Wrongful death claims are governed by their own set of rules, and understanding them is essential for the families they’re meant to protect. In this video, Keith E. Galliher, Jr., founder and principal attorney of The Galliher Law Firm in Las Vegas, explains how Nevada law shapes these cases.
Galliher explains who may bring a wrongful death claim, how statutory law defines the damages available, and why proving the closeness of the family relationship is so important to a jury’s decision. With compassion and decades of trial experience, he offers practical guidance — including preserving photos and videos of shared moments — that reflects the care The Galliher Law Firm brings to representing grieving families.
Transcript
Wrongful death cases are different animals. Wrongful death cases are created by statute. We have Nevada statutory law that controls what can be awarded in the way of damages in a wrongful death case, and also tells you who the plaintiffs can be — they have to be heirs. So, for example, if a husband is the subject of a wrongful death — say he gets killed in a car crash — the wife is the plaintiff in the wrongful death case.
The damages in a wrongful death case are limited by statute to the conscious pain and suffering of the decedent from the time of his injury until his death — and of course, if you have a car crash where he was killed instantly, you don’t have much there — and to the loss of society, comfort, companionship, and consortium, as they call it. What that means is: what was your relationship with the decedent? In the wife’s case, she has to establish that, because remember, the jury is being asked to give damages to somebody who wasn’t killed. They’re giving damages to somebody else. And if they don’t think the relationship between that somebody else and the decedent is close enough or important enough, they’re not going to be very generous, because from their standpoint, it’s, “What good is this money going to do? It’s going to somebody who doesn’t particularly care about the decedent and didn’t have a relationship with him, so we’re just not going to pay them.”
So you have to be able to document that. That means, if you happen to have a wrongful death case, make sure you locate all photos showing family gatherings, all videos showing family gatherings — the good times, so to speak — so the jury can look at these photos and determine that you and the decedent had a relationship that should result in them compensating you.
