If your spouse, partner, child, sibling, parent, or anyone else you care deeply about dies following an accident, you can be left feeling lost and overwhelmed. Anger about the accident. Depression. Apathy. Anxiety. There is no easy way through it. There are things you can do that will give you the time you need to grieve while financial recovery is taken care of.
We have helped people through wrongful death cases for many years. We know what families need at this stage, and we know how to achieve their goals. The goal is rarely just compensation, it is accountability, and it is closure, and it is making sure that what happened to your loved one does not happen to someone else's.
Our most significant verdict in this practice area is $20 million in a wrongful death trucking accident case, a case where the insurance company started with a $0 offer and we tried it all the way through. That is what trial preparation looks like in practice.
Not every accident is a wrongful death. Sometimes an accident is just an accident. When your loved one dies due to negligence or carelessness, however, a wrongful death has occurred.
Missouri law defines a wrongful death as a death that results "from any act, conduct, occurrence, transaction, or circumstance which, if death had not ensued, would have entitled such person to recover damages in respect thereof." In other words, if someone dies for a reason directly related to the misconduct or negligence of another, and the deceased likely would have had a personal injury claim had they survived, that is a wrongful death.
The deceased person's survivors are the ones who step in and seek the compensation on their behalf.
Across the United States, there are many situations where negligence ends a life. The cases we see most often:
Like personal injury claims overall, auto accidents are the number one cause of wrongful death claims. Distracted driving, fatigue, impairment, excess speed, tailgating, failure to yield, all are avoidable, all make the driver responsible. Pedestrian and bicycle deaths fall in this category, as do passenger vehicle and commercial truck collisions.
Misdiagnoses or delayed diagnoses, surgical errors, emergency room errors, and prescription drug errors. In some cases, the hospital may also be held liable.
Products that result in death, through faulty manufacturing or failure to warn of potential injuries, can support a wrongful death claim against the manufacturer.
Faulty equipment, workplace negligence, improper training. Workplace deaths frequently involve third-party liability beyond workers' compensation.
Drowning, boating and watercraft accidents, premises liability, nursing home abuse and negligence, when negligence or carelessness causes a death, a wrongful death claim may be available.
Different states have different statutes for who can file a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of a deceased victim. In Missouri, the law sets a clear hierarchy under Section 537.080:
The decedent's surviving spouse, children, the descendants of those children (if the children are deceased), and the decedent's parents.
If there is no one from the first category, the decedent's surviving siblings or the descendants of those siblings may file a wrongful death claim.
If there is no survivor from either category, a Missouri court will appoint a "plaintiff ad litem" to handle the wrongful death claim. The request must come from a person who is entitled to share in the proceeds.
Under the Missouri wrongful death statute, a variety of damages can potentially be recovered. They must be specifically related to financial losses suffered by the person or persons bringing the claim.
Tangible financial losses, medical expenses incurred between the accident and the death, funeral and burial costs, lost wages and income the deceased would have earned, lost benefits and retirement contributions.
If the decedent contributed services, companionship, support, instruction, consortium, or comfort to the claimant when alive, the reasonable value of those contributions is calculated under non-economic damages. As an example, if the decedent stayed home to care for three children and the household, the value of those contributions is calculated and paid as non-economic damages.
Non-economic damages also include pain and suffering the decedent experienced between the time of the accident and the death itself. Most wrongful death claims would qualify as personal injury claims if the individual had not died, meaning there could have been days, weeks, or even months of pain and suffering before the death, all of which are compensable.
Punitive damages apply only when the defendant showed complete indifference to the safety of others. They are not standard, but in a case where the defendant's conduct is reckless or wanton, punitive damages can substantially increase the value of the case.
For most personal injury cases, the clock on the statute of limitations starts ticking on the day the accident occurred. Wrongful death is different.
The wrongful death statute of limitations does not begin until the date of the actual death, not the date of the underlying accident. If your loved one was involved in a car accident that put them in the hospital for several months before they passed away, the start date is the day they passed, not the day of the accident.
This rule matters because some families assume they have missed their window when they have not. If the accident was years ago but the death was recent, you may still have a viable case. The right time to talk to an attorney is now, regardless of how long ago the underlying accident occurred.
In a wrongful death case, the responsible party is not always obvious. Take a wrongful death from a trucking accident as an example:
Identifying every responsible party is part of building full case value. We investigate to find every defendant who shares responsibility, because each one represents available insurance coverage and additional accountability.
$20,000,000, Wrongful Death, Truck Crash
Zero-dollar pre-trial offer. Jury verdict in a trucking wrongful death case.
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