Lexington Personal Injury & Employee Rights Lawyers

Our Lexington, Kentucky, lawyers practice throughout the state. We take most cases on a contingency fee basis. In our typical arrangement, that means we pay all the expenses needed to pursue your case, and we only receive a fee if we recover money for you.^† And while there is never any guarantee in the law, we often recover money for our clients. Since 2009, Garmer & Prather has obtained jury verdicts or settlements totaling more than $100 million.^‡

Several of the nation's busiest truck routes, including I-64, I-65, and I-75, pass through Kentucky. With Kentucky's robust automotive, manufacturing, and farm industries, many of those semi-trucks find their way from the interstates to local highways and backroads. A collision with one of these trucks can be life-altering for victims and their loved ones. While commercial trucks must carry more insurance than ordinary family cars do, even that extra insurance is often not enough to cover medical bills, lost income, and permanent injuries caused by a collision involving an 18-wheeler. When you or a loved one are injured in a Kentucky truck crash, you may need a Lexington, Kentucky, lawyer. As experienced Kentucky truck accident attorneys, we know where to look for sufficient resources to help our clients get compensated. This may include not only the trucking company but shippers, brokers, vehicle manufacturers, and even your own underinsured motorist coverage. If you or a loved one has been injured by a tractor trailer, school bus, charter bus or other commercial vehicle, you should speak with an experienced Kentucky lawyer who has taken big-truck cases to trial. At Garmer & Prather, we have.

Leaving a loved one in the care of a nursing home is an act of paramount faith. Sadly, many nursing homes do not merit the trust families place in them. A recent report found that 43 percent of Kentucky nursing homes were rated “below average” or “much below average” by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services because of serious problems with quality of care.⁶ But residents of nursing homes, personal care homes, and assisted living units are protected by the Kentucky Resident's Rights Act and the federal Resident's Bill of Rights. Yet nursing home cases are complicated and the nursing homes are defended by aggressive, experienced lawyers. The experienced attorneys at Garmer & Prather in Lexington, Kentucky, have taken nursing homes to trial and have obtained settlements for our clients in a range of cases, ranging from unintentional neglect caused by understaffing to intentional abuse of Kentucky residents. When speaking to an attorney about a potential nursing home abuse case, be sure to ask about the lawyer's track record. We are happy to share ours.

Defective products can range from the mundane – a car's parking brake, for instance – to the spectacular – an undetonated column of surface-mine explosives. Our Kentucky attorneys have handled both of those cases, as well as numerous others involving products like automotive air bags, lawn tractors, mining locomotives, airplane engines, crushed car roofs, and more. Kentucky law allows lawsuits against manufactures of defectively designed or defectively manufactured products, but these cases are among the most complicated injury cases to try. Successfully pursuing a products liability case requires securing expertise of engineers, designers, researchers and others who can help the lawyers build a case. Sometimes the evidence can fill a truckload of boxes. The lawyers at Garmer & Prather in Lexington, Kentucky, have decades of experience pursuing difficult products liability cases alongside some of the country's top technical experts. If you've been injured by a faulty product, you need a lawyer who has the contacts and experience necessary to assemble such a team. We'd be happy to talk with you about how we can do that for your case.

Serious injury and death cases do not always fit into easy-to-identify categories. When you or a loved one are injured by someone else’s negligence – simply meaning that person was not as careful as an ordinary person should be – you may have a legal claim for damages. Our Lexington personal injury attorneys have represented clients with brain injuries, paralysis, amputations, severe burns, broken bones, fractured necks, blindness, deafness, and more. Perhaps your vision was damaged by a dog bite, or you were burned by a medical device, or paralyzed in a trampoline gym accident. Maybe a loved one was killed by an impaired doctor. There is a good chance we have handled a case like yours. We are experienced Kentucky injury lawyers who practice throughout the state from our office in Lexington. Please let us know how we might be able to help you recover from your injury or survive the loss of a loved one.

Since our firm's inception, our lawyers have handled more medical malpractice cases than any other type of case. Our clients have suffered all manner of medical errors: birth injuries, surgical mistakes, wrong-site surgery, misdiagnosis of disease, burns, amputations, medical device failures, failure to diagnose cancer or infection, emergency room or EMS errors, failure to monitor a deteriorating condition, and much more. Medical negligence cases can be extraordinarily complex, and in many ways, the system is tilted in favor of doctors and hospitals. Successful resolution of a claim requires careful study of the patient's medical history and testimony of qualified experts in the corresponding medical field. We have a track record of partnering with medical specialists at the top universities and teaching hospitals in the country to make our client's case, which has often allowed us to achieve success for our clients at trial. Many lawyers advertise that they accept medical negligence cases. When interviewing lawyers, ask them how many medical malpractice cases they have taken to trial. At Garmer & Prather, we do so on a regular basis.

Kentucky is home to some of the finest racehorses, sport horses, and walking horses in the world. Top horses may be worth millions of dollars, but in Kentucky no horse is ordinary and an injury or death of a horse can affect the livelihood of not only the horse's owners, but the entire team surrounding them. When a veterinarian's mistake, contaminated feed, or a similar tragedy strikes, the company or person responsible must compensate the owner for the damage to or death of the horse. While the scientific issues in veterinarian malpractice cases are similar to the issues in human medical malpractice claims, the legal issues are different. Damages are calculated differently, different expert witnesses are needed, and the controlling law is minimal and often inapplicable to a particular case. That is why experience matters. The lawyers at Garmer & Prather are fortunate to live and work in Central Kentucky’s horse country. We have represented individual farms and multi-owner syndicates in complex equine cases throughout Kentucky, including for injured horses that have championship-level pedigree or a track record of actual success on the race course or in the show ring. We have experience handling these cases, and we are eager to evaluate your case.

Only a small number of Kentucky law firms have handled cases involving both commercial airlines and private plane crashes. Garmer & Prather has experience with both. It is well known that most plane crashes have more than one cause. Whether pilot error, faulty maintenance, or a defective part is to blame for a crash, we have experience working with leading engineers, investigators, and other experts to build our client's case. We were on the front lines of the litigation resulting from the worst Kentucky airplane crash of the past 50 years, the Comair 5191 disaster in Lexington – Bill Garmer was selected as one of five lead attorneys to represent the interests of all of the victim’s families. When you need an airplane or helicopter crash lawyer, call Garmer & Prather in Lexington, Kentucky. We are here to help.

With more miles of running water than any other state but Alaska, Kentucky is a center of recreational and commercial boating. When tragedy strikes on the water, and you need a Kentucky boating accident lawyer with experience representing clients who were injured on inland waterways, look to the lawyers at Garmer & Prather. Kentucky waterways include nearly all of the contiguous Ohio River, recreational houseboat and powerboat meccas like Lake Cumberland, Kentucky Lake, Lake Barley, and even much of Dale Hollow Lake. Commercial tows still operate on the Green River, Tennessee River, and Cumberland River. We have experience pursuing cases related to powerboat collisions, engine explosions, and more. If you have been hurt on a Kentucky lake or river, we may be able to help.

Although the days of passenger railways crisscrossing Kentucky are mostly behind us, freight trains still travel the state on a regular basis. Numerous trains haul coal out of eastern and western Kentucky, other trains haul newly-built cars away from the factories of central and southern Kentucky, while other trains just pass through the state, often with a cargo of flammable fuels or dangerous chemicals. A collision with a train at a railroad crossing is often deadly, and almost always results in serious injury because of the sheer mass of cargo trains. A chemical spill can ruin the environment and cause lasting damage to the health of people who are exposed. At Garmer & Prather, our Lexington, Kentucky, attorneys have taken on major railroads and rail-car shippers in cases ranging from railroad crossing collisions to exposure to leaking chemicals. If you need a Kentucky railroad lawyer, we are here for you.

Kentucky employers are required by state and federal law to pay their employees consistently and fairly. When an employer fails to pay employees the wages they are owed for time worked, the employees may recover their back wages and other penalties from the employer, under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, Kentucky Wage & Hour Act, and other law. The Lexington, Kentucky, attorneys at Garmer & Prather recently won a landmark Kentucky Supreme Court decision allowing our clients to pursue a claim for back wages as a class action in Hensley v. Haynes Trucking, et al. We will analyze your claim under state and federal law and determine where we think you have the best chance of success.

The oldest federal whistleblower law, the United States False Claims Act, was enacted during the Civil War. While we haven’t been around quite that long, the Kentucky attorneys of Garmer & Prather have been assisting clients to present federal whistleblower suits, often called qui tam cases, for many years. Anyone who has information about fraudulent conduct against the federal government and the U.S. military can bring suit and potentially receive part of any recovery made by the government. Employees who are fired or suffer retaliation as a result of whistleblowing may have a separate legal claim against their employer. Other federal whistleblower laws include remedies for securities fraud, financial crimes, corporate wrongdoing, tax evasion, and more. At Garmer & Prather, we are local Kentucky lawyers who have experience helping clients work through these complex legal issues and present their claims in an to government prosecutors efficient way. If you need whistleblower lawyer in or near Lexington, Kentucky, please contact us.

Sexual abuse and rape are horrible crimes that leave lasting imprints on survivors. While these events are often a criminal matter first, victims often can bring a civil lawsuit to seek financial compensation for their injuries. We have represented sexual abuse and rape survivors in numerous cases in Central Kentucky and beyond, particularly when the abuse occurred at their school, workplace, or other trusted institutions like nursing homes.

If you need to speak with a Lexington personal injury lawyer or Kentucky truck accident lawyers, please contact us. You may call us at (859) 254-9351, or you may submit your inquiry online by clicking on contact us and somebody will call you for more information as soon as possible. Whatever your injury, we will listen to you and let you know whether we can help.

^† While specific fee agreements vary, in some cases a client may agree to be responsible for court costs or case expenses if there is no monetary recovery.

^‡ Past Results do not guarantee similar outcome.

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