Don’t jeopardize your personal injury rights by making these common mistakes after you’ve been involved in a personal injury accident in Minnesota!
1. Not seeking medical treatment for your injuries after the accident.
After a car accident or other personal injury accident, people often decline emergency medical treatment or transportation by ambulance to a hospital, thinking that their injuries are not serious enough. This is a mistake! If you have any injuries at all following an auto collision or other personal injury accident, get a medical evaluation.
Doing so serves two purposes. First, it documents the fact that you did sustain injuries as a result of the accident, which is important for your personal injury claim down the road. Second, getting medical treatment right away, when necessary, may help you avoid more serious medical issues in the future. After an accident, you may be shaken up and anxious, and experiencing a surge of adrenaline. Often, this adrenaline surge masks or reduces the intensity of any symptoms you may be experiencing. Over the next several hours or even days, you may find that the minor “tweak” in your neck has turned into serious, severe neck pain and stiffness. Don’t wait until your symptoms become unbearable to seek out medical attention! If you wait several days or weeks to seek medical care (attempting to “tough it out”) the liability insurance company or the attorney that represents them will likely try to argue that you were not hurt at all in the accident.
2. Telling the insurance company that you are not seriously injured.
The insurance company that covers you or the other driver may ask you to give a recorded statement at some point after your accident. Before doing so, you should seriously consider scheduling a consultation with a personal injury attorney.
While we generally recommend against providing a statement to an insurance claim representative following an accident without the assistance of a personal injury attorney, but if you do provide a statement, make sure you are honest and detailed about the extent of your injuries. Don’t minimize your injuries or symptoms!
After being involved in a car crash, many people do not immediately experience any pain, due in part to adrenaline and other factors. It is very common for neck and back symptoms to appear 24 hours or more after an accident. Some serious symptoms may not appear for several days or longer. Insurance company representatives often try to get a statement from you immediately after the incident. It is a mistake to tell the adjuster that you’re not injured and we advise our clients to tell the insurance company representative that you don’t know the full extent of your injuries yet.
If you provided a recorded statement to an insurance company claims representative, and indicated that you were not hurt or that your injuries were minor, you can be certain that those statements will come back to haunt you down the road if your injury turns out to be more significant than you reported or than you anticipated.
3. Withholding important information from your lawyer.
Sometimes people worry that certain information about their prior medical history or facts surrounding the accident might hurt their claim so they don’t disclose this information to their personal lawyer.
In order to provide you with the best possible representation, your Minnesota personal injury lawyer needs to know all pertinent information regarding your claim. Failing to disclose relevant information about pre-existing conditions, prior medical care, or alcohol use during an accident can only hurt your case. Failing to disclose important information to your lawyer is always a bad idea. Our job is to take all of the facts and objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of your case. No matter what the facts may be, it’s our job as your lawyer to handle those facts, and we can only do so effectively if we have all the information we need. Nothing is worse than withholding information from your lawyer, only to have the other side find out the information before we know about it. Honesty is always the best policy.
If you’ve been injured in an automobile or other personal injury accident, and you want to speak with a Minnesota personal injury lawyer, call Meuser Law Office at 877-746-5680 or click here to send us an email to schedule a free consultation.