Complete guide for Eugene residents navigating car accident claims. Learn Oregon laws, compensation options, and how local traffic patterns affect your case.
Essential guide for Corvallis residents choosing the right personal injury attorney. Learn what to look for, key questions to ask, and how Oregon law affects your case.
Curious about what a car crash attorney in Eugene, OR earns? Learn about salary ranges, commissions, and what top attorneys make! People say that it is impolite to ask how much money they make. I am sure someone somewhere had a good reason to endorse and implement that rule, but personally I think it has some negative consequences that should be considered. Sometimes I think an over-emphasis on not discussing pay in a work environment can lead to gross inequalities in pay. Whereas if we were able to talk about pay, people would have the knowledge to know what other options are available to them. With that in mind there are a couple ways to answer this question: (1) Salary-Based Compensation It is possible that the car crash attorney works on a salary. In that case they likely make between $45,000 a year and $120,000 a year, not including benefits (I use those numbers because they are the lowest salary, I am aware of and the highest salary I am aware of for car crash attorneys in the Eugene, Oregon area. It could very well be that my range is way off). The benefit to the attorney of this system is that they know how much they make and how to budget based on their expected pay. The downside is that it is a fixed number and not necessarily in the person’s financial interests to do this. Personally, I would only recommend this for someone in the first year or two of practice who is still learning the ropes and has not yet built a caseload. (2) Salary Plus Commission It is possible that the car crash attorney works on a salary plus commission. In this system the salary is a floor so the attorney can pay their bills and not be worried about not being able to pay rent if they don’t generate any money, but (at least in my office) because of the floor the commission rate is lower than it would be if the person only worked on a commission. There is some alignment in this system between the attorney and the organization (because the organization needs them to generate dollars sufficient to cover their salary and benefits), and there is a backstop to ensure that the person doesn’t feel pressure to settle a case for lower than what is in the clients best interests because they always have enough salary to pay their bills, even in a down month. I personally would recommend this for someone who is in year 3-5 of practice, has built their caseload, but still isn’t confident and consistent enough to be sure they will make it on a commission only. While this will always be dependent on how much money the person brings in (which is effected by how much they want to work, and how efficient they are with their work), as a range, car accident attorneys that have worked for me in the Eugene area have made between $120,000 and $175,000 a year. (3) Commission-Only Pay It is possible that the car crash attorney works on commission only. Here, the attorney takes home money only when they generate dollars (by getting verdicts or settlements in the bank for car collision cases). Because there is no risk to the organization needing to pay dollars it does not have, and because it aligns the financial interests of the attorney with the organization and the client, I like this system a lot. The caveat with this is that the attorney should be very experienced, with a full and built caseload and confidence that they will be able to make a paycheck. In my office the attorneys that work on commission only have historically taken home the most money (by a lot) and to put it in terms of dollars the range is $400,000 to $600,000 in a year. Conclusion: Is It Worth It? I hope that sheds some light on the pay of Eugene car accident attorneys and helps whoever might be reading this gain some knowledge that they find useful. The high number that car crash attorneys can make on commission is just a percentage of the amount that they are giving back to their clients in the form of paid medical bills, property damage repair bills, and in many cases, a check directly into their bank accounts. Contact a Eugene Car Crash Attorney Call 541-HUNKING (that’s 541-486-5464) today if you were injured in a car accident in Oregon and let us help you maximize your settlement.
I asked a 19 year old relative recently what they would do if they were in a car accident. It is no surprise but the answer was “Call my mom”. I asked the question to try and better understand how to reach younger people who have been in car accidents and can use my help, but the answer I got triggered an interesting thought: what would a car accident lawyer tell a parent to tell their child who just got in a car accident? This Blog is an attempt to answer the question: “What do I tell my adult child who just got in a car accident?” Step 1: Get the Facts I would begin by asking questions to make sure you know what is going on; and they would be some mix of: Are you ok? Is everyone else ok? Are you in a safe place? What happened? These questions help you quickly assess their safety and the situation at hand. Step 2: Reassure Them and Focus on Safety Then I would go with some general advice: Get to a safe place if you aren’t already. Don’t panic; just breathe, we will get through this. Helping them stay calm is one of the most important things you can do in the moment. Step 3: Immediate Actions to Take at the Scene Depending on the severity of the incident I would then give the following advice: Call 911 (Both police or for ambulance or fire support). Call your insurance company. Take pictures of the cars, the accident scene, and any damage or injuries. Gather contact information and insurance details from all other drivers and any witnesses. If you can drive the car home safely then great; otherwise call a tow truck (or have your insurance or the police call a tow truck). Either get a ride to the hospital or home or have someone pick you up. These steps will help protect your child both physically and legally. Step 4: Regroup and Next Steps After the dust settles: Talk to your child about what happened. Decide together what to do next. Determine if your child needs a lawyer. If you’re not sure, review our blog “ When/Why Should You Hire An Attorney After A Car Accident .” If needed, call a lawyer and schedule a free consultation. There is no downside to calling a lawyer after a car collision. They will be able to quickly determine if they can help you or not, and at least at Hunking Law, consultations are free. A good lawyer can guide you through the process and will ensure that your child’s rights are protected. Conclusion I have no idea if this blog will be helpful, but I am hopeful that someone somewhere reads it and they are a little more prepared for this situation than they otherwise would have been. If your child has been in a car crash in Oregon and you’re not sure what to do next, don’t hesitate to reach out – we’re here to help. Call us today at 541-HUNKING, 541-486-5464.
The when is easy: as soon as possible. There really is not a downside that I am aware of in consulting an attorney quickly and having them on your side from the beginning of the process. If nothing else, it provides you with some inside knowledge to how the process works and what to expect.
After a car crash, you might expect your car insurance company to have your back. Isn’t that what you pay them for? Now is the time for them to step up and make sure that you are compensated for your injuries. But can you really trust them to keep your best interests at heart? How do you know if their offer is fair? Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for insurance companies to offer less than what your claim is really worth. If you’re unsure about the number they give you, trust your instincts. Here are four signs your insurance company is low-balling you after a car collision.
We at Hunking Law put dozens of man-hours collaboratively into generating this infographic because we thought it would be helpful to clients. The goal is to take the collective knowledge of the people who work here, gained step by step over years of education and practice, and make it digestible to a potential client. The information is organized into a flow which is a pretty good way to understand how these car crash cases work and what to expect next. The information itself is layered and while each section has a summary the depth of each summary is vast. The scope of knowledge needed to understand a complaint is really broad and not really something that can be understood fully within an infographic, but understanding the steps and the process we hope will put you a little more at ease when you are faced with being injured in an auto collision. As you read each section and understand it as sort of the next step on the journey feel free to think about why each step is the way it is and by what process are we really reaching a resolution to these conflicts such that you frame the information usefully in your head. At any point, if you think you need more clarification don’t worry, just give us a call and a member of our experienced team will be happy to provide you any clarification you need on any of the points. We are here to help with car collision cases and we hope this infographic is a useful way to help make your life better.
What is a catastrophic injury?
Anecdotally, in recent years more and more people use the internet to find the goods and services they need. As Oregon attorneys we have tried to adapt as best we can to meet our potential clients where they are: on the internet. In the past few years there has been a growing group of attorneys who are exceptional at leveraging internet advertising to become “Oregon attorneys”. In general terms I don’t really view this as a bad thing because so long as attorneys do good work to help Oregonians with their legal issues, I think there is a net positive for my community simply because the work is getting done. The troubling aspects occur when I see terrible legal work being done by a lawyer who advertises as an Oregon lawyer but really is a Utah lawyer. In my estimation, this does damage to my community by giving lawyers a bad reputation, failing to provide fair compensation to Oregonians and taking work that would have been done competently by an Oregon attorney away from that local business. In a technical sense, it is difficult to define whether a person is an Oregon attorney. The Oregon State Bar licenses attorneys to practice law within the state and frankly some attorneys who work primarily out of state are in fact licensed Oregon attorneys. Personally, I think the State Bar can do more to protect the public from attorneys who are lacking in competence because they are practicing law in multiple states. It is not easy to learn how to practice law, frankly it takes a lot of time to even read and understand the law in Oregon and even more time to be able to see and know that information in context such that it can be used for the benefit of a client. But, from my vantage point, when you know what right looks like it is pretty easy to see when an attorney is just wrong in their strategic choices. I, Joshua Hunking, am not a mechanically inclined person and when I go see an auto mechanic for some issue with my car it is not hard for me to see that. I don’t have the knowledge and experience that my mechanic has, so, they are much better equipped to fix my car; they can spot issues with the sound of the engine that I simply would not notice let alone be able to use as a diagnostic tool to fix the vehicle. So, the question remains, how do I determine whether my Oregon car crash attorney is actually an Oregon attorney? As of today, the best answer I can give you is that we at Hunking Law are Oregon attorneys, while a couple of us are licensed in other states as well (Washington) we know enough to know not to gamble with someone’s future unless we know what we are talking about. Our Eugene and Corvallis offices are staffed 9-5 Monday through Friday so I guess I could suggest stopping by the office during business hours. But really, any relationship with a lawyer relies on trust, so hopefully you can just ask your lawyer at the intake whether they are in Oregon or not. As I write this I am sitting in Eugene Oregon. I woke up at my house near Brownsville Oregon and took I5 to get here. The other attorneys and paralegals at this firm also live in Oregon, we know these areas, we know these roads, we pay our taxes in Oregon and most of all we care about you because we, like you, are members of this Willamette Valley community and when you get fair compensation our community gets just a little bit better.
We are often asked how long it takes to be compensated for your injuries. We addressed this in FAQs but wanted to provide more detail here. Q: How Long will it take for me to get compensated for my injuries? A: Bottom Line Up Front: As little as 14 days all the way up to 3 years or more. The Long Answer: Each case varies, and it depends on some factors that are within your control and some that are not within your control. I find it is best to describe the situation as I conceptualize it, which is in a few different ways: (1) The football analogy, (2) Linked to specific triggering events, (3) comprehensively including the desires of varying people: The football analogy: I find this explanation to be useful in that it frames the timeline as a ball being passed back and forth, which is a major component of the timeline of any given case. Because attorneys provide value to our society in our ability to resolve conflict, framing the case as a competitive event like football can be helpful to people. The first thing that happens is the collision occurs, whether it is a car v. car, truck v. car, car v. motorcycle, truck v. bicycle, car v. pedestrian or an unlimited number of different variations of that circumstance; the key is that there is some sort of damage caused by the bad act of another person and a potential payer to cover the damages. The ball starts there with the injured person. If the injured person does nothing for long enough then the situation is over and there is no conflict among humans, the football game just sort of ends. If the injured person decides to try and get compensation for their injuries, then they move the ball by asserting that fact (i.e. making a claim for recovery). Once that happens the ball goes to what the law calls the tortfeasor who is typically the at fault party. If the at fault party agrees that they are responsible for the damage and agrees with the amount claimed they have a couple of choices: (1) pay the claim in full, (2) try to pay less than what they agree they owe. If the at fault party either chooses to try and pay less (which is typical, especially when dealing with insurance companies and non-economic damages or pain and suffering) or they disagree that they are responsible or think there is some split responsibility or some other type of legal defense then you end up with a conflict. Either the claimant can yield, or the at fault party can yield, or they can come to an agreed compromise or as a backstop to resolve this conflict the claimant can take the case to court and use the power of the government to force the at fault party to pay the claim in full if the claimant proves to the court and/or jury that they are entitled to what they are claiming. So in essence the football moves back and forth between the sides during the conflict resolution process and when the ball is in your court if you move quickly you can speed up the process, but you can’t do a lot if the other side is choosing to try and run down the clock (i.e. waiting 30 days before responding to a claim so that they can conduct an investigation). Linked to specific triggering events: another way to understand how long a case will take is in average ranges after specific triggering events. Typically, you can’t resolve a claim until you know your damages and because damages are trying to measure the difference between what your life is like now versus what your life would have been like if you had never had the collision and because no one knows the future, you generally can’t even know your damages until you are either healed from the crash, or have reached maximum medical improvement (usually determined by a medical professional). Depending on your injuries, no one really knows how long that will take. Sometimes people heal quickly, sometimes it is very slow. Once the triggering event occurs, in my office, we request medical records, and we assume about 30 days from the request that we will have received those records. From there, if the records are small and easily managed it can be 48 hours before we have a synthesis done, or if there are a lot of records it can be 30 days before we have a synthesis complete. Once the synthesis is complete, we have several data points for your damages which are diagnostic codes, cost of treatment, length of treatment, etc. We then can draft a demand which will typically take a few hours, up to about a week. Once drafted we send that to the client for approval which gets approved or modified depending on how quickly the client approves or requests modification for the demand. After it is reviewed and approved, and the person has spoken with their attorney about what it means to send a demand we send out the demand. Typically, it will take about 30 days for the at fault party (usually through their insurance company) to review the demand and make an offer for resolution. If the offer is acceptable then we just need to accept, get a check, sign release documents (promising not to sue after you receive the money) complete a distribution (a document showing where the money is going to ensure there are no outstanding medical bills we aren’t tracking) and once that is signed we issue a check and the money should be in your bank account as soon as you deposit the check. That process can take up to 30 days, but usually not faster than a week. If in the alternative, the offer for resolution is not acceptable then we need to begin the negotiation process or decide to sue. That process continues until either the offer is acceptable, or, in the alternative, we proceed through a jury trial. Each triggering event causes the next process to initiate which is somewhat predictable within ranges. Comprehensively, including the desires of various people: This explanation really requires an attorney to talk with a person and truly try to understand what the person wants, lay out a plan for how to achieve it, and then execute that plan. Along the way things will go faster or slower to the degree that the desires of the other side of the conflict (insurance companies and at fault parties) are in line with the desires of the claimant. If both sides are reasonable and diligent that can be near instantaneous, if both sides have very different views about what the outcome should be then it can be dragged for years. I know this long answer is a very long answer, if you have more questions feel free to give us a call and I will try to help.