Category: Personal Injury

If signed into law, U.S. House Bill H.R. 1927 will affect injured plaintiffs nationwide. Congress passed “The Fairness in Class Action Litigation and Furthering Asbestos Claim Transparency Act of 2016” under a long, plaintiff-friendly sounding title. While it is fair to corporate defendants, the act establishes an unfair litigation qualifier that could easily strip a plaintiff’s right to file a class action lawsuit.

In 2004, two sisters were killed when their rental car leaked steering fluid and caught fire, causing the vehicle to lose control and crash into a tractor trailer. The rental company was not obligated to disclose the fact that the PT Cruiser had been recalled for a hose issue approximately one month before. The incident led to the introduction of the Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Safe Rental Car Act of 2013, a bill that requires rental companies to fix defects in recalled vehicles before making them available to the public, but the bill is not law. Legally, in Nevada and nationwide, rental car companies are still not required to divulge the recall status of their cars.

When Nevada drivers get in their vehicles, they do not expect the safety features to cause accidents. Unfortunately, defective airbags on about 7.8 million vehicles are making that a reality, according to a report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A recent story in the New York Times states that Toyota, Chrysler and Honda have now made a second round of recalls on airbags after the first fix has not corrected the problem.

The recent death of a spa worker in Las Vegas has led the state of Nevada to investigate the safety of cryotherapy chambers in order to determine whether regulations for the industry should be developed. On October 19th, 2015, 24 year old Chelsea Patricia Ake-Salvacion entered a cryotherapy machine after hours at the salon where she worked as night manager. Approximately 10 hours later, her body was found frozen inside the machine. The exact cause of Ake-Salvacion’s death is still under investigation and awaiting toxicology reports, which could take six to eight weeks.

According to the Nevada Department of Transportation crash reports, there were 1,463 large truck accidents in 2010. Fatigue is consistently listed in the top 10 causes of commercial motor vehicle accidents, and federal guidelines have addressed the issue by limiting the number of hours tractor trailer operators can work. Although the workday is defined as 14 hours, only 11 of those may be spent on the road. These hours lead to long and taxing shifts, which are directly related to accident risks.