What to do in a car accident?

What you must do if you’ve been in a car accident or crash on a road within the Australian Capital Territory.

The First Steps following a Motor Vehicle Crash in Canberra:

1. If you haven’t already, get a date with your favourite doctor:

Injuries from motor vehicle or a car accident aren’t always immediately apparent. Symptoms sometimes take a while to surface and can often stick around for a long time.

Checking in with your doctor will get that conversation rolling and help put you on the front foot with your health and your treatment. As personal injury lawyers, United Legal can’t give your health back to you, so it’s important that you and your medical team get on same page as soon as possible.

If you decide later that you want to make an insurance claim for the accident, having this early contact with the GP is helpful as well.

Motor Accident Medical Report by GP

You’ll need to get your GP to complete a Motor Accident Medical Report when you first lodge the claim. It’s very likely that their treatment file will become valuable evidence about the nature and extent of your injuries and disabilities.

Seeing your doctor early also creates what we call a contemporaneous record of your injuries and injury-related symptoms, which can be a really useful bit of evidence at the pointy end of your claim.

It’s really a win-win situation; you have nothing to lose by speaking to your doctor after a car accident!

2. Report the car accident to the Canberra police:

ACT Policing don’t always attend car crashes. If they didn’t come out to yours, don’t panic! If you haven’t already, you should report the accident to the police through this form here.

Reporting a motor vehicle accident to the police creates another one of those contemporaneous records that we talked about earlier. If you decide to make a claim, sometimes there’ll arguments about whose fault caused the accident.

The earlier you make a record of how the accident went down (by submitting the report), the more likely a court is going to accept your recollection as a ‘true and accurate reflection’ of the accident.

Evidence like this (which we call liability evidence) is a really important part of your claim. It’s important to get it right.

Most insurers require you provide AFP crash report or an AFP online submission before they’ll cover anything related to an accident.

This means without a report or a submission, you’re going to have a really hard time getting any of your medical or treatment expenses covered by the insurer.

Just as with seeing your doctor, you really have nothing to lose by reporting incidents to the police. It’s really just good practice. You never know how the information you provide might help someone.

3. Call us! Your Motor Vehicle Car Accident Lawyers in Canberra, United Legal:

Motor Vehicle Accidents make up the vast majority of our cases, and we’ve had a lot of experience with the Road Transport (Third Party Insurance) Act.

Shoot us an email at admin@unitedlegal.com.au or give us a call on 02 6295 2292 to arrange a time to speak with our lawyers about your accident.

We’ll give you a free case appraisal and walk through the whole claim process with you. If you decide to use us as your lawyers, we’ll help you with the whole process from start to finish, including:

• looking after your claim forms,
• getting all the evidence you need to run your case, and
• representing you in negotiations with the insurer or at court.

For our legal support services Contact us at (02) 6295 2283

Visit us at

54-56 Townsville St, Fyshwick ACT 2609

Author

Jayden Payne

Paralegal Canberra