ELGIN PERSONAL
INJURY LAWYER

Elgin Personal Injury Lawyer

Every year, accidental injuries lead to over 25 million emergency room visits and around 227,000 deaths in the US. Falls and motor vehicle accidents are the most common causes, but there are many ways to suffer an injury.

Sometimes, an accident is impossible to predict or avoid, but in other cases, another party’s lack of care may be at fault. If you’ve been injured due to someone else’s negligence, you might be dealing with physical or mental pain, staggering medical bills, lost income from missing work, and other difficulties.

You shouldn’t have to bear these costs alone, but the negligent party’s insurance company might disagree.

How Do You Know If an Elgin Personal Injury Attorney Can Help With Your Damages?

Whether your accidental injury was caused by a car accident, a slip-and-fall hazard, a boating incident, or any other situation, The Personal Injury Lawyers™ will examine your case and explain the options. If there is evidence another party’s negligence caused your injuries, we may be able to pursue an insurance claim or lawsuit to recover your damages.

Please contact us today for a free consultation to learn more.

How Do You Know if Another Party’s Negligence Caused Your Injuries?

In some situations, it may immediately come to your attention that someone else was at fault. For instance, if another driver runs a red light and hits your car, you will probably assume they are responsible.

However, many personal injury situations are not so apparent. In fact, we often meet people who take responsibility for their own injuries or assume no one is at fault when another party is negligent.

For example, people who slip and fall sometimes attribute their injuries to clumsiness or failure to watch where they’re going.

Yet, in some situations, a slip-and-fall injury is caused by an unaddressed hazard, such as a spilled drink, a torn carpet, a roof leak leaving a puddle on the floor, etc. If this fall occurred on another party’s property, and they knew or should have known about the hazard, then they had a responsibility to address it or at least warn guests about it.

However, when lying on the floor in pain after a fall, you might not think to examine the area where you fell. Fortunately, an attorney can help you learn more about what happened and determine if the elements of negligence were present:

• First, it’s important to establish whether the other party has a duty of care. Generally, we all have a duty to use “reasonable care” and avoid taking actions that cause unnecessary risk to others. A homeowner or business owner has a duty to provide a relatively safe environment for guests or customers; a driver has a duty to obey traffic laws and drive carefully, etc.
• Next, we’ll need to determine if the other party failed in this duty. An example of breaching the duty of care would be a driver speeding excessively or looking at their phone while driving.
• It’s essential that we connect the other party’s failed duty of care directly to your injuries. For instance, a store’s failure to put out “Wet Floor” signs after mopping might cause a person to slip and fall.
• Finally, we must provide evidence you suffered damages from the injury. We can usually show damages through medical records, medical bills, property damage repair estimates, etc.

It can be challenging to identify the criteria for negligence on your own. Additionally, accidents and injuries often involve turbulent situations.

You were likely focused on your pain and injuries and may not have noticed what was happening or even how your accident occurred. As a result, you could be unsure of what happened or who might have been negligent.

For all these reasons, we recommend speaking with an experienced personal injury lawyer if you have any concerns that another party may be at fault.

What if You Are Also At Fault?

We see many cases where one party is mostly at fault, but the injured person made a small mistake that also contributed to their injuries. Car accident police reports, for example, often feature contributing factors linked to both drivers.

Perhaps one driver is going ten miles over the speed limit, but another zoomed through a stop sign.

Could the speeding driver have stopped in time to avoid the collision if they were driving slower? Maybe, considering that reducing your speed in a car is always a good way to lower the risk of a crash.

In some situations, it might be enough to avoid an accident with an errant driver. Either way, the fact remains that the other motorist blatantly ignored the stop sign in our example.

This is just one of many situations where insurance adjusters must decide a breakdown of fault between two (or occasionally more) parties. In the vast majority of car accidents and other personal injury cases, insurance adjusters decide fault or negotiate with each other until they agree.

What’s important to understand is that each party’s insurance adjuster does not want to pay the claim. If they do have to pay the claim, they would like to pay as little as possible.

For this reason, each adjuster will likely argue the other party was at least mostly at fault. However, they might agree that their client was partially responsible, especially if the percentage of fault is below 50 percent.

Why is that number significant?

Illinois uses modified comparative negligence statutes for personal injury cases. Under these laws, an individual who is partly responsible for their own injuries can still seek compensation from another party so long as the injured person is less than 50 percent at fault.

The final settlement will be diminished by whatever percentage of fault the injured party has. So, in our car accident example, if the speeding driver was 20 percent responsible for the accident, they could recover 80 percent of their damages.

There are two potential concerns when another party or their insurance company claims the injured person is partially at fault:

• They may have overestimated the injured party’s share of responsibility, potentially lowering the final settlement by thousands of dollars.
• They may believe the injured party has some fault when they have none.

It can be difficult for the average person to know if they share fault, and if so, how much. Fortunately, a seasoned Elgin car accident lawyer will analyze the details of the accident or injury and fight for a fair judgment of everyone’s contributions.

If the insurance company has exaggerated your portion of fault, we’ll work to establish a more accurate number.

What Are Some Common Types of Personal Injury Claims?

A personal injury can happen in many different places and situations, so you should not assume your accident doesn’t count if it doesn’t seem to fit in one of these categories. However, here are some of the most common claims we see:

Motor Vehicle and Transportation Accidents

As discussed earlier, car accidents are among the most prevalent causes of personal injury claims. However, this category goes beyond “car accidents” and includes vehicles like motorcycles, tractor-trailers, bicycles, trains, planes, boats, and even golf carts.

With any type of moving vehicle, there is a potential for accidents and injuries, especially if the person operating the vehicle is careless or ignores traffic laws or safety rules.

Premises Liability

Premises liability also encompasses a wide range of injury situations. If you are hurt on someone else’s property, and you believe the owner’s negligence caused your injuries, you may have a personal injury claim.

Property owners are expected to make a sensible effort to maintain a safe environment so guests are not injured. In these cases, the main criteria that we need to establish are:

• There was a hazard or dangerous condition on the property. Examples might include a puddle of water on the floor, an unexpected hole in the ground, a loose railing, a snagged carpet, some sort of toxic chemical exposure, a fire hazard, lack of security, etc. (This is not an exhaustive list.)
• The owner knew or should have known about the hazard. Property owners should regularly perform due diligence to ensure their property is relatively safe, but can’t be expected to know everything that happens instantly. If the dangerous condition occurred two minutes after you arrived on the property, it’s unlikely the owner would be expected to know about the hazard already. However, if we can establish the condition existed for some time before you were hurt, we may be able to show that they should have known.
• The owner failed to fix the hazard or provide a warning.
• This hazard led to your accident or injury. You slipped and fell because of the puddle; you became ill because of toxic fumes; you suffered severe burns when a fire broke out, etc.
• You entered the property lawfully—in other words, you were not trespassing.

Daycare and Nursing Home Injuries

Facilities that look after our most vulnerable loved ones have a responsibility to keep those in their care in a safe environment. Unfortunately, if the facility fails to do so, your family member could suffer a severe injury.

In daycare accidents, we sometimes see children harmed by unaddressed hazards like wet floors, cleaning chemicals left out, items falling off desks or other furniture, defective toys or playground equipment, lack of safe car seats in vehicles, or lack of appropriate supervision.

In nursing homes, elderly or disabled residents may be injured due to neglect by staff members, such as forgetting to give medication on time, giving the wrong medication or dose, failing to turn a bedridden patient to prevent bedsores, lack of supervision if the patient is a fall risk, failing to provide appropriate assistance or mobility aids, and more.

Construction and Workplace Accidents

Construction sites often contain equipment, building materials, and partially constructed areas that could prove hazardous. As a result, there are numerous OSHA requirements to prevent worker injuries, as well as rules to reduce the risk to the public—such as fencing off dangerous areas, setting out cones to indicate part of the sidewalk is under construction, etc.

If these rules are not followed, an employee on the job site or a bystander could be hurt.

Can You Sue Your Employer for a Workplace Accident?

In most cases, no, because you are generally expected to go through the Worker’s Compensation system.

If you are a W2 employee in Illinois, even part-time, your workplace injuries should be covered by Worker’s Compensation in most circumstances. This is true whether you work at a construction site or in an office.

Worker’s Compensation is a “no-fault” system, so in one crucial way, it might be easier than a personal injury claim. There is no need to prove that your employer—or anyone else—was negligent.

However, there are still other reasons the insurance company can reject your claim. As with personal injury cases, the insurance adjuster will be eager to find an excuse to deny coverage. A few common reasons for rejected Worker’s Compensation claims include:

• The insurance company could claim your injuries were fake or did not happen at work.
• You can also be denied if the insurer believes you were intoxicated at work, which is why many companies perform drug and alcohol screenings immediately after an accident.
• The insurance company might deny a claim if your employer fails to turn in paperwork promptly. In some cases, the employer might say that the injured party didn’t report the accident and they had no idea it happened.
• If the insurer has some reason to think your injuries were intentional or the result of horseplay at work, they could also deny coverage.

After suffering an injury at work, it’s best to report it and seek medical care immediately to reduce the risk of issues with your claim. Be sure to report the injury in a way that you can prove later, such as an email from a personal account or a text from your personal phone.

If you feel that your Worker’s Compensation claim has been unjustly rejected, we encourage you to speak with a personal injury lawyer before you do anything else. In some cases, we may be able to help you appeal the denial.

What if you are not an employee but are injured on or near a construction site? In this situation, you may have a personal injury claim if there is evidence the site owner or construction company was negligent.

What Elgin Personal Injury Law Firm Can Help With Your Case?

If you or a loved one has suffered an injury due to someone else’s negligence, please contact The Personal Injury Lawyers™ for a free consultation. Our experienced legal team stands ready to review your case, investigate further if necessary, and provide an explanation of your options.

There is no obligation, but if you choose to move forward with our help, you won’t owe us anything until we win or settle your case. Contact us today at 312-999-9990.