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Keeping Our Kids Safe:What To Do And Know If You Suspect A Faulty Car Safety Seat

By: Richard N. Shapiro, HSCLA attorney

This is a continuing series of articles relating to keeping our kids safe and focuses on what to do if you or a family member has been in a car crash, with personal injuries to a child and you suspect that there was a faulty car safety seat (CSS) or a defect in the safety seat. Here are various things to consider or do that we as personal injury lawyers would recommend:

1. Has any type of evidence in the case been preserved? Of course, this includes the CSS and any documents which relate to the product such as purchase documentation, the box, the product instructions, photographs of how the car safety seat was installed at the time of the accident or crash.

2. Check all information available about whether there was any faulty product recall on the car safety seat. Look at www.nhtsa.dot.gov under the child seat or under the car restraint system. Even if you are looking at the car safety seat also look for recalls relating to the failure of the vehicle itself to have proper crash-worthiness. Crashworthiness relates to whether the area occupied by people will too easily crush inwards in a routine and predictable type of car crash.

3. Contact an attorney who is experience with motor vehicle injuries and lawsuits because in a very serious car accident with suspicious causes it is likely that a very well qualified accident reconstruction expert will be necessary in order to analyze the car crash. Of course, the earlier that an accident reconstruction expert can examine the scene of the car crash, including examining the car in question the better for the possibilities of proving liability.
4. Photographs and videotape must be taken of the accident scene as early as possible even if the accident reconstruction expert would not be hired or retained for days or weeks. Forensic investigation can be done with pictures and videotape in amazing ways using computer technology. Distances can be calculated using a technique called protogrammetry.

5. Make a list of all newspaper articles and all television stations which may have photographs or videotape, and obtain copies (paper copies and or computer file copies) of all of these relevant information sources.

6. Do an analysis of the relative magnitude and extent of injuries to all the persons inside the vehicle if you are asking a personal injury lawyer to consider a case involving some faulty part of the car, not only the car safety seat. If everyone in the car was killed except for the child in the car safety seat, this would be a difficult case to win. Instead, if the child was the only seriously injured victim or was killed and everyone else in the car had relatively minor injuries this would raise a red flag.

7. If you are considering asking an experienced personal injury lawyer to review the case for potential liability do not settle the case with any party quickly. In many states, settling with one party can have the effect of releasing all the other potentially responsible parties in a car accident. If you settle with the driver of the other vehicle, but suspect that there may be a very good case against the car safety seat manufacturer or automobile manufacturer, you will likely release the case against the other party if you settle with one party.

8. It is important to locate and preserve evidence outlined above, and the more weeks
and months that pass, the more difficult our job as injury attorneys becomes.

Act quickly and wisely if you or a family member have suffered a serious loss in a car safety seat defect case and seek legal advice if the issues above seem to indicate liability on a manufacturer of a car safety seat.

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Shapiro, Cooper Lewis & Appleton, P.C.
1294 Diamond Springs Road
Virginia Beach, VA 23455

Toll Free: (800) 752.0042
Phone: (757) 460-7776
Fax: (757) 460.3428

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