Greenville Pedestrian Accident Lawyers

Pedestrian accidents always result in harm to the pedestrian, exposed to injury as they are, outside of the protection of a vehicle. If you’ve been injured in an accident in which you were a pedestrian because of the negligence of another person, find out if you are due compensation.

If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely been hurt in a pedestrian accident. You’ve probably been out of work and may be looking at more lost income because your recovery is going to take some time. You may still be in a lot of pain. You are probably feeling stress and anxiety, unsure where to turn for guidance with a pedestrian accident claim.

We are here for you. Our firm offers free legal advice. Call our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers today.

Don’t put off getting answers because you’re concerned you’ll need cash up-front to pay an attorney. Give us a call as soon as you can and schedule your free legal consultation.

What You Need to Do after Being Hit by a Car

Don’t wait to call for help if you are injured in any kind of motor vehicle accident. Take action to protect your health, as well as the possibility of a pedestrian accident claim:

• Call 911 for immediate medical help.
• If you are physically up to it, exchange insurance information and contact information with the driver who hit you. You should also be sure you have the insurance information and contact information of the owner of the car that hit you, if the car being driven is owned by someone other than the driver.
• Don’t talk about whose fault the accident is or your thoughts about filing a claim or a lawsuit.
• Call police to the scene to investigate.
• Take photos of the scene, including your injuries and any damage your body did to the vehicle on impact with the vehicle, as this is proof the vehicle hit you.
• Make sure you get witness names and contact information from anyone who saw what happened.
• If you’ve got car insurance, call your own car insurance company.

Is It Possible to Be at Fault for My Pedestrian Accident?

Yes. A pedestrian can be found at fault for a pedestrian accident if they break the laws around jaywalking or walking in areas where pedestrians are not allowed. You don’t have the legal right to walk in the street and expect cars to maneuver around you. This puts drivers and you as the pedestrian at risk of injury in a crash. That said, when it comes to pedestrian accidents, it’s rare that the pedestrian is solely to blame for injury.

When it comes to determining fault in personal injury claims, South Carolina’s comparative negligence law (section 15-38-15 of the Code of Laws) states that so long as the plaintiff in a claim is less than 51% responsible for the accident, they will be eligible to receive financial recovery from the defendant.

If you’ve been injured in a personal injury as a pedestrian, you owe it to yourself to find out if you are owed compensation for the damages you’ve suffered. Give our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers a call to schedule your free legal consultation as soon as possible to learn more at no obligation to you.

When Should I Hire a Personal Injury Lawyer?

If you’ve been in a serious pedestrian accident that wasn’t your fault, or you’re unsure whether the accident qualifies you to pursue compensation, give us a call to set up a free consultation. We’ll discuss your situation and let you know if we believe you’ve got a claim worth pursuing.

Our firm works on a contingency-fee model, which means we only take cases we feel we can succeed in winning for our clients. We front all costs during your case, and in the end, we only get paid if we successfully resolve your claim. We only get paid if you get paid. Find out if it’s time to hire a lawyer by scheduling a free legal consultation.

If you’re in the Greenville, Simpsonville, Florence, Williamsburg, Darlington, or the Columbia, SC area, look no further than Christian & Christian. With a combined 100 years of experience in personal injury and free consultations, you couldn’t make a better choice.

How Hiring Our Greenville Pedestrian Accident Lawyers Can Help You

All too often, people assume that they should take on their pedestrian accident claim without a lawyer to save money. This route, however, almost always results in the victim receiving far less compensation than they could have gotten if they’d hired competent legal help.

Retaining a lawyer serves two important objectives. First, it affords you the ability to have your claim professionally taken care of for the best chance of success, while you rest and focus your energy on healing. Second, hiring a lawyer gives you the greatest chance of maximum compensation, through all of the ways it protects the value of your claim:

• Your lawyer will know how to investigate your claim to clearly identify all at-fault parties. This ensures you don’t leave money “on the table” when requesting the compensation you deserve.
• Our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers will know how to connect the liable parties to the accident they caused and connect the accident to your injuries. These connections are critical in succeeding with your claim.
• Your attorney will be able to correctly assess your damages: all the ways your life has been upended by the accident, both economically and non-economically. Accurately determining damages is often complicated. It’s essential to turn to someone who can do this right.
• Your lawyer can and should handle communications on your behalf with the insurance company. This prevents you from making costly mistakes when discussing your claim that can give the insurance company the chance to lower its value.
• The insurance company will know that if they don’t take your claim seriously and agree to a reasonable settlement, your attorney will sue.
• Your lawyer will provide you with guidance about settlement offers. When you go it alone, it’s tough to turn away offers. You may not have certainty about the value of your claim, causing you to want to jump at early lowball offers from the insurance company. But when you’ve got an attorney who has worked up your case value with accuracy to guide you, you’ll be able to evaluate settlement offers with confidence.
• If the insurance company fails to come around with a reasonable offer, you can actually take them to court. Having this option provides you with leverage and the ability to win, even if you can’t get an adequate settlement offer.

As you can tell from the list above, there are many benefits to hiring one of our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers. Another of them is that we front all claim expenses, so you don’t pay up-front for your case. We only get paid when we successfully resolve your claim. Call today.

Prevent Damage to Your Claim by Avoiding These Common Mistakes

Read on for ways that you, too, can help protect your claim, both before and after you hire one of our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers.

See a Doctor Right Away

There are two reasons to get yourself examined by medical professionals as soon as you possibly can. The first is to protect your health. Even if you don’t feel particularly injured right after a pedestrian accident, your body’s innate protective reaction — the fight or flight response — will fill your system with adrenaline that can make it hard to feel an accurate level of pain. You may also experience a boost of energy and strength that can again make it hard to tell whether you’ve been injured.

Don’t take any chances with your health. You may have internal injuries you cannot see and do not yet feel. Get checked out as soon as possible by a professional. Doing so will protect your health and a potential pedestrian accident claim.

If you skip the exam after the accident, or you wait a few days before you go, you not only risk your health, but you risk your claim. The insurance company is sure to use your failure to seek care immediately as “proof” you couldn’t have been badly injured at the time. Don’t take chances with your health or your claim. Go to the hospital or see your doctor right away after a pedestrian accident injury.

Follow the Treatment Plan the Doctor Gives You

When you are discharged from the medical facility to continue your recovery at home, you’ll be given a treatment plan that lists ways you can help advance your own recovery. This is likely to be a combination of things you can do to help yourself heal, such as take medication according to a schedule, attend physical or occupational therapy sessions, get plenty of rest, and avoid strenuous activities for a while.

Whatever the doctor suggests you do to assist in your recovery, take it to heart. Some people make the mistake of assuming it won’t really matter either way. This is not true. In fact, showing that a patient failed to follow their treatment plan is one of the main ways insurance companies succeed in lowering the value of a person’s claim.

You may be wondering how your adherence to a treatment plan is relevant to the fact that you’ve already been injured by the liable party. The answer is that if you don’t follow instructions and the insurance company gets video surveillance of that, they’ll blame you if you fail to reach a full recovery.

Say, for example, your treatment plan after knee surgery includes a restriction against sports for six weeks. But you decide long boarding isn’t really a sport, it’s “leisurely” skateboarding, and you go out with your friends. An insurance investigator catches you on video surveillance skating around town and falling twice. If, when you reach maximum medical improvement, it turns out you are not able to regain a full range of motion in your knee, the insurance company can use that footage to claim that it’s your fault, not because of the accident. If you’d stuck to your activity restriction, you could have recovered.

This scenario puts you in a tough spot for trying to keep your claim’s value from dropping. The insurance company is not going to take responsibility (pay) for anything they can blame on you, so it’s critical not to give them opportunities to shift blame. Your treatment plan can help protect your claim or put it at risk, depending on how diligently you adhere to it.

Don’t Agree to Give the Insurance Company a Recorded Statement

Once the accident report is filed, you can expect the insurance company for the liable party to come calling. They’ll request that you provide a recorded statement about the accident. Do not agree to this.

The insurance adjuster may sound helpful and kind, but they are looking out for the insurance company, not you. Anything you tell them will be used against the value of your claim, if possible. Avoid confusion and costly miscommunications with the insurance company by delegating all communications about your claim to one of our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers.

Your lawyer will know how to communicate all necessary information for the processing of your claim in a way that prevents damage to the value of your claim. This also saves you the headache of dealing with these communications yourself.

Seek Out an Attorney as Soon as Possible

It’s a mistake to put off seeking an attorney after serious injury in a pedestrian accident. Beyond making sure you don’t miss the filing date for a claim, it’s crucial to get started as quickly as you can to make sure your lawyer will have enough time to find evidence that may have been missed that could support your case.

In addition to physical evidence, your attorney will want to interview witnesses and view any security camera footage that may be available. The sooner these avenues of inquiry are pursued, the more likely they will be successful. Accident scenes get cleared away and people move and change contact information. The sooner you start, the stronger your claim will be.

While you may feel unprepared to tackle a search, consider asking for help in doing so from a friend or family member. They can help you identify a few attorneys that handle claims in your area who offer free consultations. Have them read attorney bios to confirm they have experience in pedestrian accident claims and ask them to check reviews and ratings. These days, you can easily find all this information online and quickly identify qualified attorneys to speak with.

Make Sure You Retain the Right Attorney for Your Pedestrian Accident Claim

When you move forward in hiring an attorney, take the time to make sure you are hiring a personal injury attorney. There are many practice areas within the law in which a lawyer may focus. Just as you wouldn’t hire a doctor without paying attention to their area of expertise, you must seek a lawyer focused in the personal injury practice area with a successful record of winning pedestrian accident claims.

In addition, it’s important to hire a trial lawyer. There are plenty of lawyers out there who don’t have the experience or the desire to go to trial. These lawyers work for firms generally referred to as “settlement mills.” Such firms operate by settling high numbers of claims rapidly, at the expense of their clients’ compensation, if necessary. For them, it’s all about high volume turnover.

This doesn’t benefit you. Make sure you hire a personal injury trial lawyer with a successful history of winning pedestrian accident claims, both through negotiation and at trial.

South Carolina Pedestrian Accident Client Story

We are sharing the following client story in hopes of helping you get a better idea of what to expect during the process of making a pedestrian accident claim. Though we’ve changed client names and story details to protect our client’s privacy, the information remains useful. Please read to the end, and then give us a call to schedule your free legal consultation, so we can answer questions about your specific claim.

If you asked Greenville, South Carolina resident Debbie Alvarez what she was doing on the morning in September not so long ago when she was hit by a car, she couldn’t tell you. The loss of her memory of the morning prior to the accident is just one aspect of the damages Debbie suffered because of her pedestrian accident.

Before the accident, Debbie was a healthy, kind, intelligent person with a happy marriage and two kids she homeschooled. She worked a lucrative part-time business as a remote personal assistant, earning necessary income around her responsibilities to her kids. She was also an avid runner.

Her friends often remarked that they didn’t know how she got it all done. She was always calm and centered. She’d tell them it was the running. Her daily runs were her quiet time, centering her and giving her energy and focus for the day. They also helped her stay upbeat. It was her number one remedy and prevention for sadness and depression. Debbie’s plan was to take the best care of herself possible, so she’d always be able to enjoy her runs and all they gave her.

Whenever she was on a run, Debbie was careful to stay on sidewalks and observe crosswalks and traffic signals. She wore reflective clothing and didn’t listen to music, so she could pay attention to her surroundings. She couldn’t tell you what happened on the day she was hit, but witnesses saw a car head down Rocky Slope Road toward her, then turn without warning into the dead end, hitting her in the middle of the crosswalk.

Debbie suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI), a broken elbow, and a shattered knee. She woke up in the hospital with gaps in her memory and balance so disrupted she would no longer be able to walk without a cane, much less run. Her memory would occasionally blank out and concentration would become fuzzy, leading to recurring anxiety that would sometimes disturb her sleep.

Debbie would battle depression from the loss of running, mourning her days of flying down the trails in her hometown, happy and energized. She would also have to give up her work as a personal assistant, because it would prove too much after the TBI. Continuing to homeschool her kids would become a full time job she would find challenging, at best. She didn’t know it at the time of the accident, but she was about to suffer many losses.

Ten days into her hospital stay after the accident, Debbie’s husband, Bill convinced her to meet with pedestrian accident lawyer Matthew Christian. At first, she wasn’t entirely sure she was up to dealing with a claim. She was in pain and dealing with a lot of negative symptoms from her TBI, in addition to pain from her other injuries. She reluctantly agreed, however, fairly certain her life would never be what it was before the accident.

How much does it cost to hire a lawyer for my pedestrian accident claim?

When Attorney Christian sat down beside her husband, Debbie asked him her most pressing question.

“Before we get started, we need to know how much it costs to hire your firm,” she said, sadly. “It’s going to be some time before I can go home, and right now everything is up in the air, including when or whether I’ll be able to go back to work.”

“I understand completely,” said Attorney Christian. “Our firm uses a contingency-fee model. This means we front all case expenses from start to finish. We cover the whole process, beginning with an investigation of your accident, then building your claim and settling it — or, if necessary, going to trial to fight for what you deserve. In the end, we only get paid if we are successful in resolving your claim.”

“Okay,” said Bill, nodding to his wife. “That works, doesn’t it, honey?”

“That sounds okay,” she said.

What is my pedestrian accident claim worth?

“How do you determine what my claim is worth?” she asked next.

“We take great care in determining the value of your claim,” said Attorney Christian. “We begin with the accident investigation, collecting evidence and speaking to witnesses. If it becomes necessary to bring in an accident recreation specialist to firmly establish what happened, the firm will cover that cost as well, as we build your claim. During the investigation, we identify all liable parties and establish causation. This involves proving the negligence of the driver who hit you caused the accident, and the accident caused your injuries.

“The second part of determining your claim’s value involves you reaching what is called ‘maximum medical improvement,’ or MMI. This means you need to focus all your energy on recovery. You’re going to need to follow all your doctors’ orders, such as getting rest and going to occupational therapy sessions — whatever is required to return to as close to your pre-accident level of health as you possibly can.

“Your doctors won’t declare that you’ve reached MMI until you’re through with surgeries and the doctors are confident they understand how your future will be impacted by your injuries.

“When you get to this point, we’ll know what your damages are. Then, we’ll combine the information we have from the accident investigation with your damages and arrive at a solid value for your claim,” Attorney Christian said.

“That sounds realistic,” Bill said, looking to his wife.

“Sounds like a long process,” Debbie said, as a tear slid down her cheek. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“Though you must focus on recovery, you must allow it to take as long as it needs to take for you to heal properly,” said Christian. “We’re going for steady, lasting improvement.”

How long will my pedestrian accident claim take?

“Which brings us to our third question,” said Bill. “How long should we expect all of this to take?”

“Good question,” said Christian. “Since we can’t know the value of your claim until you reach MMI and we know your damages, that’s the first determiner of your claim’s timeline. You’ve got to go as slow as necessary to truly heal for the long run. No cutting corners, and definitely no overdoing it.

“Not only can pushing too hard set you back in your recovery,” Attorney Christian continued, “it can damage your claim. The insurance company will be watching and waiting for you to do something in violation of your treatment plan so they can try to deflect blame for your condition from them to you.

“But you won’t let them do that, because you, Ms. Alvarez, are going to do this right,” Christian concluded, nodding encouragingly at Debbie. Bill nodded at her along with him.

Debbie sighed. “Yes, there certainly is no point in rushing things, especially with a traumatic brain injury.”

“Once you reach MMI, we’ll arrive at your claim’s value and send a demand letter to the insurance company. From that point forward, the timeline of your claim will rest on whether the insurance company is willing to negotiate a fair settlement for your damages. If so, we’ll be all set to close your claim and get you paid. If not, we’ll sue them in court.

“A trial would, of course, extend the timeline of your case, but if that’s what we need to do to get you the compensation you deserve, then that is where we will go,” Christian said. “We have a long and successful record of winning pedestrian accident claims in court, as well as at the negotiation table.

“Whomever you decide to retain for your claim, Ms. Alvarez, I urge you to make sure they are a personal injury trial lawyer. You need someone willing and able to fight for your right to be made whole,” said Attorney Christian.

Can I pursue a claim if the liable party is facing criminal charges?

“Now, the driver of the car that hit Debbie was apparently fleeing a traffic stop. He’s facing criminal charges of felony hit-and-run, among other charges. Can we proceed with a pedestrian accident claim as well?” Bill asked.

“Yes, you absolutely can. In fact, the burden of proof in a civil claim is lower than in a criminal case. Rather than needing to prove the driver’s guilt ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ as required in a criminal case, a civil case must only prove that ‘a preponderance of evidence’ points to liability,” said Attorney Christian.

“As always, we’d conduct a thorough investigation to confirm, but at this point, it sounds as if the police may already have plenty of proof to meet the requirement for a civil case.”

“Yes,” said Debbie. “Turns out, they were among the witnesses to the accident, right behind the fleeing driver… Not that I remember it.”

Debbie and Bill were comfortable with the answers they received in their free legal consultation. They retained Christian & Christian, and Attorney Matthew Christian won Debbie’s claim in court. They were stunned by the amount a jury awarded them.

Call Our Greenville Pedestrian Accident Lawyers Today

We hope you’ve gained useful insight from the information on this page. Since no two pedestrian accident claims are exactly alike, we urge you to reach out to our Greenville pedestrian accident lawyers and set up your free legal consultation. You don’t have to go it alone. Let us help you gain maximum compensation for your damages. Call today.