Car accidents are one of the best ways to ruin your day. What can make it worse is if the offending driver takes off before you are able to get their information. This is known as a hit and run accident, and happens too often on Massachusetts roads. If you are the victim of one of these accidents, there are certain steps you should take to make sure you gain rightful compensation.
Suffering a serious injury in an auto accident may entitle you to collect damages from a negligent driver. However, you can lose this right by waiting too long to file a lawsuit for compensation.
If you have been injured in an accident, such as a car or motorcycle collision with another vehicle, making a claim against the other driver is not as simple as going to the courthouse and starting a lawsuit. There are multiple intervening steps that will take place between the time you contact a personal injury attorney and the onset of trial. If settlement negotiations do not lead to a satisfactory outcome, then before trial commences there is often one more intervening step: the filing and resolution of pretrial motions.
To prove a cause of action for negligence in Massachusetts, you must establish the existence of multiple elements including the existence of a duty of care owed to you on the part of the defendant, the breach of that duty, and harm to you caused by that breach. Of these elements, causation can be one of the more challenging because it has two parts: actual causation, and proximate causation.
For most people, the phrase “Don’t drink and drive” is pretty much common sense. You know the slowed down feeling of being drunk (or even buzzed or “tipsy”) and don’t want to feel that behind the wheel of a car. Yet, over 35 percent of all traffic deaths within Massachusetts were caused by a drunk driver. The state takes this offense very seriously, as safety of all drivers is always top priority.
Sometimes an injury that is actionable in civil court can include an aspect of criminal law. Many states will consider a statutory violation by a defendant in a negligence case to benefit the plaintiff’s case by making the burden of proof easier to carry, by holding that the proof of such a violation establishes a rebuttable presumption that the defendant was negligent. This use of statutes is known as “negligence per se”.
No one leaves their home expecting to get into a serious car accident. You don’t approach an intersection anticipating being in a head-on collision with a drunk driver or with a distracted driver whose texting and driving caused his or her vehicle to drift into your lane of travel.
Sometimes, the cause of a car accident can be a combination of the conduct of a negligent driver and the conditions existing at the time at the location where it occurred. An accident investigation of a recent car collision raises questions about the role work done by a contractor for the state may have played in contributing to the accident.
Automobile technology has been advancing in recent years that presages the “driverless car”. Cars can now parallel park themselves, and the latest innovations include cars that monitor your blind spots for you, tell you when you are deviating out of your lane, and in some imminent collision situations will even stop themselves if you do not hit the brakes in time. It is only a matter of time before technology matures sufficiently to take you out of the driving picture altogether. In fact, the Internet company Google is one of six companies that has prototype driverless cars on the road right now, working out the bugs in the technology that will ultimately render you obsolete as a driver.
As some Massachusetts residents may recall an accident in 2013 resulted in the death of a teenager after he changed lanes to avoid debris on Interstate 91 near Springfield. The debris was identified as furniture that had fallen off a pickup truck. A superior court judge ruled that a manslaughter charge against the man who owned the pickup should stand.
Automobile Accident, Motorcycle Accident, Bicycle Accident
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