Get Justice With A Fort Lauderdale Personal Injury Lawyer

In a world where the words "tort reform" immediately bring to mind greedy lawyers and huge multi-million dollar settlements, spending a day with a Fort Lauderdale personal injury lawyer can provide an eye-opening viewpoint into the real world. Personal injury lawyers are often depicted as ambulance-chasing sharks devoted to padding their own pockets, often at the expense of their own clients. A brief browse through the files of most South Florida law firms would tell a far different story.

In fact, most personal injury lawyers are as overly romanticized as it may sound the champion of the consumer, of the little guy, of the individual injured by policies and actions of corporations and others who only care about their own pockets. The lawyer who specializes in personal injury law is often the last resort of the parents whose child received substandard treatment or the driver who was injured in an accident caused by shoddy car construction. When pharmaceutical companies cover up the possible side effects of the medications they advertise and manufacturers make billions selling products that can maim or even kill the people that use them, it is the personal injury lawyer who stands up in court and holds them accountable for the injuries they've caused.

Auto Accidents

Auto accidents are among the most common personal injury cases, but few attorneys look deeper than the immediate cause of the accident. An experienced South Florida personal injury lawyer will look beyond the drivers to the safety standards and construction of the vehicles themselves. Victories in personal injury cases involving automobile safety standards have often pushed auto manufacturers into improving safety standards that affect not just their own clients but millions of other drivers.

Defective Products

Manufacturers often continue to sell products that cause injuries even after they start receiving reports that people have been injured by defects in their products. In one case filed by a South Florida personal injury lawyer, a fireman was seriously injured when the oxygen equipment he was cleaning exploded. Research by the attorney turned up multiple cases where the same regulator had ignited, causing injuries to paramedics, firefighters and medical technicians around the country. The company continued to manufacture and sell the defective regulator until forced to pay punitive damages. The publicity surrounding the case also backed the manufacturer into a corner and forced them to recall the defective products and replace the regulators with safer brass regulators.

Medical Malpractice

If you were asked to name the leading causes of death in the United States, chances are that you wouldn't name medical error as one of them, but in fact, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. In addition to the approximately 100,000 people who die each year because of medical mistakes, hundreds of thousands of others suffer lesser injuries due to mistakes in medication, missed and mistaken diagnoses and pure negligence by medical providers and insurance companies. The medical associations that should be policing their members often protect them instead, at the expense of patients who live the rest of their lives with the results of those errors. A personal injury lawyer can ensure that patients and their families receive the justice they deserve when a medical professional fails to do their jobs properly.

If you've suffered an injury because of a defective product or medical negligence, contact a South Florida personal injury attorney to learn more about getting justice and holding the responsible parties accountable.