Areas of Practice

Personal injury means injury to the body or mind – basically an injury to a person, as opposed to an injury to property. A civil action for damages can be brought against the individuals or entities that caused the injury.

There are three major categories of personal injury suits:

• Suits for intentional harm, such as battery, assault, or false imprisonment.
• Negligence suits, where the harm was the result of another person’s carelessness.
• Defamation suits, where the harm was to the injured party’s reputation.

Truck accident lawsuits can cover vehicle accidents involving at least one large commercially operated truck. This can include vehicles such as big rigs, “semi” trucks, delivery trucks, cargo trucks,tractor-trailer trucks, transport trucks, and other types of trucks.  In this sense, the word “truck” usually refers to larger commercial vehicles rather than normal “pick-up trucks” or SUV’s.

Contract law is that body of rules that govern contractual agreements between persons or merchants. A contract is basically an agreement between parties outlining their duties and responsibilities to one another. Contracts can be formed for nearly any type of interaction. So, contract laws may address various transactions for the sale of goods and services. Contract laws outline what a person can or cannot include in a contract, and what the remedies are if a party breaches their contractual duties.

A business dispute can occur in many ways. Usually, a business dispute arises between businesses when they disagree over the terms of a contract they have entered into. A business dispute can also arise over property disputes, billing issues or other disagreements.

Real estate disputes are legal conflicts that involve real property (i.e. property that is affixed to the land or a piece of land itself, as opposed to personal property). These types of disputes can involve properties that are worth large amounts of money. Many of these disputes can take a long time to resolve, and may involve many financial/court resources. Thus, it is often common for people involved in a real estate dispute to seek alternative forms of dispute resolution.

For instance, many real estate disputes involve a breach of contract when it comes to the sale of property. In such case, both real estate laws and contract remedies may apply, thus making the situation more complex.

The term intellectual property (IP for short) broadly refers to property rights vested in the intangible. The property rights associated with real property (land) and personal property (everything else) are fairly straightforward: the owner of such property has a right to possess it, to prevent others from possessing it, and to preserve its integrity, hence our laws against theft, trespass, and vandalism.

Intellectual property law, on the other hand, protects entities which have no physical form. This includes names and logos attached to products, inventions, and original works of authorship. Because nobody can physically possess these things, the laws of personal property cannot, and do not, apply. Accordingly, rather than protecting possession, intellectual property law generally protects exclusive rights to use or reproduce the intellectual property. IP laws may also, in some circumstances, protect secrecy.

Most products sold today are safe for general use. However, some products have defects in design or construction, which make them not work properly, or even worse, cause harm to the user. Product liability describes the area of law that attempts to recover loss caused by a defective product. Where a product causes unexpected loss damage to the consumer, the law protects consumer from by holding the party that caused the defect responsible for the damage. The responsible party may be the designer, the manufacturer, the distributor or the seller of the product, or a combination thereof.

Determining who is responsible, requires an understanding of how the product was designed, created, manufactured and distributed so that you can determine where along this chain of responsibility the defect occurred.