Articles Posted in General

Good Samaritan laws are intended to protect people from liability when they voluntarily assist others in emergencies.

Here is an example of how Good Samaritan laws work. Let’s say you’re driving to work and you witness a car accident. One of the vehicles flips over the driver is stuck and yelling for help. You pull over to help, but in extracting him from the car, you end up breaking his leg and causing other injuries.

Under traditional tort law, you could be liable for the driver’s injuries. The rationale was that you have no duty to render aid. But if you helped, you assumed a duty of helping safely and reasonably.

Maryland made the right call by getting rid of the “one bite rule,” which created an assumption that dog owners know their dogs can bite.  In doing so, the Maryland legislature effectively nixed a Maryland Supreme Court ruling that said pit bulls are inherently dangerous and imposed strict liability for owners and landlords.

At the end of the day though, insurance companies are most interested in these sorts of decisions, because they’re the ones paying out dog-bite claims.  And although the dog breeds may not be as big an issue for Maryland legislators anymore, your insurance company may still discriminate and charge you more based on the dog you have.

Yes, I’m mostly talking about pit bulls.  I agree not all pit bulls are dangerous. Many are well-behaved and loving pets. But because of the breed’s reputation, owners of pit bulls often face discrimination and prejudice from landlords, insurance companies, and others.

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Miller & Zois has never advertised on television or even thought about it.

I’m not on a high horse.  I’ve never looked down personal injury lawyers who advertise on television.  I’ve always found it annoying when people do.  Everyone is doing their own thing.  It is pretty amazing how many different paths personal injury lawyers can take to make a living.  There is no one way to do this thing.

Overidenifying as a Lawyer

The “burden of proof” is a legal concept that establishes two things:

1. the party in a dispute obligated to present evidence to support their position; and
2. how much evidence that party needs to satisfy this obligation.

My law firm limits its law practice to personal injury cases on behalf of victims.  We started our firm in 2002, on a shoestring, a wing, and a prayer, we had potentially lucrative opportunities to jump out to handle other types of case.

Was I tempted?  I was tempted.  But personal injury is our true wheelhouse and we stayed there.  But over the last 18 years, we have handled many different types of personal injury cases.

What is personal injury? The term “personal injury case” is sort of an umbrella phrase that refers to any type of tort lawsuit in which a plaintiff has been physically injured and is suing someone for compensation. There are many different types or categories of personal injury claims under this umbrella. They range from very simple slip and fall cases to extremely complex medical malpractice cases.

I rarely write about legal issues that do not relate to personal injury cases.  But Maryland’s red flag law has gotten so much attention and there is SO MUCH incorrect information out there, I feel like writing a post about it. 

Reaction to the seemingly endless stream of mass shootings across the country has generated unprecedented political pressure for gun control laws. Last year, Maryland became one of a handful of states that responded to this pressure by enacting new laws aimed at curbing random gun violence.

Why can’t you get a lawyer on the phone?

I picked up the phone yesterday from someone I knew did not have a personal injury case.  He sent us an online intake weeks ago and was now cycling back to us.  This means he has called almost every personal injury lawyer in Maryland but did not keep track of who he had contacted.

The reason he did not have a case was that he had a mass tort case in litigation that has long since ended AND he was past the statute of limitations.  I spoke to the guy because he never got a personal injury lawyer on the phone to explain to why no one would take his case.

Max Kennerly writes a blog post about referral or co-counsel fees in personal injury cases, talking about a case where the lawyers agreed to a fee split but after a nice verdict, they argued about what those words meant regarding carving up the fee.

There has been talk, as Max points out, about reforming the system to not allow lawyers to fee split personal injury cases. The talk comes from advocates of tort reform who have the goal of making life more difficult for plaintiffs to bring claims.

Such a rule would do just that. My firm spends a lot of time and effort providing information about personal injury cases on the Internet. We absolutely want to attract victims directly. No doubt. Getting 100% of the fee in a case is a lot more enticing than getting two-thirds of that fee, which is what we get when we accept a referral from another attorney. When we get a good settlement or a verdict in a case where the client came to us, either from the Internet or non-attorney referral, the words “And it is all ours” slip out when discussing the case.

This Blog Generates Attorney Referrals

Yet I put a lot of time and energy into this blog that is directed not to victims, but to other lawyers. Why? I’ll tell you. Every single year, we look at where our fees are coming from. Prior clients and victims who find us online are rising every year. Yet together, they do not generate nearly as much in attorneys’ fees as cases that were referred to us by another lawyer.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about the volume of cases. I’m talking total fees. So, absolutely, we think the smartest approach is to direct our efforts primarily toward trying to attract other lawyers in and out of Maryland who have a personal injury case. The thinking is if they are regularly reading this blog for news and information, and using the resources on our website, they will think of us when they need help with complex malpractice, accident, or product liability claim. Continue reading

Note: post was originally in 2012.  It has been updated in November 2018  to discuss a new martial privilege case, Sewell v. State, now pending before the Maryland Court of Appeals with a decision coming any day now.

I never write about marital privilege. But I have an interest in modern technology and how it will affect pre-trial discovery and admissibility of evidence. Which takes me to the  4th Circuit opinion U.S. v. Hamilton.

This case involves the bribery conviction of a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates who also served part-time as an administrator with the Newport News, Virginia public school system. Basically, the guy pushed for and got a salary from Old Dominion University for getting funding for a million-dollar program called Center for Teacher Quality and Education Leadership. (FACT: 89% of all “education centers” with titles as goofy and ambiguous as this one are hopelessly corrupt.)

Anyway, a key piece of evidence in the takedown of this guy is an email that he writes to his wife about how he is trying to get this salary out of the deal which he writes from his public school computer. So the question is whether the marital privilege applies because he used his work email account.

For what I think are good reasons, communications between spouses have long been thought to implicate important privacy and confidentiality interests. This has led to a recognition of a marital privilege in both Maryland and federal law that makes communications between spouses presumptively confidential.

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Eighteen years ago, we decided that representing corporate defendants and billing by the hour was not for us, so we started our own law firm. We had a clear vision of what would bring us success: yellow page advertising. That was the vehicle for a personal injury law firm to get tons of new clients.  We assumed.

Yet there is a little known secret about yellow page advertising: in the 21st century, it does not work. Minor flaw. Not knowing this, we poured over a million dollars into yellow page advertising.

Every single year of our practice, we earned more in fees from cases referred from other lawyers than any other source. Our current yellow page budget is now zero.  We have a strong Internet and social media presence that helps us get new clients (and also new client referrals).  But that is not our best path to getting new cases.