Car accidents are one of the most common ways people are injured, with thousands of injury victims seeking compensation through insurance and the courts every year. In New Jersey, car insurance laws can be a bit confusing, and the restrictions they place on lawsuits might not be easily understood.
In any case, our lawyers can help you understand your legal rights, file insurance claims and lawsuits to cover the damages you need paid, analyze any settlement offers, and negotiate with the insurance companies to get the claims paid at fair values. If any of that is unsuccessful, we can take the case to court, go to trial, and fight for the damages you deserve in open court.
For a free review of your car accident case, call the New Jersey car accident attorneys at The Reiff Law Firm right away by dialing (215) 709-6940.
How Car Accident Cases Work in New Jersey
New Jersey car insurance laws have some elements of a no-fault system but with a choice to make your insurance more like a fault-based system instead. This leads to some strange situations where you might not be able to file a lawsuit and your ability to claim pain and suffering might be blocked. You might also have difficulty getting compensation in some situations because the other driver does not have liability insurance – and that is perfectly legal for them not to carry. As such, our New Jersey car accident lawyers often focus on getting your case into court through a lawsuit, where we can potentially open access to these additional damages and go after the driver directly for the damages they caused you.
NJ’s No-Fault Choice
New Jersey auto insurance policies come in two types: limited right to sue and unlimited right to sue (or “tort”) policies. NJ’s no-fault insurance system requires both types of plans to cover you and any occupants of your car if you were injured in a car crash, meaning that your primary coverage will come from your own insurance, not the insurance for the driver who hit you. What this also means is that you cannot sue – usually. The right to a lawsuit is blocked, and damages for pain and suffering cannot be claimed unless certain requirements are met.
One way of opening access to a lawsuit is choosing the other type of policy – the unlimited right to sue policy. These policies often cost a bit more in premiums, but they preserve your right to sue and claim pain and suffering damages in any car accident case.
Alternatively, you can still sue for damages and claim pain and suffering even with a limited right to sue policy if your injuries meet the “verbal threshold” of “serious injuries.” The serious injury threshold is defined under N.J.S.A. § 39:6A-8(a) to include any injuries that cause death, result in lost limbs, cause “significant disfigurement or significant scarring,” have a “displaced fracture,” involve death of a fetus, or otherwise are “permanent … within a reasonable degree of medical probability.” These standards are a bit confusing, but some examples of qualifying “serious” injuries might include facial scars, a compound fracture, a severed nerve from broken glass, spinal fractures, paralysis, traumatic brain injuries, and other similar injuries.
Claiming Pain and Suffering
As mentioned above, when the ability to sue is blocked, so is the ability to claim anything beyond “economic loss.” Economic damages include things like medical expenses, therapy bills, lost earnings, and other monetary effects of an injury. While these are certainly expensive and important damages – and many families would be bankrupted if they had to pay for these without insurance – they are not the end-all-be-all of your injury case.
Damages for “non-economic losses,” often collectively referred to as “pain and suffering,” can pay you back for your physical pain, your mental anguish, your emotional distress, and more. These damages include payment for lost enjoyment, missing out on activities you used to participate in, anxiety over your injury, the feeling of loss at a permanent/serious injury, and more.
Claiming these damages is vital, so it is important to always work with your New Jersey car accident lawyers to get the medical evidence needed to prove that your injuries are “serious” enough for a lawsuit. You can also speak with us if you are trying to decide what type of insurance to choose and you want to maintain your ability to sue for pain and suffering.
Liability Insurance
Usually, your own insurance is going to cover your economic damages up to certain reimbursement percentages and up to your policy limits. However, you also have to pay a deductible to use your own insurance. From there, you may still be left with damages in excess of this coverage, including pain and suffering damages. If you can file a claim against the other driver’s insurance, this can help you get the rest of these damages covered.
However, not everyone in New Jersey is required to carry liability insurance. Liability insurance is the insurance that other drivers sue when the insurance customer causes them injuries. If you have a “basic” policy in NJ, it usually does not include liability insurance, meaning that the driver who hit you might not actually have insurance to cover you.
When you sue them directly, they can be ordered to pay you directly for your injuries, even if they do not have liability insurance. Additionally, other insurance coverages that you have – such as underinsured motorist coverage – might step in and supply you with additional coverage.
Settling Car Accident Claims in NJ
Our attorneys always advise clients not to speak with insurance, not to admit anything, and not to sign anything or accept any money before speaking with us about their case. Especially given the layers of different types of insurance coverage that might apply to your case, it can be confusing to understand who is covering you, how much they are supposed to pay you, and what portions of your damages are paid by the defendant. In any case, agreeing to a settlement can bar you from additional damages, so you should not agree to anything until our lawyers have reviewed your case and the settlement documents.
When you get paid by your own insurance company, you can often accept these damages safe in the knowledge that you can still get paid by the defendant for the rest of your damages. However, even with this, the insurance company might be able to claw back some of the damages you ultimately get from the defendant to cover the money they paid out on your claim in what is called “subrogation.”
Any time you accept a settlement or money from the defendant’s insurance, it may function as a settlement for your entire case. This would mean that signing these papers or accepting the money would block you from being able to get any additional funds from the defendant or their insurance policy later. As such, you should not sign these papers until our lawyers approve it.
Settlement might also not be the best move in your case, and you should work with your lawyers to pursue the route that will best maximize compensation. If the insurance carrier offers you only what they call a “nuisance settlement” – barely more than it would cost them to defend their case in court – then it might not truly be enough to pay you back for your full damages. Our attorneys can negotiate with them and, if they refuse to up the settlement, take them to court.
Proof Required to Win a Car Accident Lawsuit in New Jersey
Our attorneys need to be able to prove your case in court if we want to win compensation for your medical bills, pain and suffering, lost wages, and other damages. That means proving four elements of your “negligence” case and providing enough evidence to meet the “burden of proof” for civil injury cases.
Elements
Car accident cases are usually based on a claim that the other driver was negligent – that they did something wrong by mistake – rather than any intentional accusations. While you can sue for intentional crashes and vehicular assault, it is not necessary to make the case harder by doing so.
Instead, the elements you have to show are 1) that the other driver owed you a legal duty, 2) that the driver breached that duty, 3) that the breach of duty caused the crash, and 4) that the crash resulted in damages you can claim in court.
The duty element will usually come from one of two sources: traffic laws or the general expectations for what a reasonable driver should do in the same situation. If the driver drives drunk or speeds, they violate a specific traffic law, and that can satisfy the duty and breach elements. If they simply were not careful enough – by an objective “reasonable driver” standard – then that also satisfies these elements, even if there was no explicit violation of the law.
From there, as long as we can show that the driver actually caused the crash, we can claim damages for all economic losses (and non-economic losses if you suffered serious injuries or have the right kind of insurance) in your case.
If there is a mix of causes from multiple drivers, we can claim partial damages from each one, leaving off any percentage of fault attributed to your own mistakes. As long as you were less at fault than the other driver/combination of drivers, N.J.S.A. § 2A:15-5.1 still allows you to claim their share of damages.
Burden of Proof
Civil injury cases use a burden of proof called the “preponderance of the evidence” standard. If you can prove that your claim of fault is more likely than the defense’s claim, you win your case, and the jury decides how much your damages are worth and orders the defense to pay you.
Paying for a Lawyer in a New Jersey Car Accident Claim
In most cases, our attorneys – and most injury lawyers – can work on a “contingency fee” agreement. This means that you only have to pay us for our services if we win your case. Tying our paycheck to your win ensures that we will be putting everything into winning your case. Even if that were not the case, we would still be ethically required to put your best interests first anyway.
Contingency fees usually equal around a third of the damages in your case, though we can also recoup the costs of litigation and certain expenses in many cases, too. However, no fee agreement is finalized until you sign an agreement for that setup, so make sure to speak with your lawyer about fees before starting your case.
Types of Car Accident Cases We Handle in NJ
Our attorneys focus on a wide variety of accidents, with no crash being too serious or too big for our lawyers to handle. We pride ourselves on taking on negligent trucking and transportation companies whose drivers cause crashes, auto manufacturers whose defective auto parts put drivers at risk, and run-of-the-mill bad drivers who negligently cause injuries.
When it comes to truck accidents, bus accidents, Uber/Lyft crashes, and delivery truck accidents, our lawyers can take on drivers’ employers to hold them responsible in place of the driver – potentially opening access to additional damages. While some truckers and most Uber/Lyft drivers and Amazon delivery drivers are often hired as independent contractors, blocking this option, we can still get compensation for you from their commercial driver’s insurance in many cases.
Accidents involving serious violations of the law, like reckless driving, drunk driving, and racing, often result in serious injuries. Our lawyers are not afraid to take on hard cases if it means helping our clients get the damages they need for their serious injuries.
Our lawyers also take on wrongful death cases and other deadly car accident claims, fighting to help the families of car accident victims get the peace and justice they deserve.
Even so, not every accident is as serious as these, and our lawyers help victims in rear-end accidents, parking lot accidents, low-speed collisions, and all other kinds of car crashes bring their cases as well.
Call Our New Jersey Car Accident Attorneys Today
For a free case review with The Reiff Law Firm’s New Jersey car accident attorneys, call (215) 709-6940 as soon as you can.
