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Litigating Death: A Multi-State Survey of Construction-Related Wrongful Death and Survivorship Actions
By Kevin Faley; Natasha Khachatourians; Jacob Liro; Scott Tyler; and Jeff Van Volkenburg
Cases involving death actions will often sit atop the list of a firm’s most serious and impactful cases. The differences in the law concerning these actions from state to state, while often subtle, are critically important for any tort litigator.
Kevin Faley
Scott Tyler
Death is one of the most emotional and confounding aspects of the human experience. Personal injury actions concerning death similarly often involve navigating a complex tapestry of legal theory and upsetting facts. While death actions can arise in connection with a variety of claims from vehicular accidents to products liability, they are often found within the realm of construction law. Such is an unfortunate consequence of the severity of injuries often suffered in the context of construction site accidents. This intersection between death actions and construction accidents is further complicated by the vastly differing framework of each state’s construction and labor laws.
While most states have laws in place providing for recovery in personal injury actions involving death, the statutes and precedent differs from state to state. Some of the most impactful, and often principal, differences concern the identity of the claimant. Whereas in some states, a decedent’s estate is the only possible plaintiff in death actions, other states have differently defined “personal representatives,” while others enumerate potential claimants through statutes. Additionally, litigating a death case often involves an analysis of the decedent’s pecuniary impact upon his issue, as well as an often morbid analysis of the moments before death. While substantively similar
Natasha Khachatourians
Jeff Van Volkenburg
Jacob Liro
Insights SPRING2021
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