Suppose you are struck by a car in the City of Buffalo and suffer a serious personal injury as a result. You file a personal injury lawsuit and, before the case is brought to trial, you are told you must attend a deposition.
A deposition is a hearing where the defendant’s attorney will ask you questions about the accident, your injuries and the impact of the accident on your life. It is usually not as formal as a court hearing and typically takes place in a conference room at a lawyer’s office, not in court. You will, however, have to swear to tell the truth before you answer. Your lawyer will be present to assist you, if necessary.
In most cases, the defendant in the case will also be deposed and required to answer questions posed by your attorney.
A deposition serves multiple purposes. It allows both sides to hear the other party’s version of events and better evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the case. This, in turn, helps the parties determine whether to try to settle the case prior to trial or proceed to trial.
Also, if the case does go to trial, your answers, and the defendant’s answers, during the trial can be compared to the deposition testimony to see if there are any inconsistent statements. Any such statements would then be used against the other party.
When an individual in the City of Buffalo is so badly injured by the conduct or negligence of another person or entity that it results in death, that person’s family is allowed to sue the party responsible under New York State Law.
Wrongful deaths in New York State are addressed under Article 5, Part 4, of the Estate, Powers and Trust Law. Under this statute, the lawful representative of the deceased individual has the right to sue for damages on behalf of the estate.
Typically, the amount of damages sought revolves around expenses associated with the death, such as medical and funeral expenses, and loss of income based a projection of how much the deceased individual would likely have earned had he or she lived. There is, however, no bar to seeking compensation for other damages suffered.
As a result, wrongful death cases may also include issues such as compensation the pain and suffering of individual prior to death and the pursuit of punitive damages to punish the defendant if the death resulted from reckless or depraved behavior. Under what theory or theories damages may be sought depends of the specific facts surrounding the individual’s death.
If you are seriously injured in the City of Buffalo and receive Social Security Disability or other financial compensation as a result, it may impact the amount that you receive if you sue the party responsible for your injury and win at trial.
Under New York State law, if you sue and recover money to cover the cost of your medical care, loss of earnings or other economic loss, the other party may then submit evidence to the judge in an attempt to establish that these expenses are covered, in whole or in part, by some other source of funding. This applies to both past and future expenses.
If the judge concludes with reasonable certainty that these expenses are covered by another source, he or she is required to then reduce the amount of monetary damages by the amount already covered. The purpose of this is to ensure that the injured person does not “double-dip” into multiple sources of compensation. Some sources of compensation, such as life insurance, are excluded from this rule.
While past compensation is usually easy to prove, continued compensation into the future, and how much will be received, may be difficult to prove. If the judge does not have a reasonable certainty that other sources of compensation will continue into the future, he or she is not required to reduce the amount of monetary damages beyond what the defense has proven to the judge’s satisfaction.
Usually, if a person is seriously injured in the City of Buffalo, he or she would have to prove that the injury was caused, at least in part, by another party’s negligence before they could successfully pursue monetary compensation. This is not, however, always the case.
Under some circumstances, a party may be held “strictly liable” for an action or circumstance that caused an injury. In cases of strict liability, an injured person may successfully sue for damages without showing that the other party was actually negligent. This situation may occur, for example, in cases involving individuals or businesses that keep dangerous animals, store hazardous chemicals or use explosives.
Strict liability may be imposed in these cases because the activity itself is felt to pose an undue risk of harm to other individuals, and anyone involved in the activity does so at his or her own risk and is responsible if someone is harmed. It may also be applied in cases of injury by a defective product. In these cases, the injured party may not be required to prove that the defect in the product was the result of any negligence by the manufacturer. It is only required that the product was defective and caused an injury as a result.
New York State is what is termed a “No-Fault” state, which means that if your are driving an automobile and struck by another car in Buffalo, your medical bills will usually be paid by your own insurance company through the automobile insurance that you purchased. So what happens if you are not in a car when struck?
If a pedestrian or bicyclist is struck by a car in New York State, his or her medical bills will, at least initially, be paid through the driver’s “No-Fault” automobile insurance policy, not the pedestrian’s policy. Under certain conditions involving a serious injury, however, an injured pedestrian may also have funds from his or her own automobile insurance, such as Supplementary Uninsured/Underinsured Motorist coverage, available as compensation for injuries.
This additional coverage may be available even though the injured party was not in a car at the time of the accident. If you are injured by a driver while biking or driving, you should consult an attorney experienced with insurance law to explore possible sources of compensation with you.
A person injured by a defective product may bring a lawsuit to recover damages for that injury. So, for example, if a person living in the City of Buffalo is badly hurt when using a poorly made piece of lawn equipment, he or she may bring a lawsuit in Erie County Court.
Defective product lawsuits are commonly called product liability cases. To recover damages in such cases, the injured party usually must establish that the defective product is inherently dangerous as it was designed or manufactured. If this is not the case, then whether the injured party can receive compensation may hinge on whether the maker of the product knew, or had reason to know, that the item was defective.
The injured party must also prove that the defect in the product was the cause of the injury. In some cases, product liability cases may be brought in the form of class action lawsuits where compensation is sought for a large number of people injured by a defective product.
The best personal injury is the one that never happens. This month, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a large recall of cribs, some of which may have been sold to parents in Buffalo. Dorel Asia SRL has recalled 635,000 cribs sold in at K-Mart, Sears and Wal-Mart stores nationwide from January 2005 through December 2009.
Apparently, the hardware holding up the dropdown side can fail, creating a space in which the infant may be trapped. There are also concerns about the potential for broken slats resulting in injury or entrapment.
There have been 31 reports of this hardware failure, with six children becoming entrapped. Three of these children suffered bruises and one died. There were also 36 reports of broken slats, some of which resulted in minor injuries or entrapment of the child.
As Buffalo personal injury attorneys, we have firsthand experience with the trauma a personal injury or wrongful death can bring, especially when a child is involved. Please, if you think you may have one of these cribs, visit the Consumer Product Safety Commission website at www.cpsc.gov for further details. If you do have such a crib, quit using it immediately and contact Dorel Asia at www.dorel-asia.com or (866) 762-2304 to receive a free replacement kit.
Buffalo has a large percentage of elderly citizens, so we are aware of the difficulties that can arise when making sure these individuals are properly cared for. On the other side of New York State, a personal injury lawsuit has resulted in the family of John Danzy, a nursing home patient, receiving $19 million in damages.
Apparently, it is the first case to have brought punitive damages against a nursing home in New York State.
According to the lawsuit and family accounts, Mr. Danzy suffered more than twenty bedsores and suffered an infection after merely six months at the facility. When he returned to his family, his weight had dropped from 237 pounds to 148 pounds.
The jury awarded Mr. Danzy’s family $3.75 million for pain and suffering and $15 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages arose, at least in part, from testimony that the nursing home had altered its records in an effort to hide the degree to which Mr. Danzy had been neglected while at the facility.
Every personal injury case, whether it takes place in Buffalo or elsewhere, hinges upon the concept of “negligence.” Simply put, negligence in a personal injury case occurs when someone is injured as a result of another party being careless. Usually a person may be considered to have been negligent if their actions fell below what would be expected of a reasonably prudent person under the same circumstances.
To prove negligence, an injured party must be able to prove that the party being sued had an obligation to act responsibly but did not fulfill that duty. Instead, he or she failed to conform to the standard of conduct that would be expected of a reasonably prudent person.
The injured party must also be able to prove that the failure of the party being sued to act as a reasonably prudent person was the cause of his or her injury. If the party being sued acted in a negligent manner but that negligence was not actually the cause of the other party’s injury, the injured party is not entitled to compensation for his or her injury.
If more than one party is found to have been negligent, for example, if the injured party is found to also have been engaging in an activity that put him or her at risk, it may impact the amount of compensation each party is responsible for providing, because responsibility for the damages may be divided among the parties based on the degree to which they were responsible for the injury.
If you suffer a serious personal injury because of an unsafe condition on someone’s property in Buffalo or elsewhere in New York State, you may be able to recover monetary damages from the property owner under the theory of “premises liability.” Premises liability is a general term applied to accidents that occur on property as a result of negligent maintenance or a dangerous condition.
In New York State, both business owners and homeowners are required to maintain their property in a manner that provides a safe environment for those who may be visiting that property various reasons, visit the property. If, for example, a property owner fails to repair an uneven sidewalk and suffers an injury caused by tripping over it, the individual injured may be able to bring a claim for various damages resulting from the injury. These damages may include medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering. Premises Liability cases involve injuries sustained on the property or premises of a negligent third party.
In addition to establishing the degree of the injury, the success of a premises liability case may also involve issues such as how long the problem that caused the injury was present on the property and how likely it was that the property owner should have been aware of the hazard.
