North Carolina Car Accident Lawyer Blog

Whether your son broke his ribs in an SUV rollover, your husband tore his ACL on an amusement park ride, or you suffered a devastating home fire when your space heater malfunctioned, you understand you have the potential to take some kind of legal action and perhaps to participate in a North Carolina class action or mass tort lawsuit.

But you are confused about what to do next. Should you connect with a legal team like DeMayo Law or “deal with the situation yourself” — i.e. work directly with an insurance company?

Everyone has different needs and sensitivities and comforts. But it’s important to be rational rather than impulsive when you make a big decision like this.

We often play to our superstitions rather than to logical common sense.

Consider the diverse nature of our strange beliefs. Whether you are afraid of the number 13; you bet your wedding date when you play the lottery; or you worry about a black cat crossing your path or something along those lines, part of you recognizes that you’re being ridiculous with the superstitions.

You understand that that you are using “magical thinking” and not logic. But even when you “call out” your superstitions — call your own bluff — you may not be able to overpower your subconscious resistance. You may not, for instance, ever feel comfortable sleeping on the 13^th floor of a hotel. If you’re Russian, you may refuse to shake someone’s hand when they reach through a doorway to you.

Depending on how deeply you hold strange beliefs, they can really hamper your life.

The point is that wrestling with such strange beliefs–even when you make those beliefs conscious and you appreciate that they’re clearly irrational–is more challenging than meets the eye.

As much as we should “trust our guts” in certain situations, we also need to learn how and when to challenge our intuitions in order to achieve best results.

To that end, if you have reservations about connecting with an attorney–or if you have some strange belief about why you are not someone who “does” lawsuits, reflect on that received wisdom. Are those concepts actually serving you right now?

Consider, for instance, the worst thing that could happen, if you got a consultation with attorney, versus the best thing that could happen if you did. That the more that you can shine rational light on your fears, the more you can move beyond them and make more compelling and useful decisions.

If the extreme faction of the tort reform movement had its way, perhaps North Carolina mass torts and class actions wouldn’t exist at all.

If you got hurt–or someone in your family got seriously injured or sickened–by a bad product, broken medical device, or improperly measured pharmaceutical, you still likely have reservations about class actions and other types of legal actions.

Most people have been trained to be wary of lawyers and litigators–to see injury firms as a kind of “necessary evil.” Arguments and statistics that so called tort reformists use to impugn the personal injury law industry generally don’t hold up to close scrutiny. In fact, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other journals of record have documented at great length the many false beliefs that the vast majority of the population has about personal injury litigation.

In summary: concerns that injury lawsuits are bankrupting the healthcare system or driving insurance companies to increase their rates are just not founded in fact.

Of course, given that this is a blog run by a North Carolina class action law firm–our reportage is obviously not without its biases. If you are concerned about the ethicality of filing a personal injury lawsuit, take some time and read articulate, well-sourced arguments by both sides.

Let the facts speak for themselves.

Meanwhile, getting back to our thought experiment–imagine if the tort reformers succeeded, and class actions in North Carolina and beyond no longer existed. How, then, would consumers redress serious wrong doings? How would hurt people pay their medical bills and other costs if they couldn’t effectively recoup those costs from a drug company or insurer or other liable party? If they got no money, they would need to fall back on the public safety net–ultimately, the taxpayers would need to foot the bill.

Taking a broader perspective, what would happen if drug companies and other businesses discovered that they could “get away with” providing poor quality products or failing to warn consumers and caregivers about dangerous aspects of their products/services?

The general point is that, as an injury victim, you really need to educate yourself and leverage the full panoply of resources available to you. Call the DeMayo Law team today for insight and help into your case.

Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Budweiser Beer, is facing a pretty serious class action lawsuit that alleges that the brewer watered down its products prior to bottling.

Thus far, plaintiffs in Texas, Pennsylvania, Missouri, New Jersey, Colorado, Ohio, and California have all filed suit against the beer manufacturer based on whistleblowing testimony from former high placed employees in the business–at 13 separate breweries.

Will a North Carolina class action against Budweiser be next?

Anheuser-Busch has fought back vigorously against the bad press–the company recently took out full page ads in The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and eight other major newspapers touting the fact that the company provided 71 million cans of drinking water to the American Red Cross and other disaster organizations. The cheeky headline read “they must have tested one of these.”

But a lead attorney in the case, Josh Boxer, shrugged off the newspaper ad blitz as a “classic non-denial…(the) alcohol readings, taken six times a second as the finished product is bottled, will confirm the allegations made by the growing number of former employees who keep coming forward to tell us the truth.”

In court, Anheuser-Busch will need to produce data on its internal and alcohol testing procedures. Ten different products are tangled up in the legal matter, including well-known brands like Budweiser, Michelob, and Bud Ice as well as more “exotic” brands, like Hurricane High Gravity Lager and Bud Light Lime.

Do you have a potential Charlotte class action lawsuit?

The team here at the Law Offices of Michael A. DeMayo can help you understand and defend your rights to get compensation. Depending on your circumstances, you may want to file a personal injury suit or a mass tort action. Our team can help you strategize and determine the most effective, accurate course forward. Call us now for a free consultation, and get clarity on what you need to do.

In the hours and days since your North Carolina injury–or your family member’s injury- you have been in a mad scramble to get medical care and make sense of your options.

What steps should you be taking (or not taking) to manage the medical crisis, collect evidence, and deal with the urgent logistics in your life? Who is going to take care of the kids while you’re hurt? Who’s going to handle the big work project that you had to drop to deal with the catastrophe? How will you pay the mortgage now that you’ve spent thousands of dollars out of pocket on ambulance and hospital services?

After you wrangle these urgent details, you then need to scramble to recalibrate everything in your life. You will also need to find a way to deal with the tremendous challenges of finding appropriate representation:

• Do you have a case or not?
• If so, what should you do first?
• Whom can you trust?
• How can you evaluate different law firms against one another?
• How can you work effectively with a law firm to make sure that you get clear answers and good communication throughout the process?

All of these urgent questions might be on your mind. And they all need to be addressed.

The several lining–if there is one–is that, once you do get all of these things taken care of, assuming you have done everything effectively, you should enjoy renewed peace of mind.

The great gift that a solid North Carolina mass tort law firm can provide is the gift of clarity.

Even though your life may feel like it’s in a million pieces right now–if you know exactly what’s going to happen next and what to expect; and if you have trusted people working on your behalf–much of the stress and agitation will lift.

Obviously, even a superb law firm is not going to magically make your injury go away or eliminate the anger and frustration you feel about what happened. But you should feel a sense of relief and security that you are moving in the right direction.

And when people feel like their lives are moving in a positive direction, they often see passed their immediate limitations and handle the process with more grace and patience.

Connect with the DeMayo Law team right now for strategic, insightful assistance with your Charlotte personal injury matter.

Why have you yet to file a North Carolina class action lawsuit? Why haven’t you take action to protect your rights and to hold a dubious insurance company or narcissistic boss or negligent product maker to any kind of account?

After all, you have plenty of reason to want to take action. Exhibit A: your serious injury or your loved one’s serious injury. Exhibit B: your strong belief (perhaps supported by evidence) that someone or some institution has not played fair with you–either failed to warn you about some danger or put you in harm’s way due to negligence, misanthropy, carelessness, fatigue, or some combination of bad factors.

Yet you are restrained. You are not taking action.

Rather than beat yourself up over this, recognize this “timidity problem” is incredibly common among accident victims. The tort reform lobby likes to paint North Carolina personal injury plaintiffs as somehow overly entitled or venal. This stereotype is totally incorrect–and almost the reverse of what’s true.

Most people who get injured are extremely reluctant to take their fight to the court system, even when they have extremely good reason to do so.

The reason they’re so reluctant is that most people don’t like to make waves. They don’t like the idea of “suing” someone or some company. It sounds really aggressive. Plus, when you “sue” someone or put up any kind of legal fight, you need to jump through all sorts of hoops and possibly retain a North Carolina personal injury class action lawyer (which can be an intimidating proposition). Then you may need to get embroiled in a battle that puts your reputation on the line (or at least so you fear). Ultimately, you may not even get results.

Thus, you could fight very hard, get your hopes up and then see those hopes dashed.

No, the problem is not that too many people pursue legal action–it’s that timid people who should at least consider their options are intimidated from exploring their options.

Understand that it’s an act of tremendous bravery and courage just to pick the phone and connect with a mass tort law firm, like DeMayo, at (877) 529-1222. Calling our firm or any reputable firm may force you to abandon your comfort zone, temporarily. And when you are sick and injured or financially struggling, the last thing you want to do is “go out of your comfort zone” even more.

But recognize that you owe to yourself and your family to understand your rights and options, even if you never decide to act on them through the court system. First, seek help, and then make a more informed decision once you know your options better.