What should you do when a crash aggravates a prior injury or an injury that is still healing? The only way to get full compensation for the aggravation of the injury may be to involve a car accident attorney.
Georgia is among the more understanding states when it comes to personal injury law. When you take a careful approach to show the healing path of your past injury and the success of healing, it may not be difficult to showcase how your crash impacted this injury. But if you have an ongoing healing process for an injury you experienced recently, it may be more difficult.
Do You Have A Current Open Claim?
Having an open claim currently can significantly impact your car accident insurance claim. For example, if you have open issues with your employer or a private property owner, it may seem as though you’re getting into too many accidents for all of them to be accidents.
Insurance fraud makes up between 15 and 17% of all auto insurance claims. That average means about one in six car accident claims are likely fraudulent. That high percentage is why car insurance providers carefully look at people with open claims with other insurance agents. For example, if you were hurt at work, have an open worker’s compensation claim, and then got into a car accident, you may be under a bit of a microscope.
While we know you aren’t committing fraud, the insurance companies are more paranoid than most people. They suspect everyone is scheming, and you may have to work to prove that you’re not trying to exploit the insurance industry.
What Happens If You Have Multiple Claims Open At Once?
If you have multiple claims open at once, you’ll want to handle them individually and collectively. First, go through the process of each claim step-by-step. Your earlier claims will likely resolve fully without a hitch because the car accident does not affect them. Second, assess how one claim will affect the next. Almost in domino fashion, you want to know how that first claim will impact the second.
To do this, you can work with an attorney and a small team of medical experts. These medical experts and possibly financial experts may be able to layout that your compensation from one claim only covered the initial medical bills for your first recovery. Then you’ll want to evaluate what medical bills you’ve incurred for that injury due to aggravation of the healing process.
Past Injuries and Medical Proof
The Georgia state bar explains that proving negligence is the critical point in every personal injury case. One of the demands in proving negligence is to show that the defendant was responsible for those injuries. So something that many attorneys have difficulty with is proving that a pre-existing injury was aggravated by this crash.
The person responsible for damages is responsible no matter if you had a past injury or not. Often called eggshell skull rule, there is no forgiveness to the driver because of the conditions you had. It is just as likely that they would have hit a completely healthy and intact person. The odds weren’t against you, they were against this other driver, and there’s not the extent of forgiveness for the ebb and flow of fate.
Supporting Your Claim from Start to Finish – Athens Car Accident Lawyers
Most people that are on the roadways have had a prior injury of some sort. That injury may have come from another car accident, a sports injury, or just a natural turn of events. What you’re looking for in a car accident attorney is someone who will defend that this injury was generally fine or on the way to recovery when the crash happened. It’s difficult to show the difference between an injury that was healed or healing, with your new injuries.
At Massey Law, you can find support from experts that can showcase your medical history and recovery from your last injury. We’ll use that information along with the evidence from your crash to show how not only were you not at fault or responsible for these injuries or the otherwise extensive trauma. Without that crash, your injuries would have continued healing or remain healed. Contact Ross Massey for support in navigating this uncommon situation.