Making Life In Acadiana Safer
Our legal system’s approach to injury cases in Louisiana and America helps to repair harms suffered due to mistakes while also motivating positive change to avoid future harms. We recently ran across a great example of this in our practice.
In October 2016 one of our clients was pushing her family member in a wheelchair from the parking lot onto the sidewalk at a favorite restaurant. Due to a defective ramp [pictured here you can see it had unsupported edges and a deteriorated, rough transition from the parking lot] the wheelchair fell over and our client fractured two vertebrae and aggravated a lumbar disc trying to prevent injury to her mom.
Sometimes life turns on a dime, and it happened just that fast: one second you’re pushing mom up the ramp, the next second there’s a fall and you are on the ground with a broken back.
Due to the abundance of good, quality medical care in Acadiana, and with fortune smiling upon her, our client is fine today. We were fortunate to utilize Louisiana’s laws to recover her medical expenses and a tidy sum for her pain, suffering and inconvenience. And to top it all off we came across a great improvement at the site of the accident.
Great improvements were made that will prevent such an accident happening again. Now the ramp is inset so wheelchair tires can’t fall off the sides of the ramp. And the transition from the parking lot to the sidewalk is smooth so the chair will glide effortlessly onto the sidewalk. If only this had been remediated a year earlier.
Oftentimes what we hear from insurers and trade groups in the media is that injury lawsuits are abused, people are swindling the system, and it just runs up costs. Well people like insurers and trade group members who are often called upon to pay for their mistakes would say that, wouldn’t they?
Much more often of course the reality is that people with actual injuries suffer great life disruptions – bodily, financially, emotionally, etc. And usually such injuries were wholly avoidable if someone had just not made a mistake like running a red light or leaving a spill on the floor too long.
