May 17, 2013
So, you’re on your way home from work when somebody behind you, distracted by their cell phone, slams into the back of your car. You step out, back aching, and look over the damage. This seems pretty straight-forward. The guy who hit you is clearly at fault. So all you have to do is get his insurance information, contact your insurance agent, and his insurance company will pay for everything, right? Wrong. This is a perfect example of how something might look simple when in reality it is full of complexities. Your auto accident case might seem pretty cut-and-dry …
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May 15, 2013
On Tuesday, May 14th, officials at the federal National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) made an informed declaration and suggestion regarding the benchmark for what should determine what counts as driving under the influence of alcohol (more informally known as D.U.I.). According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, currently, every state in the United States, and the District of Columbia, have laws that say that if you are driving with a blood alcohol content (BAC) of over .08, you are legally driving under the influence of alcohol and can be charged and convicted with such a crime. …
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May 9, 2013
“Wrongful death” sounds like an odd – redundant – phrase to most people (and with good reason). Why qualify the word “death” with a variant of the word “wrong?” Isn’t death always “wrong” in one way or another? Well, in the realm of the legal system, a “wrongful death” case is an instance in which damages are sought against an individual or other type of party for causing a death. Essentially, in a wrongful death case, the death was not caused by natural causes or a pure accident—nor was the result of homicide. Wrongful death cases stem from someone, …
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May 7, 2013
Lawyers as a class are the recipients of a disproportionate amount of unfavorable commentary. We are the subjects of countless jokes and derogatory phrases and we are constantly being referred to as people who try to make a buck off someone else’s misery. Our type of law in particular, personal injury, always seems to be in the hot seat, whether we’re the butt of an anecdote or being disparagingly referenced in a proposed piece of legislation. Personal injury lawyers—often degradingly and misleadingly referred to as “ambulance chasers”—fight hard to protect the rights of those who have been wronged by helping …
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April 19, 2013
So, what is a statute of limitations? A statute of limitation is a statute—an enactment in the legal system—that determines the maximum amount of time that can pass after an incident before legal proceedings based on the incident must commence. Statutes of limitations apply to both civil law (the type of law we handle) and criminal law (the type of law the government executes). There are some instances in which there are no applicable statutes of limitations. For example, in the United States, what are deemed to be “heinous crimes” carry no associated statute of limitations. Thus, as a general …
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April 15, 2013
In our office—and thus in our blog—we frequently deal with the fall-out from auto accidents, which account for a majority of the personal injury cases that we deal with. The aftermath of car accidents require a great deal of work and attention in answering many questions: Were there damages? Who was at fault? Was negligence involved? Will insurance cover this? How are medical bills going to be paid? How do we ensure the victim receives the compensation they deserve? While we certainly look at the causes of the accident in order to prove negligence on the part of the …
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April 1, 2013
Product recalls happen all the time. They entail a company or a government agency, publically issuing a recall on a product or a component of a product deemed unfit for the marketplace. These recalls are often the result of discoveries of safety issues—for example, a company coming to realize that one of its products are defective and might cause injury to the user of the product. In this blog, we’re going to outline three recent recalls—recalls of products that are similar to the ones we all use every day.
Let’s begin with a company we all grew up with: Fisher-Price. The …
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March 25, 2013
The time minutes, hours, days and weeks following an accident of any type can be perhaps the most traumatic part of mistreatment due to negligence. Often times, the actual infliction of injury, being hit by a negligent driver, for example, is a momentary and fleeting incident. It’s often the time that follows that is the most crucial in terms of both recovering from the injury and ensuring that you do all you can to obtain the justice you deserve. In this blog, we’re going to look at the typical auto accident and focus on what to do afterward in …
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February 18, 2013
There are varying degrees of justice and differing accounts of what can be defined as “justice.” In the legal system, justice is often equated to fairness. In a personal injury case, specifically, we can understand justice to be when the negligent, damage-causing party pays (figuratively and literally) for the wrong they have done (the damage they have caused the victim). While no amount of money can counteract the loss of mobility, enjoyment of life or in some cases a loved one, compensation can help the healing process in that it can assist the victims in their recovery by giving them …
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February 15, 2013
At the Law Offices of Aronberg & Aronberg, we hear about a great many “but what if…” questions, so we decided to, here in a blog, answer some common ones that you, a loved one, or a friend may have. These questions—and they are surely not a comprehensive list—are born from curiosity relating to the accident and sometimes fear in the aftermath of the accident.
But what if they didn’t mean to hit me with their car?
This is a question that people ask very often. Nobody (with the exception of a few wackos out there) means to hit …
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