Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog

A Jefferson County, Mississippi jury has ordered Sherwin-Williams Co. to pay $7 million to a boy who suffered brain damage after ingesting lead-contaminated paint chips. In ruling for the plaintiff, jurors found that the Sherwin-Williams was liable for the boy’s brain injuries.

An lawyer for Sherwin-Williams said they plan to appeal the verdict. With the Mississippi Supreme Court being what it is today, plaintiff's lawyers have a ways to go.

A study by Jury Verdict Research found that the median (as opposed to average) verdict in Illinois in personal injury lawsuits that go to trial is $27,220. Plaintiffs receive damages in 51% of Illinois personal injury lawsuits cases that go to trial. Putting these numbers in context, they are in the neighborhood of the rest of the country; the nationwide median personal injury verdict is $34,550, and the nationwide plaintiff recovery probability in personal injury lawsuits is 52%. The most common injuries were back and neck strains (20%), spinal nerve injuries (11%) and head injuries (10%).

Former Cleveland Browns wide receiver Joe Jurevicius has filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the Cleveland Browns and the Cleveland Clinic. Joe Jurvevicius' claim is that he contracted staph following arthroscopic surgery at the Cleveland Clinic in January 2008. His Complaint accuses his doctors, including the team doctors, of medical malpractice of negligence over a staph infection in Jurveicius' right knee.

I've been down this road with an NFL player in a case I handled against the New England Patriots. He is the motion I filed in that case to defeat the team's claim that there is no jurisdiction. But that Browns' lawyer will make the argument that unless Jurevicius' lawyer put the Browns on notice very early in the game (90 days, I believe), he has has waived his right to bring a claim against the team based on the NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement. It seems silly to break off the malpractice case into two separate cases: one against the team and one against the doctors. But at least one court that I have seen, Sherwin v. Indianapolis Colts, 752 F. Supp. 1172 (N.Y.D.C 1990), seems to think that this is the required approach under the NFL CBA. (My case gave the court an easy out: the Patriots waited 2 years to file their motion which the court relied upon to find that the Patriots and their team doctor waived their right to assert that arbitration was still a remedy.)

You cannot understate the harm caused by staph infections: CDC estimates infections - many of which are staph infections - kill 90,000 people annually. Infections result in an estimated 205,000 additional hospital days for infected patients and a whooping $2 billion in medical costs.

Still, while staph infection lawsuits are on the rise, they are tough claims. Jurevicius' lawsuit contends the training room could have been cleaner. Okay. But that is far leap from a causation link to his staph infection.

A Broward County, Florida jury on Tuesday awarded $14.6 million to a truck driver paralyzed in a 2007 accident that occurred in Palm Beach County. According to a truck accident lawyer for the plaintiff, the lawsuit was an uninsured motorist claim to National Casualty. The truck accident occurred when the driver swerved to avoid another driver who ran a stop sign. The injuries are extremely serious: the Plaintiff lost use of his arms and legs as a result of the accident and requires ongoing rehabilitation.

The average personal injury verdict in Florida is $1,819,751, according to Jury Verdict Research, a company that tracks jury verdicts. Personal injury plaintiff win at trial in Florida personal injury cases approximately 61 percent of cases that go to trial.

Florida’s threshold requiring a more serious injury in auto accident case is one reason why the average jury verdict in Florida much higher than the national average. These Florida jury statistic verdicts also underscore that large case inflate average jury verdicts and settlements. The median – as opposed to the average – money damages in Florida personal injury trials in Florida is $122,674.

If you have been injured in a serious car accident (our lawyers only handle serious car accident claims), call our auto accident lawyers at 800-553-8082 or click here for free no obligation consultation.

• Average Personal Injury Verdicts in New York (2009 study)
• How the Value of Personal Injury Claims Is Calculated? (how lawyers, insurance companies and, ultimately, juries determine value)
• Is There a Formula to Computer Value of Personal Injury Claims?
• How to Maximize the Value of Your Case (thoughts on value)

Dated but still interesting data on Florida workers compensation cases: the average back injury settlement in 1990 was $ 38,000 with medical care continuing (called "keeping your case open"). In 2002, the average back injury settlement is $ 9,800 with no continuing opportunity for further medical care.

Related Posts

Average Back Injury Settlements

(what can you expect as compensation for a back injury from a car accident)

Average Value of Florida Personal Injury Cases/li> statistics on Florida jury verdicts)

How Your Accident Case is Valued (information on how values of personal injury cases are decided by judges, juries and insurance companies for the purpose of settlement

Our Reglan lawyers are reviewing potential Reglan lawsuits for those with who have tardive dyskinesia as the result of the use of Reglan. Reglan is a pharmaceutical drug used to combat heartburn and slow gastric emptying in diabetes patients. Plaintiffs' Reglan lawyers are investigating injuries including tardive dyskinesia (also known as TD), a neurological disorder with symptoms including repeated involuntary movements.

Below is a question and answer for potential Reglan plaintiffs:

What is Reglan?

Reglan is a "prokinetic" drug that helps control gastroesophageal reflux disease by blocking dopamine receptors in the brain and throughout the body. It enhances movement or contractions of the esophagus, stomach, and intestines. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that sends signals between nerves. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies have been experimenting with dopamine in psychotropic drugs for years with mixed results.

What Are the Reglan Lawsuits About?

Certainly, it is well known that Reglan causes side effects. Most commonly it can cause a feeling of "strangeness" or difficulty concentrating. This is a typically reversible condition. Our Reglan injury lawyers are investigating Reglan’s connection to tardive dyskinesia, in which the tongue or face moves involuntarily. Afflicted patients may experience many uncontrolled and involuntary movements, including:

· Grimacing

· Protrusion of the tongue

· Lip smacking

· Rapid eye blinking

· Swaying of the hip and upper body

· Movement of the extremities

Regrettably, these side effect of tardive dyskinesia can be permanent. There is currently no treatment for tardive dyskinesia caused by Reglan. In some cases, the symptoms may lessen or stop once the Reglan use is discontinued. The gist of the Reglan lawsuits is that the risks of tardive dyskinesia were minimized in the Reglan label and other literature put out by the manufacturer. Reglan patients were not give all of the information about the possible risks associated with Reglan.

Why Does Dopamine Cause Tardive Dyskinesia?

No one knows for sure why dopamine causes tardive dyskinesia. But the conventional wisdom is that by blocking dopamine receptors, Reglan can affect the extrapyramidal system the controls the signals between nerves. The inability of dopamine to produce its normal effects apparently causes tardive dyskinesia and its associated side effects because the extrapyramidal system needs dopamine to function.

Should Reglan Be Recalled?

Our lawyers believe that Reglan should have had a more meaningful label with respect to tardive dykinesia and involuntary movements. The FDA agreed earlier this year and now requires a black box warning for Reglan.

Moreover, the manufacturers of Reglan and other generic metoclopramide-containing drugs should stop pushing it for mild heartburn. Heartburn is seldom (if ever) severe enough to risk the permanent injuries associated with tardive dyskinesia. Plaintiffs’ Reglan lawyers certainly believe that the label minimized that risk for patients by implying that there was minimal danger in developing tardive dykinesia from Reglan. Specifically, the original Reglan label said it “may produce extrapyramidal reactions, although these are comparatively rare.” Other sections of the label likewise indicated that tardive dyskinesia is a low risk. Here, Plaintiffs’ Reglan lawyers and the FDA agree. The FDA now requires makers of Reglan to place a black box warning on their label, the most stringent act the FDA can take in requiring a warning.

What About Patients with Gastroparesis?

I don't know. The Gastroparesis issue is more complicated. Ordinarily, the stomach churns food and slowly delivers digested food into the patients’ intestinal tract. In people with Gastroparesis, the stomach does not work normally and food eaten will remain in the stomach sometimes for hours, distending it and causing severe symptoms for some sufferers. Patients with severe Gastroparesis can have serious health consequences that are difficult to live with. If there was a complete Reglan recall, these patients would not have many options because the only oral drug currently approved by the FDA for Gastroparesis is Reglan (or generic metoclopramide). It is only slightly effective for many patients, but for some patients it is very effective. So, in severe cases, Reglan may be the best solution, providing patients are adequately warned about the side effects.

What Did Wyeth Know About Reglan?

In 1992, an article was published by Dr. Ronald B. Stewart on the use of Reglan by 4,515 elderly patients at the Florida Geriatric Research Program. Of the patients who reported using metoclopramide, 32% had used it for more than one year. Plaintiffs’ experts have testified in these cases that Wyeth has estimated extended use of Reglan to be over 80%. This led Dr. Steward to conclude that long-term treatment with Reglan is "quite common" and that other prescription drugs were effective and safer for treating GERD:

The routine use of metoclopramide (Reglan) for gastroesophageal reflux should be questioned in light of the availability of safer, more effective drugs such as histamine-receptor blocking agents cimetidine and ranitidine, and omeprazole. The long-term efficacy and symptomatic benefit of metoclopramide have not been documented.

The point is that Wyeth apparently knew that Reglan patient were using the drug longer than the 12 weeks that is indicated, and that tardive dyskensia occurrs more often than “rarely,” as Wyeth wants us to believe.

Do I Have A Reglan Claim? 

If you or a loved one has used Reglan or generic metoclopramide and now suffer from tardive dyskinesia or other neurological and movement disorders, call a Reglan lawyer at 800-553-8082 or click here for a free no obligation consultation on your potential Reglan lawsuit.

Related Links

Reglan Lawsuit (overview of Reglan litigation)

Reglan New Black Box Warning (how the FDA responded to the concern about Reglan)

In what plaintiffs' lawyers are calling a landmark autism case, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan has agreed to reimburse at least 100 families for costs involving treatments for their autistic children. The $1 million class action settlement from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan comes amid a legislative wave in which a growing number of a states are passing laws that require insurance companies to pay for autism treatments and screenings.

Metro Verdicts Monthly provides the following data to give the median (not average) settlement and verdicts for ankle fracture injuries:

District of Columbia: $66,000

Virginia: $21,700

Maryland: $88,000

My comment? People rarely have minor ankle injuries in car accidents in my experience. So I think a lot of slip and fall ankle injuries are included in here which lowers the value from pure auto accident ankle injury claims (or malpractice claims which are more rare for ankle injuries). I don't think we have ever had an ankle injury case settled for less than $150,000 and I can think of one that settled for over a $1,000,000 (although that case had other complicated injuries so it is hard to sort out where the value was in the case).

For more analysis of this data and more data on ankle injuries verdicts nationally, check out this Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog post.

Related Posts

Valuing Injury Cases in Maryland (value of accidents in Maryland)

Valuing Cases in Virginia (general info on Virginia injury case results)

Valuing Cases in Washington D.C. (general infomation on Washington D.C. personal injury case results)

A Hydroxycutt class action lawsuit has been filed against Iovate Health Sciences, the makers of weight loss dietary supplement Hydroxycutt, in federal court in California. The plaintiffs' Hydroxycutt lawyers allege, among other things, that the manufacturer misrepresented the product as safe and effective in its advertisements.

A Michigan jury awarded $1.8 million to the family of a woman in a medical malpractice wrongful death lawsuit against a doctor and Gratiot Medical Center in Alma.

Plaintiff, age 42, was admitted to the hospital for abdominal pain and had her gall bladder removed in a laparoscopic surgery two days later. She later died from sepsis and a perforated pouch at the beginning of the large intestine.

Plaintiffs who filed Seroquel lawsuits finally got some good – albeit expected – news. Seroquel’s manufacturer will not be able to bar medical testimony on general causation of the link between Seroquel and weight gain and diabetes, a federal judge ruled.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers’ expert on Seroquel, the chairwoman of the epidemiology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is expected to opine that Seroquel causes metabolic changes which can lead to diabetes without weight gain.

Honestly, I cannot imagine a scenario where general causation would be an issue. There really is not much legitimate dispute. The challenge that Plaintiffs’ Seroquel lawyers have had in the lawsuits that have gone forward is specific causation, whether diabetes was caused in the Plaintiff, as opposed to the general principle that Seroquel can cause diabetes.

As American Law Litigation Daily pointed out on Monday, Delaware Superior Court Judge Joseph Slights was pretty discouraging about the future of the Seroquel lawsuits in his recent opinion. The judge pointed out that in every Seroquel lawsuit, plaintiffs’ experts have been bounced on Daubert grounds. But you have to look at the facts of those specific cases (here and here). While plaintiffs’ Seroquel lawyers might have thought these were good cases to push forward, it is pretty clear that these were bad cases on the facts (it could have evolved that way in a way unknown to plaintiffs’ Seroquel lawyers.)

There are still 13,000 Seroquel lawsuits out there. There is a long way to go.

A Marion County Indiana jury has ordered several doctors and health care providers in Indianapolis to pay $5 million to a woman with a ruptured diaphragm who was misdiagnosed in 2000. The misdiagnosis led to the removal of a third of her stomach and ongoing complications, an attorney for the woman said. State medical malpractice caps will limit the award to $1.25 million.

The New York Times reports that a former military doctors accused of falsifying medical research received more than $780,000 from Medtronic between 2001 and 2009. The surgeon claimed in the study that the use of a Medtronic bone growth product called Infuse had proved highly beneficial in treating leg injuries suffered by American soldiers in Iraq. Medtronic admitted the payments for travel expenses, speaking engagements, training other doctors or other consulting services. The Justice Department is now investigating whether Medtronic paid doctors to help market medical devices for unnaproved uses.

There are not a lot of Medtronic bone Infuse case out there. But there are cases involving the Medtronic bone Infuse product because there have been a number of spinal procedures involving the Medtronic Infuse Bone Graft that resulted in severe complications. If you have suffered a complication and would like to speak to a lawyer to discuss a potential Medtronic Infuse Bone Graft lawsuit, click here for a free no obligation consultation or call 800-553-8082.

IA judge has denied the a request by Plaintiffs' Lexapro and Celexa lawyers to consolidate a newly filed proposed class action over Lexapro and Celexa with the ongoing Celexa Lexapro suicide MDL.

Judge Rodney W. Sippel - the judge overseeing overseeing the NuvaRing MDL cases - ruled that Plaintiffs' Lexapro and Celexa lawyers had not demonstrated that consolidation would be appropriate because they have different allegations and the fact that the MDL has already been going on for some time might cause prejudice in some cases.

This ruling does not means that Lexapro and Celexa victims cannot bring claims or that there is still not a class action for purposed of discovery. It just means that lawyers handling Lexapro and Celexa are not going to have a pure class action and that the claims are going to be more narrowly defined in scope in the MDL than some plaintiffs' lawyers would like.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation has consolidated a number of lawsuits brought over defective drywall made in China. The Chinese dry wall lawsuits allege that sulfur compound levels in the drywall are at levels that cause problems with electrical appliances, HVAC systems, and other electrical issues.

Most of these claims are not injury claims but property damage claims as a result of the defective dry wall.

The Missouri Lawyers Weekly ("MLW") verdicts and settlements database found that the median plaintiff's verdict award for motor vehicle cases that involved back injuries is $212,500. For all car, truck and motorcycle accident injury cases in MLW's database that earned a plaintiff's verdict, the median award is $300,000.

• Back Injury Settlements (an overview and the relative hierarchy of types of back injuries)
• Herniated Disc Cases (an overview)
• Sample MRIs in Disc Injury Cases
• Cervical Herniated Disc Values (average settlement/trial value neck and back disc injury cases)
• Sample MRIs in Disc Injury Cases

The Irish Times reports on a study from the National Suicide Research Foundation that found that the experience of being abused in an institution had led to huge anxiety among survivors regarding the possibility of receiving nursing home care in later life.

There is no real legal/nursing home abuse angle to this story. It does underscore, however, how fragile some patients are both physically and mentally went they enter a nursing home which highlights the obligation of nursing homes to provide not only proper but loving care to nursing home patients.

John Day writes a blog post on the new Tennessee medical malpractice lawsuit notice requirement and the new certificate of merit requirement.

I'm not sure of the thinking as to why you have to give a doctor notice before you file a malpractice lawsuit although that has always been the law in Tennessee. As to the certificate of merit change, I also can't see the wisdom in requiring the certificate of merit to be filed with the lawsuit. Maybe there is a reason beyond just making life more difficult for the malpractice lawyer but I can't see what it is.

The Alabama Supreme Court has overturned a $5 million malpractice verdict given by a Mobile jury (actually the jury awarded $8 million and it was reduced) to the mother of a child who died shortly after birth four years ago. Plaintiff's medical malpractice lawsuit alleged that negligence by a Mobile OB-GYN led to her son's death.

I cannot find the opinion so I really cannot comment on it. But the process of electing judges in Alabama for their Supreme Court is just a bad idea. The problem for Mobile malpractice lawyers fighting for their clients is that while juries look at the facts of individual cases, voters often hate malpractice lawyers and, vicariously, their clients when they are in the voting booth. This can make victory at trial in a malpractice case just the first step of getting a meaningful recovery.

A Kentucky jury has ordered a doctor’s malpractice insurance company to pay $3.8 million for acting in bad faith by delaying payment on aclaim it knew its client was liable for, the Louisville Courier-Journal reports. The insurance company initially offered the Plaintiff $75,000 to settle her case despite the fact that the malpractice insurance company estimated the case to be worth $1 million. Typical stuff that does not surprise any malpractice lawyers. Plaintiff was left permanently disabled after her doctor botched a cosmetic procedure the doctor suggested Plaintiff had while she underwent a hysterectomy.

Median jury awards in motor vehicle tort trials dropped to $17,000 in 2005 from $41,000 in 1992. I don't know about you but this underscores to me that auto accident verdicts are not driving car insurance rates.

The picture is different in medical malpractice and product liability lawsuits. Product liability trials had median awards at least five times higher in 2005 than in 1992. Medical malpractice trials median awards more than doubled to $682,000 in 2005 from $280,000 in 1992.

I realize this data is a bit dated - 2005 - but that is how we typically get personal injury statistics... a little dated.

You can find the entire study here.

A jury in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania awarded $1.88 million to a Dunmore woman in a cancer misdiagnosis medical malpractice lawsuit filed on behalf of her husband, who died of cancer in 2008. The jury found a urologist, a pathologist, and Wayne Memorial Hospital responsible for failing to diagnose the man with bladder cancer during several doctors’ visits complaining of urinary problems over a sixteen month period.

Cancer of the urinary bladder is the fourth most common malignancy among men, and the eighth most frequent among women. Urinary problems obviously do not necessarily mean a patient has cancer, but obviously this jury found that there was enough evidence where more should have been done when the patient presented with an inflamed and enlarged prostate.

This is a list of cancer misdiagnosis verdicts in Maryland.

I blogged last week about settlement loans in the personal injury context. The New York Times published an article yesterday on the big business of settlement loans in large commercial cases (located via Overlawyered).

• Colorado experiments with requiring doctors to report successful malpractice claims and the Denver Post provides a trite editorial on the malpractice problem without offering a single idea.

• Colonoscopy plaintiffs verdict case in Towson, Maryland
• Verdict against a gastroenterologist in Tennessee
• The South Florida Injury Attorney Blog has a post on the problem in Florida of doctors not carrying medical malpractice insurance
• Fort Worth Injury Lawyer Blog reports on new bill to toughen DWI laws to prevent boating accidents
• The Brain Injury Law Blog has a post on the Washington’s states new law to prevent further head injuries when the student has a concussion (common football injury)
• Summary of Kugel mesh implant cases