Personal injury attorneys in Live Oak, FL, of the Warner, Sechrest & Butts, P.A. law office of Gainesville, Florida, serve their clients skillfully and successfully in several legal practice areas, primarily personal injury, product liability, medical malpractice, and premises liability.

A car accident attorney in Live Oak spoke recently about personal injury claims as alleging either negligence (mostly) or intent (occasionally) and presenting four basic elements:

Every car accident attorney in Live Oak defines duty as an obligation required by law, and a breach of a duty is a failure to do what the law requires, whether reasonable care to avoid or prevent negligence or a specific, usually statutory, requirement. Causation relates the breach of the legal duty to the injury for which the claimant seeks recovery of compensation in financial damages. Causation is an important issue when pre-existing injuries not related to a defendant’s alleged breach of duty are present.

A Live Oak car accident lawyer says compensatory damages are economic if quantifiable as to how much the plaintiff loses or suffers from the defendant’s misconduct. The same Live Oak car accident lawyer distinguishes noneconomic damages as necessarily indeterminate from pain and suffering, mental anguish, lost quality of life, and so on but may be enormous in severe personal injury cases.

Warner, Sechrest & Butts, P.A. advises anyone with a personal injury question to consult a Live Oak personal injury lawyer, preferably a board-certified civil law attorney. The Florida Bar recognizes only 223 of the state’s 90,000 attorneys as such experts, and four of them practice at Warner, Sechrest & Butts, P.A.

Product Liability Attorneys Serving Live Oak

In product liability law, manufacturers or sellers of defective products may be liable for injuries they cause consumers. There is no federal product liability law. Claims are under state laws of negligence, strict liability, or breach of warranty modeled on the Uniform Commercial Code.

Claimants don’t need to be the original purchasers of defective products. Anyone who foreseeably might be injured may recover compensation.

Any party in the product’s chain of distribution may be liable:

Product liability plaintiffs must prove that a defect made the product unreasonably dangerous. Three types of defect might impose liability:

• Design defects present in a product from the beginning even before manufacture
• Manufacturing defects that occur in the course of manufacture or assembly
• Marketing defects like improper labeling, insufficient instructions, or inadequate safety warnings

The res ipsa loquitur doctrine is that a defective condition would not be present without negligence. Application of the doctrine as a matter of law shifts the burden of proof in product liability cases to defendants to prove lack of negligence.

If strict liability applies, plaintiffs need not prove negligence but only the defect. By eliminating the issue of fault, strict liability laws allow plaintiffs to recover where otherwise they might not.

Plaintiffs must connect the defective product to the parties responsible for manufacturing or supplying it. An exception to this rule applies to defective medications. When a plaintiff cannot identify which pharmaceutical seller supplied the drug, each manufacturer is liable according to its percentage of sales in the area where the injury occurred.

Another defense manufacturers might raise is that a plaintiff, by substantially altering a product, caused the injury. A similar defense is that a plaintiff’s unforeseeable misuse of a product caused the injury alleged. Personal injury attorneys in Live Oak, FL, are familiar with such defenses and how to deal with them.

Live Oak Medical Malpractice Lawyers

Medical malpractice occurs when a healthcare provider’s negligence injures a patient. In the State of Florida, healthcare providers must act as would competent practitioners in similar circumstances. A healthcare provider who breaches this duty of reasonably competent practice is liable for any resulting damages.

Medical malpractice claims allege incompetent medical care that kills, harms, or worsens the condition of a patient. It is important to retain the services of an experienced Florida medical malpractice attorney as soon as possible after the injury.

Medical malpractice claims can recover compensation for medical bills, pain and suffering, and income lost due to the malpractice. Some common medical malpractice claims are

Medical malpractice lawsuits involve two areas, law and medicine. Both areas of expertise require the knowledge, skills, and abilities of our experienced medical malpractice attorneys, who:

The personal injury and medical malpractice attorneys of Warner, Sechrest & Butts, P.A. use our many years of medical malpractice experience to anticipate defense strategies. Assisted by full-time nurse paralegals, expert witnesses, and physician consultants, we can relate the provider’s negligence to client injuries convincingly. We have helped thousands of Florida clients recover compensatory damages for injuries from medical malpractice.

Premises Liability Lawyers Serving Live Oak

To succeed on a premises liability claim, the injured claimant must prove the property owner’s negligent maintenance of the property, that the property owner knew or should have known that the premises were unsafe and still failed to remedy the situation.

Live Oak accident lawyers classify many personal injuries as premises liability cases:

Under Florida law, the owner’s liability for damages depends first on the claimant’s status on the property. Trespassers do not have the same level of civil liability protection under Florida premises liability law as do those invited or authorized to be on the property. Thus, the determination of whether a claim for damages against the property owner is legally viable and, if so, for how much, starts with the claimant’s status as invitee, licensee, or trespasser.

Invitees have the most legal protection under Florida premises liability law for on-site injuries. The law imposes on owners no duty to keep premises safe for licensees, those there solely for their own purposes and neither invited nor induced to enter although the owner permits their entry. Trespassers are not supposed to be on the premises at the time they get injured and so can make no claims. Traditionally, landowners have no owed duty to trespassers other than children, to whom there is a duty of reasonable care to prevent a foreseeable risk of harm to them from artificial conditions on the land.

Cases of inadequate building security usually occur in apartment buildings or offices. Such building owners have a duty to act reasonably in securing building access by employing doormen or security guards and reminding tenants to be security conscious. If an intruder breaks in or simply walks in and assaults a resident, the injured person may have a claim if there is evidence that the building owner failed to take reasonable steps to secure the premises, Live Oak accident lawyers agree.

Consult A Board-Certified Live Oak Personal Injury Lawyer

The personal injury attorneys serving Live Oak from Warner, Sechrest & Butts, P.A. are dedicated to pursuing justice for their clients injured in personal injury, product liability, medical malpractice, or premise liability cases. As every case is unique, our personal injury law firm offers a free case evaluation to help injured claimants decide whether to file lawsuits. Any information provided is strictly confidential. Contact our law firm today to schedule a free consultation.