There is a really simple answer to this which no one is going to like, but I’m going to explain it after I give it and it should, hopefully, make you feel better.
Who is paying for your healthcare after an accident? You are.
Eek. That’s a hard pill to swallow, I know. You weren’t at fault, you didn’t cause the accident, you didn’t ask to get hurt, so why should you pay for it? It’s a systemic issue that does have a remedy. If it helps, you can think that you’re temporarily renting the bills until you get someone else to buy them. What the hell does that mean? Let me explain…
The best way to begin this analysis is to look at it is that nothing is certain until it’s certain. If you have a need for healthcare, it’s just that: A need for healthcare like any other, so you have to pay for it. If there is a liability claim against the person who caused the need for the care, then there might be a way to get reimbursed for it. But the take-home message is this: In North Carolina, there is no system set up to protect you from paying for your own health care needs following an accident that was caused by someone else. Your bills are yours until and unless you (or your attorney) can make someone else take responsibility for them.
The good news is that there IS a system for RECOVERING your losses, including medical expenses, from an accident that was someone else’s fault. But the hard bit to swallow is that you have to incur those losses first in order to recover for them. That means, for the most part, that you’re responsible for paying your bills until and unless we can make someone else responsible. But it’s a two-step process.
This can be frustrating. It can also be a difficult system to navigate. This is why there are personal injury attorneys like me. Call me at 919-929-2992.
In Durham and Chapel Hill, there are a LOT of people walking about. With two giant universities and vibrant downtown areas, pedestrians are everywhere. As a result, there are a lot of accidents involving pedestrians. Why is this? Well, let’s talk about a few issues associated with pedestrian v. automobile accidents.
DRIVERS AND PEDESTRIANS
Part of the problem is these accidents don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s not always just this one car struck this one pedestrian. Often times, a pedestrian has begun walking in a crosswalk and one car stops for them, but a car in the other lane doesn’t see them or understand why the car has stopped and BOOM, there’s trouble. If you’re operating a vehicle in a multi-lane road and a car in the lane next to you stops for a pedestrian, YOU MUST STOP TOO! This can be frustrating for drivers because it takes the decision out of their hands, but this rule is right. Once someone has stopped for a pedestrian, it’s best to just let them get across safely and not have to play real life version of the video game Frogger.
RIGHT OF WAY…WHO HAS IT?
Traffic lights give us a good idea as to who has the right of way, but NC law can be a bit squishy on this. Once a pedestrian is in the roadway and/or crosswalk, that creates a duty on the part of the driver to yield to the pedestrian, even if the pedestrian shouldn’t have been there because of what the light is doing. This seems somewhat unfair, but think of it this way: We can’t just run over people simply because they’ve made a bad decision. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s ALWAYS the driver’s fault…
CONTRIBUTORY NEGLIGENCE
I’ve written and talked about this issue ad nauseum…check out this vid for a more detailed description, but the short version of Contributory Negligence is if a victim is even 1% at fault, they are statutorily prevented from being awarded ANYTHING from the person who is 99% at fault. North Carolina is one of only 4 states who still have this fossil of English Common Law on the books, sadly. It can be a very difficult barrier for many pedestrian claims in that it’s fairly easy to make an argument that even if the pedestrian had the right of way, the pedestrian had the duty to exercise reasonable care, too, and maybe they didn’t and that’s at least PART of the reason why they were hit. The take-home message here is that Contributory Negligence can really be a killer for pedestrian cases, so you should call an attorney if you have one.
Call me for help with any injury claim. 919-929-2992.
Most of what I do is personal injury claims arising from auto accidents. So normally, I’m on the other side of this so I don’t really actively seek out this kind of work. Having said that, I like to give out useful info, so if you caused an accident in Orange County, North Carolina and got a ticket for it, here’s how I would handle it:
First, make sure your auto insurance company is aware of the accident. Once a claim is set up, they’ll determine if they’re going to pay damages to the other side. If they are accepting liability, that will make things easier for you vis-a-vis the ticket.
Second, once they’ve resolved the property damage claim of the other party, get a letter from your insurance company stating the following info:
they insured you at the time of the accident
they HAVE PAID (past tense) the property damage of the other party(ies)
and have them spell out the amount paid
Normally, though not always, that is enough to get your ticket dismissed in Orange County, NC. Just take that letter with you to your court date and knock on wood that will work. If the accident was more serious and/or if you have more serious charges, then it might not be as simple as that.
You will likely be concerned that your rates are going to go up now. They are.
Hopefully you don’t need me for this kind of thing, but if you want to hire me to deliver that letter instead of doing it on your own, I’m happy to talk to you (as long as I don’t represent the injured party already).
At the end of the day, what I am supposed to do is get people money for the injuries. I can therefore understand why people are often very focused on the settlement value of their injury claim. But we CANNOT start the conversation with that. It’s not that I’m being coy, it’s that I’m being smart. Let’s discuss…
How do we value your claim? There’s A LOT that goes into that analysis. Here are just a few things that I consider when valuing a claim:
Liability issues
Potential defenses
Pre-existing injuries
Causation concerns
Type & timing of medical treatment
Duration of recovery
Diagnoses
Cost of treatment
Out of pocket expenses
Lost income and the proper documentation thereof
Presentation of the plaintiff in light of potential jurors
County of venue
…and that’s not even an exhaustive list!
So when you call me 2 days after your accident, when most of the above list is no where near sorted, I simply can’t tell you what your case is worth. And I shouldn’t even try! Anyone that is worth their salt in this business won’t try to guess what a case is worth. It’s not worth the trouble that an off answer might result in.
What you SHOULD be looking for is an attorney that’s focused on the RIGHT parts of your claim. The first priority is your health and that should override all other concerns. The second priority is handling your claim in the best way possible, and that does NOT involve making random stupid guesses about the value of your claim when we just don’t know what it will look like over time.
If you want thoughtful advice and guidance on your case, call me at 919-929-2992.
Can I tell you a figure on what your claim is worth? Well, kinda…
I don’t mean to be cheeky, but this is a very inexact process, so I try to explain to clients what we look at before I talk about what I think I see. First, no need to reinvent the wheel. Here are some blog posts I think you should read: https://www.jeffreyhowardlaw.com/newsite2025/expectations-are-your-worst-enemy/
OK, so you have an idea as to what I’m looking at now and how you shouldn’t necessarily get your hopes up about anything. Now, let’s look at what I see – about 80% of my cases – in most injury claims…
The average case that I see involves an auto accident with no problems with liability (no defenses, that is) one ED or Urgent Care visit, followed by some form of PT or Chiro for about three months, and a mostly full recovery within 6 months (even those that don’t feel perfect after 6 months tend to feel fine after or less than a year later). In general, those cases tend to garner something in the realm of $1500 for pain and suffering, after fees and bills are paid from the settlement. So, what I try to do is compare each case with its resultant offers (with the math, of course) to what the average looks like, and I judge them from there.
Now, I’d have to dissect how your case presents:
In a nutshell, there are are going to be good things about your cases and some bad, too. Don’t take it personally, it just is what it is.
What it comes down to at the end of the day is how much can YOU take home after fees and costs. That has a lot to do with what your treatment costs are and how much we have to pay back. There is a fine line between having high enough treatment costs to make the carrier take your case seriously vs. having perhaps artificially high treatment costs that make the carrier devalue your case and make settling actually more difficult. But this is what I have to work with.
Bottom line is I’ll get you as much as I can and I’ll work to put as much of that money in your pocket and not your health care providers’ as I can.
If you want some help with your injury claim, call me at 919-929-2992.
Every case is different but there are certain factors you can look at to determine who quickly you might look into settling your injury claim.
Most of the time the standard play in resolving an injury claim is a step by step process…
Get the treatment you need;
Wait until you’re released by your health care providers at “maximum medical improvement” (as good as you’re gonna get);
Then get all of your damages documentation and evaluate the claim for settlement
That’s a fairly standard play and can/should work for most cases. But every case has its own peculiarities, and depending on what those are, you might be able to speed up the process.
If you have really catastrophic injuries, there is a statistical likelihood that the defendant’s liability limits won’t be able to cover all of your losses, so in that situation it might make sense to make a stab at them early on.
That doesn’t mean you “settle” the claim, though. That’s just an attempt to find out what they have and whether or not they want to make a limits offer. And even if they do, you’re still not done. You still want to investigate other methods of recovery, such as other liability policies, umbrella coverage, and underinsured motorist coverage for example.
But even if you do have catastrophic injuries, that doesn’t mean you should be in a rush to get the claim resolved. Once again, cases shouldn’t be looked at as files that need closing. Your case is an important event in your life and it deserves individual attention tailored to the specific facts you’re facing. If you’re not getting that you should call me at 919-929-2992.
This is not just me coming up with arbitrary rules to make your life difficult. I make $0 from doing that, so please believe me when I tell you I have ZERO incentive to make up random rules or argue with people about it. Let me explain why I need your certificate TWO DAYS BEFORE YOUR COURT DATE.
Let’s say your court date is on the 3rd. I will leave the office, normally around 2pm (I have little kids and there’s no reason for me to sit in the office when I can do stuff at home – hello, 21st century!), the day before your court date. My mail doesn’t run here until 3, so if something is coming to me in the mail, I WILL NOT GET IT ON THE DAY BEFORE YOUR COURT DATE.
Moreover, the day before your court date, you know what I’m doing? I’m getting ready for court for everyone else and you. It’s really a huge time suck for me to be planning on meeting you for a drop off or trying to print this late email at 10PM or having to leave my family and go BACK to the office just to check the mail to see if something got there.
And remember, I ALWAYS give clients TWO MONTHS to get driving schools done. For the most part, the counties I go to only require online driving schools that you can do at your leisure. For those rare folks who have to do an in-person school, I certainly give more leeway. If you don’t get that online school done in two months, it is 99.999999% a time-management problem on your part. This does not, as much of a surprise as it might be to you, constitute an emergency on my part. I gave you plenty of time to help yourself out, so asking me to change my schedule, lose my family time, and have me run around in a tizzy because you couldn’t do an online course in 60 days is simply not a reasonable request to make of me.
If you took the time to read the Rep Agreement you filled out for me, you’ll note at the end that if you don’t get me your DS certificate two days prior to your court date then I can (and should!) charge you an extra fee. Remember, I have to appear in court for you and explain to the court why they offered you a plea deal and you’re dragging your feet. This is not necessarily always a simple thing. Then, instead of being able to send you a disposition email I have to send you an email explaining your deficit and the potential consequences of your failure. Your delay creates extra work and hassle on my part. You think you should get paid when you have to do extra work you shouldn’t have to do, right? Same here, friend.
The bottom line is this: You hired me to get you the best deal possible, but sometimes that requires some effort on your part. If you want the best deal, you have to expend the effort I ask of you, in the time-frame that I ask. There are deadlines in life, and definitely in court, and sometimes you just have to meet them, whatever your excuses might be. I don’t want this to be any more difficult than it already is, and trust me, I have NO desire whatsoever to argue with a client about why they should pay me more for making me do work because they sat on their homework. That’s no fun for me. If you want the best deal I can get you, jump through the hoops I give you in the time allotted and everything will be so much easier.
If you miss your court date on a speeding ticket in North Carolina, you can rapidly get into way more trouble than you think.
Missing your court date is referred to by court officials as “Failure to Appear” (often shortened to FTA). When you have an FTA, a clock starts running on a veritable time bomb. You have 20 days, generally, on Chapter 20 violations to get your matter resolved or get a new court date. If you do that in that amount of time, then you’re probably OK. But if you go past that 20 day window, DMV is notified and another clock starts ticking. Shortly, you’ll receive a letter from DMV notifying you that your license will be suspended if you don’t resolve the matter by a date that DMV sets. If you fail to do that, your license is suspended, meaning you can’t legally be driving, indefinitely until you resolve the underlying offense.
Indefinitely can mean forever if you don’t ever fix it! That’s a huge deal. Driving While License Revoked is a Class 2 Misdemeanor in NC and technically can result in jail time. Granted, if you don’t have an absolutely horrible criminal record, you almost certainly wouldn’t be sentenced to jail time for a DWLR, but it is possible. Moreover, you rarely get pulled for JUST a DWLR, but often for another moving violation at the same time. Even if you somehow get out of the DWLR but are convicted of ANY moving violation while you were in a state of revocation, that conviction revokes your license for a year. So even if you resolved the FTA and get the DWLR dismissed, if you don’t handle the subsequent charges correctly, you can end up revoked again!
This stuff gets complicated. Maybe needlessly so, but here it is. This is why having an attorney is generally worthwhile. If you missed your court date on your traffic ticket in NC, call me at 919-929-2992.
As an attorney, I’m ethically prevented from discussing a particular gripe with a particular client, even if that particular client decided to make their gripe public. To me, that’s like picking a fight with an old lady with no arms, but this is sort of my point about negative reviews: They tend to be written by negative people.
Take a look at my reviews. At the time I’m writing this, it’s July 2022 and I have more than 230 reviews and a 4.9 star average. Not too shabby, right? That means the overwhelming – and I mean absurdly vast – majority of my reviews are stellar (see what I did there?) reviews from happy clients. I think this translates into a safe assumption that, for the most part, I’m good at my job and tend to leave mostly happy clients in my wake.
Of course, I have a couple of negative reviews. The frustrating part about those negative reviews is that, unlike virtually every other business out there, I am FORBIDDEN from defending myself from whatever they say about me. I have a friend with a screen printing and retail business who got a negative review from someone saying they experienced “bad customer service,” but they were there for a job interview to which they showed up late! My friend was able to counter this review very effectively and demonstrate that this was just a disappointed troll taking out her life frustrations on an easy target with 0 consequences likely. I can run into this, too, but without the ability to explain anything to potential customers reading the clap trap written about me.
To address this issue, I thought I’d point out the two main themes I’ve seen in negative reviews that I and other attorneys get. So in pointing these things out, Mrs. Bar Investigator, I’m NOT discussing any client information; I’m relaying generic examples.
Not Hearing What They Want to Hear
Believe it or not, several of us have reviews from people that didn’t. even. hire. us. That’s right. Some wack-job can write a negative review about an attorney without having actually used their service, and potentially cost them thousands of dollars in revenue because of the negative perception. Thanks, internet! But I’ve seen it. Person calls, you tell them that they’ve got a situation you can’t help with and they would be better off calling someone else, and then BOOM sour grapes review. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to waste someone’s time, or my own, talking to a professional that has explicitly stated that they are incapable of helping me. And I sure as hell wouldn’t go complaining to the internet at large about ME calling someone who couldn’t help me and being mad about the truth I was told. Maybe I’m the crazy one, though.
Unreasonable Expectations
You just can’t satisfy some people. If you’re charged with speeding over 90mph, it’s probably not going to just go away, at least in the counties that I go to. You’ll be very lucky if I can save your driver’s license. Surprisingly, sometimes when I do just that – I SAVE SOMEONE’S DRIVER’S LICENSE FROM BEING REVOKED DUE TO THEIR OWN STUPIDITY – and then I get yelled at. Even more frustrating, I would never tell someone that I could make a ticket “go away” anyway. In fact, I have a very good idea how every ticket I handle is going to work out, and I normally share that – making NO guarantees – with clients before they hire me. So nothing that I do for a client is a surprise. But some people just have unreasonable expectations and/or gross memory deficit and/or hallucination issues.
If I don’t tell you what you want to hear, that’s not my fault. First, it’s your fault because you probably put yourself in this predicament anyway. Second, it’s also your fault because you called a professional and asked that professional for their professional opinion and decided to pout about it like a petulant child because it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. OK, maybe that second bit is also partially your parents’ fault, so maybe write them a review instead of trying to make me look bad on the internet. If I tell you what to expect, and then I do that, and then you’re mad at me for fulfilling the prophecy I already warned you about, you should not waste anymore time on the internet and you should talk to a physician of some sort. That’s not a problem I can fix.
I know I’m destined for a couple more negative reviews in my time. I plan on practicing at least for 5 more years, maybe more, and so it’s statistically probable that I’ll run into one of these jackanapes again. So when/if they write whatever hogs wallop they choose to write, uncaring as to the inappropriateness of the accusations against me or the financial consequences to me and my family, I’m going to reply with a link to this article because it is more likely than not that their issues fall into one of those two categories above (maybe both) and at least future clients can understand that, for the most part, my real clients who are not insane people like me and trust me to do a good job.
All of us come to accidents with a compromised body. To some degree, we’re all already a bit messed up. But that doesn’t mean that your NC auto accident claim isn’t worth anything. Here is the best tip I can give you about your prior injuries as they relate to your NC auto accident claim:
The First Rule of Pre-Existing Injuries: The first rule of pre-existing injuries is that we do not talk about pre-existing injuries. That’s a little strongly worded, but the Fight Club reference was screaming to get out. My point is that there’s no need to spout on about your medical history when you’re reporting your accident. I had a client once who had some back pain 5 YEARS prior to her accident, and when she reported the accident (before hiring me) the first thing she said was, “Now my back hurts, but I also had back pain 5 years ago…” WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? Look, I’d never tell a client to be dishonest. But bringing up conditions that you had (past tense) when discussing injuries that you just received is not being honest, it’s TMI (too much information). It’s just not relevant. Keep it simple. Did your back hurt when you were driving? No? Good. Then if your back hurts after the accident, it must have been caused by the accident. Right? Of course, it’s different if you just had surgery. I’ve had that case, too: A client had back surgery and a few months into his recovery was in an auto accident. That’s fine. Disclose that. It’s going to come out anyway so it’s best to get ahead of it.
Of course, every situation is somewhat unique, so there’s not a lot of one size fits all kind of advice to give here. Maybe the best advice is to call a lawyer after your accident. Call me at 919-929-2992.
