News and thoughts from this week:
- Baltimore moves closer to settling a claim brought by a man who was injured while doing sanitation work as his court-mandated community service.
- The Maryland Daily Record has a big Monday law story on a woman was suing her medical malpractice lawyer. I can’t speak to the merits of the case – who know if the allegations are true.=? The problem with these “someone filed a lawsuit against Joe Smith” stories is that everyone remembers the story of the lawsuit but no one will remember if he gets a defense verdict. I’m not saying these stories should run. But it is a minor tragedy if the trial comes out differently than the allegations alleged in the story.
- What can Rick Perry’s “oops” teach trial lawyers?
- Federal regulators have ordered a Maryland-based trucking company to get off the road, owing to multiple safety violations.
- In other trucking news, a Pennsylvania federal jury ordered a trucking firm to pay $4 million to a man seriously injured when an overloaded tractor-trailer driven by a very small person with insufficient training barreled into the victim’s truck.
- “A jury has awarded $2.35 million to the estate of a 56-year-old man who died after choking on a meatball at a Detroit-area nursing home.”
- Everyone has an angle on this Joe Paterno/Penn State debacle. One of mine on this unbelievably depressing story: I just wonder if the perfunctory “Oh, these boys’ lives are ruined” talk is really helping the victims. Hopefully, for some of these men, while their lives were ruined for a time, they got over it – at least to a significant degree – and now live happy and productive lives. Inadvertently, I think we are telling the victims that well, of course, their lives are destroyed. Do we have to condemn them to a life of misery with our rhetoric? When I watch the depressing commentary, I’m always looking at it through the victims’ eyes. If I was doing well, I’d be wondering if I should do well with everyone, assuming I’m a destroyed basket case.
