When two cars driving toward one another collide, it’s typically called a head-on collision. Head-on collisions may be rare, but they do happen, and when they happen, they often cause devastating injury and loss.
Head-on collisions occur often when a driver drives on the wrong side of the road or freeway. Wrong-way drivers have proven to be particularly dangerous on the Chicago roadways in recent years. They may also happen when a vehicle’s breaks fail. (Learn more about when car defects lead to personal injury claims.)
Often times, drunk or distracted driving is a cause of head-on collisions when they happen.
Seeking Personal Injury Damages as Result of a Head-On Collision
If you’re ever injured as a result of a head-on collision and seek personal injury damages as a result, you’ll need to demonstrate negligence, or perhaps even recklessness, on the part of the at-fault driver. To do so, you’ll need to show that that driver had a duty of care to you at the time of the accident. Drivers have a duty of care to those on the roads to ensure that they avoid foreseeable risks of accidents and injury in as much as it is possible. Ignoring the risks on the road can often constitute a breach of that duty to others you may encounter.
Say, for instance, you decide to go out drinking with friends and over-do it a bit, ending up intoxicated and unable to drive. If you ignore the inherent heightened risks associated with impaired driving and get behind the wheel, you breach your duty of care to others on the roads. If you cause an accident as a result and someone is severely injured, aside from the criminal risks and implications, you could be held responsible for the financial damages that result.
Proving a breach of a driver’s duty of care in a head-on collision can be quite difficult if the cause is not drunk driving. When distracted driving is the cause of the accident, the driver is often distracted only for a moment. Having a witness or two to corroborate the driver’s actions before the collision is a great way of showing neglect. However, if there are no witnesses, it’s often your word against theirs.
Reconstructing the accident could then become an important part of proving your claim, if that’s the case. There are accident reconstruction experts who can do the job and help show the traffic conditions at the time of the accident and possibly who had right-of-way. If they can demonstrate the other driver was on the wrong side of the road or that they failed to yield when they should have, according to the rules of the road, it can go a long way toward proving fault. The difficulty is in head-on collisions, the impact can often throw both cars in wildly disparate directions, hiding the original positions of both cars. So an expert accident reconstruction team is often vital in showing a court what actually happened and who was at fault.
Once you’ve demonstrated a breach of the duty of care the at-fault driver owes you, you need to show that that breach caused the accident and that you sustained injuries and losses as a result. Managing these elements of your claim can become a complex battle given the fact that the opposing attorney and/or insurer will fight tooth and nail to prove that the other driver either was not at fault at all, that you bore at least partial responsibility for the accident, or worse, that you were fully responsible. It takes experience and knowledge of personal injury law to win against these odds. That’s why it’s important to seek the representation of an injury attorney with experience in motor vehicle accident claims.
If you’re looking for an experienced Chicago personal injury lawyer to help navigate your personal injury claim, we will fight assiduously for your right to the compensation you deserve. Call Bizzieri Law Offices at 773.881.9000. The case evaluation is free, and we never charge a fee unless we recover damages for you.