Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog

The American Statesman, a newspaper in Austin, Texas today reported that an attorney, citing a 2005 Mayo Clinic study that documented 11 Parkinson's patients who became compulsive gamblers while on a drug called Requip, filed suit against manufacturer GlaxcoSmithKline on behalf of a retired doctor in Austin, Texas. His Complaint alleges that after taking Requip in 2004, the plaintiff "developed an irresistible compulsion to gamble," which lead to his losing over $13 million. The Complaint also claims that the casinos knew or should have know of his Parkinson's and the Mayo Clinic study (conveniently ignoring that the study came out after he lost most of his money).

I worked for GlaxcoSmithKline as an outside lawyer about five years ago defending their antidepressant Paxil. I cannot imagine a scenario where they would ever consider resolving a claim like this. You cannot blame Glaxco in this case. This lawsuit seems frivolous. (I use the word "seems" only because I do not have access to the same information that the attorney filing the suit may have.) A study of 11 patients is not enough for Glaxco to rely upon given the side effect is not life threatening. I find these claims frustrating because there are many meritorious claims pending against Glaxco and the other drug companies. Pharmaceutical lawsuits like this one weaken by association those deserving pharmaceutical cases.

It is always interesting for a personal injury attorney to hear about trial verdicts in accident cases. We subscribe to Metro Verdicts Monthly which summarizes primarily personal injury accident cases in Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. Basically, Metro Verdicts Monthly calls the attorneys involved in the case and tries to get as the key details of the case from them. One of the most interesting facts is the pretrial demand and offer. (Sometimes, the lawyers cannot even agree on that which does not make you wonder how the case went to trial!) Metro Verdicts Monthly will also - for a fee, of course - conduct research of similar cases to your facts. Our accident lawyers have used this on a few occasions in fighting motions from defense lawyers to reduce the jury's verdict in personal injury cases.

Another interesting resource that looks more to individual cases is Jury Verdict Research which looks not only at individual cases but collects data from as many personal injury cases as it can around the country. In 2005, they reported on jury awards in accident cases. Nationally, it found that the median jury award in a personal injury case was $38,461 and the nationwide plaintiff recovery probability was 55 percent.

In Maryland accident cases, the median compensatory award in personal injury trials was $12,813. The good news for injury victims and Maryland accident lawyers is that the injured party prevailed in 69% of Maryland accident cases (as opposed to 55% nationally). Specifically, in Maryland auto accidents, the injury victim prevailed on liability at trial in 83% of the cases. The average jury award in Maryland car accident personal injury cases was $11,277. This study did not consider the jury verdicts by Maryland county but certainly the larger jury awards in Maryland are in Prince George's County and Baltimore City.

From reading Metro Verdicts, I suspect that one of the reasons Maryland verdicts are relatively low compared to the national average is because so many Baltimore accident lawyers are filing 10-104 cases (where you do not need a medical expert to testify that the medical bills and treatment were reasonable and necessary, but the plaintiff is limited to $25,000 in damages). These cases should be in district court but most Baltimore personal injury lawyers fear filing suit in Baltimore City District Court in small cases because the verdicts are traditionally very low in comparison to other state district courts in Maryland.

A federal jury on Friday in Texas found Merck not liable in the 2001 death of a Florida man who apparently had been on Vioxx for less than a month. Vioxx cases vary in strength and this case was clearly a factually weak case for the Plaintiffs. Plaintiffs are expected to have a far better chance when trials begin for long-term Vioxx users come to trial. Moreover, this was the second time this case was tried. In Houston, where the case was heard in November and December last year because of Hurricane Katrina, the judge declared a mistrial because the jurors could not agree on a verdict. The data on Vioxx indicates that stroke and heart attack risk are more grave after longer term use. This presents a very different case against Vioxx and makes the data that Merck ignored not only inflammatory but relevant. The next Vioxx case for a long-term user is expected to start in early March in New Jersey.

The FDA said yesterday that a new study demonstrates that women using the Ortho Evra birth-control patch have double the risk of developing blood clots compared to women who are using birth control pills. Dr. Daniel Shames, director of the division of reproductive and urological drugs at the FDA, said the risk of a blood clot was about one per year in 10,000 women not using a contraceptive. For those using a hormonal contraceptive like the patch or pill, the risk rises to 3 to 5 per 10,000, Dr. Shames said. This patch is made by Ortho Women's Health and Urology, which is owned by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has named H. Jack Price, solicitor for the city of Cumberland since 1990 and a private practice lawyer, to teh Allegany County District Court bench. Judge Price fills the longest judicial vacancy on a district court in Maryland, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Governor Ehrlich also appointed Mary C. Reese to the Howard County District Court. Judge Reese succeeds Judge Louis A. Becker III, who was elevated to the Howard County Circuit Court last year. Like Judge Price, Judge Reese had been a private practice attorney until her elevation to the bench.

Psychologist David Ball has published a second edition of his book on Damages. The book costs $85. The first edition was similarly priced and feels and looks like a thin, big print paperback. But looks are deceiving in this case. The book is excellent, offering insight based on systematic research as to why jurors make decisions they do about damages. Dr. Ball discusses juror motivations for awarding money, why some jurors are reluctant to award compensation, and specific strategies to enhance damages for voir dire (which does not really apply in Maryland), opening, direct and cross-examination, and closing.

I heard Dr. Ball speak last year at the Maryland Trial Lawyers Association convention. He was impressive. Like me, he believes in juries and realizes they are far smarter than most personal injury lawyers believe they are. Dr. Ball does not try to give you information to "trick" the jury because he knows juries almost invariably do not fall for such artifices. Instead, Dr. Ball looks at some of their motivations for not giving fair compensation and how to overcome those obstacles.

I am ordering this book and will review it on this blog in the next month.

Newsday reported on Sunday that a young victim killed in a drunk driving accident, seventeen year-old Donny Ray Harris Jr., will be the first drunken driving victim in the state of Georgia to be remembered with an official highway marker, erected under a state law the governor Sonny Purdue signed just 13 days before the fatal car crash. Georgia is among a growing number of states that give official status to landmarks of fatal drunk driving accidents. The markers will be put up for five years and will read "In Memory Of," followed by the accident victim's name and "DUI Victim."

This is something I wish Maryland would adopt. Every single one of the thousands of injuries and deaths caused by drunk driving is preventable. Sure, as long as there are alcohol and cars, trucks, and motorcycles, there will be drunk driving deaths. Some people could watch videos all day long of the horrors of drunk driving accidents and still drink a six pack and blithely jump behind the wheel. But there are a great many drunk driving fatalities caused by otherwise decent people doing an awful thing. These are the people that education - reminders of the tragedy a single drunk driving mistake can mean to them, their families, and their innocent victims - can change behaviors and save lives and human suffering.

The Baltimore Sun reported that a change ordered in procedure for nonfunctioning traffic light was implemented after two teenagers were killed in an auto accident in Columbia, Maryland. Howard County police are now requiring officers to stay at nonfunctioning signals until they are fixed or until a stop sign or another temporary device is taken to the scene. Howard County also is also testing a battery backup system for traffic lights in an attempt to control the danger of faulty traffic lights.

This was obviously an awful tragedy. If the county made a mistake in either failing to maintain the light or in taking the proper precautions after the light malfunctions in this case or in a similar case, they may be amenable to suit. This issue was addressed in Montgomery County v. Voorhees, 86 Md. App. 294 (1991). In this case, Montgomery County's attorneys argued that it was immune from suit stemming from an auto accident at Route 29 and Fairland Road under the doctrine of sovereign immunity, and even if it was not immune from suit, its planning, designing, and timing of the traffic light was not the proximate cause of the accident. The Court of Special Appeals found that operating traffic lights was a governmental act that was not covered by sovereign immunity and that a reasonable jury could have concluded, as it did, the Montgomery County was the sole proximate cause of the accident. Unfortunately, a bit of quick research that I did on this issue indicates that Florida courts appear to disagree, finding that even when a municipality is negligent in disabling or failing to repair a traffic light, there was no liability even in the absence of negligence on the part of the drivers. See e.g. Metropolitan Dade County v. Colina, 456 So. 2d (Fla. 1984).

The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland issued an opinion yesterday in the case of Mayor and City Council of Baltimore v. Hart. In this case, the plaintiff was injured when a Baltimore City police officer ran a red light. The City of Baltimore's attorneys contended, however, that the police officer had the right to go through the red light since he had his siren and emergency lights on and he was responding to an emergency.

Baltimore's attorneys filed a motion in limine to prevent the accident victim's attorney (one of which was Irwin Weiss, a well-respected lawyer in Baltimore County) from introducing Baltimore Police Department General Order No. 11–90, which set for relatively strict standards for the police officer's duty of care in going through an intersection like the one at issue in this case (the intersection of Madison and Wolf Streets in Baltimore City). Instead, Baltimore's lawyer argued that the Maryland Transportation Article § 21-405 applied, which applies less stringent standards.

The trial court not only allowed the admission of the General Order but also allowed the relevant portion to form one of the jury's instructions. The Baltimore City jury returned a verdict in favor of the injury victim, awarding damages in the amount of $46,894.05. The portion of the judgment entered against Baltimore was $20,000 (the maximum recovery by Maryland law because the police officer was responding to an emergency). The remainder of the judgment was entered against Allstate Insurance Company under the injury victim's uninsured/underinsured motorist policy.

Baltimore's lawyers appealed the trial court's decision to allow the accident victim's lawyer to reference to the general order and its use as a jury instruction. The Court of Special Appeals of Maryland found that the Baltimore City Police Commissioner's instructions to officers on safe driving practices as articulated in Baltimore Police Department General Order No. 11–90 was properly admitted as evidence by the accident victim's attorney. The court specifically rejected Baltimore's argument that such standards are not admissible under the Maryland Court of Appeals decision in Richardson v. McGriff, 361 Md. 437 (2000). In Richardson, a suit was brought against a Baltimore City police officer who shot a man who, along with six of his friends, had broken into a vacant apartment in Baltimore City. The court in that case held that the introduction of police guidelines on the use of deadly force was not appropriate and instead the standard to determine the reasonableness of the police officer's use of lethal force should be determined by examining the circumstances surrounding the shooting, i.e. the reasonable man test. But the Hart court distinguished the guidelines in Richardson as discretionary and subject to the officer's judgment in the moment, but the traffic guidelines were more specific guidelines that the police officer in this case should have followed.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that plaintiff's attorney Marc Bern filed a lawsuit against Random House in U.S. District Court in Manhattan alleging that his clients purchased James Frey's now famous "A Million Little Pieces." Plaintiff's attorney stated that the claim was based on "failed to conduct a reasonable investigation or inquiry regarding the truthfulness or accuracy" of the material. Bern said he will seek a mere $50 million in damages, presumably for the "pain and suffering" of reading a book that they thought was non-fiction.

My feeling is that this claim is worth about fifty cents on its best day and lawsuits like these do personal injury victims and their attorneys a disservice. They feed into a popular anger over lawsuits, leading people to believe that recoveries of this kind for this type of "tort" are commonplace when, of course, they are not. Stores of million dollar recoveries in cases that simply never happened fuel this frustration. My favorite is the man who, assuming his Winnebago would drive itself, set the cruise control at 90 mph, left his seat and went to make a cup of coffee, and then sued and recovered millions because he was not warned that cruise control did not mean the vehicle would drive itself. Of course, the other great "myth" is the McDonald's coffee case, which has been so distorted that the actual facts of the case have been long lost. For the real facts of that case, click here.

The point is that our personal injury lawyers are fighting every day to recover fair compensation for accident victims. To do this, directly or indirectly, we have to ask jurors for financial compensation for a victim's injuries. It is (near) impossible to accomplish this task if a jury does not believe not only in the client but in his or her lawyer. Lawyers asking for $50 million in damages because his "clients" read a book they thought was non-fiction, does not help personal injury lawyer's credibility with a jury.