Injuries
We fight to win you just compensation for your wrongful injury.Serious Injuries and Wrongful Deaths
Automobile Accidents
Car accidents happen everywhere, every day. If you are involved in one, it can have devastating effects on your life. You suffer from your injuries. You suffer from the pain you never had before. You may miss out on your pay from work. You are accumulating bills that are not your fault. You need the help of James Law Group to get the financial support to which you are entitled.
The person who is injured or has lost a loved one because of someone’s negligence or carelessness will always be out-maneuvered by the insurance claims adjusters and their lawyers who are advising them behind the scenes. One must remember that to an insurance claims adjuster, even if the insurance company is your own, you are just a number. The adjuster’s job is to save his employer money. The adjuster saves his employer money by paying you as little as possible to settle your claim for your injuries or the death of a loved one.
If we cannot persuade the insurance company to be fair, then our only remedy is to file an action with the court asking that the court or a jury settle our differences for us. What most clients do not realize is that when an action is filed, under Missouri law, we have to bring it against the individual bad driver or other wrongdoer and not his insurance company. The law fears that if members of the jury are told that the defendant, that is the bad driver or other wrongdoers, is covered by insurance that the jury would be unfairly prejudiced in favor of the injured person. So, the fact that his insurance company covers the defendant’s negligent conduct cannot even be mentioned in court. The real fact is, however, that it is extremely unlikely that the case would ever be before a jury if there were not insurance to pay the judgment against the defendant.
Another problem that the client’s case encounters in court is that the jury will often assume, even though there is no evidence to support the assumption, that the injured person had health insurance, and that the health insurance has already paid the person’s medical bills. Often this is not the case, and even for those times when it is the case, the person’s health insurance carrier has notified the defendant’s insurance company that it has a lien against any settlement or judgment in the case for the repayment to it for any bills already paid. The problem is that the jury, not understanding how this works, is tempted not to take the injured person’s medical bills into account when arriving at a figure for the injured person’s harms and losses, thus arriving at a verdict that is manifestly unfair to the injured person and a boon to the defendant’s insurance company.
It takes a skilled and experienced attorney to overcome these obstacles through negotiations and through a jury trial if necessary. The attorneys at James Law Group have been holding insurance companies and corporations accountable for their duties to ordinary citizens for over 30 years. When you or someone you love has been seriously injured or killed by someone’s wrongful conduct, don’t let the corporation or insurance company shirk their responsibility. Such windfalls to corporations and insurance companies frequently result in the injured person, their family, and the American taxpayer shouldering the burden of the corporation or insurance company’s responsibility.
Trucking Accidents
Injuries or deaths from wrecks with a commercial vehicle is a category of law that requires more than average knowledge and ability than the general personal injury practitioner is apt to possess. There are many federal regulations that govern the operation of commercial vehicles, especially large interstate trucking companies with which the lawyer representing the injured person needs to be familiar. The great majority of these accidents result from driver fatigue. Driver’s fatigue results from the trucker falsifying his logbook to enable him to drive many more hours that the law allows. Money and job performance is the motive. The trucker is usually paid by the mile. Because most of these collisions are the result of driver fatigue, they are usually characterized by rear-end collisions where the trucker hardly slowed the tractor-trailer before impact, and the drifting out of the traveling lane into other traffic.
Trucking companies are multi-million dollar corporations that will use all their resources to keep you from uncovering their responsibility for such wrecks and holding them accountable for their irresponsible and sometimes illegal actions. You need an attorney who is accustomed to dealing with such corporations and their tactics. The James Law Group has over thirty years of experience in handling such cases.
Railroad Crossing Accidents
Railroad crossings are very dangerous and present a high potential for collisions. When collisions between automobiles and trains happen, the resulting injuries are almost always tragic and frequently fatal. Railroad crossing accidents can be caused by various factors, including the conductor’s failure to sound the proper warning whistles or the railroad company failing to properly mark and maintain the crossing or put up gates. If you or family members have been injured or killed due to being struck by a train at a railroad crossing, the experienced personal injury attorneys at James Law Group, LLC can help you.
Many railroad crossings are maintained in an unsafe condition without clear lines of sight, gates, guards, bells, lights, whistle posts, or without providing an adequate warning to cars and pedestrians. Some crossings do not allow for clear visibility of an oncoming train because of overgrown shrubs, trees, or buildings. Other factors causing railroad injuries include excessive train speeds and failure to sound train whistles. Engineers do whatever is necessary to make up lost time. Their speeds have often been recorded in excess of 80 miles an hour when approaching crossings, especially in small-town areas.
Railroad companies are multi-million dollar corporations that will use all their resources to keep you from uncovering and holding them accountable for their irresponsible and sometimes illegal actions. You need an attorney who is accustomed to dealing with such corporations and their tactics. The James Law Group has over thirty years of experience in handling such cases.
Product Liability (Defective Products)
If you have been seriously injured by the neglect of a corporate manufacturer or their conscious disregard for the safety of their customers, you need an attorney who has experience in dealing with the complex issues involved in holding them accountable. When a company produces a product that places its customers at unreasonable risk of injury out of neglect or simple greed, they will do everything in their power to prevent the reputation of their company from being tarnished. They will often provide endless boxes of documents in an attempt to hide documents that reveal their responsibility for your injuries. They will spend vast sums of money on “experts” to testify to sometimes absurd conclusions like claiming that it is not unusual for a car to burst into flames after a low impact collision.
Without an attorney experienced in dealing with such tactics and “experts,” such manufacturers are often successful in avoiding responsibility for their actions. You need an attorney who has dealt with similar companies before and knows how to weed through the voluminous documents to find what they are trying to hide. You need an attorney who has dealt with dubious experts before and knows how to effectively reveal their bias or even prevent them from testifying to dubious scientific conclusions altogether. James Law Group has helped individuals stand up to the corporations who hurt them for over thirty years.
Work Accidents
Any on-the-job injury is a serious matter. An injured employee and his or her family may suddenly face a lack of income, uncertainty about the nature of an injury, pain, frustration with available medical treatment, and confusion about the future. At James Law Group, LLC, our attorneys offer experienced workers’ compensation (“work comp”) representation to workers throughout Missouri, in cities including St. Peters, St. Louis, O’Fallon, Troy, Warrenton, Wright City, Bowling Green, Hannibal, Wentzville, Montgomery City, and St. Charles. We can help to lessen the uncertainties you may be experiencing.
Workers’ compensation is a no-fault social insurance program. The injured employee does not need to prove that an on-the-job injury was someone else’s fault in order to receive workers’ compensation benefits. Most employers are required to provide workers’ compensation insurance coverage for each employee.
Work-related injuries or illnesses typically covered by workers’ compensation laws include:
- Carpal tunnel
- Repetitive trauma injuries
- Back injuries
- Work-induced heart attack or stroke
- Occupational diseases such as asbestosis and dermatitis
- Asthma or other work-related pulmonary conditions
- Eye injuries
- Hearing problems
We are experienced in workers’ compensation law, and we can help you pursue your workers’ compensation claim. Benefits that may be available to you include:
- Medical Care
- Temporary Disability
- Permanent Disability
- Death Benefits
- Money Settlement
Nursing Home Neglect
Nursing home negligence and/or abuse resulting in injury or death to a loved one is sometimes a difficult case to pursue because many nursing homes – instead of responsibly carrying insurance to cover their liability when they neglect those they are supposed to care for – choose to hide their assets through multiple layers of corporations, interchangeable officers and board members, and real estate holding companies, so that the corporation owning the nursing home that actually injuries or contributes to the death of one of its residents is nothing more than a shell with no insurance and no assets. All the money has flown upward and is safely secured in a real estate holding company owned by a few investors who have made themselves rich by warehousing the elderly while pretending to care for them—and are making themselves richer every day.
It is not uncommon in their efforts to avoid responsibility to go further, even to the point of altering or withholding medical records in an attempt to hide the truth about their misconduct. With such cases often involving hundreds or even thousands of pages of medical records, it takes a great deal of time and know-how to uncover such attempts to hide the truth. It takes an attorney experienced in dealing with these types of nursing homes and holding companies that hide their money to break through the barriers they have set up in an attempt to avoid responsibility for their actions.
At James Law Group, nothing makes us happier than being able to have a jury hold them accountable for the harm they have done, no matter how much they have tried to hide the truth as well as their assets. If you or a loved one has been injured by a nursing home’s neglect or abuse, contact us today to makes them take responsibility for their actions.
Medical Malpractice
Perhaps no kind of case is more discussed or more vilified than medical malpractice claims. It is also the type of case about which there is the most misinformation – like the notion that all medical malpractice cases are “frivolous” lawsuits. The truth is that, according to a study conducted by two doctors and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, approximately 98,000 people die every year in this country due to the carelessness or incompetence of doctors. Further, under Missouri law, a medical malpractice case cannot even be filed unless a medical doctor is willing to swear under oath that the defendant did something improper and that his carelessness caused the injury or death of the patient.
Under the current climate of public perception, however, anyone who has been injured by the misconduct of a doctor starts at a great disadvantage to the defendant doctor and his insurance company. It takes an attorney experienced in dealing with the current public perceptions to overcome any biases a jury may begin with so that they can see what the defendant actually did and hold him accountable for his carelessness or incompetence.
Additionally, medical malpractice cases require a level of familiarity and knowledge regarding the medical terms and conditioned involved in a particular case. An attorney representing a person injured by a doctor’s carelessness or incompetence must not only be able to understand the conditions and treatments himself, but also be able to distill highly technical and complex medical issues down to easily understood kernels of information that jurors who did not go to medical school and may only hear a few days of testimony regarding the issues can understand. If the jury cannot understand the medical issues, they will never be able to understand why the doctor was careless or incompetent.
At James Law Group, we have been helping patients who have been seriously injured by careless doctors for over 30 years. We have the experience and the tools to help a jury understand how the doctor was careless and how his actions injured you.
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