A Closer Look Into The World Of The Personal Injury Case
Personal injury cases come in all shapes and sizes. From the car accident personal injury claim to the medical malpractice personal injury claim, there are quite a few of them as well. It’s car accidents, as one might have already assumed, that actually make up the brunt of all personal injury claims. In fact, more than half of all personal injury cases are motor vehicle related, followed only distantly by cases of medical malpractice and product liability.
The reasons for this type of personal injury claim to be so very popular are many. For one thing, there are just so many car and other such motor vehicle accidents over the course of each and every year – as many as six million of them in the span of just 12 months. Unfortunately, the toll that these motor vehicle accidents take is also quite high, which again leads to many a personal injury claim. In this same span of just one year, as many as three million people will be injured in such events – and while some of these injuries will be relatively minor, others will be much more severe.
The data that has been gathered on the subject more than backs this up. After all, up to 35% of all spinal cord injuries sustained in the United States will occur during car accidents and other such motor vehicle accidents. And as many people know, spinal cord injuries are often hugely life changing events. They can cause permanent paralysis, thus disrupting the injured party’s entire life as they know. Many people who suffer a spinal cord injury will even go on to need full time care, something that will, as you might have already guessed, often lead to a personal injury claim being filed.
And as many personal injury lawyers and personal injury law firms as a whole will already be well aware of, there are many causes behind such a personal injury claim. For one thing, driving while intoxicated is a huge problem in this country. In fact, driving under the influence of a substance that is not alcohol currently causes more than 15% of all motor vehicle accidents on a yearly basis. And the toll that alcohol alone takes is staggering.
In just one day, very nearly 30 people will lose their lives because of drunk driving alone. And for every two minutes that pass us by, a brand new person will become somehow injured in a drunk driving related incident. As discussed above, some of these injuries are very severe indeed. And still the rates of drunk driving are high, with as many as 300,000 people getting behind the wheel while intoxicated and under the influence of alcohol on a daily basis. Unfortunately, only a scant 4,000 or so of these people will actually end up being arrested and facing any sort of legal consequences.
Of course, there are many other reasons that people file a personal injury claim, especially here in the United States. For instance, cases of medical negligence and malpractice are perhaps more commonplace than many realize. In fact, medical malpractice personal injury cases make up a full 15% of all personal injury cases in this country – and can happen in a number of different ways.
One cause of medical negligence is that of the wrong site surgery. A wrong site surgery can all too often have severe and lasting consequences and while people might think that such a mistake would be quite rare, wrong site surgeries happen far more commonly than most would realize. In fact, such botched surgeries are actually likely to occur as frequently as 40 times throughout a single week.
And there are still other types of medical malpractice. Birth injuries, for instance, can all too commonly occur when the doctor dealing with the delivery makes an avoidable error. These birth injuries can have a life long impact for both baby and mother alike and can totally change an entire family’s course of life. In total, all medical malpractice cases, including those surrounding birth injuries and the like, come in at around 20,000 per year. And as many as 25,000 total additional people will actually die because of medical malpractice.