Idaho Law Blog

The most important thing is, go see a doctor and get better.　 There is time later to worry about the legal issues surrounding your accident. Also, getting to the doctor quickly may help your case.

It is common for certain kinds of injuries in relatively minor accidents to go unnoticed at the time. Just as sometimes your muscles don’t hurt until the day after a workout, sometimes the symptoms of a soft-tissue injury, a whiplash, or a brain injury don’t appear until the next day, or even longer. This is a well-established fact, and it should not hurt your case at all if you said at the time you were not injured.

That is, so long as your doctor is able to relate your injury to the accident. In an Idaho personal injury case, your lawyer must be able to prove that your injuries were caused by the accident. This requires that a doctor testify that the accident caused the injury.

Husband and wife were driving/riding on a motorcycle and were involved in a collision with a car; wife sustained fatal injuries.　 Through a series of additional very unfortunate events, not all of wife’s medical bills were timely billed to her insurance company for payment.　 The at-fault driver of the car only had $50,000.00 in insurance to cover wife’s damages.　 Wife’s unpaid medical bills were approximately $90,000.00 and the insurance company that paid the bills that were timely submitted had a subrogated interest of approximately $50,000.00.　 Any recovery for wife’s estate seemed dim.　 I was able to get the entire $90,000.00 written off and the $50,000.00 was compromised to $10,000.00.　 The wife’s survivors were tearfully grateful for the recovery and compromises obtained.　 This result will forever be with me as a case where I made a big difference for my client.　 Stephen Muhonen

You took a car trip over the holidays, and got in a wreck. Now you are recovering from personal injuries caused by someone who lives in another state. It looks like you will have to sue to get compensation. What do you do?

You will probably have to sue in some other state. In all likelihood, the courts in your home state lack “jurisdiction” over the responsible driver. The U.S. Constitution and state laws make it difficult to drag someone into court in a distant state with which she has few connections.

If you must sue, you will have to find a court that has jurisdiction over the responsible person. Under the laws in almost every state, that means the state in which the responsible person resides, or the state where the accident occurred. Every state has a law which allows its courts to exercise jurisdiction over persons who come into the state and cause an injury there.

Clients should look for and retain an attorney who they feel they can freely and openly communicate with on all aspects of their case.　 The case should be viewed and handled as a team; the process requires teamwork and candid communication, with all involved working together towards an understood and concerted goal.　 Stephen Muhonen

Ever heard of the quip, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”　 In many respects this rings true in the law as well.　 Because I have been a Pocatello Police Officer and an Idaho State Police Trooper, I have developed relationships within the field of law enforcement that have been extremely helpful to many of my personal injury cases.　 A lot of officers are wary of attorneys and are reluctant to speak freely to them.　 However, because of the relationships I have with these officers, many of them are willing to speak to me freely about their thoughts and insights of their cases or even cases they weren’t involved in but may have expertise in.　 Knowing the people involved in the investigation of collisions has been extremely important to the success of many cases.　 Stephen Muhonen