You do not have to cover the cost of an accident due to negligence yourself. Instead, you can place that burden on the negligent party by filing a personal injury lawsuit in Yorktown Heights.
No matter the cause of your specific injuries, you should get all relevant documents and reports that may support your recovery. For example, if you called 911, our attorneys can help you get the resulting report from law enforcement. Once we obtain this and other evidence, we can build you a strong case, file insurance claims, file lawsuits, and seek full compensation for your injuries.
Call The Martello Law Firm at (914) 685-6950 to have our personal injury lawyers evaluate your case for free today.
Types of Personal Injury Claims We Handle
Our personal injury attorneys handle a wide range of cases. No matter who hurt you or how they did it, we are ready to fight to hold them accountable.
Car Accidents
Car accidents are one of the most common injury cases out there. Our lawyers can hold negligent drivers responsible for drunk driving, speeding, running red lights, or doing anything else on the road to put your safety at risk.
Car accident lawsuits are often difficult without “serious injuries,” but this definition is broad and can cover many injuries, like broken bones. Our lawyers can also always sue for a loved one’s death in a crash.
When you file a lawsuit, you can seek damages beyond what your no-fault insurance covers, including pain and suffering damages.
Trucking Accidents
Accidents involving truck drivers or other commercial drivers are often far more serious. They also potentially open up access to additional funds by suing the driver’s employer.
Employers are responsible for what their employees do, including when it comes to trucking accidents. This allows us to sue trucking companies for their drivers’ accidents, even if the trucking company did nothing wrong.
If the trucking company did do something wrong, like encourage regulatory violations, retain a dangerous driver, or fail to maintain their vehicles, we can hold them directly liable as well.
Slip and Falls/Trip and Falls
Falling down can cause serious harm, especially if you are older or have preexisting injuries or disabilities. Tripping over loose cables, uneven flooring, or uneven stairs can mean a hard, sudden fall. The same is true for slipping on icy sidewalks/parking lots or spills in stores and restaurants.
When you fall because of the property owner’s negligence, they are responsible. This often means suing the store or business at a location, the owner of the property, or the tenant in an apartment.
In some cases, fault can be confusing to split between property owners and renters, with common areas potentially being managed by the landlord and individual units by the tenants. This may even lead to lawsuits against your own landlord.
Other Property Injuries
These are not the only accidents that dangerous property defects can cause. Victims injured by building fires, structural collapses, missing handrails, electrocution, and other accidents can also sue property owners. Sometimes dog bites are also listed in this category.
In most cases, owners/renters will have insurance to cover your injuries, but getting insurance companies to pay is often difficult. We may need to turn to a lawsuit if their homeowners/renters insurance or business liability insurance refuses to pay you.
Medical Malpractice
If you were injured by a doctor’s negligent care, you can often sue them. These cases involve things like misdiagnosis, wrong prescriptions, surgical errors, anesthesia errors, birth injuries, and more. Our personal injury lawyers can hire medical experts to examine you, go over your medical records, and determine what the doctors did wrong.
Depending on your situation, the damages in these claims can be quite high. Patients often face pain and suffering, aside from whatever additional medical care costs and lost wages they face, driving up the cost of these claims. Unlike other states, New York has no cap on these damages.
Wrongful Death
If an accident claimed your loved one’s life, your family could be entitled to damages to move forward. Medical bills for end-of-life care, funeral expenses, and the lost earnings and support your family faces can make moving forward impossible. Getting you these damages and other economic damages is our top priority in wrongful death cases.
Some damages account for the claims your loved one could have made if they lived to sue. That claim can include pain and suffering they faced before passing. However, the claim for your family’s damages cannot include pain and suffering or other “non-economic damages.”
Work Injuries
Work injury lawsuits are often limited because victims cannot sue their employers except in specific situations, such as certain regulatory/safety violations. However, independent contractors face no such restrictions.
You can also sue other parties for their share of fault, such as the company that produced defective safety gear, a driver who hit you while you were working, or a vendor/supplier who injured you during a delivery.
Product Injuries
If a product injured you because it was defective, overly dangerous, or missing warnings, we can hold the manufacturer liable. This includes claims for dangerous household items, appliances, tools, and toys, but it also includes injuries from defective pharmaceuticals, auto parts, safety gear, and more.
Breaking Down Personal Injuries in Yorktown Heights, NY
Personal injuries happen when one person’s negligent, reckless, or intentional wrongful act harms another. The victim might sustain emotional harm in addition to physical injuries, both of which are compensable in Yorktown Heights.
Defendants
Accidents, personal injuries, and the claims that follow involve negligent parties, who later become defendants. For example, if a driver hits you with their car and you are eligible to sue in New York, you could file a claim against the driver.
The negligent party might not always be as clear, however. For example, if you use a product in your home and it malfunctions, injuring you, the company that produced and distributed it might be liable. Because of this, if you sustain an injury in an accident, you should investigate the matter further, even if it does not initially appear that other parties are involved.
Personal injuries might also happen in the workforce. According to a dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that includes Westchester County, New York, the most common jobs are in office and administrative support, sales, transportation, and healthcare. All these industries present the risk of unique accidents and injuries that might require compensation.
Victims might also get hurt on another person’s property. For example, if a restaurant failed to clean up a spill and you slipped, the restaurant would be liable for your injuries. The same can be said for negligent homeowners who fail to maintain safe environments for guests in Yorktown Heights.
Damages
Victims can receive compensation for economic and non-economic damages in most cases.
For economic damages, this means getting all expenses and costs from the accident covered, such as medical care, rehabilitation, physical therapy, property damage, lost earnings, and more. For non-economic damages, this means getting payments for pain and suffering, emotional distress, mental anguish, and more.
Legal Fees
Lawyers have a reputation for being expensive, but personal injury lawyers like ours usually do not ask for payment up front. Instead, we only get paid through a “contingency fee” if you win your case.
If we cannot get your case paid, we do not get paid. This ties our success to your success, even though we already have legal and ethical obligations to do everything we legally can to win your case.
Fees are paid as a percentage of your winnings, which virtually guarantees that you have the funds to pay your legal fees. Additionally, some cases involve serious harm or serious fault that can include your attorney’s fees as part of your case.
Getting Relevant Documents for Your Yorktown Heights, NY Personal Injury Case
For your lawsuit to succeed, you should get all relevant documents that could help your case. This may include the accident report from the police, an incident report made to the negligent party, and a victim’s medical records.
Incident Reports from the Police
Law enforcement will process the scene when victims call 911 to report accidents. They will collect relevant information and condense it into a police report. You can get this report from the Yorktown Police Department (YPD). The YPD sends completed accident reports to CrashDocs.org for victims to download. It generally takes a few days for police officers to finish reports, but you should not have to wait unnecessarily long. Our personal injury lawyers can contact officers at the YPD to ask about the delay in finalizing your report if necessary.
After we get the report, we will check to make sure it is wholly accurate. We can also review it to see if officers noted eyewitnesses’ contact information or other relevant details.
You can call the police to report any accident that injures you. Reporting to the police is not just reserved for motor vehicle accidents, but it is also a good way to document any incident, especially if you need compensation for it.
Incident Reports from Negligent Parties
When hurt on someone else’s property, a victim might inform the property owner instead of calling the police. For example, if you tripped over a hazard in a store, you might fill out an incident report with the store itself. Make or request copies of all correspondence or reports related to the accident. We can use this to show that you informed the other party of the accident, their negligence, and your injuries and serve as documentation of the incident.
Beyond an initial accident report, you should not have any additional correspondence with the negligent party without our attorneys. If you do, you might unintentionally misspeak or otherwise jeopardize your claim. If the negligent party has documentation of that correspondence, they might try to use it against you to lower or eliminate their liability in Yorktown Heights.
Medical Records and Bills
You will also need to get your medical records to use as evidence in your case. Generally speaking, you can obtain your own medical records by requesting them and filling out the necessary forms with your provider or the applicable hospital.
You may also need records from before the accident to negate any arguments that your current condition or injury is from a preexisting condition and not the defendant’s negligence. Get records from all facilities or practices you have sought treatment from, including the emergency room you went to immediately after the accident in Yorktown Heights.
Furthermore, as you receive charges from medical treatment, give copies to our lawyers. We can use this as evidence of your losses from the accident. If you need long-term care for permanent injuries, we can get medical experts to testify so you get compensation for future damages not yet incurred.
Call Our Yorktown Heights, NY Injury Attorneys Today
Call The Martello Law Firm at (914) 685-6950 to discuss your case for free with our personal injury lawyers.
