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How Outside Experts Help Victims Build Strong Evidence in Truck Accident Claims

Victims who go up against large trucking companies after an accident are tasked with proving the extent of their injuries and the emotional, physical, and financial changes the accident has caused. As part of that process, it sometimes becomes necessary to bring in experts and professionals who can help victims prove their claims. This might include the services of:

Medical experts
Attorneys
Trucking-industry and safety experts
Economic experts
Accident reconstructionists

These outside experts play an important role in truck accident cases, and the testimony they provide can make a big difference for victims with serious injuries or unusual circumstances.

Bringing in an Expert Can Help You Prove an Injury Claim After a Truck Accident

The legal process that victims must go through to claim compensation for their injuries is often difficult. Victims can collect evidence from the scene, keep their receipts from medical care, and save their medical records, but presenting and making sense of the information is a huge part of winning a claim. Expert witnesses can help prove a victim’s claims by:

Interpreting existing evidence. Doctors, engineers, trucking professionals, and other experts understand industry-specific language, procedures, and common practices, and they can offer insight into what documentation and facts really mean in practice.
Providing expert opinions. Expert witnesses can also provide opinions and important calculations when it comes to questions of how an accident took place or what your financial and medical future might look like as you recover from the accident.

Getting access to the expert witnesses you need isn’t easy on your own, but an attorney who is experienced with truck accident claims will have the resources, connections, and knowledge to arrange for everything needed to prove your claim and get a fair outcome after you have been hurt by a driver’s recklessness or a trucking company’s negligence.

Need more information about your rights after a truck accident? Request your free copy of our book, The 8 Steps to Follow After Your Illinois Car Accident, or contact our Chicago personal injury team directly to start taking control of your case today.

Confusion and Difficult Injury Claims Often Follow Serious Multi-Car Wrecks

Multiple-car wrecks and highway pileups only take a few terrifying moments to cause serious injuries and death, but the victims of these wrecks could be left waiting for fair compensation for months or years after an accident. With more parties involved in an accident, it simply takes more time to determine what happened, who was responsible, and how victims can get compensation for their injuries. And, before victims have these basic answers about the cause of an accident, it’s hard to know what to do or where to turn in the meantime.

Why Multiple-Car Accidents Create So Many Legal Difficulties for Seriously Injured Victims

While looking at the cause of an accident can help victims and their attorneys determine responsibility after a wreck, the causes of accidents that involve multiple vehicles, people, and insurance companies aren’t always immediately clear because there are:

Many victims. In cases where a large number of people are hurt because of the reckless behavior or one or two drivers, the insurance companies responsible for compensating injuries will be very vigilant about limiting claims and avoiding blame.
Many differing reports. It’s hard to get a clear idea of what happened when multiple drivers and passengers are involved in a large, serious wreck. Each person will have his own opinion and account of the accident, making these kinds of injury claims very dependent on solid evidence.
Multiple responsible parties. When dozens of vehicles are involved in a major pileup or chain-reaction wreck, there may be more than one person responsible for what happened. Victims who were hurt may have a lot of trouble understanding who can be held responsible out of the dozens of potentially liable drivers.
Months involved in the investigation of a large accident. Even after the accident scene is cleaned up and victims have started to recover, answers can remain unclear. The accident will be thoroughly investigated, analyzed, and documented by law enforcement officials, attorneys, and insurance adjusters—and this process can stretch on for weeks or months after a multiple-vehicle accident.

If you have been involved in a multiple-car accident, don’t hesitate to reach out to our experienced Chicago legal team for answers. Our personal injury attorneys have extensive experience helping families with large and difficult injury claims, and we will take the time to answer your questions with the care and attention you deserve. Call today at 312-332-1400 for help, or use the Live Chat button on this page to connect with us immediately.

Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Continues Despite High-Profile Cases

Although many people are quick to believe that recent, well-publicized cases of child sexual abuse in schools and religious communities across the nation have reduced the amount of abuse that goes on in these kinds of institutions, the truth is that sexual abuse is still a risk. More people are now aware of the issue in light of major cases covered in the media, such as the allegations against the Catholic Church, but this new awareness has not stopped children from being sexually abused by adult authority figures in schools, afterschool activities, and community groups. In fact, the response to this greater awareness may make it even more difficult to report and pursue cases of potential sexual abuse.

Institutional Policies on Child Sexual Abuse Create Bigger Problems

While highly publicized cases of child sex abuse have not stopped abuse from happening, they have meant that institutions that work with children are being more careful about putting policies in place that protect their image if allegations do come up. It hasn’t been unusual in the past for suspected abusers to be moved to another facility or for claims of child sexual abuse to be quietly settled with families away from the public eye. While many families do hope to avoid publicity when sexual abuse is involved, these kinds of actions can:

Hide abuse from public sight
Open the potential for other children to be abused
Help abusers avoid accountability for devastating abuse

Additionally, even employees of these institutions who try to report suspected abuse may be deterred from taking their complaints further or making the issue public. Companies and organizations may make it difficult for adults to report suspected sexual abuse of a child to the appropriate authorities, especially when there is very little evidence against the abuser.

Getting Help If Your Child Has Been Abused by an Adult Authority Figure

Whether the potential abuser is a teacher, coach, pastor, or employee of a childcare facility, parents can take legal action to hold sexual abusers responsible for emotionally and physically hurting a child. For more information about your family’s rights after allegations of sex abuse, or to make contact with an experienced attorney who can answer your questions confidentially, call our Chicago office today at 312-332-1400 or use the Live Chat button on this page.

Patients Often Suffer Medical Mistakes Without Apology or Acknowledgement From Doctors

When patients are affected by a medical mistake, they rarely hear the words “I’m sorry”—and they might not hear about it at all. National Public Radio (NPR) recently published an article addressing the issues surrounding the non-disclosure of medical errors and the pressing question of why doctors and hospitals have only rarely taken responsibility for mistakes in the past.

Medical Mistakes Are More Common Than You Might Think

Medical mistakes are very common, and NPR cites a 2013 study from the Journal of Patient Safety, saying that an estimated 210,000 hospital patients die every year due to medical errors—and that number doesn’t include the many other patients who are harmed outside of the hospital, left with non-life-threatening injuries, or make a full recovery.

The reality is that human error is always a possibility in medical care. But why are so many mistakes hidden from patients and their families, and why do so many families end up paying for errors they weren’t responsible for? Unfortunately, there has been a long-time policy of silence about mistakes in the medical community, but new changes in the patient-care industry may be forcing medical providers and facilities to reconsider how these kinds of incidents are handled.

What Should Happen After a Medical Mistake

In a perfect world, care providers who make medical mistakes would take responsibility for their errors and reach out to patients in order to:

Disclose. Even when errors are known, patients may not be informed. The first step toward taking responsibility for a medical mistake is letting a patient know what happened and why.
Apologize. Although an apology can’t change what happened, patients deserve a sincere apology when the provider they’ve trusted with their health makes a mistake.
Compensate. While negligent doctors and hospitals should foot the bill after a mistake and sometimes do, the Journal of Patient Safety published data that showed at least 30 percent of patients hurt by medical mistakes end up paying some or all of the costs of the error.

In practice, however, doctors are often hesitant to take responsibility for mistakes and oversights, and the problem may not be as easy to address as it should be.

Why Doctors May Be Hesitant to Admit Medical Mistakes

Why are medical professionals so hesitant to admit their mistakes? Many doctors and care providers fail to address mistakes because:

They are afraid of humiliation and loss of reputation.
They fear malpractice claims from patients.
They simply don’t know how to react because they’ve never been trained for the event.
They are following hospital or risk-management policies at work.

In many cases, these roadblocks to transparency could be opened with the right training and policies in place, but it has so long been an industry practice to hide errors that hospitals and doctors are hesitant to start looking at the problem. However, with the urging of advocates around the nation, change may be close on the horizon for many care providers.

How Disclosure Policies Help

As more medical schools begin to address the issue of medical mistakes and more medical facilities and hospitals adopt disclosure policies, patients may see a major change in how they are treated after an error. Additionally, other care providers and medical support staff—such as nurses, medical assistants, dentists, pharmacists, and more—are also now more likely to receive training about how to handle mistakes ethically and with the patient in mind.

Beyond the ethical concerns, there is some evidence that training and formal disclosure policies actually help reduce malpractice claims after errors, could actually build patient-doctor relationships, and don’t have a dramatic effect on whether or not a patient pursues legal action.

However, despite the ways patient care is changing, some medical providers and facilities still attempt to conceal medical mistakes as a matter of policy—and when they do, patients can get help uncovering the truth.

If you or your loved ones have been hurt because a doctor, pharmacist, dentist, nurse, or other care provider made a mistake, you deserve an apology and some acknowledgement of the error. For more information about your rights in these difficult situations, or to take advantage of a free case review, don’t hesitate to contact our office by using the live-chat service on this page.

Cooking Accident Sends Four Macy’s Employees to the Hospital With Burns

When most people imagine a gas explosion or flash fire at a workplace, they probably think about dangerous professions like construction, oil & gas work, or electrical work. However, tragic accidents can happen at almost any workplace, and they are often most dangerous when they aren’t an expected risk of the job. A recent cooking fire at a Chicago Macy’s store is an example of how a sudden fire can cause serious injuries for unsuspecting workers in any industry, as four workers were hurt during the seemingly safe activity of enjoying an employee breakfast.

Macy’s Cited by Fire Department After Aerosol Can Explodes and Causes Fire

The incident took place at Macy’s State Street location just before 10:00 a.m. on Friday, November 21, while employees of the store were gathered for a pancake breakfast before the store opened. A flash fire broke out when a can of aerosol butane exploded during the event. Although the fire quickly put itself out, four employees suffered burns in the short blaze and were transported to the hospital. At least one of those four employees suffered severe burns to the face, while the other three reported more minor burn injuries. Thankfully, no customers were present in the store at the time of the accident because the store had not yet officially opened for the day.

According to reports of the incident, the aerosol can that started the fire ruptured because it had overheated during the cooking event, and Macy’s received a citation for improper handling and storage of butane.

What Are the Rights of Employees Who Are Hurt by a Fire or Explosion in the Workplace?

Although a lot depends on the details of each individual case of injury, most workers generally have the right to recover compensation for on-the-job injuries under workers’ compensation programs. Injured employees may also have the right to take legal action against a negligent company other than the employer if it contributed to the injuries, such as the manufacturer of a dangerous product or defective equipment. However, the complexity of the laws involved can make the legal process following an injury confusing, especially for workers who get hurt in unusual accidents. Because their rights to compensation may hinge on unclear questions, a thorough investigation of each accident and a strong understanding of injured workers’ rights are vital for the individuals and families who suffer when something goes wrong in a workplace.

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An Experienced Truck Accident Attorney Knows What to Look for After a Crash

After a serious wreck involving an 18-wheeler or large truck, victims may need to turn to an experienced personal injury attorney for help preserving evidence and avoiding insurance-industry tricks. Although it may be possible to settle a serious injury claim against a trucker or trucking company without legal help, it can be extremely difficult to secure the maximum recovery for your family without a trained eye on your side. This is why it is so important to get an attorney involved with your truck-accident case as soon as possible after you’ve been hurt.

Experienced Attorneys Know What to Look for While Victims Focus on Recovery After a Truck Accident

While it may be obvious that you need to take photographs of the damage to your car and get copies of your medical records, there is usually more evidence involved in successfully resolving a claim against a commercial driver or trucking company. While victims may overlook this information, or even be unaware that it exists, an attorney knows what to look for when it comes to less obvious information and evidence, such as:

Important evidence from the scene of the accident. Although you may have been transported to the hospital immediately, the witnesses and evidence at the scene of the truck wreck can be key to proving your case later on. If you or a family member reaches out for help, an attorney can be present at the scene to collect evidence on your behalf.
Driver logbooks and documentation from the trucking company. Some documentation kept by the trucking company, such as logbooks and loading records, can help pinpoint factors that contributed to the wreck and establish fault or negligence by the truck driver or company.
Accident reconstruction and expert opinions. Sometimes, it becomes necessary to bring in experts to offer opinions on your medical recovery, what caused the accident, trucking-industry standards, economic losses, and other specialized topics. An experienced injury attorney will have the resources and knowledge to work effectively with these experts to prove a victim’s claim.
Other potentially responsible parties. While it’s easy to put the blame on the truck driver, many truck accidents are the fault of manufacturers, loaders, maintenance workers, and others. An experienced attorney can quickly review your case and identify the parties who may be held responsible for what happened.

For more information about protecting your rights after a truck accident in Illinois, don’t hesitate to reach out to our compassionate Chicago legal team by phone today. We have helped victims across the state hold negligent trucking companies and reckless drivers responsible for life-altering injuries and fatal accidents, and we hope that we can help your family get the answers you need and understand how to take action.