Personal Injury Settlement Lawyer & Injury Attorney

Personal Injury Attorney – General practice is a choice for some lawyers, but others focus their practices on particular fields of law. 
Individuals may be aware that many attorneys specialize in general areas such as tax, divorce or bankruptcy law.Clients tend to be aware that they should hire an attorney that specializes in the area of law applicable to the issues at hand. Many consumers do not know, however, that there are lawyers who focus their practice even more narrowly than categories such as “tax lawyer” or “divorce lawyer” would suggest.  For example, there are tax lawyers who focus their practice on issues involving inheritance tax questions, and criminal defense lawyers who handle only white collar crime.In keeping with this practice, many trial attorneys limit the scope of their practices to handle automotive product defects.Automotive product cases are entirely different from typical personal injury lawsuits such as more straight-forward auto collisions cases, or “slip and falls” and the like. Product defect cases tend to be much more complex, much more expensive because of the need to retain highly specialized engineering and other experts, and require much more technical knowledge on the part of counsel than other types of injury cases.Therefore, many personal injury attorneys, despite many years of practice, may not have the requisite experience to handle product failure cases specifically.

Successful handling of a product defect case to resolution involves a number of challenges.To begin, the defect that may form the basis for the case must be identified.It may sound obvious and straight-forward that identifying a defect is the first step to handling a product defect case, but a great deal of technical knowledge is often required to do this. The success of a tire tread detachment case, even though seeming fairly straightforward, may rest on determining the specific design and/or manufacturing flaws that caused the failure, as there may be a number of factors involved.
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. Tire manufacturers, through the use of internal experts and others, will typically blame road hazard or tire misuse for the failure.Crashworthiness issues are also complex and difficult to identify, and the question becomes whether a vehicle was appropriately designed to protect the occupants in a foreseeable crash. 
Crashworthiness is well demonstrated by the Ford Pinto exploding gas tank. As a consumer, one could reasonably expect that auto makers have designed a car so as not to explode in a minor fender-bender.
However, Ford came to the defense of the Pinto and alleged that the explosions were the result of factors beyond Ford’s control.
To overcome Ford’s defenses and obtain justice for the victims, highly trained and diligent attorneys and trained experts worked tirelessly for success. It may come as a shock to most consumers that there are several vehicle systems that can fail and lead to preventable injury or death.

Everything from improperly designed ignition systems that lead to fuel fed fires, bad seat belts that fail if stressed in a wreck, to badly designed tires can cause serious injury or death. Of course suing a vehicle manufacturer for a tragic accident makes no sense unless it can be shown that the accident was the result of active negligence or misconduct of the manufacturer in the vehicle’s design or manufacture.In proving that an accident was avoidable – and the fault of the manufacturer – it is critical to choose counsel who have experience and resource available to take on the large product maker.Companies often claim defenses that a lawsuit is “frivolous” or that they are being held to an impossible stand of care for which it is necessary to obtain critical and relevant documents in order to disprove these defenses. 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. In most cases, this results in a staunch defense turning into a substantial settlement offer or verdict. Often to the frustration of plaintiffs, corporations are masters of resisting efforts to find these admission-type documents.Hiring counsel who have experience in fighting with big corporations increases the odds of success at obtaining the critical documents. Access to qualified experts – those who can both explain the product defect to a jury and survive any legal challenges raised by defense – is a major stumbling block in litigating a product defect case for the unwary.

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.Having an expert who will testify as to a defect is not enough, because the expert must also pass the standards of the Court for offering such opinions with regard to a particular type of product.The goal of experienced product defect attorneys is to meet all of these challenges and to provide justice for their clients based upon the truth, the facts, and the law rather than the size of the corporate defendant’s wallet and legal team.

Regardless of what you’re looking for in an attorney, from tire suit litigation to Passenger tires make sure you do your reasearch and find a firm that you trust.

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