Have questions about a pedestrian accident case? Here’s a few salt lake city pedestrian accident case tips give us a call to learn more.
Partial Fault Pedestrian Accident
Sometimes people think that just because they were pedestrians when they were in an accident that the car is always at fault.
When it comes to determining fault in accidents, Utah law applies a legal doctrine called comparative negligence. Comparative negligence means that any time there’s a claim or a lawsuit, anybody involved can have their respective amounts of fault compared to anybody else that was involved.
This can may seem complicated, but it really isn’t. What it means is, if a pedestrian does something wrong, his fault can be compared to the driver of the car. If a pedestrian is in the middle of a dark road wearing black clothes far away from a crosswalk, in some circumstances, that pedestrian could be more at fault for the crash than the car was.
In Utah’s comparative negligence, you need to be less than 50% at fault to recover from the person in the car. Our job as your lawyer is to do everything we can to minimize any liability that you might have so that we can get a recovery for you from the insurance company.
Differences Between Pedestrian Accident and Car Accident Cases
I get clients who ask, how does a car versus pedestrian claim differ from that of a regular auto accident claim in Utah?
There are a bunch of things that are the same. The pedestrian gets no-fault benefits like a car. The rules of the road are the same. Insurance law is the same. Of course, there’s levels of insurance that might be available through your own policy. How they differ is also really important.
When a crash involves a pedestrian, usually we’re dealing with a pedestrian’s right of way, crosswalks, intersections, pedestrian signals, what the car driver should’ve seen or what they did see.
Whenever there’s a pedestrian, it adds this extra layer of investigation regarding negligence. How did the crash happen? What was the driver’s field of view? What was the lighting like, the location of the pedestrian, either on the street or on a walkway? Were there any witnesses? Witnesses become critically important with pedestrian cases because with a car, you can look and see the points of impact on the car.
You can’t necessarily see those points of impact on a person’s body. With a car versus pedestrian, we’re missing that physical evidence unless the pedestrian does some damage to the metal or glass on the car. Because of that, there’s certain things that go into a pedestrian vehicle accident that need to be investigated right away before that evidence is lost.
All these things help us reverse engineer how a pedestrian crash happened so that we can present the best possible case to the insurance company.
Pedestrian Accident Case Value
One of the most common questions I get from clients is, “What’s my case worth?”
It’s a really important question. It’s a question that the insurance companies want you to think is easy so that you’ll take that first check from them within days of the crash. The reality is however, that the value of full justice for your auto pedestrian case is complicated and has a lot of different factors.
There are just too many things that go into it to give you a clear answer right away, but your attorney can help you analyze each one of these. For example, fault. Is it clear or is it shared? How bad are the injuries? What part of your body was injured? How extensive was the treatment? Were there any medical procedures involved? How did you heal up? How was your recovery? What was your disability time? Are your injuries permanent or are they gone completely? What limitations do you have going forward? What are the insurance limits of the car that hit you? Are there any other negligent parties that could be brought in?
These are just a few examples of the many factors that must be considered.
Each case has its own answer to all these questions. That’s why your attorney should be able to talk to you about each factor, about their experience, and how they’ve been able to handle those factors in the past.
Did you or your loved one get seriously injured while walking and have questions about a pedestrian accident? Contact experienced Salt Lake City pedestrian accident lawyer Brad DeBry for a free consultation.