TRANSCRIPT:  I’m Attorney Ben Schwartz and today we have seven questions about Delaware dog bite personal injury cases.

One of the types of cases that my law firm handles is dog bite cases. Oftentimes, we handle not only dog bite cases, but dog knock-down injury cases.  We’ve handled car accident, motorcycle accident cases caused by dogs running free, all types of personal injury cases relating to dogs that you would never think about and it makes up a pretty significant portion of our practice.  So today, we have seven questions about dog bite cases and my lovely and talented assistant, Alyssa, who is off camera but who’s shooting this video is going to ask questions and I’ll give you the answers.

  • Do I have the right to ask my neighbor to pay my doctor’s bills if their dog bites me?

Absolutely, if your neighbor’s dog bites you, then hopefully your neighbor has homeowner’s insurance that will pay for the medical bills relating to the dog injury. If you’re injured as a result of a bite or a knock-down or some incident involving your neighbor’s dog, you absolutely ought to notify your neighbor immediately to let them know their dog caused the injury and you should ask them to contact their homeowner’s insurance and put the insurance company on notice of the claim, get you a claim number so you can use it, give that to your doctor’s office. And assuming that there is insurance there, then I would say, get that claim number and give it to the doctor’s office and then let the doctors office deal with billing and getting paid for the treatment relating to that injury.

  • What liability does the dog owner have when a dog bites a child?

Well, these are pretty unfortunate cases and these are cases that we see a lot. Children love playing with dogs. Children don’t necessarily know how to approach a dog. In a lot of cases we see, children will be hugging on dogs or putting pressure on dogs and oftentimes, when the dog bites a child, it’s in the face or in a sensitive are.  So there’s a number of things legally speaking that the child is entitled to recover.

One is what we just talked about: medical coverage, medical payments, so that the child can get medical treatment or psychological treatment if necessary for the injury.

Some other things a child is entitled to is compensation for disfigurement. Disfigurement means scarring. So, if the dog bite caused a scar or the dog scratch injury caused a scar, then the child is entitled to compensation for that scarring and disfigurement. Compensation for pain and suffering – everyone I think knows what pain and suffering damages are. Damages to compensate you or your child who was bitten by the dog for the pain and suffering, the trauma that they had to go through, or deal with as a result of being bitten by a dog.  And there are other elements of damages. There are other things that are recoverable. For instance, if the dog bite creates an impairment to the function of a body part, that’s one of the things that damages would be available for compensation to cover. So there are a number of things in every dog bite case that were able to recover compensation for a child injury case.

  • Is an owner responsible for injuries to a trespasser?

In Delaware, we have a statute, a law, that basically says that the owner of the dog is liable, is legally responsible, for any injuries caused by their dog and you don’t have to prove that the owner was negligent. You don’t have to prove that owner did something wrong.  You just prove that the owner is the owner of the dog, and that owner is legally responsible for all injuries caused by the dog. That’s called strict liability. There are exceptions to the Delaware strict liability statute and one of them is that if the victim of the dog bite or dog injury was trespassing on the owner’s property, or was there to commit a crime and was in the process of committing a crime on that property, then the owner is not strictly liable. So, I would say no: if the victim is trespassing on the property and gets bitten, then the statute does not impose strict liability on the dog owner for those injuries.

  • Does Delaware have the one free bite rule?

No, what we were just talking about liability… so let me talk about what the one free bite rule is, generally speaking.  When you’re talking about a liability case for an injury victim where the injury occurs on someone’s property, generally speaking, you have to prove that the owner of the property was negligent, and what that typically means is that there is a dangerous condition causing injury, and you have to prove that the owner of the property knew about the dangers condition or they should have known about the dangerous condition.  So if the dangerous condition is a dog, the question becomes, did the owner of the property with a dog is residing there, did that person know or should know they have known, that the dog was dangerous? Did they know that the dog was going to bite someone?  That’s the one free bite rule.

Some states say that if the owner of the dog didn’t know the dog was dangerous, the owner of the dog thought it was a friendly dog, didn’t have any history of biting people, had no reason to believe that the dog was going to bite someone in a particular case, then they’re not liable. They’re not legally responsible.

That’s not the rule in Delaware.  As we were talking about just a minute ago, the Delaware statute says the owner is strictly liable. There’s no one free bite in the state of Delaware. So basically it’s very simple for dog bite cases: there are exceptions to the rule as we talked about a moment ago for trespassing or if the victim is tormenting the dog and the dog bites then liability doesn’t apply, but in Delaware there is no such thing as the one free bite rule.

  • Can I appeal if I lose against a dog bite case?

Well yes, yes you can appeal. In Delaware, dog bite cases are filed generally speaking in the Superior Court, which is the Court of General Jurisdiction. The appeals from Superior Court are to the Delaware Supreme Court. There are two types of appeals. One type of the appeal is called De Novo appeal which means an appeal for a new trial in a different court. There’s also an appeal that is an “on the record” appeal and the “on the record” appeal means that you get a transcript from the trial where you believe that the judge made a mistake, and so you want to go to a higher Appellate court and show them the mistake in the transcript, submit a brief which is basically a written legal memorandum outlining the law, outlining the mistake, outlining how it ruined your trial, and you do that in the Supreme Court. That’s the type of appeal that we have in dog bite cases. If you file a lawsuit in Superior Court and you lose, you go to Supreme Court where you get an “on the record” appeal.

  • If I get a lawyer, won’t this ruin everything; take a long time, be too expensive, hurt my relationship and make them put the dog down?

Well getting a lawyer doesn’t make anybody put a dog down. Putting a dog down is a proceeding that the lawyer quite frankly doesn’t get involved with and doesn’t have any control over. That’s something that typically animal control’s going to be involved with.

You know getting an attorney in a dog bite case, prosecuting a dog bite case, may hurt your relationship with your neighbors, if the dog belongs to your neighbors and they really love their dog and now you’re suing them for the injuries caused by the dog. That could certainly impair your relationship with your neighbors. Nobody likes to get sued, but in most cases we find when someone is bringing a lawsuit against the neighbor for dog bite injury case, most of the time there’s insurance to cover that and so it’s not like the neighbor, the owner of the dog is going to be paying the award of damages out of their own pockets.

This dog bite case will cause friction between neighbors absolutely, but you know what really causes friction between neighbors is having dangerous dogs that go around biting people.  And so I wouldn’t say it’s hiring a lawyer that creates the problem. I would say that if you have a dog and it bites me that is what the problem is.

  • Are dog owners always covered by insurance?

They’re not always covered by insurance. A lot of times, people will let their homeowner’s insurance lapse. A lot of times, people don’t see the value in paying the premium or they get in a tight spot, they need to use that money for something else. Maybe they have an emergency and they don’t pay homeowners premium and the homeowners insurance lapses and then when the dog bites someone and we contact the dog owner, we say hey get your insurance and give it to us, and it turns out they don’t have insurance. Also we find homeowners insurance will sometimes have an exclusion for the dog, it will say we do not cover Rottweilers and pit bulls and you know a list of breeds, then the dog that bit our client, if it’s one of those types of dogs, may not be covered by homeowner’s insurance.  So it’s not automatic that insurance is going to cover the injury, but that’s not something that you typically find out until you get an attorney involved. The attorneys start the process notifying the parties and researching whether there’s insurance.

Ben Schwartz is the Managing Partner of Schwartz & Schwartz, Attorneys at Law. If you are searching online for a personal injury attorney, please contact Ben about your case. Ben and the other attorneys in the firm represent people who have been injured in car accidents, tractor-trailer and bus accidents, motorcycle accidents, slip-and-fall accidents, and dog bites. We have offices in Havertown (suburban Philadelphia), PA, Wilmington, DE and Dover, Delaware. Click the “Contact Us” button above and see if we can help you today!