Articles Posted in General

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.

I just finished George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Channeling my inner Joe Biden, I loved the book; I hated the book. (2019 Update: By golly, Joe Biden is still relevant today!)

I hated the book because as much as Lakoff tried to fight it, he does too much of the “no reasonable person could think this way unless they were being manipulated” spiel. It is just too condescending and partisan for my tastes, which I think takes away from some luster of the book for me.

Tort Reform

I like to blog on Monday but given my figurative post-Mother’s Day weekend hangover; I reviewed the original stories/opinions of others as opposed to venturing to offer my own:

The Baltimore Sun had an interesting article on allegations of bizarre misconduct by a Nevada judge in a bizarre story with a lot of interesting six degrees of separation subplots.

The Washington Post has a good article on legal outsourcing in India, discussing both the exponential growth and some challenges in training lawyers in India.

The Legal Intelligencer has an interesting article about the size of personal injury law firms. I have always found it interesting that personal injury law firms in Maryland and in most states come in two sizes: small and very small. Peter Angelos’ office in Baltimore is the sole exception in Maryland, largely because they have their hands around the asbestos juggernaut. Otherwise, I do not think there is a single plaintiffs’ firm in the top 20 largest Maryland law firms. In contrast, Texas and Florida seem to have much larger, successful personal injury firms. I have never fully understood why the same business model would not apply, regardless of location. But even the largest of plaintiffs’ law firms in the country are smaller than Venable’s Baltimore office.

Yesterday, we settled a serious car accident case in mediation that I never thought would settle. The client was looking well beyond the fair value of the case, valuing the claim at $2.1 million (our maximum potential recovery with Maryland cap on pain and suffering damages) and defendant undervalued the claim from the very beginning. Somehow, after over six hours, the case miraculously settled. This is one of those cases I had assumed as an article of faith that it would have gone to trial. It really is hard to tell which cases will trial and which cases will settle.

But even more incredible than the case settling was the fact that the driver defendant came flew up from his home in Atlanta, Georgia for the mediation. Obviously, the court did not require or expect him to be there. After the mediation was over, he gave an articulate two-minute speech apologizing to the plaintiff and his wife for the accident. This guy really put himself out in a way that provided him no benefit, but he came because he thought it was the right thing to do and he wanted to accept responsibility. It was one of those things that really gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling about our fellow man.

One more feel-good story… I got back to my office this morning and a client whose case is pending in Baltimore County Circuit Court sent a note to our lawyers and staff thanking us for our continued hard work. She included with her note what is essentially a $100 tip! We will send the check back to her, but it definitely boosted my spirits when I got here this morning.

I saw today an interesting blog post by a Massachusetts law firm advocating that Massachusetts ban finance companies that offer loans to people using their personal injury cases as collateral. The post (and comment on the post) argues that by making the loans non-recourse loans contingent on the settlement, these companies get around existing usury laws. Particularly where liability is not an issue and payment is a near certainty, using non-recourse seems like a backdoor around the law.

Mixed Feelings on These Loans

The Lure of Quick Money Is Hard to Resist

Point of Law has an interesting blog post on a recent study regarding contingency fees. I found two conclusions of interest.

First, the study found that people who had the financial means to pay attorneys’ fees upfront still preferred a contingency fee arrangement, even if that arrangement meant they were ultimately likely to pay more in fees. Apparently, the experiment included affluent trial lawyers as imaginary plaintiffs, and they too chose the contingency fee agreement over the hourly billing rate. The authors explain that our instinct to be “loss adverse” is the principal reason people prefer a contingency fee arrangement, even if they expect it will cause higher legal fees. This theory may also explain why people are far more unhappy when they lose $100 than happy when they find $100.

I suspect another reason for this preference that the authors do not point to is that it is less stressful to have some level of cost certainty. I know I dislike paying anyone by the hour, especially when I do not know how many hours attorneys will expend. I would rather they give me an all-inclusive price to solve the problem.

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).