Life After a Bicycle Accident

We have had many clients who have been injured when a motor vehicle hit them on their bicycle. One of the first things they always want to know is how long their case will take to resolve. The answer to that, as with any other personal injury case, is it’s really hard to tell. There are a lot of things that go into determining how long it will take to resolve a personal injury case.
Some of the most important details are how significant the injuries are and how much insurance coverage the at-fault driver has. If the insurance amount is relatively low and the medical expenses are relatively high, those cases will resolve pretty quickly. They can be resolved usually within a couple of months after the injured party has finished medical treatment. If there’s a lot of coverage and injuries are less significant, those are the type of cases that can draw on longer because the parties don’t agree on the value of the injuries, and a lawsuit may need to be filed.

In Georgia, the statute of limitations to file a personal injury lawsuit is two years from the date of the incident, the date of the accident. At the point when you have to file the lawsuit, there’s a lot of work discovering information and presenting the claim, and it may actually have to be presented to a jury at the end. When you file one of those claims, it’s fair to assume that it’s probably going to take somewhere between one and three years after the filing of the lawsuit to resolve it.

That is something that, unfortunately, can be determined at the beginning of a case. The reason for that is that the value of your claim is dependent upon how you recover. If you have an injury that you never recover from, that is a more valuable claim than an injury that you fully recover from. The first thing that has to happen before value is determined is to have you get medical treatment and determine if you are going to make a full recovery.

The next step would be then evaluating what ways your life has been disrupted, and looking at what you’re entitled to recover in damages. Under Georgia law, you can first recover damages that are called special damages. These generally are lost wages and medical expenses that you’ve incurred as a result of your treatment. Those are pretty easy to determine. The harder category is what’s called non-economic damages. Those are things that you can’t get a receipt for, such as pain and suffering. They are things like the disruption and loss of enjoyment in your daily life.

Now, looking at those categories, that’s how they determine to some extent the value of your case, but you also have to take into consideration what the available insurance coverage may be because these cases all become about insurance money. How much liability coverage does the person that harmed you have? You have to look at that to determine value. Under Georgia law, a driver is only required to have at minimum $25,000 of liability coverage. That severely limits a case if you have several hundred thousand dollars of medical expenses and the at-fault driver only has $25,000 worth of coverage. That also significantly drives the value of your claim. Even though you’re on a bicycle, it is the liability insurance of the driver that is required to compensate you for your claim.