Car Accidents

Speak to a White Plains Car Crash Lawyer About Your Injuries

Accidents and collisions on the road can have devastating consequences. They may result in injuries such as broken bones, traumatic brain injuries, spinal cord damage, amputations, lacerations. Even when injuries are more minor, the aftermath may be stressful as you try to pursue redress. Perhaps the accident was a hit and run. Or maybe insurers are uncooperative. Even small injuries may require you to go to the doctor and take time off work. You may not be able to afford all that. After suffering injuries in in Westchester County, you may want to know whether you can be compensated for the full spectrum of what you have lost. State law allows car accident victims to obtain compensation for their losses, sometimes in the form of damages won through a settlement or verdict against the party or parties at fault. White Plains car accident lawyer Mark A. Siesel can represent you in your effort to recover damages for losses you sustained as a result of a car crash.

Recovering Benefits From No-Fault Insurance

Unlike some other states that allow you to immediately proceed against an at-fault driver that caused your injuries, New York is a no-fault insurance state. Under Article 51, § 5103, every car owner’s liability insurance policy must also provide for personal injury protection (PIP) coverage, which entitles the policyholder to first party benefits. This means that when you purchased your insurance to cover other parties’ damages in case of a car accident, you also obtained mandatory PIP coverage. It’s this coverage that provides your initial protection against the economic losses that arise from a vehicle accident, like wage loss and medical bills.

The minimum amount of PIP insurance you can buy is $50,000 per accident. This type of coverage allows you to recover compensation for minor injuries, no matter who was at fault, and even when the other driver involved was uninsured or underinsured, or even if it was a single car accident that didn’t involve another driver, such as crash into a tree or damage to your parked car while you were away from it. It covers cover injuries sustained by you, passengers in your car, and any involved pedestrians.

After a collision that produces injuries, your first step is to turn to your PIP coverage to be compensated for your economic losses like medical bills and lost wages, even when the other driver was at fault. The coverage is for injuries sustained by you, passengers in your car, and any involved pedestrians in a single accident. However, it doesn’t cover your noneconomic losses, regardless of the severity of the injuries.

Under Insurance Law Section 5104, our White Plains lawyers can only bring a car accident lawsuit again an at-fault driver for economic damages if your losses exceed what the insurance company considers “basic economic loss” covered by your no fault benefits. You can also sue an at-fault driver for non-economic damages if they arise from a “serious injury.”

What are the Serious Injuries that Allow You to Go Beyond No-Fault Insurance?

If your injuries qualify as a serious injury, you can file a personal injury lawsuit or third-party liability claim against the driver who was at fault. Under the law, serious injuries can include fractures, permanent restrictions on using a body member or organ, substantial restrictions on the use of a bodily system or body function, significant disfigurement, and serious disability lasting for at least 90 days. For instance, if you are in a T-bone accident that results in spinal cord injuries and paralysis, you may be able to pursue compensatory damages from the other party. Similarly, if you suffered amputation or your arm, serious vision loss, and significant facial disfigurement due to burns in a head-on collision, you could bring a lawsuit against an at-fault driver.

White Plains Lawyers to Pursue Damages for a Car Accident

Most people don’t plan for the possibility of catastrophic injuries, those that may permanently change your life. If you have serious injuries caused by another driver, your economic and noneconomic losses will probably be substantial and you may want to recover damages for those losses. You can recover damages from another driver if our attorneys can establish that he or she was at fault for the collision. Typically, this requires us to prove that driver’s negligence.

We’ll need to establish negligence by proving by a preponderance of evidence that: (1) the other driver owed you a duty to use reasonable care, (2) the other driver breached the duty of reasonable care, (3) actual and proximate causation, and (4) actual damages. If we are not able to establish one or more of these elements, we cannot obtain damages from the other party. For instance, even if you were in a collision, if you were not injured such that there were losses such as medical bills, need to get a rental car, or lost wages, we won’t be able to obtain damages.

What Constitutes a Breach of the Duty to Use Reasonable Care?

All drivers owe a duty to act with reasonable care, or the degree of concern for your own safety and that of others, that an ordinarily prudent person would use given the circumstances. Drivers’ breaches of the duty to use reasonable care occur in many ways. They can occur, for example, when a driver speeds, tailgates, weaves through traffic, cuts off other drivers, drives aggressively, fails to obey traffic signs and signals, or is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Our White Plains lawyers will need to show a causal connection between the actions constituting a breach of the duty of reasonable care and the injuries that you suffered. Sometimes this is straightforward to prove. For example, if a drunk driver is tailgating you at high speeds and rear-ends you when you have to come to a quick stop due to stopped cars, it is likely a jury would find the other driver is at fault.

However, establishing a breach can be more complicated. For example, if you saw one driver tailgating another, and tried to switch lanes while distracted by the spectacle but didn’t match the speed of traffic in the other lane, and therefore didn’t see a drunk driver who had been weaving erratically, you may both bear some responsibility for the accident. In those cases, you both may have breached the duty to use reasonable care, and in those cases the rule of comparative negligence applies.

Damages and Comparative Negligence

In New York, courts follow the rule of pure comparative negligence. This means that the other driver may try to show that you were partially or fully to blame for the car accident and resulting injuries. The jury will be asked to look at the evidence and assign a percentage of fault to each party. As the plaintiff, your damages award would be lowered by an amount equal to any percentage of fault for the accident. For example, if the total damages are $200,000, and you were 30% to blame, you can recover $140,000.

It’s important to realize that it’s not only other drivers that may be at fault. In some cases, crashes are the result of negligent property owners, manufacturers, or other entities, or some combination of these.

Damages You May Be Able to Recover

A White Plains car accident attorney can help you pursue both economic and noneconomic losses. Economic losses are often covered by no-fault insurance, at least partially. Economic losses can include a wide range of harms suffered in connection with serious injuries, including replacement services, rehabilitation, therapy, caregiving, and out-of-pocket costs as well as medical bills and lost wages. Generally, economic losses are documented. In the case of very complicated and severe injuries, it may be necessary to retain an expert or experts on the issues of future lost wages and other future losses.

Noneconomic losses can include pain and suffering, mental anguish, and lost earning potential. You cannot obtain noneconomic damages through no-fault insurance coverage. They are usually subjective losses and represent the value of the losses that the jury believes would naturally flow from the kinds of injuries that you suffered. The attorney whom you retain can make a huge difference with regard to noneconomic damages, based on how he elicits your testimony, presents your story, and demonstrates your losses.

Consult Trustworthy Car Collision Lawyers in White Plains

If you are injured in a collision, you should call the seasoned car accident attorneys at the Law Office of Mark A. Siesel for guidance on your legal options. We represent victims in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, as well as across Westchester, Kings, Putnam, Dutchess, Orange, Rockland, Sullivan, and Ulster Counties. Call our law firm at (914) 428-7386 or use our online form to set up a free appointment.

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