Alhambra CA Personal Injury Law Blog

An employee running an errand for the boss can expose the employer to liability for a car crash. In addition to the driver, employers may need to pay compensation for car accident injuries even if the employees drove their own vehicles.

An employer is not liable for accidents caused by an employee commuting to and from work. Their personal insurance covers this accident. But, employers may be financially responsible if the employee made a trip in the scope and course of their employment, even if such a trip happens only occasionally. A worker is acting upon the scope and course of their job if they deviated from their normal commute at their employer's request. This includes tasks such as making deliveries for their employer, picking up and transporting clients, getting food for an office party and picking up mail from the post office, for example.

Trucks are considered masters of the highway, but crashes involving these vehicles may be catastrophic and involve serious injuries or death. This risk multiplies with California's extensive highway network. After studying truck accidents, government researchers have disclosed the three major causes of these accidents.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration studied a sampling of fatal and injury accidents involving 141,000 trucks and 120,000 fatal and serious injuries in the Large Truck Crash Causation Study (LTCCS). In two-vehicle accidents, according to the LTCCS findings, truck driving error was the critical reason for 44 percent of the accidents. Even though this is less than half of the causes, these errors document accidents where truck drivers should have been driving safer.

Deadly car crashes are not limited to the actions of a reckless, distracted or drunk driver. The family of a women who was killed in a car accident by a driver fleeing police filed a legal action against the Long Beach police. The victim's family held police partially responsible for her death.

The victim's mother filed a wrongful death claim against Long Beach on behalf of the victim's 11-year-old daughter. Compensation was not specified. These actions are usually a forerunner to a lawsuit.

Doctors, like the rest of us, are not 100 percent objective. In fact, 12 million patients in this country were misdiagnosed because of bad judgment. Implicit bias was, according to research, involved in many claims for wrongful death or disability.

Judgment errors were responsible for 86 percent of the 55,377 medical claims involving wrongful death or disability, according to research from the director of the John Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality's Center for Diagnostic Excellence. Bad judgment includes assorted gaps in knowledge, inattention and misinterpretation, along with implicit bias.