Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog

I get emails from people marketing legal directories and whatnot all day but I particularly enjoyed the hubris of this one:

Hi Ron,

Your name was passed to me as a potential candidate for a Lead Counsel position on our Personal Injury panel in the Salisbury area. We are currently seeking a qualified attorney who can take additional casework. We do need to verify your qualifications in order to see if you are eligible for this position. This is a four attorney panel and we are only looking to work with one additional attorney. We currently have several candidates in review for the position. If this is something you would like to be considered for; I would need the preliminary info below returned within 24 hours.

How long have you been practicing Personal Injury?

Are you in good standing with your State Bar?

Have you had any client related disciplinary action taken against you?

When is your next available time to have a phone appointment to discuss this position further? Please list a time and date.

Note: Only emails with an appointment time listed will be considered.

Regards,

Colin Richardson
Director of Lead Counsel

Phone: 800-397-3743 ext. 7027
Fax: 800-220-4546
Website: www.lawinfo.com
E-mail: crichardson@lawinfo.com
Need more Clients? www.lawinfolegalmarketing.com

So he sends a cold call email (he left a message, too) agreeing to interview me for the "position" but will only consider me if I quickly follow his explicit instructions and have great credentials (like, you know, being in good standing with the bar). I love the strategy although I have to wonder how effective it is with prospects who have a third grade education.

Continue reading "Annals of Bold Legal Marketing" »

Personal injury lawyers hate talking about their contingency fee agreements with their clients. Me too. But, it is an interesting and important topic, and one that is of great importance to people who are seriously injured and will be hiring at attorney. This post explains how our law firm operates and gives a few thoughts on contingency fee agreements in personal injury cases.

Our contingency fee agreement with our clients in every person injury case is exactly the same. Our firm gets one-third of the recovery if the case settles before a lawsuit is filed. If a lawsuit is filed, or there is an agreement to arbitrate the case, our fee increases to 40%. We have fronted all client expenses in every case we have handled in the last 10 years. If we are not willing to put up our own money, we would not be willing to take the case.

He is a copy of our fee agreement. If you are a client of ours, this is the agreement you executed. We have made very few modifications of this agreement over the years. None of the changes we have made were material.

This is our agreement in every single personal injury case in our office. We have turned down at least two cases (that I know of; I'm sure there have been more) that have culminated in a seven figure recovery because we did not agree to reduce our contingency fee.

Before I explain why we do it this way, let me go the other way and set forth the argument why we shouldn't have a set fee for all of our clients. Contingency fees in personal injury cases are designed to a large measure to compensate attorneys for the risk in time and money they must incur. So, theoretically, in a world of perfect information, you should calibrate the contingency fee with the risk/reward and set the attorneys' fees accordingly. [This is the short version; you can find the long version here.]

Continue reading "Our Attorneys' Fees: 33.3%/40%" »

A few weeks ago, I was pushing Nicholas Allard as my choice for the new dean at the University of Baltimore Law School.

Well, he got hired. But not by us. At this time, I would like to withdraw my endorsement.

In the spirit of sour grapes, I want to say that I did not want this guy anyway. Seriously. After I wrote that blog post, I Googled him and found that he has basically been applying to be the new dean at every law school from here to Timbuktu. I thought he saw a unique opportunity in Baltimore. Instead, he was just a guy who wanted to be a law school dean somewhere. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But, the girl at the bar who really wants to go home with anyone is not quite as appealing as the one who sees something special in you.

I learned about this from a comment to my original post.

We now have 1,182 Miller & Zois followers on Facebook. To stay current on the latest in personal injury law in Maryland and around the country, and to get our tips on preparing and trying accident, malpractice, and product liability cases, join us on Facebook.

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Tanning beds cause cancer. Cancer kills. Tanning beds also make you look old before your time.

Of course, this matters little to the Maryland Senate who crushed the bill in committee. Which committee? The Finance Committee. Because, you know, that makes sense.

The bill, sponsored by Montgomery County Democrat Jamie Raskin, would have prohibited anyone under 18 from using an electric tanning bed, eliminating a provision in Maryland law that allows minors to tan if they have parental permission.

The World Health Organization's cancer division last summer listed tanning beds as definitive cancer-causers. I'm willing to take their word for it, along with numerous studies that concluded the risk of melanoma jumps by 75 percent in people who used tanning beds in their teens and 20s. Melanoma is lethal; 69,000 U.S. cases were diagnosed last year, and about 8,650 people died.

Listen, Katy Perry notwithstanding, it's dumb to let your child go into a tanning bed. This we know. So what is the problem? According to the Indoor Tanning Association, 8% of the customers are either 18 years old or younger. On an average day, over 1 million Americans engage in indoor tanning. Do the math. See where the lobbyists are coming from on this?

Continue reading "Tanning Beds Kill Kids; Maryland Legislature Cool With That" »

There are five finalists for the dean of University of Baltimore School of Law that will be visiting campus beginning March 26. I will review these candidates for you and make my selection. To be fair, I have never met or even heard of any of these people. I've limited my education to a three minute Google search of the candidates.

• Nicholas Allard: A lawyer at political heavyweight, Patton Boggs, Allard is a former chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and former legal counsel to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. While I'm not pretending I've ever heard of him, this is the celebrity pick. Moynihan was one of the few politicians in the last 50 years who was deeply respected by the left and the right and Kennedy was Kennedy. That's the big time. He is knee deep in pedigree, attending Princeton, Oxford, and Yale which, in a bizarre coincidence, are the same schools my children will be attending in 13 years (although they are certainly not going to law school). Here's my concern: is there a risk that hiring Allard is like hiring Michael Jordan to play baseball? Dean Closius came here with a history of turning around a law school. Allard would come with a history of being great at lots of things other than running a law school.

Continue reading "University of Baltimore Law School Dean Candidates" »

I'll take "Gimmick Blog Post Titles That Will Defy the Odds and Be Worth Reading, I'm Serious, Just Give Me a Chance" for $400 please, Alex.

Tied for first at the top of Knick players who have had 20 points and 7 assists with 6 consecutive games is Jeremy Lin. As little as three weeks ago, if you were taking odds, you would have bet the Knicks would cut him so that they did not have to guarantee his salary for the season. The odds of going from there to this are roughly the same as Barack Obama calling you today and telling you he is dropping Eric Holder and he desperately needs you to be the U.S. Attorney General. Seriously, the last time I enjoyed a sports story this much was when Mark "The Bird" Fidrych burst onto the scene in 1976. And that was only because I was 7 years-old. Jeremy Lin is actually a better story.

There are a lot of Jeremy Lins out there in our business - great personal injury lawyers that are obscure and handling Yorkshire Terrier dog bite cases. Their first problem is the lack of opportunity. Trial lawyers can only do so much with the facts that they have. If you don't have good cases, you are going to struggle to get consistently great verdicts even if are channeling your inner Gerry Spence.

(The same is true for defense lawyers. I've tried cases against lawyers considered to the best in Maryland that I thought they were either awful or I caught them on a bad day. I've also tried cases against lawyers I thought were brilliant that I know have a very hard time chasing down $120 an hour auto tort insurance clients. It is even harder for defense lawyers in some ways because they don't get paid and recognized for good results like personal injury lawyers do... unless they really know how to spin their successes.)

They key when you are in this spot is to Jeremy Lin it. (Yes, I'm using his name as a verb, too.) You have to do the best you can with what you have. Shortly after we started our practice, we tried a case in Baltimore County where a woman was in line at the drive-thru at the bank and got in a rear end accident. The uncontested testimony was that the at-fault driver was going one mile an hour. Laura and I tried the case together. We threw everything and the kitchen sink at it and we got a $125,000 verdict. We had had better verdicts but this was our signature verdict at the time. LawyersWeeklyUSA did a cover story on it. We got some attention, more lawyers started referring us cases, in we built from there.

(Looking back, almost 10 year later, I look at all differently. Man, I wish I could not see so many shades of gray. First, I'm a little embarrassed we even took the case. How pathetic is it, on some level, to take 1 mph bumper tap case, anyway? And we are really bragging about getting $125,000? My law firm would never take that case in 2012. Yes, I believed the plaintiff was hurt from the car accident and still do. It was one of those rare, fluke things that happen. Still, we turn down cases all the time where I think the person may have gotten badly hurt from the accident but we don't think we can prove it. Also, the unspoken implication was that we were such great lawyers we could turn a garbage car accident or other personal injury case into a case just because we were the attorneys. It is a false premise although a lot of lawyers who are full of themselves would swear otherwise.)

Continue reading "Personal Injury Attorneys and Jeremy Lin" »

Clearly, the new Republican tradition is to pay homage to Ronald Reagan whenever you have a segue to do so - and even when there's not. Everyone has forgotten Iran-Contra and those Marines in Lebanon and focused on the fact that he presided over 8 years of relative peace and prosperity and his contribution to our victory in the Cold War. At a debate back for the RNC Chairmanship, Grover Norquist asked the candidates, "Who is your favorite Republican president?" Every one of the six candidates picked Reagan. Poor Lincoln. Even Democrats look back on Reagan and point out - maybe correctly, I don't know - that Reagan is not conservative enough to win the Republican nomination in 2012.

I found on my Google +1 (come join me there, and Miller & Zois too) a post from someone who worked for Reagan, that looks at what he actually said about tort reform. Apparently, all of his years of public life, Reagan gave only one tort reform speech in his political career in which he specifically said the issue is one for individual states. He never followed up on this speech.

Continue reading "Was Ronald Reagan for Tort Reform?" »

USAA's release for minors includes this language:

I/We do hereby state that said minor is completely recovered from any and all injuries sustained as a result of said accident and promise to bind myself/ourselves jointly and severally, my/our heirs, administrators and executors repay to the said ________________________ his/her heirs, successors and assigns any sum of money, except the sum above mentioned that he/she/they may hereafter be compelled to pay because of the said accident.

USAA is trying to put itself in the best position that it can to prevent minor plaintiffs from later disavowing the settlement. But it is silly to suggest that having the child's parents affirm that the child has completely recovered is of any help. You could even argue it makes the problem worse: the parent(s) did not even know the child was so severely injured.

Continue reading "USAA Release for Minors" »

I have not been blogging as much as I would like in 2012. I have been working a good bit on our "new" Maryland car accident lawyer website. The site was actually built in 2002, but it was mostly a shell site that only linked back to the Miller & Zois website. We recently gave the website a new design and are starting to add content. That is a reason why there is not a lot of genuine fresh content: it is hard work. It also provides less immediate satisfaction. People will read this blog post within minutes of publication but some of these long, detailed web pages take a lot more time and the search engines might not notice that it exists for months.

Besides the usual, "We are the best, you should hire us!" dribble, we are looking to eventually build this into a "how to" center specific to personal injury car accident cases for Maryland lawyers, similar to the Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer Help Center. This is beginning of this effort but the goal is to restructure this page so that it takes a lawyer handling a car accident case from intake through appeal. This is the beginning but there should be a lot more to come.

My partner, Laura Zois, was selected by SuperLawyers as one of their Top 50 women attorneys in Maryland for 2012.

It is a pretty unbelievable honor. There are thousands of female lawyers in Maryland lawyers. I only recognize one other female personal injury lawyer, the well respected Alison Kohler, on the list.

Congratulations Laura!

I was always into statistics. When I was little, baseball statistics were the outlet. I was doing Moneyball when Billy Beane was still learning what a double steal is. (This is hyperbole for effect.)

Like a lot of us, I began to look at risk very differently when I became a parent. Now I'm more interested in what the authors of Freaknomics tell us about what matters when raising a child. (Here's the transcript of a podcast I recently listened to which I found more than a little depressing. Among other things, it really makes you question the efficacy of piano lessons.)

Freaknomics interests me because it uses statistics to assess risk that questions largely held assumptions. I try use statistics in parenting to make sure my kids are avoiding the risks that we can reasonable avoid. Clearly, car accidents are on a big blip on the radar screen. Car accidents are a major risk of serious injury and death for young children, a far greater risk that 95"% of the things that you worry about as a parent.

Drunk driving is a big risk factor for car accidents. It never occurred to me to look at where in Maryland drunk driving is the greatest. So I read with particular interest these statistics on the number of drunk driving cases in Maryland in 2010, sorted by county, as well as the number of DWI cases tried in court in 2010 and the resulting verdicts:

• Montgomery: 3,512 DWI cases filed. There were 5,324 cases tried in 2010 resulting in: 1,858 Guilty verdicts, 98 Not Guilty verdicts, 2,585 Probation Before Judgment [PBJ] verdicts, and 1,029 "other" verdicts (which include Dismissed Cases, Nolle Prosequi, Stet, Merged Cases, Jury Trial Prayers, and Miscellaneous Others)
• Prince George's: 2,733 DWI cases filed. There were 2,206 cases tried resulting in: 75 Guilty, 34 Not Guilty, 185 PBJ, and 1,912 other - 1,425 of which were closed as Nolle Prosequi.
• Baltimore County: 2,459 DWI cases filed. There were 2,563 cases tried resulting in: 715 Guilty, 86 Not Guilty, 1,312 PBJ, and 450 other.
• Anne Arundel: 2,009 DWI cases filed. There were 2,468 cases tried resulting in: 590 Guilty, 74 Not Guilty, 1,200 PBJ, and 604 other.
• Howard: 1,440 DWI cases filed. There were 1,694 cases tried resulting in: 337 Guilty, 41 Not Guilty, 943 PBJ, and 373 other.
• Baltimore City: 982 DWI cases filed. There were 969 cases tried resulting in: Guilty, Not Guilty, PBJ, and other.
• Carroll: 935 DWI cases filed. There were 816 cases tried resulting in: 156 Guilty, 36 Not Guilty, 424 PBJ, and 200 other.
• Harford: 909 DWI cases filed. There were 1,094 cases tried resulting in: 461 Guilty, 19 Not Guilty, 484 PBJ, and 130 other.
• Frederick: 900 DWI cases filed. There were 1,027 cases tried resulting in: 273 Guilty, 16 Not Guilty, 448 PBJ, and 290 other.
• Charles: 794 DWI cases filed. There were 1,135 cases tried resulting in: 376 Guilty, 13 Not Guilty, 513 PBJ, and 233 other.
• Worcester: 662 DWI cases filed. There were 1,053 cases tried resulting in: 439 Guilty, 36 Not Guilty, 482 PBJ, and 96 other.
• Washington: 642 DWI cases filed. There were 859 cases tried resulting in: 267 Guilty, 4 Not Guilty, 387 PBJ, and 201 other.
• Calvert: 626 DWI cases filed. There were 968 cases tried resulting in: 285 Guilty, 16 Not Guilty, 510 PBJ, and 157 other.
• Cecil: 585 DWI cases filed. There were 285 cases tried resulting in: 41 Guilty, 7 Not Guilty, 65 PBJ, and 172 other.
• St Mary's: 510 DWI cases filed. There were 736 cases tried resulting in: 376 Guilty, 13 Not Guilty, 307 PBJ, and 109 other.
• Wicomico: 489 DWI cases filed. There were 818 cases tried resulting in: 275 Guilty, 18 Not Guilty, 317 PBJ, and 208 other.
• Allegany: 341 DWI cases filed. There were 557 cases tried resulting in: 219 Guilty, 2 Not Guilty, 232 PBJ, and 206 other.
• Queen Anne's: 321 DWI cases filed. There were 583 cases tried resulting in: 227 Guilty, 8 Not Guilty, 222 PBJ, and 126 other.
• Talbot: 276 DWI cases filed. There were 372 cases tried resulting in: 99 Guilty, 56 Not Guilty, 155 PBJ, and 62 other.
• Caroline: 258 DWI cases filed. There were 308 cases tried resulting in: 125 Guilty, 10 Not Guilty, 74 PBJ, and 99 other.
• Dorchester: 182 DWI cases filed. There were 225 cases tried resulting in: 97 Guilty, 13 Not Guilty, 59 PBJ, and 56 other.
• Garrett: 181 DWI cases filed. There were 297 cases tried resulting in: 77 Guilty, 3 Not Guilty, 129 PBJ, and 88 other.
• Somerset: 167 DWI cases filed. There were 195 cases tried resulting in: 68 Guilty, 5 Not Guilty, 83 PBJ, and 39 other.
• Kent: 119 DWI cases filed. There were 179 cases tried resulting in: 60 Guilty, 6 Not Guilty, 72 PBJ, and 41 other.

Statistically, what jumps off the page is the number of not guilty verdict drunk driving cases in Ocean City. There are more not guilty verdicts in drunk driving cases in Ocean City than in Prince George's County. I'm assuming that it is because they have so many seasonal police officers it is tough to make cases stick. You have a 31% chance of getting a not guilty verdict in a drunk driving case in Ocean City and a 2% chance in neighboring Somerset County. That's crazy, right? (Why have we never read an investigative news piece about this?)

Of course, these are misleading statistics if you are trying to avoid drunk drivers in Maryland. This data shows not just drunk drivers but enforcement. Drunk drivers hit our roads somewhere between 88 to 500 times on average before getting in trouble, according to various experts and studies.

There is some good news here, too. Drunk driving charges are declining in Maryland. A total of 22,032 DWIs were filed in 2010, down from 23,904 in 2009, and 25,466 in 2008. Assuming that enforcement efforts have remained the same or increased, this is encouraging.

The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog was named one of the Top 25 Tort Blogs by LexisNexis.

LexisNexis is now taking votes for the best tort blog. Normally, I would send you over there to vote for me but I think you have to register to vote and that might be a big much to ask. (If you insist, you can go here.)

I really do not know much about the process of selecting these blogs. There was some voting, although I'm not sure whether that was the only mechanism for selection on this list. Ultimately, I don't care. If someone wants to say something nice about my blog or the shirt I'm wearing, I'm happy and grateful. I'm not going to thin slice it. So thanks LexisNexis.

LexisNexis is starting a New Top 25 Tort Blogs. The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog is on the list of nominees.

These awards are silly popularity contests that have nothing to do with the quality personal injury law blogs. The only true measure of this blog is the devotion of its readers, defined by the number number and frequency of visits by other personal injury lawyers. This is all just a silly Nexis-Lexis marketing ploy.

(It may also be that this is all sanctimonious dribble, I'm in denial, and I really want to make this Lexis-Nexis top tort blogs list. If you subscribe to this theory, please "vote" for the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog by adding a comment in the box at the bottom of this page.)

Our receptionist has gotten promoted and we need a new one. If you or someone you might know is interested, call Tiffany at 410-553-6000. Incredibly, we have four former receptionists who are still with our firm. So there is definitely room for growth.

If you read and like this blog, could you please nominate it for a the ABA Top 100 list? This is the nominating form. Thanks.

Hello Blog. I'm back.

I just got back from vacation and then a trial in Baltimore City. Laura Zois and I won a $537,000 verdict for our client in a slip and fall case. It does not match the $2.5 million verdict awarded to our clients last week in Rod Gaston's case (see Daily Record article) but it is still a good 10 days for Miller & Zois clients.

I'll write more about our trial later and try to put some of the samples from the trial in the help center on our website. We may even order the transcript to post on line because it includes so much of the David Ball/Don Keenan reptile themes that I have talked about on this blog.

This was a really fun case to try and it reminds me of why we do what we do. But I'm glad to be back to my usual routine which includes regularly posting to this blog.

These are the Alexa statistics for the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog. Avvo has a ranking of lawyer blogs - based on Alexa statistics.

There are only a few personal injury blogs ahead of the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog. But using page views or unique visitors is a poor indicator for this blog anyway. If it was, you would see more "What do you do when you are in an accident?" posts.

Instead, the purpose of this blog is to attract potential accident, malpractice and product liability lawyers looking for co-counsel, consistent with our firm's strategy of teaming up with lawyers to co-counsel with on serious personal injury cases.

The plan, then, to spell it out, is to continue to build a readership base of personal injury and other lawyers. (To do this, frankly, I need to keep posts like this to a minimum.) The plan is to give lawyers news and information they can use while underscoring our experience in catastrophic or wrongful death cases. So when you are looking for co-counsel to help you maximize the value of your client's case (and frankly to maximize your own fee), you call Miller & Zois.

• Our co-counsel relationship with referring lawyers
• Firm overview (who we are and the kind of cases we are taking)

• The Volokh Conspiracy asks about a question that was left out of the Squawk Box coverage I saw this morning: does IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn have diplomatic immunity in the United States. In spite of the fact that I enjoyed diplomatic immunity as a teenager - man it felt cool - I think the whole idea of it is infuriating. If some French hotshot in a $3,000 a night hotel raped an American, we need to make sure we can hold him accountable (or at least make sure the French do).
• There are more reports of arrests in a personal injury settlement scam, this time in Florida. On Thursday, deputies issued warrants for 53 people involved in a fake injury, fake treatment, settlement ring. As this St. Petersburg Times article points out, this is a tax against the honest. Florida motorists are believed by one study to pay $83 more in annual personal injury protection premiums because of fraud. Of course, Florida brings much of this on themselves with their silly no-fault system.
• Max Kennerly gives a long dissertation on his philosophy of Google, search engine optimization, and the balance between writing a credible blog that is an important part of the conversation and also making your blog productive for your practice. I breakdown my similar theory here.
• We are starting out slowly announcing it because we are completely redoing the blog format with Justia's help. But the Miller & Zois Kids Foundation has a blog that is eventually going to blow past this one. You can find our new inchoate, but soon to be next big thing, blog, called Miller & Zois Kids Blog, here.
• Brooks Schuelke has to be just wringing his hands over what Texas has done and continues to try to do to destroy legitimate personal injury claims. What? He is doing that right now? Okay, I'll link to it.
• House Bill 5 has made it out of committee in the House. It strikes me as a political speech instead of a piece of legislation. The chance of this bill passing approaches zero.
• Baltimore City looks to score a new courthouse. What is wrong with the old one? It is 1,000 years old and has 5 amazing - really nice - courtrooms and the rest are awful.

Continue reading "Monday Morning PI Roundup" »

Dan Snyder is easy to mock. I will probably do it in this post. So when he filed his lawsuit against the Washington City Paper for defamation, I instinctively rolled my eyes. So did you. We all did.

Continue reading "In Defense of Dan Snyder" »