A Washington jury awarded $15.5M last week in a 2004 truck accident case. The injuries, as the verdict suggests, were catastrophic. The auto accident caused the Plaintiff’s blindness. She continues to undergo surgical procedures to reconstruct her facial structure and is still in therapy to aid in her recovery from…
I have expressed my disdain for Maryland’s cap on non-economic damages many times on this blog. I read an interesting article in the University of Baltimore Law Forum on an issue to which I have never given much consideration: the impact of the cap on non-economic damages on women. In…
A post on the Illinois Trial Practice Blog discusses a product for malpractice attorneys called>MedMal Reports. This company generates a report based on the payout reported in the National Practitioner’s Data Bank. Reporting of settlements and verdicts is mandatory, so the data is not skewed the way published verdict reports…
The Maryland Court of Appeals issued an interesting opinion last week on Maryland’s assumption of the risk doctrine in American Powerlifting Association v. Cotillo. The Plaintiff, a Prince George’s County police officer, suffered injuries in a powerlifting contest at Patuxent High School in Calvert County, Maryland. He brought a negligence…
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Allstate Insurance Co. will now fairly compensate thousands of Washington drivers for out-of-pocket medical expenses in a class action settlement. In 2005, a driver sued Allstate for arbitrarily limiting PIP payments for car accident victims. Allstate used Colossus to determine the average pay rate for…
Twenty-nine people have applied to fill the at-large vacancy on the Court of Special Appeals left by Judge James A. Kenney’s mandatory retirement. (Parenthetically, most judges continue to sit on the bench after they retire, so can we just drop the mandatory retirement nonsense? The antiquated notion of mandatory retirement…
I read a study this weekend (my wife was at a jewelry party and my kids were asleep on Friday night) published last year by the Cornell University Industrial & Labor Relations Review, that looked at the correlation between truck driver compensation and safety outcomes. I am sure the Teamsters…
The Illinois Supreme Court has approved a new plan that requires medical malpractice parties in two Illinois counties to seek mediation before suing in medical malpractice cases. The hope is that both sides can come to an agreement to resolve the case without the necessity of lengthy (and costly) discovery…
On January 1, 2008, the recent IOLTA rules approved by the Maryland Court of Appeals go into effect. There have long been rules for Maryland lawyers to open a trust account for the deposit of client funds that are not purely payments for legal fees or expenses. What had been…
For years, pharmaceutical drug manufacturers have argued that the FDA approval of a drug preempts a duty to warn claim. If this argument had succeeded, FDA preemption would bar claims for injuries caused by a manufacturers’ failure to warn about risks associated with their FDA-approved prescription drugs. President Bush’s administration…