Personal Injury Lawyer

Asbestos is a material that was once popular in construction, particularly for homes, but its hazardous health effects caused its removal from most supplies. However, much of the asbestos that was used in homes still exists in those that haven’t been remodeled or renovated. If you discover asbestos in your home, there are some key things to you need to understand and do to make sure it doesn’t become a health risk.

Identifying Asbestos

Asbestos is not always easy to spot. Oftentimes, it is hidden within walls or floors, and you won’t realize you have it until you open these up. Homeowners with older houses planning to do renovations should consider consulting with an asbestos contractor who can inspect the house. This way you’ll know about the asbestos before potentially damaging it and creating an exposure risk.

Discovering Asbestos

If you have positively identified asbestos in your home, the first important step is to make sure it isn’t disturbed. Most asbestos that hasn’t been touched is harmless; it’s only when the asbestos is broken up that small fibers can get into the air and cause problems. If you can’t get the asbestos removed immediately, make sure that the material isn’t moved or disturbed. Make a room off-limits, if necessary, to ensure that no one accidentally comes in contact with it.

Handling Asbestos

You shouldn’t try to remove the asbestos yourself if you don’t have the proper training and qualifications to do so. If any asbestos is missed during a cleaning, it could pose a health threat to anyone in its proximity. Instead, check for any damage and call a trained professional for removal.

Contacting an Asbestos Removal Contractor

Asbestos removal contractors are trained to remove asbestos safely and securely. They can make sure that your home is asbestos-free for all future renovations and remodels. If you aren’t sure you have asbestos, you can always contact an inspector to come examine your house. Get a written evaluation of the inspection that contains recommendations on how to fix it. Materials containing asbestos, like pipe and insulation, can sometimes be sealed, trapping the fibers together so that they are harmless. Larger materials may be encased to seal the fibers in.

When picking out an asbestos abatement contractor, like Nielsen Environmental, be sure to look at their experience and credentials. You can look up reviews online and talk to previous customers to discuss their experiences with the contractor. Asbestos is a serious problem if left untreated, so getting the right help is essential in creating a safe space for your family.

Personal Injury Lawyer

Most drivers end up with a traffic ticket at some point. For some, this might not be a big deal. In other instances, it can hit your wallet hard or lead to a license suspension. Here’s what you need to know about hiring a traffic attorney and how much a traffic attorney might cost.

Why You Need a Traffic Ticket Attorney

After receiving a traffic ticket, you may wonder if it’s worth fighting it. It depends on the violation and your level of guilt. Tickets with low fees might be easy to accept and pay off or to show up in court alone to face. There are situations where it’s better to fight with an attorney at your side, however.

If you have limited understanding of traffic laws, then you may want a lawyer to discuss your charges with you. While the law might seem simple, if you’re upset over the ticket, you might not be calm enough to understand the law fully. Instead, a lawyer will have years of experiencing behind him or her to help you fight the ticket.

If you’re a first time offender and the ticket fee is low, you might not want to fight it. However, if you’re dealing with a ticket that is $500 dollars, then you may not have the funds to pay it off easily. An attorney can help lower the ticket penalties or negotiate alternative discipline. When it comes to traffic violations, some carry serious sentences. DWIs, for example, if you’re charged with speeding on top of a DWI, you may face a hefty sentence. In this case, you may benefit from a lawyer.

How Much a Traffic Attorney Costs

Traffic attorneys usually fight your ticket for a flat fee. The Kreger Law Firm starts at $150. Of course, when it comes to pricing, it is always going to vary. It depends on how complicated the case is and how much time and effort the firm has to put into the case. Some traffic tickets are cut and dry, whereas others may require an investigation or more extensive research.

When it comes to traffic tickets, whether you were stopped because you were speeding or because you received a DWI, you don’t always want to accept the ticket and pay for it. In some cases, you may not have the funds to pay for your ticket or perhaps you don’t believe it’s justified. No matter the reason, it helps to have an attorney at your side. Get started by calling a Traffic Violation Lawyer, like the lawyers at The Law Offices of Mark T. Hurt, to arrange a consultation.

Personal Injury Lawyer

Contemplating your own death is never easy, but if you have a family and want to protect your assets for their benefit once you are gone, then making a will can be an effective way to accomplish this. A will outlines your final wishes, divides property and finances per your direction and announces beneficiaries. If you are ready to make your will, there are a few tips you can keep in mind to ensure its validity.

1. Consult a Lawyer 

While some websites offer do-it-yourself will kits, these may not be useful if your estate is complicated or you have multiple beneficiaries. Consulting a lawyer about how to create your will, what kind of language to use and how to outline the disbursement of property and money may help you feel more confident about the process. The assistance of an attorney may also be useful if any questions arise during the drafting of the will.

2. Make a Checklist 

Before you write your will, you may want to make a checklist of who you want to include, what assets you have and what property you want to gift. You can include vehicles, antiques, real estate and 401K or savings accounts. This kind of preparedness may help you write your will with more efficiency and prevent omissions that can cause problems for your beneficiaries once you are gone.

3. Choose an Executor 

Your executor or executrix will be responsible for ensuring your final wishes are carried out as they are stated in your will and handle the arrangements for any expenses you might have accrued before your death. For example, if you required hospice or nursing home care at the end of your life, your executor will pay those bills from any existing accounts under your name before monetary gifts are made to any beneficiaries. Remember to outline these tasks carefully so the executor or executrix has the power to carry out your wishes.

4. Have Your Lawyer Review the Will 

Once you complete your will, have your lawyer review your wording and to ensure all beneficiaries and assets have been included. If family connections change in the future, you can ask your lawyer to help you revise the will to reflect those changes. You may want to make corrections as soon as possible for protection against unexpected illness or injury.

Writing a will can seem like a complicated task, but there is help available. Contact an attorney, today for further information or to make an appointment for an initial consultation.

Personal Injury Lawyer

There are many advantages to running a corporation. One of the biggest is the limited liability that a corporation provides. This protects your personal finances from going to satisfy business debts. To take advantage of benefits such as these, there is a trade-off. Corporations large and small have to comply with state regulations that govern them and meet certain minimum requirements. Regardless of where your corporation is located, the laws of your state require regular shareholder meetings and records of the meetings in the form of minutes.

How Often Are Shareholder Meetings Required?

The laws of all states require that corporations hold shareholder meetings on a regular basis. Some require annual shareholder meetings, while others may allow a corporation to set its own schedule as long as the meetings occur on a regular basis.

Corporations are not required to limit shareholder meetings to those that are scheduled regularly, however. Sometimes circumstances such as an impending merger may require the Board of Directors to call special shareholder meetings as needed.

The Board of Directors must send out notice of the meeting to shareholders in advance, giving them sufficient time to prepare for it, but not so far ahead of time that shareholders are likely to forget about it. Between 60 and 10 days prior to the meeting is considered a general guideline.

Shareholders are not required to attend the meetings. However, corporation bylaws or state regulations may set a quorum required for it to take place. A quorum is a minimum number of members required to be present to conduct any valid business at the meeting.

What Should the Minutes Contain?

Memory is notoriously faulty. If there is no written account of what goes on at a meeting, different members may remember it in different ways. Therefore, it is crucially important to keep an accurate record of the decisions made at a shareholder meeting. State regulations and/or corporation bylaws may require the secretary or other designated officer to take minutes to serve as the written report of the meeting.

Initially, the minutes should record substantive details about the meeting:

• Matters under discussion
• Results of votes
• Place and date it took place
• Names of shareholders present and absent

As the official record of the meeting, minutes of each should be stored in a safe location and retained for at least seven years. Those who attended the meeting should have the opportunity to make corrections and amendments in the interest of preserving accuracy.

You could lose limited liability protection if you do not comply with state regulations governing corporate operations. Contact a law office for guidance from a business lawyer, such as from Brown Kiely, LLP, on meeting requirements.

Personal Injury Lawyer

Fourth of July.  Independence Day in America.  A day when flags are flown, families gather for picnics, parades, and companionship, and the day is ended with incredible fireworks displays.  The Fourth of July is when we celebrate all that is good about America.  

Capitalism is a wonderful thing.  Anyone with an idea and ambition can create a company, create and patent a product, or just plain invest, and raise themselves to a life of comfort and ease.  Or they can play the lottery and win.  

America has set aside National Parks for the preservation of natural wonders, designated Wilderness areas to preserve habitats and wildlife, and created a system of national forests, and designates national recreation areas.  The American public has access to each of these areas for hiking, camping, and recreating.

In urban areas, where people live in apartments, condos or townhouses, public transportation takes people from place to place.  In suburban America, most of us own individual homes.  We each drive our own vehicle. The more rural the area of America, the more self-dependent the inhabitants.  

Oh, America has its flaws.  As with any country, its history is fraught with embarrassing growing pains.  What we want to forget should be put into a museum.  

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.  When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.  Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santyana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906).

I want to display the American flag this Fourth of July, but I need to put hooks on my house to hold it.  I have a 3 foot by 5 foot flag which flew over Washington, DC.  Many, many years ago, my father was Management Assistant (2nd in command) at Glacier National Park.  A Senator from another state wanted to camp in the back country of Glacier.  My father arranged the horses and mules and itinerary.   When the Senator showed up, he had brought his black Labrador Retriever with him, thinking the dog would enjoy a wilderness adventure.  Of course, my father explained that dogs made great bear bait, and refused to let the dog attend.  So, I babysat the dog for the week. (He was, as every Lab is, a wonderful dog.).  When the Senator and his dog returned to Washington, the Senator sent me a flag as a thank you gift.

I will display my flag, not as allegiance to any one person or party, but as a tribute to the great nation America is.

Planning for your future is also an important thing to think about, and a lawyer, like an estate planning lawyer from Silverman Law Office, can guide you through it. Call an office today.

Personal Injury Lawyer

Many of us now record our histories digitally, and experience entertainment media online or downloaded from the web. In short, much of our assets are digital. How do we address these in divorce? The answer, generally, is that digital assets are very similar to physical ones and should be divided in the same way as other property. In some cases, there is no need to divide property because it can easily be duplicated for both spouses.

Streaming Services And Purchased Digital Downloads

If you are like most Americans, your household probably has family subscriptions to numerous streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and HBO Now. What happens to these accounts after the divorce?

Thankfully, there are a few easy options. You can:

•         Cancel shared streaming services and just open individual accounts
•         Split up which spouse pays for which service and continue to share mutual access to them
•         Split up which spouse owns which service and decide not to share (based on lack of interest from either spouse)

A slightly trickier issue is what to do with purchased digital downloads like music and movies bought on iTunes or Amazon Prime. But this is fairly easy to solve as well. You could:

•         Split up media according to which spouse originally wanted to purchase it.
•         Keep a shared account open so that both spouses can access content purchased on it.
•         Have one spouse keep the content and buy out the other spouse’s financial share in it by trading an equivalent amount of other shared assets.
•         Copy jointly owned media for the other spouse, when copying is allowed.

Protect Your Most Important Digital Assets: Family Photos And Videos

From a dollar-value perspective, sharing family photos and videos should be a non-issue. You own these assets together, you can easily copy them and ensure that both spouses keep 100 percent of these important files.

Unfortunately, these assets can also be in danger during a contentious divorce if one spouse decides to spitefully withhold from the other (or delete them before the other spouse can get to them). If you’re worried about this, you’ll need to speak to your lawyer and have a sharing provision included in the divorce agreement.

If you have children together, you may decide you’d like to include an agreement to share all photos and videos (featuring just the children) going forward. This would be one way to ensure that you don’t miss out on mementos of moments that you may not have been present for, such as recitals or school plays. Such an agreement would be a little difficult to enforce, but putting it in writing and agreeing to abide by it would be an act of mutual good will for mutual benefit.

Working With A Lawyer For All Aspects Of Your Divorce

Whether you’re splitting up downloaded movies, copying family photos or deciding on who stays in the marital residence, it’s important to work with an experienced divorce attorney, such as from Brandy Austin Law Firm, PLLC, who understands all aspects of divorce and property division. To learn more about how a lawyer can help you, contact a law firm to arrange an initial consultation. 

Personal Injury Lawyer

Every job comes with some risks to worker health and safety, but there is obviously a lot of variation in hazard levels. Those who work at a desk all day may suffer the health effects of a sedentary lifestyle and eye/wrist strain from working on a computer, but they rarely need to worry about anything more serious than that.

Then there are jobs which are inherently dangerous, like construction and heavy industry. Despite the advancements in workplace safety policies and procedures, these jobs always come with a risk of serious injury or even death. Therefore, it is critical to take every precaution to ensure that workers leave work each day in the same condition they arrived. A major aspect of risk mitigation is personal protective equipment, or PPE.

Standard But Essential Safety Gear

On a given job site for construction workers, you may see workers using any of the following gear:

•         Hard hats and other head protection
•         Safety glasses, face shields and similar items
•         Respirators, dust masks and other equipment to protect lungs and airways
•         Ear plugs or earmuffs, some with built-in radios for communicating with other workers
•         Work gloves, tear- and cut-resistant clothing, steel-toed boots, etc.

Will these items save you from the most serious and devastating injuries? Probably not. But they will keep you safe in many more situations that you might expect. Moreover, they will protect your body from the daily wear and tear that can really take a toll over time. You don’t want to lose your hearing because you didn’t wear ear plugs, for instance, or develop a lung disease because you didn’t wear a mask.

Wearing Safety Equipment Is A Joint Responsibility

Whose job is it to ensure that workers wear safety gear? Does each worker decide for himself, or does the employer have to enforce rules? Do co-workers need to encourage and remind each other? The answer is that everyone is responsible for workplace safety and the use of PPE. Employers need to provide safety gear and set expectations for using it. Workers need to always wear it and encourage other workers who may have forgotten.

If and when an accident or injury does occur, it is up to employers to respond by ensuring that the injured worker receives proper medical care and understands how to apply for workers’ compensation benefits.

The Benefits Of Working With An Attorney

You are not legally required to work with a lawyer when seeking workers’ compensation benefits. But sadly, over the years, the system has become heavily biased in favor or employers and worker’s compensation insurers. Therefore, many legitimate claims are denied the first time they are filed. When you work with an experienced attorney, however, you may be able to present a more compelling initial claim and be prepared to appeal if your claim is denied.

If you’ve been injured on the job and are nervous or uncertain about filing a worker’s compensation claim, please contact a lawyer, like a work injury attorney in New Jersey from Rispoli & Borneo, P.C., to discuss your case with a caring and attentive attorney.