Georgia Personal Injury Lawyer

After an accident, the first thing you need to do is get your injuries examined. It’s important that you get written assessments of your injuries from your medical providers – they should look at the short-term and the long-term impact as this makes a big difference to the amount of compensation you can claim. If you don’t have the money for your bills, our personal injury attorney can often make arrangements for you to delay payments so please contact us if you are worried about this.

The other important thing for you to do is to gather evidence for your insurance company. Make sure you have details of anything that might affect your claim and the contact details of any witnesses who saw what happened.

You might want to keep a diary to help you keep track of everything that happened on the day and after the accident. This can be a valuable way to keep track of events when you are likely to be in shock.

You should let your insurance company know that you’ve been involved in an accident but you need to be very cautious about making any kind of recorded statement. Insurance companies oftentimes use the things that people say to try to reduce the value of their claims. Your lawyer can handle this process for you to protect you from this kind of trick.

Murphy Law Firm works on contingency lawyer fees for personal injury claims. You will not need to pay anything upfront. We handle everything from your initial free consultation to your compensation claim being settled and you only pay us after you get paid. The exact percentage you pay will depend on your contingency fee agreement, which we explain when we meet you. Every lawyer charges slightly different amounts and complex cases can reach as much as 40% if you have to go to court. This covers all the time and expense in taking your claim forward to get you the full compensation you deserve for your injuries.

If you have been hurt, even if the accident seems minor, it’s best to talk to an experienced lawyer or attorney. You can go right ahead and book your free consultation with us and we will help you take your claim forward.

As far as the law is concerned, Personal Injury cases are situations where someone suffered an injury to their bodies, minds, or emotions when it wasn’t their fault. 

While incidents leading to personal injuries can sometimes include damage to property, property damage by itself is a different sort of law. 

The causes of Personal Injury can usually be broken down into a few main types.

• Accidents

Accidents are one of the most common causes of Personal Injury. When someone’s careless actions lead to someone else getting hurt, car accidents, slip-and-fall accidents, and other similar situations are types of accidents.

• Defective Products

When a product is unnecessarily dangerous, or defects in the product lead to someone getting hurt. Children’s toys with unnecessary sharp parts, defective machinery parts, and other similarly dangerous products are types of defective products.

• Intentional Actions

When someone deliberately performs an action that leads to someone getting hurt. Assault, fraud, defamation, and other similar situations of deliberate harm types of intentional actions

A professional Personal Injury Attorney will often have experience dealing with all of these types of cases and help you fight for the compensation you deserve.

Unless you’re filing a claim against a government agency or employee, the time limit for a Personal Injury claim is two years from the time of the incident. 

When filing a claim against the government, you’ll usually deal with a time limit of about six months and may have to file your claim in a specific way. These types of claims make having an experienced Personal Injury Attorney on your side especially important.

This two-year or six-month period is not the limit of time for completing your claim but is the last opportunity for a claim to be officially made and taken to court. 

The earlier you begin preparations for your claim, the more likely it is to be successful. Even for experienced lawyers, it can take time to fully investigate all of the details of a case and make the preparations to make sure that your claim is rock solid.

Insurance companies are required by law to respond in a reasonable amount of time, but the exact amount of time spent dealing with your insurance can change depending on the details of your case. In general, your insurance has about 30 days to respond to your claim after you first file it with their initial response.

If your claim is accepted, they’ll then have ten (10) days to make their payments after the time your claim was approved. If the insurance company contests the claim, things can get a little more complicated, with negotiations going back and forth between you and your lawyer and your insurance company.

Most cases will resolve reasonably quickly, but more complicated cases can sometimes take longer. When a case goes to court, it has usually been at least a year since filing the case when negotiations haven’t worked out.

Being injured in an accident often involves more than simply missed work and hospital bills. There can often be other types of impacts on a person’s life that you cannot easily break down into a dollar value in damages. 

These damages are called General Damages, and Pain and Suffering are some of the most common. Some examples of what Pain and Suffering are

• Pain

Pain includes your injuries, as well as the physical impact your injuries have on your life. Being unable to participate in activities you could before, struggling to do things without hurting from your injuries, limited movement, scarring, and similar things that impact your quality of life might be relevant here.

• Suffering

Suffering is the emotional impact stemming from your injuries. Depression or anxiety caused by your accident, general distress over your injuries, or fear stemming from your accident such as a sudden fear of dogs after a dog bite might be relevant here.

Every case is different, and the physical and emotional impact on people after an accident will obviously be different based on the person and the accident itself. An experienced Personal Injury Attorney will be able to help guide you through the process of figuring out just what these impacts might be for your specific case.

Depending on the details of an accident, someone might be found to be only partially at fault for the accident. According to Georgia’s comparative fault law, as long as someone was less than 50% at fault for an accident, they can still be compensated based on the level of their fault for the accident.

For example, if someone slipped and fell on a slippery, unmarked floor, the fault for the floor being slippery might at least partially belong to the owner of that building. If the person who fell had been texting on their phone and not paying attention to a warning sign, they might be found partially at fault for not paying attention. 

In a situation like this, the owner might be 60% responsible for not properly making the dangerous area inaccessible, and the person who fell maybe 40% responsible for failing to notice the warning sign and being distracted by their phone.

In this case, Georgia’s comparative fault law would say that the person who fell would only be able to receive up to 60% of their damages. If their damages turned out to be $10,000, they would be able to receive up to $6,000 of that.

When you were injured while at work, your claim will be a worker’s compensation case rather than a typical personal injury case where you’ll be dealing with the other party’s insurance. A business with three or more workers is required to be covered by worker’s compensation.

You’ll want to report your injury to your employer as soon as possible. Your company’s worker’s compensation insurance provider is obligated to cover your medical expenses for an injury that you suffer while on the job.

You can also find more information about Worker’s Compensation on our Worker’s Compensation page or at the State Board of Worker’s Compensation website at https://sbwc.georgia.gov/

When you’ve been in a serious accident, it can be easy to think that your case is open and shut. You were hurt, and it was obviously the other side’s fault. 

Unfortunately, the other side also has an interest in proving that they weren’t at fault, and dealing with insurance and other legal matters can be both stressful and confusing while you’re disoriented from your accident. This is where having a Personal Injury Attorney on your side comes in.

• Time-sensitive evidence

After an accident, there can be a lot of evidence that you, as the injured person, might not know to look for. Some of this evidence may end up disappearing if the accident isn’t investigated and preserved as soon as possible. An experienced Personal Injury Attorney will have a better idea of what to look for in order to make sure that your case is as solid as possible.

• Insurance tricks

While you might get lucky and have an insurance company that’s reasonable to work with, it’s still part of their job to make sure they pay out as little as possible by insisting that your injuries aren’t as bad as they really are. 

Sometimes they might argue that your injuries might have come from something other than your accident, or by making an offer that they know is lower than what you need, or denying your claim in hopes that you’ll just accept it and go away. A good lawyer will be able to help you navigate this and help to make sure that you receive the proper compensation you deserve for your injuries.

• Focus on recovery

When you’ve been hurt, it can be difficult to run around doing everything that needs to be done in order to handle the legal aspects of your injury claim. It can be hard to even know everything that needs to be done! By having an experienced Personal Injury Attorney on your side, you can focus on getting better, whether that’s treatment or rest.

Choosing your Personal Injury Attorney is an important step in your recovery. Most good Attorneys will allow you to meet with them for free about your case to let you know how they can help you. Even if you’re not sure if you’ll need a lawyer, they might be able to offer you a viewpoint you hadn’t considered before.