North County San Diego Injury Lawyers
When you are injured at work, you may wonder how you can file a lawsuit and who you can bring the lawsuit against. In many cases, if you are injured at work, you cannot sue your employer. Instead of a lawsuit, you must file a workers’ compensation claim. The workers’ compensation law and its processes are quite different from a personal injury suit.
However, if you are injured at work by someone other than your employer or fellow employees, you may be able to seek personal injury damages against the responsible party. In some cases, there may even be more than one responsible party. In those types of cases, it may be easier to make your case because you only have to make your case for liability against all of the responsible parties.Then the responsible parties must present their own evidence to show that the other party caused your injury. Generally, this “finger-pointing” can lead to a larger recovery for you, because they will essentially help you prove your case against the other party.
While injuries can occur in any type of workplace, injuries are particularly commonplace in construction and other heavy industrial environments. If you think about a construction site or other heavy industrial workplace, the dangers are immediately apparent. Such places have a lot of tools, equipment, scaffolding, and materials that can cause harm to anyone on the job site. Those items can belong to anyone on the site, because many construction and heavy industrial workplaces have a number of contractors and subcontractors present. Statistically, the more workers and more dangerous materials on the job site, the more likely that an injury will occur.
In addition, injuries in construction and heavy industry tend to be more serious.Most construction injuries occur to the spine, back, or trunk area of the body. In cases where the injury is more serious, it also means that the recovery will generally be larger, because the purpose of a personal injury lawsuit is to return the injured worker to his or her pre-injury status.
You may be entitled to damages even if you are partly at fault. For example, if you should have been paying more attention to where you were walking and were injured by the negligence of a subcontractor, you may still be able to recover some damages.California law allows an injured worker to recover damages if they are partially responsible, but the amount of damages are reduced by the percentage that the worker is responsible for the injury. For example, if you are 40% responsible for your injury and you would normally be eligible for $100,000 for your injury, then you will only receive $60,000.
An injured worker’s damages may include lost wages, medical bills, and pain and suffering. If your injury is very serious, you are more likely to have a large recovery in order to cover all of the medical bills, particularly if you have a lengthy hospital stay or operations. If the injury is very severe, your pain and suffering damages can be higher because severe injuries will result in a great deal of pain that you should be compensated for.
