One of the most important steps that must be made when pursuing a personal injury case is obtaining every piece of information relevant to the case. This is known as the discovery process, and it is typically used to prove liability of the defendant, who may knowingly or unknowingly be harboring some critical safety oversight within their mountains of documents.
In the February 2009 issue of Advocate, our firm’s own Rahul Ravipudi delves into the complications that go along with the discovery process when pursuing a personal injury claim against the state of California. He expounds on a certain federal provision that the state typically uses to stymie a personal injury lawyer’s efforts to uncover liability in an accident case.
Basically, the statue they hide behind has a provision wherein states do not have to hand over for discovery those items pertaining to the development of federally funded state highway projects. As Ravipudi demonstrates, this way of thinking is inherently faulty, and a defense strategy crafted around such interpretation of the law can be used to hide safety issues whose correction may have prevented harm in the first place.