Mendocino County Personal Injury Attorneys

First Steps to Hiring a Personal Injury Lawyer

Before getting a personal injury attorney, you must follow certain steps to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible. This will help you gather the needed evidence for building a solid case and help your lawyer once you hire them.

These are the first things your lawyer will ask for once you get a free consultation, so the best thing to do is to get them out of the way:

Pursue Medical Attention

The most important thing you must do before anything else is to seek medical attention to ensure all parties are safe. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel bad right away, as most injuries don’t appear right away, and this will give you a complete overview of how severe the accident is. This is especially true for the following injuries.

• Neck injuries
• Back injuries
• Amputations
• Spinal cord injuries
• Lacerations
• Broken bones.

Retain All Records, Photos, and Notes

Now, you must keep evidence of as many things as possible. Personal injury cases need to be backed up by all sorts of pictures, records, and testimonies so that you can avoid all potential legal issues, especially if it turns into a wrongful death case. Some of the most common pieces of evidence are the following.

• Pictures
• Videos
• Medical records
• Police records
• Expert testimonies
• Witnesses
• Notes.

Please keep everything organized in a detailed document for your personal injury attorney to review once you hire them from a Mendocino County law firm.

Informing the Other Party

Once you’ve decided to take legal action against someone, you must let them know they will be getting sued, so they can hire their own Mendocino County lawyer before the process gets too far. This will also make the negotiation process much more manageable, which will help you get a fair settlement.

Time Frame to Initiate Litigation

Depending on where you are located, whether it is in Mendocino County, Sonoma County, Lake County, or Santa Rosa, you will find yourself with a statute of limitation that stipulates the time you have to pursue legal action against the other party. Therefore, you must check this before doing anything else so that you can file the claim before it is too late.

However, you can also ask your personal injury attorney about this during a free consultation.

Hiring the Personal Injury Lawyer

Finally, you can hire a Mendocino County personal injury attorney. Still, please get a free consultation first so that you can interview them and make sure they have the needed experience to manage your case.

You should also hire a lawyer with whom you can establish an excellent attorney-client relationship, as you will spend a lot of time with them once the case starts.

How Personal Injury Lawyers Prove Negligence

The first step to building a personal injury or wrongful death case in Mendocino County, CA, is to prove negligence, which will help determine who is the liable party. In order to do this, Mendocino County attorneys must create a strategy to demonstrate the following factors:

• There must have been a legal duty between the victim and the liable party. A typical example is drivers’ legal duty not to drive while intoxicated.
• Then, the liable party must have breached that duty.
• The victim must provide evidence of their injuries.
• Finally, there must be a direct correlation between the breach of duty and the victim’s injuries.

The most critical element in these cases is evidence, which is why personal injury lawyers must do as much research as possible to build a strong case that won’t cause legal issues in the future. Still, you can check out the following detailed steps they take to prove these factors:

Establishing Legal Liability

Whether it is a personal injury or wrongful death case, a lawyer’s first step is establishing the liable party. This is done through thorough research of how the accident happened. The most common are car collisions, medical malpractice cases, animal bites, and injuries inflicted by defective items.

Sometimes, your Mendocino County lawyer will hire a professional investigator to execute this part of the legal process. You can ask more about this and whether it applies to your case or not in a free consultation.

Elements of Legal Liability

Once you’ve established the possible liable parties, the previously mentioned elements of negligence must be proved for the case to be successful. That’s why documenting everything and conducting thorough research is key to winning the case in Mendocino County or Sonoma County.

Proving the Elements of Legal Liability

Some elements that can help prove the elements of negligence are police records, medical bills, expert witnesses, videos, pictures, notes, etc. Keep in mind that wrongful death cases will probably be much more complicated than regular personal injury cases, so the attorney must uncover much more information.

Expert Witness Examination and Testimony

In some cases, the Mendocino County lawyer will need to hire an expert witness to examine a piece of evidence to prove negligence against the other party. This will give you an insight into the case that will help you understand how the injuries happened and how the defending party acted negligently.

Discovery of Evidence

Finally, when all the evidence has been gathered, it is called a discovery of evidence, and now the lawyer can file the legal claim. They may also need to interview the defendant and check their phone records and other reports to strengthen their case. If possible, this must be negotiated with the other party’s lawyer.