Going to the hospital can be an unsettling experience. There are many ways treatment can go wrong and result in serious injury or death. Medical conditions can be misdiagnosed or wrongly diagnosed, wrong prescriptions or doses can be prescribed, and surgical errors can occur. When these mistakes happen and a…
It is vital to know proper court procedures at the outset of litigation or else an otherwise valid claim might be thrown out of court without ever being heard. One prime example is the need to send initial court documents to a defendant within a set deadline (sending such documents,…
The Jones Act is a law that provides seamen the chance to bring personal injury suits against the owners and operators of vessels they are working on in cases where the owner or operator was negligent or in some other way at fault for the injury. One of the types…
A class action suit occurs when a group of people bring a case together as representatives of an entire class of people who are similarly situated. In order to bring a class action in Louisiana, a judge must certify the class. This means that the class of plaintiffs meets the…
The term wrongful death refers to cases in which the decedent’s death was the fault of another. The other “person” could be one individual, such as someone driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol; it could also be a group of people or a business, such as the decedent’s…
Under Louisiana law, there are very specific rules about how to properly serve someone, and one of the important aspects of service that an attorney has to get right is the timing of it. Furthermore, not only does the service have to be carried out in a timely manner, but…
In order to aid the court, a judge might occasionally appoint an expert to help with specific aspects of the case. Court-appointed experts are different from a specific party’s experts because the court-appointed experts do not favor one side or the other, but rather, help the judge with certain tasks…
In a recent case, Johnson v. University Medical Center in Lafayette, the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Third Circuit reversed a trial court decision to dismiss a plaintiff’s case for abandonment due to her failure to timely pay the costs of appeal. The plaintiff in the case, Lela Johnson,…
In September 2006, Georgia Gulf Lake Charles, LLC’s Westlake facility suffered a fire and explosion. Because of the fire and explosion, hazardous chemicals were released into the air. Several people filed suit because of the medical complications that the exposure caused. Georgia Gulf stipulated that it was the cause of…
In 2011, a Louisiana woman appealed a decision issued by the state’s highest court in a case she filed after suffered damages from the drug metoclopramine. Julie Demahy filed a lawsuit in 2008, alleging that she had suffered damages from the generic version of metoclopramide, which she took between 2002…