If you were injured by a dangerous medical device, read these 6 frequently asked defective medical device questions. Call our Florida lawyer!
1) How Do I Choose The Right Defective Medical Device Attorney?
We always advise, without exception, to get one that’s got experience. These are not easy cases. These are not inexpensive cases. These are complicated cases. These are not cases for young lawyers who have never handled them before or never been inside a court room before. These are for experienced lawyers. We’ve been in practice 38 years and have seen a lot of different medical device cases come into our office. If you have a medical device case, number one consideration is experience. Experience not only in terms of years but in terms of handling medical device cases.
2) How Much are Defective Medical Device Attorney Fees?
Having said that, do not wait, particularly in a medical device case where a device has been implanted in your body and you have to have surgery to take it out. It’s very important that we preserve the device because it will have to be examined by someone to determine whether it’s defective. There are other reasons for getting in touch with an attorney immediately. Witnesses go away. Other types of evidence disappear. Memory fades.
3) What is a Defective Medical Device Class Action Claim?
A class action is simply a collection of people who have been hurt, for example, with a medical device. There have been class actions brought where their injury is a result, the mechanism of injury is the same and a lot of similarities. There are some complexities to whether a class action suit will survive. If there is one, many times it involves defective devices. There have been class actions and other similar actions like multidistrict litigation where there has been a defective device put on the market. There have been many knee replacement devices and shoulder devices that have been bad and lots of lawsuits were filed— some of them as class actions, others as actions that were collected in one or directed to be collected in one particular federal district where one judge can manage the cases. Many times your medical device case will end up in one of those two collections of cases. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but those are things that we go over with.
4) How Do I Determine the Value of a Defective Medical Device Case?
This is a question that we don’t answer immediately because several things go into putting a value range on a case. Many times it takes a long time because we have to determine whether a device is defective and that is not as simple as it sounds. That can take a very long time to determine. Once we do that, we factor that into other aspects of your case— your medical bills, what kind of disability you’ve had from the medical device, those types of things. Putting a value on the case, eventually we do, but it takes time.
5) What Damages are Available Defective Medical Device?
In Florida, there are several elements of damages. Some of them are pretty obvious. If you’ve suffered medical bills, medical expenses, as a result of the medical device, you can claim those. If you’ve lost time from work connected with the medical device going bad, you can collect those things. You can collect what are known as general damages or intangible damages. Those are things, some of which you have probably heard of, including pain and suffering, as well as others that you’re perhaps not quite as familiar with, such as inconvenience, loss of the capacity for the enjoyment of life, or mental anguish. If you have suffered all of these losses in the future, you get to claim those as well. Those are some of the things that you can collect and those are the things that we look at in valuating your case.
6) If a Medical Device is Recalled, Should I File a Lawsuit?
When medical devices go bad, many times there is a recall, either voluntarily by the manufacturer or at the instruction of the federal government. In those cases, you can use that to file a case for damages for a defective product. Recalls happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, they are pretty obviously done because of a defective nature and they’ve hurt people. Others not so much so. The recall has to be looked at closely but certainly it is a helpful tool to use in determining whether we file a lawsuit.
Did you or a loved one experience an unreasonably dangerous medical device in Florida and have questions? After reading these 6 frequently asked defective medical device questions, contact an experienced Nassau County defective medical device lawyer at Paul Boone Law today for a free legal consultation and case evaluation.
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