What are the Most Common Personal Injury Cases in Kentucky?

The terms or phrases “personal injury” or “personal injury case” get used often in the legal world. However, a personal injury case is a broad term and a phrase that includes various situations. The basis of a personal injury case comes when there is negligence involved, meaning that one or more parties behaved carelessly, which causes an accident that results in harm to others.

What is a Personal Injury Case? 

A personal injury case is any case where someone else’s actions or a business’ actions or inaction injures someone. Those actions can be affirmative acts—such as when someone runs a red light. Or, they can be an omission, where someone doesn’t do something that they should have—such as when someone fails to clean a floor. They can also occur when a doctor fails to prescribe a prescription or a medical procedure. 

Saying a personal injury case is any case where you get injured is very broad. But there are many different kinds of personal injury cases, and certain types tend to happen or occur more often than others.

Car Accidents

A typical personal injury case is a car accident. However, saying that every case involving a car is the same is certainly not true. Even within the vast category of car accident cases, different car accidents happen very commonly.

For example, a car or motorcycle accident case can include:

• A rear-end accident.
• An accident in an intersection caused by the other person running a red light or a stop sign. 
• A lane change accident, where someone doesn’t look to see that the lane they are going into is empty.
• Hitting a pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorcyclist.
• Hit and run accidents, also known as “phantom” or unknown drivers.
• Commercial truck accidents.

Because there are so many cars on the road and so many ways that people can get in accidents while driving cars or motorcycles, this is hardly an all-inclusive list. Additionally, anybody in a car can be a car accident victim, including passengers. 

However the accident happens, car accidents remain one of the most common personal injury cases.  Call your Louisville car accident attorney with any questions.   

Slip and Falls

A slip and fall is a case where someone falls while on or on someone else’s property, usually because a foreign object or substance was on the floor. It may be accidental, such as when something spills, or purposeful, such as when a worker is actively cleaning the floor, but if the store just doesn’t put markers or cones around the dangerous area to alert people that the floor is dangerous.

Slip and falls also can include situations where there is no foreign object on the floor. Perhaps there is a condition on the floor that is dangerous. Examples may be when someone leaves an object on a walkway or a crack or a brick on the floor that creates an uneven walking surface that causes someone to fall.

Slip and fall cases don’t just happen in stores or businesses-they can also occur in people’s homes. Homeowners have the same obligation to keep their property safe as business owners do.  Call your Louisville personal injury attorney with any questions.

Negligent Security

Businesses must keep their property safe. That includes keeping the actual physical premises safe by minimizing, lowering, or eliminating the risk of criminal activity that could end up causing someone an injury.

A negligent security case involves three “actors”: You (the victim), the store or property owner, and the perpetrator or criminal. Although it seems like criminals act independently, and a store owner has no responsibility for your being a victim of violent crime, that is not the case. Stores located in high crime areas must take proper security measures to lower the chance of crime happening on the premises.

Standard safety measures are employing security guards, using gates or fences, proper lighting in parking lots, and using video cameras to deter criminal activity.  

Products Liability

Often, products do not work the way they are supposed to, and people get injured. Many product liability cases make national news when things like cars, airbags, drugs, or other products don’t function properly.

Product liability cases can involve an item that is just a “defect,” such as where a single product comes off the assembly line differently from other similar products. Product liability cases can also involve a product that works as it is supposed to. It’s just that the product was made or designed dangerously.

In a product liability case, you or your Louisville personal injury lawyer must do the following: hire experts who will look at a product, analyze what went wrong, how the product was made or designed, and render an opinion on whether the product was made or designed dangerous.

All parties responsible for the sale of a defective product are liable for the injuries the product causes. In other words, not only the manufacturer or maker of the product is liable for your injuries, but also distributors or retailers.

Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice is an action or omission taken by a medical provider that falls below the accepted standard of care. It is where a medical provider does something different than what most other medical providers in the same field or specialty would do.

Any medical provider can get sued for medical malpractice—not just doctors or doctors who treat you. Nurses, acupuncturists, radiologists, anesthesiologists, and other medical specialties can all commit medical malpractice.

Not every bad medical outcome means that there was medical malpractice—medicine is, after all, still an inexact science. Your Louisville personal injury lawyer will need to retain and hire an expert to evaluate your medical records and what your medical providers did or didn’t do to see if you have been a victim of medical malpractice.  

Nursing Home Negligence

Nursing homes get charged with safeguarding the most vulnerable members of the population, a population that is generally not able to care for themselves-the elderly and infirm. Unfortunately, many nursing homes are understaffed, have untrained employees, or the team doesn’t know how to deal with difficult patients or patients with complex medical needs.

Nursing home personal injury cases can include a broad range of situations. For example, a resident may be mobile and walking and then fall because it was not medically advisable for the person to be walking about. Someone can be walking about and fall on items on the floor.

Even the things supposed to protect nursing home residents, like bed rails, can cause injury.

Many residents are injured when the staff ignores their needs, such as not being moved in bed or in pain, and staff may be non-responsive in coming to their aid.

Because many nursing home residents have medical needs and get treated by doctors inside the home, a nursing home resident can also be the victim of medical malpractice while in a nursing home.

Some residents may even find themselves victims of physical or sexual abuse, either from fellow residents or the home staff.  

Dog or Animal Bites or Injuries

The owner of an animal is liable for the injuries caused by that animal. The animal owner doesn’t have to have known, in advance, that the dog could bite or cause injury. The fact that an owner is “surprised” that their dog injured someone is not a defense either.

Many animals can injure other people not out of anger or aggression but just accidentally. For example, an exuberant dog may jump on someone and cause them to fall or scratch them. Even if the dog injures someone else just being playful, the owner can be liable. 

Speak To A Louisville Personal Injury Attorney

These examples are hardly an exhaustive list of all the kinds of personal injury cases. Many other personal injury cases can be pretty standard. Examples include injuries at amusement parks, gun shops negligently selling weapons to unauthorized individuals, or where a daycare or school fails to supervise children, resulting in personal injuries. 

The law doesn’t require that you categorize your personal injury case, and where it does, your Louisville personal injury lawyer can help you. You don’t need to worry about what kind of personal injury case you have. So long as you are injured and believe that someone or a business may have been responsible, you have a right to sue for your injuries.

Call our Louisville personal injury attorneys at Claim Your Justice to schedule a free consultation at 847-434-3555 to help you with your personal injury case.