Should You Speak to an Acworth Personal Injury Lawyer?

Hi, I’m Roger Ghai and I run into a very common question that clients oftentimes ask me when they’re considering hiring a lawyer. That is, “Should I even be speaking to a lawyer at this point? The accident just happened. I don’t know if I’m hurt. I don’t know if I want to hire a lawyer,” those types of questions. The answer to your question is absolutely. You should be talking to a lawyer if you’ve been involved in an injury case. The reason that you should be talking to a lawyer is simple. Number one, you may not end up hiring a lawyer, you may not end up needing to hire a lawyer.
The lawyer actually may tell you that, “No, it’s not the type of case that you need to hire a lawyer for,” but a lot of times, if you don’t speak to a lawyer, you’re going to make certain decisions in your case that are going to be harmful to your case. For example, let’s say, you’ve been involved in a motor vehicle accident or truck accident or what have you recently. Let’s say, that the insurance company wants to take your recorded statement. If they want to take your recorded statement — I have to apologize to you now, because I think we’ve got an airplane going overhead, so if you can bear with me that would be fantastic.
If the insurance company wants to take your recorded statement, most lawyers will tell you not to do that. The reason that they’ll tell you not to do it is simply for the simple fact that the insurance company wants to lock you in into certain facts. They want to get your statement on record saying immediately after the accident that you weren’t really hurt, or they want to try to pinpoint liability. They want to get you to say, “Well, the other driver may not have caused the accident”, those types of things. The answer to your question is yes.
You should talk to a lawyer just to know exactly what you should or you shouldn’t say, for example in this case, to the insurance company. You want to talk to a lawyer too, because there may be certain time limits on your case that you could potentially miss, if you don’t talk to a lawyer and notify the appropriate authorities soon after the car accident. Let me just say this. Let’s say, you’ve been involved in a car accident case, and typically you have two years actually to file a lawsuit against the other person, who caused the car accident case, but what happens in the case where you might have been struck as I’ve had a couple cases by a city of Atlanta police officer, or some other county employee.
There are special limitations that apply in those circumstances. If you don’t put, for example, the city on notice within six months of when the accident happened, then you’re going to be out of luck. You may regret the fact that you did not hire a lawyer. A lot of times we all see is this. The client thinks they don’t need a lawyer, they want just to get physically better and so forth. They’ll treat for five or six months and then they’ll say, “Okay, well, I need to hire a lawyer or something, because the insurance company’s not dealing with me fairly.”
At that point, if you were hit by one of these vehicles that was a county employee or state governmental employee, and you didn’t put them on proper notice, you don’t have two years to go ahead, and then follow the lawsuit, and then make your claim against the negligent party. Yes, my answer is yes. You should always hire a lawyer. You should always have at least maybe a lawyer that you can call up, even if it’s just for free advice. If you ever have a question about whether you need to hire a lawyer for your particular case, or whether you even actually have a case, feel free to call me at 770-792-1000.