Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog

A Houston personal injury lawyer has threatened the city of Houston, a concession company and Continental Airlines, claiming it is their fault he left his Polo coat behind at an airport food court.

Normally, when a lawyer is under attack for doing something stupid, foolish, insane or [fill in your own adjective here], he is identified as a personal injury lawyer when he is really not. But, alas, I Googled the guy and he certainly a personal injury lawyer.

Well, maybe this is like the McDonald's case where the facts are taken completely out of context. But, alas, his demand letter is on line and it is exactly what it appears to be: he's mad because no one grabbed the coat that he left.

In that case, I have another defense. If a congressman tickles his staffer, no one assumes that everyone in Congress is a tickler. Why is everyone so quick to judge one personal injury lawyer on what another personal injury lawyer does? Why is the whole profession implicated?

The answer to my question is simple: that is the way it is. And while no one hates Congress because of their propensity to tickle staffers, people do hate personal injury attorneys because of the perception they are trying to bully their way into money to which they are not entitled (which is rarely, but sometimes, true). So sometimes you have to take your lumps and move on.

I get at least a call a day from some service or another that generates leads for personal injury claims, mostly accident or pharmaceutical drug product liability claims. They all leave the same message, pretending like they are either referring lawyers or victims themselves without actually saying as much, keeping it as vague as possible while trying to generate enough interest for a callback. The giveaway that they are marketers: they always overuse the phrase "personal injury," wielding it like a sword without realizing that neither victims nor referring lawyers use that phrase in the context in which they are using it. "This is Mike, I'm calling you from Atlanta about personal injury cases." Personal injury lawyers just don't talk that way.

Their frequent calling cousin is "I work directly with Google" or the more boldly audacious "I'm with Google." The claim is identical in almost every case: "I'm 'with Google' and I am going to work exclusively with one personal injury lawyer in the Baltimore area. I can get you on the front page of Google in 24 hours." Again, the caller's purpose is to mislead you into thinking you get guaranteed high placement on Google through some magical trick as opposed to what it really is: pay-per-click advertising.

I always respect anyone's job and I remain polite to everyone, including cold callers. Between college and law school, I got my stockbrokers license, Series 7 license, the whole 9 yards. I think I made about three cold calls before my short lived career died. (I did make some decent progress with one guy on Smith Avenue in Baltimore pushing tax free bonds... I still remember that the calls I made were on that street because I probably looked at the list for hours before making my first call.) It was just brutal and I respect anyone strong enough to keep making call after call. Still, I do resent the fact that the messages are almost invariably intended to mislead the gullible.

Miller & Zois will contribute a dollar to Doctors Without Borders for the Haitian Relief effort for every new fan we add on Facebook. So if you are not already in, become a fan by clicking here. We have already donated a dollar for each current Facebook fan we have to date.

I'm tempted to add here my trite commentary on the scope of this tragedy. But at this point, we all get it. It is unspeakably horrible world sometimes. All we can do is pray and send money.

The reality is that Haiti has been a disaster forever. But if the world throws its heart and soul (and checkbook) at Haiti, is there a chance that Haiti can overcome its history of corruption and instability and can be rebuilt better and stronger than it was before?

Also, if you want to do your own Facebook friend drive or any other hook you can think of to raise money, let us know and we will plug it for you.

Last week, I announced our Miller & Zois new Facebook page. We had 31 fans. Today we have 325 and we continue to advance forward every day. I think that is pretty cool.

If you are a regular reader, please click here and become a fan.

I can not long argue that social media is a passing fad. You can now follow Miller & Zois not only on Twitter but also now on Facebook. All of our blog posts are linked on Facebook and Twitter. So become a fan of Miller & Zois today. You can find Miller & Zois on Facebook. Become a fan by click on the link. (You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.)

One thing I have been doing though Facebook is keeping track of lawyers in other states when we have potential clients that come in from other jurisdictions. If you want to be on the list of referring attorneys that we use, please sent us an email though our Miller & Zois page after you have become a fan, telling us of your areas of practice and what part of your state you cover.

Five Miller & Zois lawyers were represented on the Maryland Superlawyer 2010 list: Ron Miller, Laura Zois, Rod Gaston, John Bratt, and John Cord. This honor is accorded to less than 5 percent of the total number of lawyers in Maryland.

Some have questioned honors like these. Eric Turkewitz in his New York Personal Injury Blog specifically questioned how much gravitas the Superlawyers award should have. Of course, some awards are so powerful that it is impossible to question whether politics and other factors impact whether an honor is bestowed, such as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Time Magazine Man of the Year. Oh, wait, bad examples.

You get my point. Every honor is tainted with some measure of politics or something else that qualifies the purity of the award or accomplishment. So you graduated as your class valedictorian. But did you really work harder than everyone else or were you just good at taking exams? Yes, your child turned out great but was it the luck of the draw or your spouse's genes or were you really a great parent? So I think when you get an honor, particularly one like Superlawyers that puts you in an exclusive class of Maryland lawyers, I think you should happily smile and be proud.

I'm also proud of what this shows about the depth of our law firm. Five of our lawyers received mention in SuperLawyers. Our goal in bringing new lawyers aboard was to make sure that every lawyer that touches a Miller & Zois file could handle a case at the highest level. Does this award prove that? No. But it is definately a point on the right side of that question.

I am going to be speaking to the North Carolina Advocates for Justice in Greensboro on Friday, December 11th on maximizing the value of personal injury claims and the related issue of dealing with insurance companies.

By popular demand, Miller & Zois has just created a Twitter page that links to all Miller & Zois blogs. Okay, maybe popular demand is a little strong but I have gotten a lot of requests. All right, no one actually asked. But if you are not following our lawyers' blogs on an RSS feed, this is another easy way to do it.

We have a lot of lawyers writing a lot of really good, substantive blogs. Check them out.

You can also follow me on Twitter here.

I've joined the 21st Century this year and started using PowerPoint in my insurance law class at the University of Baltimore School of Law. I've been a professor at UB for 11 years, teaching every semester. But after five or six classes using PowerPoint, I really can't imagine teaching without it. It gives the students something more tangible to grab onto and I think it makes a difference.

The only caveat is that you become a little to wedded to the presentation which, if you are not careful, can present a barrier between you and your students. I felt it yesterday for a moment where I thought I was sticking too much to the outline and thinking where my next slide was going as opposed to truly listening to what the students were saying. I got back on track, but I think it is always something to keep in mind.

Anyway, I know for past comments to this blog that I have a few insurance law professors reading this blog. If anyone out there is teaching Insurance Law and is using PowerPoint slides or any other demonstrative teaching aids, I would appreciate it if you would send me what you have. You can review my PowerPoint presentation for my insurance law class here.

The University of Notre Dame provides a good list of tips for giving PowerPoint presentations if anyone is interested.

• Insurance Law Syllabus (my syllabus, using Insurance Law: Cases and Materials by Henderson and Jerry)
• Michael Abramowicz's Insurance Law Syllabus
• Sample Insurance Law Exam

Today, it Jeans Day at Miller & Zois in honor of breast cancer. Everyone who wore jeans today made a contribution to breast cancer research. Cancer is an awful thing but I really think we are going to beat it in my lifetime.

I'm pleased to report that an article that John Bratt and I wrote has been accepted for publication in December in Trial, the flagship publication for the American Association of Justice. The article is about mediations in catastrophic personal injury cases.

Sorry for the self congratulatory, as opposed to substantive, post. I'm walking into a mediation (in a catastrophic personal injury case) in the next 25 minutes.

Above the Law has a post of discussing a thread of comments to another blog post about being an insurance defense lawyer. Basically the question is whether the "low-end of insurance defense" is "toxic." I'm not entirely sure what is meant by "low-end," but I'm pretty sure I've been the plaintiffs' lawyer in cases that would fit this commentator's definition.

I guess it all depends on what you mean by toxic. But if I were State Farm, Allstate or GEICO, and I had a big trial coming up, I would want my average in-house lawyer to try the case over the average big firm litigation lawyer. The vast majority of the in-house insurance lawyers know exactly how to try a case. There are also a lot of fantastic big firm trial lawyers, too. But an in-house insurance defense firm is going to have more depth. There are a lot of big firm litigation lawyers who have just never gotten even a modicum of real trial experience and just don't have a clue how to try a case.

One of my post Labor Day resolutions is to blog more often to continue to grow the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog readership. But I'm still trying to get trying to get back into the flow of things today, so instead of a substance post, I'll just leech off the work of others:

LawyerUSA reports on a $24 million settlement between a Florida company and the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it made illegal, pre-recorded "robo-calls," selling what the feds say was questionable coverage.

I'm fine with the federal government policing this stuff, and, in principle, I'm fine with lawyers bringing claims that help the government enforce our rules.

Still, as a matter of practice, I find it annoying. I remember a guy standing up at a trial lawyers' seminar talking about a Maryland procedure issue in a case where a guy got an unwanted fax. The lawyer said that he "had a client where [such and such] motion was filed...." I'm thinking to myself, "I have clients. This guy does not have a client. He has a guy who got a fax."

Again, it is probably a good thing private lawyers are aiding governmental effort on these consumer issues. And I do not like the calls, either. But it just seems so petty to me. So you get a few extra faxes or have to screen an occasional robo-call? I can recycle the faxes, and caller ID was invented for a reason.

I might lose a few consumer protection lawyer readers with this rant. In fact, I came very close to deleting the email. But it is the opinion I have and if I lose a few readers, hopefully a few others will appreciate the candor and add the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog to your RSS feed.

Tragic and bizarre lawsuit in Baltimore City where a father sued his son's stepfather for leaving a loaded gun in the house, which the boy used to commit suicide. Incredibly, the father won a $50,000 verdict.

Agree or disagree with him, the father certainly was willing to go to great lengths to make his point that I largely support: guns are dangerous and you cannot leave a gun and bullets out for minor children - or anyone else - to grab. Whether this should equate to legal liability on behalf of the gun owner is above my pay grade.

I actually meant to post this blog on the Maryland Lawyer Blog where I post on non-personal injury lawyer related issues.

While I'm plugging Miller & Zois blogs, if you have any interest in drug and medical device litigation, you should take a look of John Cord's Drug Recall Lawyer Blog that is growing leaps and bounds every day. Another interesting Miller & Zois blog to read is John Bratt's extremely candid Baltimore Injury Lawyer Blog which covers topics similar to the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog from a different perspective.

The Drug and Device Law Blog has an interesting post on how long lawyers stick with blogging. The short version: most lawyers fail miserably at blogging over the long haul.

Lawyers blog for a lot of different reasons, usually related, at least in part, to furthering their professional career. There are three paths. The road most traveled is the, "Hey, there was an auto accident on I-97 last night." There are about 1000 of these sites written by or for personal injury lawyers who have nothing to add to the conversation but are trying to attract clients directly. These blogs come and go and they are both painful to read and, I'm sure, to write. If you are trying to attract personal injury clients like this, you are almost certainly going to fail unless you have been doing it for years (Google likes websites that have been around for a while).

You know you are reading one of these blogs because when you are finished, you have learned absolutely nothing except that the lawyer wants personal injury clients. These are almost exclusively personal injury lawyers. The patent lawyer approach of "Hey, Microsoft got a patent yesterday" is clearly not going to work. The personal injury lawyers' "there was an accident last night" pitch will also fail, but it is just not as obvious to the blogger.

The second path is the purist. There is no hint of marketing or sensitivity to Google search terms - just pure facts, analysis and opinion. Jim Beck and Mark Herrmann's Drug and Device Law Blog is an excellent example, as is Eric Turkewitz's New York Injury Law Blog. These bloggers certainly enhance their professional reputations with their blog. This is a very effective route, but there is one problem with this path: you actually have to have something to say that would be of interest to someone else.

The third avenue is the hybrid where you write to be educational, informative and interesting, but you are not above an occasional pitch to consumers, and if the possibility avails itself, you use a Google friend keyword you would not use if Google was not keeping score of these things.

Continue reading "Personal Injury Lawyer Blogs: Thoughts on Blogging" »

From my email box this weekend:

i need an example direct examination of liabiliy expert in snow/ice slip and fall case preferably illinois.

We have dedicated an area of our Personal Injury Lawyer Help Center to providing sample examination outlines and sample trial transcripts because our lawyers think it is really helpful to have real samples to review, particularly for personal injury lawyers who have not had the opportunity to try a lot of cases. We do this altruistically but also with a selfish motive: when personal injury lawyers do their jobs correctly, it helps insurance companies properly value future claims.

I get a request like this a few times a week and I’m generally more than happy to help. And I’m sorry if this sounds petty. It probably is. But it takes me 5-10 minutes to find something that we have not already put on-line. But in exchange for those 5-10 minutes you think I could get a “thanks’ or even a “tnx” when making a request? Because I give a lot more respect to people I’m asking to do something that get a paycheck from me every two weeks. Tnx.

This came in response to my post discussing the difficulty doctors have in dealing with medical malpractice lawsuits, pointing out that good doctors make honest mistakes:

Nonsense! Good doctors making a mistake? No one can be subject of a legal action for only a mistake. In fact the law is very favorable to physicians. We are not talking of good doctors making a mistake. We are talking of the crooked, but also lazy and greedy ones. After all, if a doctor is not good enough that he/she makes "mistakes," then why not finding another career? That is what people do all the time. No Sir, you want preferential treatment for doctors. That is why you attempt to confuse your reader by focusing on the good who makes one or two mistakes.

I love the notion that I favor preferential treatment of doctor. But I'm depressed by the notion that anyone believes a doctor who is a good person can't make a medical mistake that badly hurts someone.

As the battle over health care reform reaches a feverish pitch, more opinions are forming on medical malpractice reform and everyone feels more compelled to use the extremist as an example of everyone who shares their view. Did you see Nancy Pelosi try to characterize everyone opposed to health care reform with swastikas because one person displayed one at a rally? Insane. But so is pretending that the only purpose of medical malpractice lawsuits is to pad the pockets of malpractice lawyers, which at least one editorial a day seems to allege.

Similarly, I think the “every doctor who commits an error is either ‘crooked’, ‘lazy or greedy’” outlook on medical malpractice just plays into the hands of people who want to limit the rights of malpractice victims because it makes everyone who supports traditional notions of civil justice in malpractice cases seem unreasonable.

I wait for every Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog post with baited breath. You are absolutely amazing. Is there any way to get notification the moment a blog post hits?

Arguably, I made up this question. But you can receive an email notification of a new post by signing up on the left hand side of this page. Of course, you can always add the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog to your RSS feed. (I recently started using Google reader and I think it is fantastic.)

I'm pretty diligent about sticking to issues of interest to personal injury lawyers on this blog. But Eugene Robinson has a great article on the Henry Louis Gates debacle that was both insightful and fun to read.

Overlawyered celebrates its 10th birthday today. I disagree with many of Walter' Olson's views but we have a lot of common ground, too. I read his blog almost every day as do a lot of others who, like me, share a different philosophy on many issues.

Really, the one of the nicest complements you can give a writer is that you listen to what the writer has to say even when you disagree with it. I feel the same way about, for example, George Will and Charles Krauthammer. I think that all of us need to keep in mind that on a lot of issues of our day, someone smarter than us disagrees. And, with Walter, you always feel like you are getting his thoughtful views as opposed to a knee jerk "party platform" opinion. One good example: Sonia Sotomayor. I don't know how much Walter agrees with her on issues of our day on which reasonable minds differ that will be before the Supreme Court, but those differences did not change his analysis. Too many of us try to solve the equation after we already know the answer. Walter comes up with his own answer by doing his analysis and forming a conclusion, as opposed to forming a conclusion and then doing the analysis.

Happy 10th Birthday Overlawyered!

I'm back from the Maryland State Bar Association convention in Ocean City. What? You did not see me there? Okay, I never actually made it to the convention. But the brochure looked nice.

Anyway, I'm back and these are the links of interest I found this weekend:

• Maryland law firms are hiring. Really. And it was a good week nationally for (the relative absence of) law firm layoffs. Just call it a comeback.
• The “drug made me do it” defense is being used again in a New York case where the defendant alleges Zoloft caused him to assault his girlfriend. My friend Andy Vickery tried this Zoloft defense unsuccessfully in a much publicized criminal case in South Carolina. If Andy can’t pull it off under what on the surface appears to be much better facts, I doubt this guy will.
• Justinian Lake writes about a Texas Supreme Court opinion that goes out of its way to attack a very well respected plaintiff’s lawyer.
• A Tennessee malpractice lawyer tries to rile up jurors into changing their mind after multi-million dollar malpractice verdict.

Continue reading "Personal Injury Links: Post Vacation Update" »

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