If you’re injured by a defective product and pursue damages for your injuries in a lawsuit, your case could be consolidated with other lawsuits into a class action if the same product has injured multiple people. A recent case in point is the consolidation of numerous claims seeking damages for burns suffered by defective pressure cookers manufactured by Florida’s Sunbeam Products.

Earlier this year, the J.M. Smucker Company issued a voluntary recall of select Jif peanut butter products sold in the U.S. after the product was linked to multi-state salmonella outbreaks. The recall, which was conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), affected 20 other companies that had used the peanut butter to manufacture their own products. This marks the biggest FDA-related recall issued this year.

Medical care and recovery are the first things most people think about when they are injured in an accident in Florida. Considerations about the costs of medical care and the potential monetary impact of lost wages, physical therapy, childcare, property damage, and other unexpected expenses arising from the accident soon follow.

Florida laws are designed to ensure that people injured in a motor vehicle or car accident receive compensation for their injuries through personal injury protection (PIP) insurance, another driver’s insurance, civil litigation, or a combination. However, securing full and fair compensation for auto accident injuries can be challenging, as insurance companies are highly skilled at limiting claims.

Injuries are a fact of life, as evidenced by the millions of Floridians treated in emergency rooms and hospitals yearly. However, injuries are not always a natural fact of life caused by accidental circumstances because a defect in a consumer product causes some. And when a defective product causes an injury, illness, or death, Florida’s product liability laws allow the victim(s) to pursue compensation for medical costs, pain, lost wages, and other reasons. Thus, the personal injury lawyers at Tallahassee-based Akbar Thomas, Personal Injury Attorneys, advise their clients to seek legal advice...

You will probably not be surprised to hear that automobile accidents are the leading cause of personal injury in Florida. On average, the state records more than 380,000 accidents per year, or more than 1,000 every day. These accidents result in almost 250,000 personal injuries every year, of which the latest Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) statistics characterize between 15,000 to 19,000 as “incapacitating.”

For most people, monetary compensation will never make up for the loss of a loved one. Still, it could help, especially if the decedent had provided financial support to those left behind. Besides potential Social Security payments, such compensation is not given freely when a person dies. However, if the negligent actions of others caused your loved one’s death, you have the right under Florida law to seek financial compensation from those responsible.

The emotional trauma of being involved in a motor vehicle accident is compounded by the severity of personal injury caused by the accident. In other words, the physical and emotional trauma caused by a car accident can be debilitating, painful, and disruptive to all other elements of your day-to-day life. Therefore, you should make your health and recovery from personal injury a priority after you have been in a car accident.