Rossville, MD Car Accident Lawyer

When motor vehicle collisions happen, many people do not know what to do. Between serious injuries that need expensive medical treatment, working through the prospect of missing time at work and doing things you love, and potentially replacing your own car, there is a lot to think about. Even if a car accident victim knows they want to sue after an accident, they may not know where to start.

That is where we come in. We have tackled countless car accident cases at our firm, so we have the professionalism, experience, and drive to effectively represent you in court. We will not stop fighting until we have exhausted every legal avenue or you get the payout you deserve.

To have a free, no-obligation analysis of your claim, contact Rice, Murtha & Psoras’s car accident attorneys by calling (410) 694-7291.

Who Can You Sue in a Rossville, MD Car Accident Lawsuit?

A very important part of your car accident lawsuit is choosing who the defendants are. In law, you can only obtain financial compensation from those parties that actually caused your injuries. If you sue someone who had nothing to do with your injuries, you will not be successful. For that reason, it is very important that you sit down and discuss your case with our car accident lawyers so that we can figure out the right parties to sue.

Negligent Drivers

You will almost always want to sue the driver who struck you in your car accident lawsuit. Drivers can be liable for injuries in car accidents when they are negligent – or careless. Drivers can be negligent in a lot of different ways. First, they can be negligent by disregarding traffic rules like speed limits or road lines. If a motorist does this, they are negligent because they are violating the law.

Another way that a driver can be negligent is by acting unreasonably. Drivers have an obligation to act as a reasonable driver would under their circumstances while behind the wheel. If they fail to do this and someone gets hurt, they can be considered negligent. Whether a driver acted “reasonably” or not is up to the jury at trial, so our lawyers will need to work to make sure that they see the defendant’s carelessness.

Negligent Manufacturing and Design Companies

If a problem with the vehicle itself is the cause of a car accident, you can file a claim against a number of different parties depending on what exactly the root cause of the problem is. As a whole, these problems are called “defects.” In law, a defect is something wrong with a product that is likely to cause injury when the product is used in its intended manner. In vehicles, defects can stem from the vehicle’s design, a manufacturing error, or a maintenance issue.

Design defects are baked into the core design of the vehicle. They will be present even in a car built exactly to specifications. Examples of design defects in cars include gas tanks that are likely to ignite their contents on impact or self-driving systems that do not prioritize driver safety highly. If you believe that your accident stemmed from a design defect, you may want to include the company that came up with that model of vehicle in your claim.

Manufacturing defects derive from mistakes rather than being “baked into” the vehicle. These problems pop up somewhere in the vehicle’s building process. For example, if a worker incorrectly installs a vehicle suspension system at a factory, that vehicle can be said to have a manufacturing defect. Alternatively, suppose the brakes in your vehicle are replaced, but the new ones do not work, and you get in an accident as a result. In that case, you could sue the brake manufacturer for giving you a defective product.

Some defects could also be the result of bad maintenance work. For example, if you take your car in for maintenance and the airbags are replaced with faulty ones that do not go off at a crucial moment, you could sue the shop that worked on your vehicle for installing airbags that did not work, rendering your vehicle defective.

Employers

Sometimes, you can sue employers for your injuries in a car crash. The law has a principle called “respondeat superior,” which lets injured plaintiffs sue the employers for the actions of their negligent employees. You can only take this route, however, if the employee caused your injuries while doing something related to their job. For example, if a painting company sends a painter out in their company van to paint someone’s house, but they hit you on the way there, you can probably sue the painting company because driving to a work site is part of their job. However, suppose that same painter is driving home for the day in their personal vehicle. In that case, you may not be able to sue the painting company because driving home from work is not sufficiently related to the painter’s job.

Government Entities

In some limited circumstances, you may be able to file a lawsuit against a state or local government entity. Usually, this happens when a plaintiff alleges that their accident was the result of sub-par road conditions, as government entities are responsible for keeping Maryland roads in good working order.

However, there are special rules about suing government entities, so you should let our attorneys closely examine your claim if you are planning on taking that route.

Chat About Your Case with our Rossville, MD Car Accident Attorneys Today

The car accident attorneys with Rice, Murtha & Psoras can give you free case analyses when you contact our offices at (410) 694-7291.