{"id":3396,"date":"2017-12-07T13:49:46","date_gmt":"2017-12-07T13:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/wordpress\/lavie\/?p=3396"},"modified":"2017-12-07T13:49:46","modified_gmt":"2017-12-07T13:49:46","slug":"law-and-liability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/2017\/12\/07\/law-and-liability\/","title":{"rendered":"Law and Liability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Question:\u00a0 <\/b>My best friend here on campus is planning to go to law school after graduation. I think that\u2019s great–she\u2019s a talented and smart person, and I\u2019m sure she\u2019ll make a fantastic lawyer. But I have to say that I was a little put off when I found out that she is planning to join her father\u2019s law firm, a personal injury firm. I don\u2019t like the idea of getting money from other people in the way that personal injury lawyers do. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s right the way lawyers can sue other people over their clients\u2019 mistakes, like that lady who spilled her coffee on herself and sued McDonald\u2019s. I remember my parents telling me when I was a kid that we couldn\u2019t get a pool because of the \u201cliability issues.\u201d It all just seems really selfish and sleazy to me.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

I feel terrible thinking this way about my friend and her father, so I try to pretend to be as excited about her future as she is. But the truth is that I want something better for her! What should I do?<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Answer: What you should do is take a closer look at the way you think of some types of lawyers.<\/p>\n

Like any other group, lawyers have their fair share of questionable characters. But the broad strokes with which you\u2019re painting personal injury lawyers are doing them a disservice and giving you a warped view of the world.<\/p>\n

For instance, there\u2019s no merit to the type of lawsuit you\u2019re talking about when you say that attorneys sue others over mistakes their own clients make. If you are injured through a mistake of your own, then you are highly unlikely to be successful in suing anyone else, because the law is simply not on your side. We need personal injury attorneys, say lawyers at Alabama\u2019s Moore Law Firm, for instances when we are injured through no fault of our own<\/i><\/a>. That\u2019s when someone else is liable (responsible), and we are entitled to compensation. It\u2019s about fairness, not greed: if someone else\u2019s malice or negligence puts you in the hospital, then you shouldn\u2019t have to pay those hospital bills.<\/p>\n

Of course, sometimes the wrong people win lawsuits (and anyone can try<\/i> to sue anyone, which is part of why only 4% of personal injury lawsuits make it to court<\/a>). But bad judgments don\u2019t happen as often as many of us believe, and some of the most famous examples–such as the \u201chot coffee\u201d lawsuit you referred to–did not happen the way they are remembered in the popular culture. For instance, the hot coffee case really did involve coffee heated to extremely unsafe temperatures, and the victim suffered grisly burns<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not as if liability is all that easy to come by. Sure, your parents would have had certain responsibilities if they had installed a pool on their property–but the installation consultants at Monarch Pools and Spas told us that it\u2019s easy to fulfill your legal obligations to keep a pool safe<\/a>. Fencing off the pool to keep it out of the way of wandering neighborhood kids is both a common-sense measure and a legal obligation, and only those who recklessly ignore such obligations should reasonably fear personal injury and wrongful death suits.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are some unscrupulous personal injury attorneys. But if you believe your friend to be as moral as she is intelligent, then you should rest assured that she\u2019s on her way to a career of helping injured parties–and there\u2019s nothing wrong with that.<\/p>\n

\u201cHate lawyers all you want. Unlike you, we\u2019ll never be replaced with robots! Case closed!\u201d — Natalya Vorobyova<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question:\u00a0 My best friend here on campus is planning to go to law school after graduation. I think that\u2019s great–she\u2019s a talented and smart person, and I\u2019m sure she\u2019ll make a fantastic lawyer. But I […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3396","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-campus-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.lvc.edu\/lavie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}