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When I meet with new clients that have been injured by a truck accident here in the Tampa Bay area, I get asked, “What are the steps that are necessary and important for us to be able to establish our case and prove it?” First and foremost, you need to be getting your medical care and treatment to get well and try to recover from your injuries, damages, and losses. That is the most important thing for you to do to make sure that you’re getting better.

Sometimes we have clients that say they’re tough. They say, “I can heal on my own. I don’t need to see doctors.”. Generally speaking, that’s not a good idea. You need to get medical care and treatment, and you need to follow the recommendations and advice of your doctors. They’re your trusted healthcare providers and they want to help you, so don’t try to tough it out alone. Get that medical care and treatment. That’s step number one, and we’re going to be making sure that you’re doing that.

Step two, we’re going to be doing our investigation about how the accident occurred. We’re going to make sure that the vehicles are photographed. We’re going to make sure that the scene is preserved and photographed. We’re going to be making sure that witness statements are obtained. We’re going to be looking to GPS information that’s available from the truck company. Many commercial truck carriers have GPS information on their vehicles, and we’re going to be obtaining the vehicle black box information. That’s the event data recorder that you probably have in your vehicle and don’t even know it and is likely also in the truck vehicle as well. We’re going to be using our trusted investigators to obtain that information because that’s very critical.

The third step is we put this all together once we know the full extent of your injuries and damages. That’s when we’re going to be pursuing your rightful claim to injuries and losses for what you have sustained to make sure that you, indeed, are fully and fairly compensated for what you have gone through. Those are the steps that we take when we pursue a trucking accident here in the Tampa Bay area.

You may be wondering after your truck accident, “How long is this going to take?” There’s a sense of urgency to get a case wrapped up, but the problem is you can’t do it successfully without taking some time to get it right. You can’t go to the insurance company or the commercial trucking company and say, “Give us a little bit now and we’ll come back for more later.”

We’ve got to put a case together and it’s going to take time, and we want to have that case fully developed on both the injury side and the negligence side before it’s resolved. Sometimes that requires that we file a lawsuit. We make that decision because we know there’s value in doing so and that it has greater value for us to get into a posture of prosecuting the claim in a formalized context where we have subpoena power, the ability to get actual records, and the ability to get actual documentation and proof of the negligence of the commercial truck driver.

All of those are what makes a claim valuable, which means that we’ve got to take time. Be patient and give yourself the opportunity to let your lawyer do everything they can. Sometimes that can take years.