By: If you’re an Irvine bicyclist hit by a car, an attorney can help. Bicycle collisions happen all too often when you’re not driving near traffic; when you do get into a wreck with a car, the damage is often severe. Many drivers are reluctant to share the road with a bicyclist, so no matter how careful you are, you run the risk of cycling next to someone who would just as soon clip you as move into the other lane for 500 feet. When that happens to you, if you’re injured or your bike is destroyed, it’s in your best interested to retain the best attorney you can.
Because of the closely related nature of the cases, if there’s a foot accident — say, an Irvine pedestrian hit by a car — the attorney that handles cycling cases can often handle the case just as well (and vice versa; a cyclist can use a pedestrian accident lawyer equally well also.)
The first thing you’ll want to do once you recover from your accident is collect the information of all the other parties involved — insurance, address, phone number, name, and so forth. Then, you’ll want to start looking for the right Irvine personal injury attorney.
Asking co-workers, relatives, and friends for a referral is the time-honored way of getting a good lawyer for this kind of situation, but the odds aren’t all that great that your friends and acquaintances actually know a bicycle accident lawyer — at least not in Irvine. So you may have to simply call around and ask the lawyers themselves for referrals.
Once you’ve gotten an ‘alpha list’ of 5-6 attorneys, call around and do an ‘initial consultation’ with each one. Get a feel for how they work, tell them about your case, and in particular ask them how much experience they have with cases of this kind. Ask them about their win/loss ratio of the specific attorney that will be representing you and of the firm as a whole. Ask them for a guarantee that the lawyer they say will be representing you is the one you’ll actually get.
Once you’ve gotten all their responses, it should simply be a matter of picking the best W/L ratio that has someone you feel like you can work with — because no matter what their record is, if you don’t like each other, your case will go much more poorly.