If you have been attacked and bitten by a dog, you may be feeling angry and wondering what you can do now. You may want to file a personal injury claim. Follow these dog bite case tips and you will have better success.
Dog Bite Case Tips: First Steps
In a situation where a dog is loose and encounters a person – knocking them down, biting or otherwise causing an injury because of the attack, the first thing to do is to seek medical attention. The hospital is going to ask you at that first visit if the dog that bit you had up-to-date shots, specifically rabies and distemper. If you are injured, but can gather information at the scene, get whatever information you can about the dog and its owner. The owner of the dog can be held responsible for injuries if it can be shown that the dog had a propensity for certain behaviors, and that propensity can be demonstrated in a variety of different ways.
Dog Bite Case Tips: Mistakes to Avoid
The most common mistakes we see with dog bite cases are the failure to collect any witness information at the scene, and also not noting specifically the address where it happened, for example. If you’re just walking through the neighborhood and something like this happens to you, you don’t first think about trying to nail down where the attack came from or how it happened.
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The other issue, of course, is trying to lock down information regarding any prior bites or prior vicious propensities. Neighbors are often the best resource for that because they’ve seen the dog over the years, often times lunging at the mailman, for example. If you can knock on a door, show the neighbor what happened, the neighbors become much more helpful because they don’t want their children attacked or they don’t want to be attacked themselves. When you see the damage that this dog has done, they tend to be much more cooperative, and then we have information that we can use with the insurance company to let them know that this was not some freak occurrence, but that this dog did, in fact, have problems beforehand.
These dog bite case tips were brought to you from the personal injury attorneys Andrews, Bernstein & Maranto, PLLC.