How wearing safety gears in a course of motor accident affect your claim

How wearing safety gears in a course of motor accident affect your claim

In any road traveling, government, families, and communiyt advice and encourage everyone to wear appropriate and high quality protective gear when driving motorcycle or wear a restrain and proper clothes when driving a car as threat of road accidents recently is on high given that sprouting risks of crashes and other accidents are a lot since number of road users is drastically increasing overtime. Venting a quarter of your money in some protective equipment is worthy as it would run for more than 10 years of your safety rather than none that could cost you medical bills or your life itself at any moment. 

For example, helmets are essential and is a government-issued requirement when owning a motorcycle as main means of transportation. In retrospec, helmets have helped protect riders and its passengers from sustaining an injury in an accident such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), spinal cord injuries (SCI), and fatal facial road rashes. Though, helmets solely protect head injuries but leaving the body exposed to risks but it can be covered with safety gears such as plastics pads, boots, denim or leather jacket. 

Helmet Safety Statistics
Here are the recorded history of helmets benefits from previous years according to Insurance Information Institute (III):

• Helmets are found to reduce almost 70% of risk of fatal and serious head injuries.

   

• Usage of helmet reduces risks by percentage as follows: 51% for head injury, 69% for serious head injury, 33% for face injury, and 65% for fatal head injury.

   

• Helmets are proven effective to reduce 37% of riders from sustaining fatalities due to injuries and 41% for motorcycle passengers. 

   

• In an estimation, there should be 37 of those riders out of 100 riders involved in a motorcycle accident that died that can be saved. But if 100 of those drivers were wearing helmet, 100 of them could be alive. 
  

How wearing helmet and other safety gears can affect your filed claim?

The matter of using a helmet or not in an accident could affect your claim, setting aside the physical, mental and property damages that you have sustained, it could scale to positively or negatively affect your claim. From previous blogs, we have talked about how insurance companies low ball or try to make the compensation pay or settlement pay as little as possible by making legal yet tricky moves to the person who have filed a claim against them. They will interestingly investigate to the scene and look for a hole in your situation to convert it to their strength such as not wearing helmet and put it as victim's negligence or not adhering to law and regulations and reduce it as low as possible or a potential counterfiling a claim against you as you were injured by your own negligence, they say. 

Here are some negative impacts of not wearing safety gears when involved in an accident:

• If you have sustained head and neck injuries without helmet then; insurers of the at-fault driver will likely rebut with how would things went if you wore a helmet and wouldn't have sustained injuries in the first place. They will likely add that you go against the law of safety driving and it has contributed to the injuries you have sustained and most likely that they would reduce the settlement amount as low as possible and even get a lawsuit. 
  
  
• If you have sustained body, limbs and back injuries without helmet then; the at-fault driver insurer would still argue, but unlike to sustaining head and neck injuries without helmet, they will still press that negligence part and breaking against law as they are convinced that you are aware that helmet is required when driving a motorcycle and still didn't wear it then the unexpected happens, the blame is on you. On occassions, the court could pass a partial blame on the victim and a lesser settlement pay which is impactful on you and your piling bills following an accident. 
• If you have abide to all safety measures such as wearing high quality and approved helmet and safety pads then; you are likely to have no problem at filing and claiming your compensation pay even at full or more than the value of your claim being filed as you took all measures and without a doubt, abide all road rules. Though, insurers would partially blame you for the occurrence of the accident but is it pretty normal for filing a claim, that's why hiring an injury lawyer is recommended after all. 

If you have been involved in a car accident recently, with all evidences and proofs gathered suggest that you are not at-fault, and with that, you have sustained significant injuries that has estimated to cost you a lot. You are not sure where to go and what to do, we recommend you to hire an injury attorney to represent your claim against at-fault driver insurers to grant you your compensation pay. Ryan LLP is an Ohio based injury attorney firm, Ohio as an at-fault state, gives us stronger and upper hand when representing victim's claims as in addition, we have 40 years of experience in the field of civil litigation of wrongful death, personal injury and medical malpractice. Call our office now for free legal consultation.