Workers' Compensation
Workers' compensation is a form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory relinquishment of the employee's right to sue his or her employer for the tort of negligence. The tradeoff between assured, limited coverage and lack of recourse outside the worker compensation system is known as "the compensation bargain".
Wrongful Death
Wrongful death is a claim in common law jurisdictions against a person who can be held liable for a death. The claim is brought in a civil action, usually by close relatives, as enumerated by statute. Under common law, a dead person cannot bring a suit, and this created a loophole in which activities that resulted in a person's injury would result in civil sanction but activities that resulted in a person's death would not.
Hospital Negligence
If you are injured when receiving treatment in a hospital, can you sue the hospital for negligence or medical malpractice? Though hospitals are often on the hook for incompetent care provided by employees like paramedics, nurses, and medical technicians, they often are not responsible for a doctor's medical malpractice unless the doctor is an employee of the hospital or appears to be an employee.
Different Claims with Harms and Losses
We have experience in a wide variety of injury claims including, automobile and truck collisions, oil field injuries and deaths, slip and fall injuries, injuries caused by drunk drivers and the bars or restaurants that serve drunks.
We try to recover for all of the harms and losses suffered by you or your family member. And to do that we need evidence from you, your friends neighbors, co-workers as well as documents like medical records and bills. Lawyers and judges use the term "damages", but they are really just your harms and losses and we will want you to itemize those early in the process if we are your trial lawyers.
Legal Malpractice
Legal malpractice is the term for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, or breach of contract by an attorney that causes harm to his or her client. In order to rise to an actionable level of negligence (an actual breach of a legal duty of care), the injured party must show that the attorney's acts were not merely the result of poor strategy, but that they were the result of errors that no reasonable attorney would make.
Family Law
In the common law tradition, the law of domestic relations, many sorts of dispute fall into this broad category; many people who will not otherwise have any dealings during their lives with the judicial system have domestic relations disputes. Because of the volume of legal business generated by the law of domestic relations, a number of jurisdictions have established specialized courts of limited jurisdiction, sometimes called family courts, which hear domestic cases exclusively.
Insurance Bad Faith
Insurance bad faith is a legal term of art unique to the law of the United States that describes a tort claim that an insured person may have against an insurance company for its bad acts. Under the law in New Mexico, insurance companies owe a duty of good faith and fair dealing to the persons they insure. When an insurance company places its interests above those of its insureds, the insurance company is acting in bad faith.
Medical Malpractice
Medical malpractice is professional negligence by act or omission by a health care provider in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes injury or death to the patient.
Doctors win much more than 85% of the cases that are tried even if there is good evidence to find for the patient and that makes them difficult to win.
Medical Malpractice cases are the most difficult cases to prevail on for a number of reasons even if they have merit and even when the jury should decide in their favor. One reason why medical malpractice cases are difficult is that courts will allow the jury to be instructed that a recognized risk of any procedure is “death” and that makes all potential outcomes a recognized risk of the procedure or care. Another reason why medical malpractice cases are difficult to win is that the defendant doctor or hospital will always have an expert to testify in their favor and the court will also allow the defendant to testify on his behalf and that the plaintiff will only have one expert on his or her side. Another reason why medical malpractice cases are so difficult to win is because jurors like doctors and believe that they go into the profession to help people and that are reluctant to rule against a doctor unless they believe that the doctor intended to hurt the patient, even if that is not the law in New Mexico.
And Medical Malpractice cases are extremely expensive which eliminates pursuing cases that have merit if there are not substantial damages to justify the expense of pursuing the case.
Professional Negligence
Professional negligence is a subset of the general rules on negligence to cover the situation in which the defendant has represented him or herself as having more than average skills and abilities.