Fresno Child
Injury Lawyers

If your child is hurt, get medical attention as quickly as you can. Dial 911 or take your child to the nearest emergency room or a doctor’s office.

If you know your child has been in an accident but doesn’t show signs of injury, have them checked out in an emergency room or by a doctor as soon as possible. A car crash, for example, can injure children in ways that are not visible, such as a concussion. A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and is potentially very serious, but you and your child may never even notice the symptoms, which can include momentary loss of consciousness.

If your child is too young to note symptoms or talk about what they are feeling, be sure that the doctor who sees them is experienced in treating children of that age group.

Don’t try to treat your child at home by assuming their injuries are minor. You need a medical professional to determine what is major and minor.

After the injuries are treated, it’s prudent to seek a lawyer’s attention if the injuries were caused by another person or an organization, such as a landlord or a manufacturer of products.

If your child is hurt, get medical attention as quickly as you can. Dial 911 or take your child to the nearest emergency room or a doctor’s office.

If you know your child has been in an accident but doesn’t show signs of injury, have them checked out in an emergency room or by a doctor as soon as possible. A car crash, for example, can injure children in ways that are not visible, such as a concussion. A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and is potentially very serious, but you and your child may never even notice the symptoms, which can include momentary loss of consciousness.

If your child is too young to note symptoms or talk about what they are feeling, be sure that the doctor who sees them is experienced in treating children of that age group.

Don’t try to treat your child at home by assuming their injuries are minor. You need a medical professional to determine what is major and minor.

After the injuries are treated, it’s prudent to seek a lawyer’s attention if the injuries were caused by another person or an organization, such as a landlord or a manufacturer of products.

It’s not uncommon for families to feel that they are drowning under medical bills, especially if your child’s injuries were severe and if you are not insured.

If another person or organization is at-fault (negligent) for your child’s injuries, you can get reimbursed for medical bills of all types—and you can receive compensation in other categories as well.

The compensable damage categories are as follows.

• Medical bills and treatment – For emergency department treatment and transport, doctor’s office visits, prescription medication, hospitalization, surgery, diagnostic tests, assistive devices, and more. You can also receive reimbursement for at-home car and retrofitting your home for treatment.
• Wages lost from work – If your child is a teenager, worked, and earned wages, wages lost from work due to the injuries are compensable.
• The lifetime value of earnings – If a child’s earnings are sufficiently severe to make earning a future livelihood challenging (or not doable), you may seek the lifetime value of earnings that your child could have been expected to earn had they not been injured.
• Pain and suffering – Physical, emotional, and mental pain and suffering.

Damage compensation can either be sought via the at-fault party’s insurance company or by filing a lawsuit in civil court.

It’s also possible to start with an insurance claim and move to a legal claim if the insurance company denies the claim or doesn’t offer a reasonable amount.

Tragically, some children die because of injuries sustained. Most information on childhood injuries centers on legal compensation for the injuries, but what is the recourse of loved ones when a child dies?

Family members are eligible to file a wrongful death claim for certain types of compensation if they could have filed a lawsuit had the child lived. Parents and siblings, if no parents survive, may file such a claim.

Wrongful death claims enable the parents to seek compensation for funeral and burial expenses and medical bills incurred by the injury. Damages for loss of love, companionship, and affection can also be sought.

We realize that no claim can compensate a family for the loss, but the law does recognize liability and the need for family members to receive economic compensation for financial and emotional losses.

Folks may be almost afraid to approach a child injury lawyer because they fear it will cost too much. But rest assured on that score. You will see no fees unless we at the May Firm win your case.

It’s simple. We work on a contingency basis. We are paid out of the eventual payment of compensation for injuries to you, whether it’s an insurance claim settlement or a legal victory. We take a certain percentage as a contingency fee.

If you do not receive a settlement of a claim or a legal victory, you owe us nothing. Not even one red cent.

For that reason, it pays you to consult us about your case. There are many ways in which you could end up receiving less than the injury is worth if you don’t consult a lawyer.

We also offer a completely free initial meeting to discuss your case. At that point, we will ask you what happened, who or what you feel is responsible for your child’s injuries, and how the injuries impact your child and your family.

After the meeting, we will give you an opinion about whether you have a legal case.

What happens at the initial meeting? A lawyer needs to know what happened and what the precipitating event caused in terms of effects on your child’s life and yours. Anything that contributes to that understanding is helpful.

You should put together notes to discuss your case. If you have them, police reports, pictures of the injuries, pictures of an accident scene if it was an accident, eyewitness statements, and contacts if available can all be helpful. Doctor’s diagnoses and records are also helpful. If these aren’t immediately available, a lawyer can help you obtain them.

Here’s a brief rundown of what our lawyers can do.

Conduct insurance company negotiations. The first stop for many families whose child has received injuries is an insurance company.

You may think it only fair that an insurance company is your only stop. Unfortunately, insurance carriers often don’t work for the best interest of injured parties. They can ultimately simply be a source of stress and annoyance.

Why? Because insurance carriers exist to earn a profit. In their world, paying out an insurance claim decreases potential profit. Thus, they don’t want to do it!

Insurance adjusters are actually trained in how to deny and minimize claims. It may seem unbelievable that they are actually trained to make children and families suffer unnecessarily, but that’s the net effect.

Let’s say that you don’t have the paperwork for your child’s medical visits—or didn’t take them to the doctor initially. Insurance adjusters are trained to make the lack of documentation or the lack of medical visits seem like your child was not injured as you say, or not as seriously as you say. After all, if the injuries were serious, you’d take them to the doctor, right?

Or let’s say you have a lot of medical bills and don’t make a lot of money. Insurance adjusters are trained to make you a low offer almost right off the bat. Sounds incredibly good, right? It does, until you realize that the claim is far, far below what your child’s injuries should have received. They know the claim payout will be good news and are preying on that.

Other techniques are to simply take forever to process the claim and not return your e-mails or phone calls. They are hoping you’ll become too discouraged to pursue it further.

A lawyer is familiar with the mindset of the insurance companies. They are far more apt to negotiate successfully for a fair settlement.

Crucially, they can also take your case to court if the insurance company doesn’t offer a fair claim. The court case will be heard by judges and juries, who are both notoriously more sympathetic to injured people than insurance companies are. Insurance companies don’t want a court case, because they see it as a potential money-loser. They are more apt to settle fairly with a court case in the offing.

Investigating causes. Another common insurance technique is to dispute who caused the injury to your child. They don’t deny the injury, they just deny that their insured caused it. They may name another at-fault party, blame you or your child, or just deny responsibility without naming anyone else.

In these cases, it can really help to have someone on your side investigate the causes in an impartial way.

You and your child may both receive injuries in accidents—such as car accidents—in which you’re not sure who or what caused it because the accident knocked you unconscious.

Lawyers often work with investigative teams that specialize in finding out how an accident occurred. They pull surveillance footage, talk to eyewitnesses, talk to the police (if there were police involved), and can even reconstruct similar events to find out what happens.

Estimate your losses. One of the most stressful parts of going to an insurance company or filing a lawsuit can be estimating your total losses.

You may not have received or kept medical or other paperwork. If your child needs future medical attention, it is almost impossible to estimate the costs. If your child deserves a lifetime value of earnings, it is almost impossible to estimate that amount.

That’s to say nothing of pain and suffering. How can you know what pain and suffering damages to ask for?

A lawyer can help with all these issues.

First, they can add together existing bills. Bills are often the basis for medical damage claims. If they need to call hospitals or doctor’s offices to receive and track down bills, they do.

Second, they can work with medical professionals to estimate likely future medical charges. These are arrived at by ascertaining standard treatment. Then, they forecast the estimated duration of treatment. Some medical treatment is over within a month; some medical treatment may last the rest of your child’s life.

Then, they estimate the costs of that treatment and multiple it by the duration.

For earnings, they consult established professionals who work with average livelihood costs. Estimating these types of damages requires professional expertise.

Pain and suffering damages are arrived at by establishing the expected impact and duration of the injuries on a person’s life. The pain and suffering of someone who will need life-long care are universally agreed to be much more severe than that of someone whose injuries are more minor and which will heal relatively quickly.

Gathering evidence. Evidence is needed to establish what happened and the extent of your child’s injuries.

But you may not have much evidence to begin with. People in car and other vehicle accidents, for example, should report it and receive a police report from law enforcement. But you may not have received a police report or have kept it.

Lawyers’ teams know how to gather evidence. If you were in a vehicle accident and don’t have a record of it, they can pull one from the state. They can see if surveillance footage shows the accident or if eyewitnesses took video or pictures. They can track down and interview eyewitnesses.

Lawyers’ teams can also make sure that they have all medical records, including diagnoses, evidence of (and pictures of) the injuries, and medical feedback on expected consequences of the injuries.