Miami Bus Accident Lawyer

Miami is a dangerous city to get around in, and if you were involved in a bus accident in the area, you are not alone in your suffering. Bus accidents can be dangerous for a number of reasons, including the fact that buses rarely have seatbelts for occupants. Due to their large size and weight, buses also have an outsized damage impact on other vehicles. If you or a family member were injured in a bus accident, a Miami bus accident lawyer from our team may be able to help. Call our office at Chalik & Chalik Injury Lawyers today for a free case evaluation at (305) 944-2035.

In Florida, the law allows for people who are partially at fault to still collect damages. You may still be entitled to financial compensation even if you were at fault for some of the damages. Florida Code 768.81 lays out the details of Florida’s comparative fault law. This section also explains economic damages.

Types of Compensation for Bus Accident Victims

Accident damages are intended to make the victim or plaintiff whole again financially speaking. This is why the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not charge income taxes on liability settlements or judgment payouts. You can get compensated for a driver who negligently hit you, and you do not owe taxes on the settlement money. But if a driver intentionally did something, there could be criminal charges involved. In such a case, punitive damages may be assessed, and these are taxed and can be much higher than the negligence settlement intended to restore a person financially.

If you were in a bus accident, liability damages could include:

• Past medical costs
• Prescriptions
• Ongoing therapy treatments
• Missed work or wages
• Lost income ability or potential
• Mechanic bills or car replacement costs (if a bus hit your car)
• Pain and suffering
• Mental anguish

These are the primary categories courts look at in Miami to discern how much to pay a bus accident victim.

How a Miami Bus Accident Lawyer May Help People Like You

Serious injuries require serious attention to get better. Physical therapy and prescription management are all just part of the equation. Healing is no easy task by any measure, but neither is dealing with insurance defense agents with decades of negotiating experience. A Miami bus lawyer with our office may protect your legal rights while you focus on healing and getting better. We can assure the doctors about your legal situation and help ensure that you are receiving the best of care in the hospital you are at or clinic you are visiting.

It almost goes without saying, but medical costs can be an astronomical expense. Especially without insurance, there is little to protect a person from racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Even with insurance, injuries can be debilitating, and insurance co-pays can also feel sky-high if you are on a more affordable monthly plan. A Miami bus accident lawyer may be able to front the cost of waging your lawsuit, including legal fees, document service fees, and the urgent evidence discovery and collection process.

Collecting evidence early on is the first, most urgent reason why people may choose to hire a bus accident lawyer. Their legal team will know what evidence to collect, where to look, who to ask, and what public records may be relevant to pull out.

For example, you may want to subpoena information, such as a cell phone record. This involves forcing an adversarial side to hand over some information that would otherwise be confidential. This information can reveal vital clues as to whether a bus driver, or another driver who may have contributed to causing the accident, was distracted and had been texting while driving, and may make a material difference in your case.

Reasons To Act Quickly

At Chalik & Chalik Injury Lawyers, we see cases often in which a person hesitates too much early on with pursuing an injury. It is easy to underestimate how much you could truly receive in your settlement. Some people wait too long to start pursuing their rights, and by that time, an adversarial party could have gotten to the evidence first.

Beating any adversarial parties to collect additional evidence is the first early chess match that goes on in any lawsuit. The parties compete to collect any pertinent evidence to their case to add more validity beyond one’s word against another’s.

Each piece of evidence tends to lower your percent of liability, thus raising the amount of the damages that you can keep. In this way, collecting evidence has a very real impact on the amount of money you keep or do not keep after your lawsuit ends. Collecting more evidence, such as video footage from nearby establishments that offers foundational or supporting evidence, can be huge for a case. Working with log books and any potential witnesses is another type of evidence to potentially collect, but your Miami bus accident attorney with Chalik & Chalik Injury Lawyers will know exactly where to look. Call (305) 944-2035 today for your free consultation.

Legal Code That Limits Your Rights to Collect

The statute of limitations limits the amount of time that a person has to collect based on their injuries. If you were involved in a bus accident, you have four years to take legal action in Florida, per Florida Statute Section 95.11.

This means that you have four years to file your lawsuit. Ultimately, evidence does not last anywhere close to four years in the field, but the reason this law gives so much time is because people’s injuries take time to heal. Serious injuries can require many surgeries to recover, and any one of those surgeries can be prohibitively expensive if it is not covered by insurance. One of the tough things about liability accidents is that if your health insurance company gets wind that your injuries are due to the fault of another person on the road, such as in a bus accident in Miami, then you may lose insurance coverage for those injuries, since your insurance company may expect you to sue and collect.

Bus accident injuries can be serious and life-threatening, so we recommend that you do not waste any more time, but give our legal team a call today to get some of your early questions answered. We work on a contingency-fee-basis and only collect if you collect. Call us today for your non-obligatory case evaluation at (305) 944-2035 and find out how a Miami bus accident lawyer from our team may be able to assist you.