Los Angeles Injury Lawyer Blog

This is part two in a two part series relating to social benefits from personal injury lawsuits.

Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on February 12, 2010. He should not have.

Lawsuits remind people to take the care necessary to make sure they do not injure others.

The designer of the luge course and the International Olympic Committee knew in advance how dangerous the course was and still sent relatively inexperienced luge riders down the track. They knew athletes were crashing more often, and at higher speeds than normally occur in the sport.

Such dangerous conditions occur because the speed and danger of the track make the event sell better. It makes the race more exciting. It also saves the money that should have been spend on having an engineer review the course to determine how high that safety wall should have been, and the expense of making the course safer, including a higher wall and padding and barricading the steal beams next to the track.

Huffington Post blogger Marian Salzman wrote: “With 82 countries participating in the Games this year, shouldn't the course have been designed to be safe for all of them? Where were the safety wardens?”

Personal injury lawyers are part of the safety wardens in Southern California. Any business knows that when they produce a defective product or a dangerous product, and sell it, personal injury lawyers will hold them accountable. Personal injury attorneys will make them pay for their negligence. So, manufacturers are more careful.

Even when you drive on the freeway, people watch how fast they are going. Why don’t people speed more? Because they do not want to get a ticket. The reason people do not want to get tickets is because it will make their insurance rates go up. Tickets make insurance rates go up because speeding causes auto accidents. It places other people in unnecessary danger.

When drivers hurt people, car accident attorneys hold the negligent driver accountable. These lawsuits give people a reason to be more careful when they drive. Drivers are forced to think about the safety of others not only to protect other people (which is the right thing to do), but also to prevent their insurance rates from going up.

This is part one in a two part series relating to social benefits from personal injury lawsuits.

People in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California are hurt in auto accidents and through the negligent of others all the time.

Everyone hates lawyers. Juries tell us there are too many lawsuits. Governor Schwarzenegger is taking aim at lawyer with his supposed tort reform proposals.

The loss of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili highlights why the work of Los Angeles personal injury lawyers is so important.

The Vancouver luge track, has been described as the fastest ever built prompting safety concerns before the death. Why wasn’t it fixed? Nodar was competing in a sport with inherent risks, therefore the luge track owners may assert “assumption of the risk” as a defense and escape liability for causing the death of Nodar. Imagine how this story might have ended if the track builder knew they would have to pay for the harm they caused.

The new track had a reputation for causing crashes in all but the most experienced sliders. Most alarming was the fact that race officials knew that lugers were traveling at record speeds and crashing. They knew that this was a dangerous corner, and even erected a slight extension to the wall at the fatal turn. However, they did not take the simple and inexpensive additional precautions of erecting a higher wall and most importantly, protecting riders from the exposed steel beams next to the track. Had their responsibility for their decisions not been shielded from lawsuits, things would have been different.

Part two of this series will discuss how this tragedy relates to Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyers keeping people safe.

This is the third in a three-part series about birth injuries in Los Angeles County.

Macrosomia is a condition in which a fetus’ birth weight is much greater than is normal during pregnancy. Generally, macrosomia is defined as a birth weight greater than 4000 grams or 8 pounds, 13 ounces. It is a condition that affects one in ten pregnancies.

Some factors that contribute to macrosomia - genetics, ethnicity, and the size of the parents - cannot be controlled. Other factors that may predispose a fetus to unusual growth in utero can be identified and should be addressed by the obstetrician. If the mother has gestational diabetes, excessive weight gain or diabetes mellitus, her fetus is at risk to develop macrosomia, which is associated with birth trauma to the baby and mother. Women whose pregnancies go on longer than they should are also at risk to develop macrosomic babies.

The larger the fetus, the greater likelihood that the baby and/or mother will suffer injuries during delivery. If there is ultrasound evidence that the baby is very large, the doctor needs to take this into consideration when discussing delivery options with the parents.

A woman with a history of having had several large babies without difficulty vaginally may be an appropriate candidate for a vaginal delivery. A petite woman pregnant with a first baby that appears on ultrasound to weigh nearly ten pounds, should be advised of the risks of vaginal delivery and advised to undergo a planned Cesarean section.

Continue reading "Southern California Doctors' Medical Malpractice Causing Erb's Palsy" »