Hiring an auto accident attorney immediately following an auto accident is important for many reasons. First and foremost, having legal advice at the onset of your claim is critical to preserve all avenues of potential recovery possible, given your set of facts and circumstances.
What to Expect After You’ve Been In A Car Accident in Florida
Immediately following an auto accident, you will:
- speak with investigating police officers,
- call the incident into your insurance company,
- likely speak with the other driver’s insurance company and any witnesses to the incident
Assuming you were injured, you will be taken to medical care professionals for care and evaluation and eventually advised on what treatment avenue to take, given your injuries. And these are just the things that happen initially following an accident.
When you speak to the officer, you will be alone as the opportunity to get a lawyer at that time is not reasonable. As such, you need to remember to be clear in what happened and provide all the facts as they were without leaving anything out. Additionally, you should take photographs of the scene to preserve any potential evidence and to help explain the incident long after you have forgotten most of the specifics.
When Do You Need to Hire An Attorney?
Following the initial scene and the things that will occur there, you need to hire an attorney immediately. You will be asked by insurance companies to give recorded statements. You will be told by insurance companies about everything other than how to protect yourself and recover for your losses, and you will be convinced of things that will hurt your case and you as a result. You NEED a personal injury attorney to:
- conduct and complete the investigation phase,
- to be there with you for recorded statements,
- to discuss things with insurance companies, and everyone else involved so that you don’t have to.
Why It’s Important to Hire a Personal Injury Attorney
Mistakes made at the onset of a claim have damaging effects for the life of the claim, and many of these mistakes are ones that cannot be undone.
Having highly trained and skilled individuals handling your accident claim from its inception to completion is a vital part of ensuring your recovery is fair, just, and includes all of what you deserve.
Often, I have clients come to my office who first tried handling their claim on their own, and most of the time, I will refer them elsewhere. It’s not that I do not want to help them. It is that after finding out that their case has been mishandled, it becomes clear that there is not much I can do to repair the damage that has been done. After many failed attempts to repair these types of claims, I have found that the client is best served completing their claim process themselves.
It is critical to have a professional handle the early stages of your claim, as this is the building blocks of how your case will flow in the future.
It is important to understand and remember how these things are handled will determine the availability and viability of much, if not all, of the recoveries available to you. For this reason alone, I believe it is clear that hiring an auto accident attorney very early on is critical to maximizing your recoveries.
