If your vehicle is crashworthy it means it will adequately protect you during a collision. If this does not happen, you may be able to file a personal injury lawsuit.

Crash ratings of vehicles these days are important things to note. They tell you what your chances are of being able to survive a collision. While it won’t tell you if your injuries will be reduced, the crashworthiness of a well built vehicle is something that is a distinct benefit for the vehicle’s occupants.

The term crashworthiness really refers to the total design of a vehicle and deals with things like the engine compartment, how the frame is put together and other integral structural items. Other items come into play when determining crashworthiness, and those relate to vehicle suspension, locks, air bags, seat belts, engine mounts, tires and other elements.

While many car makes do put their vehicles through some very rigorous testing to determine passenger safety, the question is how thorough are the tests. It’s not unheard of for consumers to see crash-test dummy runs that show what happens when a vehicle is subject to a rollover, gets T-boned, or rear ended. Instruments attached to the dummies will report on the type of impact and its force. It’s this information that lets engineers extrapolate the severity of potential injuries based on the force of the impact.

It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that if a vehicle isn’t designed properly and causes harm to its occupants, that someone is going to sue. Indeed, this type of litigation – called crashworthiness litigation – has been around for a number of years. The ultimate goal of court cases like this is to hold vehicle makers responsible for poor and/or unsafe design that made injuries sustained in a crash worse than they should have been.
For instance, we have all heard about crashes where someone was ejected through the window of the vehicle. In many cases, this is related to a seat belt breaking loose from its anchor, as opposed to someone who chose not to wear a belt. If the seat belt had held, as it was supposedly designed to do, injuries would have been far more minimal. There are many other examples that could be cited, but the idea is safety designs of a vehicle can determine the extent of injuries in a crash.

One of the most rollover-prone vehicles in the history of car manufacturing is sports utility vehicles, otherwise called by the acronym SUV. Their defects when rolled often amount to catastrophic injuries. The fact is the insurance industry states that in all accidents involving SUVs, except for the heaviest ones, the passengers have a higher death rate than in single vehicle crashes. The worst thing about these vehicles is their high center of gravity.

If we look to National Highway Transportation Safety Administration stats, we note that SUVs are in fatal crashes close to 37% of the time when compared to a 15% rollover rate for passenger cars. Put another way, the SUV’s crashworthiness rating is poor and this has resulted in a lot of lawsuits by survivors and relatives of loved ones who did not make it.

Know the crashworthiness rating of any vehicle you are thinking about owning. It may save your life later.

Christopher Mellino is a Cleveland Malpractice Lawyer specializing in Cleveland Medical Malpractice cases in Ohio. To learn more, visit Christophermellino.com.

There has been an interesting proposal made in the House and Senate that things be made easier to sue makers of medical devices. The question is will this work if passed?

While it may be a good idea to have legislation in place that allows patients who have been harmed by defective medical devices to sue the device’s maker, the question becomes, will this work? Medical devices that have been in the news lately because they failed include artificial knees and heart valves.

The proposed Act, known as the Medical Device Safety Act (2009), if passed, would effectively overturn the ruling in a 2008 case (Riegel v. Medtronic) which dismissed a lawsuit based on a ruptured catheter. Medical device firms were overjoyed by that ruling and viewed it as something finally going right for “their” side. That bubble burst in early December 2009, when the Supreme Court handed down a ruling (Wyeth v. Levine) upholding a $6.7 million jury verdict for the amputation of a musician’s arm after he was injected with an anti-nausea drug.

Will the proposed legislation get enough votes to have it pass? This is more than just a good question and the reason for this is because the federal law pertaining to medical devices has a clause that specifically addresses the pre-empting of state laws/requirements. On the other hand, the federal law relating to pharmaceuticals does not.

The nugget that needs to be examined in this latest case decision and the possibility of new legislation being passed is this: if the legislation were successful it would in essence let state courts review medical devices. The result of this would not only be a major headache, but create a landscape of inconsistent and confusing guidance about using medical devices for patients and doctors. It may even ultimately limit their availability.

While there is something to be said for medical malpractice resulting from the use of defective medical devices, this isn’t to say that “all” medical devices are defective. Nor does this mean none of them should be used. Thus, limiting the availability of medical devices that on the “whole” tend to work well, may have even worse consequences than being able to access the devices even with their history of failures.

In the meantime, until something resolves, those filing lawsuits should expect that defendant’s attorneys will keep trying to have their suit booted out of state court by referencing the 2008 (Riegel v. Medtronic) decision.

On a more disturbing note, January 2009 was a dismal month in federal court when a judge in Minneapolis tossed out several class action lawsuits from patients who were implanted with heart defibrillators which had wires that fractured and delivered lethal shocks.

Where will this controversy end? Only time and further court cases will tell. As for the proposed legislation, if it is passed, it will become a matter of time before the provisions in the Act are tested in court.

Christopher Mellino is a Cleveland Malpractice Lawyer specializing in Cleveland Medical Malpractice cases in Ohio. To learn more, visit Christophermellino.com.