Hood River Car Accident Attorney

The first thing to do is obviously to make sure you are OK and everyone involved is as well. Call the police and seek any necessary medical attention. Get to a safe location and exchange insurance information with the other driver (s). Make sure to gather their insurance, name, license information and try not to speak of any of the details about what happened, as your words might come back to hurt you later in your case. Take photos of all vehicle damage, gather information from witnesses, if there are any.

File an auto insurance claim with your insurance within 72 hours of the accident and find out the details of your coverage. You may have what is called Personal Injury Protection (PIP) which can cover an amount of medical costs, bills and treatment. This PIP might not cover everything you need though, which is one reason to call us at the Johnston Law Firm. Insurance companies will work to pay as little to you as possible, as they have one agenda: save money. The Johnston Law Firm has an agenda too: make insurance companies fulfill their obligation to you and help regain you what you lost. We will listen to you and fight for your legal rights in pursuit of compensation. We will care for you as if you were part of our family.

There are two types of compensatory damages, both of which are designed to compensate the victim for their losses:

Economic Damages: compensate an injured victim for direct financial losses, such as medication costs, hospitalization stays, surgery bills and lost wages. Economic damages are defined by Oregon law as “objectively verifiable monetary losses including but not limited to reasonable charges necessarily incurred for medical, hospital, nursing and rehabilitative services and other health care services, burial and memorial expenses, loss of income and past and future impairment of earning capacity”.

Noneconomic Damages: compensate an injured victim for more subjective losses such as emotional trauma or distress. Oregon law defines these as “subjective, non-monetary losses, including but not limited to pain, mental suffering, emotional distress, humiliation”. These damages are more difficult to quantify, as emotional pain can be traumatic and long-lasting, as well as difficult to recover from