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Some personal injury lawyers in Maryland have a very negative opinion of chiropractors and they usually try to steer their accident clients away from using chiropractors to treat injuries suffered in an accident. Is this view unfair?  It is.  But this negative opinion of chiropractors is largely shaped by how chiropractors are viewed by insurance claims adjusters.

Patients often see it differently. Many insist that chiropractors provide effective treatment and make them feel better. Most insurance adjusters, however, are more reluctant to pay full value for chiropractic therapy.  Adjusters argue chiros treat patients too long and charge too much.   The other problem with chiropractors in personal injury claims is that they usually don’t give injured patients a diagnosis, or any sort of long-term treatment plan with an end goal of recovery.  Too many chiropractors have the mentality of trying to get a lifelong patent.

As lawyers, it is not our job to control or direct our clients in their medical treatment choices. However, we do have an ethical obligation to advise our clients that if they chose to use a chiropractor instead of a traditional doctor, it could have a negative impact on the value of their accident case if there is not a medical doctor standing behind the chiropractors work and blessing the treatment.

Our office is in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore City.  So our lawyers see a lot of pedestrian accident cases.

Walking on the street should not be a dangerous activity, right?  But, my goodness, it is. Pedestrians struck by a vehicle are far more likely to experience severe or fatal injuries than vehicle occupants. This is because — and I’m not telling you anything you did not already know —  they lack a vehicle’s physical protection. If

Pedestrian-vehicle accident statistics

Workplace injuries are a fact of modern life and many workers get injured on the job every day in Maryland. But most workers, even those in high-risk fields, do not spend a lot of their free time preparing personal game-plans for what to do if they get hurt on the job. This mentality is easy to understand, but it can be detrimental.

If you suffer a work-related injury, knowing what to do and, more importantly, what not to do can have a big impact on your ability to get compensation.

In this post, we will look at some common mistakes people make after getting injured on the job and how these missteps can negatively impact workers’ compensation claims and settlement amounts.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a study this week, showing that three separate devices designed specifically to alert drivers when infants and children are left alone in a car do not work properly. Part of a campaign to raise awareness and prevent heatstroke, the study results say that these devices are unreliable when used on their own.

According to the San Francisco State University Department of Geosciences, in 2012, 15 children and infants have died from hyperthermia from being left alone in a vehicle. Since 1998, almost 550 children have died, half of them under the age of two years old. These tragic deaths are unnecessary and several companies released products that are supposed to alert the driver if he or she walks away from the vehicle without extracting the child.

Three of those devices were tested by researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. They tested the ChildMinder Smart Clip System, the ChildMinder Smart Pad, and the Suddenly Safe Pressure Pad. The main problem they discovered was that car seats with lots of padding made it hard for the sensor to work properly.

The Louisiana Supreme Court this week overturned a jury’s verdict in a sidewalk slip and fall case. The court found that, as a matter of law, the defect on the sidewalk did not present an unreasonable risk of harm.

For slip and fall cases, plaintiffs’ lawyers want the story to begin in a good way. This one does: “Plaintiff was walking home from church when….” As she was walking, Plaintiff slipped and fell on a section of the sidewalk and sustained a comminuted fracture of the radius of her right arm.

The sidewalk ran into a driveway. Two sections had become, or were installed, depressed in relation to the rest of the sidewalk. So they sat a few inches lower than the remaining sidewalk. The elevation change was approximately one-and-one-quarter to one-and-one-half inch in addition to the elevation change created by the depression.

Barron Hilton got hit with a $4.9 million verdict after he hit a gas station attendant while he was driving drunk.

The news media identifies Barron Hilton as “the brother of Paris Hilton.” Crazy, right? His great grandfather builds an empire to the point where everyone knows the name Hilton, yet he is identified as “Paris’ brother.”

Anyway, Barron did something he shouldn’t do, namely get drunk and hurt someone really bad. His blood-alcohol level registered .14%. He was 18 at the time. You deserve a pass for almost anything at 18. But someone is permanently disabled because he went out and got wasted. So senseless. His driver couldn’t take him home?

• Several Baltimore police officers were steering drivers who had been in accidents to a towing company from which they got kickbacks.
• SCOTUS term not so good for consumers and accident victims. Gasp.

When a couple goes out to dinner or whatever, who drives? Even among progressive people, the man usually drives.

This is probably a bad idea. Here’s why according to accident statistics (source – Google statistics that seem legit):

• Men are 77 percent more likely than women to die in a car accident. Before you say anything, this is based on miles driven. So it builds in the math, the fact that men drive more often.

“Hey, I got a call today on a great bus accident case.” Honestly, accident attorneys don’t say this too often. The vast majority of intakes in bus accident cases are not meaningful claims worth pursuing. If you throw in the phrase “client fell getting off the bus”, the chances of that claim being a case are about the same as Brett Favre winning the husband of the year award.

But there is a reason why smart lawyers listen to the whole story. A California jury awarded a man $6.4 million in a lawsuit stemming from brain injuries he suffered getting off of a bus. The man, tragically already a quadriplegic, was dropped while getting off the bus, causing a severe brain injury. Under California’s comparative negligence, the city will pay 17 percent of the damages and the bus company will pick up the balance. In Maryland, both would be jointly and severally liable because they are both proximate causes.

I have been trying for a while to find the time to summarize MAMSI v. Wu, a Maryland Court of Appeals opinion holding that health insurance companies may make benefits secondary to PIP benefits available for medical bills suffered in a car accident. You can read the full opinion here.