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 note that I often let our successes slip into this blog, a million-dollar settlement here, a million-dollar verdict there, and so forth. Oops. Over the last few years, we have had an amazing run. Fantastic settlements and our verdicts have typically been many, many 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, which doctors amputated above the left knee. 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. 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 a 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 our job is getting a deserving client an award that will make a meaningful impact on the client’s life. There is nothing like it, at least not in the legal profession. 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 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: The court granted us a new trial in this case and the jury found the Defendant was negligent as a matter of law. The new trial is in August, 2008.)
(June 12, 2013 Note: We tried this case four times. No kidding. Two more mistrials. Then we agreed to a favorable high/low. Then we lost. I still can’t believe it, but when you try a case for the fourth time, you realize anything can happen. It was the toughest case we have ever lost on some level. Great client. Great family. But still, the client got a recovery from the case which eased some pain.)