Personal Injury Settlement Lawyer & Injury Attorney

Accident Attorney – General practice is a choice for some lawyers, but others focus their practices on particular fields of law.
The public is most often familiar with attorneys that specialize their skills to become tax lawyers, prosecutors, or divorce lawyers.In searching for legal representation, injured parties are most often aware that they should hire counsel with expertise in the area most closely resembling their situation. It is not commonly known that some lawyers have very narrow practices, even more narrow than suggested by commonly used terms such as “personal injury lawyer” or “divorce lawyer”.As an example, some attorneys may hone their practice areas to specialize in inheritance disputes while referring questions about tax related issues to other professionals.By the same token, there are personal injury lawyers who focus their practices entirely on defective automobile related products.There are typically many differences between product defect litigation involving personal injury or death and the standard personal injury lawsuit. Product defect cases require counsel to command much more technical knowledge than other types of injury cases, and because of their complexity require the involvement of often costly highly specialized engineering and other experts.Moreover, many attorneys who have a breadth of experience handling personal injury cases aren’t necessarily equipped to take on the complexity of a product defect case.

A number of challenges arise in the handling of product defect cases.First, the defect that may be the basis for the case must be identified.Identifying key defects often requires substantial technical knowledge. While seeming straightforward, a product failure such as a tire tread detachment can be the result of many different design and manufacturing issues, and determining the specific design and/or manufacturing flaws that cased the failure can be critically important to the success of the case.
Many lawyers also believe that a tire company will readily accept fault for a tire that suffered a separated tread, but this is not true. Typically, tire companies employ internal experts and others who blame tire misuse or road hazard for the failure.  Also complex and difficult to identify are issues involving crashworthiness, where the question becomes whether a vehicle was appropriately designed to protect the occupants in a foreseeable crash.
The Ford Pinto exploding gas tank is a well known example of this concept. Most consumers would agree that auto manufacturers should design cars such that they are not likely to explode in minor fender-bender accidents.
Despite consumer expectations, Ford defended its Pinto design saying that the explosions were caused by factors outside of the automaker’s control.
It took many highly trained experts and defect lawyers to overcome Ford’s defenses and obtain success and justice for the victims. Most people have no idea how many vehicle systems can go wrong and cause preventable injury or death.

For example, other system failures include defective seatbelts, mis-fired air bags, inappropriate roof crush, vehicle instability, etc. each of which may form the basis for seeking compensation in the event of a serious accident resulting in injury or death. Knowing which tragedies were caused or contributed to by preventable automotive defects as opposed to unavoidable accidents is no easy task, and mistakes can be costly.It takes a well qualified product defect attorney to have adequate resources and experience to go “head to head” with large corporate defendants in complex litigation.It is often essential to obtain company documents that are relevant to the allegations in the cause of action in order to disprove defenses that a lawsuit is “frivolous” or that the company is being held to an impossible standard of care. Most consumers would be surprised to learn that companies that deny fault often have hidden “smoking gun” documents in the form of admissions by company engineers or others of defects in the product that prove the case against them once located by vigilant counsel. Manufacturers who start out their defense claiming that their product was state of the art may come begging to the jury not to award punitive damages when smoking gun documents are found. Often to the frustration of plaintiffs, corporations are masters of resisting efforts to find these admission-type documents.In order to pry these materials free from the protective grasp of the corporations, a products defect attorney must be stubborn and have expertise and a lot of experience handling complex document production issues. Another major obstacle for product defect litigation is gaining access to qualified experts who can explain the defect to a jury and survive any legal challenge raised about credentials by the defense.

It is not uncommon for a case not to be allowed to move forward if a qualified expert is not involved and willing to testify against the manufacturer.Most Courts have rigorous expert standards that an expert must meet, which renders the expert useless if he or she is not properly qualified.An experienced product defect lawyer strives to meet all of these challenges and more, with the ultimate goal being to obtain justice for his or her clients.

Regardless of what you’re looking for in an attorney, or Accident Lawyer make sure you do your reasearch and find a firm that you trust. Try us and see, we have the best Accident Litigation results.