Valparaiso is the Porter County seat, and its courthouse on Lincolnway is where Porter County injury cases are filed. Our Merrillville office is twenty minutes west on U.S. 30, and one of our attorneys practices from Valparaiso. Our Merrillville office is at 8002 Utah Street, Merrillville, IN 46410, and you can reach it at (219) 472-8391. If you cannot come to us, we will come to you, including hospital and home visits for seriously injured clients.
U.S. 30 through Valparaiso, State Road 49 north to the Dunes and the Toll Road, and the rural two-lanes toward Kouts and Hebron account for most of the serious crashes we see from Porter County. Valparaiso University, the downtown restaurant district, and the big-box corridor along U.S. 30 produce the slip, trip, and parking-lot cases. Porter County juries are different from Lake County juries, and we prepare cases for the courtroom they will actually be tried in.
Where Valparaiso cases are filed: Porter Superior Court at the Porter County Courthouse in downtown Valparaiso.
Hospitals we work with for Valparaiso clients: Northwest Health Porter (Valparaiso), Franciscan Health Michigan City. We request records and bills directly so you are not chasing them.
Indiana sorts visitors into three groups, and the duty depends on which one you were. An invitee is on the property for the owner’s benefit, such as a customer in a store, and is owed the highest duty: reasonable care to discover dangers and to fix them or warn about them. A licensee, such as a social guest, is owed a warning about hidden dangers the owner actually knows about. A trespasser is owed only a duty not to be willfully or wantonly injured. Most of our cases involve invitees, where Indiana follows the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 343. We must show the owner knew or should have known of the condition, should have expected that you would not discover or protect yourself against it, and failed to use reasonable care to protect you.
An owner who created the hazard or was told about it has actual knowledge. An owner who should have found it through reasonable inspection has constructive knowledge, and that is where most premises cases are fought: the longer a condition existed, the harder it is for the owner to say it could not have been found. The defense will also argue that you should have seen the hazard and avoided it. Indiana’s comparative fault statute, Ind. Code § 34-51-2-6, still allows recovery unless you were more than 50 percent at fault, with the award reduced by your share, and an owner’s failure to fix a condition it had every opportunity to find usually outweighs a visitor’s momentary inattention.
Slip and fall cases involve a surface that gave way underfoot: liquid, ice, grease, or a freshly mopped floor. Trip and fall cases involve a fixed hazard such as a raised sidewalk slab, a parking lot curb stop, or an unmarked step. Each has its own page because the proof is different. Beyond those, we handle structural defects, including floating docks built contrary to the manufacturer’s installation instructions and materials specifications; building-code violations such as a missing handrail or guardrail on a stairway or ramp; inadequate lighting in stairwells and parking areas; and negligent security, where an assault in a parking lot, an apartment complex, or a bar was foreseeable because the owner ignored prior incidents.
Most injury claims must be filed within two years of the date of injury (Ind. Code § 34-11-2-4). If a city, county, or state agency is involved, a tort claim notice may be required within 180 days. The sooner you call, the more evidence we can preserve.
A Chicago-area native who worked in telecommunications and held two jobs to support his family before law school, Jason founded the firm in 2010 on a no-nonsense, plain-spoken approach to solving clients’ problems.
Admitted to the Indiana bar at 24, the youngest licensed attorney in the state at the time, Miguel pairs that early start with more than fifteen years helping Northwest Indiana families through injury claims and bankruptcy.
Chesterton · Portage · Hebron · Kouts · Wheeler · Hobart · Westville · LaPorte
Most Valparaiso injury cases are filed in Porter Superior Court at the Porter County Courthouse in downtown Valparaiso. Our attorneys appear there regularly and know the local judges, the mediators, and the defense firms the insurers hire.
Premises liability is the whole category: any injury caused by an unsafe condition on property someone else controls. A slip and fall is one kind of premises case; trip and fall, negligent security, and code violations are others.
The claim is made against the homeowner’s or renter’s insurance policy, not against your friend personally. In most cases your friend never pays a dollar.
Five minutes on the phone and you will know where you stand. You will not owe us a fee unless we recover money for you, and the bills get handled before the check does.