Articles Posted in Indiana

This page examines settlement amounts and jury payouts in Indiana personal injury cases. Our lawyers also provide an analysis of Indiana personal injury law.

If you are a personal injury victim bringing a compensation claim in Indiana, it is only natural to want to know how much your case might be worth. Monetary compensation is what a personal injury or wrongful death case is ultimately about.

This page is designed to examine how personal injury cases have been resolved in Indiana and to allow you to match your claim with Indiana personal injury settlement statistics, example settlements, and jury payouts.

The Indiana Supreme Court sent back to the trial court last week a wrongful death medical malpractice action involving the tragic death of a child after surgery for an undescended left testicle. The boy was just 13 months old. Just awful.

The issue in Alsheik v. Guerrero was something far less sad: prejudgment interest. This case went to trial and the jury awarded $1.165 million. The trial judge denied the plaintiff’s attorney’s request for pre-judgment interest. The plaintiff appealed this ruling.

In Indiana, for civil cases to qualify for prejudgment interest, the plaintiff must send a settlement letter. The purpose of the settlement letter is to give the defendant “notice of a claim and provide them with an opportunity to engage in meaningful settlement.”

Trying to tell the difference between a product and a service may not be harder than deciding if a glass is half full or half empty, or if a tomato is better characterized as a fruit than as a vegetable, but it is certainly not easy.”
Whitaker v. T.J. Snow Co., 151 F.3d 661, 664 (7th Cir. 1998).

Is it a good or is it a service? This argument has been fought ever since the distinction between products’ cases and service arose. This distinction really mattered in a burn injury case in Indiana that was decided last week because the Indiana Product Liability Act does not apply to transactions that involve wholly or predominantly the sale of a service rather than a product. Barely, it would seem, a lawsuit against a maker of work shirts for burn injuries, allegedly caused because of the failure of a cotton uniform shirt to serve as expected, survived summary judgment last week in Indiana.

Here are the facts. Plaintiff was a welder/plasma torch operator who was operating a Pro Cut 80 plasma cutter made by the defendant. The Pro Cut 80 plasma cutter is used to cut through metal and steel. As you would expect, the plasma cutter fires off sparks when cutting metal. While using the plasma cutter, the plaintiff’s shirt catches fire causing serious burns.

Plaintiff sued a number of folks, including the manufacturer of the shirts saying these shirts just shouldn’t catch fire like that because everyone knows what the people in these shirts are doing, and the defendant has an obligation to make them safe for the intended use. The plaintiff’s argument that the negligence claim is not subject to the product liability act in Indiana because the relationship between the defendant and plaintiff’s employer was for the laundry service rather than the providing of work shirts.

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