Auto Accidents
Unintentional damaging events involving automobiles. Auto accidents can damage one of more autos, people or structures. Auto accidents-also called traffic accidents, car accidents, road accidents, road traffic accidents (RTA in many police forces' terminology) and motor vehicle accidents, cause thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities each year.
Worldwide, car accidents kill an estimated one million people each year (a 2002 statistic).
Slip-and-Fall
Short-hand for any legal claim or case based on a person slipping (or tripping) and falling. It is a tort and based on a claim that the property owner was negligent in allowing some dangerous substance or condition to exist that caused the slip or trip.
Property owners generally have two-(2) basic defenses to slip-and-fall claims.
The first defense is that they were not negligent. Perhaps the banana dropped on the floor by another customary had not been on the floor long enough for a store employee to see it and remove it. Perhaps the store never cleaned the oil on the floor behind the counter because they never expected customers to be behind the counter. Perhaps they regularly inspected the stairs and had no way of knowing that a riser would come loose when that 500 pound man walked on it.
The second and more typical defense is that the person who was injured was negligent. If they had just been watching where they were going, they would have seen that spilled bottle of coca-cola on the floor or that unevenness in the flooring or that un-marked step-down into the back of the store.
Because of a general perception that slip-and-falls are at least partly the fault of the person injured, slip-and-fall injures are usually worth less than injuries from other types of torts.
Dog Bite
A wound received from the mouth (and in particular, the teeth) of an animal. Animals may bite in self-defense or in an attempt to predate food. Other bite attacks may be apparently unprovoked.
Bite wounds raise a number of medical concerns for the physician or fist aider, including:
- Generalized tissue damage due to tearing and scratching.
-Serious hemorrhage if major blood vessels are pierced.
-Infection by bacteria or other pathogens.
-Introduction of venom into the wound.
-Introduction of other irritants into the wound, causing inflammation and itching.
Wrongful Death
A claim in tort against a person who can be held liable for a death. The claim is brought in civil action, usually by close relatives. Unlike criminal law, private parties may bring suit. The Defendant has fewer due process and Constitutional protections such as immunity or the right to refuse to give testimony. The standard of proof is typically preponderance of the evidence as opposed to clear and convincing of beyond a reasonable doubt. For all the above reasons, it is often easier for a family to seek retribution against someone for wrongful death in tort than a proper criminal law conviction. It should be noted, however, that the two actions are not mutually exclusive; a person may be prosecuted criminally for causing a person's death (whether in the form of murder, manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide or some other theory) and that person can also be sued civilly in a wrongful death action.
As a technical legal matter, a wrongful death claim is not a tort claim. in most, if not all states in the United States, there was no common law right to recover civil damages for the wrongful death of a person. However, now the states have each enacted statutes to correct this deficiency in the law so that there is a right to such recovery. It is true that because the statute incorporates the tort law as the law of liability. For this reason, a wrongful death claim does share much in common with a tort claim, but it is still grounded in statute, not common law tort.
Defective Products
Encompasses a number of legal claims that allow an injured party to recover financial compensation from the manufacturer or seller of a product. In the United States, the claims most commonly associated with product liability are negligence, strict liability, breach of warranty and various consumer protection claims. The majority of product liability laws are determined at the state level and vary widely from state to state. Each type of product liability claim requires different elements to be proven to present a successful claim.
Medical Malpractice
Lay terminology for negligence that occurs in respect of a doctor's treatment of a patient.
It also covers the public perception of adverse events during medical care.
Medical Malpractice law is generally defined as those laws having to do with medical malpractice. These laws are different from country to country and even within those countries.
In common with other forms of claims for negligence, in order to succeed in a claim (lawsuit) against a doctor or medical facility, the Claimant (plaintiff) must successfully demonstrate these things:
That the doctor failed in his/her duty of care towards the patient.
The doctor failed to do something that a reasonably prudent doctor in the same field would have done under the same or similar circumstances.
That the doctor did something that no reasonably prudent doctor in the same field would have done under the same or similar circumstances.
That some harm was caused by this failure to comply with the duty of care and that the harm risked by such misconduct was reasonably foreseeable at the time.
The amount of damages that would reasonably compensate the plaintiff for the harm caused by the malpractice.
Although medical malpractice is most often thought of as applying to physicians, the term includes the medical negligence of any medical care provider including, for example, dentists, nurses and therapists.
Workers' Compensation
Systems (workers comp or compo) exist to protect employees who have incurred work-related injuries. These laws are usually a feature of highly developed industrial societies. Employees' compensation laws are often only implemented after long and hard fought struggles by trade unions, particularly in early industrialization. There are often benefits available to dependents of workers killed on the job as well.
Employees' compensation laws were first enacted in Europe and Oceania, with the United States following shortly thereafter. Workers' compensation programs were a key component of the labor structure of the former Soviet Union and similar societies, as communists are known to take workers' rights seriously.
Disability
Any condition that impedes the completion of daily tasks using traditional methods. National governments and global humanitarian agencies have narrowed this definition for their own purposes, only pledging aid to those with specific disabilities of a certain severity.
John R. Moeller, Jr., P.C.