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Truck Accident? A Lawyer in Orlando’s Best Advice Is to Move Quickly

By accident_attorney_florida on February 25, 2013 in Article

The truck accident lawyers of Orlando have an extraordinary onus on them if they want to win their cases — they must, among all of the legal maneuverings that occur at the beginning of a case, conduct an investigation that will get them the evidence they need to win their upcoming court battle. Their biggest enemy: time! Evidence disappears quickly, especially in accident cases, which is why it’s critical that you get your lawyer working on the job as quickly as possible.

As you begin searching for the right lawyer, you want to do what you can do collect evidence yourself and keep all of your paperwork and records in order. If you see a doctor, keep your receipts as well as anything s/he gives you that describes the conditions you’re suffering — even if they seem unrelated. If you’ve been contacted by the insurance companies of the other people involved in the accident, write down who, when, and what they said.

If you can walk into your attorney’s office and hand them a fat, well-organized binder of information, your chance of winning your case skyrocket. If you can do it within 48 hours of your accident, they go up even more.

The Problems with Evidence
Physical evidence is notoriously quick to disappear in an accident. Skid marks vanish not only when it rains, but also when other vehicles drive over them (particularly if someone else skids in the same area and confuses the scene.) Broken vehicle parts like headlight plastic and whatnot are often picked up by opposing counsel if they get there first, or by litter patrols.

At the same time, the more time passes between an event and an inquisition, the more likely a person’s memory of the event is to be faulty. Our memory works less by recording every detail of an event and more by remembering two or three impressions of it and then filling in the details later. The sooner your lawyer can get depositions from the witnesses and other involved parties, the more accurate the reconstruction of the event will be.

In short, don’t wait! Get one of the truck accident attorneys in Orlando on the job now!

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If You Have an Orlando Theme Park Accident, An Attorney in Orlando Can Help

By accident_attorney_florida on February 18, 2013 in Article

The sad truth about theme park accidents in Orlando and other major family-vacation destinations is that all too often, the park itself will spend a significant amount of money to cover up an accident, mislead the family that suffered, and do the absolute minimum necessary to fix the problem before proceeding with business as usual. These families don’t realize that the theme park is legally obliged to keep their grounds — including rides, lines, booths…the whole bit — safe. If they fail at that and someone you love gets hurt because of it, they’re liable for the results.

So how do you keep a family vacation place like that honest? By hiring a theme park accident attorney from Orlando. Attorneys skilled in premises liability (also called ‘slip and fall attorneys’ because that’s the most common kind of premises liability case) know what legal channels to move through in order to firmly put the responsibility for a theme park accident right where it belongs: on the theme park.

The families that suffered this horrible misfortune have often just spent a big chunk of their nest-egg on a giant family vacation — that’s why their in Orlando in the first place — so they don’t have a lot to spend on a lawyer. That’s why most Orlando personal injury attorneys operate on a ‘no-win, no-pay’ (technically known as a ‘contingent fee’) basis: if you don’t get any money from the theme parks, the lawyer doesn’t get any money from you.

By sharing the risk of failure with you, the attorney is powerfully motivated to win your case — but you still have to keep up your end. Your attorney will ask you for paperwork, detailed affidavits and statements, and other things of evidentiary value. The more you can provide, the better your chances of winning your case; don’t think you can find a lawyer and then sit back and wait for the money to come in.

So if you get in a theme park accident, don’t assume that anything the theme park tells you is necessarily correct — get yourself a qualified lawyer to talk to you about what your real options are, and get the best result you can.

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Small Plane Crash — Lawyers in Winter Gardens Talk Legalities

By accident_attorney_florida on February 11, 2013 in Article

Much of aircraft design is performed for the purpose of making aircraft less likely to fail. The reason why is obvious: an airplane crash is a dramatic and horrifying way to die, with long minutes of knowing that the end is coming before the final fireball — and it doesn’t help that dozens or even hundreds of lives are lost all at once when an airplane falls.

Having a small aircraft certainly reduces the number of casualties, but dramatically increases the chances of a crash, for a variety of reasons. Not only are smaller crafts more fragile, but pilots flying solo or with small, personal groups are more likely to nod off, get in an argument, or have some other incident take their mind off of the flight. Finally, smaller planes aren’t equipped with the massively power autopilots that grace commercial planes.

All this means there are a surprising number of small plane crashes. Lawyers in Winter Gardens, when asked what the legal issues surrounding small plane crashes were, had a lot to say:

· Were Actual Damages Incurred? — This seems like an obvious question: if nothing else, someone’s airplane was ruined! But there are some interesting technicalities that can make this question harder to answer than it first seems.
· Who Is At Fault? — Assuming damaged were incurred, the obvious question is always who is at fault for the crash, and there’s a long list of potentially-culpable parties. The pilot and copilot are obvious ones, but the fault can also lie with air-traffic controllers, maintenance people at the airfield, or even the manufacturers of a part that malfunctioned in mid-flight.
· Can You Prove It? — Even if someone was clearly at fault for the plane crash, the question of proof remains. Because the kind of case these Winter Gardens personal injury attorneys pursue are civil cases rather than criminal ones, the proof doesn’t need to be “beyond a shadow of a doubt” — it’s merely whether or not the “preponderance of the evidence” points at the guilty party. It’s still not easy to prove, but it’s much more likely to get a victory in a civil case than you would in a criminal case against the same defendant.

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A Horrible Train Accident: Attorneys of Florida Respond To The Carol Sachs Case

By accident_attorney_florida on February 4, 2013 in Article

Generally, when you think about train accidents, you think about high-speed, high-drama events — but not all of them are quite that adrenaline-filled. Take, for example, Carol Sachs of Berkeley, CA. This poor woman was trying to board a train when the doors closed on her. She slipped between the train and the platform and her legs were crushed as the train pulled away. Both of them had to be amputated at the knee.

You can imagine that, like anyone would, she sued the train immediately for failure to provide a safe place to board, failure to warn passengers that the doors were closing, and negligently pulling away when there was a person caught between the train and the tracks. And if it weren’t for a technical detail, she almost certainly would have won.

The problem in this case is that this happened to Ms. Sachs in Austria, where the government runs the trains. U.S. law prevents civil suits from being brought against foreign governments or government-run organizations. Sachs had a solid legal argument for the suit: she purchased the ticket for the train in the U.S. before departing for Austria, and foreign governments doing ‘commercial business’ on U.S. soil are exempt from the ban on suing foreign governments.

Unfortunately for Sachs, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on March 2nd, 2013, that because the Austrian railroad was merely using the U.S. company that sold the ticket as a business partner and wasn’t actively managing the transaction, it wasn’t the Austrian government that was doing commercial business. The <a href="http://justicedeserved.com/personal-injury-central-florida-legal-services/vehicle-accident-lawyer"train accident attorneys of Florida are split about the issue.

On the one hand, many of us believe that Sachs has every right to sue the railroad — hiding your commercial activities by contracting another company to sell your products or services is a transparent dodge. On the other, several train accident lawyers across Florida understand the necessity to keep foreign governments out of our legal system — or rather, keep our legal system out of foreign governments’ affairs. As sad as it is for Ms. Sachs, the bigger picture of international relations may have to take precedence over her injury, no matter how horrific.

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Ambulance Chasers A Thing Of The Past? Personal Injury Lawyers of Florida Speak Out

By accident_attorney_florida on January 28, 2013 in Article

“Ambulance chaser” — what an awful term. The image of the personal injury lawyers of Florida (or wherever you’re from, really) actually following an ambulance to see if they can get a new client under their belt on the way into the hospital is a revolting one. Fortunately, it’s also not true, and people are starting to understand that.

The ambulance chaser is a product of the media, not of reality. Or, more accurately, those people who do become personal injury attorneys because they think that’s where the money is are going to be crappy lawyers and they won’t be in business for long. In that way, being an attorney is just like any other industry you might go into: if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing and you’re just doing it for the paycheck, you’re never going to amount to anything.

By and large, any lawyer that has been successfully practicing personal injury law for more than five years or so has to be a hard-working, ethical person who truly enjoys seeing his clients winning their just compensation for the negligence that he has suffered. The kind of money-grubbing, no-holds-barred miscreants depicted in the press will have moved on (quite possibly to Wall Street) when they found out that every case they lost cost them almost as much money as the cases they won made them.

There may have, in fact, been a time a few decades ago, when accident attorneys trolled the ER for trauma victims, handing out business cards. But that wasn’t a viable business model. The personal injury attorneys at Florida‘s plane crash sites, descending into the wreckage before the smoke had cleared, have moved on to greener pastures.

That’s because the real prize for trial lawyers who speak out for the victims of personal injuries isn’t the money — don’t get me wrong, it’s good to earn a living, but seriously — it’s about the pleasure of seeing justice done and the little guy get what he deserves. Today’s personal injury attorneys are advocates for the injured, wrongfully killed, or emotionally traumatized — definitely not the type to perk up at the sound of a siren.

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