Cleveland Ohio Injury Blog

A death at an Ohio company put it on a list of employers in this country who placed employees and communities at risk through their unsafe practices, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health private safety advocacy coalition. A fatal workplace accident is often the basis of a wrongful death lawsuit.

National COSH issued its 2018 report of the "Dirty Dozen" of unsafe employers last month. This group named an excavating company from Mason, Ohio, where a 25-year-old worker was buried alive in 2017. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration had cited the company three times for its failure to protect its workers from trench collapses.

Although nursing homes are regulated, there are too many cases of nursing home neglect and abuse. Consumers should look behind the curtain for signs of nursing home neglect and other problems.

For instance, mandatory arbitration clauses may be tucked into the contract. These require residents and their families to settle claims outside of court and take away their right to sue for serious problems, such as negligence. Evidence of nursing home neglect may be hidden in plain view. Families should look at other residents to see if they are clean and properly cared for. Living quarters should be clean, safe and in good repair.

The Ohio state Supreme Court will decide whether a widow can proceed with a lawsuit over claims that her husband suffered catastrophic injuries while playing football for Notre Dame in the 1970s. The former player was suffering from dementia and the early onset of Alzheimer's when he filed a lawsuit with his wife in Ohio in October of 2014. They named Notre Dame and the NCAA as defendants and claimed that these institutions displayed reckless disregard for the safety of football players by not educating and protecting players from concussions.

The plaintiffs claimed that the NCAA waited until 2010 before requiring colleges to prepare concussion protocols requiring removal of an athlete from a game or practice and medical evaluation, even though the dangers were known.

It may be only a matter of time until autonomous vehicles, currently under development, are on Ohio's roads. Wrongful death cases involving last month's first fatal self-driving vehicle crash poses new legal questions for motorists and pedestrians across the country concerning this new technology.

On March 18, a 49-year-old woman was walking across a four-lane road outside a crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona when she was struck by a self-driving Uber SUV. It was traveling along a dark road when its headlights suddenly illuminated the victim in front of the vehicle, according to video footage from the SUV's dash-mounted camera. Other video footage revealed that the vehicle's human safety driver, who was sitting behind the wheel, was looking down and not at the road seconds before the collision.