Perhaps the only sure thing in life is death and taxes, but at least you can anticipate the exact date and time of your tax payments. But if you are a healthy, thriving person, predicting the exact time and date of your death is impossible.
However, what is possible is that you can wake up a happy and vibrant person, and an hour later while driving to work, you might end up T-boned by a speeding semi that’s just blown a red traffic light, and suddenly your soul has left your body for good. This is what constitutes a wrongful death case.
Says, MyPhillyLawyer, a wrongful death lawyer, wrongful death is all too often result of reckless indifference or gross negligence on the part of vehicle drivers, healthcare providers, employers, manufacturers, and more. Since wrongful death will often involve a family’s primary wage earner, the surviving family needs to contact a reputable wrongful death attorney right away to seek out the lost wages and monies that are now lost forever due to the wrongful death case.
According to a recent report by Health Tech, when a person suffers a sudden wrongful death, his or her loves ones are going to be shocked and enter into a prolonged period of mourning. They will feel a wide range of emotions.
But on top of dealing with heavy grief, dealing with a wrongful death case requires a lot of legal knowledge. Here are some of the basics you need to know about wrongful death in 2023.
The Legal Definition of Wrongful Death
Again, legally speaking, wrongful death is best described as the killing of a person as a result of another person’s negligence. It also means the person who is directly responsible for the death acted with reckless disregard for safety of others or even outright malice.
Wrongful death can occur any number of ways, which include when an individual suffers from medical negligence at a medical center, or when a driver who is under the influence of alcohol and drugs crashes into you and kills you. This constitutes homicide.
Wrongful death that occurs in a hospital setting usually involved a patient who’s been injured in a hospital accident. In a case like this, it is typically found that the medical center failed to take the appropriate action to protect the patient. Wrongful death in a hospital can include misdiagnosing a patient, prescribing a major surgery they do not need which leads to death, mistreatment of patients, failure to provide adequate medical care, and not adhering to standard safety protocols.
Defining Medical Negligence
Says Health Tech, medical negligence can refer to any omission or action that causes physical harm to an individual. This will include failing to treat a patient properly, neglecting to diagnose correctly, providing substandard medical assistance and care, utilizing low quality or damaged medical equipment.
Keep in mind that medical negligence can occur at any stage of a sick patient’s care. It can lead to serious consequences like serious injury, chronic illness, or even death.
Some Basics of Wrongful Death Lawsuits
If you plan on filing a wrongful death lawsuit, you must have solid evidence that a death was caused by another person’s recklessness or negligence. Negligence suggests that the killer failed to so something they were required, by law, to do. Certain examples of negligence include the following:
Wrongful death from vehicular collision: If a person dies in a car crash due to the actions of another driver, that person can be held liable from the wrongful death in a court of law. These usually include vehicular collisions where drugs or alcohol or both are involved, along with reckless and dangerous driving.
Medical center and hospital negligence: If a person has perished as the result of hospital negligence, the surviving loved ones have the right to sue the hospital for monetary damages. Hospital and medical center negligence can include anything from improperly to the blatant abandonment in the treating of a patient according to strict standard operating procedure.
Wrongful death occurring from accidents at the workplace: If a loved one dies due to a workplace accident, you as a surviving loved one will have a legal case against the employer. Employers are fully responsible for providing their employees with a safe workplace, even if the workplace is a construction jobsite.
If an accident should happen to occur and its determined that the employer was acting out of negligence in their daily duties, you can hire a wrongful death attorney and engage in a lawsuit against them.
Wrongful death is a shocking and sad way to lose a loved one way too soon. Be sure to employ the best wrongful death lawyer you can find to get the money you deserve as a surviving loved one who will be grieving for a long, long time.
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