If you have been in a motorcycle accident in or around Rock Hill SC and it is not your fault, you need to know what to do.
Let us just say it is Saturday, late morning, awesome weather day. You get on your motorcycle bound for South Town Wake Park off Rambo Rd. You are travelling down Saluda Rd. headed South and just past Rock Hill Country Club. Suddenly, some jerk, not paying attention and traveling too fast pulls into your lane and hits you broadside, sending you into the pavement. You are now an injured biker; you are down, and it is not your fault. What do you do?
- If you are already out of the roadway and are safe where you are, do not move. You may have spinal cord injuries or other life-threatening injuries so you want a medic to make sure you can safely move. Your health and safety are the single most important thing.
- If you are still in harm’s way and can carefully get to safety, do so.
- Call the police
- Get medical attention
- Do not admit any fault, just state the facts
- Document the accident (take pictures of the scene, involved vehicles, damages, license plates, etc.)
- Talk to witnesses and collect their contact information
- Contact your insurance company
- Contact a personal injury attorney
There are always two central issues, Liability (who is at fault) and damages (what are the injuries). Frequently the biker is carted off by an ambulance, injured, in shock or not conscious and it is the car or truck driver who explains what happened to the police and sometimes they try to blame the innocent biker. How do you avoid this? Sometimes you cannot but at the Law Offices of Jason E. Taylor we have sent out our investigators, hired accident reconstructionist and posted rewards for witnesses. We have even hired surveyors to map the topography where one motorcyclist was killed and the spouse terribly injured. Then we used that information to have our reconstructionist build a computer-generated animation of the accident. Fortunately, Rock Hill is in SC, which is a comparative negligence state which means even if you were say twenty percent at fault, the other driver would owe you eighty percent of the value of you case. Your damage includes things like your bike and your lost time from work and your medical bills. It also includes things like your physical pain and mental anguish. It also includes things like impairment in your range of motion and function. We frequently hire additional experts to help quantify some of your losses.
I mentioned the two central issues, liability, and damages but you frequently have other issues to address like are there other at fault parties? Road design for example, or a product liability issue relative to your equipment or the other driver’s vehicle. Tracking down all the potential insurance and relevant assets is another issue.
So, what do you do? If you want to make sure you get everything you are entitled to you contact an experienced motorcycle accident law firm, like ours, The Law Offices of Jason E. Taylor, P.C. We are your legal team!
