Where Can I Find Burn Injury Lawyers in Big Pine Key, Florida

A burn injury lawyer provides several different types of legal support for clients.

Describes Your Rights

Different states have passed different statutes regarding personal injury cases. A Florida-licensed burn injury attorney from Morgan & Morgan explains your rights under the state’s personal injury laws. You should understand your right to file a civil lawsuit that seeks monetary damages, as well as how long you have to file a civil lawsuit. If you decide to move forward without legal representation, you run the risk of the other party’s legal counsel trying to take advantage of your lack of legal knowledge.

Gives Helpful Advice

An accomplished personal injury litigator provides advice on navigating the complex legal process for resolving burn injury cases. The most important advice is to receive comprehensive medical care and save every receipt to present to your insurance company, as well as to the other party’s lawyer. One of the most important pieces of advice you can expect to get from a Morgan & Morgan attorney is not to interact with the other party’s insurance company. The other party’s insurance company might try to convince you to accept a settlement that is nowhere near the amount of money that you deserve.

Conducts a Thorough Investigation

One of the benefits of working with a large, established law firm such as Morgan & Morgan is we employ more than 1,500 professionals who provide a wide range of support services. This includes experienced investigators who help us gather and organize evidence to present to the other party’s insurance company and the judge hearing a civil lawsuit. Part of our investigations involves interviewing witnesses to verify the validity of physical evidence. We also interview expert witnesses, such as accident reconstruction specialists.

Negotiate a Settlement

Although personal injury lawyers are more recognized as litigators during a civil trial, at Morgan & Morgan, we first try to negotiate a favorable settlement for our clients before we ask a judge to set a date for the start of a trial. Negotiations start with one of our Big Pine Key, FL burn injury lawyers presenting an offer to the other party. The other party can either accept the offer or send us a counteroffer. Negotiations can take several rounds of counteroffers before either party ends the back-and-forth sessions to move forward with a civil trial.

Represents You During Different legal Processes

One of the Big Pine Key, FL burn injury lawyers at Morgan & Morgan can act as an intermediary between you and the other party’s insurance company. If your case goes to trial, having an experienced litigator in your corner ensures you receive the best legal representation. An experienced lawyer examines witnesses, files timely motions, presents persuasive evidence, and argues forcefully but tactfully while asking the judge hearing your case to approve a satisfactory value for monetary damages.

The key to winning a burn injury case is to prove that one or more other parties committed an act of negligence that caused you harm. Negligence represents a legal principle that holds an individual or a company legally liable for causing harm to a victim. To prove another party committed one or more acts of negligence, your legal counsel must demonstrate the presence of four elements.

Duty of Care

The first element of negligence to demonstrate is called duty of care, which means showing the other party was responsible for protecting you against an accident. For example, the owner of a gas station owes you a duty of care to prevent a gas fire from causing you harm. Another example concerning burn injuries is the owner of a commercial property that catches fire. The owner of the commercial property owes everyone working in the building the duty of care to prevent a fire from causing injuries.

Breaching the Duty of Care

Although proving the first element called duty of care is typically easy to do, demonstrating the other party breached the duty of care requires detailed investigative work. This is the point during a burn injury lawsuit when a personal injury attorney from Morgan & Morgan makes a huge difference regarding legal representation. Our team of investigators works around the clock to collect and present convincing evidence that proves the other party breached the duty of care doctrine.

Breach Caused Your Injuries

The third element for proving negligence involves linking the breach of the duty of care doctrine directly with your injuries. The defendant in your civil lawsuit might have breached the duty of care doctrine, but the actions taken did not cause your injuries. Another aspect of the causation element determines whether the defendant involved in your civil lawsuit could have reasonably known that the actions taken by the defendant might have caused an injury. For example, the steam rising from a buffet table burns your hands and arms, but the restaurant can be exonerated from causing the steam burns because the restaurant could not have reasonably foreseen the personal injury incident.

You Endured Financial Losses

Now we come to the most important reason to hire one of the best Big Pine Key, FL burn injury lawyers. The fourth element of proving negligence requires your Morgan & Morgan personal injury attorney to prove the incident that caused you harm also caused you to lose money. Medical bills alone can put you in serious financial distress. The results of diagnostic tests represent influential evidence that allows your lawyer to connect the cause of your injuries to the suffering of financial losses.

The most important reason why you should hire one of the Big Pine Key, FL burn injury lawyers from Morgan & Morgan is to ensure you meet every deadline mandated by state law. Florida has established the statute of limitations for filing a personal injury lawsuit at two years. The clock starts ticking for the deadline on the day when you sustained your injuries.

If you do not file a burn injury lawsuit before the expiration of the Florida statute of limitations, you can expect a court clerk to dismiss your case. Although two years can seem like plenty of time to file a civil lawsuit, you should act with a sense of urgency and file your civil lawsuit as quickly as possible after the burn injury incident. Witness accounts tend to be more accurate right after a personal injury incident, as opposed to a couple of years after the incident.

The judge hearing your case can award up to three types of monetary damages.

Economic Damages

Economic damages represent the most important type of monetary damages because, for a burn injury case, your financial losses just for medical bills can run into tens of thousands of dollars. You have the right to seek compensation to recover the costs of diagnostic tests, treatment programs, and physical therapy sessions. Recuperating from burn injuries often requires months—if not years—of rehabilitation. This means your attorney can ask for compensation to cover the costs of future treatment programs and physical therapy sessions.

You also have the right to request compensation for lost wages. Severe burn injuries make it impossible to get out of bed, much less hold down a steady job. Your personal injury lawyer presents financial records that indicate how much money you have lost because your burn injuries forced you out of work.

Non-Economic Damages

You also have the right to seek non-economic damages, which cover issues such as mental anguish and emotional distress. Your personal injury attorney from Morgan & Morgan calculates the value of non-economic damages by referring to a formula that includes the value of economic damages.

Punitive Damages 

Punitive damages penalize the defendant for committing one or more acts of negligence. Judges and juries typically determine the value of punitive damages based on the seriousness of the negligent acts, as well as the litigation record of the defendant. For example, if the defendant has faced a previous civil lawsuit for negligence, a judge or jury might award a higher-than-average value for punitive damages.

After sustaining one or more burn injuries, your focus should be on recovering from the injuries. When you hire one of the highly-skilled Big Pine Key, FL burn injury lawyers from Morgan & Morgan, you are able to concentrate on getting better while knowing that your case is in the most capable hands.

Schedule a free case evaluation to get the ball rolling on your burn injury case.