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How are personal injury claims handled in the state of West Virginia?

Most top-of-the-line law firms begin with a thorough interview and meeting with the client. The client needs to understand what the lawyer can do for them, how they’re going to do it, how long its going to take and, last but not least, how much is it going to cost. We work on a contingency fee basis. That means, until we get our client’s money, they don’t owe us any money and if we are not successful in their case, then they don’t owe us any attorney fees. It’s that simple. Once the lawyer is in place you start the investigation. In a simple accident, that may only take a few days. In a complex trucking case or a complex coal-mining explosion or death case, it could be a few weeks or several weeks. Sometimes, if you’re waiting on the NTSB – the National Transportation Safety Board – the wait can be as much as six to nine months. The next step is the filing of a complaint. Sometimes an insurance company or major corporation will approach the Segal Law firm quickly and ask us to provide them with information. This is so they can make an early settlement to […]

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What type of lawyer handles a car wreck or trucking accident?

With regards to car wrecks, it depends. There are some car wrecks that are very simple. The injuries are not profound or life changing. Personal injury lawyers or trial lawyers handle these cases on a regular basis. At the Segal Law firm, we tend to focus more on serious life-altering cases where people involved in car wrecks have been killed or paralyzed, lost a limb, suffered blindness or suffered a serious head injury which results in them not being able to continue working and providing for their family. You want to have a lawyer who has not only prepared a car wreck case for settlement but has tried them in a court of law to a jury. You have to look at a lot of factors in a car wreck because sometimes there is evidence that people overlook. You may see someone who is in a rather mild car wreck but they suffer paralysis. Everyone is scratching his or her head saying, “Well, how did that happen?” But it turns out, when you look under the seat, the seat belts are sheared off. So obviously the force of that particular car wreck may not look like it was a lot

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What legal recourse does a brain injury victim have?

I can’t tell you how many different ways people manage to get brain injuries in the workplace. There are literally thousands of different ways. Falling objects, equipment that someone else is operating where they run into an employee because they are operating the equipment improperly or there’s a blind side where they don’t see them. There are also tripping hazards where people fall and hit their head. You can also have very difficult work environment where people are in a confined space and they strike their head on an object. You may even be in a wearing a hard hat but get whacked on the noggin good enough to suffer a brain injury. There are also horrible head-crushing injuries where a human beings skull is actually crushed causing a brain injury. Those are very serious cases, which require a very experienced lawyer with well-qualified experts. It’s important to talk about the range of brain injuries. Some brain injuries can actually be photographed, not with a camera but with an x-ray or CAT scan. We also have devices now known as MRI, which are magnetic resonance imaging machines, and we also have something called PET Scanners. They can demonstrate where parts

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The Upper Big Branch Disaster

The upper big branch disaster was just a horrible nightmare for 29 West Virginia families. A series of bad decisions by management resulted in 29 miners losing their lives. They were working on a long wall section with other miners where an enormous amount of the mine wasn’t rock dusted or sprayed with limestone to limit coal dust, which is explosive. But there was an explosion and the coal dust lifted into the air and started a chain reaction. In addition, certain types of safety devices on the long wall were not operating properly. Sprayers that knock down what the deep miners call “pops” – when you hit methane pocket and it ignites. If you’ve got a sprayer on the drill bit that will tamp down any explosion and keep it from spreading. Sadly at Upper Big Branch there were so many deficiencies in the safety procedures being used that those guys never had a chance. When the explosion began it was all over. There are photos of pieces of equipment that weighed several tons that were moved literally hundreds of feet. The rails used to move equipment were actually bent like pretzels due to the severity of the explosion.

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How can West Virginia coal mines be safer work places for miners?

Coal miners deserve and have the right to expect to be trained – and it is federally and state mandated that they are entitled to be properly trained for their job. At the Segal Law Firm, we can help them understand what they need to know about their job to protect their own safety. Employees have the right to have equipment properly maintained using the manufacturers specification, as well as parts for critical pieces of equipment and the safety features provided. Lastly, coal miners are entitled to a safe working environment. This would include rock dusting, proper ventilation, and proper maintenance of equipment with regards to having water on certain cutting heads – all kinds of different safety features on machines. But safety training is vital and miners have to be environmentally safe in their work and have the right equipment and tools to do their job safely. Deep coal mining is a very, very risky and difficult job on its best day. Coal companies have an absolute responsibility under state and federal law to help our miners stay safe and to send them home to their families safe. It takes a real effort on the part of the management

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Coal mine negligence when dealing with a workplace injury

Most coalmine cases that we handle at the Segal Law firm are not simple negligence cases. A negligence case for a coal mine would be if you were there as an independent contractor. In other words, you were not employed by the coal company itself and you got hurt. A negligence case may include poorly maintained equipment, lack of appropriate safety devices to protect people that are there doing contract labor and a lack of training. The more common form of coal mine accidents that we see in West Virginia is what’s called a “deliberate intent” case. You need an experienced lawyer to prove deliberate intent and the burden of proof is on you and your legal team. You have to show the judge and jury enough evidence to get past workers compensation and get the worker and his family more money from the coal company. You have to prove deliberate intent. You have to show that the supervision at the mine knew that a dangerous condition existed. Then despite knowing that it could harm, seriously injure or kill the coal miner, they still subjected them and exposed them to that risk. If a coal company knows a machine has

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What can lead to victory in a Mesothelioma case?

It’s not very difficult to win Mesothelioma cases because there is an enormous body of scientists who agree that the most common cause of Mesothelioma in North America is the exposure to asbestos. The question you have to ask is, how was the person exposed? Were they a pipe fitter? A boilermaker? An electrical worker? Did they work around power houses? Chemical plants? Industrial facilities where asbestos insulation was used? If you have a good exposure history and you know what products the person worked with or were around – you have a very high likelihood of succeeding in your case. Not all asbestos products cases are the same, not all asbestos exposure is the same. You have a very good likelihood of obtaining substantial settlements on your behalf and your family members because unfortunately Mesothelioma is a very aggressive cancer and almost always fatal. We work very closely with the worker and the family to protect them and get them good settlements, sometimes in the millions of dollars. We are able to do that because we have literally tens of thousands of depositions of workers who know where and what asbestos products were used throughout the industrial facilities in

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Mesothelioma

Mesothelioma is an extremely aggressive cancer. It is rarely, if ever, curable and almost always fatal. The settlements range for these cases based on several critical factors. First, how was the person exposed and how many products containing the asbestos can we prove they were exposed to. That’s a critical part of what we do at the Segal Law Firm. We have literally thousands of workers’ depositions that identify the various types of asbestos that were used in the state of West Virginia in factories, power houses, chemical plants and other industrial facilities. The disease can tragically affect people in their 50s, 60s and 70s. For much older folks, the cases are worth less because their life expectancy at the time they contracted the disease was less than it would be for an individual who is younger. Generally, you see settlements in Mesothelioma cases where you have very difficult product identifications and much older people. Those cases may only settle in the high hundreds of thousands of dollars whereas younger people with good exposures – that would be people in their 60s and early 70s –will probably settle somewhere in the millions of dollars. It is a wide range, but

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Worker’s Compensation

The most important question to the worker is, “Is the lawsuit going to be against your employer? Or is it going to be against a third party, not your employer, because that’s who hurt you?” For instance, if you go to a work site and you are told, “We want you to paint this room.” But the person who brought you there, the premises owner doesn’t tell you, “Oh, and by the way, that’s a high-voltage room.” They can be sued for straight negligence. Likewise, if you got to a facility to do your job, and you’re given a defective piece of equipment, and you are told, “You can use this piece of equipment to do this,” and the equipment is defective, that’s a straight negligence lawsuit that you can file against the person who gave you the defective equipment. I had a very interesting case once where a welder was in a chemical plant, and he got what’s called a welding ticket, which is essentially a certification from the company who owned the chemical plant that the vessel he was going to weld on had been cleaned and did not have any dangerous gases. And so he put his

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Tractor Trailers and Traffic Laws

The result of two objects coming together, one of which is your car and the other of which is something that weighs tens of thousands of pounds, is not going to be a good result. And you don’t have to be a physicist or a scientist to understand that if a tractor-trailer hits you in your little car or your SUV or your minivan, you and your family are going to be seriously hurt or killed. There are a whole set of complicated federal regulations and you need an attorney that knows the federal regulatory system inside and out, and knows how to develop a tractor-trailer case. Federal Laws regulate how many hours they are allowed to drive so many truckers keep two sets of logbooks. One set is the driving time that they get paid for. The other logbook is the driving time they show the state troopers, or they show the federal regulators, or they show the truck stop operator. The equipment, the rig, how often it has to be inspected, how it has to be maintained – those are all things that are regulated by the federal government. Often, we will do a case and we will

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