Should I Get My Own Lawyer if I Am Not The Only Victim?

Yes. If there are multiple people hurt, you certainly want a DC injury attorney looking out for your personal interest. If the interests of the different people are aligned, you don’t necessarily need to get a different attorney. However, if there is a prospect that the interests are not aligned, or will not be down the road, then it’s even more important to get your own attorney.
But any time a person is injured, the first thing they should do is consult with an attorney. There’s no fee typically for a consultation, and at the very least to the attorney can evaluate whether they have a claim.

Again, people are not typically experienced in these legal matters, and consultation with the lawyer as to whether or not they have a claim and need to be represented makes it very important to be consult with an attorney.

Certainly the people involved in the case on the other side have their attorneys, their insurance companies, and they are getting legal advice too from the get go. The insurance companies and their attorneys are going to do everything in their power to protect the interests of their clients, so it’s very important for the injured party to have an attorney there to be protecting and representing their interests from the very beginning.

What is a Class Action Lawsuit?

A class action lawsuit is where a number of individuals have experienced or suffered injury from the same cause and from the same defendant. You see them many times in drug pharmaceutical cases where a class of people have taken a certain drug and it has been deemed that that drug has caused harm. And so, when a number of claimants have the same injuries caused by the same defendant, a class action suit is a way of administrating a case in court so that all of those claimants can be brought together before the court and there aren’t many separate actions for essentially the same case.

It’s not just related to pharmaceutical cases. A class action can be any case where there are multiple plaintiffs pursuing the same defendant for injuries suffered by their same negligence conduct. It’s just a way of combining those cases for purposes of establishing liability and then each plaintiff likely has to prove their individual injuries, but it’s done in order to assist with the orderly presentation of the case instead of having a number of different plaintiffs in different courts all over the place, each of which could potentially arrive at a different result.