Entrusting the care of your child to a daycare facility is a significant decision that millions of parents make daily. When a young loved one is entrusted to the care of a daycare facility, it is particularly upsetting to learn of an injury to that minor child due to the negligence of the daycare provider. It is crucial to understand that you have the power to seek legal support in these situations. The child is often very young and typically unable to verbalize how they were injured. Thus, these types of claims usually require forensic evidence to support the claim, plus common sense. While common sense does not seem technical, we want things to make common sense so a jury can understand and empathize with our claim.
A daycare is something that millions of Americans and plenty of DC residents can relate to. It is challenging to entrust a company with your child’s safety. Our DC daycare injury lawyers have extensive experience handling child injury cases at Gelb & Gelb. We know how emotionally charged these cases can be. Unfortunately, daycares are not required to have insurance coverage in neighboring states. This is a gross oversight by these states’ lawmakers. Fortunately, Washington, DC, does require daycares to carry liability insurance. If a daycare employee behaves negligently while acting in the scope of their employment, and that negligence injures your child, you may have a claim worth pursuing.
Contact our DC daycare injury lawyers today to discuss your options in a free consultation.
In DC, typically, contributory negligence acts as a total bar to recovery as a plaintiff. A jury will determine you to have been contributorily negligence if you were even 1% negligent in causing your injury. It is an affirmative defense, but it is a complete defense. However, to be negligent, you must have the capacity to behave negligently. Accordingly, children below a certain age cannot be found negligent in an accident. This critical rule affects the claims of countless cases in DC. However, it is generally not applicable in DC daycare injury accidents.
Our DC daycare injury lawyers handle many different types of daycare injuries. As long as the daycare is negligent, the case is worth exploring.
These are the most common types of daycare injuries our DC daycare injury lawyers receive calls about. However, they are often not due to the negligent conduct of the daycare and thus do not warrant a claim. Although, if your child has suffered severe injuries, it is always worth exploring your options.
Burns can occur at daycare due to hot food, boiling water, or radiators. Again, the viability of these claims depends on the nature of the injury.
Choking is a commonality among young children. They may choke on small toys or the food they are eating. This can lead to serious health issues or even death.
A viable claim with a DC daycare injury lawyer for a poison injury comes when a child eats or drinks something they shouldn’t, and an injury occurs. This may involve ingestion of cleaning supplies or improperly stored medications. The daycare has a duty to protect the children from reasonably foreseeable harm.
This should come as no surprise, but daycares can be hotbeds for infectious diseases among children. Common illnesses include colds, flu, hand-foot-mouth disease, and more serious infections like meningitis.
Below, we list the most common causes of injuries that our DC daycare injury lawyers encounter. However, this list is not exhaustive of all the viable causes of action to look out for. If your child is injured due to negligence and is not included in the list below, please contact our office immediately.
A daycare must supervise the children appropriately and reasonably to do their professional duty. That means they must have enough well-trained eyes on the children in proportion to the number of kids there are. For example, if there are 100 kids in the room and only three staff members, that is destined to be a supervision failure and a prime example of negligence. If this negligence leads to an injury, your child has a claim against the daycare.
Anything deemed unsafe for children is a facility hazard and a sign that the daycare has behaved negligently. Staff should be maintaining this equipment on a reasonable and regular basis. Common examples of facility hazards include:
This falls in the same vein as supervision failures. However, a supervision failure may be negligent supervising. Meanwhile, a staffing issue may include insufficient staff numbers, inadequately trained staff, and lack of background checks.
Our DC daycare injury lawyers can help you build a case and get you the compensation you deserve. We can use security footage from the childcare to develop your case. If they are unwilling to hand the footage over during settlement talks, we can assume this is favorable to our side and proceed accordingly. Additionally, we can subpoena this footage during the trial. Our attorneys can also help you understand the value of your case and coordinate with your child’s doctors to ensure you get the best medical care available.
A great example is a case handled successfully by DC premises liability attorney Roger Gelb. In this case, a very young child was taken to a daycare facility in no apparent distress – not crying or fussy. A few hours after the child was dropped off, the parents were called and asked to pick up the child because the baby was crying uncontrollably. Even after rescuing the young child, the crying continued non-stop, prompting the parents to bring the child to the pediatrician. The doctor examined the baby and discovered the crying became more intense when the doctor touched one of the baby’s legs. The pediatrician ordered the child to be taken to the emergency room, where a fractured leg was diagnosed.
Other than dealing with a plaintiff who often needs help communicating, the biggest hurdle in these claims is coverage for the daycare facility. Usually, these providers are uninsured and unlicensed and are run out of someone’s home. The homeowner’s policy rarely covers commercial enterprises that run out of insurance. However, it’s important to note that without insurance coverage, recovering these cases can become challenging but not impossible. With the proper legal support, you can still seek justice and compensation for your child’s injuries.
Speaking purely in terms of the law, four main things determine negligence. The first is duty: does the daycare have the legal responsibility to care for your child? Next, we ask if the daycare breached this duty in some way. For example, would your child’s injury have been preventable if there had been proper supervision as promised when you hired the company? The following two, causation and damages, go hand in hand. The question is, did the breach of that duty cause the damages being treated? So, was your child’s injury, where they had to get four stitches, a direct result of this breach of duty? You must be able to prove these four elements to have a case. If it isn’t possible to prove that the breach of duty caused the damages, there is no case.
Note that we do not endorse this list, nor do we allege negligent behavior against any of these daycares at this time. This is a list of daycares in Washington, DC, that may or may not behave negligently in the future.
Of course, every case is different, so we always recommend contacting an attorney with more specific questions. As in all personal injury cases, you must call to discuss your case with an experienced attorney to discuss your options. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia attorney Roger Gelb and his firm have represented over 10,000 clients and have recovered over $150,000,000.00 since its founding in 1954. Contact us today for a free consultation.
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