Motor Vehicle Accident Lawyer

Last year in California, there were 164,596 injuries, with 3,751 fatalities in California, the highest ranking injury and death state in the country. Nationwide, the second leading cause of unintentional death is death by a motor vehicle. Thirty-two percent of all fatal accidents are the result for driving under the influence. Most accidents happen at intersections. The major causes of vehicle accidents include 50% of those being attributed to rear-end collisions. Also, turning movements, about 22%. Left-turning vehicles are the most frequent that we see. Other factors are speed and attention. Unfortunately, we're seeing numerous fatalities as a result of people texting or being on their phone. If you've been in a collision first thing, get to safety. Call the police, get a police report, take photographs, get medical attention, and report it to your insurance. Get pictures of the vehicles, pictures of the debris on the ground, pictures of injuries. It's important, especially if you're hit by somebody who's an uninsured motorist to report the collision to your insurance company immediately. Oftentimes, you won't know whether or not they're uninsured, so make it a practice to contact your insurance company, even if it's not your fault. You can obtain a police report by requesting a copy of what's called the CHP form 190. San Francisco and Los Angeles allow these requests to be made online. I can't tell you the number of times that we've seen clients who have been found to be at fault in a police report, and after we've studied it, we've analyzed it, and we've reconstructed it, we've been able to show that it was not the motorist's fault at all. A case that comes to mind is one that I tried last year involving a motorcycle and a left-turning vehicle. The police officer put 100% of the fault on the motorcyclist who lost his leg. At trial, we were able to show that the driver of the car was 90% responsible for what occurred. It's important to actually contact a firm with a lot of experience, because there are many things that need to be done right away. The first of those is sending out a qualified investigator who can look for cameras. We've found ATM cameras that have shown what caused a caused the collision. We need to canvass for witnesses, photograph the cars, take photographs of marks left on the roadway that can show the direction of travel and braking and turning movements. We can access what's called the electronic data recorder in a vehicle. Many people refer to it as the black box. We use LiDAR. It's a type of radar that actually allows us to recreate the scene in a computer. We hire experts who are familiar with computer modeling. PC-Crash is one of them. We end up using animations. Today, jurors expect to see what happened, not only hear about it. I've recovered 100s of millions of dollars on behalf of innocent victims, in these types of cases throughout California. Damages fall into two categories: economic and non-economic. Even if you have some percentage of fault, you have the right to bring a lawsuit because the law in California is called a comparative law state. We look to see who has the percentage of fault and then the damages are adjusted accordingly. You need to hire serious lawyers like us to the Dolan Law Firm. We bring 30 years of experience to handling these cases with great success.