Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog

More than five years after the gory photographs of a teenage girl killed in a horrific automobile accident were released on the internet, her family's lawsuit has come to an end. The deceased girl's family filed suit against the California Highway Patrol (CHP) for broadcasting graphic photographs of the dead girl's body over the internet, photographs which can still be found today.

The tragic story begins with the teen having driven her father's Porsche without his permission, and ends in a senseless accident with her body being maimed and nearly decapitated. After reaching speeds of more than 100 mph, the teen clipped another vehicle, swerved, and struck a toll booth. She was so badly disfigured that her family was not permitted to view her body. Sadly, they would be given the chance thanks to two CHP dispatchers who took it upon themselves to leak the photographs. The photographs, never intend for public viewing, appeared on thousands of websites. Unbelievably, many websites mocked the girl as a spoiled rich girl, who got what she deserved. She was nicknamed "Porsche Girl." The family even received anonymous taunting messages.

The family filed suit claiming an invasion of privacy. A Superior Court judge initially threw out the family’s lawsuit, concluding that the agency had not breached any legal duty to the family, as the law did not recognize the right of family members to sue for invasion of privacy involving photos of the dead at the time. But that changed in 2010 when the state's 4th District Court of Appeal reversed the decision. For the first time in California, the court established that surviving family members have a right to sue for invasion of privacy in such cases.

The family is still desperate to have the photos removed from the internet. As part of the settlement, CHP has agreed to help fight to remove the photos, experts say they will never be removed. A simple search of the family's last name brings up links to the photos.

All the way around, it is just an awful situation.

Medicare continues to make efforts to try, post Haro v. Sebelius, to make for an easier solution for dealing with Medicare liens. The latest? In very small cases, the types of cases more likely to be handled by injury victims themselves as opposed to personal injury lawyers, Medicare will offer a 25% gross payment alternative to dealing with Medicare on a lien.

It is certainly not the deal of a lifetime by any stretch. More importantly, it is only for cases that do not exceed $5,000. But the option applies in:

• Cases after November 7, 2011
• Involve physical injury
• $5,000 or less
• The option is selected in a to-be-determined time frame
• Medicare has yet to make a final demand
• The beneficiary does not expect to receive future third party injury payments

If these conditions are satisfied, a beneficiary will be able to resolve and satisfy Medicare's lien by paying Medicare 25% of the insurance settlement. While the primary application will now, more than likely, be small soft tissue car accident claims, a successful run might lead to larger scale implementation down the road.

Continue reading "New Medicare Rule" »

This Maryland Accident Lawyer blog post provides a sample cross examination of an expert that provides a good example of what you do with IME doctors that have a history of testifying for insurance companies.

A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against a municipality in Washington after a fatal car accident stemming from a police chase.

The woman that caused the crash was drunk. The lawsuit claims that the police were negligent in chasing the woman because of the risks posed by the chase.

This issue of how far the police should take a chase is gaining new steam in recent years as more eyes are policing the police than ever before. One problem in many jurisdictions: limits on liability against police who are responding to an emergency.

It is a tough issue. You want police to catch the bad guys but you don't want them killing the rest of us in the process. Hard balance.

I wrote last week about the whole "settle case over policy limits and sue for bad faith" gambit last week. Here is another opinion from Tampa, Florida where the plaintiffs' accident lawyer did the exact same thing. Sure this one failed too. Still.

Ultimately, the "insured dragged its feet on settlement" is a tough road to hoe.

You can read the full opinion in Machalette v. Southern-Owners Insurance Co. here.

The West Virginia Supreme Court last week dealt with a common problem in car accident cases: the defendant has no coverage. The Plaintiff, who suffered serious injuries, tried to bring a claim against Nationwide Insurance after it disclaimed coverage because the defendant's insurance policy had been canceled. Defendant claimed he did not know the policy was canceled. (They somehow never seem to know.)

Plaintiff in this case was blameless. He was driving a van and struck a sport utility vehicle head-on. He suffered real injuries: a broken femur, concussion, low grade coma, broken nose, broken ribs, bruised shoulder, injured hips, and multiple bruises, cuts and scrapes. Plaintiff files suit and gets a default judgment of over $6 million. Of course, that and a quarter will buy you a turn at the arcade.

Continue reading "No Coverage Means No Coverage" »

A wrongful death lawsuit has been brought by the survivors of three people killed in a car accident. The wrinkle in this case is that they have brought a suit against the city of Charlotte and Crescent Resources, accusing them of negligence for not installing a traffic light where the high-speed crash along N.C. 49 occurred two years ago.

Why bring in the governement entities? The families' lost loved ones were not the cause of the accident: the accident was caused by two guys who were racing. The answer in these cases is always the same: inadequate insurance.

The suit claims Charlotte and Crescent Resources, the developer of a community along the highway in southwest Mecklenburg County, created a dangerous intersection and failed to install a traffic light.

These are very tough cases, they really are, although sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that the governement screwed up (here is one example). The one big problem plaintiffs have with a jury: there are already well defined bad guys, two guys driving 100 miles an hour that have been charged with murder.

A former police officer in Philadelphia received a $1.3 million settlement after suffering injuries in what would generously be decribed as a minor car accident. What defines minor? No property damage. None.

The officer was at a stop light when he was rear ended in the kind of car accident that most people walk away from without even exchanging information. In fact, the police officer didn't think he was hurt either. But he claimed to have suffered a pinched nerve in his right arm that ended his career as a police officer. Those guys are well paid which means good economic damages.

The temptation is to blame runaway juries. This case was settled before a mediator.

Was this a worthy case? Ultimately, who knows? But it is a country with 311 million people. There are one in a million, one in ten million type injuries were people suffer very serious injuries in very minor accidents, some of which involve negligence.

You can read more about the case here.

The majority of the cases our lawyers handle involve auto accidents and truck accidents in the area. We handle only extremely serious injury and wrongful death accident claims.

Although not all, the vast majority of our cases are in Maryland. We will handle truck accident and car injury cases outside of Maryland but only in the event of catastrophic injury or death.

You are trying to choose a lawyer? Take a second and take a breath. Your choice matters. Do some research. Talk to a lot of lawyers. Find out who is really trying cases and getting verdicts for their clients and who is running a marketing firm to get and settle - regardless of the value - cases as fast as they can. And... one other thing I think is critical: ask every accident lawyer you talk to who they would refer a case to if they could not handle a serious car accident case on behalf of a loved one. If the answer keeps coming up one firm, you have a great candidate.

Our car accident lawyers have already recovered millions of dollars in compensation for car accident victims by settlement or trial in 2011. If you or a loved one has serious injuries and you need a lawyer, call 800-553-8082. You can also make a free on-line inquiry here. Ultimately, you should not be talking only to us. You should be interviewing a lot of accident lawyers to figure out the big question you need to answer: who is the best lawyer for you?

Insurance companies have a lot of car accident cases in suit. How do they juggle them all on a limited litigation budget? This Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog post explains tactics when it comes to designation expert witnesses.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is probably going to throw his hat in the ring to be the Republican who takes on President Obama next fall. Good for him. He's got a good head start with George Will's "Gee, I think you are hotter than Derek Jeter and I love the way you eat a big hamburger" article a few weeks back.

But while deciding to run, Perry has to make sure he nails his Republican bona fides by trying to run to the right of Michele Bachmann. That's hard to do right now. But Perry wants to try.

The Texas Legislature passed a law virtually every state is passing: you can't text and drive. Not a big controversial issue, some studies are suggesting that texting is more dangerous than drunk driving. Probably a dangerous exaggeration in its own right but, still, you get the point: texting = more accidents and deaths in car accidents.

Continue reading "Perry's Texting While Driving Veto Will Cost Lives" »

An Ohio man was awarded $1 million after suffering a mild traumatic brain injury in a 2006 car collision with a police cruiser. According to Plaintiff's lawsuit, the car accident occurred when a Strongville police officer made an illegal left turn while responding to a "non-emergency" call. The plaintiff claims a traumatic brain injury.

Our lawyers handle a lot of TBI cases. Plaintiff's TBI from the car crash presented as many of these injuries often do: pretty much no big deal. Obviously, in this case and countless other TBI car accident cases, the injury evolves from nothing to something extremely problematic.

In Wilson v. State Farm, a U.S. District Court in Kentucky found that an insurance carrier did not act in "bad faith" by delaying payment of the settlement in a car accident case pending plaintiff's lawyer squaring away a Medicare lien.

In Wilson, the plaintiff brought an uninsured motorist claim and the insured tendered the policy of $50,000. Plaintiff said, "Okay, we settled the case, pay me." State Farm withheld payment, worried that it would be responsible for the Plaintiff's Medicare lien. Plaintiffs' lawyers deal with this issue every day.

Plaintiff's lawyer understood State Farm's position and tried to marry the two, demanding that State Farm put the settlement in an escrow account from which Medicare's conditional payment amount would be payable. The plaintiff (and probably his lawyer, I don't know) also promised to hold the insurer harmless with respect to any potential claim asserted by Medicare.

State Farm's answer was a solution that was offered - and rejected - to me in a case just last Friday: putting Medicare on the check. Getting them to sign that check would probably take literally an Act of Congress.

Continue reading "State Farm Holds Back Settlement Pending Medicare Lien" »

I have a five part (so far) review of portions of David Ball's book on Damages:

• Part 1 (opening statement)
• Part 2 (closing statement)
• Part 3 (cross-examination of defense experts)
• Part 4 (dealing with prejudices about your client)
• Part 5 (who do you call as your first witness?)

Ryan Dunn, a star of MTV's "Jackass", was killed today in a car accident. Normally, I hate the whole blogging about some celebrity dying in a car accident thing. But the accident happened this morning approximately 2:30 a.m. and there is a moral to this tragic death.

I don't know if alcohol was involved in this single car accident death. The police report says nothing other an speed could have been a factor. Ryan Dunn tweeted a picture that would lead you to believe he probably was but who knows?

But there is one thing I'm completely sure about: nothing good happens outside of your house after 2:30 a.m. Typically, it is car accidents, arrests and fights. My kids are going to have a curfew until they become grandparents.

I've written a lot about how personal injury lawyers have to and should be dealing with medical and other liens. When I go back and look at the web traffic generated by these posts, it typically gets low page views, probably from the same 20 lawyers that read all of our nitty gritty details on handling personal injury cases stuff.

Not so with Haro v. Sebelius, a new opinion from Arizona that may dramatically alter the relationship between Medicare (and Medicaid but I lump Medicaid into Medicare for grammatical ease). I think the big difference in the impact of Haro v. Sebelius is something car accident and medical malpractice lawyers are feeling right now.

Here's the deal in a nutshell. Haro v. Sebelius is a lawsuit filed by two Medicare beneficiaries for whom Medicare benefits were paid for treatment that was ostensibly needed as the result of a car accident. Interestingly, the car accident lawyer in this underlying case is also a named plaintiff.

Continue reading "Haro v. Sebelius: Medicare Liens" »

Indiana has passed a new law that prohibits texting while driving. Indiana is the 32nd state to prohibit texting while driving. Under the new law, effective July 1, violators face a maximum fine of $500. The law extends Indiana’s current texting ban to all drivers. Drivers under 18 are also prohibited from all cell phone use.

I was jogging yesterday close to the road. There was no sidewalk. A very young girl was texting while driving by me. I'm certain she never saw me. This is how people die.

The average car/truck/motorcycle accident verdict in New York is $837,020, which is stunningly high compared to most other jurisdictions.

Why is this? Are New York jurors just that much more generous than, say, jurors in Maryland?

The answer is that New York's no-fault accident law requires that plaintiffs suffer a “serious injury" before a lawsuit can be brought against the at-fault driver. While there is some question that having a magical threshold that needs to be crossed is going to be fraught with great flaws, there is no question that this New York scheme, as desultory as the justice it might bring, keeps minor personal injury car accident cases out of court.

What's my point? My point is that this completely distorts average car accident verdicts in New York. I read Metro Verdicts Monthly and Mealey's which provide a lot of individual verdicts in car accident cases in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. It is amazing how many jury verdicts there are for $10,000 when, if you look at the case, is really not such a bad result. New York has none of these cases deflating their average.

Continue reading "New York Car Accident Verdicts" »

You get into a car accident. You curse out the at-fault driver. You shouldn't have. But you did. Is the defense going to have the opportunity to put on this evidence or cross examine you with it? The Maryland Accident Lawyer blog writes about a recent decision in federal court in Maryland that answers this question (for this judge, under these facts).

You hate to single out "most important bones to break" particularly as a segue into discussing the value of injury claims. Still, the femur is a pretty important bone, certainly on the "top 10" list of important bones that are not in the spinal cord. Approximately one-fourth of your height is made up of the length of your femur. The Maryland Injury Lawyer blog has a discussion of the value of broken femur cases and settlement and verdict data generally.