Have You Received an Injury Due to a Car Crash?
As a car injury lawyer, Hergott Law works to ensure that the victims of a car accident are fairly compensated for their very real and often severe injuries and losses.
Do You Need a Car Injury Lawyer?
Except in those very clear rear-ender crashes, the “who is at fault” question always arises. ICBC’s internal determination of fault has zero bearing in a court of law, and should not be accepted without independent legal advice form a car injury lawyer. Regardless of their internal decision, and even if ICBC initially accepts full responsibility on behalf of their insured motorist, liability can be raised and challenged down the road.
If the evidence indicates that you have contributed, by some percentage, to a crash occurring, your entitlement to fair financial compensation is not eliminated, but rather is reduced by the percentage of that contribution. In every case, we take all necessary steps to investigate and preserve evidence so as to be armed to prove liability if it becomes necessary to do so, regardless of what liability position ICBC takes initially.
The Common Causes Of a Car Injury
Car injury lawyer exist because we as a driving society often believe that car crashes occur because of a failure to stop a stop signs and red lights, a failure to limit our speed to posted limits, a failure to confine a vehicle to the right side of the roadway and other failures to follow the basic rules of the road you find in an ICBC driver training manual. The reality is that most crashes occur because of a simple failure to pay full attention to the task at hand: the piloting of thousands of pounds of steel down a shared roadway.
Rear-enders occur again and again and again because of a failure to notice traffic slowing and stopping ahead, or even more often the bizarre failure to notice a line of fully stopped traffic waiting for a red light to change to green. The failure to adjust speed to icy road conditions is not so much a speeding issue as it is a failure to be watching out for and adjusting to icy conditions. Head-on crashes occur most often because of inattention or failing to take a rest break and falling asleep at the wheel.
Trying to maintain a conversation by cell phone (hand-held or hands-free), text messaging, juggling food and other dangerous driving behaviours compound the problem, but our driving culture is simply very much complacent about the attention we pay to the important activity of driving.
The reason for that complacency is a lack of awareness of the very serious consequences of car crashes. The big, fiery crashes with fatalities are infrequent enough and occur in circumstances that we feel can be easily avoided and will never happen to us. The vast majority of other crashes are reported by the news media as resulting in either “no injuries” or “minor injuries” because typical car crash injuries, even those that end up resulting in chronic pain that never, ever resolves, are invisible and not even symptomatic at the scene of a crash. The driving public is led to believe that we are driving around in bumper cars; that collision does not result in serious consequences.
Paul Hergott’s One Crash is Too Many awareness campaigns is working to change driving attitudes, learn more here.