What to do After a Car Accident
Summary
Your health and well-being are my highest priority before you begin taking legal action for a car accident. We have a 2-year window from the time of the accident to thoroughly research and investigate what happened.
Full Transcript
I've represented a lot of clients that were unfortunately involved in automobile accidents. I, of course, want to hear what happened, how it happened, and I want to get as much, as much detail of the events as possible. But the thing that I always tell my clients that's first and foremost, that is the most important thing is after you've been in a car accident, make sure you seek the medical care that you need. There's going to be plenty of time for you to file a lawsuit if that's what you choose to do.
But the most important thing is to make sure that you get the medical treatment that you need. We want you to be healthy. We want you to be of the right mind. And I think that if you are not feeling well physically, it's hard for you to be thinking about things like a lawsuit and litigation and judges and lawyers and all of that stuff.
So I always tell my clients, thank you so much for giving me a call. Thank you so much for letting me know about what happened, and let's take care of you. Let's make sure you're taken care of first. We've got plenty of time to talk, and we've got plenty of time to figure out what we want to do if somebody is responsible for the reason you're calling me. But let's take care of you because I want you to be the best you that you can be under the circumstances.
Generally speaking, in California for a personal injury lawsuit, once you've been injured, you have about two years before you need to file a lawsuit. It's called the statute of limitations.
And in California, the statute of limitations for personal injury cases is two years. So to my point that I just made, it shouldn't be you're in a car accident and you immediately want to file a lawsuit. No, we want to find out the facts first. We want to, first of all, get you healthy, or at least as healthy as possible. But we also want to do some investigating.
We want to hire people, experts, if it's needed to go out and to figure out, okay, well, wait a minute, what happened here. We want to have a very good handle of what happened in your case, because, again, we want to start from a position of strength. We don't want to be scratching our heads in the very beginning saying, well, I'm not really sure what happened, so let's just file a lawsuit and we'll figure it out later. Now we want to figure it out on the front end of it. And so once you have started treatment with your medical professionals, and once we've done our investigation, then we'll file a lawsuit if that's what you choose to do.
And once we file the lawsuit, that's when we get into the written discovery part where I explained to you about the exchange of documents, us answering questions, the defendants answering questions. And once we've done a fair amount of that written discovery, then we start doing the depositions that we talked about, which are oral testimony, the written discovery, that's all written stuff, and the depositions, that's oral discovery. So you're sitting down, you're answering questions. You're not looking at notes. You're not reading a script.
You're just telling people what happened to you. You give some general background information. Where were you born? Where did you go to school? What city do you live in?
Do you have any kids? Do you have a spouse? Things of that nature. And once the depositions are done, then we can continue figuring out, okay, well, what's going to be our strategy? And based on the conversation between me and my client as far as what the strategy is going to be, then we decide, do we need to take more depositions? Do we need to send more questions to the other side for them to write responses?
That's really the process. And all the while, we know that there is a trial date that we have to meet, and if things happen where we don't get the work done like we thought we were, sometimes defendants are difficult. Sometimes they stonewall. Sometimes they don't give plaintiffs the information that they're entitled to. And you have to go to court, and you have to file motions, and you have to ask the court to make sure that the defendants are playing fair, because that's all we want.
We want them to play fair. And if we need to go to a court, we'll do that, and we'll get the information that we need in order to make the best case for you. Because our ultimate goal is to make sure that you are in a position where you get to tell them, this amount of money is what I believe is fair under this circumstance.
Final Thoughts
Many personal injury lawyers, including myself, will give a free initial consultation so you can determine if I am someone you feel comfortable sharing sensitive information with, and working with for at least several months to as long as a few years.