Personal Injury and Insurance Bad Faith
The Hemphill Firm, P.C.’s practice encompasses representing individuals in a wide variety of personal injury cases, including matters involving wrongful death, medical malpractice, sexual assault and automobile collisions. The Hemphill Firm has successfully litigated and recovered millions of dollars for clients who have sustained serious injuries from medical errors, construction equipment failures, defective medical devices, carbon monoxide poisoning and electrocution. Because insurance companies do not always treat people fairly, the successful pursuit of any personal injury case requires an understanding of the complex laws that govern insurance companies’ obligations to their insureds and to claimants. The Hemphill Firm has many years of experience in insurance bad faith law.
In the late 1990s, The Hemphill Firm represented the family of a young man catastrophically injured when his motorcycle collided with a vehicle that had pulled partially into an intersection because of uncut weeds obstructing the driver’s view. After the insurance company refused to pay the policy limits available, The Hemphill Firm sued not only the driver of the vehicle but the landowner who failed to cut back the weeds and the City which failed to enforce a weed-cutting ordinance, resulting in a significant victory for their clients.
In 2008, The Hemphill Firm took a case to trial in which a drug and alcohol-impaired driver lost control of his vehicle on gravel left by the New Mexico Department of Transportation in a center turn lane, causing him to kill a young couple and their unborn child. Although the trial court excluded evidence of other traffic fatalities in the same area under the doctrine of design immunity, The Hemphill Firm took the case all the way to the New Mexico Supreme Court. In January 2013, the New Mexico Supreme Court reversed the trial court and created important new case law that dramatically limits the use of the design immunity doctrine where the government has notice of ongoing problems with a defectively designed roadway.
In December 2012, The Hemphill Firm secured a $1,000,000 verdict against Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center on behalf of a patient who was over-medicated and suffered a near-death experience, leaving her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Other significant settlements have included obtaining substantial compensation for the family of a belly dump truck driver who died months after having his legs crushed in the jaws of a defective truck, for the family or a well-drig operator who was electrocuted when his boom struck improperly placed electrical wires, and for a 20-year old disabled girl who was brutally raped after eloping repeatedly from a group home and then sexually assaulted by a fellow patient at the New Mexico Behavioral Health Institute in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
In addition, over the past ten years, The Hemphill Firm has been involved in hundreds of uninsured/underinsured motorist claims against New Mexico insurance companies and has acted as lead counsel in two class action lawsuits related to securing uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage benefits to New Mexico insureds. The Hemphill Firm also served as local counsel to New Mexico women whose mass tort cases involving transvaginal mesh injuries have been filed against manufacturers throughout the country, and was also involved in Roundup
Cancer litigation in New Mexico.
Disclaimer: Past results are not a guarantee of future results. Every case is different and must be evaluated on its own merits.