Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog

Maryland was one of 32 states that decreased their number of drunk driving fatalities, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report issued yesterday. Drunk driving deaths in Maryland declined by 10, a 5.3% decrease. The national average was a 3.7% decease.

This is good news The bad news is that almost 13,000 people were killed in car, truck and motorcycle accidents where the driver was shown to have a BAC of .08 or higher. If we took the money we are spending in Maryland now on the Bay Bridge bridge and put that money into more drunk driving checkpoints, we only save about 20 times the number of lives.

More troubling news was that the number of motorcycle drivers killed in alcohol related motor vehicle accidents increase 7.5 percent. The government has been doing good thing pushing the motorcycle accident issue head on, featuring motorcycle accidents in their $13 million advertising campaign to attack the drug driving accident problem that comes on Labor Day weekend.

A number of states did not follow the national trend. Drunk driving deaths increased in Washington, D.C. and Virginia as well as Alabama, Alaska, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin..

Hit and run and phantom vehicle cases can be a challenge for Maryland accident lawyers. But good lawyers can obtain compensation for their clients in the vast majority of cases.

In Maryland, if you are injured in an accident as the result of the negligence of a hit-and-run driver, you can still recover for your medical bills, lost income from work, and pain and suffering damages as if the driver had been identified by bringing an uninsured motorist claim or lawsuit pursuant to your own car insurance policy. Maryland law treats an unknown negligent driver as it would an known uninsured driver for purposed on the injury victim's uninsured motorist policy.

With respect to phantom vehicles - those vehicles that cause an accident but then drive away before then can be identified - some states require physical contact with the phantom vehicle for the injury victim to be able to make an uninsured motorist claim. Maryland law, however, does not require physical contact. If the insurance company has policy language to the contrary, Maryland courts will ignore the language.

The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog has a post about difficult dealings with an Erie Insurance adjuster.

Most insurance adjuster are decent people and it is just as hard to make generalizations about insurance adjusters anymore than it is about doctors or lawyers or Indian chiefs. In September, I'll have the opportunity to visit State Farm for settlement day where we will attempt to settle our outstanding State Farm cases in a single day. We did the same thing a few years ago (I blogged about State Farm Settlement Day here.) It is a nice opportunity to meet adjusters and put a human face on our dealings with State Farm.