You did everything you could, but the car never saw you or your bike. What are your rights?
Motorcycle accidents happen because car drivers are distracted. They are looking at their phones. They are playing with their radios. Or they just choose to change lanes without checking their mirrors or their blind spots. The problem for motorcyclists is that you cannot have a fender bender on a motorcycle. When you are out riding and have been hit, there are three serious things you needs to know:
The insurance company will attack you and your choice to ride a motorcycle.
The person who keeps calling from the insurance company is called an adjuster. Adjusters are insurance professionals who receive regular training in how to deal with injured people. They are graded based on their ability to pay as little as possible to resolve claims. From the moment the adjuster finds out you were on a motorcycle at the time of the wreck, they are going to hold that against you. They wrongly believe that your decision to get on a motorcycle means you are just a thrill seeker with a death wish. They will try and discount the value of your claim because you were on a motorcycle and not driving a car or truck.
In addition to holding your choice to ride against you, they may run background checks and conduct audio/visual surveillance using private investigators of you and your family. They will record your conversations with them in an effort to get you to say the wrong thing about what happened, about your medical history or about the ongoing medical issues you are having. They will dig into your medical treatment history to find any basis to discount or deny your claim.
The insurance company has a trained team that is biased against you and is working to prove the wreck was your fault. Call us to have your own trained professionals fighting back.
Holding the right people accountable for the wreck requires attention to detail and knowledge of the law.
Why didn’t the driver see you? Does your motorcycle insurance policy cover your injuries if the person who hit you fled the scene? If you weren’t wearing a helmet, can you still make a claim? Was the person who hit you driving a company vehicle at the time of the wreck? If the driver was a teenager, did his parents know that he was using their car? If the person was drunk, where did he get the alcohol and why did they give him so much? If it was a single motorcycle accident, did the State of Tennessee have information that the curve was dangerous or the roadway wasn’t wide enough?
The answers to these questions can make or break your case. We know how to use the tools that the legal system and the internet give us to track down every single person potentially responsible for your injuries and hold them accountable. And we know how to navigate the potential pitfalls and traps that a motorcycle case presents.
Explaining everything you have been through will require experts and experience.
Every injury client we represent goes through a basic interview process at the beginning of their case to tell us about all of the doctors and hospitals they have been to. Almost without fail, our clients do not know the name of every provider they have seen. For example, if you got to a Nashville emergency room and get a CT scan for a neck injury, you are likely to have at least three different doctors bills: one for the ER doctor, one for the ER staff and one for the radiologist who read the CT scan after it was conducted. If you fail to track down some of these bills, you may leave out thousands of dollars in medical treatment from you claim.
And what about proving the permanency of your injuries or how much money you have lost in income or the severity of your post-concussive syndrome? In order to recover what you are entitled to for each of these types of losses, we will need to hire expert witness included economists, doctors, neuropsychologists and vocational rehabilitation specialists. If you do not have experts, the insurance company will be much less likely to compensate you for these losses.
Insurance companies are professionals at attacking motorcyclists. Make sure you have your own team of professionals fighting for you and your family.