The Best Accident and Personal Injury Lawyers in DeKalb

The Best Accident and Personal Injury Our personal injury practice has helped people in 30 of Illinois’ 102 counties to fight for their rights. While our home office is located in Rockford, Illinois we routinely are called upon to represent victims that have been injured due to the negligence of others and extend that protection to citizens in the DeKalb, Illinois metro area. With a variety of state highways and an interstate running through the county there are frequent motor vehicle collisions both in the county, and within DeKalb itself, that the services of a personal injury law firm are warranted.

If you have been injured in a car accident in DeKalb, Illinois, or in a surrounding community, there are essentially two ways to recover compensation for your injury.

The “law and order” type path, where a suit is filed and a judge or jury ultimately rules on liability and/or damages at a contested trial. You would be present, and the insurance company would provide an attorney for the other involved party to your accident. Testimony would be taken on all sides, and then a decision would be rendered on your case. Certainly, some cases must go to trial; perhaps liability is questionable as to who caused the accident. However, in some cases with severe injuries and high monetary (money) damages, some insurance companies would rather pay for a civil defense firm to litigate the case to try to avoid what’s fairly owed to the victim of their driver’s bad act.

This leads us to option two, which is litigating your claim through the Illinois Car Accident Settlement Process, which will be described further on this page.

• Section 5/11-401 of the Illinois Vehicle Code says you must report any car accident that results in injury to or death to a person. If you are injured, you must let the responding officer or police agency know about your injury. It is required by statute, and the officer on scene will be a key component in not only requesting medical assistance (e.g., an ambulance), but also in formulating a crash report on how your accident happened. Having information regarding the extent of your injuries in a police report is a good starting point when your lawyer begins to investigate your case.
• Under Illinois’ mandatory insurance law, all drivers of a motor vehicle in Illinois must be covered by the following minimum insurance requirements: i. $25,000 for an injury to or death of one person in an accident, ii. $50,000 for injury to or death of more than one person in an accident, and iii. $20,000 to cover damage to property of another person.
• It’s easy to see that because of these low minimum standards, it is a wise decision to ensure that you not only have a comprehensive insurance policy of your own to cover uninsured motorists who may collide with your vehicle, but also a policy to cover underinsured motorists who may have only a minimum policy for an injury of $25,000. In practical effect, without covering yourself with such a policy, you risk a two-fold injury to yourself or your family. Imagine you are driving through an intersection and someone with minimal insurance runs a red light and drives into your door at 45 miles per hour. Perhaps the resulting injury causes an injury such as a crushed foot or leg that will never return to normal after the accident, and you have a job that requires you to be on your feet all day, or that you have small children who you regularly engage in play with. Not only will you never be the same physically, but you’ll also never be the same mentally or emotionally; you likely will never be able to return to the same job with the same duties you had before, and you may never be able to engage with your children the same way as before either. With medical bills alone, it’s hard to imagine that an at-fault driver’s insurance coverage of $25,000 is going to cover your medical bills, let alone the pain and suffering someone would endure in the aforementioned situation.