CTA Injury Lawyer In Chicago Tells You Straight: How Do These Cases Work And How Can You Win Your CTA Injury Case?
Every day, millions of Americans use “common carriers” as their method of transportation. Any CTA Personal Injury lawyer in Chicago is very familiar with the term “common carrier”. Common carriers are defined as modes of transportation that carry passengers and goods in exchange for money.
In other words, you pay and you ride. However, sometimes the ride doesn’t go as expected and there is a crash. This is when you need help from CTA bus accident attorneys in Chicago.
With its thousands of buses and trains, the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) fits the definition of a common carrier, and each day millions of Chicago residents depend on it as their main mode of transportation.
Common carriers are held to rigid standards of safety by both federal and local regulations, but inevitably, accidents and injuries occur.
The most common causes of CTA accidents are:
- Collisions with other vehicles or solid objects, like guard rails or bridge abutments, often due to driver negligence.
- Criminal action. It’s impossible for common carriers to provide 100 percent protection, but they must make every reasonable attempt to prevent criminal actions.
- Slipping and falling. Carriers cannot control the weather or prevent passengers from spilling drinks, but they can take steps to minimize the effects of these things.
Here are some essentials for you to know and do if you’ve suffered an injury on the CTA.
- First and foremost, remember you only have one year to file your claim for damages, not two years.
- Collect as much evidence as possible, including cell phone photos, witness accounts, police reports and your own notes of the incident.
- Get the names and numbers of other people on the bus who can corroborate what you say happened.
- Get immediate medical treatment for any injuries suffered.
- Do nothing to aggravate your medical condition, and if you have a pre-existing injury or old problem medically, do not hide it.
- If you do, or fail to seek medical treatment, either of these could reduce your chances of collecting damages for your injury.
- If contacted by the CTA, don’t give them a recorded account of the incident. In our opinion, they’re not trying to help you. They’re trying to collect information to build their defense against your claim.
Frankly, it’s not easy to collect damages from the CTA, partly because they rarely settle injury claims out of court, even when they should. Consequently, many personal injury lawyers won’t take these cases.
Years ago, the CTA would give you a fair shake and they were not obstructive. But now, they do everything in their power to deny cases and claims. They make getting the evidence we need to win these case pretty tough. It is always a fight in a CTA injury claim these days.
So what are the most common kinds of CTA personal injury lawyers in Chicago get?
- The bus driver pulls away from the curb quickly or stops suddenly, and causes the passenger to fall.
- The bus crashes into another car or truck.
- The bus driver closes the “power” bus doors on to a passenger.
- A CTA bus driver hits a pedestrian or bicyclist.
- Dripping water inside a CTA train station causes some to slip and fall.
- Someone is attacked on the CTA.
Because we know that in cases of this kind, we are in for a fight, a good lawyer is going to do a thorough interview of you to find out exactly what happened. You cannot just treat a CTA crash or injury case like a small fender bender car crash case.
Because CTA fights the cases, we have to be loaded for bear and have all of our ducks in a row from Day One. That means a thorough investigation.
It is sometimes hard to provde the CTA was negligent for suddenly stopping or pulling away very quickly causing passengers to fall. These usually happen when it was raining and the bus floors are wet. The CTA drivers can really drive like jerks sometimes.
But CTA defends these cases by pointing out that everyone who rides the buses knows that the rides are jerky and you’d better hold on. Shockingly, this ridiculous defense actually works, so it is hard for a CTA injury lawyer to take these kinds of cases unless the evidence is favorable and the injury is pretty big.
All of the other kinds of cases against the CTA have to be considered pretty carefully too. If an injury lawyer takes a bad case and gets your hopes up and then is not able to get you a fair outcome on the case, he has really done nothing, and worse, has disappointed you, despite perhaps spending a lot of time and money on the case for you.
But you do not hire a lawyer to try hard — you a hire a lawyer to win. So if the lawyer doesn’t take the case, he is actually doing you a favor.
The CTA buses and trains are all equipped with cameras these days. The cameras often capture the action, though the CTA claims malfunction and claims that the video isn’t available quite often. This makes me very suspicious.
Even when they do produce the video of the incident, the video can be from a strange angle or it can be misleading about what actually happened or how the bus actually moved to cause the fall. That’s why I tell folks that if you have witnesses, that helps a lot.
You do not want to work with a CTA injury lawyer in Chicago who is going to give up on your case without a full investigation, and you want one who will go ‘all the way’ if that’s what it takes.
As CTA bus accident attorneys in Chicago, at the Law Office of Scott D. DeSalvo LLC, we’re not afraid to take your case to court, and, honestly, we wish more of our fellow lawyers would do the same. 312-500-4500.
