Accident and Injury Lawyer Blog

Sample uninsured motorist caption:

The Maryland Auto Accident Lawyer Blog has a post setting forth the filing fee in Maryland personal injury cases. The fee varies depending upon the court.

The first MRI contrast lawsuit for for patients claiming nephrogenic systemic fibrosis as the result of diagnostic drugs containing gadolinium will go to trial in San Francisco in January.

Our law firm is handling MRI contrast lawsuits. I believe these are huge cases. Just how big these cases are remains to be seen but this case will offer the first clue. I think Bayer and the other defendants are going to want to reach a settlement in these cases after a few of these cases are tried.

If you believe you or someone you love has or had NSF or NSD as the result of exposure to gadolinium, call one of our MRI contrast lawyers at 800-553-8082 or get a free MRI contrast consultation. On some of these cases, there may be statute of limitations questions so potential claimants who are interested in a settlement or a lawsuit should contact our lawyers or another lawyer immediately.

The South Carolina Lawyer Blog has a blog post about a malpractice/product liability lawsuit involving the radiation overdoses at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center which the Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyer Blog posted on last week.

Sometimes it makes sense tactically to file a lawsuit quickly. But it seems that the only cases that get filed in less than a few weeks are those cases that coincidentally happen to make headlines.

Maryland and Georgia both have rulings on tap from their high courts on caps on economic damages. Georgia got the ball rolling yesterday when the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday on whether its cap on damages for medical malpractice claims is constitutional. A Georgia medical malpractice lawyer argued for the Plaintiff that the tort reform law in 2005 is unconstitutional because it grants unfair preferences and exemptions to hospital emergency departments.

Plaintiffs have a real shot in this case. The Georgia high court has previously stuck down laws that gave special exemptions to asbestos manufacturers facing property claims. Stay tuned....

In a case I blogged about back in February, an Illinois woman involved in a lawsuit over the alleged wrongful death of an 89-year-old Alzheimer’s patient has pleaded guilty to criminal neglect, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The victim died of hypothermia earlier this year after wandering out of the Arbor of Itasca nursing home in freezing temperatures. The nursing assistant in charge did not respond when Plaintiff triggered an alarm. A nursing home wrongful death lawsuit is currently pending against the Arbor of Itasca nursing home.

If you need a nursing home lawyer in Maryland or Illinois, call 800-553-8082 or click here for a free consultation.

Settlement for $1.8 million was reached in a medical malpractice lawsuit where the jury this June awarded $4 million against an emergency room doctor. While that sounds like a major compromise, there is a cap on medical malpractice awards in Virginia, so the actual verdict after the cap was $1.8 million.

Plaintiff's Virginia medical malpractice lawyers alleged that a doctor misdiagnosed their 25-year-old client's heart condition. Plaintiff's condition was eventually diagnosed by doctors at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore.

This case had complications in discovery because of a problem I have discussed before: one lawyer representing all of the doctors (you can find the details in this article on the case). Defense medical malpractice lawyers love when doctors lock hands and sing "all for one, one for all." The problem is that this invariably leads to conflicts when the doctors could very easily point at each other.

Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog has a practice tip on coordinating workers' compensation and PIP claims in Maryland accident cases.

The Maryland Accident Lawyer has a post on bad intersections and the balance between human life and the convenience of the automobile.

The Maryland Court of Appeals decided Pittway v. Collins last month, a tragic case involving a lawsuit that arose out of a fire that took two lives in Montgomery County in 1998. The fire was caused by a burning candle in the basement, where the children – guests of the tenants of the house - were sleeping. The children lit the candle during an electrical outage caused by thunderstorms and the HVAC powered smoke detector that had no backup was not operational. Making the problem worse, the basement was a windowless basement bedroom that did not have proper egress.

Plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against a chain of defendants on the failure to supply an adequate fire alarm: the builder, the landlord, the electrical subcontractor, the city rental inspector, and the home improvement company that renovated the basement four years earlier.

After settlements and summary judgment, everyone got out of the case except for the builder and the manufacturer. Both filed motions for summary judgment, before the discovery deadline, that intervening negligent acts superseded the claims against them. The trial court granted the motions. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals reversed.

The Maryland Court of Appeals agreed with the narrow CSA opinion that the motion to dismiss before discovery was premature. The court provides a detailed history of Maryland law on proximate cause, superseding cause, and foreseeability.

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 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.

The Orlando Sentinel (via Overlawyered) has an interesting article taking a detailed look at statistics surrounding theme park lawsuits. This is not your garden variety media article of a legal trend. It has detailed breakdown of the lawsuits filed against theme parks, and through statistics and interviews, sets the game plan of Disney theme parks, and I think to a similar but lesser extent, its brethren when facing a lawsuit: wage elongated war, make discovery brutal for accident lawyers and their clients, and settle the cases you think you might not win - particularly those cases you might prolifically not win.

John Bratt's Baltimore Accident Lawyer Blog has a good post on cross examining IME doctors.

Obviously, it impossible to consider a few variables - even a multitude of variables - and come to a calculation of winning a medical malpractice lawsuit in Maryland. But the Maryland Malpractice Lawyer Blog provides some analysis as to the percentage of malpractice lawsuits that are successful and the types of malpractice lawsuits that are most frequently seen.

The Maryland Malpractice Lawyer Blog has a post about a doctor's lawsuit claiming that he was wrongful terminated from an OB/GYN practice. The doctor who fired him claims, among other things, that the OB/GYN doctor failed to come clean about a medical malpractice lawsuit that had been filed against him in Pennsylvania.

Virginia Lawyers Weekly reports on an insane case in Virginia where an emergency room doctor in Hampton received a defense verdict.

After a night of partying, the decedent and his friend got into a dispute over whether the decedent would drive drunk from Hampton back home to Atlanta with his 4-year-old son. The best friend did what best friends usually do - he stabbed him in the thigh.

The decedent was taken to the emergency room. Plaintiff's malpractice lawsuit claimed that the emergency room doctor should have sought out detailed information about the length of the knife. The defendant was told only that the decedent was stabbed with a knife and that the length of the blade was unknown. The defendant assumed it was a small blade.

Turns out it was a very large blade and his injuries did not resolve. As the decedent was deteriorating, following a transient response to the fluid resuscitation, the defendant called in a general surgeon who arrived three hours later and told the ER doctor that the decedent was in hemorrhagic shock secondary to a stab wound and blood loss. The general surgeon instructed the emergency room physician to transfer the decedent to the ICU. Sadly, the stabbing victim died.

Plaintiff's Virginia medical malpractice lawyer contended that the defendant should have responded more aggressively to treat the injury.

People who get stabbed and blame their injuries on medical malpractice usually don't fare too well at trial. So the defense verdict is no surprise. I was surprised that an offer of $500,000 was rejected. Usually, in a case where the jury has an easy target to blame - the criminal who stabs the victim - it becomes difficult to pin the injuries or death on medical malpractice. But in this case, they got a $500,000 offer. I wonder whether it was the family or the malpractice lawyer that suggested rolling the dice.

Listed here are groups of Maryland legal links that mostly involve issues of interest to malpractice and accident lawyers, but there are also a few interesting employment and family law links included as well.

Medical personnel responding to a 8 year-old's injuries by an exploding cannon at a Fourth of July celebration in Washington were negligent in his death, according to a Complaint filed by his family's malpractice lawyers. The lawsuit alleges that the responders were improperly trained and should not have canceled a previously requested medical airlift. The boy died after being struck by shrapnel from an 18-inch cannon fired by his grandfather.

These are tough cases because the laws in most jurisdictions are set up to give medical personnel responding to an emergency more discretion. I don't agree with this - like emergency room doctors, the law takes into account the exigency of the moment. In Washington, gross negligence is required to bring a claim against emergency personnel.

Related Posts:

Article on Case From Seattle Times (story on lawsuit)

Maryland Lawsuits Regarding Emergency Vehicles (immunity from liability provided in Maryland accident and medical malpractice cases)