Let’s say you are in your vehicle headed to the grocery store and waiting at a stop light. You look up in your review mirror and see a truck twice the size of your hatchback barreling towards you. The driver is looking down at a cell phone, and he’s not slowing down. He rear-ends your car. You’re injured, and now you have medical bills and missed time from work.
The commercial truck driver isn’t the only one who may be held responsible for your injuries, medical bills and time lost from work due to vicarious liability. The trucking company who hired the truck driver can be held vicariously liable for the driver’s negligence under a legal principle called “respondeat superior.” That means “let the master answer.” The theory holds an employer liable for an employee’s negligence, like the trucker looking at his cell phone while in the course of his employment in our example.
For an employer to be held liable, the negligent act has to occur within a set of determining factors:
A recent case in Santa Clara County in which a plaintiff motorcyclist sued a motor vehicle driver for negligence in a motorcycle and car accident case resulted in a verdict of nearly $1.2 million for the plaintiff. The defendant driver had claimed the motorcyclist was negligent and thus at least partly liable for the accident.
Los Angeles bicycle accidents are, unfortunately, on the rise especially in certain parts of L.A. Bicycles have increasingly become popular again as more people move into the larger city areas. The need for transportation in these areas is always in high demand, and own and operating a car is not always practical for city life. Public transportation is not always reliable or available and some people just prefer not to ride a bus or train.
On October 20, 2011, a young California man, who was employed as a union carpenter for Ghilotti Construction, fell and injured his back while working on a bridge. The incident occurred as the result of a piece of uncapped rebar snagging the worker’s pant leg and causing him to fall. He was wearing a 50 pound utility belt at the time of the fall, and his leg remained about two feet in the air, both of which exacerbated the injury he sustained.
The Government Accountability Office released data that showed that pedestrian fatalities increased by 3 percent – from 11 percent to 14 percent – between 2004 and 2013. During the same time frame, the numbers increased from 1.7 percent to 2.2 percent for cyclists. However, overall traffic deaths dropped by about 25 percent – from 43,000 to 33,000 – during that period.
Orange County, CA has experienced a surge in bicycle and pedestrian accidents resulting in injury or death in the past few years. Pedestrian and bicycle incidents are occurring more frequently as each day passes. In fact, by some estimates, a pedestrian is struck and killed in the O.C. 
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently ruled to improve its rating system with the intention of encouraging manufacturers to produce safer vehicles. The new safety rating system includes changes such as:
