Missouri Medical Malpractice Laws

They call them man’s best friend, but sometimes dogs cause more harm than good. If you or a loved one has been bitten by a dog, there are a couple things that you need to do immediately to protect your rights. One is to contact the authorities, police department or animal control, and fill out a report. Another thing which is very important is to find out and identify the owner of the dog. It doesn’t do any good to call an attorney, it doesn’t do any good to call the police if you don’t know who owns the dog that bit you. If you or a loved one have been bitten by a dog, contact us, call us on the number on your screen, or visit us through the Internet. I’m happy to answer your questions without any cost or obligation. Call 314-A-LAWYER today for your free consultation.

By: Spencer Farris

When you’ve been hurt whether it’s in a car or because you’ve gotten injured on someone’s property at that moment a Missouri personal injury lawyer is important to you and the Missouri law is important to you. But up until that time you weren’t even aware it existed and you’re always in the cross hairs in our state legislature. There hasn’t been a year gone by since the 22 years that I’ve been practicing that the Missouri legislature hasn’t had injury victims in it’s cross hairs. They want to get at the lawyers, but they do it by walking over folks like you, that have been hurt.

Unfortunately you don’t know your rights have been infringed upon, you don’t that you’ve been within the cross hairs of the legislature until you get hurt. But because of that you don’t know all the things you need to do to handle your case once you’ve been hurt and how the law has developed over the last several hundred years. And you need a Missouri personal injury lawyer to help guide you down the path and make sure that you don’t get taken advantage of by the insurance company for the folks that hurt you.  When you’ve been hurt and the bills are racking up, you don’t have to pay a lawyer out of pocket to represent you in your injury case. Call my office and if we can help you, we won’t charge you anything until the end of your case if we’re successful for you. Call 314-A-LAWYER today for a free consultation.

By: Spencer Farris

A trial is when your case is finally decided by a judge or a jury, and somebody else decides what your case is about and what it’s worth.

By: Spencer Farris

If you’re a victim of a hit and run in Missouri your uninsured motorist coverage will protect you. And a Missouri auto accident attorney is who you need to hire to make sure that you collect from the insurance company and take care of all of your losses. You don’t need to know who hit you. They may not even need to touch your car in Missouri. If they swerve and cause you to wreck, your uninsured motor coverage is available to you and a Missouri accident attorney knows how to follow the law to get you your damages back. If I do my own plumbing at home and mess it up, I can call a professional plumber. He’ll come in – he may laugh at me – it may charge more, but he can fix it. But if you have a legal case and you don’t have an experienced Missouri auto accident attorney you can never get over that. You can never fix that problem. You get one shot to collect all of your damages and one shot to do it right. Over the years folks have come to me that tried to handle their case at the beginning because the insurance company the claim reps are very friendly and they want you to trust them. But at some point folks realize they can’t go it alone and they call me because they’re looking for a Missouri auto accident attorney. Sometimes I can help and sometimes I can’t, but it always works better if you call me, call an attorney immediately or as soon after a crash as you can. The longer the wait the harder it is for me as a Missouri auto accident attorney to do my job.  When you’ve been hurt and the bills are racking up, you don’t have to pay a lawyer out of pocket to represent you in your injury case. Call my office and if we can help you, we won’t charge you anything until the end of your case if we’re successful for you. Call 314-A-LAWYER today for a free consultation.

By: Spencer Farris

When you’ve been in a crash with a drunk driver, you need a Missouri personal injury lawyer to protect your rights, because your insurance may come into play. His may not be enough, and you need someone that knows the law, and will pursue those cases aggressively. They’re not open-and-shut just because the other driver was drinking.

I remember a case, many years ago, where a drunk was aggressively driving, and racing someone else. Blew through a red light, and hit my client’s car in the side. The impact was devastating. His– when I first met the young man, his face didn’t even look like a human face, because of all the swelling, and all the injuries he sustained. But we were fortunate to be able to help him in that situation, and were very creative in finding enough coverage to try to help him put his life back together.

You wouldn’t think so, but a drunk driver in Missouri who’s hurt somebody with his first offense, even if it causes a death, may not go to prison, may get probation. Part of what civil law does, and what a Missouri personal injury lawyer does, is help hold these folks accountable for the damages they cause, make them pay for the beautiful vase that they’ve broken, or the beautiful life that they’ve destroyed. If you don’t hire a Missouri personal injury lawyer after you’ve been in a car crash, you’re at the insurance company’s mercy. And they are there – and they’re generating profits for their shareholders – not by paying folks like you who have been hurt, but by paying as little as possible on claims. They’ve got professionals on their side, and if you don’t have a Missouri personal injury lawyer fighting for you on your side, you’re going to take the crumbs that they feed you. When you’ve been hurt, and the bills are racking up, you don’t have to pay a lawyer out of pocket to represent you in your injury case. Call my office, and if we can help you, we won’t charge you anything until the end of your case, if we’re successful for you.  Call 314-A-LAWYER today for a free consultation.

By: Spencer Farris

It’s too late, once you’ve been in a wreck, to think about insurance coverage.

Injury Law News, brought to you by the S.E. Farris Law Firm.

I’m Spencer Farris, an attorney with the S.E. Farris Law Firm, in St. Louis, Missouri. You buy automobile insurance and hope you never have to use it. But there are kinds of insurance that will help you quite a bit if you’re in a wreck. Let’s talk about those for a minute. In order to drive a car in Missouri, two types of insurance are mandatory: liability coverage, to take care of the harms you cause to other folks – and uninsured motorist coverage, in case someone hurts you, who doesn’t follow the law. Liability coverage protects you if you hurt someone else while you’re driving. It’ll also provide you with legal services in case you get sued. Although Missouri requires all drivers to have liability insurance, not all drivers follow the law. That’s why uninsured motorist coverage is also mandatory in Missouri.

Uninsured motorist coverage means that the person who hit you, who harmed you because of their negligent driving, has now coverage to cover your injuries. Besides the mandatory required coverages in Missouri, there are some other insurance coverages that will assist you if you’re ever hurt in a car crash, and it’s someone else’s fault. We’re not going to talk about property coverage today – just coverages for occupants, people, in the vehicles. The first of those is underinsured motorist coverage. Underinsured motorist coverage means that the person who harmed you doesn’t have enough insurance to cover all of your losses. If you’re seriously injured in a car crash, and the person who hurt you only has the minimum coverage required in Missouri – which right now is $25,000 – underinsured motorist coverage would help bridge the gap, between what they had and what you suffered, to help put you back where you were before you got hurt.

Even though you may have health insurance, medical payments coverage is another coverage that is available to you, to help defray some of the losses you have when you get hurt in a car crash. You can use medical payments coverage, even if you have health insurance, to help cover your deductibles and the other out-of-pocket medical expenses that you will have. Just because you have health insurance coverage doesn’t mean you can’t collect your medical payments. And it’s not cheating. It’s like having two life insurance policies. If you’ve paid for extra coverage, you get to collect when you have to. And if you’re hurt in a car crash, there’s not enough money for what you’re going through. You need to collect everything that’s available to you. In my office, and with most qualified injury attorneys in Missouri, there’s no fee for helping you collect your medical payments coverage. When you’re injured and go to the hospital or doctor, you want to make sure that, if you have health insurance, you present your health insurance information, and demand that the doctor or hospital bill your health insurance company.

Contracts with major providers, like Blue Cross Blue Shield, etc., will require that the doctor and hospital accept health insurance for payment. If you don’t do that, the health care provider is going to want to take money from your settlement. And there’s not going to be enough money, at the end of a settlement for an injury, for what you’ve suffered – the pain and the discomfort. It’s important to have a lawyer help maximize that coverage. And one way that my law firm does that is by making sure that health care providers bill health insurance. Medicare and Medicaid are the same thing as health insurance plans, and make sure that doctors and hospitals bill them. Don’t worry about repayments to Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurance plans. A qualified lawyer will take care of that, and try to minimize those repayments, so that more money goes to the injured victim.

Call the S.E. Farris Law Firm if you have any questions about insurance coverage. We’re happy to talk with you without a charge. The S.E. Farris Law Firm is dedicated to the needs of injury victims and their families.

By: Spencer Farris