San Mateo Injury Lawyers Blog

Back on New Year’s Day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s website published some useful information that knowledgeable San Mateo car accident attorneys, as well as those who’ve been in a crash, already know: that the injuries you suffer in an accident – even a low-speed one – will not always trigger immediately apparent symptoms.

Sometimes, it may take days or even weeks for the symptoms to appear. Our bodies are programmed, in the immediate aftermath of serious trauma, to dump large amounts of adrenaline into our systems. That adrenaline helps our bodies deal with the blow we’ve just been dealt. That physiological reaction may also cause certain people not to feel pain for an extended period of time.

The reality is that each person is unique, and each person’s body’s responses to a crash are also unique. Just because Person A experiences significant pain almost immediately after their crash while Person B takes days or weeks for their problems to lead to the perception of pain doesn’t automatically make Person B’s harm any less authentic or any less serious.

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As future attorneys, many law students train in something called “issue spotting,” which means identifying and understanding all of the potential legal issues within a complex set of facts and then comprehending how to apply the law to those facts. That’s important because, when you as a client hire an attorney, that’s what you want: a knowledgeable and insightful professional who can take the jumbled ball of facts that you provide to him/her and decipher all of the claims, arguments and legal maneuvers that those facts make available to you. This is what an experienced San Mateo car accident attorney does every day, and why having that kind of legal representation can pay massive dividends for your injury case.

A recent accident case from Southern California is a good example of what we mean. In that case, a man’s car broke down on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles County. The man coasted his disabled vehicle onto the shoulder of the freeway. He then called his automobile club for roadside assistance.

After more than two hours on the shoulder of the freeway, the man still had not received assistance. As he continued to wait, an unlicensed driver spun out of control, ran onto the shoulder of the freeway and rear-ended the man, causing him to suffer significant injuries.

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Some people have an unfortunate tendency to view “pain and suffering” damages as somehow less legitimate – mostly just the stuff of shrewd lawyers’ fancy legal arguments and overly sympathetic jurors. Anyone who has been substantially injured in an auto accident – or knows someone who has been – knows that this simply isn’t true. An auto accident injury has the potential to affect you negatively for the remainder of your life. The totality of the harm you suffered in that auto accident is greater than just the amount of income you lost (and will lose) and the sum of your medical bills. When it comes time to seek all of the damages that you deserve, be sure you’ve sought out a skilled San Mateo car accident attorney.

Many times, the totality of your pain and suffering harm (also called “non-economic damages” in California) will exceed your “economic” losses like lost earnings and medical expenses, and perhaps exceed it by a lot. For example, last year, the state Supreme Court ruled on a case where the jury awarded $1.8 million in economic damages and $3 million in non-economic damages. Although the net verdict was a smaller sum, the high court ruled in favor of the trial court outcome.

A trial court case from Southern California (Orange County Ct. Case No.30-2019-01055888) is another good example. The injured driver was a 48-year-old woman who was rear-ended as she traveled to the mall. The woman suffered a cervical soft-tissue injury in her neck.

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