Filing a Lawsuit for Catastrophic or Accidental Death

In some sad cases, a person who has been injured will die from those injuries. When this happens, the person's heirs can still attempt to get compensation for the costs associated with the person's injuries. To learn more about accidental death, haga clic aqui. The lawsuit becomes a specific type of personal injury case known as a wrongful death claim.

Whenever someone dies because of non-natural causes, there may be grounds for a wrongful death claim. Murder is perhaps the most obvious cause of wrongful death that there is. The person responsible does not have to be found guilty of the criminal charge of murder to be guilty of the civil charge of wrongful death. Even a person found not guilty of murder may be found guilty of wrongful death by a civil court.

Most wrongful death cases, though, are about accidents. The cause of death can be any number of things. The heirs of a person killed in a car accident might sue for wrongful death, for example. If the person died because of medical malpractice, it can also be a wrongful death claim. Basically, any injury that might be the basis for a personal injury claim can be the grounds for a wrongful death claim.

While wrongful death is a type of personal injury claim, the rules about filing wrongful death claims are different from those that apply to other personal injury claims. A big difference is that the statute of limitations is different for a wrongful death case than it is for a personal injury case. Let's look at a car accident case as an example. If the person in the car accident was injured, they would have up to four years to file a claim. You can click here to consult a medical malpractice lawyer. If the person dies in the auto accident, though, the person's heirs will only have two years to file a claim, even though the cause of death was the auto accident.

Another big difference is who can sue. When you're dealing with a personal injury claim, the injured person files the suit. In a wrongful death case, this is obviously not possible, so the law allows for certain people to sue on the deceased person's behalf.

In Utah, the person's immediate family can be heirs, which covers parents, children, spouses, and siblings. Utah also requires that all heirs act as a single plaintiff, usually by selecting one of the person's heirs to act as representative for the group and only one lawsuit can be filed for that person's death. Consult the Salt Lake City attorneys now! This means that the mother and the wife of a deceased person may not file individual claims for the person's death, but must file a single suit together. Any judgment given must also be shared among the heirs. A person's heirs may opt out of an award, but the representative heir cannot disinherit any of them on their own.