San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer Fighting for Justice for Accident Victims

Personal injury lawyers advise and represent clients who have been physically or psychologically injured because of another party’s negligence – the negligence of an individual, a business, or even a government agency. Personal injury lawsuits can also be brought by physically-harmed victims against parties who have intentionally inflicted injury.

Our offices handle personal injury cases arising from – but not limited to – automobile and truck accidents, workplace accidents including oilfield accidents, premises liability claims including slip-and-fall accidents, and cases that involve the victims of brain injuries.

Matthew Norris is an aggressive negotiator who will use whatever legal tools are necessary to bring your personal injury case to a successful outcome. If your injury claim cannot be resolved out-of-court, he will take your case to trial, explain exactly what happened, and ask a jury to award you fair compensation.

If You’re Injured by Negligence, What Steps Should You Take?

If an accident happens and you’re injured, seek medical attention immediately. At that moment, medical attention is your only priority. Even if you feel fine, if you’ve been involved in any incident where you may have sustained a latent or hard-to-detect injury, obtain a medical examination within 24 hours. A latent or hard-to-detect injury could emerge in only a few days as a serious medical condition. Without an immediate medical examination, you may not be able to prove when and where you were injured to an insurance company or a jury.

The negligent party’s insurance company may deny your injury claim if you don’t have the medical documents that prove when, where, how, and how severely you were injured. An insurance company might even allege that you were actually injured at another time and place or that you weren’t really injured at all. You’ll need an aggressive attorney with considerable personal injury experience to defend you against such claims and to present a strong and compelling case for your compensation.

Were You Partly At-Fault for Your Own Personal Injury?

You shouldn’t even speak to a negligent party’s insurance company after you’ve been injured. That’s your attorney’s job. Anything you say could be twisted and used against you by the insurance company to deny your injury claim, so always refer an insurance company’s questions and inquiries to your personal injury attorney. If the company offers you a quick settlement, reject it. Your attorney, in most cases, can negotiate a more generous offer than a quick settlement made without retaining counsel.

A factor that must also be considered in every personal injury case is the injury victim’s own share of the blame for the accident – if any. Texas is a “modified comparative fault” insurance state. This means that if you had any share of the fault for your accident, your compensation is reduced by that percentage, up to 50 percent. That being said, if you are in fact partially at-fault for the accident, be honest and upfront with your personal injury attorney so that he or she can develop a case that reduces the share of liability assigned to you – and increases your compensation.

How Long Does the Process Take? When Do You Receive Compensation?

You have probably read or heard about high-profile personal injury cases that went on in various courtrooms for years. That’s rare. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of Texas’s personal injury claims are settled outside of the courtroom, privately and quickly. If your claim entails no particular complications, and if the other side does not dispute the claim, you can possibly receive your compensation in just a few months.

On the other hand, if a lawsuit must be filed in your case, a resolution may take many months, and if the case is complicated, possibly years. Every personal injury case is different, so until an attorney can review your own case’s details, there is no way to estimate how long the process may take. The Law Office of Matthew S. Norris will work diligently to ensure that your case is not unnecessarily delayed for any reason.

Are Different “Types” of Compensation Available to Personal Injury Victims?

A personal injury attorney will seek to recover compensation for both your “economic” damages and your “non-economic” damages in a typical case. Economic damages are the quantifiable monetary losses that you’ve suffered due to your accident and injuries – the losses that you can document with pay stubs, receipts, and copies of medical bills and other documents. It is vitally important to keep those documents, make copies, and store them in a secure location. Bring copies of those documents to your first consultation.

Noneconomic damages compensate the injured victims of negligence for their personal physical pain and emotional trauma and suffering. It is difficult to place a dollar figure on pain and suffering, but an experienced attorney will seek what is right for you.

What If Your Injury Was Sustained on the Job?

In the unfortunate event that you are injured on the job, and your employer doesn’t offer workers’ compensation (as it is not mandatory in Texas), there is still an option available to acquire a settlement to cover medical bills and other expenses. You may be able to file a personal injury claim against your employer. One of the benefits of this type of claim—as opposed to going through workers’ comp, even if it is an option—is that you can sue for the total amount of your losses and may not have to follow the cap set through workers’ comp.

If, on the other hand, your employer does have workers’ comp, but someone else is also partly to blame for your work accident, in some circumstances, you can pursue a third-party liability claim. For example, if there is faulty or defective equipment, the ladder you fell off of was built from improper material, or if another individual was involved, you might have the ability to bring charges against that other party, in addition to filing for workers’ comp.