Accidents are highly unpredictable events. As your safety isn’t always guaranteed, it’s crucial to seek responsibility and compensation from people who have directly or indirectly inflicted this mishap, which is what personal injury law is all about.

The premise of personal injury law is that your situation should be made fair in the event of incurring physical injury and financial loss that’s caused by someone’s negligence. If you’ve encountered an accident and injured yourself, it’s possible to file legal action against those who are responsible.

How will you know if you’re fit to submit a personal injury lawsuit after an injury? Here are seven accidents that you can bring to legal action:

 

1. Slip and Fall Accidents

Slip and fall accidents, as the name imply, is an accident where an individual slips and trips in someone else’s property, resulting in injury and death. As estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17,000 people die from slip and fall accidents annually. A slip and fall accident can occur in your workplace, private properties, and public properties.

Liability in slip and fall accidents should be proven as created by a responsible party because many plaintiffs don’t realize that their demise can result from their own carelessness. To confirm that the property owner is indeed responsible, the plaintiff should prove that the scene of the accident is a ‘dangerous condition,’ in which the responsible party was aware of but neglected otherwise.

If you’ve encountered a slip and fall accident due to third-party negligence, this article elaborates on what you can claim.

 

2. Medical Malpractice

People seek medical care providers to better their health and wellness, but what if you’ve experienced the opposite under their supervision? Unfortunately, several healthcare workers may also commit medical malpractices that could cost their patients’ lives. This form of negligence can’t escape legal action, especially if the patient has faced detrimental consequences.

Medical malpractice or negligence is usually brought by a medical error. Some situations involving medical malpractice typically involves:

  • Failure to recognize symptoms of health conditions
  • Misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose
  • Improper medication administration and prescription
  • Improper dosage provided in medication
  • Disregarding appropriate patient history
  • Poor quality of follow-up or aftercare
  • Wrong-site surgery or surgical errors
  • Unnecessary surgery

Unfortunately, only 2% of patients who experience some form of medical malpractice file compensation claims for their injury, pain and suffering, failing health, and poor quality of life.

 

3. Motor Vehicle Accidents

Vehicular accidents are among the most common causes of death globally, with 3,700 people getting killed daily by road crashes involving motor vehicles, like cars, motorcycles, buses, trucks, bicycles, and pedestrians.

When dealing with accidents caused by vehicular accidents, auto insurance comes into the picture. Generally, the at-fault driver should cover the expenses of both parties incurred during the crash. In case the individual at fault is still unclear, the injured persons must prove that a legal duty owed was breached by the defendant, resulting in injuries and damage.

Your state also impacts what happens after the accident. Your fault or no-fault state policy will determine the process of filing a claim and the possible compensation you’ll receive after experiencing injury and vehicle damage.

 

4. Workplace Accidents

Employers are responsible for creating a safe, healthy, and injury-free workplace for their employees. However, if employees suffer from an accident within the working site’s premises, employers may face a workplace accident lawsuit.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulates employee safety inside workplaces. According to their definition, a workplace accident is any unanticipated event that resulted in a worker’s injury or property damage. The slip and fall accident discussed earlier can also fall in this category if an employee slips, trips, and falls inside the workplace.

Aside from slips and falls, these are other causes of workplace accidents:

  • Overexertion and repetitive stress
  • Exposure to dangerous substances
  • Falling objects
  • Electrocution
  • Caught in or between machinery

Workplace accidents are lose-lose situations for both the administration and employees. Companies can create a better and safer workplace with these accident prevention tips.

 

5. Dog Bites

Pets like dogs are unaware of their own behavior. Thus, it’s their owner’s responsibility to ensure that they won’t harm anyone in public and private properties. When a dog hurts someone, particularly biting another individual, the victim has the right to file a personal injury report and receive compensation from the dog’s established owner.

If the dog owner has a homeowner’s insurance or renter’s insurance policy, this insurance can cover the injuries inflicted. However, these insurance policies may have specific coverage limits of USD$100,000 to USD$300,000 and don’t allow insurance coverage for dangerous, aggressive dog breeds like American Pit Bull Terriers and Rottweilers.

 

6. Premises Liability Accidents

As the main category where slip and fall accidents belong, premises liability accidents refer to accidents within the negligent party’s property. Essentially, this legal concept explains that the person responsible has failed to provide the level of care expected of them in the accident.

Premises liability accidents involve the following situations or circumstances:

  • Negligent security
  • Inadequate or poor lighting
  • Elevator accident
  • Ceiling collapse
  • Fire safety violations
  • Building code violations
  • Defective stairways

 

7. Product Liability

When companies design, produce, and put their products up for sale, they must follow specific standards for quality assurance, product safety, and product reliability. Any product can’t end up on store shelves without undergoing these processes. Sadly, product defect and liability accounts for the second-highest damage in all personal injury cases.

Product defect and liability accidents are often grouped into three classifications:

  • Accident due to product’s defective manufacture
  • Accident due to product’s faulty design
  • Accident due to failure to provide sufficient instructions and warnings about product use

Take a pharmaceutical drug as an example. If you were hospitalized due to contamination of the product, it’s classified as a manufacturing defect.

Meanwhile, if the drug remained uncontaminated, untampered, and composed of its usual ingredients yet still inflected an injury or health issue, product liability stems from its defective design.

Lastly, if the drug provided no such warning that you can’t combine it with other medications, and you took it with another drug without awareness, your claim refers to the product’s failure to warn.

 

Seeking Professional Legal Help: Bottom Line

Many insurance policies, such as car and renter’s insurance, exist to protect policyholders from legal and financial liabilities. However, it’s possible to encounter insurers who are hesitant to respond and pay out to these claims and even attempt to limit their compensation.

If you’ve suffered from any of the accidents that inflicted a serious personal injury and you’re confident that it should be pointed to someone’s negligence, you have the right to file a personal injury claim. To ensure a smooth-sailing process that’s guided with informed legal decisions, hiring professional legal help is your best choice.