Connecticut Injury Attorney Blog

Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice cases are not only about benefiting the injured parties, obtaining answers for them and appropriate financial compensation,but also about achieving social justice which benefits us all. To quote Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Peter Zarella:

"The profession of law is not just a business. It transcends a mere occupation. It is a lifelong communal pursuit of justice."

Just like government must be accountable to have a free and fair society and its mistakes laid bare the same is true in our society's private endeavors. Errors committed by Connecticut area hospitals, physicians, construction companies, manufacturers , Insurance companies as well as Companies who employ Connecticut workers must be held accountable where their actions cause harm and suffering. The natural inclination to deny any mistake or wrongdoing and defend is most often the predictable iniital response. Occasionally, active concealment and coverup is as well. Neither instinct when allowed by these Entities to become an ongoing legal strategy serves to assure justice to those injured or the rest of us. That behavior is injurious to our familes in the larger community and must not be tolerated. You may find below a number of active claims and cases which implicate some of these concerns and my firm has direct involvement in them. Some of the details and identities of those involved are intentionally left out due to privacy concerns as well as the fact that they are active matters. Some of these will no doubt end up being decided by a Connecticut Jury and fundamental considerations of fairness require discretion at this point. If you have a serious matter which may help improve safety for others in our community we would welcome your immediate contact.

Connecticut Hospital allows Surgeon who operates on Woman's breast at the wrong site to re dictate operative note weeks later

Patient is over sedated following routine surgery, goes into respiratory distress and dies

A Woman driving a Toyota traveling on the Meritt Parkway loses control of her vehicle and crashes due to a brake pedal malfunction

Company involved in Middletown gas plant explosion is sued for the reckless conduct of one of its supervisor on the Highway

State of Connecticut Department of Transportation Truck amputates the leg of a maintenance worker

A disturbed young man whose family member calls the police on to prevent a threatened suicide is evaluated an released by a local Connecticut Hopsital deemed not to be at risk in apparent violation of the applicable assessment criteria and kills himself within 24 hours

Thirty minutes after a gang related incident invovling a shooting at a night club after hours, a young man who was a chef just off duty getting a bite to eat at a local restaurant is fatally shot . The local municipality involved failed to order a curfew and crowd dispersion when twenty minutes before gang related shooting occured and a large noisy crowd had filled that local restaurant and police officers were standing outside and actually commenting to eachother that the place was overcrowded. When trouble started inside nobody could get out when trouble started beginning with verbal altercations and chairs being thrown.

Elderly Nursing/Rehabilitation home resident requiring a two person assist is moved by only one nurses aide ,who lies about what happened in written note about the incident, fractures hip, has surgery and ultimately dies due to related complications. Family misses him terribly and is devastated.

Insurance Company decides to deny claim and offer nuisance value settlement after the Decdent dies due to surgery related complications. Implicit theory of defense appears to be that since the Woman is no longer hear to testify what happened in the motor vehicle accident in the first place they may win the case outright.

In this age of diminishing expectations from our professional community , high profile reputational crashes and the like it is easy to forget the good that comes out of serious and dedicated efforts in the much maligned personal injury practice field. Any serious reflection upon the advances in industrial and consumer product safety, hospital and medical procedures will recognize the direct benefits brought about by shining the light of financial accountability on those involved. Personal injury Lawyers may not always have such noble thoughts in mind since they are caught up in pursuing their client's individual cases while trying to make a living for their own respective families in the process. However, the contribution which such efforts have made to fostering continued safety improvements and increased efforts to provide safe work and consumer environments are undeniable.

Accidents involving Buses have repeatedly made headlines in our State. Most recently, a school bus driven by an operator with a poor driving history was involved in a tragic bus crash which led to the death of a Rocky Hill High School student and injured scores of others. In this particular event, it appears that the lack of mandatory seat belts for Connecticut school bus riders shares blame with the bus operator's error and that of his employer for hiring this individual in the first place without conducting a thorough driving history background check. This occurence is now reverberating through Connecticut's legislature and perhaps will finally enable the necessary political will to adopt laws protecting the vulnerable passengers of such motor carriers. The sheer weight and mass of the bus when combined with highway speeds or rollovers at even city street speeds produces sheer and crush injuries to the muscular skeletal frame of many riders.

Mandatory seat belt requirments would come at a price which most would support and yet another example of how industry will fail to adopt proven and available technology where neither the government nor the civil courts have held them accountable for not providing it as a standard safety feature. It shocks the conscience to imagine that cost benefit studies have been undertaken and held up in private collaborative settings as justification for holding back upon the implementation of this widely accepted technology in passenger car settings. It remains a blemish upon a progressive State such as ours that such legislation has repeatedly been held hostage to political jockeying and never yet made it our of Comittee and onto the floor for a successful vote. Perhaps things would have turned out differently for the Greater Hartford Academy students and this young talented High Schooler who accompanied them on this bus ride.

Given an appropriate case to force the issue, I remain convinced that a single verdict against even one bus manufacturer which has failed to install this readily available equipment and the vendor which distribute these machines may have a resounding impact on the accepted standards of conduct.

A commerical dough mixer was determined to be a defective product by a hartford Connecticut Jury in April 2008. The Connecticut Jury also found that the manufacturer's failure to have placed on the machine in question a bowl guard which was only available as an optional piece of equipment warranted the assessing of punitive damages. A Punitive damages award is uncommon in the setting of a products liability lawsuit and is generally based upon the determination that the manufacturer or distributor's actions were taken with extreme indifference to the rights and safety of the products intended or forseeable users. In this case the manufacturer, Varimixer, had maintained a practice of selling large and powerful commercial dough mixers without having an interlocking bowl guard as a standard piece of safety equipment. It appeared to councel based upon information developed through discovery that the decision to only offer this safety device as a non standard piece of equipment available for an extra charge was commercially motivated and failed to take into account the potential for harm to the user should the mixer be used without the bowl guard. Based upon user experience throughout the industry, it was known that there would be a certain injury incident rate that would occur in the absence of the bowl guard's presence. The defendant's expert argued at trial that the injury incidence rate was small enough that making the bowl guard standard was not necessary in order for the product to be considered safe enough to use in accordance with the ordinary consumer's expectations of safety for the product. The Hartford Connecticut jury in this defective products personal injury case rejected that argument and found the manufacturer liable for both compensatory and punitive damages. The Compensatory damages award exceeded 1.3 million dollars. The case was settled for a confidential amount following the jury award last year.

Our firm is interested in making sure that Varimixer as well as other commercial dough mixer companies such as Hobart for example have now begun a campaign to retrofit all dough mixers sold without the safety cage being included. While we were unable to require the retrofitting campaign to occur given the express finding of this jury it would be unreasonable for this company and the industry not to similarly conclude that adding on safety cages to these machines presents and unfair and avoidable risk of harm to those that use these machines in the workplace which covers tens of thousands of commercial kitchen workers nationwide. We are interested in following up on this issue and if necessary filing additional lawsuits on behalf of those injured by the commercial dough mixers through inadvertent contact with their hands due to the absence of the bowl cage guards.