Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog

The Insurance Research Council found that rising gas prices in the last few years have increased the number of serious auto accident injuries. The reason is that when drivers switch to smaller vehicles as a result of higher prices at the pump, more accident injuries ensue.

The institute took 9,000 accident claims from 2007, broke them down according to vehicle weight, and found that people driving compacts, sports cars and other smaller cars submitted injury claims that were 14 percent larger, on average, than those of people driving SUVs and other larger vehicles. A hidden cost of small car accidents, according to the study: more people lose work time because of injury than in large-vehicle accidents.

The large vehicle gas guzzler versus small vehicle great gas mileage choice is a false choice in terms of technology: carmakers can build large cars that get good gas mileage. The problem with large cars that get good gas mileage is that they accelerate much more slowly than consumers are willing to tolerate.

In MAIF v. Baxter, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled that Maryland law does not require a car insurer to provide uninsured motorist coverage to an uninsured stranger/pedestrian who is struck by a car driven by a person excluded under the insurer’s policy. Basically, the court found that the Maryland Legislature only required that UM coverage be extended to an “insured.”

For once, MAIF was – albeit accidentally – fighting for the good guys, because the pedestrian’s estate asserted a claim against the Uninsured Division of MAIF. The Plaintiff’s estate was relatively indifferent because the UM limit was $20,000 in either event. So, incredibly, we have MAIF fighting unsuccessfully to create good case law for Maryland accident lawyers.

I have not read the nuances of this case closely enough to find great flaw in the court’s interpretation of Maryland uninsured motorist law (and it does not sound as if reading MAIF’s briefs would be of much help in this regard). But this is just bad law. The woman is an innocent pedestrian walking down the street. There is insurance coverage on the car. That should be enough. (But I understand reasonable people can disagree with this premise.)

One funny thing about the case - and this sounds just like MAIF – is that MAIF asserted for the first time in its reply brief that the insurance policy issued by the insurance company that covered the car (Interstate) should have provided coverage.

I received an email last week from a lawyer asking me to send them a recent Maryland Court of Special Appeals Court opinion that I wrote about by failed to properly link to the case. You can find Maryland appellate court opinions here.

A goal of mine is to pull out all of the Maryland accident appellate opinions and categorize them. Alas, this has remained just a goal.

What is the average car accident settlement in Maryland? I don't think anyone knows. But the Maryland Auto Accident Lawyer website has a page with information and resources to try to figure out - within a range of course - the average expected value of your car accident settlement or verdict in Maryland.
This resource provides information that should be helpful to Maryland accident lawyers trying to evaluate car accident cases.