Recovering from a burn injury can be as easy as rubbing some ointment on the area or as difficult as going through multiple surgeries over a year. Depending on how bad the burn is, your bank account might hurt just as much as your skin.
Thankfully, you can turn to your insurance provider for compensation and speed your recovery along. But what are you to do when insurance companies have a reputation for lowballed offers and business-first over client-first practices?
If you need a solution, contact Valley Law Accident and Injury Lawyers today at 801-810-9999. Alternatively, fill out our online form.
Lead attorney Brigham Richards brings over a decade of expertise to Valley Law. The firm serves both English and Spanish-speaking clients and offers a jumpstart to your compensation claim after a burn injury.
Why Hire a Salt Lake City Burn Injury Attorney?
Technically speaking, you could handle a burn injury case on your own. But working together with an expert lawyer offers several advantages you can’t get when filing solo.
Legal Expertise
Not everyone can be an expert in legalese. Not everyone has the time or energy to invest in becoming an expert in legalese.
Between knowing what documents matter when in a case and paying attention to 100% of the fine print on anything you sign, handling your own case can quickly turn into a slogging labyrinth just to file for compensation.
And that’s without mentioning the opposition you face in the form of an insurance adjuster or the liable party’s own legal representative.
Having a lawyer on your side means you don’t get lost throughout the claims process. Your lawyer can simplify things that need explaining, inform you of developments, and speed things up so you can put your burn injury behind you as soon as possible.
Legal Representation
When you work with a lawyer, you authorize them to represent your interests when meeting with relevant parties.
A skilled burn injury lawyer can work with you throughout every step of your case. But if your injuries prevent you from going through your day-to-day, much less your case, then your lawyer can take the reins and handle everything in your stead.
Peace of Mind
Working with a lawyer implies that you trust them to fight for you even when you cannot.
Your lawyer can work together with your doctor, your therapist, and other professionals to ensure all the evidence matches up. And, of course, all your information will be held in confidence.
So what will you be doing while your lawyer pushes your case forward? Well, anything you need: focus on yourself, spend time with your loved ones, plan your recovery, or catch up on missed work.
How Dangerous Do Burn Injuries Get?
Burn injuries can have a number of different causes, namely extreme temperatures, radiation, electricity, or chemical reactions. While these all seem to harm the skin in different ways, the similarity is that they all involve the release of energy responsible for tissue damage.
The severity of a burn is determined by the depth of tissue damage and ranges from first-degree to fourth-degree.
First-Degree Burns
First-degree burns are the mildest form of burn and are also the most common. They are also called superficial burns because they only affect the outermost layer of the skin.
First-degree burns are dry, red, and painful without blisters. These types of skin damage, fortunately, heal quite quickly, taking anywhere from two days to a little over a week, depending on the size of the affected area.
Complications from first-degree burns are rare, but the risk of skin cancer later in life increases with repeated first-degree radiation burns (such as sunburns).
Second-Degree Burns
Second-degree burns are the most commonly encountered burns in household kitchens and dining areas, usually as a result of boiling liquids.
If a second-degree burn reaches the upper layer of the dermis, it will appear moist and red with blisters. If it reaches deeper, it will look yellowish or white. Shallower second-degree burns are extremely painful because of exposed nerve endings.
This level of injury risks infection and needs several weeks at least for a full recovery. Particularly bad injuries may have a high risk of scarring and may require skin grafts to heal.
Third-Degree Burns
At this level of injury, tissue damage extends throughout the dermis. Third-degree burns are often painless due to a complete lack of living nerves in the affected area.
Third-degree burns are damaging and result in toughening of the tissue into what is basically leather. Healing is almost never complete, even after a recovery period of several months, and scarring is common, even with skin grafts.
Fourth-Degree Burns
The most serious of all burns, these injuries penetrate the entire skin, revealing and even damaging underlying muscle and/or bone. Fourth-degree burns have nearly zero possibility of healing the damaged tissue and require excision as a treatment.
There are classification systems that recognize burns of up to six degrees. These are less common than the standard four-degree system of classification, however.
How Does a Burn Injury Lawyer Help?
You don’t want to be running around filing documents when you should be resting and recovering from an injury. This is especially true for burn injuries, given what we’ve discussed about how painful and damaging they can be.
A professional burn injury attorney can handle the entire claims process for you while you take your time healing. With the right legal aid by your side, you can avoid the hassle of gathering evidence, negotiating with an insurance company, and, if worst comes to wear, filing a lawsuit.
All of that can be done in your stead by an experienced legal representative.
Gathering Evidence
Burn injury lawyers are trained to identify useful information to help a victim’s case. our Salt Lake City personal injury lawyer will reach out to all relevant parties to gather evidence regarding your injuries.
- Medical records: Some of the most reliable proof for a burn injury case, medical records give detailed reports of the damage you sustained.
- Receipts: Whether it’s hospital receipts showing what you spent in the hospital, pharmaceutical receipts proving medication, or the receipt for a faulty product that caused the burn, these slips of paper prove expenses that your plan can cover.
- Photographs: Photos of the injury itself serve to support medical records. Photos of the accident site and any equipment related to or damaged in the accident help the insurance company see a clearer picture of what happened.
- Video footage: If a picture paints a thousand words, video footage, when available, paints 60 images each second. Traffic cam, security cam, dashcam, or bystander footage can help support your claim, depending on the context of the burn accident.
- Psychiatric evaluations: Psychological damage is a difficult aspect to prove when it comes to pain and suffering damage claims. However, psychiatric evaluations are some of the most robust forms of proof in making an insurance claim.
- Police reports: If your burns are the result of another person’s actions, wilful or not, your lawyer can turn to the police report to gather valuable data.
The exact documents your lawyer seeks out will depend on your case, and not every case needs an instance of each of these examples. Part of your lawyer’s job is to identify which ones are necessary so as not to waste time and resources on irrelevant information.
Calculating Damages
Having gathered the evidence, your lawyer will then contact your insurance company to meet with a claims adjuster. This meeting is where the value of your claim will be determined.
The insurance adjuster will review the case and the evidence as presented by your burn injury attorney. They will, as representatives of the insurance provider, make you an offer based on the information, though there is a good chance it’s going to be less than you hope for.
This is where your lawyer shines. As your representative, your attorney will negotiate for a higher amount, pointing out details that the adjuster might have missed (or possibly outright ignored).
If your lawyer is worth his salt, they will be able to push the offer to the upper limits of what your insurance policy can provide.
Filing a Lawsuit
Sometimes, your insurance adjuster might not be willing to pay you the amount you are owed. Or perhaps you may want to look to the liable party for compensation instead of turning to your insurance.
In either of these cases, your attorney can file a lawsuit for you.
Lawsuits rarely ever make it to court. They tend to be more expensive than coming to an agreement, and they are taxing on time and energy as well.
Plus, lawyers are professionals and do not turn to lawsuits without knowing they have a chance at winning. If your attorney pushes for a lawsuit, the opposing party’s legal representatives will likely know their chances aren’t good and de-escalate with a settlement.
Still, a lawsuit might be the right move depending on your circumstances, and your lawyer can help you figure out if you should take this route forward. If you make it to court, your lawyer will argue why you deserve the compensation you seek.
Work With Our Expert Salt Lake City Burn Injury Law Firm
A burn injury can be the start of a lot of troubles for you. We at Valley Law Accident and Injury Lawyers would like to be the ones to provide you relief.
If you’re looking for compensation, Valley Law offers burn victims the opportunity to maximize the resources they can claim from their insurance policy. If you’re looking for justice, Valley Law offers the chance to hold at-fault parties accountable.
Call our number at 801-810-9999 or fill out our online form to contact us today for a no-cost evaluation. We don’t charge unless we win your case.
