medical malpractice Archives - Plumides, Romano & Johnson, pc

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Tractor Trailer Accidents in North Carolina

Truck driving is one of the most under-appreciated professions. All those big trucks you see on the highway during road trips or during your commute to work are transporting food and other necessary supplies either to your local community or to somewhere beyond North Carolina. You can get an idea of how much skill it takes to drive a commercial truck successfully just by reading the North Carolina commercial drivers’ license requirements or the Department of Transportation website. For a more detailed look at all of the long-term planning and in-the-moment decision making that goes into a truck driver’s day, read Finn Murphy’s memoir about his years driving an 18-wheeler. When everything goes well, commercial trucks and their drivers deserve credit for many of the everyday comforts that you usually take for granted. When a truck driver makes a minor mistake, though, it can cause a huge accident in which dozens of people get injured and multiple vehicles are totaled. If you have been injured in a traffic accident involving a commercial truck, contact a Charlotte personal injury lawyer.

What Do You Have to Prove in a Tractor Trailer Accident Lawsuit?

If you get injured in a traffic accident involving a tractor trailer, you have the right to file a personal injury lawsuit. In order to win your case, you must prove the following things:

The truck driver had a legal duty not to cause an accident.
The driver did something irresponsible to cause the accident, such as failing to apply the brakes on time, distracted driving, or failing to keep the truck in a safe condition.
Because of the truck driver’s mistake, you sustained injuries.
Because of your injuries, you suffered financial losses, including but not limited to medical bills.

The standard of proof in personal injury lawsuits is lower than it is in criminal cases. To win a truck accident lawsuit, you must only show a preponderance of the evidence for your claims. This means that you must show that it is more likely than not that your claims are correct.

Most commercial trucks belong to large companies, such as delivery companies like Amazon or FedEx or to supermarket chains. Others belong to companies that are simply in the business of transporting freight to more medium-sized businesses. In some cases, though, the driver owns the truck. The owner of the vehicle that caused the accident, whether it is a person or a company, is legally responsible for damage caused by the vehicle. Most companies have commercial liability policies with very high limits, which means that the chances are good of recovering enough compensation to cover your accident-related financial losses without going to court.

A truck accident lawyer can help you seek damages if you suffered financial losses because of a tractor trailer accident. Contact Plumides, Romano & Johnson, PC in Charlotte, North Carolina to discuss your case.

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Healthcare is expensive, but your health is priceless. If you have been struggling to pay medical debts for years, you can at least console yourself that the medical treatment that wrecked your finances restored your health, and you are healthy enough to work to support your family and slowly chip away at your debt. What is worse is when medical treatment makes you sicker. Whether a routine medical procedure left you with a permanent disability or whether you recovered from the medical error but it caused you to require more treatment and therefore to incur more bills, you have the right to seek monetary damages if you have suffered medical malpractice. If a preventable medical error has left you with unaffordable medical bills, contact a Charlotte personal injury lawyer.

What is Medical Malpractice?

Medical malpractice is when a doctor makes a preventable error and causes a patient’s health to get worse. The error could be something as egregious as operating on the wrong body part or as subtle as not noticing a detail in the patient’s medical records that would influence the doctor’s decision about which drug to prescribe. If the error by a physician or other healthcare worker (such as a triage nurse who allowed a patient’s health to deteriorate in the emergency room waiting room while the doctors treated other patients) is the direct cause of the patient’s poor health outcome, it is medical malpractice. It is not always medical malpractice when a treatment does not work or when you get sick from a drug side effect.

In all personal injury lawsuits, you must show that the defendant breached the duty of care; in a medical malpractice lawsuit, this means that the doctor’s actions were outside the standard of care. It is obvious to all judges, jurors, and defendants that someone who was driving at 100 miles per hour on a city street was endangering other people. By contrast, the standard of care in medicine varies greatly from one instance to another, and the only way to find out whether the doctor’s actions were appropriate is to ask other doctors who perform the same type of treatments what they would have done in your case

For example, doctors must sometimes remove part of a patient’s rib in order to do a tissue biopsy to see whether a tumor in the chest is cancerous. You and I would not know which part of the rib to remove, nor would everyone who has graduated from medical school; not even every oncologist would know. You would need to ask a thoracic surgeon. Therefore, medical malpractice lawsuits often involve expert testimony from doctors with clinical experience in the same subfield of medicine as the defendant.

How Much Money Can You Win in a North Carolina Medical Malpractice Case?

A medical malpractice lawyer can help you seek damages if you suffered financial losses because of a preventable medical error. Contact Plumides, Romano & Johnson, PC in Charlotte, North Carolina to discuss your case.