Can you sue if you get burned at work in Orlando?

Burn injuries are particularly gruesome because victims often deal with lifelong scars and disfigurement for the rest of their lives in addition to physical injuries.

Every day, people are injured by hot items, fire, chemicals, and other substances through no fault of their own. Some burn injuries are minor and require minimal medical attention. Others send people to the emergency room. Some are fatal.

Depending on how the injury happened, there may have been some unsafe conditions and other factors in the environment that led to something like a hot tar spill or electrical burn. While there is always some risk in life, property owners, businesses, and other parties are often responsible when accidents happen.

If you or someone you know suffered burn injuries, you may be able to sue responsible parties to cover medical costs, pain and suffering, and any other expenses related to the injury.

An experienced lawyer can help you know whether you have a case and what steps you should take next. With a burn injury attorney, Orlando residents find support when life turns upside down.

Burn Injury Attorney Orlando Assessments

Just like with most injuries, burns vary significantly in severity. A minor burn is probably no big deal. Blow on it a few times and keep on kicking.

However, burns are also sometimes very serious. They can cause lasting nerve and tissue damage and leave a person disfigured for the rest of their life.

Wherever burns happen, whether you’re cooking in a vacation villa and the gas line explodes or you’re walking by an unsafe construction site and hot machinery burns you, one of the first things you need to do is get a medical assessment.

A doctor will take a look at your injury and decide if it’s a:

First-Degree Burns (superficial): This type of burn is the mildest, and usually only damages the top layer of the skin. Think mild sunburn.

Second-Degree Burns (partial thickness): Second-degree burns cause minor damage deeper into skin layers. You can spot a second-degree burn when blisters appear around the injured area.

Third-Degree Burns (full thickness): This type of burn damages several layers of skin and can reach into body tissue, causing nerve damage. They may involve damage to the bone, muscle or tendons, and usually require hospitalization and rehabilitation.

Understanding the severity of a burn injury is necessary to communicate how bad the accident was. Your lawyer will use what type of burn you or a loved one has in discussions with the liable parties, insurance companies, and in court.

Examining How the Burn Injuries Happened

Burn accidents, unfortunately, happen all the time. What’s wrong is when you or anyone else shrugs off the injury as a mistake that no one could control. While accidents happen, there are often conditions that make them more likely.

Burn injuries happen in:

• Accidents involving faulting electricity wiring
• Chemical spills or improper chemical handling procedures
• Steam burns in kitchens
• Around construction sites
• Open fires as a result of poor safety measures
• Hot liquid spills
• Explosions
• Hot outdoor surfaces (like metal that heats up under the hot sun)

When someone is burned, they sometimes feel like it was their mistake. They shouldn’t have touched that hot item, or it was an act of god and out of their hands.

This is flat-out wrong thinking. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: there are often mistakes and negligence that contributed to your injuries.

The Responsibility to Provide a Safe Environment & Safe Products

It doesn’t matter if you’re staying in a hotel or using a new tool you bought from the store. Here are some things you should expect to avoid burn injuries:

• Posted warning signs and instructions.
• An equipment manufacturing process to ensure everything is in good working order (furniture, machinery, pots, etc.).
• A comprehensive quality control system.
• Limit access to dangerous chemicals and other hazardous materials.

These are just some of the steps property owners, businesses, and product manufacturers need to take to prevent burn injuries. When they don’t, people assume they are safe and burn injuries happen. 

Suing for Compensation After a Burn Injury

Worker’s compensation exists for when something happens at work that prevents you from working. If you become sick on the job or injured, worker’s compensation covers your wages while you’re away and getting better.

But what happens when you’re not an employee and you suffer burn injuries as a result of negligence or poor safety conditions? You have your insurance, but often it’s difficult to get the coverage you need and deserve to cover all the costs.

Insurance companies, by design, are out to take in as much money as possible and payout as little as possible. That’s how they make their profit. And that’s why, when you are involved in an accident, someone else’s insurance company will typically try to pay as little as possible. 

Things get a bit dicey when insurance companies aren’t paying fair compensation for injuries. That’s where your lawyer will step in.

You can decide to sue responsible parties for several reasons including:

• Negligence
• To cover medical costs
• Pain & Suffering
• Punitive damages

You can make sure that the mistakes that led to your injuries never happen again. 

Remember, even after all of the medical costs and lost wages are added up, the burn victim is going to deal with the effects of the injury for the rest of their life. How do you put a price tag on that when a company or property owner was negligent when it came to safety?

Duty of Care

What is a duty of care? This phrase typically refers to the responsibility one has over another. For example, parents have a duty of care when it comes to their children. They need to keep them safe and provide for them.

No book outlines everything a parent has to do to take care of their kids. There are, however, general expectations. In a legal sense, parents are expected to do what “any” reasonable parent would do in the same situation.

The same goes for talking about duty of care related to burn injuries.

It’s true, sometimes burn injuries happen, and it’s not someone else’s fault. The product manufacturer did all of the inspections, maintained the equipment, trained employees and posted visible warning signs and policy instructions, etc. The property owner went the extra mile to avoid burn risks.

The court may decide that the accident was not a third-party’s fault because they did what any reasonable company or property owner would do to prevent burn injuries.

The problem comes into play when they don’t meet that standard of care. A company may have been lax or tried to save money by cutting down on training hours or leaving dangerous materials too close to customers. Then, a court can decide that their actions were not “reasonable” after an accident.

When a company breaches its duty of care and someone is hurt, they must make things right.

How a Burn Injury Attorney Orlando Firm can Help

If you are injured and suffer burns, a burn injury attorney Orlando specialist can help.

One of the most important things you need to do after a burn injury is proving liability.

When someone or a company fails to take the necessary steps to protect others, they’ve violated their duty of care.

An experienced lawyer can gather evidence and examine the conditions in place when the injury occurred. They can help you build a case against:

• A product manufacturer that made a faulty product that contributed to the burn injury
• A restaurant where hot coffee or other liquids are spilled on a customer
• A retailer or wholesaler that sold the product knowing it was faulty
• A general contractor managing a work site that failed to make the environment safe
• A parts supplier responsible for maintaining equipment
• A property owner that neglected to keep their home, hotel, or villa safe.

As you can see, a burn injury case and assigning liability or proving negligence often goes beyond a single liable party. As is the case with most burn injuries, there are a lot of parts at play, and there could be multiple responsible parties.

A burn injury attorney Orlando expert and their legal team will spot problems that led up to the injury and hold those people responsible.

Leighton Panoff Law has worked for years to help injury victims get the compensation they deserve. We have a long track record of helping burn victims obtain recoveries for their injuries, including a $688,000 verdict for a hot coffee spill at a Disney resort. Call us today to talk about your case and how we can help. Get a no-obligation consultation to start the process today.