The Unthinkable: Maliciously Spreading the Virus and Causing Personal Injury
Working on personal injury cases is always tough but it can be tough in different ways. In many instances, an injured party was injured in an accident or through negligence. It’s important to think of tort laws being used to avoid future injury by shaping responsible policy and also offering relief to those injured. Then there’s the other types of cases. The types where malicious acts cause harm- where the burden of fault also contains potential criminal charges. It would be nice to think that no one would intentionally infect another with a disease, especially not a deadly one and especially [...]
Understanding Third-Party Agents Liability and Rights
With so many businesses closed and others tentatively opening, it can be frightening to engage with employees or to enter a building. To get around this, many people are relying on third-party agents to handle their shopping and deliver orders of food, clothing, and more straight to the home. Third party workers are often liable for actions they take even when working in a capacity for another business. Meanwhile, they lack the insurance and protections of those working for a company. They also have fewer rights than the consumers who rely on deliveries and services. What rights do these workers have [...]
Posted Warnings and Personal Injury Fault
As sectors of the economy seek to reopen in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and consumes alike wonder about the safety. Businesses, in particular, face the biting choice of staying closed, and seeing further reductions in finances, or opening and becoming exposed to liability claims. For consumers, the question remains how safe is safe and if you get ill from a business or employee, what can you do about it? Despite the constant turmoil of the past months, this question is easier to wrestle with than some others. Posting signs helps a business to instruct the public about risks [...]
The Role of Bad “Medical Advice” in Malpractice
Most people interact with doctors only when they are injured or ill. These heightened states make it easy to latch onto information, even when that information may be wrong. It can be difficult to figure out what is what when many different medical professionals provide conflicting advice. When dealing with ‘medical advice’ in malpractice cases, it’s important to the law to establish a duty between the caregiver and the patient. This distinction under the law is carefully constructed. When panicking in a hospital sett or emergency care setting, it’s easy to run into problems. What do you do when a nurse, [...]
Understanding the High Impact of COVID-19 on Nursing Homes
Protective measures and policy updates to curtail the threat of the COVID-19 coronavirus rolled out slowly and left many vulnerable. Whenever a threat occurs, it is the most vulnerable that tend to pay the highest price. It’s saddening, but not surprising, that elder care and nursing home facilities suffered immediately from the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only have they experienced high losses in terms of resident fatalities, but structural weaknesses and policy lapses have been brought to light. The impact has been so brutal that within days of first death, lobbyists for large scale facilities began pushing for State and Federal courts [...]
COVID-19 Impact on Filing for Social Security Disability
The process of filing for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) has never been easy to get through. The program requirements are complicated, like most bureaucratic language, and filing while suffering from a disability adds extra layers. Additionally, the timing of disability and retirement benefits is difficult to understand. Both SSDI and SSI share a pool of funds that they draw from, but they operate differently in terms of payouts and access to services. Currently, there’s been a jump in applications for SSDI even as medical experts struggle to understand the residual effects of COVID-19. The sudden jump in claims corresponding with [...]
COVID-19’s Impact on Auto-Accidents
It would be nice to say that there are some silver linings running along with the current state of crisis. While there are multiple reports showing that overall auto-accidents are down, they are also up in some locations. Worse, reports also indicate a marked increase in fatalities following a traffic accident as injured persons are at increased risk of exposure in hospital environments. Along with this is the further risk that being in an accident raises cases of COVID-19 related mortality. It’s becoming common to hear that certain rules and regulations have been suspended or shifted because of the pandemic. However, [...]
Onset of Mental Birth Injuries
Sadly, injuries to the brain are both more common and harder to detect after birth. The reasons are obvious, the head is the largest part of a newborn and it’s the part that must undergo the most transformation and deformation during birth. The brain is precious, which is why so much of the prenatal time is needed to develop it. Because of the size of the brain, the skull starts loose and hardens into a full shape over time. Though the body takes a great deal of time and energy into creating and protecting the brain, it is still vulnerable to [...]
Quarantine Rules and Medical Malpractice
One of the trickiest areas of law deals with the infringement of freedoms and rights. When is it okay for the government to rescind the normal rules and order for a few to protect the many? This question gets even further complicated when considering the implications from a medical malpractice viewpoint. It is necessary for a doctor to offer help to a patient but if that help comes with another set of risks, is it still a good idea? In times of panic, where people tend to make decisions more poorly and with less regard for the consequences, how can we [...]
Workers’ Compensation From Exposure: Does it Include COVID-19?
It’s tough for the American workforce right now. It’s common for many to fear exposure to a dangerous infectious disease and subsequently lose work, infect their families, or worse. Complicating this further is uncertainty of what life will be like if forced to stay at home to prevent spread or to recover from the disease. How will you cover your bills if you cannot work from an illness contracted while at work? Is exposure to COVID-19 something that workers' compensation covers? If so, how much and to what extent? The answers to these questions are tenuous and difficult to understand. This [...]
Workers’ Compensation at Home: Employees Telecommuting
The statistics on working from home and telecommuting continues to grow as information technologies increasingly decentralize the workplace. A decade ago, only 24% of workers had home offices and/or performed workplace activities from home. Last year, this number rose to 60%. This includes full time telecommuters and workers that spend at least half of the week performing duties not in the workplace. With the recent outbreak of the Covid-19 coronavirus, now more that ever, it makes sense for businesses to move equipment and bodies out of the office. One under-explored aspect of the telecommuting phenomenon is liability and responsibility when it [...]
Medical Malpractice and Infectious Disease Protocols
The number of issues that can affect your care in a medical facility are already numerous. From the moment you enter the door to the moment you leave, there’s a lot of room for error and mistakes that cost you your health. The offerings of a medical establishment usually outreach the risks, but those numbers seem smaller in the face of infectious disease scares. Hospitals and other medical facilities have an increased need to meet new guidelines for disease control to avoid risking patient health and committing medical malpractice. Hospitals need to both keep the regular services operating, as well as [...]