Personal Injury In New Carrollton, Maryland

New Carrollton is a small city in the state of Maryland, just to the east of Washington, D.C. Because of its proximity to the nation’s capital, New Carrollton is largely a commuter town, where people who work in the District of Columbia live. The short, twelve-mile commute is made even more convenient by the fact that New Carrollton is right on the Capital Beltway as well as Route 50 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, each of which provides quick and easy access to the city.

While New Carrollton is a quiet residential neighborhood, that does not mean that accidents never happen within its town limits. Innocent people get hurt because of the conduct of others all the time, and New Carrollton is no exception to that rule. In fact, precisely because of the large amount of traffic that passes through the area, New Carrollton is likely the site of more car accidents than other, similar areas.

In these situations, having a personal injury attorney at your side can make a world of difference. By hiring the personal injury lawyers at the law office of Gilman & Bedigian, you can rest assured that everything will be done to get you the compensation that you need to make a full recovery from an accident, even if it means filing a personal injury claim in court. This is especially important whenever you were not at fault for the incident that led to your injuries because it would be unfair to expect you to pay for the costs of your own recovery in those situations.

New Carrollton

New Carrollton is a young town in the central area of Maryland, barely a dozen miles to the east of Washington, D.C. The town was founded in the 1950s after a real estate developer, Albert Turner, obtained a charter from the Maryland General Assembly to put up houses on an estate he had recently acquired. The name for New Carrollton came from Charles Carroll, a member of the Continental Congress and early advocate for the American Independence. Because two other towns in Maryland were already named Carrollton, though, a 1966 referendum approved the renaming of the city to New Carrollton.

The city is located inside the triangular wedge formed by I-495 – the Capital Beltway – on the east, Route 50 on the south, and the busy Baltimore-Washington Parkway on the north. Route 450 also runs through New Carrollton and is the site for most of the city’s commercial buildings and businesses, largely in the form of strip malls and chain stores. This area is also where a couple of apartment complexes have been built, while nearly all of the remaining area is for single-family homes and suburban residences. In all, New Carrollton was the home for 12,135 people during the 2010 census, including sizeable Hispanic and African-American communities.

Personal Injury Claims in New Carrollton

Accidents can happen everywhere and can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. This is because human beings make mistakes and act negligently all the time. When someone else is negligent, though, it can end up getting you hurt, instead of them. When this happens it would be unfair to expect you to pay for the costs of your losses out of your own pocket. Even if the other person was not acting deliberately, between you and them, you are far less responsible for your injuries.

To rectify this issue, Maryland allows accident victims to file personal injury lawsuits to get the compensation they need in order to recover after an accident. While financial recovery does not begin to make things better in some cases – especially if the injuries that were suffered were extremely debilitating – they can make a huge difference when it comes to medical bills and lost wages.

To succeed in a personal injury lawsuit, you have to show four different things were present in your case:

1. The person you are suing owed you a duty of care to keep you out of harm’s way,
2. That person breached their duty of care,
3. That breach was the cause of your injuries, and
4. You were, in fact, hurt in the accident.

Duty of Care

In Maryland, everyone has a legal duty of care to act like a reasonably prudent person whenever their own conduct raises the foreseeable probability that it will cause an injury to someone else. While this is the general rule, certain situations might fall into one of the numerous exceptions to it. To further complicate matters, what it means to “act like a reasonably prudent person” is often very fact-dependent, and relies on the circumstances surrounding your individual case.

Breaching the Duty of Care

Once it has been established what duty of care you were owed and how the other person was required to act under Maryland law, the next step is to prove that the person you are suing failed to uphold their duty of care towards you. Importantly, it does not matter whether the breach of their duty of care was done on purpose or by accident – even if it was negligent, they should still pay for the consequences of their negligent actions because it would be more unfair to expect you to pay for them when you were completely innocent.

Causation

However, just because someone else had a duty of care and then failed to uphold it, it would be unfair to expect them to compensate you if their negligence was not actually the cause of your injuries. This is why Maryland requires you to prove causation, as well. This involves two different aspects:

1. But for the other person’s breach of the duty of care, you would not have been hurt, and
2. The other person’s conduct was not so far removed from your injuries that it would be unfair for them to still be liable for them.

Damages

Because personal injury lawsuits are all about getting you the compensation you need in order to recover from an accident, showing all of the ways that you were hurt is crucial. If it was not required, there would be no way to know how much compensation you were entitled to.

In Maryland, your legal damages go far beyond just the cost of your medical bills. It also includes the medical bills that you are expected to pay in the future to cope with your injuries, as well as the wages you have lost, and are likely to lose in the future, because of the accident. Finally, you can recover financial help for non-monetary damages, too, like compensation for the pain and suffering that you and your family have gone through because of the accident.

Car and Truck Accidents in New Carrollton

In New Carrollton, car accidents are one of the most common types of personal injury cases out there. With so many cars passing through the area on a daily basis, car crashes are a daily occurrence.

Legally speaking, drivers owe each other a duty of care to drive in a reasonably safe manner. Practically speaking, though, this rarely happens. People seem to eat, drink, text, and do almost everything else behind the wheel. When this leads to a car or truck accident that ends with you getting hurt – whether physically or financially – you should be compensated accordingly.

Dog Bites

A dog bite is another common source of a personal injury claim. Dog owners are usually certain that their pet would never harm someone else, but they are not always right. Unfortunately, by the time they learn they were wrong, you or someone you love has already been severely hurt by their dog. Worse, young children are the most common victims of a dog bite, largely because they trust dogs without much reservation and do not often know how to tell whether a dog is irritated and about to lash out.

Premises Liability in New Carrollton

Whenever someone owns property or opens a business in New Carrollton, they owe their visitors a duty of care to keep their area reasonably safe. If they fail to uphold this duty of care, they can open themselves up to premises liability. This is true even if you were not given their permission to be on their property – even trespassers have legal rights that can be enforced in a personal injury lawsuit if you have been hurt.

Gilman & Bedigian: Personal Injury Attorneys in New Carrollton

Whenever someone else was the reason you got hurt, it can be frustrating because you were just minding your own business when you suffered a significant injury. It can feel unfair to have to pay out of your own pocket to recover from an accident that you could not avoid because you had no part to play in it.

That is where the personal injury attorneys at the law office of Gilman & Bedigian can help. By legally representing you both in and out of court, we can fight for your rights and interests and ensure you get the compensation you need and deserve. Contact us online or call us at (800) 529-6162.