Legal Talk

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Q: My dad was mowing the lawn with a brand new lawn mower, he had only used it two times since he bought it.  Something happened with the lawn mower and a piece of metal came out from under it and hit him in the heal.  It cut his heal pretty badly chipped a bone and we had to take him to the emergency room.  He had to take off work and we are not sure what to do. My mother doesn't work and they need his income to get by. Is there anything we can do?

A:  First off, you need to contact a personal injury lawyer right away.  Remember, you have a limited time to assert a claim so do not wait and valuable evidence needs to be preserved.  That being said, I assume from the question that this just happened recently so to get started you want to check with your father's employer to see if he has any short-term disability insurance that he can utilize to get some money coming in why he is healing.  Depending on the extent of the injury he may need to seek long-term disability. As far as getting additional money to compensate him, speak with a personal injury lawyer.  There may be some liability on the part of the manufacturer of the mower depending on if the mower malfunctioned or if it was damaged in some way.  If he just hit something in the yard and it came up and hit him then there also may be some design defect that would also give rise to liability on the part of the manufacturer of the mower.  I would also want to know if he was mowing is own yard or if he was mowing another person’s yard, another person they may have some liability also, depending on the circumstances.  Long story short, you need to speak with a personal injury lawyer so he/she can investigate what happened and your father's possible claims.  Sorry to hear about your father's bad luck, hope he gets better soon.