Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog

Some jurors see a bike plaintiff and think this

A law firm dedicated to handling just bicycle accidents? You are not going to find that in Maryland. But New York is a big city.

The New York Times exaggerates a little bit. The lawyers at Rankin & Taylor do handle other cases, including this one involving a masseuse who says police required her to clean a toilet at the station before releasing her. (Crazy, right?) But they don't appear to run from the fact that their focus is representing bicyclists who get tickets in a New York that is increasingly anti-bicyclist.

Our lawyers are not taking these kinds of cases. But our law firm does handle motorcycle accident and bike cases. Truth is, juries are like New Yorkers: they are skeptical of motorcycles and bikes. Bikers minding their own business don't get noticed (sometimes to their peril). But you always remember a bike that cut you off or almost caused you to get in an accident. Bike accident lawyers in these cases need to anticipate and refute this bias from voir dire to closing.

I wrote about this a few years ago. Interestingly, as I note in this post, juries seem more biased toward bicycles than motorcycles.

An Illinois jury awarded $1.275 million to the family of a 25 year-old woman who had almost completed her nursing degree and was killed while driving to her job at a hospital. Tired driving appeared to be the cause of the car accident: the Defendant just fell asleep and hit the Plaintiffs' decedent.

The damages only trial lasted four days. The jury heard four grueling days of testimony from the family. Not that a tragedy like this can get worse, but this young girl had already been through a lot: surviving two kidney transplants only to be senselessly killed by someone driving down the road.

Continue reading " How Much for the Wrongful Death of a 25 Year-Old Girl? " »

A tow truck driver was struck and killed this morning by a hit-and-run driver on Route 100 in Glen Burnie during rush hour. He got killed near where I work. He lives in the same town I do.

Certainly, there is a desire for all of us to sigh a bit of relief and say, "Okay, I would not be helping a sewage truck on the side of the road. That couldn't have been me." But have you ever been pulled over on the side of the road. Of course you have. This could have happened to you, me or any one of us.

The next step is to find creative ways to blame the victim. Why was he so close to the road? Shouldn't he have seen it coming? We all have this attribution bias, to varying extents. When you peel that away, what you have is a poor guy who was probably trying to feed his family and while doing so died for no good reason.

Just awful.

I have been trying car accident cases for almost 16 years. I never realized until reading this article that August is the most dangerous month for car accidents.

Something to keep in mind when after you pile your kids in the car. Of course, you have to hope the other guy on the road is thinking the same thing.

There is a good article in the Lawyers Logbook this month on the shell games trucking companies play to buy the minimum insurance - $750,000 for most big rigs under federal regulations - and play shell games by taking advantage of corporate structuring to minimize liability when they kill someone.

As Ron Miller wrote on the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog, truck accident defense lawyers are not shy about giving trucking companies advice on just how to do this.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued as many imminent hazard orders in the last two years, getting rid of more unsafe bus and truck companies, than the prior 10 years combined.

Buses are incredibly safe. If you are in the bus. This shocks parents but it is probably true: your child is better off with an unsafe bus driver taking her to school than you. But if you are in a bus' path, it is a different story obviously, particularly for pedestrians.

You can read the DOT release here.

The Baltimore Sun reports today on the tragic death of a Glen Burnie man who died after a car accident with an SUV being driven by an unsupervised teenager on a learner's permit. Apparently the at-fault driver, a nineteen year old who lived in Millersville, was driving on her learner's permit with another 19 year-old.

This is the 19th fatal car accident in Anne Arundel County this year. Not every story gets a lot of attention. The angle the media is taking on this one is that the supervising driver was not old enough.

Easy narrative but I doubt it would have made a difference here. Police said they had no evidence that drugs, alcohol or speeding contributed to the crash. Some people just don't pay attention to where they are going. When this happens, people can die. If my mother and her spotless 50 year driving record had been in the car seat next to this young girl, I doubt it would have made much of a difference. The scary reality is what happened to this man could have happened to your kids or mine if they were in the same place at the same time in Crofton as this man tragically was on Sunday.

Ultimately, the best protection from this type of stupidity is the safest car possible. Which leads to a very inconvenient truth: as awful as big cars are on our environment, they probably do save lives.