Steps After a Car Accident

Answer:

The question is: “What steps should I take if I’m seriously injured in a car accident in Florida?” First and foremost, in Florida, if you’re seriously injured in a car accident, we want you to make sure you take care of yourself. Get to your doctor, get to the emergency room, or get to urgent care. The next thing you should do is you should contact a lawyer that’s experienced and familiar with handling car accident cases and serious injuries. You have an obligation in Florida, and we often tell people when they call us, for example, a couple of weeks ago, I had a lady who contacted me. She had had a car accident four months earlier. She had never contacted her insurance company. Her medical bills were not being paid. She had never contacted a lawyer. We help you navigate through the insurance system. You owe a duty to your insurance company to let them know when you’re injured. We can help you do that.

If you, as we told this lady, contacted an insurance company on your own, they take statements and use those statements against you, especially if you’re shaken up and confused after a car collision. It’s really difficult. If you take care of your immediate medical needs and then contact a lawyer, one of the things that we do here at Morgenstern & Herd is that we make sure that we report the incident to your insurance company so that your medical bills are paid because we have no fault law. It doesn’t matter if someone else caused your injuries. The first $10,000 of your reasonable medical bills are going to be paid by your insurance company. We help you notify them, get in the proper paperwork, so that the medical bills are paid, you’re evaluated for your injuries, and then we confirm that the at fault driver has coverage that will provide compensation to you for your bodily injuries. If the other insurance company, the at fault driver’s insurance company, tells us that there’s no bodily injury coverage, then we look to your policy to see if you have uninsured motorist coverage. If you’re not sure what kind of coverage you have or you should have, you need to go over that with your insurance agent or call us at Morgenstern & Herd so that we can help make sure you’re protected when you get injured in a car collision in Florida.