Car Accidents

If one is injured in a motor vehicle accident, a claim for personal injuries may exist. An understanding of all the facts is critical for making any determination. The most common ground used for recovery is negligence, meaning one side did not fulfill all duties owed to the other, thereby breaching that duty (i.e., while driving will stop at a red light). However, the injured party’s own conduct will be fully examined as well and if it contributed, even slightly, to the accident, then that person’s personal injury claim can be barred completely. This is called contributory negligence. Many states have pivoted away from this standard in favor of comparison of the degrees of fault, but Virginia is not one of them.

When an injured party makes a claim against the responsible party, the claim is really directed at the liability insurance company involved, meaning the company that provided liability insurance on the car driven by the responsible party. Sometimes there may be problems with the insurance coverage – there was none, it is not enough, meaning that many motor vehicle personal injury claims require a good understanding of insurance law and the interplay of various insurance policies to maximize the available pool of money eligible to the injured person (i.e., uninsured motorist coverage, underinsured motorist coverage, medical payments, stacking of policies, umbrella polices, etc.)



If one’s claim is successful, then one may be awarded money damages for past and future health-care expenses; past and future lost wages; disfigurement or deformity (i.e., scars, loss of limb) and associated humiliation or embarrassment; pain and suffering in the past and may be expected in the future; and inconvenience in the past and reasonably expected in the future. Some of these categories are dependent on the actual figures involved (i.e., health expenses, lost wages), while others are subjective and will turn on the facts and evidence presented (i.e., pain and suffering).