident claims. That’s because the goal of the insurance company is to pay you as little as possible, and they know that accident victims who work with an attorney recover, on average, 3.5 times more compensation than those who don’t hire an attorney.
So how much will a personal injury lawyer cost you?
Personal injury attorneys know that an accident causes financial hardship, and that when people are faced with a decision to put funds toward medical care or legal representation, medical care should always come first. Because they want you to focus on healing and getting better, they work on a “contingency” basis.
This means that the law firm supplies all of the financial resources necessary to reasonably win your case, and does not ask you for a fee unless your case is won. If you don’t win your case you simply walk away, and don’t owe the lawyer a penny.
