El Monte Pedestrian Accident Lawyer | San Gabriel Valley
A vehicle of some kind hit you while you were on foot. No airbag, no seatbelt, no protection of any kind. That is why pedestrian injuries are so often so severe. Many are life-changing.
Stop blaming yourself, please. Maybe you weren't in a marked crosswalk. Maybe it was dark and you had on a dark jacket. Maybe you looked at your phone for a second. The insurance company will gaslight you into believing it was your fault. When they say "he was wearing dark clothes at night and my guy couldn't see him," we say fantastic - you just admitted fault.
Tell me: whose job was it to avoid the collision, the driver or the pedestrian? The driver is operating a machine that can kill. The law puts a continuous duty on them to watch for people on foot, including at the unmarked crosswalks that exist at nearly every intersection, whether there's paint on the road or not.
And even if you made a mistake and partially caused the accident, California uses comparative fault. If you are 30% at fault, you still recover 70% of the damages. Insurers count on you not knowing that. It is the single most common reason pedestrians settle for a fraction of what a claim is worth.
If a police report named you at fault that is not the end either. A report is an officer's opinion, and opinions get obliterated by facts - like traffic camera footage.
That evidence disappears fast. Security cameras, traffic signal video, a dashcam in a car that happened to be passing - most of it gets overwritten within days. Timing is critical. Finding it can make or break a case.
Here's the honest part: not every pedestrian accident is a case. If you were barely touched and walked away, that's a conversation, not a lawsuit. Brad will tell you that plainly. But if a vehicle put you down and you're hurt, the driver's insurance is already building its version of events, and you need someone building yours.
We are an El Monte pedestrian accident lawyer. Pulling the video before it's gone, challenging the blame, and making the driver's insurance pay for what they did is how Brad Hayes Law earns its fee, paid out of the settlement if we win. But we can't win if you don't call.
Now that you know more about a pedestrian accident than most,
is there anything you want to ...