All We Do Is Injury Law

Our firm uses the slogan “All we do is injury law” to summarize what our firm’s focus is. However, there are really many types of cases within personal injury law. As a Virginia (VA) personal injury attorney, it always amazes me that clients may not fully understand what areas of law we practice in when we say we do injury law. I have had a client indicate that he didn’t contact me about the wrongful death of his son who was hit on a bicycle by a motor vehicle because he didn’t think we did wrongful death cases. I have had other clients who while listening to our voice message for clients on hold realize that we handle automobile cases, not just train wreck and railroad injury cases. We hope that our clients realize that we handle cases in all areas of injury law and not just in Virginia (VA), North Carolina (NC) and West Virginia (WV) but throughout the eastern United States.

Some of the other areas which come under the heading “injury law” include auto accidents, collisions involving tractor trailer negligence, motorcycle wrecks and cases where a pedestrian or bicyclist is hit by a car. From the stand point of a Virginia personal injury lawyer, all of these injuries cases involve motor vehicles. From the stand point of getting a fair recovery to compensate a person for injuries suffered by a motor vehicle, these cases all have much in common. It doesn’t really matter whether the motor vehicle involved in the accident is a car, a light truck, a big rig, or a golf cart. We are experienced in dealing with all these different combinations and scenarios. Obviously the insurance law applicable and the coverage rules are different in a large interstate truck with a million dollars of coverage compared to a passenger car that may have minimum coverage which in Virginia is $25,000 per person. However, whatever the type of motor vehicle wreck we are experience in handling cases where someone is hurt or killed by the actions of someone else operating such vehicles.

Injuries that we represent people on involve all sorts of different kinds of trauma and medical services. This means that our field of expertise involves all parts of the human body that can be hurt in an accident. These range from death down to strain/sprain injuries to the connective tissue in the back. However, there are certain typical injuries that we have developed experience with over firm’s lawyers’ decades of practice. For example, traumatic brain injuries are very complex injuries which often occur in accidents. We are also very used to dealing with plastic surgery injuries such as burns and scarring to the skin. Another area that we as personal injury lawyers deal with regularly are broken bones and other injures requiring surgery to the musculoskeletal system, including all the joints like knee injuries, shoulder injuries, elbow injuries and hand injuries. We have many cases that involve spinal injuries like herniations, ruptures or protrusions of the discs separating the bones of the spine. This kind of injury to the spine and to its discs routinely occurs in car wreck and FELA injuries to railroad workers. In the area of FELA injuries caused by railroad companies to their workers, there are certain types of injuries that we see over and over again such as carpal tunnel problems with the wrist and hands requiring surgery, bulging discs in the back, traumatic hearing loss and tinnitus from loud noise in the railroad work environment and, tragically, severed limbs. Often the injuries in railroad related cases are among the most severe because of the huge size and weight of railroad equipment which causes major destruction when it comes in contact with the human body or a vehicle.

Another set of areas of personal injury law that we routinely deal with has to do with who is the actor causing an injury. Injuries that occur as a result of errors by health care providers are common. These cases are often referred to as medical malpractice cases, and can also include nursing home or hospital negligence. A common theme in this kind of injury is that the person responsible is someone in the medical field providing services. Under Virginia law there is a whole special set of statutes or written laws governing what happens when medical mistakes occur and cause injury. These cases typically involve permanent and catastrophic injuries because unless such injuries are involved it’s hard to justify taking on the fight against doctors and their powerful insurance companies under the challenging law in Virginia to prove these cases.

Another area of injury law that Hajek, Shapiro, Cooper, Lewis and Appleton regularly practice in is premises liability. There are many terms that you may have heard of to describe premises liability cases. However these injury cases are the ones where you get hurt at a particular place where the owner or occupier of the land or building has done something wrong to cause the injury. Sometimes these cases are referred to as trip and fall injuries cases, slip and fall injury cases or similar language. The common denominator in these injuries and wrongful death cases is that someone having a duty to properly keep their premises safe has failed to do so by leaving a dangerous condition that should have been corrected or warned about. Many times these cases are against businesses like restaurants, stores, or railroad companies who know that people will be on their land and yet fail to take proper safety precautions to prevent injuries. Often these cases involve someone slipping on water that has been left on the floor or tripping because of a hole that has been left unrepaired. However premises liability cases can involve things like falling merchandise that has been stack to high by a warehouse store in such a way that is falls onto customers. In the railroad context it often involves children playing near railroad tracks or other dangerous industrial sites with horrible results.

A further area of injury cases are ones against manufacturers or distributors of products or services which are defective and cause harm to death to an individual. These cases can involve major, expensive and complex products, like airplanes that crash because of some flaw, down to much more simple, everyday household products. Defective products can include a space heater which does not have appropriate safety devices and causes a house fire where a family gets hurt. Often products liability cases arise out of industrial accidents such as a ladder which is improperly made that causes someone to have a severe injury. For more information about these and other types of injury cases, please look at our website under the case results section at www.hsninjurylaw.com. I hope that this summary of what we mean when we say “all we do is injury law” is helpful to you in defining all the different types of cases that we get involved in. Obviously, I hope that neither you nor your loved ones get hurt in any fashion. However, if you are hurt as a result of someone else’s wrong doing or think that you may have been, I hope that you will contact us to see if we can help.