Orange County Sideswipe Accident Lawyers

Because liability in sideswipe accidents is not always clear-cut, it’s especially important to have an experienced lawyer on your side who can help prove your case. For example, sometimes it’s necessary to engage the services of an accident reconstruction expert who can use point of impact and other technical information to convince the insurance company who is at fault.

What Are Common Causes Of Sideswipe Accidents?

Generally speaking, sideswipe accidents occur because of poor judgment that causes a driver to lose control of his vehicle and strike a car in the adjacent lane. More specifically though, these are the most common causes of sideswipe accidents we see:

• Distracted driving: texting, talking on a cellphone, applying makeup, or using a navigation system for example.
• Inattentive driving: simply not paying attention, ‘zoning out’, or failing to check their blind spot.
• A driver trying to change lanes might not see the driver coming up beside them.
• A driver trying to make a turn might turn too wide or cut their turn too close.
• Drunk driving: drivers who are under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs are known to swerve and straddle lanes.
• An object in the road: a driver who is trying to avoid an object in the road might swerve into someone else’s lane and collide by accident.
• Aggressive Driving: Drivers that weave in and out of traffic at a high rate of speed can easily sideswipe a car by misjudging a lane change losing control of their car.

Can A Sideswipe Accident Cause Injuries?

A sideswipe accident is often seen by the insurance company as a minor type of accident when compared with other kinds of traffic collisions, like head-on collisions. But make no mistake about it, sideswipe accidents can cause significant injuries to the vehicle’s occupants.

These are some of the injuries we commonly see in sideswipe accidents in Orange County, CA:

• Brain injuries from striking your head against a door or window.
• Shoulder injuries, like a torn rotator cuff from striking it against the door.
• Knee injuries, like a torn meniscus from striking it against the door, dash, or steering column.
• Wrist injuries from gripping the steering wheel tightly to regain control.
• Neck injuries as a result of your head being tossed from side-to-side.
• Burn injuries as a result of the side airbag deploying upon impact.

How Can A Lawyer Help With Insurance Companies After A Sideswipe Accident?

The other driver’s insurance company will probably argue there isn’t any “mechanism for injury” in a sideswipe accident. What they mean by that is that the property damage was too minimal to have caused injury to the occupants. If an insurance adjuster says that to you, they’re lying. Injury causation in sideswipe accidents is more nuanced than that.

Insurance adjusters make this argument because in sideswipe accidents there usually isn’t any frame damage to the vehicle. They’ve been trained to equate or conflate, frame damage with a mechanism for injury. In other words, if there is frame damage to a vehicle, the insurance adjuster knows they can’t possibly argue the accident was too minor to cause injury.

If the impact was hard enough to bend the frame of a car, of course, it was hard enough to injure the people sitting inside of it. The problem is that insurance adjusters think the inverse is true (and it’s not): if the impact wasn’t hard enough to bend the frame of the car, then it wasn’t hard enough to injure the people sitting inside of it.

The truth is that mechanism for injury in sideswipe accidents depends on a lot of different factors that have nothing to do with whether there was frame damage to the car. According to a study by Columbia University, occupant injury in sideswipe accidents depends on the following factors:

Crash Type

Whether it was an angle crash, sideswipe in the opposition direction, or sideswipe in the same direction. Angle crashes and sideswipes in the opposite direction are associated with higher injury rates than sideswipes in the same direction.

Side of the Vehicle the Accident Occurred

Whether you were seated on the same side as the crash or the opposite side as the crash. Occupants seated on the same side as the crash are more likely to have severe/fatal injury compared to occupants seated on the opposite side or in the middle seat.

Size Difference in Vehicles

Occupants of larger vehicles are less likely to be injured in a side-crash.