Long Island Burn Injury Lawyer

Burns can be some of the most painful and debilitating personal injuries you can suffer. Depending on the severity of the burn, you may be facing a recovery process of months to years, and you may never fully recover at all.

Burn patients often require care at a specialized burn center and numerous skin grafts. In the meantime, they may experience severe pain and a grueling rehabilitation process. Even with treatment, many burn victims live with permanent scarring and disfigurement for the rest of their lives.

If you or a loved one have suffered a burn injury that was someone else’s fault, you may be entitled to significant financial compensation. Contact the attorneys at Rosenberg & Gluck, LLP, for your free initial consultation. We represent clients with severe injuries and regularly obtain six and seven-figure recoveries.

Please reach out today if you believe someone else should be responsible for your burn injury-related losses.

Burn Injury Risks on Long Island

About 450,000 people in the United States need medical treatment for serious burns yearly. Many of these people are in New York, and Long Island itself has many burn injury risks.

Burns might happen due to electrical accidents on construction sites or scalds from hot liquids at restaurants. A house might catch fire, leading to burns and smoke inhalation injuries. Someone might suffer exposure to toxic chemicals at work and suffer burns. No matter how a burn happens, it can still be excruciatingly painful and life-threatening.

There is no disputing that burn care in the United States has advanced. However, despite the medical progress, burn victims will still have their lives changed forever. There is only so much that one can recover from a severe injury that can impact a large area of their body.

Many burn injuries will occur in the home. Still, accident victims are eligible for financial compensation when the fire was someone else’s fault. For example, faulty wiring or home appliances can be the cause of the fire. Your fire might result from the careless actions of a neighbor, whether you live in an apartment building or a single-family home.

If you believe someone else was responsible for your burn injury, seek help from a Long Island burn injury attorney immediately.

Where Burn Injuries May Occur

Outside the home, you can get burned:

• From hot liquids at dangerously hot temperatures – the classic example is the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, where the victim sustained significant damages when the fast-food chain served coffee that it knew was dangerously hot. Lost in the media storm was the description of the severe and painful injuries that the injured woman suffered.
• In car accidents, when your vehicle catches fire – some cars have design defects, so they have a higher chance of igniting in an accident.
• In a work accident at your job – typically, you may not sue your employer, but you can sue a third party who was responsible for your accident, such as a power company or a business that made defective goods.
• At restaurants and hotels, when something catches fire – the hotel itself or another guest can cause the fire.
• When a person or company exposes you to dangerous substances and chemicals – toxic burns are just as severe as burns from heat.
• Anyplace where exposed electrical lines or wires are near you – many electrical accidents cause burns where the electricity enters or exits the body.

Immediate Burn Care Is Critical

The days after a severe burn are the most critical. In the short term, the victim’s life can be in danger, depending on how much of the body the burns cover. The accident victim may have open wounds and require continuous treatment with antibiotics to prevent infection. They may need medical treatment for days or weeks to stabilize them before they can even begin to undergo the first of what can be many surgical procedures.

Once medical providers stabilize your situation, you may begin to realize the long road that you have ahead of you. Recovery time will likely involve years and not weeks or months. You should not wait to discuss your legal rights with our attorneys. Compensation can help support you as you move forward on your burn injury journey.

Long-Term Effects of Burns

Burns may cause the following long-term effects:

• Scarring
• Disfigurement
• Trouble breathing
• Nerve damage
• Loss of sensation
• Chronic infections

The pain associated with burn injuries can last for years, or it may even be permanent. You might lose the use of important body parts due to scarring or amputation. You should receive full compensation for all of these effects when someone else was responsible.

The Very High Costs of Burn Injury Care

So long as you need any type of medical care for your burn, the costs are sure to be steep. Forty-one percent of burn patients spend time in specialized regional burn centers for treatment. Many must stay in a hospital burn unit for some time, especially when there is a severe risk of infection. Any type of emergency treatment will result in a bill of thousands of dollars, compounding when you need to spend time overnight in a hospital.

Many burn patients will need skin grafts to replace the skin that suffered permanent damage from the burn. Each procedure will be costly. Some burn patients may need upwards of a dozen skin grafts just to achieve a partial recovery. The aftermath of these procedures can be painful, and you may miss quite a bit of work and life activities due to continuous medical procedures.

Can You Recover Damages for Pain and Suffering?

One of the significant elements of a personal injury case is pain and suffering. This compensation pays you for what you have had to endure from someone else’s negligence. Pain and suffering damages compensate you for both the physical pain and the emotional trauma. In addition, your non-economic damages can include payments for permanent disfigurement and disability, which are things that many burn victims will experience.

Insurance companies may use a multiplier method to calculate your pain and suffering damages. They will take the total of your economic damages and multiply it by a certain number depending on their impression of the severity of your injuries. The problem is that their impression often underestimates how severe your burns are.

If the insurance company is trying to minimize your injuries and your experience, we will fight for you. Our lawyers will make sure that no one brushes your case aside, and an insurance company looking to save money cannot profit at your expense.

It May Take Time to Learn Your Prognosis

You may not know immediately after the accident what your future prognosis is. To receive full compensation for your accident injuries, you need to know the full extent of your damages, including future losses. It can take some time to understand your recovery process and whether you can fully recover at all. Nonetheless, you should begin the legal process by calling an attorney, even if you are not yet ready to file a claim or lawsuit.

One way your lawyer helps you is by working with experts to figure out the value of your claim. Your attorney needs to have prior experience with burn injury cases to understand your prognosis. You must estimate your future medical expenses because they will be part of your settlement or your jury award. You cannot come back and seek more money in the future when you learn you have greater losses than you anticipated.

You must properly value your claim from the start, which is where our experienced injury attorneys come in. We ensure you never request or settle for less than you deserve.

What May Determine Your Burn Injury Damages

How much money you may may recover will depend on:

• How many skin grafts you may need
• The extent of the pain you are dealing with
• Whether you can work again
• How visible your burns are
• The extent of residual scarring
• The quality of life that you may have after your injuries and how much you lost from what you had before the injury

Your burn injury damages are specific to you. For example, if your burns result in disabilities that effectively end a hard-earned professional career, you may be eligible for more damages.

Proving Negligence in a Burn Injury Case

There are two parts to the legal process. Before you can even have a conversation about how much money you should get, you need to prove that someone else was responsible for your injuries. To do this, you must have evidence that demonstrates what someone did and how it caused damage to you. Then, you will need to show how the other person fell short of what the average person should do. In other words, you must prove that someone else was negligent.

Here are some examples of what the law might consider negligence in burn injury cases:

• An electric company has hanging wires or does not correctly bury utility lines at a work site, and you suffer electric shock.
• A product manufacturer makes a defective product that explodes, gets extremely hot to the touch, or causes a household fire.
• A hotel catches fire because of faulty equipment or careless acts by hotel staff or guests.
• Your landlord does not have working smoke detectors, and you suffer burns in an apartment fire.
• A truck driver rear-ends your car, and it causes a fire in your vehicle.

Negligence depends on the facts of your case. In some instances, an insurance company is willing to concede negligence and move right to trying to underpay you. In other cases, they may deny a claim outright.

How Can a Burn Injury Lawyer Help Your Case?

Your lawyer will handle the details of the legal process. When you are dealing with the aftermath of a burn injury, you are in no shape to deal with anything yourself, nor should you even try.

Further, when you are dealing with a sophisticated insurance company, you should not try to present the claim on your own or try to negotiate compensation. The one certainty is that the insurance company will get the better of you. They always do when people try to represent themselves. In your effort to save on legal fees, you can end up costing yourself far more.

The most powerful word that your lawyer can say is no. Your lawyer will say this when the insurance company makes you a paltry settlement offer that tries to give you pennies on the dollar for your injuries.

The inadequacy of the insurance company’s initial settlement offer may shock you. Getting full and fair compensation requires tenacity and toughness. We have the experience and resources to take on any party that caused your injuries – including large corporations when necessary.

Contact a Long Island Burn Injury Lawyer Today

If you have suffered a burn injury, you must have a determined and aggressive lawyer who will make your cause their own. There is a wide disparity in financial outcomes in severe personal injury cases. In many cases, how much you get depends on your attorney and the legal strategy that they use.

The one outcome that you cannot have is not getting enough money because your settlement funds can run out, and the law prohibits you from trying to get more money if you settle for too little. You risk being responsible for your losses far into the future if you do not have the right advocates handling your burn injury claim.

The personal injury attorneys at Rosenberg & Gluck, LLP, are here when you need us and ready to work for you. For your free initial consultation, you can fill out our online contact form or call us at (631) 451-7900. Consultations are at no cost with no obligation, and you do not need to pay us anything unless you win your case.