Pasco County Car Accident & Injury Lawyers

If you were seriously injured and you have been dealing with the insurance companies on your own, you may have received a settlement offer. Is it enough? Probably not. The insurance companies will try to settle your claim for as little as possible; and, if they are making you an offer, it is most likely because they know you are entitled to more.

Calculating your losses after an injury is a complex process. You need to assess your current and future expenses as well as the non-financial impacts of your injuries (such as pain, suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life). To avoid settling for too little too soon, you need to hire a law firm that can accurately determine the full extent of your physical, financial, and emotional harm.

The key questions are: (i) “What caused your injury?” and, (ii) “What is the extent of your losses?” Our personal injury attorneys in New Port Richey represent clients who have suffered injuries including:

• Bone fractures
• Eye, ear, and facial injuries
• Scarring burns and lacerations
• Soft tissue injuries
• Spinal cord injuries
• Traumatic brain injuries (TBI)
• Other serious injuries

If you were injured and you believe you were not fully at fault, it is in your best interest to at least speak with a personal injury lawyer. Our New Port Richey personal injury lawyers provide free, no-obligation case reviews. We will listen to the facts of your case and give you our honest assessment as to whether we believe we can help you recover substantial damages.

Studies show that folks who hire a lawyer to represent them do recover more money, on average, than those who handle the insurance claim process on their own. If you’ve been injured in New Port Richey, it’s worth taking 15 minutes to speak with an experienced attorney about your options.

We start by learning about you and the most important facts of the case. Then, we set to work building your case. When you work with us, we carefully document your injuries, and we work with reconstruction experts in order to prepare to tell your story to the jury. We also handle negotiations with the other side.

In some cases, our case preparation is so convincing that the other party agrees to pay you fair compensation for your injuries before your trial date even arrives. In other cases, we look forward to telling your story to the jury and asking for fair compensation. We’re seasoned trial attorneys, and our case preparation utilizes technology to make sure that the jury can follow along in a way that’s easy to understand.

Maybe. Florida is a modified comparative negligence state. This means that if you are found to be no more than 50% at fault for the injuries, your recovery is reduced by the same proportion as your percentage of fault. As an example, if you are found to be 20% at fault in an injury, you may still recover 80% of your damages in a lawsuit. If, however, your percentage of fault is found to be more than 50%, you are barred from any recovery under the law.

In a traditional claim against the person responsible for your injuries, you must show that that person acted negligently. To act negligently means to fail to exercise the level of care that an ordinary person would use in the same situation. For example, if a person injures you by disregarding a stop sign, they’ve acted negligently, because a reasonable person in the same situation would observe the stop sign.

When you’re hurt, it’s important to talk to an experienced New Port Richey personal injury lawyer about the case. Law enforcement isn’t in the job of determining who acted negligently. That’s a job for the jury, not the police. Our attorneys can help evaluate your case and give you an honest opinion of how Florida law applies. If another person didn’t behave in a way that a reasonable person should behave, you can recover for your losses.

You have a right to several different types of damages when you’re hurt in a New Port Richey crash. Besides punitive damages, these losses fall in the categories of economic and non-economic damages. Economic damages represent the financial losses that you sustain in a crash, while non-economic damages include things like pain and suffering and the loss of use of your normal bodily functions.

Economic losses are things like medical bills and loss of income. It also includes personal property losses. Basically, it’s any kind of financial loss that you sustain because of your injuries. These are direct, out-of-pocket losses that you can directly account for.

Non-economic damages are damages that are meant to compensate you for losses that aren’t financial. For example, if you lose full use of your shoulder because of the incident, non-economic damages aim to reduce that loss to a dollar amount to pay you for it. Of course, money can never give you your health back, but Florida law aims to pay you in some way. Non-economic damages also include things like pain and suffering, inconvenience, and mental anguish. When we work with a client, we aim to make sure that we carefully document all of your losses in order to ask for full compensation.

Punitive damages laws exist in Florida in order to allow the courts to punish a person or company for bad behavior that isn’t necessarily criminal. Punitive damages allow you to recover extra amounts when your injuries result from another’s choice to put profits over safety. An example of this usually comes into play in cases where a motor vehicle manufacturer ignores design problems at the expense of those on the road.

There are limits to the amount of punitive damages that you can recover in any case. It’s three times the amount of economic damages or $500,000, whichever is the larger amount. Punitive damages are meant to give companies an incentive to take reasonable precautions for the safety of consumers.