Common Types Of Personal Injury Cases
The job of a personal injury lawyer involves helping clients deal with many different types of claims. Personal injury is an umbrella term that contains within it civil cases where a particular party may have been responsible for someone coming to harm. Let's take a look at five of the most common kinds of cases a personal injury attorney might tackle.
Car Accident Claims
The largest number of injury cases arise from collisions involving a passenger vehicle. Generally speaking, incidents involving commercial vehicles, especially 18-wheelers, are part of as a subset known as truck accident law. These cases often end up being fairly complex because there can be questions about the maintenance of vehicles, weather conditions, operator error, inattentiveness, and even the consumption of drugs or alcohol. Drivers are often insured, and the prospect that an insurance company will pay out a claim is a motivation for a personal injury lawyer to choose to specialize in this field of law.
Slip-and-fall Claims
Having an accident while on a property, particularly one owned by a business or government, is something that has a decent chance of occurring in any given person's life. These cases can arise from things like poorly maintained sidewalks and handrails. The biggest challenge in these cases is often proving that a particular party was actually the one expected to maintain a specific space.
Medical Malpractice
As is the case with any other business, a medical practice or a hospital has a responsibility to not unnecessarily put its patients at risk of injury. For example, knowingly utilizing an outdated technique during a procedure is a form of medical malpractice. There are several subsets of this form of law, with birth injury and brain injury cases being among the more common examples.
Animal Attacks
There is a responsibility for the owner of an animal to keep it from harming others. In many states, liability only occurs once it has been shown that an animal is aggressive. This is sometimes called the one-bite rule. Not too surprisingly, most animal attack cases arise from dog bites.
Intentional Torts
When you hear about a person or an entity being sued in regards to something like an assault, police brutality, or a similar deliberate act of violence, that's considered an intentional tort. Some kinds of wrongful death claims, especially those arising from murder cases, are considered intentional torts.
For more information, reach out to an attorney like Kenneth P Hicks.
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