It is best if you contact a personal injury attorney as quickly as possible after your injury. This is especially true if the injuries are severe or there was a death. While defense attorneys like to paint this in a negative light, there are important reasons for quick contact to a personal injury attorney. Valuable evidence can disappear or be destroyed, witnesses move, memories of the parties involved or witnesses fade, and ultimately, the longer that time passes, the harder it may be to prove your case.

If you are beginning treatment or still being treated by a physician, an attorney can help guide you through the process as well as how to deal with medical bills. While litigation is stressful, having a seasoned personal injury attorney there to help walk you through the case and evaluate things lessens this burden. Don’t be afraid to contact a personal injury attorney today if you’ve suffered an injury and would like your claim evaluated.

Our case evaluations for personal injury claims are FREE. We will typically do an initial intake on the phone or through email to see if your claim qualifies. If we believe you may have a claim, we will schedule an appointment for you to come in to meet with us. These appointments usually range from about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the complexity of the case.

If you do not make it past the initial screening, we by in no way mean to degrade or detract from your injury. Unfortunately, there are some situations where there may be a significant injury, but no remedy under the law. Just because we don’t take your claim, however, doesn’t mean you don’t have one. We always recommend that if we don’t take your claim to keep trying other personal injury lawyers, because someone may take a different approach to your case.

There are four things to look at when it comes to evaluating a slip and call claim: duty, breach of duty, causation, damages.

Duty: Whomever you are suing must have a duty to maintain safe spaces or prevent hazardous situations or defects from arising that could cause injury. For example, grocery stores have a duty to maintain their aisles from spills or produce to prevent a hazard.

Breach: There must be a breach of this duty. In our example above, it would mean that grocery store employees knew or should have known that there was a spill or something in the aisle and they neglected to clean it up.

Causation: This means that the defect itself caused you to fall and resulted in damages. I.e., it was the liquid in the aisle that should have been mopped up that resulted in your falling on the floor and being injured.

Damages: There must also be resulting damage. If you slipped and fell but were not injured, there is no claim. Damages can be both tangible and intangible losses such as loss of income, medical costs, pain and suffering, and future loss or cost.

While pictures of the scene definitely can help establish liability, many of those who are injured don’t think about taking pictures for various reasons. However, this doesn’t mean you are forbidden from making a claim. There are several things an experienced slip and fall attorney can do to establish liability. There may have been witnesses that can corroborate the condition. They store likely has a video surveillance camera that captured the before and after of the fall. This can be important because it can show just how long the dangerous condition existed and if anyone saw or should have seen it.