Middleton Wisconsin Personal Injury Law Blog

If you unexpectedly lose a loved one in a fatal Wisconsin car accident, your life may never be the same. Only those who have lived through such tragedies can understand the emotional pain and suffering associated with such incidents. If you were to learn that your loved one's death was entirely preventable and due only to another person's recklessness behind the wheel, you may feel frustrated and angry in addition to grief-stricken.

Wisconsin law allows immediate family members to seek legal accountability against a reckless driver who caused a loved one's death. That can be quite challenging, especially if defense attorneys aggressively try to dispute your assertions. A recent fatal collision in Dane County is an example of a case where there might be grounds for filing a wrongful death claim.

Of the many drivers in Wisconsin and elsewhere who distract themselves with their smartphone, some wish for new technology that can save them from themselves, so to speak. It may seem ironic, but there are devices out there to solve the problem that was caused by technology in the first place. One company has developed a device that plugs into the car and links the driver's phone to its service provider via a cloud. The service provider can block all communications once the user is driving.

The device is called Groove and can virtually put the phone on "airplane mode." It does not merely silence messages, and it prevents not only texting but also all accessing of social media networks. Callers and senders are notified that the recipient is driving. Groove allows for navigation and music streaming, but these can be blocked as well after a simple customization.

Wisconsin has one of the nation's strictest seat belt laws, and road safety advocates have urged lawmakers in other parts of the country to follow the Badger State's example. All passenger vehicle occupants in Wisconsin must fasten their seat belts, and the results of a study published recently in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health reveals that taking this safety precaution could prevent them from suffering potentially fatal liver injuries in a crash.

The researchers studied motor vehicle accident statistics gathered between 2010 and 2015 from the National Trauma Data Bank, and they discovered that accident victims who suffered severe liver injuries died almost twice as often as those who suffered moderate or minor liver injuries. They also found that vehicle occupants who were properly restrained were far less likely to suffer a serious liver injury. The researchers say that this is a key discovery because the liver is one of the organs most often injured in car accidents and cannot be removed by surgeons.

Using a cell phone while in a moving vehicle could be considered a form of distracted driving. Those in Wisconsin use their phones on 36 percent of all car trips in 2017, which is below the national median phone use rate. Drivers in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama used their phones during 47, 45 and 44 percent of car trips in 2017, which was the highest in the United States.

This data was obtained by reviewing the habits of 300,000 users of a safe driving app called Everdrive. In 2015, there were 3,477 fatalities related to distracted driving in the United States according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). There were also 391,000 injuries because of distracted driving during that year. It is important to point out that there are many types of dangerous driving, many of which do not involve phone use. The NHTSA data included all instances of distracted driving such a eating while a car was moving.