In this week’s “David’s Take”, David explains why time is of the essence for your case. If you’ve been involved in a car wreck or accident, the sooner you hire an attorney to help with your case the better. There are a lot of steps that need to take place and things an attorney can do to help make sure you get fairly compensated.
Hi, I’m David McDivitt and this is my take on why it’s important in most circumstances to get a lawyer on your case as soon as possible. We get a lot of calls from potential clients wanting to know if we can take their case and also wanting to know whether now is the right time to take their case or whether they should wait it out a little bit. Sometimes we get calls from people who after the fact already settled with an insurance company only to realize, “Hey, I really wish I had contacted a lawyer sooner.” So one of the things that they often ask us is, “What should I do? Should I wait to hire a lawyer? Should I try to do some of the things on my own right now to help build up my case? Should I wait to talk to the insurance company? Or should I get a lawyer on my case right away?”
Now there are maybe occasional circumstances where it does make sense to wait but usually I counsel potential clients that it makes sense to get a lawyer as quickly as possible on your claim if for no other reason than to help preserve evidence. This is one of the biggest things that I think so often gets forgotten. But you know people say, “Well I want to wait to talk to the insurance company” or “I think the insurance company’s going to do the right thing.” Every day that goes by where you don’t have a lawyer on your case is a day that your legal team is not able to then work for you to try to collect, gather, and preserve evidence. Whether you’ve been in a car crash or a motorcycle crash. Whether you’ve been hit, and this is particularly important, if you’ve been hit by an 18-wheeler or very large truck there’s certain requirements and things that have to be discovered and kept, procured or gathered by the attorneys and that’s one of the things we start working on immediately.
And it’s not just the physical evidence. The thing that may be at the crash scene, for example, but it’s also people evidence, it’s thoughts, it’s impressions. We need to identify as quickly as possible who saw what so we can start communicating with them right away to try to preserve their memory of what happened. And often times if a client or a potential client waits too long to hire a lawyer, even if they try to do some of that evidence gathering themselves, information gets lost. What we do in every case that we can is we get the information, we lock it down, we preserve it and then we figure out how to best use that information. Do we need to hire an expert to come in and help us determine a collision occurred? Well if we do, we need to know as quickly as possible the details of that collision. We need to go out to the scene if possible or if necessary to gather the information that’s helpful for the investigator. And it’s the same with witness statements too.
Remember, if you’ve got a potential case, call a lawyer, find out what can be done right then to try to lock down the information and get going on it. If you’ve been in a collision or if you’ve been hurt in an accident, contact a lawyer, contact a lawyer right away and allow that lawyer or that law firm to get started for you as quickly as possible to preserve the evidence and allow them to do everything that they can to increase the value of your case. That’s my take.
