If you’ve been injured in a motorcycle accident in San Antonio, it’s important to know your legal rights. Texas is an at-fault state, meaning the driver who caused your accident and injury is responsible for paying for your medical bills, lost income, emotional distress, and other damages. But recovering full and fair compensation isn’t always easy. It often takes an experienced local motorcycle accident lawyer to protect your rights and ensure you receive a fair settlement for your losses.
What Are Your Rights if You Were Injured in a Motorcycle Accident?
Motorcyclists can potentially suffer very severe injuries in a crash. Recovering may take weeks or months of expensive medical treatment, during which you may not be earning an income. On top of this, your motorcycle may have been seriously damaged, requiring extensive repair work. Provided that another driver caused your injury, as is often the case with motorcycle accidents, you have a right to pursue reimbursement for all these losses from the other driver’s insurance company.
But successfully winning a settlement will require proving the other driver’s negligence, which can be challenging in motorcycle cases. Nevertheless, a skillful attorney can investigate and gather evidence to prove the full value of your claim. Most successful motorcycle injury claims are settled out of court. But on occasion, if the insurer isn’t agreeing to a fair settlement figure, you may need to file a lawsuit and take the case before a jury and pursue a court-awarded payout.
Potential Damages You May Recover
As the injured accident victim, you have a right to pursue various damages: monetary compensation for any losses you’ve suffered as a result of the accident. Your attorney can help you understand and calculate all the damages you’ve suffered, which may include both economic and non-economic damages.
Economic Damages in Motorcycle Accident Cases
Any medical expenses and costs of recovery that you’ve been forced to pay should be included in your damages. This may include ambulance fees, hospital fees, family physician fees, surgery costs, prescription costs, pain management costs, physical therapy fees, and more. Motorcycle injuries sometimes require long-term or even lifelong treatment. In these severe cases, you may also seek compensation for your medical expenses extending into the future.
Property damage to the motorcycle is often another important economic damage, as is any income you’ve lost from missing work as a result of your injuries. And if your ability to work has been somehow reduced, preventing you from earning a living in the future as well, you also have a right to pursue compensation for these future losses.
Non-Economic Damages in Motorcycle Accident Cases
Many injury victims aren’t aware of the various non-economic damages they also have a right to claim. Non-economic damages are damages for losses that don’t have a specific monetary value but may, nonetheless, still amount to a significant portion of a settlement payout.
Physical pain and suffering are common non-economic damages. You may have experienced a great deal of emotional distress, such as anxiety, depression, loss of sleep, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Disfigurement, scarring, impairment, disability, humiliation, and loss of enjoyment in life are all potential non-economic losses. Your attorney can help you calculate the entirety of your damages and then start gathering evidence to prove their full value.
The Challenges With Proving Fault in Motorcycle Accidents
As mentioned, upholding your rights to financial compensation requires proving that the other driver was at fault and therefore responsible for your injuries. But insurance companies often dispute liability and seek to cast at least partial blame upon the motorcycle driver.
One of the difficulties often faced in motorcycle accident cases is a tendency for jury members to see motorcyclists as somewhat reckless and therefore responsible for their own injuries. Also, eyewitness accounts can sometimes be less reliable when it comes to motorcycle crashes; motorcycles are smaller than cars, move in unusual ways, and accidents tend to happen extremely quickly, making it harder for eyewitnesses to say for sure how a crash was caused.
Your Attorney Can Strengthen Your Claim With Evidence
If you find yourself facing these kinds of obstacles in your personal injury claim, don’t let them dishearten you. Experienced motorcycle accident lawyers understand how to overcome them. The key is to build a case based on robust evidence, which may include a police report, photo and video evidence from the accident scene, as many eyewitness accounts as possible, surveillance camera footage, and hospital and doctor’s records.
The Value of Expert Witness Testimony
Accident reconstruction experts also frequently play a key role in proving a motorcycle accident claim. These experts can thoroughly investigate the incident and then explain what occurred to a jury with a step-by-step timeline, using various visual aids. Highway safety experts may also be of use in describing hazardous road conditions.
And in order to prove the full value of your damages, your attorney might retain further expert witnesses such as medical experts, clinical psychologist experts, forensic accountant experts, and vocational rehabilitation experts. When you hire an experienced motorcycle accident lawyer in San Antonio, not only do you benefit from their legal know-how and expertise, but you also gain access to their database of high-quality local expert witnesses.
What To Do Immediately After Your Accident
The steps you take right after your accident may help a great deal in strengthening your case down the road. First and foremost, get yourself to safety, call the police, get the other driver’s details, and seek emergency medical treatment if necessary. Then, if it’s safe to do so, take as many pictures of the accident scene as possible, including vehicle positioning, vehicle damage, skid marks or debris on the road, weather conditions, nearby road signs, and any injuries suffered.
Approach eyewitnesses and politely ask for their contact details, and take notes on your phone of everything that happened, including anything anyone says. If you’re severely injured and can’t carry out these evidence-gathering tasks, ask a friend, family member, or attorney to do it for you. It’s important to seek immediate medical attention, even if you feel fine: you may be hurt more seriously than you know and the hospital or doctor’s records will later help in your claim.
Protect Your Rights With a Motorcycle Accident Lawyer in San Antonio
The surest way to understand your rights in the aftermath of a motorcycle accident is to speak to a specialist motorcycle accident attorney. Having helped many accident victims in many similar cases, an attorney can evaluate your case, estimate your damages, and explain your optimal course of legal action. Without this legal guidance, many accident victims make mistakes early on while filing their claims and consequently win a good deal less in compensation.
A local attorney knows the personal injury laws in Texas. They can handle the insurance company for you, taking that pressure off your shoulders and giving you space to relax, rest, and recover from your injuries. They can collect all the evidence necessary to build a rock-solid case, and even file a lawsuit and pursue your compensation in court if need be. An attorney can also provide valuable moral support throughout the entire claims process.
If you need the help of an experienced motorcycle accident attorney, contact Gamez Law Firm today at 210-951-2024 for a free consultation. With over $100,000,000 in successful settlements won, our seasoned lawyers have been helping local residents in San Antonio and the surrounding region to financially recover from their accidents and injuries for over 50 years.