Aurora Car Accident Trials

Following a car accident, it is inevitable that an individual will have to go to trial if they wish to pursue compensation for their injuries and/or damage to their vehicle. An attorney can be instrumental to the car accident trial process. If an individual wants to know more about Aurora car accident trials, they should consult a qualified car accident attorney that could answer their questions and help them hold the at-fault party accountable.

Trial Process

On the first day of trial, the first thing to get done is, one, the judge presents the case or calls the jury selection, which is a pretty time-consuming part of the trial. Both sides want to have the best jury for them, so a lot of time is spent trying to seat the proper jurors that each party feels will be effective for their case and remove jurors that might not have the right ideologies or beliefs to give the verdict that you are looking for in a case.

Opening Statements

After the jury has been selected, there are opening statements. The plaintiff will give their opening statement first. Defense will follow with their opening statement. In some opening statements, the plaintiff gives their case-in-chief, which requires calling first responders or a testifying person. Medical providers who are considered non-retained experts will give their treatment of the plaintiff throughout the course of their injuries then perhaps some friends and family members to establish the non-economic portion of the plaintiff’s pain and suffering, inconvenience, and impairment of their life, showing things that they could do before the collision and now they cannot do.

Expert Witnesses

If there are retained expert witnesses that can opine as to the effect of the collision on the plaintiff’s ability to earn wages in the future or any future medical considerations that they think are pertinent to the plaintiff and the costs of those medical considerations, they will speak to that, as well as if the plaintiff has sustained any type of permanent impairment.

Following that, the defendant or defendants will be able to present their case-in-chief and call any witnesses that they think are pertinent to the case as well as their retained experts. Following the defense’s case-in-chief, each party gives their closing arguments; the order is plaintiff, defendant, and then if the plaintiff has preserved rebuttal then that will go forward. Finally, the court will read the jury instructions to the jury.

During car collision trials in Aurora, each juror is given a juror notebook with the jury instructions in it as well. They are lengthy so they provide them one of each. They will go and do their deliberations trying to decide if they think the defendant is at fault and if they think that the defendant’s fault caused the plaintiff’s injuries and damages and, once they have a decision from the jury, they will come back and read the verdict.

Important Elements in a Car Accident Case

One of the most important elements of Aurora car accident trials is preserving records. Throughout the course of trial, there are some numerous evidentiary questions and admissibility decisions that a judge has to make that may or may not be what each side thinks is the right decision and so the judges do their best and they are judges because they understand the law and they are intelligent but they are human and they do not always get it right. Attorneys and car accident victims want to make sure that they preserve each opportunity to make an appeal if they think that it might be an evidentiary issue that the judge might be ruling incorrectly on.

Highlighting and Establishing Damages

One of the things an attorney could do is highlight and establishing the plaintiff’s damages, especially if it is a case where they have admitted that they are at fault. For instance, generally, a rear-end collision does not have any element of the defendant saying, that the plaintiff is at fault, so at that point, the attorney is just trying to show how has this collision affected the plaintiff numerically.

The focus there is doing as much as you can to show, one, the economic harms, which are the medical bills, the lost time from work, and maybe future wage loss if the client was a construction worker and now does not have the past functional capacity to work in construction anymore but does not have the intellectual ability to do an office job, their damages are going to be high because a whole sector of gainful employment is taken away from them.

Litigators are always focused on driving those points home to the jury and doing a good job of cross-examination of defense experts that are going to testify exclusively for defendants in a case-by-case basis and will always render the same opinion saying, the plaintiff was lying about their injuries, when the medical records and everything surrounding the case points otherwise. If an individual wants to know more about Aurora car accident trials, they should consult a knowledgeable attorney that could help.