Skokie Personal Injury Lawyer
Suffering an injury, even a moderate one, can cause you weeks of pain, missed time at work, and high medical bills. A severe injury could have even more troubling consequences, including the potential for permanent disability.
If someone else’s negligence caused your injury, you have the right to seek compensation for your damages. However, the negligent party and their insurance company may put roadblocks in the path to recovering a fair settlement.
Fortunately, an experienced personal injury lawyer can assist you in fighting for appropriate restitution. The Personal Injury Lawyers™ team is always available for a free consultation about your personal injury claim.
Our legal experts will review your case, answer questions, and offer guidance on the options available to you. Please contact us today to learn more.
How Do You Know if You Need a Skokie Personal Injury Attorney?
Many people are unsure if they need a lawyer or even have a personal injury case. Some may assume their injuries are no one’s fault or will be covered by their health insurance.
Others might feel another party is at fault but aren’t sure they can prove it. They may also have concerns that the responsible party can’t afford to pay their expenses.
Unfortunately, the reality of dealing with medical bills—sometimes for months after the initial injury—can make the situation more urgent. In many cases, health insurance only covers some of the medical costs of an injury, and copays can be expensive.
Add to that lost income, property damage, and other related expenses, and you could suffer a severe financial setback.
If you or someone you love has suffered an injury that you even think might be due to someone else’s negligence, we urge you to talk with an experienced personal injury lawyer right away. It’s okay if you aren’t sure you can prove what happened—or if you aren’t sure what happened.
Injuries often occur quickly and can be disconcerting, so confusion is understandable.
When you contact a personal injury attorney, we’ll review the details of your case. If necessary, we may investigate further to learn more about what happened.
The sooner you contact us, the easier it will be to find evidence showing how your injury occurred. For instance, in some cases, we may locate a doorbell or security camera in the neighborhood that captured your accident.
However, these types of videos are usually erased on a regular basis, so the opportunity to obtain this evidence might evaporate after a few weeks.
What Happens if There Is Evidence of Another Party’s Negligence?
If we find evidence of the following, you may have grounds for a personal injury claim:
- Another party had a duty of care or a responsibility to take reasonable steps to prevent potentially dangerous situations.
- This duty of care was breached, or the other party did not take reasonable steps to prevent accidents or injuries.
- Because of this breached duty of care, you suffered an injury.
- Your injury led to damages, such as medical bills, lost income, pain and suffering, permanent disability or disfigurement, and property damage.
Once we establish that you have a strong case, we’ll determine your options and explain them. In most situations, the next step is pursuing a claim against the at-fault party’s insurance policy.
Sometimes, the client doesn’t even realize that there is a relevant policy, but often there is.
An insurance claim can be especially helpful when the injured person doesn’t want to sue the negligent party, perhaps because they’re friends or because they know the other party can’t afford to pay their damages.
Here are a few examples of how insurance policies may apply in different personal injury situations:
Motor Vehicle Accidents
Only about 16 percent of Illinois drivers are uninsured, while the rest should have at least $25,000 per person in bodily injury liability and $20,000 in property damage liability (Larger policies are available, so some drivers may have more insurance). The state also requires $25,000 in uninsured motorist bodily injury coverage, so you are not entirely out of luck if hit by an uninsured driver.
However, if you have severe injuries and the negligent driver has no or minimal coverage, you may be left with unpaid expenses. Your attorney will search for other avenues to recover these damages, which we’ll discuss later in this article.
Usually, the best option is to have uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage higher than the required minimum.
Insurance is sometimes relevant to other types of vehicle accidents, such as those involving golf carts or ATVs. Under Illinois law, golf carts that are operated on a street or highway must meet certain safety requirements and also carry liability insurance.
Such liability insurance is not necessary for driving these vehicles on private property, but if the owner has made the wise decision to purchase it, we may be able to make a claim.
However, other types of insurance, such as homeowners or business liability insurance, may also be relevant in some golf cart or ATV accidents, depending on the situation.
Homeowners’ and Renters’ Insurance
It’s important to understand that homeowners’ and renters’ insurance policies can cover different types of situations, and not every policy will include liability coverage. However, if the renter or property owner is found to be liable for your injury, and their policy includes liability coverage, we may be able to recover your damages from the insurance company.
These policies are often helpful in what we call “premises liability” situations. Premises liability occurs when a person is injured on someone else’s property due to the property owner’s negligence.
Here are a few examples that might lead to a premises liability claim:
- You go to a party at your neighbor’s home, trip on a loose floor tile, and fall, breaking your arm.
- A coworker invites you over to ride ATVs on their large property, but they forget to warn you about a large depression on one of the trails that causes you to crash into a tree.
- You visit a friend’s home, and their overly enthusiastic dog knocks you over, causing you to hurt your back. Or, perhaps the dog becomes aggressive and bites you.
However, there are some limits to what an insurance policy will cover. We will need to show that the owner knew or should have known about the hazard and failed to act to prevent injury by taking reasonable steps—fixing the hazard, warning you about it, etc.
In some cases, the owner might claim you were warned but chose to behave recklessly or that your injuries were simply the result of your own carelessness. When this happens, an experienced personal injury attorney will investigate thoroughly and fight to demonstrate the property owner’s negligence.
In dog bite cases, there are sometimes policy exclusions for certain breeds or for dog injuries in general if the owner fails to disclose the dog when buying the policy. The dog’s owner might also claim you “provoked” the dog, which the insurance company is likely to use as an excuse to deny your claim.
Any time you are injured on someone else’s property, it’s a good idea to speak with an attorney to learn if your medical bills and other damages might be covered by their insurance policy.
Business Liability Insurance
This type of policy can also cover premises liability situations, including those similar to some of the examples above. If you slip and fall in a store, for instance, and the store is negligent, we might make a claim on their liability insurance.
However, premises liability can occur in less obvious scenarios. One common issue is negligent security. Businesses open to the public have a duty of care that includes providing reasonable protection from crime and violence.
That does not mean a business is always at fault if a customer or guest is injured during some criminal undertaking. We will have to consider whether the company’s security measures were reasonable.
What is “reasonable” may vary by situation but is usually rooted in previous criminal incidents involving the negligent party.
Here are some examples of injuries that might be caused by negligent security:
- You are shot during a robbery at your neighborhood grocery store. We later learned that the store had no working security cameras or system and had been robbed twice before in the previous year. Even after these incidents, the owner did not spend any money improving security or reducing the risk of another robbery.
- You’re staying in a motel room when a burglar breaks in and assaults you. We found out the lock on your door was of poor quality, making a break-in easy and fast, and the motel had no security personnel on staff.
- During a big, heavily publicized sale, a store attracts large crowds of shoppers, including you. As you wait in a long line to buy your items at a discount, some of the other customers decide they’re tired of waiting and rush for the front of the line, knocking people out of their way. Others join in, and soon, the store has a large altercation on their hands, which leads to you being trampled and injured. Our investigators learned that the store expected hundreds of customers but only had two security guards on hand to prevent these types of disturbances. The guards did their best but were no match for such a large crowd.
- You are mugged in a mall parking lot with poor lighting and only a few widely spaced security cameras. Our investigation uncovers several previous muggings in the same lot in recent months, yet the mall did not take steps to increase security.
Business liability insurance might also be relevant if a defective product injures you. We will need to find evidence that:
- The defective product caused your injuries.
- The product defect was unreasonably dangerous. In other words, you weren’t injured because you simply used the product in a reckless or unreasonable way.
- The defect existed when the product left the negligent party’s control. In most cases, the negligent party is the manufacturer, but occasionally, it might be an intermediary or third party like a vendor or retailer. However, proving when and where a defect occurred can sometimes be difficult.
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