If you are a passenger in a car accident, what are your rights to compensation? Attorney Gregory Spektor discusses the different types of damages that may be available to passengers in a car accident, and how to go about seeking compensation.

SPEAKERS

Gregory Spektor, Michael Levitis

Michael Levitis 09:11
Welcome back, everybody. This is Michael Levitis from JurisQ.com, where we bring you different attorneys from different practice areas to answer your FAQs, frequently asked questions on law. And today we welcome back Gregory Spektor. Welcome back. Gregory.

Gregory Spektor 09:28
How are you Michael, thank you for having me.

Michael Levitis 09:29
The reason why we have you is because you are a renowned authority on personal injury. You have handled so many cases recovered millions of dollars for your clients, you and your firm. It’s always such a pleasure to talk to you because to pick your brain at different situations which need clarifications. We talked on our previous session what happens if you are a driver in the car there’s a car accident. What happens if you’re at fault, partially at fault, or the other drivers completely at fault? What are the different avenues of compensation? Today, I want to talk about a situation where you are a passenger in the car. And by the way, this could be a very sensitive topic because you could be a passenger in the car driven by your husband, your wife, your friend, your relative, right? You get, unfortunately injured in the car accident. Who do you sue? For what, what happens if the other driver is at fault? Not your driver? What could be done? Can you please explain to us?

Gregory Spektor 10:39
Well, first of all, in most of the cases, when you are a passenger, you are free from what’s called comparative fault. There are exceptions, of course, if you decided to distract the driver, when he or she is going 60-70 miles an hour on the highway. But I’m assuming we’re not going into the exceptions, but rather staying within the rule. When you’re a passenger, you are pretty much always fault- free. What that means is that you can sue both: driver of the host vehicle and the other driver, and to you it really doesn’t matter who has a bigger policy, I’ll tell you why. I mean it matters to a degree. But let’s say and we’ve had cases like that, let’s say one vehicle has a $25 million policy, and the other vehicle has a $25,000 policy. Now, for you to be able to go after both of those insurances, you need at least 1% from any of those policies.

Michael Levitis 11:59
What does that mean? Math wise.

Gregory Spektor 12:00
That means that let’s assume this case goes to trial. I’ll give you a perfect example of a case where that happened. Our client was a passenger in a vehicle that belonged to a company that services JetBlue. It happened on the ground, so JFK Airport, and that vehicle according to the driver, and the host driver was stopped at the stop sign, exiting a parking lot, where another vehicle hit it on the door of the passenger door exactly where our client was sitting pretty bad. In fact, they actually had to extract that door before the client could come out. Now that car had 25,000 dolars policy, however, the driver of that car said that the host vehicle came right in front of him. So now you have the story. And I’ll be honest with you, with the points of impact, and so

on and so forth. This story of the host vehicle was more believable. However, the police officers that arrived at the scene of the accident he cited both drivers for failing, failing to yield the right away. So we process the claim, we prepare for trial takes a few years of force, it’s very heavily litigated case, we get expert witnesses deposed. Both drivers will depose the police officer that responds to the scene of the accident. We get all the medical records, the person’s life is really shattered. I mean, she tried to go back to work good and go back to work. At the end of the day, listen, were in the front of the judge, and it’s a pretrial conference. The judge is saying: Look, I see that your position might be more believable, but I’ve never seen the jury deny that 1% liability when in the end they asked to split whether it’s gonna be 50/50, 60/40, 80/20, 90/10 Anyway, you slice it or dice it, you will most likely be on the hook for the whole policy. Bbefore you said joint and several liability, right? That is exactly what it is. We ended up recovering $1.85 million for that that client.

Michael Levitis 14:43
Certainly that’s very good news for the injured party. Of course it’s horrible to be in a car accident and to get injured but at least now you have the means to support yourself and take care of yourself. Definitely it alleviates the pain for you and your family.

Gregory Spektor 15:03
Of course, and you need to understand it’s not just that simple to ask jury to award this kind of numbers, we had to put a lot of work into this, we had to hire rehab doctors who are applying how much it will cost to support that person’s injuries through the life expectancy that she had.

Michael Levitis 15:31
You bring up excellent points here that I’ve seen too many attorneys, they take the case without a thought. Then just hope to settle it, get some money, and move on to the next one. With your firm you actually analyze, and you have a whole team to do it, to analyze a case to pursue all possible avenues again, money and bring in other experts for which you pay, you pay for those experts out of your own pocket to analyze how you can maximize compensation for your clients.

Gregory Spektor 16:03
Absolutely. Listen, we have 10 attorneys on staff, and when you talk about experts, of course we work with these experts, and they won’t just throw their name under the bus when they applied to something they do believe in what they’re saying and they do believe in their opinions. We have a whole network of accident reconstructionist specialists, and there is a lot of issues as to how the accident happened. We have a whole network of doctors who can apply as to how difficult it’s going to be to recover from his injuries or how much it will cost to support even the pain management for the person. It’s kind of weird to ask for future pain and suffering, because, you know, what are you asking? You’re asking to have an ATM machine where you can come up to and get a certain amount of dollars for certain things, very difficult for people to grasp that concept. When a pain management back there, we’ll put it out on the spreadsheet. Then the economist will project that through the life expectancy and counting the rate of inflation ….

Michael Levitis 17:21
Well, that’s a whole science, at some point we should do a whole little session explaining that, just that how do you calculate future pain and suffering? It’s very, very interesting and intricate, and you have to be a real authority on the matter to calculate it properly