The Most Common Summer Personal Injuries

Accidents that cause personal injuries happen throughout the year, but they are especially prevalent in summer for many reasons. Family vacations put a considerable number of more vehicles on American roads and highways. More traffic in grocery and convenience stores increases the incidence of slip and fall accidents. The number of construction projects rises substantially because of the large window of favorable weather. Activities such as cycling and water sports send more people to the nearest emergency medical centers.

Let’s discover the most common summer personal injuries that require our clients to seek compensation to recover financial losses.

Car Accidents

The perfect storm brews in summer for car accidents. Families take annual vacations, inexperienced teens drive more because school is out of session, and more people than in any other season travel to and from special events like baseball games and outdoor concerts.

Car accidents produce a wide variety of injuries that vary in severity. Cuts and abrasions represent the minor personal injuries sustained by a motor vehicle collision. More serious car accident injuries include whiplash, brain trauma, and spinal cord damage. The seriousness of a car accident injury is often dependent on the speed traveled by the vehicles involved in a crash. Other factors such as the type of auto collision also play a role in determining the extent of car accident injuries.

Dog Attacks

As the temperatures start to warm up, the frequency and the length of dog walks increase. This means many more interactions between canines and strangers. Some dog breeds have an innate dislike for strangers and the result can be a dog lunging at a victim and placing a strategically located bite on the leg, arm, or hand. Although dog owners in a vast majority of municipalities must keep their canines on a leash throughout walks, some dog owners flout the laws by allowing their canines to move about leash-free.

Dog attacks can create serious puncture wounds that can require a painful rabies shot. A significant loss of blood can place a victim in danger of losing consciousness. Dogs also use their strong legs to scratch victims, which generates cuts and abrasions.

Construction Sites

Even during the colder months of the year, construction sites represent the most vulnerable type of workplace to experience an accident that causes injuries. The types of construction site accidents include falling from elevated heights and prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals. Working outdoors can also lead to life-threatening heatstroke, as well as serious cases of heat exhaustion.

Trade professionals that work on road and highway projects are at risk of getting struck by a motor vehicle or construction equipment. Common summer injuries for construction workers include broken ribs, serious burns, and compound fractures caused by falling to the ground.

Slips and Falls

Hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores generate the highest sales volume during the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Each of the four venues is the ideal location for slip and fall accidents to occur. Wet floors near ice and beverage stations sometimes do not receive the urgent attention they deserve. The result of not removing a wet floor hazard can be one or more customers slipping and falling to the floor.

Slip and fall injuries can be relatively mild, such as sustaining a few bruises on the area of the body where it made an impact with a floor or object. However, slip and fall injuries can include compound fractures, particularly compound fractures of the wrist that result from a slip and fall victim using one arm to brace the body for impact.

Recreational Activities

Summer is the season for boating, cycling, and hiking, as well as numerous other types of outdoor recreational activities. A bicycle crash can cause serious, if not life-threatening injuries such as brain trauma and spinal cord damage. Getting involved in a boating accident produces many of the same types of injuries that result from car accidents, including painful and lingering whiplash symptoms. Hiking accidents typically involve an injury to a foot or leg, although falling to the ground while carrying a backpack can generate injuries to internal organs.

To receive monetary damages from filing a personal injury lawsuit, the attorney you hire from Morgan and Morgan must prove the other party committed at least one act of negligence. To prove negligence, your lawyer must establish the other party had a duty of care to protect you against harm. Your legal counselor also must show the other party breached the duty of care doctrine. The last two elements for demonstrating negligence are to prove the personal injury incident caused your injuries and that the injuries sustained caused your financial losses.

Your personal injury lawyer will request three types of monetary damages.

Special Compensatory

Also referred to as economic damages, special compensatory damages cover tangible expenses such as medical bills and property damage. You have the right to request compensation to cover the costs associated with diagnostic tests, treatment programs, and physical therapy sessions. If applicable, you also have the right to receive compensation for prescription medications and the purchase of an assistive device such as a cane.

Property damage represents another type of special compensatory damages. Your personal injury lawyer also might request compensation for lost wages, if you missed a large chunk of time from work.

General Compensatory

Because of the difficulty calculating the value of general compensatory damages, which are otherwise called non-economic damages, you should lean on the personal injury attorney from Morgan and Morgan to calculate a reasonable value. The most common type of general compensatory damages involves pain and suffering. The mental and emotional trauma after an incident that causes injuries can trigger feelings like acute fear, anger, and anxiety.

Your personal injury attorney calculates a fair value for non-economic damages by using a formula that includes the value of economic damages as a calculation factor.

Punitive Damages

Judges hearing civil lawsuits do not award punitive damages to help plaintiffs recover the financial losses caused by a personal injury incident. Instead, judges award punitive damage to punish the defendant for committing one or more acts of negligence. The legal principle behind punitive damages is to deter the defendant from committing similar acts of negligence in the future.

If you sustained one or more of the most common summer personal injuries, you should search for legal representation to recover your financial losses. The question is not whether you should hire a personal injury attorney, but instead, what factors should you consider before hiring the best legal counselor.

Proven Record of Success

Many personal injury attorneys like to boast about their years of experience. However, years of experience do not matter unless the experience is backed up by a proven record of winning favorable legal judgments. Read the positive reviews left by our clients on sites such as Yelp and Google to see for yourself the impressive record compiled for more than three decades by the personal injury attorneys at Morgan and Morgan.

Skilled Negotiators

Not every personal injury case ends up in a civil courtroom. In fact, most personal injury cases conclude when both parties reach a settlement. Negotiations can happen at any time during the legal process, but they usually unfold during the discovery phase of a civil trial. Discovery allows both parties to share evidence and witness statements. Negotiations start when your personal injury lawyer makes an offer, which is either accepted, rejected or sent back with a counteroffer.

Negotiations can consist of several rounds of counteroffers before both parties agree to settle or decide to continue the litigation process.

Provides Legal Support Every Step of the Way

When you hire a Morgan and Morgan lawyer to handle your personal injury case, you can expect your legal counselor to provide legal support from the day of the free case evaluation to the day when your case gets resolved. Unfortunately, far too many personal injury attorneys delegate responsibilities to paralegals and/or less experienced lawyers.

You do not want your personal injury case to fall in the hands of a less experienced litigator.

Every state has established a statute of limitations for the filing of a personal injury lawsuit. Most states give plaintiffs between two and four years to take legal action for a personal injury case. Because you have medical bills rapidly piling up at home, you should act with a sense of urgency by scheduling a free case evaluation with a Morgan and Morgan attorney as soon as possible after sustaining injuries that result from an accident.