Burn Injuries
We’re trial lawyers. Our core competency – above everything else – is trying cases to juries. And we specialize in beating giants.
MINNESOTA Burn Injury Lawyer
A severe burn can be an extremely painful injury. The individual who suffered the injury may need extensive care and will likely face a long road to recovery. Some burns can result in death. When you’re looking to hold the person responsible for the harm you endured, our Minnesota burn injury lawyer can help. We’ll hold the party that caused your injuries accountable and fight for you to get the recovery you deserve.
Differences in Burn Injury Degrees
Madia Law can help clients with different degrees of burn injuries. Burns can cause more damage if they get deeper under the skin. Let’s look at the degrees and how they vary.
- First-Degree. These are often referred to as superficial burns because they only affect the outer layer of skin. When this burn happens, the area is often red and dry. It can be painful, like sunburn. These injuries will usually heal on their own.
- Second-Degree. When the burn reaches below the outer layer of skin and to the layer underneath, the area will likely be swollen and red.
- Third-Degree. At this degree, the first layers of skin are destroyed and the burn reaches the inner layer of skin. The burn area can either look white or black.
- Fourth-Degree. This is when the burn can reach deep tissue like muscle and bone. A fourth-degree burn will cause nerve damage.
When the burn injury is a higher degree, it will require more medical attention. Some injuries may need consistent bandage changing and medication. In some situations, the person may need to undergo surgery to treat the burn. When areas of skin are completely destroyed, skin grafts may also be necessary.
While quick treatment can help reduce the chance of permanent scarring or deformity, these can still occur. For example, a facial burn could result in disfigurement. These types of injuries can be physically and emotionally damaging, which is where our law firm can help. If you’re seeking compensation for your burn injuries, Madia will investigate what caused the accident and who was at fault. Let’s look into how these types of injuries occur.
Common Causes of Burn Injuries
With Madia as your lawyer, we will determine the type of burn injury you endured. This includes the degree of the injury and how you were hurt. Burns can come from different sources and can be classified as the following types of burns:
- Heat
- Electrical
- Chemical
- Sunlight/Radiation
There are many sources that can cause these burns. Unfortunately, someone may come in contact with these on a regular basis. The various causes of burn injuries include:
- Fire
- Scalding Liquid
- Steam
- Hot Objects
- Chemicals
- Electrical Currents
When someone acts negligently, they can put others in danger of sustaining burn injuries. A few examples of negligence include:
- Leaving a lit candle unattended.
- Walking away from a stove that’s in use.
- Touching a hot pan.
- A defective product malfunctions and starts a fire.
Any time someone is reckless or doesn’t act safely when a possible fire hazard is involved, they could start a fire that could result in burn injuries and other major losses. A lit candle could start a house or apartment fire, or a stove that’s left on could burn what’s on it and a fire could progress from there.
With Madia as your burn injury lawyer, we’ll find out how you were burned, then we can begin looking into who was responsible for it. Then, we can start fighting for you to get the justice you deserve.
Who Is Responsible for Your Injury?
When you can identify the responsible party, you can seek compensation for your injuries and damages. To do so, your burn injury lawyer at Madia is going to show that the other party failed to act responsibly and their negligence is what caused your losses and suffering.
In a burn injury case, we’ll first need to show that the other party owed you a duty of care. It was their responsibility to act safely. Then, we’ll also establish that they didn’t adhere to this duty of care. This could be a person using a grill under the eaves of a house or tall tree and starting a fire that way or if a worksite doesn’t have proper safety protocols and a chemical spill occurs.
We’ll show how their negligence caused the accident that resulted in you sustaining burn injuries. Because of this accident, you suffered injuries and damages.
You may not immediately know who was responsible for your injuries, that’s where your burn injury lawyer at Madia will step in. It could be a neighbor, it could be someone who started a campfire that spread, it could even be someone who caused a car accident that resulted in you sustaining burn injuries.
It’s possible that the responsible party wasn’t at the scene where the burn injury occurred. If you have a defective product that malfunctions, like a space heater, then you could have been burned because of negligence from the company that made the product. If this is the case, we will hold the negligent company accountable.
We how devastating burns can be and how they can affect your life. With Madia as your Minneapolis burn injury lawyer, we will stand up for you. We will do everything we can to fight for you to recover the compensation you need to recover.
Madia Can Protect Your Rights
Dealing with the aftermath of a burn injury can be overwhelming. The costs of medical treatment, recovery time, and going through the legal process is difficult for someone to do on their own. That’s where our Madia Law attorneys can help.
You deserve to receive full and fair compensation for your injuries. With Madia as your burn injury lawyer, we’ll fight for you to recover:
- Medical Expenses
- Lost Wages/Diminished Earning Capacity
- Property Damage
- Mental Anguish
- Pain and Suffering
- Loss of Enjoyment of Life
The expenses of a burn injury can extend far into the future as you continue to heal and your ability to work can be affected. If your injuries are catastrophic, a full recovery may not be a possibility. You may be able to heal up to a certain point, but you may also have a disability or disfigurement. Living with a permanent injury can be painful and require more medical care, but you can trust that with Madia as your lawyers, we will take all these details into consideration when determining the compensation that you’re owed.
With Madia at your side, you can rest assured that we’ll launch a full investigation of your case. We’ll look at the full extent of your injuries, including the care that you’ll need to continue treating the burns and the emotional suffering that you’re experiencing, to help you get the recovery you deserve.
While you may think you have plenty of time to come forward with a claim, this time can pass quickly when you’re focusing on your recovery. If too much time passes, you may not be able to file a claim. Meeting with a lawyer as soon as possible is in your best interests so you can be sure that you haven’t missed the statute of limitations. Your burn injury lawyer at Madia will be able to determine the timeline you have. Acting quickly will also put you on the path to recovering the damages you’ve lost.
If you’re seeking compensation and the other side is trying to say that you had something to do with the injury, then this can affect the compensation you recover. This can make your case complicated, but we are used to dealing with complex cases. In these situations, our past experience in assessing the evidence and advocating for injury victims will allow us to stand up for you.
Madia has experienced attorneys who can help burn injury victims. If necessary, we can consult with specialists to find out what happened. Then, we will build you a strong case to give you the best chance of maximizing your compensation.
Madia will treat your case with the attention it deserves—we knows each case will have unique circumstances and details. You can have peace of mind when we are representing you because we are ready to take on the legal side of your case while you can work on healing.
Reach Out Today
Burn injuries can happen unexpectedly and can cause painful consequences that can last a lifetime. If you or a loved one has been hurt, you can seek the help you need today. Madia protects the residents in Minnesota and we can protect your rights.
THE MADIA Law WAY
We have a process that works in getting exceptional results for our clients.
We are trial lawyers who prepare every case for trial from Day 1. Investigation and legal research are the first things we do, and we spend a lot of time on them. Because we haven’t filed the case yet, we have complete control – the defendant has no say and we want to use this time wisely. We interview witnesses that can help us prove the case. We’ll ask you for all relevant documents in your possession and review those carefully as well. We also will spend some time conducting legal research about unique issues in the case. We pull the jury instructions that the judge will ultimately charge the jury with after closing arguments at trial.
Our next step is typically to send a demand letter to the defendant. In the letter, we thoroughly lay out: the facts surrounding the defendant’s misconduct; the applicable law (including statutory and case citations) that make clear that the defendant broke the law; an analysis of your damages and the defendant’s monetary exposure; a demand for a monetary amount to settle the claim; and an instruction to preserve all relevant evidence, including electronic evidence. The point of this letter is to give the defendant a chance to do the right thing and pay a fair amount before litigation, and to give the defendant an opportunity to present any defenses or evidence it wants us to consider before moving forward. Sometimes we skip the demand letter if there are strategic reasons to move straight to filing, but we typically give defendants a chance to do the right thing.
If early negotiations fail, great – we file a Complaint and serve the defendant with it. A Complaint is a legal document that states the facts of what happened and alleges how the defendant broke the law. It formally starts the lawsuit. Many lawyers draft complaints in a general and relatively vague way, just to get it done and filed – because that’s all that’s really required. We take a different view. We view the Complaint as our first chance to tell your story to the judge, and we take it seriously. So we draft detailed complaints and include legal citations to statutory and judicial authority on unique points. Sometimes we’ll include a number of exhibits, diagrams, or other demonstrative aids to help the Court understand our claims. A secondary benefit of this approach is that defense lawyers reading the Complaint can become educated on the problems of their case and the state of the law – sometimes this leads them to reach out to us shortly after service of the Complaint to re-initiate settlement negotiations. Of course, by that time, the price for settlement has gone up.
Some lawyers view written discovery as a necessary evil – something to get done and out of the way before depositions. Not us. Written discovery is a gift and an opportunity. We spend a great deal of time crafting requests for documents and interrogatories (questions for the defendant to answer in writing) that are specific, detailed, and tailored to get what we need to prove our case. Many lawyers – even great ones – think written discovery is a waste of time because defense lawyers typically answer them on behalf of their clients and can try to stonewall with legalese and objections. We view this as a wonderful opportunity. In our experience, most defense lawyers can’t help themselves when answering discovery: they over-state their defenses and make assertions that their clients will not be able to support in testimony. So we get to commit the defendant to defenses that they can’t back up, leading to contradictions, confusion, and chaos in their depositions later on. We also use Requests for Admission – which many lawyers don’t. The Federal Rules and Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure allow us to ask defendants to “admit” certain facts. We send them RFAs that are very difficult for them to deny. Of course, they do it anyway, but that sets them up later for cost and fee-shifting, which the Rules mandate for defendants that deny RFAs that are later proven true. And usually, we can get the defendants’ own witnesses to admit facts that their defense lawyers denied in RFA. That’s a great situation that leads to more chaos and confusion on the defense side.
One last point on written discovery – we send multiple waves of it throughout discovery. We typically send 3 or 4 sets of written discovery requests to defendants throughout discovery. This compounds the problems for them, because the defense lawyers continue to overstate their defenses, but now run into contradictions from not just the defendant witnesses’ deposition testimony, but also their own previous discovery responses. This makes for a great record that we can present to the judge at dispositive motions, and use for impeachment at trial.
This is our chance to question relevant witnesses, on the record with a court reporter (we typically videotape important depositions as well). We get to confront the defense witnesses with all of the evidence we’ve developed through written discovery and document production. By this time, the defendant put its witnesses in an impossible position through its written defenses, which are often untrue and indefensible. So the witness has to either lie to support the defense, or admit it’s not true. That’s a dilemma that works for our clients either way, no matter which option the witness takes. We use depositions to expose contradictions, create a record for dispositive motions, lock witnesses into their stories so that we can impeach them later at trial, and sometimes, to show defense lawyers how hopeless their case is. We often calls from defense counsel shortly after depositions of their clients, seeking to re-start settlement negotiations.
The defendant will usually make a motion for summary judgment after discovery, asking the Court to throw out the case without having a jury trial. Because we’ve hit discovery so hard – both through written discovery and depositions – this is a tough motion for defense counsel to write in our cases. We draft our response for the Court and now get to bring everything together: the admissions, contradictions, nonsense, and obvious fact disputes that we’ve uncovered through discovery. We tell a compelling story that wraps everything together for the Court and makes clear that the defense motion has to be denied, and the defendant needs to face a jury for its conduct.
Sometimes, we’ll even make an affirmative motion for summary judgment, asking the Court to grant judgment in favor of our client without a trial. These motions are generally rare for plaintiffs to make, because the defendant can usually point to some fact dispute on its intent or some other factor that necessitates a trial. But we make affirmative summary judgment motions significantly more than is typical for plaintiffs, and that’s because the work we put in during discovery helps build a fantastic record to do so.
After the Court denies the defense motion for summary judgment, the defendant has only 2 options: 1) do the right thing and pay you a fair amount to our client to settle your claim (usually much, much more at this point than the defendant could have paid at the beginning of the case to settle); or 2) face a jury for its conduct and risk an enormous verdict. This is the dilemma that we have been creating and forcing the defendant into for the entire case. We’ll engage in settlement negotiations at this point from a position of extreme strength, mainly because most defendants are (rightly) terrified of facing a jury to defend their conduct.
This is, candidly, our favorite part of the case – why we went to law school: to hold the powerful accountable before juries. We prepare heavily for trial, including: detailed witness preparation, focus groups, and mock trials. At this point, the potential outcomes and consequences for the defendant are much more severe than if it simply did the right thing at the beginning of the case and paid a fair amount to compensate our client for its misconduct. As we advocate to the jury for our client, we’re also mindful of protecting the record so that defendants will be unsuccessful in attacking the verdict in post-trial motions or appeal.
What Our Clients Say
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Competence, I demand competence. Ashwin and Zane digested all the elements of my case, a complex case with a plethora of moving parts yet distilled it down to its essence. Don't be a victim, stand strong, keep your nose clean and give Sara a call at Madia Law.
If you’re reading this, it’s awful that you are in a position right now where you are online searching for an attorney. I searched online as you are perhaps doing now, read some reviews and settled on an attorney after doing some research. I’ll never forget how blown away I was after my first meeting with Ashwin Madia. I was fortunate to have this man represent me. . I am eternally grateful.
No need to search any longer. You’ve found the right lawyer.
I was referred to Ashwin Madia when it became evident that my case was going to jury trial. He is definitely an expert as a trial lawyer. I found him to be very straightforward, no nonsense, a clear communicator, and I was pleased with the outcome he brought at trial. I would recommend him, and I would go to him again to represent me if the need ever arises.
I would encourage you to spend some time reading Mr. Madia's impressive bio. If that doesn't have you convinced, I will tell you that as someone who spent over 19 years in law enforcement, I have never seen a better trial lawyer than Ashwin. His passion, expertise, ethical commitment, and his incredible memory of the facts, were some of the major reasons I prevailed in my discrimination lawsuit against my employer.Thanks again!
I was referred to Ashwin Madia by a friend, who is also a lawyer. Mr. Madia and his partners dove into my case and prepared for trial in three weeks. Madia Law Firm markets itself as a "trial" driven law firm, and it did not disappoint. Mr. Madia overwhelmed opposing counsel, and after 5 days of trial, the jury ruled in my favor.
My wife, who has been a trial attorney for over 20 years, described Madia's trial work as "amazing," and described his closing argument as one of the best she had ever seen. I highly recommend Madia Law.
I have the utmost respect for Ashwin Madia. Ashwin is professional, knowledgeable, sharp, and genuine. After three years of litigating against my employer, I found myself financially and emotionally drained.
I was ready to give up.
Just five weeks before trial, Ashwin agreed to take on my case and did an amazing and spectacular job at trial! We won! I am so thankful there are people like Ashwin in this world. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
After being referred to Ashwin Madia I wasn't sure what to expect. Many times in the past I felt unsure of myself. I knew I wanted justice but many times in the past I've had to just walk away. This time was different; if you have the opportunity to get Ashwin Madia to represent you, I know you will have the ammunition you need to defeat your opposition to get the justice your seeking.
This is a spectacular attorney with the understanding of the rights and feelings of others, with the willingness to protect and stand up for those that may not have a voice. I thank you so much Mr. Madia.
Aswhin is an incredible trial lawyer. When we realized that a claim against our business was definitely going to a jury trial in federal court we switched counsel to Ashwin and his team. At the 11th hour they got spun up on the facts and the law (intellectual property) and delivered an amazing performance against a huge "downtown" law firm. From the beginning of his opening statement it was clear that we made the right choice.
I can't recommend Madia Law highly enough.
Ash is an amazing Lawyer! He gave us great advice but still made sure the decision at the end was ours. He was willing to fight for us and did a wonderful job. I could not be more pleased with the outcome and I recommend him highly to anyone in the need of a lawyer. Ash was so smart and did such a great job of helping us understand the process and make sense of it all. He is not only extremely good at his job but he is also a great person. He lets his guard down and by the end of the process he felt more like a friend who was fighting for what was right! I can not say enough good things about him!
Attorney Zane Umstead recently represented my family's interest in a difficult legal situation. He was quite effective and direct in dealing with the opposing party; yet to us he was very kind, thoughtful and courteous. He even generously offered to waive his entire legal fee after spending a generous amount of his time working hard on the case, if we elected not to bring the conflict to a conclusion. His integrity is exemplary and he makes his profession respectable. We highly recommend Attorney Umstead with great enthusiasm.
What can I say about Madia Law, working with Zane and Cody was a privilege, working with Ashwin was a honor. This firm shows great appreciation and care to their clients. I wish nothing but success to all of them.
The future of Madia law is bright and prosperous.
Thank you again for believing in me and showing the little guy counts.
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