Legal Question in Personal Injury in Massachusetts

Re: Personal Injury/Agency

They may have delegated the duty of care, but they cannot delegate the obligation.

Both they and their management company should be sued for their joint negligence.

Re: Personal Injury/Agency

Did you not pursue an injury claim at the time of the damages claim? If not, why not?? If this happened afterwards, I would make an argument that you have a PI claim against both parties. The only caveat, is that why did you not do the clean-up yourself?

Re: Personal Injury/Agency

It sounds as though the injury case was not tried wih the condo repair case. If not why not? And, more importantly, have you/your lawyers reserved rights to separately proceed against the trustees for the injuries, having already tried their "duty of care" re: the repairs? If your injury claims were not separately preserved, you could potentially face serious "claim preclusion" problems here, preventing you from the ability to go back and sue the trustees for injury claims you could have brought in the repair case, but did not...

As for the agents, they would probably share some portion of the trustees' liability for the injury through contributory negligence, in a percentage to be determined by the jury. If injury claims against the trustees are barred, however (and there are no other legitimate defendants), then only the management company would remain as a legitimate defendant.

Feel free to contact me for a free initial office consultation regarding this.

Re: Personal Injury/Agency

You obviously have an attorney and are shopping for second opinions. The questions you ask are somewhat like a law school exam question. The answer, as always, is, it depends. The facts are not always clear cut, if the jury believes your facts you win. If the jury believes the other side's facts, they win. Perhaps the judge does not think there are enough facts to submit the case to the jury, and the plaintiff loses. Typically a party with a duty of care can hire an independent contractor, and an injured party's recourse would be against that contractor, with certain exceptions. This is very fact intensive, and there may be other facts out there which would totally change how this comes out. I would suggest you give consideration to retaining counsel and then trusting your counsel's advice.

As a matter of civil procedure, there is a prohibition against claims spitting so any claims you have against a given party arising out of a given transaction must be brought or those rights are lost (with exceptions). Therefore it might be possible you had to bring the injury claim along with the other claim. You should get professional advice from an attorney in person. Regards, John Stewart.