Car Accidents

September 18, 2019

Preexisting Injury Can Harm Car Accident Case Unless You Do These Things

Average Compensation for a Whiplash Settlement Under Texas law, a driver who causes a crash must pay the other driver’s damages including medical bills, lost wages, and pain that he caused. But often people have been hurt before. With little if any evidence, insurance companies will argue that someone’s damages were not caused by this collision but from a preexisting injury from a prior crash or event to get out of paying what the case is worth. That is not fair. Any good personal injury lawyer knows how to fight this trick so that his client is compensated fairly.

September 5, 2019

Fatal Car Crashes by Red Light Running At All-Time High

by William K. Berenson

You see this as you drive in North Texas all the time. You slow down and come to a stop when you see that the traffic light changes to yellow, then red. This is Driver’s Ed 101, not to mention common sense. But another driver — often a young man in an oversized truck — guns it and blazes through the intersection. We saw that happen as we were taking this photo. The problem is when someone — often in a smaller car coming from a side street — doesn’t or can’t see that truck. These red light runners are causing more and more fatal car crashes.

New report explains what is causing these fatal car crashes

A new study reveals that this serious problem has reached a new high. Almost 1,000 people died at the hands of red light runners in 2017, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. This was the fifth year in a row that this terrible number increased and there is no apparent end in sight.

August 28, 2019

Five Most Dangerous Intersections in Fort Worth

by William K. Berenson

car-accident The Dallas-Fort Worth area is growing furiously with over 100,000 people moving here each year. This has naturally increased the amount of people driving and the number of car accidents — especially at intersections. Almost half of wrecks happen there. Which ones in Fort Worth where are primary office is are the most likely to be the site of car and truck wrecks?

No, the answer is not all of them! But we already have 80,000 of them each year year in Tarrant and Dallas Counties. They were all preventable. Here is a photo from one of many crash cases we are currently handling where our client was rear ended by a man in the pickup truck running a light at an intersection and hitting other cars.

But first, people will have to stop texting or surfingthe net while driving, slow down, not drive while intoxicated, and obey traffic laws.

Until those things happen, you can be safer if you know where the most dangerous intersections are so you can hopefully avoid them. While collisions are reported on the news constantly, you never think that you will be in one — until it happens.

The Safe Communities Coalition that I am a member of researched crash data and reported that these were the top five intersections last year:

East Lancaster at Riverside
183 at 360
I-20 at McCart
East Lancaster at Sargent
I-35 at Meacham

August 26, 2019

Avoiding Car Accidents With Children

by William K. Berenson

school-crossing-guard

It was exciting that school began last week but every year, a lot of people forget how much potential danger lurks. That’s because roads are more congested in school areas and people won’t put down their cell phones, even as kids are darting across the street. School buses pick up and unload over one million kids in Texas. So the need to be hyper-vigilent as we drop children off or make our morning and afternoon drives has greatly increased. Here are some helpful tips that will help stop these preventable car accidents with children.

August 14, 2019

When Your Health Insurance Company Won’t Pay Your Bills, What You Should Do?

by William K. Berenson

A health insurance company must pay medical bills, right? No, not always.

We are often hired by people justifiably angry after their Blue Cross-Blue Shield plan declined to pay for their amulance, hospital, and doctor bills. You have to pay expensive premiums and high deductibles and co-pays. So it is natural to assume that after you are in a car or truck collision in North Texas, that your health insurance company will pay for your medical bills. But unfortunately, it often won’t. But you won’t know this for months.

So the best thing for you to do after being in a wreck is to hire a good personal injury lawyer immediately. He will fight to get your medical bills paid or lowered by your health insurance company and your damages paid by the other driver’s liability insurance company. And if you don’t have health insurance, he can get you treated by qualified doctors and pay for some of them up front or guarantee payment so they are repaid from your insurance settlement or jury verdict. It’s a win-win for you.

July 30, 2019

Herniated and Bulging Disks: What Should You Do?

by William K. Berenson

MRI Most people who are in car and truck accidents suffer from neck and back pain. Sometimes after undergoing diagnostic tests, they find out that the cushion-like disks that separate the bones (vertebrae) in their backbones have been damaged. This especially happens in rear-end collisions. Your doctor may have told you that you have one or more herniated and bulging disks. This post discusses what this means and what you can do about these often serious medical problems.

A herniated disk happens if the outside of the annulus fibrosis, the disk’s outer cover, ruptures or tears. Some of the soft nucleus puplosus, the jelly-like material inside the disk that gives it the shock-absorbing quality to protect your vertebrae, leaks out.

Sometimes it escapes into the spinal canal, often contacting a spinal nerve root. Enormous pain and other symptoms can result.

Herniated disks progress in stages going from smaller to the most extreme: prolapsing, protruding, extruding, to sequestering. In that last state, the material inside the disk has severed from the disc.

They are also referred to as ruptured or slipped disks and the pain can be called a pinched nerve.

Adding to the complexity of a correct diagnosis, herniated disks do not always cause extreme discomfort. At other times, the symptoms are more like those from bulging disks that are described below.

Further, while they can be caused by the sudden trauma of being crashed into by another vehicle, they can also be caused by aging, falls, other injuries, or other factors.

July 24, 2019

What Texas Car Insurance Adjusters Don’t Want You to Know: Top 10 Things

by William K. Berenson

insurance-adjuster-tricks

If you have been injured in a car accident, you may think you can just pick up the phone and get a good settlement. Good luck with that! While some jobs are do-it-yourself, knowing how to develop and argue a personal injury claim, negotiate with shrewd Texas car insurance adjusters, and try your case in a courtroom are not things you can master by watching a You Tube video. You won’t know how to proceed in the complicated legal, medical, and insurance worlds. So you are bound to make mistakes that will cost you a lot of money, time, and frustration.

We get calls almost daily from people after 3 months, 12 months, or even several years since their car crash asking us if we can take over handling their cases. They have gotten little if any response from the other driver’s or their own insurance companies. Or they received another stalling demand for information. Or after waiting forever, they finally got a low-ball offer.

They have no way to pay for their needed medical treatment and may still be not able to work. These people are justifiably angry and overwhelmed by the amount of work involved and the poor results.

We understand how frustrated they are. But like they say, if it were easy, anyone could do it.

So many mistakes may have been made that we often are not able to help them get the results they want. We wish they had contacted us or another good personal injury law firm immediately after the car accident. We have many in the DFW area. The choice can be hard, so here are tips to help you decide who to hire.

Like it or not, Texas car insurance adjusters are trained to take advantage of people. Each one has 500 claims just like yours. While it’s your life, you are just a computer file to them.

The adjusters have a lot of secrets they won’t tell you. Here are some of them.

1. They will act friendly but do everything to cheat you out of your damages.

July 19, 2019

$200,000 Recovered for Car Crash Victim

by William K. Berenson

If you are researching a Fort Worth car accident lawyer, here is an example of how we can help you get the compensation you deserve for your collision case.

The crash

Our client was driving her car through an intersection when a truck ran the light and caused a pile-up.

Our firm immediately went to the scene with our expert and conducted an investigation. We got recorded statements from several eyewitnesses, spoke with Fort Worth Police Department officers and traffic camera technicians, and secured video footage of the collision.

However the other driver adamantly claimed that our driver was at fault and his liability insurance company denied the claim.

Mr. Berenson strongly argued that the other driver was liable but his insurance company refused to budge, claiming its witnesses supported its policyholder. So Mr. Berenson drafted a lawsuit, emailed it the adjuster and its attorney, and alerted his process server.

The settlement

The next day in a final attempt to avoid litigation, Mr. Berenson called the adjuster and was able to make him pay the truck driver’s entire insurance policy amount of $100,000.

Other people had been injured, one person seriously, and he wanted to make sure his client recovered the maximum available. Going to court reduced the likelihood of that happening with multiple claimants and the usual conflicting accounts. In addition our client had already been out of work for a month and needed money quickly.

We then obtained the entire amount available under our client’s underinsured motorist policy in the amount of $100,000.

Our client received $120,021.00 after we negotiated a huge reduction in her health insurance reimbursement claim. Most people have never heard about this, so here is more information on this topic: How subrogation affects car accident claims

July 10, 2019

Lawsuit Filed For Couple Crashed Into By Commercial Vehicle

by William K. Berenson

…. and who shot J.R.?

Berenson Injury Law has filed suit on behalf of a husband and wife who were seriously injured when they were rear ended by a commercial vehicle on Interstate 35. Both could have died. They suffered multiple fractures, had to undergo surgeries and extensive physical therapy, and have a very difficult time recovering from their massive injuries.

The young commercial driver admitted that he looked away and didn’t notice the traffic in front of him slowing down. We intend to prove that he was texting while driving in violation of state and federal laws.

July 9, 2019

Rollover Accidents More Common In These Types of Vehicles

by William K. Berenson

BLOG-W-FT-W-CRASH-FRI Deadly car and truck accidents happen across the DFW area almost every day. One happened near our office last week when an SUV rolled over on I-30 which critically injured several people and took the life of a 22-year-old woman. Here’s a photograph from the scene. And on Sunday night, two people were ejected from a truck in a rollover accident east of Dallas. Since rollovers accidents have the highest fatality rate of any collision, this is an important public safety topic for all of us.

Causes of rollover accidents

Rollovers happen for a number of reasons and are more complex from a liability viewpoint than other vehicle accidents.

New report explains what is causing these fatal car crashes

A health insurance company must pay medical bills, right? No, not always.

What is a herniated disk?

The crash

The settlement

…. and who shot J.R.?

Causes of rollover accidents