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Please note, the Carabin Shaw Law Office has moved to 875 E Ashby # 1100 San Antonio, Texas 78212

Accident Injury Lawyers – Truck Accidents

The Two Ways to Win

Most 18-wheeler accident cases present two different ways to win compensation for your injuries. Most big rig cases settle out of court when the plaintiff and the defendant or defendants arrive at an agreement (that is, a settlement) without the intervention of a judge or a jury. Sometimes, however, the parties are unable to reach an agreement, and a plaintiff will have to win at trial in order to receive damages.

Settlements

In a settlement, a defendant offers a plaintiff an amount of money as compensation for his injuries, despite the absence of a judge’s order that money must be given. As a trade, the plaintiff agrees not to file a lawsuit for more money in the future. Agreeing to a fair settlement offer helps a plaintiff because it lets them receive money quickly without the stress of waiting for a courtroom and randomly selected jurors to decide the fate of the compensation to which he’s rightfully due. More on this webpage

Because defendants recognize they face no legal requirement to pay you money, it can be difficult to get a fair settlement offer out of them without our experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney helping you. Having Carabin Shaw’s experienced lawyers looking after your case will clearly signal to the defendants that if they don’t settle with you, they risk losing big in the courtroom. If you are able to make a defendant nervous about losing in court, he will be much more willing to offer you a fair amount for your injuries outside the courtroom. The experienced 18-wheeler accident attorneys of our firm know just how to pressure defendants to settle your case. We have won settlements and verdicts against virtually every major insurer in the nation. Insurance companies know our name and our reputation. That’s way they are typically eager to settle with our clients rather than lose to our lawyers in the courtroom.

Be very careful about bad settlement offers. Before you are looking to hired our 18-wheeler accident attorney, you might receive a bad settlement offer. After all, defendants understand that if you accept such an offer, you will not be able to hire an attorney in the future to sue them for additional money. They are also aware that in the aftermath of a tractor-trailer accident, accident victims are short on cash and faced with repair bills, medical bills, and the high stress of lost wages. That’s why it’s common for defendants to offer victims fast cash, aiming to get them to accept the offer and surrender their legal right to pursue them for full compensation. In other words, offers you will be presented with before hiring our experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney will probably not be fair, and they’re pretty much always binding if you agree to them. If you’re looking at accepting a settlement from an insurance company, make sure you let an experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney look over it before you agree to the offer. The lawyers at our firm can tell you the true value of your case, and whether you are entitled to more money than the defendants are putting on the table for you.

Large Insurance Policies

The law mandates that trucking companies are obligated to carry insurance policies for their fleet of big rigs. These insurance policies are worth about fifty times the amount of policies carried on ordinary passenger vehicles. Therefore, insurers stand to lose about fifty times more money due to an 18-wheeler accident than they stand to lose in an ordinary passenger vehicle wreck, and so they will devote about fifty times more resources to defending against paying these claims. It’s straightforward to understand why the huge amount of money involved in these cases alone can make it harder to receive compensation from a truck insurance policy compared to a car insurance policy.

Insurers use insurance adjusters to dodge paying out on 18-wheeler accident claims. These adjusters are nothing like the individuals you might have to dealt with in the past if you have ever filed a claim against a policy on an ordinary passenger vehicle. Insurance companies reserve their most experienced and ruthless adjusters to work on big rig accident claims. These are professionals who have reached their current positions by building track records of successfully denying commercial vehicle accident victims’ claims. Usually, the only thing these aggressive adjusters fear is facing an experienced 18-wheeler accident attorney.

Be careful when you talk with an adjuster. They’ll likely phone you to ask innocent-sounding questions about your 18-wheeler wreck. They might seem nice, but their actual goal is to get you to say something that can be used against you to harm your case. Whatever you say to them will be recorded and used against you. The best way to deal with insurance adjusters is to not deal with them at all. At our firm, we don’t let insurance adjusters talk to our clients and badger them with questions. We take their calls instead. That way, they don’t have a chance to use your words against you.

Also, insurers frequently use specialized defense attorneys to help them dodge paying claims. These lawyers are highly skilled in insurance defense law, and they know plenty of technicalities that they can use to dismiss lawsuits brought by inexperienced plaintiffs or inexperienced lawyers. The accident attorneys at our firm, who have been practicing in this area of law for twenty years and counting, know all of the defense lawyers’ tricks and how to respond to them.

Self-Insured Trucking Companies

In some situations, an insurance company won’t be involved in the case whatsoever. This is because some trucking companies opt to be self-insured. In other words, they devote a portion of their budget to assets they can distribute to a plaintiff if they are ever successfully sued. If you are facing a self-insured trucking company, you likely won’t be negotiating with any kind of traditional insurance adjuster. Rather, you will be dealing directly with an officer of the self-insured trucking company. Though traditional insurance adjusters can be quite aggressive and stubborn, self-insured trucking company officers are often even more difficult to deal with unless you have an 18-wheeler accident attorney at your side.

The salaries of self-insured trucking company officers typically come directly from their employers’ profit. In other words, if a self-insured trucking company officer opts to pay your claim, that means his paycheck will likely take a hit. Because many self-insured trucking company officers are more concerned with their own finances rather than yours, you can expect their personal motivations to take priority in how they handle your claim.

Furthermore, self-insured trucking company officers, unlike traditional insurance adjusters, are not licensed professionals. Traditional insurance adjusters at least are supposed to abide by certain ethical guidelines in order to keep their licenses. But self-insured trucking company officers face no such standards. That’s why clients often hire us after self-insured trucking company officers have been harassing them. These officers are known for tampering with evidence and taking any number of other unethical steps not to pay victims’ claims. Call us right away for relief from these sorts of behaviors. Our 18-wheeler accident attorneys know how to use the law to stop their unethical conduct.

What our firm can do for You

There’s a great deal our 18-wheeler accident attorneys can do to help you succeed with your claim. One of our initial steps is always to make sure our clients get the medical treatment they need. If a client is uninsured or for some other reason can’t afford medical treatment, we can often help that client see a doctor. Our next steps are to manage every step of our client’s cases and keep them fully informed along the way.

Please note, the Carabin Shaw Law Office has moved to 875 E Ashby # 1100 San Antonio, Texas 78212