Burn injuries are graded by depth, and depth drives most of what follows: whether grafting is required, what the scarring will look like once it has matured, and how much treatment is still ahead at the point the claim is being valued.
Where the burn came from is the other half of the analysis. A property owner, a defective appliance or product, a vehicle, and a third party at a workplace are separate routes to recovery, on separate timelines. Margossian Law represents people with burn injuries in California.
Depth and Extent Drive Everything That Follows
Burns are classified by how deep the damage goes and how much of the body it covers, and those two figures largely determine the medical course: whether grafting is required, how many surgeries follow, what the infection risk is, and what the scarring will look like once it has matured.
They also determine the claim. A deep partial-thickness burn across a hand is a different case from a superficial burn of the same area, both medically and in what it costs someone over a lifetime of using that hand.
How Long You Have
Two deadlines govern most injury claims in California, and they are nothing like each other in length. Which one applies to a burn follows from where the burn came from: a property owner, a defective product or appliance, a vehicle, a public agency, or a third party at a workplace are each looked at separately, and a single incident can involve more than one of them at once. The short one is what catches people out, because nothing about the injury announces that a shorter period is running.
6 months
To present a claim against a public entity
2 years
To file suit in most other cases
Where Burn Injuries Come From
- Building fires caused by faulty wiring, missing detectors, or a landlord’s failure to maintain
- Vehicle fires following a collision, and fuel system defects
- Defective appliances, heaters, batteries, and consumer products
- Chemical burns from improperly stored or unlabeled substances
- Scalding from water systems held at unsafe temperatures
- Electrical burns from exposed wiring or unsafe equipment on someone else’s premises
Burned at Work
A workplace burn is usually handled through workers’ compensation, which does not require proving fault and does not pay for pain and suffering. That is not necessarily the end of it. Where a party other than your employer contributed, such as an equipment manufacturer, a contractor on site, or the owner of the premises, a separate third-party claim can run alongside the compensation claim, and that one does include the losses workers’ compensation leaves out.