Kerrville 18-Wheeler Accident Attorneys

Though it may seem entirely obvious that you were blameless in your Kerrville 18-wheeler accident, winning full compensation for your losses is neither a guaranteed nor an automatic process. By law, the defendant or defendants in your case owe you nothing at the start. In short, to recover compensation for your losses, you have to fight for your rights.

The fact is, unrepresented truck accident victims, that is to say, victims who choose to represent themselves, rarely receive the full compensation that their cases merit. Our experienced 18-wheeler accident attorneys in Kerrville could be the key to ensuring you recover thousands or even millions of dollars for your injuries, instead of recovering nothing at all.

Even though receiving compensation for your losses after an 18-wheeler accident in Kerrville is not automatic, it does not have to be difficult either. Understanding your rights and making sure you have an experienced personal injury attorney at your side will significantly increase your chance of winning your case and holding the blameworthy defendants accountable for their misdeeds. In the following articles, we’ll go over the basics of 18-wheeler accident law to help you understand your rights.

This article is only meant to explain the fundamentals of truck accident law. However, if you would like to learn more about the precise legal implications of your specific situation, please give us a call. Our truck accident attorneys in Kerrville will gladly answer any of your questions about tractor-trailer accident law and extend to you a free consultation.

Filing a claim or bringing a lawsuit against a defendant or multiple defendants serves an essential purpose. Undertaking this action will facilitate your financial recovery from the losses you have suffered due to your 18-wheeler accident. The law dictates that people injured in truck accidents are not automatically entitled to receive even a single penny for their losses. That means the scales of justice are tilted in favor of the blameworthy parties, the defendants, from the beginning. In order to secure damages, you will have to tilt those scales in your favor. An experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney can help you do this. The defendant has no automatic obligation to pay you anything at all, and you can expect that you will have to fight for the full compensation to which you are entitled by law. Our Kerrville accident attorneys can help you do that, and we are committed to keeping our clients informed throughout the process.

Some of your losses, of course, are probably emotional and physical, and some of them are probably financial. For example, 18-wheeler accident victims typically face high vehicle repair costs, high medical bills, and the financial strain of being unable to return to work after their tractor-trailer accident. Receiving full compensation from the blameworthy parties who caused your injuries eases those financial pressures and allows you and your family get back on your feet again.

Furthermore, filing a lawsuit places financial punishment the people and organizations at fault for causing your Kerrville 18-wheeler accident. Applying this kind of financial toll on the defendant or defendants means that they will think twice before erring in the same ways in the future and putting more people at risk.

Most 18-wheeler accident cases present two different ways to win compensation for your injuries. First, most big rig cases settle out of court when the plaintiff and the trucking company agree (that is, a settlement) without the intervention of a judge or a jury. Sometimes, however, the parties cannot reach an agreement, and a plaintiff will have to win at trial to receive damages for the truck drivers’ negligence. The following articles provide comprehensive information about settlements and trials involving 18-wheeler accidents.

In a settlement, a defendant offers a plaintiff an amount of money as compensation for his injuries, despite the absence of a judge’s order. As a trade, the plaintiff agrees not to file a lawsuit for more money in the future. Agreeing to a fair settlement offer helps a plaintiff because it lets them receive money quickly without the stress of waiting for a courtroom and randomly selected jurors to decide the fate of the compensation to which he is rightfully due.

Because defendants recognize they face no legal requirement to pay you money, it can be challenging to get a fair settlement offer from them without an experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney helping you. Having our experienced lawyer looking after your case will signal to the defendants that they risk losing a lot in the courtroom if they refuse to settle and take your case to court. If you can make a defendant nervous about losing in court, he will be much more willing to offer you a fair amount for your injuries outside the courtroom. Our firm’s experienced 18-wheeler accident attorneys know just how to pressure defendants to settle their cases. We have won settlements and verdicts against virtually every major insurer in the nation. Insurance companies know our name and our reputation. With that in mind, they are typically eager to settle with our clients rather than lose to our lawyers in the courtroom.

Be very careful about inadequate settlement offers. You might receive a settlement offer that is far lower than the amount you could receive from hiring an 18-wheeler accident attorney. After all, the defendants understand that if you accept such an offer, you will not be able to hire our personal injury lawyer in the future to sue them for additional money. They are also aware that in the aftermath of a tractor-trailer accident, accident victims are short on cash and face repair bills, medical bills, and the high stress of lost wages. That is why it is common for defendants to offer victims fast cash, aiming to get them to accept the offer and surrender their legal right to pursue them for full compensation. In other words, offers presented to you before hiring our experienced truck accident lawyer will probably not be fair, and they are almost always binding if you agree to them. If you are looking at accepting a settlement from an insurance company, let an experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney look over it before you agree to the offer. The lawyers at our firm can tell you the true value of your case and whether you are entitled to more money than the defendants are putting on the table for you.

Some cases do not settle out of court for any number of reasons. Therefore, these cases typically need to go to trial for you to win full compensation. Because commercial vehicle accident victims have the burden of proof in a lawsuit, you will face a challenging task at your trial. You will be required by law to present evidence for four different elements of your 18-wheeler accident claim in order to win. These elements are duty, breach, causation, and damage.

Proving duty means you have to show that the defendant in your lawsuit owes you the duty to act with enough caution to keep you from getting harmed. Proving duty is often a straightforward task since most people owe each other the duty to behave like reasonable person would so as not to harm others. This duty of care might involve refraining from doing unreasonably dangerous things or taking affirmative precautions to prevent others from being harmed.

Second, you have to show that the defendant’s behavior breached the owed duty of care. If the “reasonable person” duty of care applies in your case, proving breach involves demonstrating that the defendant did something a reasonable person would have refrained from doing. To prove breach, you need to bring evidence into the courtroom that shows the jurors exactly what the defendant in your lawsuit did or failed to do. The jurors will think about all of the circumstances surrounding your big rig accident and then decide whether the defendant’s actions counted as a breach of the relevant duty of care.

Third, you have to prove causation. It is not sufficient just to show that the defendant breached the duty of care you were owed; you must continue by proving the defendant’s breach of the care caused your injuries. In other words, you must prove the breach and your injuries were definitely linked. This requires extensive evidence. Many parties play a role in getting a commercial vehicle ready to undertake a haul, and any one of these multiple parties might have made a mistake that contributed to your accident. Because so many individuals or organizations could potentially be at fault, defendants named in the lawsuit will frequently try to shift blame for the big rig wreck onto someone else or even onto you. Without enough evidence that clearly places blame for the accident on the defendant, your lawsuit will fail.

Fourth and finally, you have to prove damages. The word “damages” means the money you are to collect from the defendant if you successfully prove the above three elements of your 18-wheeler accident claim. Damages can compensate plaintiffs for lost wages, pain and suffering, medical bills, loss of earning capacity, repair bills, and other losses they might have suffered due to the 18-wheeler accident. To receive damages, you not only have to calculate how much you are owed, but you must also bring evidence to the court to show your calculation of damages is reasonable and supported by evidence. It is likely that the defendant in your case will also calculate their own amount of damages, a number that is sure to be smaller than the one you came up with. It takes powerful evidence to convince a jury that you are not looking for a handout and the defendant is just trying to escape legal responsibility.

Calculating damages for your Kerrville truck accident is usually a complex task. If your medical treatment is ongoing, it can be difficult to figure out by yourself an estimation for how much your bills will ultimately cost. Placing a price tag on ambiguous losses such as pain and suffering can be challenging for non-lawyers and reasoning out the damage amounts for loss of earning capacity can be very intricate once you start thinking about the time value of money and other factors, such as potential earning raises. Our firm’s experienced personal injury attorneys understand what it takes to calculate the damages for all kinds of losses. We have been calculating damages for thirty years and counting. We have both the resources and experience to provide an estimate of what the jury in your case would consider to be a fair number.

Whether your claim winds up settled out of court or decided upon in the courtroom, our 18-wheeler accident attorneys are here to help. We know how to pressure defendants on behalf of our clients who need fair settlements, and we know how to build a bullet-proof trail strategy for winning your claim in the courtroom. Any litigation requires early on that you identify which defendants are blameworthy and therefore liable in your case. This is a remarkably complex task since, as mentioned above, the work of multiple parties goes into getting a commercial vehicle ready to make a delivery. Any one of these individuals or organizations, or a combination of them, can make a mistake behind the scenes that wound up leading to the wreck. If more than one individual or organization caused your collision, they could be named defendants in your lawsuit.

In 18-wheeler accident cases, certain parties are typically to blame for the errors that lead to wrecks. These parties are truck drivers, trucking companies, cargo-loading companies, and route-planning companies. In the following section, we will talk about the role these parties frequently play in causing tractor-trailer accidents.

Our 18-wheeler accident attorneys can do a great deal to help you succeed with your claim. One of our initial steps is always to ensure our clients get the medical treatment they need. If a client is uninsured or for some other reason can’t afford medical treatment, we can often help that client see a doctor. Our intention is to manage every step of our client’s truck accident cases and keep them fully informed throughout the whole process. For your free consultation, or for any questions you might have, call us today at 800-862-1260. We look forward to working with you.