You need an attorney experienced with defective seat belt cases
We can help
If you or a loved one was involved in a car accident, you may have been the victim of a defective seat belt. Seat belts fail for many reasons, and when they do, it can have disastrous consequences. Did any of these things happen to you?
Were you thrown into the windshield?Were you thrown into the dashboard?
Did your head hit the side window?
Did your body slam into the side door?
Were you thrown from the vehicle?
Were you thrown around the vehicle unrestrained?
If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you may have been the victim of a defective seat belt and you may deserve compensation for your injuries, medical expenses, and pain and suffering.
Will any personal injury lawyer work?
Defective seat belt cases are no ordinary car accident lawsuit. Just finding an experienced personal injury lawyer isn't enough. You need to find an attorney who has experience with defective seat belt lawsuits. The Law Offices of David H. Greenberg is leading the way in defective seatbelt research and lawsuits. If you'd like to read the official complaint we filed against Toyota for a defective seat belt please click on the following link Bosserman v. Toyota. We've helped our clients get over $200 million in verdicts and settlements. The reason why these seat belt failure cases differ so much from ordinary car accident lawsuits is that seat belts are complicated engineering feats and they work within the framework of the vehicle that they are installed in. So determining if and why a seat belt is defective requires engineering experts who can help test and determine what happened in an accident and why. If your attorney doesn't have experience with these types of cases, he or she may not even know that your seat belt was defective in the first place! And they may not have the experience and expertise to prove it in a court of law.
Why do seat belts fail?
Seat belts operate as part of your car's restraint system and they are designed to protect you in case of an accident. In fact they are so essential to a person's safety that many States have made it a requirement to buckle up when you drive. And many people wouldn't dream of putting a car in drive until they have clicked their seat belt. So it may be a shock to realize that car and seat belt manufacturers actually design some seat belts to fail in an accident. They can do this in two ways:
- Setting load limiters to fail
- Setting a seat belt to spool out
What does this mean? Load limiters mean that seat belts are effectively set to fail at a certain load limit. A load limit is how much pressure is put on the seat belt. If you jerk a seat belt with your hand, you will feel it catch and stick. This is what we expect to happen in an accident. But if the accident is severe enough that your body is flung against the seat belt at a weight bearing equal to or greater than the load limiter setting, then that catch mechanism is overridden and it will actually fail to catch. The spool out is the amount of seat belt that will be allowed to literally spool out once the load limiter has caused the seat belt to fail. That could be anything from one inch of seat belt material to an unlimited spool out. An unlimited spool out is literally as far as you could pull the material of the seat belt out. Obviously if the spool out is too long, it is effectively equivalent to not wearing a seat belt at all.
As you can see, defective seat belt cases are very technical and complicated. If you've been in an accident where you were injured or a loved one was killed, call us and we can help you determine if it was due to a defective seat belt. Call toll free for a free and confidential consultation at 1-888-204-1014.
