Howard County traffic accident police reports where the injuries are not fatal are now available on-line. Only motor vehicle accident police reports will be made available on-line. To get the report, you have to pay $5 and certify that you were involved in the accident or you are an accident attorney or insurance company representing someone involved.
You can get more information here.
An Ohio lawyer has been suspended for two year years suspension for submitting “false and fraudulent” time sheets. Theoretically possible for the workaholic? Sure. But three of her bills reflecting more than 24 hours of work in one day, once billing 90.3 hours of work during a 96 hour period. In another, she billed 139.5 hours of work during a 144 hour period.
Although the number of lawyers who pad their bills is probably on the downside in 2010 as more companies are looking for more ways to trim legal budget fat, lawyers who bill by the hour have been padding their bills since Emperor Claudius lifted the ban on lawyers billing more than 2,000 years ago. Little known fact: Abraham Lincoln was a notorious bill padder, sometimes charging clients five times the number of hours taken to complete the task. There was scores of client complaints about Lincoln about his billing. (Before you pass this information along, consider the possibility that I'm completely making this up.)
Anyway, while most lawyers don't, the fact that one lawyer was caught ridiculously padding her bills in not actually a Page 1 story. But I found the defense to the crime particularly interesting: it was the the law school's failure to teach law firm management.
The first reason why this is so ridiculous is obvious. As Carolyn Elefant points out, if you can't figure out that you are not allowed to bill more than 24 hours in a day, a law school class is not going to set you straight.
But, in my opinion, the whole idea of Law Firm Management as a course is an exercise in futility. You have make believe lawyers pretend to run a make believe law firm with make believe problems. Students just are not going to really digest the problem. It is like suggesting the guy that won your fantasy football league three years in a row would make a great general manager.
Continue reading "How to Teach Lawyers Not to Steal" »
What do the players in the World Series of Poker have in common with jurors? Poker faces. Unless you really (really, really) have a jury, they usually don't give that many tells.
Of course, now we have a cheat sheet with Facebook. Apparently, a Michigan juror pronounced a criminal defendant guilty while the trial was still, ah, ongoing. Everyone is so enamored with social media and its intersection with how it impacts jurors and lawsuits, so these stories make big news. But just how many times has this happened where it never leaked out? I'm pretty sure I could confess to a felony on Facebook and no one would really be paying that much attention.
While we are talking about Facebook, please join our Miller & Zois fan page.
The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned a $31 million verdict in a Ford rollover case stemming from a catastrophic accident in 2001 that caused brain damage to a 12 year-old boy. This was a difficult case. A mother was driving with four children who were not wearing seat belts and the mother took her eyes off the road and swerved to get back on the road. The question was whether the design of the Ford Bronco was a substantial contributing cause to the child's injuries.
Obviously, a jury found that it was and sent a powerful message to Ford: $16 million in actual damages and $15 million in punitive damages.
The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the verdict for a lot of reasons. I won't go into all of them but there are two reasons set forth for the court's reversal that I think are of particular interest.
First, the court found that it is improper for lawyers in closing arguments "to arouse passion or prejudice." The court cites these statements made during the plaintiff's lawyer's closing argument as improper:
1. "This is how Ford looks at this. That little bit of thirty people being killed every year didn't matter. Those thirty people, those thirty extra people getting killed in a year didn't matter to them because it was just a little bitty number."
2. "It does matter about those people getting killed. Those thirty people do count. Those thirty people--that's thirty more people that got killed that year. If you expect these vehicles to last about twenty years, that's six hundred more people getting killed using this vehicle as opposed to a Chevy S-10 Blazer. That's serious."
3. "And that doesn't count the paralyzed people, the quadriplegics, the people with serious injuries, the thousands of people that have been in these events because of this rollover propensity of this vehicle that they knew about, and they knew it since day one but they chose profit over safety every time because they looked at it as numbers. They didn't look at it as lives, as people."
4. "I submit to you that the evidence is that they did it because they thought it was a little, small number. . . . [T]hey did not look at it as thirty lives a year[], they didn't look at it as six hundred lives. That's how they should have looked at it, but that was not how they did it."
5. "They got together at the highest levels of Ford Motor Company and they made a judgment that rather than delaying and improving the Bronco II, they were going to sell the vehicle as it was and that they were going to risk people's lives and they were going to risk serious injuries like we have here today. They were going to risk people's brains."
6. "Jesse Branham is here today with a brain injury and six hundred other people, or however many it is, lost their lives, and numerous others have brain injuries or are paralyzed, quadriplegic, have extremely serious injuries. We believe that you should tell Ford Motor Company what you think about this kind of thing."
The court found these improper because they relied on evidence that was inadmissible, because it asked for damages for harm to others, and because it improperly inspired the jury to act on passion as opposed to reason. All of these arguments are flawed.
If the evidence is inadmissible, then that is the basis to overturn the verdict. There is no need to tie it to an improper closing. Presumably, this would be true in any case where evidence was inadmissible.
Additionally, the court believes these statements led to asking for damages for harm to others. But the attorney is asking for punitive damages. We don't have punitive damages in Maryland without proof of actual malice - which eliminates 99.999% of cases like this from being considered for punitive damages. But if you are asking for punitive damages, it seems to me that you have to give the context of why there was a risk of harm to more than just the plaintiff. (Plaintiff's lawyer also got into evidence the salaries of certain executives at Ford which does sound pretty incredible. But, again, our law firm has never handled a punitive damages case so I really can't speak to the standard for admissibility in these cases.)
Continue reading "$31 Million Rollover Verdict Overturned" »
This month, Metro Verdicts Monthly graphs the median verdict and settlement value of back fracture cases over the last 23 years. The median settlement/verdict in Washington D.C. is $52,500. Maryland has a slightly lower median of $43,126. The median settlement/verdict in a back fracture lawsuit in Virginia is $125,000. These are back fracture cases where there is no paralysis.
Most back factures come from some sort of trauma, usually from a car accident or falling. The reason the numbers may sound lower than you are might expect is because many back fractures are not as serious as the ominous sounding "back fracture" would suggest. When I was in high school, I hurt my back swinging a baseball bat at baseball camp in Florida. A chiropractor worked on me for a while but I made no progress. I went to an orthopedic doctor and, low and behold, I had a fractured back. It ruined my baseball season and I had to wear a back brace for eight weeks but I never suffered any ill effects after removing the back brace.
Continue reading "Back Fracture Verdicts" »
The Maryland State Bar Association Newsletter reports that Maryland's judicial electronic case management system will be up and running in Anne Arundel County in 2012 and throughout the state by 2015. This system sounds like it will be much like the system used in the federal court system. The expected cost to bring this e-filing system to fruition is expected to exceed $50 million.
We have a big race in Anne Arundel County for Circuit Court that is getting surprisingly little attention in the media. Alison Asti is challenging sitting Circuit Court Judges Laura Kiessling and Ronald Jarashow.
The problem with this election is that most people - I think most people - make a reasonably informed vote when voting for president, Congress, state legislatures and other elected offices in this Country. But I don't think the majority of people, even Anne Arundel County lawyers, are in a position to make an informed call on judges. Our law firm tries a lot of personal injury cases and we have not tried a case in front of either Judge Kiessling or Judge Jarashow. So there are probably 11 lawyers in Maryland who are in a position to have been in front of these judges and know Ms. Asti well enough to thin slice who would be the best judge. And I wouldn't even defer to those 11 people.
What are the issues in the campaign? No one is suggesting the other side is not qualified to be a judge. (Actually, I'm making that part up because it makes my argument flow better. I think proponents of the sitting judges have argued that while Ms. Asti may be a fine lawyer, you need to have been a trial lawyer to be an effective judge. I'm not unmindful of this point. Having supported Justice Kagan, I feel a little hypocritical suggesting drawing the line between an appellate judge and a trial judge for who needs to have been a trial lawyer.)
Assuming all of the candidates are qualified, what are we deciding in this election? Who would be the fairest of the fair? How do you debate that? And if you can't have a debate, should you have an election? But we have one. So I think the best rule for voting in judicial elections is to vote for the incumbent judges unless you have a compelling reason not to do so. Important point: compelling should not be defined as a sentence you did not like in a criminal case when you really do not even know the facts of the case, how the witness presented, and so forth.
Anyway, the sitting judges are good judges and good people by reputation. Judge Kiessling and Judge Jarashow both made it past the Anne Arundel County Judicial Nominating Commission and were nominated by Governor O'Malley. Even Bob Ehrlich would admit under sodium pentothal that Governor O'Malley has been apolitical in the judicial nomination process and has appointed good judges to the bench. The Republicans in the Maryland Senate have certainly thought so. (Dear Republicans: It is okay to concede your opponent has not been awful at everything. It actually enhances your credibility. I promise.)
It is not that I do not think Ms. Asti would not make a good judge. I also do not oppose her right to run. She is availing herself to the political process that is currently in place (even if I disagree with the premise of electing judges). But she has not suggested a reason why these well thought of judges should be removed from the bench and I think that is because there isn't one.
Accordingly, my law firm made a donation yesterday to the campaign of the sitting judges Laura Kiessling and Ronald Jarashow. More importantly, they have earned the highly sought after, much anticipated and ballyhooed Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog endorsement.
The Michigan Supreme Court came out a few weeks ago with a very interesting opinion in favor of the Plaintiff in a malpractice claim that most likely would fail in Maryland.
The doctor's malpractice attorneys argued that the allegation that the doctor's negligence caused a reduction in the risk of stroke from 10 to 20 percent to less than 5 to 10 percent was not enough to get the claim to a jury because the loss was not sufficient enough to meet the burden of proof on proximate causation. The doctor argued that Michigan law is whether the opportunity to achieve a better result was greater than 50 percent. Under this law, if the plaintiff could not prove that receiving the alleged appropriate treatment would have decreased his risk of injury by 50%, plaintiff's claim would fail.
Thankfully, a divided Michigan high court found that this is not the law and that malpractice cases such as this should be decided under a simple principle: the plaintiff is required to prove that the doctor's negligence more probably than not caused the plaintiff’s injury.
Regrettably, Maryland goes in a different direction on these types of cases as I have previously discussed. One thing Maryland has Michigan beat on is collegiality among the judges on the court. Battles in the Michigan Supreme Court are both political and personal in a way that would shock Maryland lawyers. Judges quoting political statements made by other judges to the press, the judge that wrote the majority opinion writing separately to refute one judge's personal attack - if you have no interest in this issue it is worth reading the opinion just to get a taste of what this different world is like.
Continue reading "Loss of Chance/Opportunity: New Opinion from Michigan" »
Miller & Zois lawyers Laura Zois and Rod Gaston obtained this afternoon a $1.1 million verdict for our client in a medical malpractice (lap chole) case in Baltimore City.
A new Jury Verdict Research study found that the average verdict in an improper medication case is $3,539,541. The median, which many consider to be a more accurate number, is $1.2 million. Verdicts ranged from $2,074 to $35,500,000. But only 28% of medication error plaintiffs recover at trial. I think the problem in many medication error cases where plaintiffs do not prevail is causation because sometimes the medication error compounds a larger pre-existing health condition and it is difficult for the jury and the doctors to sort it out.
Incredibly, 1.5 million people are victims of medication errors every year, according to an Institute of Medicine study from a few years ago. Of course, most of these errors are relatively harmless. We get frequent calls from people who are justifiably angry that such a careless error was made. But, more often than not, they don't have a case because they were not significantly injured (in the malpractice sense of the word, anyway). Still, more people die annually from medication errors than from on-the-job injuries, according to the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention, and the extra medical costs incurred from improper medication errors each year is a whopping $3.5 billion.
Paul Luvera offers on his blog a good checklist for preparing a case for trial.
Paul points out that checklists - seemly obvious things that have probably been around since man was carving into stone - have received renewed interest in other fields, most notably in medicine where some studies have shown that being a slave to the checklist is in some cases better than the doctor using their own judgment.
If this is even occasionally true, it is pretty humbling for a professional, particularly a doctor. Accepting that you need reminders of the obvious does not stimulate the ego. But I think most errors that result in medical malpractice or legal malpractice are not because the doctor or lawyer did not have the skill to avoid the mistake but because they didn't make proper use of what they already knew. Proper use of checklists can help fill that gap.
Besides the humility required to implement them, checklists get a bad rap because of how often people mindlessly check off items without consideration as to whether the item has been properly completed or they work just to check off the list without consideration of the big picture. But there is no system that is going to be able to withstand user neglect.
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