Injury Claim Lawyers
It all happened in a blur. You caught a glimpse of something headed toward you, fast ? a black car, face in the window puckered in a permanent O. You braked. Too late. The impact sent your face into the airbag, your back into the side of the car, and your arm ? somewhere. You wind up dazed, in a car that needs to be cut open, and you hurt all over. Eventually you?re in the hospital in bed. The doctor congratulates you on not suffering too much injury ? a few bruises here and there, he says, a cut, perhaps some strained muscles in your back. You thank him; he discharges you the next day. But the pain doesn?t stop. It gets worse. Finally you see an orthopedic surgeon, who tells you that you have soft tissue damage and maybe a ruptured disk in your back. You will probably be in pain for the rest of your life ? and if you return to your job as a construction foreman, you risk injuring yourself worse and being paralyzed as well. Suddenly, your whole life has changed. And it?s not even your fault ? the other driver, a teenager talking on a cell phone, turned right into you. But the insurance company stonewalls; there?s no provable medical damage, they say. Our doctors looked at the x-rays. You?re fine. You?re faking your injuries. Faking your pain, which grows worse every day. You need a personal injury lawyer. Personal Injury Lawyers A personal injury lawyer is a lawyer who specializes in representing victims in personal injury cases. He may have people who?ve been in a car accident, like you. Or he may be used to representing people who?ve been injured in industrial accidents, by doctors or other medical professionals, or by corporations who either fraudulently proclaim something safe or accidentally release something harmful. Your personal injury lawyer has heard it all; and he knows that your pain is real. A personal injury lawyer can do a lot for you. He can line up doctors who will examine you and your medical records to attempt to determine precisely what?s wrong. For every doctor the insurance companies line up to swear that your records show no injury, he can produce an equally qualified professional to testify that they?ve examined you personally and you most certainly do have permanent debilitating injuries. But it?s not just car injuries that may make you require his services. In today?s high-pressure workplace, you may be injured by workplace stress; one of my friends was rendered unable to work for years after she had a nervous breakdown at work in the bathroom. They sent her home. And then didn?t understand why she couldn?t come in the next day. Your personal injury lawyer can help you find a professional who will help you with your problems, and who will testify in court as to the extent of your damages and how they were caused. In another case, a doctor who had been given the task of circumcising a premature infant ? slipped. Just a little. But it only took a little for the circumcision to turn into a castration, and the poor little boy suffered the consequence. His parents made the very difficult decision to have him surgically changed into a girl; they sued and were awarded damages to cover the child?s medical and therapy bills, and to make life easier as he grew into an adult. Doctors and nurses and other medical professionals make mistakes (http://www.personal-injury-accident-claim.com/malpractice.html). Sometimes they admit them; often, they don?t. A personal injury lawyer will stand by you, help you find alternate medical treatment, and then support your case as you sue the professional who injured you. Sometimes companies do bad things and cover them up. Asbestos, though it was restricted years ago, still causes damage to people today. Chemical spills that are covered up by the violating company for fear of having to pay large sums in environmental cleanup fees can sicken hundreds if it gets into the water. At Love Canal, an entire suburb was built on top of a contaminated industrial waste dump; dozens of children were sickened, even developing leukemia, when the contaminants seeped in through basements and baseboards, poisoning the air they breathed with invisible toxins. Sometimes companies do bad things accidentally, or because they didn?t study the situation enough. Pharmaceutical companies have a very difficult time studying enough people to rule out harm; recently, drugs like Vioxx have made the news when they caused serious harm to people who were taking them for issues they could have lived with. Even though the harm was accidental, the company is liable for it; people died, and people had debilitating heart attacks. There are those whose lives will never be the same. In all these cases, a personal injury lawyer can represent the victim. How Much Does It Cost? If you?ve been injured, chances are very good that you?re already having financial difficulties. Therefore, personal injury lawyers have worked out a system to help victims get the legal assistance they need without paying anything up front. It?s called a contingency payment plan. Their fee is contingent upon you winning your case. You pay nothing up front. If the lawyer loses your lawsuit against your injurer, you pay nothing at all. If the lawyer wins your case, however, you pay a specified percentage of your claim to him. That?s it. By using this system, personal injury lawyers have helped out millions of people who would otherwise have had to suffer in poverty and silence while those who caused them injury went unpunished. A personal injury lawyer helps see that justice is served.
More information available at http://www.personal-injury-accident-claim.com/
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* Government Statistics on Legal Verdicts and Jury Awards - $ U.S. district courts terminated approximately 512,000 civil cases during fiscal years 2002-03. Nearly 20% or 98,786 of these cases were torts in which plaintiffs claimed injury, loss, or damage from a defendant’s negligent or intentional acts. $ Of the 98,786 tort cases terminated in U.S. district courts in 2002-03, about 2% or 1,647 cases were decided by a bench or jury trial. $ An estimated 9 out of 10 tort trials involved personal injury issues C most frequently, product liability, motor vehicle (accident), marine, and medical malpractice cases. $ Juries decided about 71% of all tort cases brought to trial in U.S. district courts; judges adjudicated the remaining 29%. $ Plaintiffs won in 48% of tort trials terminated in U.S. district courts in 2002-03. Plaintiffs won less frequently in medical malpractice (37%) and product liability (34%) trials. $ Eighty-four percent of plaintiff winners received monetary damages with an estimated median award of $201,000. $ Plaintiffs won more often in bench (54%) than in jury (46%) tort trials. The estimated median damage awards were higher in jury ($244,000) than in bench ($150,000) tort trials.
April 2006 - A Jury in New Jersey found last week that Vioxx significantly contributed to a 77-year-old man's heart attack awarded him $9 million in punitive damages yesterday, raising Merck & Co.'s liability in the case to $13.5 million and intensifying pressure on it to settle such lawsuits.
Example of Personal Injury Case 2004 : Ford Explorer rollover-prone and roof not crash safe and worthy- CASE TYPE : Product Design Defect, Auto Truck Vehicle - SUV,
Motor Vehicle – Rollover CASE : Buell-Wilson v. Ford Motor Co., San Diego Co.,
Calif., Super. Ct. GIC 800836 Los Angeles, Calif.
JURY VERDICT: $369,000,000 (369 Millions Dolalrs
2005 - In what may be one of the biggest massive medical malpractice tort verdicts in the state of Texas, a state jury awarded $606 million - including a remarkable $ 600 million dollars in punitive damages - to the family of an 82-year-old patient who had cancer and then who died after receiving an overdose of chemotherapy drugs.
2005 - In the 9th big loss for Ford in SUV Explorer rollover cases, a Florida jury awarded $61.2 million to the parents of an 18-year-old boy who was killed in a 1997 (wrongful death & Product Defect and Product Liability Issues)
Example of Personal Injury Lawyer Case 2004 : Dodge Caravan seatback collapsed on baby in a car-seat - CASE TYPE : Automobiles, Products Liability -
Product Design Defect, Wrongful Death, Motor Vehicle -
Rear-ender, Motor Vehicle - Passenger, Motor Vehicle - Minivan
CASE : Flax v. DaimlerChrysler Corp., Davidson Co., Tenn., Cir. Ct. O2C-1288
JURY VERDICT : $105,500,000 (105 Million Dollars
2005 – Billion Dollar Verdicts - In one of 2005's largest verdicts to an individual plaintiff regarding financial fraud , a Florida jury ordered Morgan Stanley Broker Dealer to pay $1.45 billion to investor Ronald O. Perelman for defrauding him in the sale of his camping gear company - Coleman.
2005 - February, a prominent Houston law firm and a Texas bank were SMACKED and Beaten with a $65.5 million verdict in a highly complex estate planning case that involved major problems and conflicts of interest. (65 million dollar jury award)
2005 – 3 years after a jury acquitted a company in Florida of manslaughter and criminal charges, a Florida civil jury SLAMMED the outdoor advertiser with a $65 million jury award verdict for the shock and electrocution of a sixth-grade boy.
Age Discrimination - In December, a Los Angeles California jury found that PrivatAir - an aviation company focusing on private airline services - wrongfully fired Captain Doyle D. Baker on the basis of his age, defaming him in the termination process and causing extreme emotional distress.
Punitive damages serve a number of important functions which—despite a few horror stories, which are themselves either apocryphal or overturned in the courts, the functions remain valid and in the public interest. Persons causing great harm—persons deliberately or with gross negligence causing great harm should not view paying damages as merely a cost of doing business, a cost that might fit neatly into a risk analysis of wrongdoing. That is what happened in the Ford Pinto case in which the cost of paying claims to victims of a known deadly hazard was deemed less than the cost to retool the assembly line, and thus the hazard was maintained knowing full well that further people—more people would be injured or killed.
This is the purpose of punitive damages, to punish this kind of egregious wrongdoing, and to deter, to be a deterrent to such conduct. It is not immediately clear why a deterrent—or the necessity of the deterrent should bear any great relationship to the amount of actual damages in a given case. There is nothing wrong and indeed something highly desirable in maintaining this disincentive to wrongdoing in an appropriate relationship to the harm and the conduct of the tort-feasor. This trend has led one commentator to suggest that ''[p]unitive damages have replaced baseball as our national sport.'' Theodore B. Olson, Rule of Law: The Dangerous National Sport of Punitive Damages, Wall St. J., Oct. 5, 1994, at A17. See also Malcolm E. Wheeler, A Proposal for Further Common Law Development of the Use of Punitive Damages in Modern Products Liability Litigation, 40 Ala. L. Rev. 919, 919 (1989) (''Today, hardly a month goes by without a multimillion-dollar punitive damages verdict in a product liability case.'').
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