Las Vegas Electrocution Injury Attorneys

If you or a family member was shocked, burned, or hit by an arc flash recently, even if everyone “seems fine,” a few steps protect both health and any future claim:

Each of these is expanded below. The deadline to file a claim is real but not immediate; the evidence window is the part that closes fast.

The second blind spot is liability. People hurt by electricity often assume there is one obvious target: the employer whose site it happened on, or the landlord who owns the building. In reality, electrical hazards are usually created and controlled by several different parties, and the law treats each one’s duty separately. Identifying all of them is what protects the full value of a claim, because a single defendant may be underinsured, may have only a sliver of the fault, or may not be the party who actually caused the failure.

Who the responsible parties are depends on what failed and who controlled it:

A few features of Nevada law make this layered analysis matter even more than it first appears:

Workers’ compensation does not close the door on the other defendants. If the injury happened at work, workers’ compensation is generally the exclusive remedy against your employer, and you typically cannot sue the employer directly. But that exclusivity runs to the employer (and, in construction, to a “statutory” principal contractor and certain design professionals), not to everyone else. Under NRS 616A.020, the workers’-comp remedy is exclusive “of all other rights and remedies of the employee … at common law or otherwise.” That bars the employer claim, and NRS 616C.215(2) preserves the third-party action only against a person “other than the employer or a person in the same employ,” so a co-worker, and a statutory co-employee working under the same licensed principal contractor, are barred as well. A separate claim against someone outside that chain (an equipment manufacturer, a utility, an outside property owner) survives. For an injured worker, this is frequently the most valuable part of the case, because a third-party negligence claim can reach damages that workers’ compensation alone does not.

Overhead power-line contact has its own statute. Nevada law prohibits work that brings a person, tool, or equipment closer to an energized high-voltage overhead line than the required clearance: 10 feet for lines rated 50 kilovolts or less, with greater distances for higher voltages, under NRS 455.220. Note who that duty falls on: the statute speaks to the person performing the work or operating the equipment, not to the utility. A related provision, NRS 455.240, runs in the same direction: where an act violating the chapter causes contact with a high-voltage overhead line, each person who committed the violation, or caused another person to commit it, must pay the public utility for damage to its property, for its reasonable costs and expenses from the contact, and for the costs and expenses it incurs as a result of the contact for damages to third persons, jointly and severally. So the clearance rules are a concrete standard against which conduct near power lines is measured, and that can cut either way in a case like this. Whether an injured person also has a claim against the utility is a separate question that turns on the facts of the case.

Multiple defendants are usually liable only for their own share, with key exceptions. Under Nevada’s comparative-negligence statute, NRS 41.141, when recovery is allowed against more than one defendant, “each defendant is severally liable to the plaintiff only for that portion of the judgment which represents the percentage of negligence attributable to that defendant.” In plain terms, fault is divided, and each negligent defendant generally pays only its slice. But the same statute preserves joint and several liability (where any one defendant can be pursued for the whole judgment) in specific categories, including claims based on strict liability (subsection 5(a)) and “an injury to any person or property resulting from a product” (subsection 5(e)). That product-liability exception is one reason identifying a defective tool or component matters: it can change not just who is liable, but how much of the judgment each defendant can be made to pay.

Federal workplace electrical-safety rules set out how electrical work is supposed to be done safely. One example is OSHA’s safe-work-practice standard at 29 CFR 1910.333, which requires de-energizing live parts before work and using lockout/tagging procedures. Consensus standards such as NFPA 70E (the standard for electrical safety in the workplace) cover the same ground for hazards like shock and arc flash.

But the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act does not create a private right to sue for a violation. Instead, a violation of these standards is generally used as evidence of the standard of care in an ordinary negligence claim: proof that a defendant did something the safety rules say not to do. (How forcefully that evidence is treated varies; some jurisdictions treat a violation as strong evidence of negligence, others as some evidence of it.) The legal claim is still negligence (or, for a defective product, product liability); the OSHA or NFPA 70E violation is powerful support for that claim, not a substitute for it. Importantly, because it is evidence in a negligence case rather than a workers’-comp matter, this is exactly the kind of proof that can be used against a third party (a contractor, a property owner, an equipment maker) even when the employer is shielded by workers’ compensation.