Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog

As expected, an FDA advisory committee today ignored the urging of many leading researchers and consumer advocate groups and even one of its most influential scientists and voted 20-2 to keep the diabetes drug Avandia on the market. The FDA is not required to follow this recommendation but, almost invariably, it does.

Yesterday, Dr. David Graham, a leading FDA scientist and one of the FDA officials widely respected by both pharmaceutical companies and patients' rights advocates, said Avandia should be removed because of the risks and because Avandia was no better at controlling blood-sugar levels than similar diabetes medications such as Takeda's Actos (which might also increase the risk of heart disease according to a just published study).

Should Avandia be taken off the market? I don't know. Certainly, if a patient with serious life threatening diabetes is having a great result with Avandia, maybe the risk does outweigh the benefits for that particular patient. Perhaps the FDA should restrict Avandia for use in selected patients and brand Avandia with prominent and meaningful warnings referencing the studies that point to a greatly increased risk of a heart attack. But this is a different question than the real question Avandia lawyers are looking at with clients who have suffered a heart attack or stroke while on Avandia: what are the risks of Avandia are when did GlaxoSmithKline learn of these risks?

The Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog will return tomorrow. I just returned from a great vacation in Dewey Beach, Delaware and I'm ready to get back to blogging. But first... I have to clear off this desk!

I wrote a blog post for the Maryland Lawyer Blog on a new opinion in Minnesota on their seat belt gag rule. After surfing around after writing the post, I found the oral argument for the case on line. The Internet era really changes televising courtroom proceedings.

I think this is a fantastic development. I also think Supreme Court arguments should be televised. Why not bring the biggest issues of the day before the American public? I know that some Supreme Court justices have expressed concern that televising hearings would result in justices to losing their anonymity (I could not pick Justice Souter out of a lineup, I'm sure) and that the media might use sound bites to misrepresent statements made by the justices. But aren't these the fortunes of public life? Why should the Supreme Court be immune? Whether I'm right or wrong, I think my view will carry the day eventually and we will see televised Supreme Court hearing in the next 10 years.

Metro Verdicts Monthly's graph this month is median settlements and verdicts in wrongful death claims in Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia. The median wrongful death settlement in Maryland is $850,000. In Virginia and the District of Columbia, the medians are $675,000 and $750,000, respectively

Previous blog posts have discussed these numbers in motor vehicle accident and medical malpractice wrongful death cases.

For personal injury lawyers, I used to think that this kind of information falls under the category of "fascinating information but I have no idea what to do with it." But I have found presenting adjusters with objective information sometimes helps the adjuster better appreciate the value of a case, particularly in truck accident cases where the adjusters are typically in other jurisdictions and do not fully appreciate the value of a certain kind of case in your jurisdiction.

The Maryland Trial Lawyers Association Auto Negligence section is having a seminar Friday, September 7, 2007 in Columbia, Maryland at the Hilton Hotel. The subject of the seminar is bad faith law in Maryland with a focus on the new first party bad faith law. The following Maryland lawyers/judges are expected to speak:

Robert J. Zarbin (The Jaklitsch Law Group in Upper Marlboro, Maryland)

Thomas E. Dewberry (Chief Administrative Law Judge, Maryland Office of Administrative Hearings headquarters in Hunt Valley, Maryland)

Irwin E. Weiss (Law Office of Irwin E. Weiss in Baltimore, Maryland)

Lawrence M. Schultz and Mark Jenkinson (Burke, Schultz, Harman & Jenkinson in Martinsburg, West Virginia)

Michael Weiss (Weiss & Saville, P.A., in Wilmington, Delaware)

James R. Ronca (Anapol Schwartz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

If you are a Maryland personal injury lawyer and you have not joined the Maryland Trial Lawyers Association, you should do it today. If you are handling automoblie accident cases, you should join the Auto Negligence section as well.

The Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog focuses on providing tips and information for personal injury lawyers. Today, I’m using it save me the $200 it would cost to go to a good board certified psychiatrist.

If you read this blog regularly, you will note that I often let our successes slip into this blog, a million dollar settlement here, a million dollar verdict there, and so forth. Over the last few years, we have had an amazing run. Fantastic settlements and our verdicts have been 10 or 15 times the offers we had before trial. I could not be prouder of what we have accomplished for our clients.

Yesterday, this run came to a very bitter end in a trial in Prince George’s County that I will never forget. Defendant pulled out from a stop sign and hit our client, a 36 year-old man (with a beautiful wife and three kids), on the favored road. He was on a motorcycle and witnesses claimed he passed some vehicles on the left and the right before the accident on a one lane road (the widest one lane road you will ever see in your life).

He lost his leg in the accident, an above the left knee amputation. You might think this accident destroyed his life and he has been miserable ever since. Hardly. He is one of the happiest, upbeat, and optimistic people I have ever met in my life.

GEICO offered absolutely nothing to settle the case. Zero. So the decision to go to trial was an easy one. I tried the case this week with my partner, Laura Zois, who did an absolutely fantastic job. We knew it was not an easy case but we thought we presented a compelling case to the jury with a compelling client. After a few hours of deliberation, the jury disagreed.

The best part of the job for a personal injury lawyer is getting a deserving client an award that will make a meaningful impact on the client’s life. There is nothing like it. The worst part of the job is having a great client with a great family and getting a result that you think is unfair and just plain wrong. It just feels awful. If you see me on the street in twenty years from now and you ask me about this case, I’ll still be mad about it.

I’m off now to write post-trial motions….

(July 11, 2008 Note: We were granted a new trial in this case and the jury found the Defendant was negligent as a matter of law. New trial is in August, 2008.)

As regular readers of the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer blog are aware, I have been a critic of the MAIF because of the speed with which it reviews cases, the offers it makes which almost invariably cause reasonable car accident lawyers to file suit because the client's best interests demand a lawsuit, and because the it invariably makes its lawyers (and our lawyers) jump through discovery hoop after discovery hoop in large cases before offering its policy limits on the eve of trial when the policy limits should have offered from jump street.

In this Baltimore Business Journal article, MAIF's executive director since 2004, M. Kent Crabbe, talks about some of the challenges MAIF faces as an "insurance company" operating under a somewhat unique and complex regulatory scheme, including why it may be more difficult for MAIF to recruit and retain quality people. I put "insurance company" in quotes not derisively (well, kind of) but because technically under the Maryland Insurance Code, MAIF is not an insurance company.

I spoke today to one of the more competent MAIF adjusters who told me that the bar is being raised at MAIF with respect to responding in a professional and timely way to personal injury claims. I'll save my "picking the bar off the floor" joke (well, I guess I didn't save it) and hope that there are real changes in store at MAIF. I realize that government agencies are always going to struggle to keep up with for profit businesses in terms of efficiencies, but I have seen many other Maryland state agencies - including MVA in recent years, believe it or not - that seem to run far more efficiently.

Related Posts:

• Private Insurers Claim They Can't Compete with MAIF 9/2/08

• Whose Your Daddy? Do MAIF Lawyers Work for Client or for MAIF 5/8/07

• Fraud at MAIF: 1/16/06

• Our Lawyers Experience Dealing with MAIF : 1/16/06

Why the Maryland Lawyer Blog? We are starting the Maryland Lawyer Blog because the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog focuses exclusively on providing information pertinent to personal injury lawyers in Maryland and around the country handling auto accident, truck accident and medical malpractice cases. Because of this, the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer blog rarely strays off the personal injury course. I read a lot of blogs and when I start reading posts about the author's life philosophies or other off topic messages, I rarely revisit that blog. Accordingly, I try to be disciplined about staying on message: news and information a personal injury lawyer can use.

The Maryland Lawyer Blog will also address issues related to personal injury cases. But it will have a broader base that will include more general areas of the law and specific areas of the law that I find interesting even if I do not practice in those areas. Although my firm only handles personal injury cases, I have interests as a lawyer and as a person in other areas of the law. For example, I'm interested in criminal law even though all of my knowledge of criminal law comes from watching television. So you will see occasional posts on issues ranging from A to Z, from adoption law to zoning ordinances.

Many regular readers of the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog are not going to enjoy this blog because it will be far more rambling and diverse than you have come to expect. My suggestion: give it a shot, if you do not like it, take it off your favorites (and just keep reading the personal injury blog). Hopefully, this blog will also attract other readers whose legal interests extend beyond personal injury cases. I will also pass along news stories and other blog posts that I think you might find of interest.

A great joy of mine has been watching the regular readership of the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Blog grow over time, which I have been able to track using Google Analytics. Hopefully, the Maryland Lawyer Blog will be able to do the same. It might also be a flop, who knows? But give it a chance and I will try to make the Maryland Lawyer Blog interesting and informative.