After an accident, it can be difficult to get back on your feet. The stress, distress, and pain after an accident could make it hard to return to work, and without your income, you might find it challenging to pay for medical bills.
Fortunately, Maryland allows accident victims to sue the parties responsible for their injuries, as long as they do so within three years. A lawsuit can help you get the compensation you need for medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering, and other damages. When we take on your case, our lawyers will gather evidence, file on time, and monitor your damages to help ensure your fair recovery.
Call our personal injury lawyers at Rice Law for a free case review at (410) 694-7291.
How Do You Know if You Have a Personal Injury Claim?
Most people have probably heard of personal injury lawsuits, but what do these cases actually involve? How do you know if your situation amounts to a legitimate personal injury claim?
Physical Harm
Generally, personal injury lawsuits must involve plaintiffs who suffer bodily injuries because of the defendant. Injuries do not need to be severe to be grounds for a lawsuit. Even if plaintiffs are expected to fully recover, they can still sue for the costs they incurred because of their injuries.
Accidents
Accidents are common in personal injury cases. Most cases involve plaintiffs who were injured in accidents caused by negligent defendants. Often, defendants did not mean to cause harm, but they can still be held responsible for their careless behavior.
Fault
Someone else must be to blame for your injuries. You cannot sue for damages that are entirely your fault. In Maryland, if a plaintiff is even slightly to blame for their injuries, they may be barred from recovery.
Premises Liability Claims in Personal Injury Cases
The liable property owner or manager should pay for injuries caused by a dangerous defect on their property. This type of injury case includes slip and falls, but it is much broader.
Premises liability would include injuries from electrocution, sharp objects, drowning, fires, and other injuries that could have been prevented by warning the victim or repairing the dangers.
Injuries from Slip and Falls or Trip and Falls
Our personal injury lawyers handle a wide range of cases. One of the most common causes of injury is falling down because of slippery floors or tripping hazards.
Who is Responsible?
Property owners are responsible for ensuring that their premises are safe for guests and passersby. Leaving wet or slippery surfaces or other hazards can be dangerous and may violate the property owner’s responsibility to keep the premises safe.
The Property Owner’s Duty of Care
Generally, property owners have a legal duty to remove or repair any known hazardous condition on their property. They must also make reasonable inspections for potential unknown hazards.
If property owners cannot remove or repair hazardous conditions, they must warn visitors about the hazards, typically with signs or verbal warnings. Slip and fall accidents commonly occur because of floors slick with ice and snow, spills in stores and restaurants, loose wires, overgrown tree roots, and loose or damaged flooring.
What to Do After a Slip and Fall Accident
If you are injured in a slipping, tripping, or falling accident, do your best to photograph the hazardous conditions on the property, so our personal injury lawyers can prove the property owner’s negligence.
Property owners may clean up the accident area and remove the hazards after you leave, and we cannot hold this against them, as cleaning up the area may prevent future accidents. However, this may mean that important evidence will be lost if you do not take pictures.
Personal Injury Claims for Car Accidents
Car accidents are another incredibly common cause of action for personal injury cases. Car accident victims may be able to sue the driver who hit them to seek compensation for their injuries and the expenses resulting from those injuries, like hospital costs and lost wages.
Who is Responsible for a Car Accident?
In most car accident cases, other drivers are held responsible for causing collisions. All drivers owe a legal duty to drive with reasonable safety under the circumstances while obeying the traffic code. Anything a driver might do to breach this duty could cause an accident. Even minor traffic violations, like speeding or running a stop sign, could make a driver liable for a resulting accident.
Insurance vs. Lawsuits
Although victims may initially file claims through a negligent driver’s liability insurance, they may receive higher compensation by filing in court with help from our experienced lawyers.
Gathering Evidence from a Crash Scene
We can support your claims for fair compensation by preserving evidence of the at-fault driver’s negligence, such as eyewitness statements and photos from the scene. Involving accident reconstruction experts can also help maximize victims’ financial recoveries in car crash lawsuits, especially those that go to trial and are decided by juries.
Injuries Caused by Defective Products
When you purchase or use a product, you expect it to work properly and safely. Design or manufacturing defects can put consumers at risk.
Design Flaws
Some products are designed in a way that cannot ensure customer safety. Even if the product is not damaged or defective, it might be designed so poorly that accidents are not just possible but probable. Safety in design is especially important for inherently risky products, like power tools or sharp appliances.
Damaged Goods
Sometimes, products malfunction and cause injuries because they became damaged before reaching the customer. If a product hurt you because it was damaged some time after it was manufactured but before you purchased it, you may sue anyone within the chain of sale, including manufacturers and retailers.
Failures to Warn
Some injuries stem not from a design problem but from a failure to warn consumers about dangers from moving parts, high temperatures, or other risks. These cases often involve injuries from household appliances, power tools, vehicle parts, and other dangerous items.
Failure to warn is common in cases involving inherently dangerous products. Even if these goods are safely designed, they are still risky to use. For example, products that are designed to heat up (e.g., hot plates, hair dryers, heated blankets) may pose a fire risk, and customers must be adequately warned and advised on how to prevent such risks.
Preserving Evidence
After accidents involving defective or damaged goods, victims should keep the defective product and any packaging, receipts, and instructions for our lawyers and qualified experts to review. Professionals can inspect the product and determine whether it was defective, damaged, or poorly designed.
Personal Injuries and Medical Malpractice
Doctors are held to a high standard of care, which requires them to do everything in their power to act as any reasonable doctor would in their situation when treating patients.
If a doctor provides treatment that falls below the standard of care, patients could face serious injuries and health complications. Surgical errors, birth injuries, drug errors, and other examples of negligence are often avoidable, and your doctor could be responsible for any unnecessary injuries they cause you.
Wrongful Death Claims Related to Personal Injuries
If a loved one was killed in an accident or died because someone breached a duty they owed them, you may be entitled to sue the responsible parties for your loved one’s death. A lawsuit for their death may be able to help support your family financially in your time of need and may be vital to moving forward with your lives.
Damages for Personal Injuries in Rockville, MD
The damages you may claim relate directly to the harm you suffered. This typically means more severe injuries are worth higher damages, especially since they tend to cause more pain and suffering and costlier medical expenses.
Medical Bills
Medical care can be very expensive, even for minor injuries, and it is crucial that you save all records about your care, including medical bills from the hospital. Medical bills are straightforward records of the cost of your care and can help prove how much compensation you need for hospital stays, rehabilitation, surgeries, and other care costs.
Costs of Property Damage
Many accidents cause damage to the victim’s property. This might include larger pieces of property, like damage to vehicles in an auto accident. It may also involve many smaller items, like phones, wedding rings, and various personal items you might have lost in an accident.
Lost Income
If you missed work because of your injuries, our personal injury lawyers may produce bank statements, pay stubs, and other records of the wages you lost. If your injury is severe, you may also be able to claim damages for future lost wages after medical experts testify to your diminished earning capacity.
Pain and Suffering
Pain and suffering damages are harder to demonstrate because there are often no financial costs associated with your feelings. Instead, you can typically testify regarding how the injury felt, how it affected your life, and other details about your physical pain and mental suffering. Our attorneys can guide you through what damages you are entitled to and how we will prove them in court.
What Can You Use as Evidence in a Personal Injury Case?
Evidence varies from case to case. Evidence that other plaintiffs need may look very different from the evidence you need. Still, some evidence is common and comes up in many personal injury cases. We can investigate for evidence that may include…
- Witness testimony
- Photos of the accident scene
- Photos of injuries
- Video footage of accidents
- Medical records
Timeline of Recovering Damages for Personal Injuries in Rockville, MD
Personal injury lawsuits take time to complete but begin with plaintiffs filing complaints in court. This typically must happen within three years of the accident, or victims lose their chance to sue.
Because of this, and because much consequential evidence could be lost when cases are delayed, you should contact our lawyers immediately after being injured by another person’s negligent conduct.
Preparing a Formal Complaint for a Personal Injury Case
The complaint is a lengthy legal document that kicks off your lawsuit. The complaint is highly formal and must include detailed, specific information about the accident. We must explain what happened and how you were injured. We must also explain who was involved and why we believe the defendant should be held liable.
The complaint must also spell out all your damages. If we accidentally leave certain damages out of the complaint, it may be difficult or impossible to add them to the case later, and you might miss out on compensation.
We must include some evidence in the complaint, but we do not need to include all possible evidence or even enough evidence to meet our burden of proof. We must include enough to establish a valid cause of legal action.
Extending Your Time to File a Personal Injury Lawsuit
The statute of limitations is not entirely inflexible. Although unusual, special circumstances may allow a plaintiff to have the limitation period tolled, thereby extending their time to file their claims.
Date of Discovery
Victims who do not realize their injuries until later could have the limitation period tolled for delayed discovery. In these cases, the statute of limitations would begin to count down on the date of discovery rather than the date of injury. For this exception to apply, the delay in the discovery of injuries must be reasonable. Failing to take action for obvious injuries does not count.
In medical injury claims, victims must file within five years of the date of injury or three years of the date of discovery, whichever comes sooner.
Injured Minors
There are additional complicated rules regarding filing deadlines and tolling for victims harmed as minors, and our lawyers can explain these changes if applicable to your case. When a minor is injured in an accident, they might be unable to take legal action without help from a parent or guardian. If nobody steps up to help the child file legal claims, they may do so on their own when they turn 18. As such, injured minors may have the limitation period tolled until they turn 18.
Can You Negotiate a Settlement for Personal Injuries?
Generally, the next step after filing lawsuits is negotiating settlements. Though defendants might agree to pay large amounts out of court, this is typically preferable to being found liable by a jury. That said, fair settlements typically only come after our lawyers aggressively negotiate and assert victims’ deserved damages.
Evidence as Leverage
Preserving evidence early in your case will give us leverage over the defendant during negotiations, potentially prompting them to increase their offers. The more evidence we have showing the defendant’s negligence, the more leverage we may have in settlement negotiations.
Understanding Your Damages
Victims unaware of their full damages could inadvertently accept low settlement offers. When this happens, lawsuits end. The settlement you agree to will be the amount you receive, even if you soon realize your losses are greater.
We can avoid this by calculating your claim’s value before filing your case. We should consider medical expenses and lost wages you have already incurred, and damages you expect to suffer after the case ends.
Going to Court for Personal Injuries
Although many injury lawsuits settle out of court, some go to trial. This allows our attorneys to present the case and evidence of negligence to the jury. It is our burden to prove the defendant more than likely caused your injuries because they breached their duty of care.
Even during a trial, the defense might send settlement proposals, which could be higher than previous offers.
After deciding the defendant is liable, the jury will calculate your damages based on the evidence we present. This is why compiling medical bills, pay stubs, and proof of other losses throughout your physical recovery is paramount. We may have experts testify to convince jurors of victims’ non-economic damages from pain and suffering, which could comprise a large portion of victims’ eventual awards.
For Help with Your Case, Call Our Rockville, MD Injury Lawyers
Call our personal injury lawyers at (410) 694-7291 to discuss your case for free with Rice Law.