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…
Nora Freeman Engstrom writes an amazing article for the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics titled Run-of-the-Mill Justice. She writes about settlement mill law firms, writing with a 60 Minutes investigative journalism style that names names, calling out a few law firms she has labeled as settlement mill firms. Engstrom characterizes these…
I will 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.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals decided Romero v. Brenes yesterday. This case involved a single-car accident that killed both passenger and driver. A Montgomery County trial court granted the Defendant’s attorney’s motion for judgment at the close of the passenger’s wrongful death case because the trial judge found that…
Whenever I prepare for giving an opening statement, as I am today, my head is filled with more advice that I have heard or read over the years than expletives Bill Belichick threw out last night. I am writing today about two issues: what you should wear to trial and…
Accident lawyers attempting to negotiate settlements with insurance companies view insurance companies as monolithic, i.e., “Insurance Company A is difficult’ or “Insurance Company B is easy to deal with on claims.” Sure, it is an oversimplification. Claims practices by different insurance companies vary from state to state and even from…
While not as fun as, say, baseball statistics in the pre-steroids era, I really enjoy looking at statistics on personal injury lawsuits. The Department of Justice just released a new report on personal injury lawsuit statistics (which I found via TortsProfBlog). The data, as always with this stuff, is older…
The Baltimore Sun has written another story (link since removed) about the tragic death of a young woman who was a junior at Johns Hopkins and was killed by a drunk driver who has had nine previous drunk driving convictions. I’m avoiding writing about this topic because I really could…
Sean Wajert’s MassTort Defense Blog (c/o Torts Prof Blog) has an interesting post on a new opinion by the Iowa Supreme Court on whether you can admit subsequent remedial measures in cases that sound both in negligence and strict liability. The Iowa court found that Plaintiff’s design defect and failure-to-warn…
Medical malpractice lawyers, victims’ advocacy groups, doctors (and their lobbyists), and insurance companies have produced a heretofore unprecedented spate of editorials on medical malpractice reform in the last few months. Even I’m bored with it. But a recent editorial in Salon is a little different because the message—that medical malpractice…