Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog

David Stratton, a defense lawyer with Jordan Coyne & Savits, provides a link on his blog to an interactive map that shows the location of road accident fatalities between 2001 and 2009. If you allow yourself to move past the dry statistics and really think about what you are seeing - even for an instant - it is terribly depressing. It makes me wonder: exactly how much would it cost - in time and money - to cut this figure in half? Lower the speed limits? Require car makers to build safer cars? More restrictions on truck drivers? I'm not saying we should do this. But I sure would like someone to do an estimate so we can figure out what the tab would be.

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?" »

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.

A critical component of damages in wrongful death car accident cases is loss of services of the survivors from the victim. Loss of services is a dumb legal expression we would do best to get rid of. Solatium damages is an awful phrase, too. But at least it does not imply in the definition that the loss is pretty much someone doing less for you. (Noneconomic pain and suffering damages is a little better, I guess. We will use that.)

In Maryland, we describe these wrongful death damages to a jury as "mental anguish, emotional pain and suffering, loss of society, companionship, comfort, protection, marital care, parental care, filial care, attention, advice, counsel, training, guidance, or education where applicable." Most states use similar strange language but the gist of it is: what has really been lost - calculating everything - from the death of this person?

Here are the statistics nationally on noneconomic pain and suffering jury awards:

Continue reading "Calculating Pain and Suffering Damages" »

The hardest car accident cases to try are he said/she said accidents where there are not natural facts that make one version more likely than another. The classic example of this scenario is lane change/merger accidents. Which car came over into which lane? Even a good accident reconstructionist struggles to be able to put the pieces together. So it often comes down two factors: (1) which version seems more likely (incredibly subjective), and (2) which driver has more credibility (incredibly subjective squared).

According to a Jury Verdict Research study of jury verdicts in these types of cases, the results are what you might intuitively expect: 50/50. The JVR study found car accident plaintiffs win about 48 percent for lane change collisions and 45 percent for merging collisions. The average verdict is $47,807.

We have tried and won these cases. But our firm is going to turn down most lane change or merging crash cases unless there is something compelling that makes us think we are going to win the case. We need two things to move forward in a lane change or merge crash case: (1) a very serious injury (sad but true commentary on the real world), and (2) a client that is extremely credible.

Google "personal injury settlement calculator." A lot of people get on-line looking for a personal injury settlement calculator as if there is some formula that will calculate the amount of money they will get for their personal injury car accident claim.

The reality is that trying to find a calculator to determine your personal injury settlement is fool's gold. Please trust me, if you find an answer on the Internet that values your car accident settlement, it is utter nonsense.

Generally speaking, the personal injury settlement formula for a car accident cases is:

Past and Future Medical Bills
+
Past and Future Lost Wages
+
Past and Future Pain and Suffering Damages

How does that formula apply to you? The first two you may be able to knock down pretty simply if there are no future medical bills or future lost wages. But, ultimately, the money in personal injury car accident cases is your pain and suffering damages. And there is no personal injury settlement calculator that you can find that is going to give you pain and suffering damages that are specific to you. Because each case - your case - is unique.

Our website does discuss some of the major factors of case value that apply in most personal injury cases.

If you still feel like you just need some sort of personal injury settlement calculator and you don't care that the result that it churns out are stupid and useless of no help at all, go here. These kind folks pretend there is a formula. Granted, these people are not lawyers, they are a consulting company that presumably generates leads for accident lawyers by creating a website called... wait for it... Personal Injury Calculator.

I do not know if it is a trend or whether I'm just noticing it more often. But I think our firm is seeing more cases than ever where the medical expert designated by the defendant is not the appropriate expert. Instead of matching the expert to the facts, they seem to just designate the usual suspects regardless of what the case is really about - trotting out shoulder guys in knee cases, orthopedic doctors in neurology cases, etc.

Here are two good questions to ask in these cases:

• Do you believe your training and experience is equal to or greater than the treating doctors in this case? The obvious answer is, "'I have no idea," but so many of the DME docs just feel compelled to go all the way in to fight anything they perceive as progress for a plaintiff's lawyer. So if the doctor says "yes", then follow up with: Do you know the training and experience of the doctors who treated this patient? Almost invariably, the answer is going to be, "no."
• Would you send someone you love to a doctor who has not seen a patient with your loved one's injury in 3 years?

Our law firm has recently put up a page on our website analyzing claims against Travelers Insurance. The short version: Travelers is a better draw in car accident claims in comparison to the usual suspects in Maryland accident cases. Still, they are, how do you say... still an insurance company. Which, by definition, makes tham a challenge to deal with when trying to settle an auto accident claim.

In car accident cases, there are typically relatively "good" settlements on ankle injury cases. For our purposes here, "good" is defined as the probability of getting a reasonable settlement offer before filing a lawsuit.

Why are ankle injury cases easier to settle than other accident claims? But the most obvious explanation is the nature ankle injuries. With neck and back injuries, which are common car accident injuries, people with the exact same radiological findings can have very different manifestations of pain. Given this, insurance companies tend to assume the lowest level of pain in these types of cases.

In contrast, ankle injuries are far less often the result of degenerative changes and are usually caused by trauma, rarely leading to concerns about preexisting injuries or arthritic changes. Just as importantly, they are typically objective injuries we can see on a radiology report. It also helps in reaching a value of an ankle injury for settlement purposes that the treatment of ankle injuries is generally not as involved as other car accident injuries which decreases the extent of the "you should not have gotten so much treatment" arguments from the insurance company.

Four years ago, the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog reported on ankle verdicts and settlements in Maryland. You can find those here. A recent Jury Verdict Research study found that the average ankle injury verdict is $290,130 ($90,000 is the median). Maryland's median - again, four years ago - was right on par with the national average at $88,000.

I think this is useful data in determining an appropriate value for an ankle injury settlement. That said, all average verdict data is of questionable usefulness in a given case and ankle injury data is probably even less useful than most other types of car accident injuries. You can drive a truck though the difference in settlement value between a hairline ankle fracture and a crush injury. So, as always, take the ankle verdict data with a grain of salt.

Every Maryland accident lawyer enounters difficulty in dealing with Medicare liens. The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog has a post on a new 11th Circuit opinion that, while not a panacea for accident lawyers dealing with Medicare liens, underscores that, "Super Lien" or not, Medicare does have to follow at least some of the same rules as any other lienholder.

One underutilized tool for Maryland truck accident lawyers: Freedom of Information Act requests to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. While FOIA does protect certain records from disclosure in truck accident cases, you can often get inspection reports, compliance reviews, and other information that defendants either do not have or do not produce in discovery.

Red light/green light cases are maddening to take to trial. Sometimes, an accident lawyer just knows the defendant is lying... but can't prove it. Often, there is no solution to this problem in red light/green light or other liability dispute car and truck accident cases. There are no witnesses and all you have is the police report. But in some cases there is proof out there that the defendant is lying because the light sequence report is mutually exclusive of the defendant's version of how the car accident occurred.

The solution by now for Maryland accident lawyers is obvious: if you have a liability dispute where light sequencing is an issue, get a copy of the traffic sequence report from the state of Maryland.

• Sample Light Sequence Report
• Sample Request Letter for Sequence Report
• Maryland accident claims: an overview

The problem with big rig trucks is there are just too many ways they can cause serious accidents. My husband just called me and reported the traffic is stopped on the Baltimore Beltway because a truck apparently shifted too abruptly causing the pavers it was hauling to fly out of the truck, sending them across the jersey wall and into oncoming traffic.

There are just so many different consequences that can stem from negligence in big rig tractor trailers accidents that don't exist with passenger vehicles. Apparently, what happened here is one of those truck accident risks the general public thinks very little about: properly securing the truck's load. Federal law clearly sets forth a trucker's obligations in this regard under 49 CFR 392.9

Maryland law - specifically Insurance Code Section 19-513 - prohibits the stacking of insurance policies. Accordingly, under Maryland law, if there is uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage, the insurer is liable to its insured for the full amount of the accident victim's damages minus the amount paid by the liability carrier or the Defendant.

In other words, let's say you have a Maryland accident case where the defendant has a $100,000 liability policy and the injury victim has a $300,000 uninsured/underinsured motorist policy. If the $100,000 is paid by the liability carrier, the uninsured/underinsured motorist obligation is $200,000, not $300,000. So if the liability policy is lower than the UM/UIM limits, you are going to be capped in your recovery for the uninsured/underinsured motorist claim by the amount of the policy.

Lawyers in other jurisdictions - Pennsylvania leaps to mind - are shocked at how conservative Maryland accident law is on stacking insurance policies and lots of other issues related to the handling of car accident claims. We are a blue state with very red accident laws.

Section 392.14 of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations requires truck drivers to use extreme caution driving a commercial truck in snow, ice and other inclement conditions including rain. Accordingly, if the weather conditions are not perfect, truck accident lawyer in Maryland should argue that federal law preempts state law and that the standard is not longer what the reasonable prudent truck driver would do but instead whether the truck driver used "extreme caution."

The most serious car or truck accident is a head-on collusion. A recent Jury Verdict Research study found that 79% of plaintiffs involved in a head-on truck accident – defined as a truck accident where at least one of the vehicles traveled across the centerline, with a truck received damages – received a damage award. The median damage award in a head on truck accident case is $ 242,150. I did not see the average truck accident jury award but I suspect it is well over a $1 million.

• Average Rear End Truck Accident Verdict (average national verdict)


• Truck Accident Settlements and Verdicts (more Jury Verdict Research data)


• How Truck Accident Cases Are Valued (who lawyers and insurance companies put a settlement value on a truck accident case)


• Truck Accident Verdict Data (even more data)


• Truck Accident Cases (general overview)

There are two fundamental things we need to do to reduce auto accident injuries. First, we have to decrease the number of accidents. Driver inattention is a tough problem to fix, but real gains can be made with drunk drivers and drivers using their cell phones or text messaging.

The second is reducing the severity of injuries after an accident occurs. This means safe cars, trucks and motorcycles that can withstand an impact and occupants wearing seat belts. With respect to the latter, John Day's Day on Torts reports that seat belt use in 2009 stood at 84 percent, a gain from 83 percent use in 2008.

Most of our country's fatal car, truck and motorcycle accidents occur on rural roads, according to statistics released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Fifty-six percent of 37,261 traffic deaths occurred on rural roads during 2008. Researchers say that the higher death rate on rural roads stems from a combination of faster driving speeds, poorer road engineering, behavioral influences and slower delivery of acute medical care.

I would think you would have to add more single lane, curvy roads where vehicles are traveling at excessive speeds.

Forklift truck accidents frequently cause catastrophic, life-altering injuries. But the risk is not just to forklift truck drivers. As many as two-thirds of forklift accidents - at least in some areas - involve pedestrians or otherwise innocent bystanders. Many forklift claims involve: caught limbs, running over pedestrians' feet, and entering or exiting the vehicle improperly.

Here are some disconcerting forklift accident statistics:

• OSHA's statistics indicate that forklifts are involved in about 68,000 accidents each year, resulting in 95,000 injuries
• 10% of forklifts are involved in an accident
• Two-thirds of all forklifts in use will be involved in some sort of accident during the life of the forklift
• Operator training can improve forklift truck performance by approximately 70 percent.

Continue reading "Maryland Forklift Truck Accidents" »