A state statute is the amount of time following the date an injury occurs that you have to contact a personal injury lawyer and file your claim. Most states have a statute of around two years; however, that differs from state to state and can be waived in certain circumstances. That means if it takes you a year to be ready to speak to a personal injury lawyer, you still have time to fight for your legal rights.

Once the state statute has been reached, however, your personal injury claim is considered to be dead in the water. If you try to take it to a lawyer, even a week after the time limit has been reached, they’re probably going to tell you that you don’t have a chance. A judge is going to throw the case out of court because you waited too long, and because personal injury lawyers work on a strictly contingency basis (which means that they don’t get paid unless they’re able to negotiate a settlement) they aren’t likely to even attempt to take on a case that they don’t stand a chance of winning.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you want to wait until your time is almost up to contact an attorney and file your personal injury claim. As the victim of an accident the brunt of the responsibility for proving the guilt of the people responsible for your accident is going to fall to you. That means that you need to be able to pull out and reproduce every memory, every piece of evidence, anything that’s going to make a difference on your case and present in a way that’s going to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that they did it.
That’s a pretty tall order after two years. Memories fade. Proof “disappears”. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that the people responsible for your accident are going to walk away without so much as a scuff on their reputation.

State statutes for filing a personal injury claim make it possible for people who are severely injured to at least start on the road to recovery before they have to launch into a battle for their legal rights. If you’ve been injured and quite a bit of time has passed since the date of an injury, check out your state’s statutes for filing your claim. If you’ve been recently injured, don’t wait. Contact a personal injury lawyer today. It’s never too early to get the ball rolling to defend your legal rights, but it can definitely be too late.