Personal Injury Attorneys for Ride Share Accidents
If you find yourself in a situation where you have been in a collision with a ride share such as Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats – you have found yourself in a more complicated situation than a typical auto accident. There are more layers of insurance to pierce and to decide if they even apply to your situation.
We want to break this down by what role you are playing in this accident – are you a passenger in a ride share or were you driving your own vehicle or were you even a pedestrian and you were hit by a ride share driver. Your role in the accident has implications for what the team at Willis, Willis & Rizzi can do for you, but also we need to determine what the ride share driver was doing. Are they actually driving for a ride share company at the moment when they hit you or are they on their personal business?
Let’s pause for a moment and go back to the “before times” – before there were ride share businesses like Uber and Lyft. You had people on their personal auto policies driving for personal reasons and then you had commercial drivers such as truck drivers and taxi drivers. That was the split – was it a personal or commercial situation. Now, the ride share companies have muddied those waters. It’s actually quite fascinating. We enjoy these types of cases as there are many opportunities to get you a full recovery however there is a lot of untangling to do.
For example, if you are a passenger in the ride share we know immediately that the driver is on the ride share app because they are transporting you. And if they are on the ride share app they have higher levels of liability insurance coverage. We know this because if the driver is on the ride share app there will be corresponding data that they accepted a fare and were actively transporting the passenger or were on their way to pick the person up. In this case those higher levels of liability coverage will apply. Typically, those higher levels of liability coverage are $1,000,000 although they can be other amounts. However, if the ride share driver is not on the app the liability insurance limits are not nearly that high and can be as low as $25,000 or $50,000.
Why Choose Willis, Willis & Rizzi?
Another fascinating aspect of these cases is if the ride share driver appears to be at fault, being able to dig in and prove what they were doing, were they distracted doing something else on their phone such as trying to grab their next fare or jumping onto a competing app. These drivers tend to drive for all the ride share companies. Proving driver distraction and driver negligence can get involved, that’s why you need an experienced law firm like Willis, Willis & Rizzi to dig in and make sure those bases are being covered.
Understand that if you are in a situation where you have a claim against a ride share company or a delivery company like GrubHub and you have substantial injuries (and this is true in all personal injury cases) the bigger the claim, the harder the insurance companies will fight. If you are in a situation where that $1,000,000 liability coverage is in play and you, or your loved one has substantial injuries, and you are facing a long road of recovery ahead – you need experienced lawyers on your side because it can get brutal.
You also want to get a law firm quickly, because this evidence can disappear. Unfortunately, these types of cases are such that you have a lot of technical data that needs to be preserved if there is going to be a fight. If you don’t have an experienced law firm like Willis, Willis & Rizzi to help you cover all the bases and to preserve all of this evidence, your case is losing value and becoming more and more compromised with each passing day.
Contact Willis, Willis & Rizzi today at 330-535-2000 or fill out the inquiry form and speak to a personal injury attorney today.
