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COPYRIGHT©
2001 |
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PAGE
4 OF 8
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A
Primer on Crashworthiness
How
to Recognize the For the lawyer who does not specialize in personal injury or crashworthiness, the most important question is how to avoid overlooking a crashworthiness case. There is no easy answer to this question. But we can make some suggestions. It is important to recognize that not overlooking a crashworthiness case is different from actually determining that a crashworthiness case exists. Making the determination that a viable crashworthiness case actually exists in a given set of facts can be very complicated and expensive, involving examination of the vehicle, the scene, and the medical facts by automotive design engineers, reconstruction experts, biomechanics experts, and sometimes others. It can be a lengthy and expensive process and requires greater expertise than required to simply avoid overlooking a potential case. To avoid overlooking a crashworthiness case, the first step is to become generally familiar with common types of known defects and types of defect litigation. This paper attempts to summarize the most important. Yet, no summary can hope to pinpoint all kinds of potential crashworthiness cases. The practicing lawyer must be open to the possibility of crashworthiness cases not listed here, or anywhere.
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