It doesn’t cross your mind until it happens to you. Maybe you know the steps to take after a car accident where you or someone you know is driving, but what about when you’re using an Uber or Lyft. Do you know the steps to take after a Lyft car accident? Passengers may be lost about how to legally protect themselves when injured. If your Uber driver is at fault, are you aware of how to get an Uber accident settlement that helps compensate you for your injury and the pain it causes? Contact a Florida car accident attorney.
What You Need to Do First
The first thing to do in any motor vehicle accident is to make sure you’re safe, others are safe, and that everyone is getting medical treatment. Take note of the circumstances of the accident: what time is it? What are the road conditions? Do you know the area?
There is information you then need to get from the driver. You’ll need the following from your driver:
- your driver’s name, address, and phone number
- your driver’s personal insurance information
- the insurance information of the service you’re using (Lyft, Uber, or anyone else)
You’ll also need the following from any other drivers involved in the accident:
- the other driver’s name, address, and phone number
- the other driver’s personal insurance information
Finally, you’ll need:
- the vehicle information of all cars involved: make, model, license plate, and registration number)
- names, addresses, and phone numbers of witnesses
- images, video, or notes of injuries and vehicle damage sustained
The Next Steps
Needless to say, you may not be able to get all this information if you’re dealing with an injury sustained from the accident. You may be getting treated, or taken to the hospital. You may go with a loved one who’s injured. You may be dazed and unable to collect this information. Your health comes first.
Getting this information later can be a pain, especially if you’re still recovering. Luckily, there’s an easy way to solve this. A personal injury attorney helps build your case. They can get this information from police and other sources with ease.
It’s also important that you’re careful speaking with anyone else’s insurance company. In the event of a lawsuit – whether yours or someone else’s – other insurance companies can use your statements to against you. Many people want to be polite when speaking with insurance, but this can make people soften what happened and this can come back to bite them.
Allow your attorney to deal with the insurance companies for you. In an Uber or Lyft car accident, passengers may deal with multiple insurance companies and plans. These include your driver’s plan, Uber’s or Lyft’s own plan, and the plans of any other driver involved in the accident. That gets messy quickly.
Pursuing Compensation
Uber and Lyft both use insurance plans that cover up to $1 million per accident. That’s portioned out at $50,000 per injury per person. That may not be enough if you’ve sustained an injury that’s debilitating, or that causes pain and suffering. Medical bills can certainly rack up higher than that after a serious car accident.
Personal injuries can impact your life as well. You may lose certain capabilities, face huge medical debt, lose the ability to work for a long time or permanently. You may go through a great deal of pain, stress to your family, and financial stress. There may be experiences that you can no longer enjoy. You may lose out on job opportunities or opportunities for advancement. Any of these reasons is a legitimate one for pursuing financial compensation for your pain and suffering.
This means building a case that evidence fault for the accident. This is where so much of that early information you or your attorney collects is so important. A seemingly harmless accident can be revealed to be one that’s truly someone’s fault. This is why accidents are investigated. It’s important to have this information regardless of how the accident looks early on.
What About Compensation Offers?
If you’re offered compensation, have a personal injury attorney look at it. Often, compensation is offered quickly in order to avoid a later lawsuit. It may offer you money in exchange for fine print that makes you agree not to sue. When you’re offered this quickly, there’s often a reason for it – because a company as big as Uber or Lyft knows you might have a very good reason to sue.
A personal injury attorney will also have a good idea of whether what you’re being offered will meet your eventual bills. They’ve dealt with car accident injuries and have seen what long-term expenses as the result of an injury look like. Some compensation that looks like a big number can actually be a small one in relation to what you’ll eventually need as a result of your injury. A Lyft or Uber accident settlement can actually become much higher than their initial offer. An early offer might only cover part of your injury’s impact on you, whereas a settlement can cover all of it.
If you’ve been injured in a Lyft or Uber accident, contact a personal injury attorney at the LaBovick Law Group right away.
