Ron Miller is an attorney who focuses on serious injury and wrongful death cases involving motor vehicle collisions, medical malpractice, and products and premises liability. If you are looking for a Maryland personal injury attorney for your case, call him today at 800-553-8082.

Joanne Doroshow from the Center for Justice and Democracy writes a blog post for AOL the Huffington Post arguing that medical malpractice tort reform will increase the national debt.

A few weeks ago, I observed that no one was saying anything new on the subject of tort reform. There is an editorial a week on tort reform but nothing new. The AMA is relentless in what has to be a systematic effort to push new malpractice award limits and other curbs on malpractice lawsuits.malpractice reform federal deficit

Ms. Doroshow has something new to say. Fundamentally, Ms. Doroshow contends that limitation on malpractice lawsuits will increase our national deficit because hospitals and doctors will lose the incentive to provide the safeguards necessary to protect patients. From this, the increase in injuries and deaths from medical malpractice will increase the societal burden of supporting patients who are brain-damaged, mutilated, or rendered paraplegic. She explains her thinking further:

CBO notes that one study finds such tort restrictions would lead to a .2 percent increase in the nation’s overall death rate. If true, that would be more than 4,000 additional Americans killed every year by medical malpractice, and that’s on top of the hundreds of thousands of additional patients who survive their injuries. How could this possibly be an acceptable trade-off?

It can’t be. Like I said last week, we get no bang for our buck on malpractice reform. In exchange for our end run around the 7th Amendment and for trampling on the rights of people that need justice, we get nothing tangible back economically. Continue reading

The Maryland Court of Appeals tackled a piece of one of the new vexing issues our courts face: dealing with social media. Most of the legal opinions circulating around involve discovery of social media such as Facebook and Twitter in civil cases. The court’s opinion in Griffin v. State deals with a different issue: determining the way to authenticate at trial electronically stored information printed from a social networking site. This is a Cecil County criminal case but the same logic would apply to a civil case so it is a case personal injury lawyers should read.

In this Cecil County case, the Defendant’s girlfriend apparently had a MySpace name of “Sistasouljah” who put an entry on her page that read: “FREE BOOZY!!!! JUST REMEMBER SNITCHES GET STITCHES!! U KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!”. Without social media opiniongoing into the details of the case, it suffices to say that this did not reflect well on the Defendant’s case.

For reasons that are unclear, the prosecutor did not authenticate this social media entry through the Defendant’s girlfriend, although she testified. Instead, they tried to use a police officer who, on the stand, put two and two together.

A divided Maryland Court of Appeals disagreed that the officer can authenticate a social media posting because the identity of who generated the profile is unknown. The court’s problem is that just because I put up a Facebook profile claiming I’m Charlie Sheen, it does not mean that I’m Charlie Sheen.

Judge Harrell appreciated the concern of the technical “heebie-jeebies” (yeah, he used that phrase and defined it by footnote) but believes that you can add two and two together under these facts because the heebie-jeebie concerns go to the weight to be given the evidence by the trier of fact. If the post was not the girlfriend’s post, the Defendant should argue that, in Judge Harrell’s opinion.

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The Maryland Court of Appeals decided today GEICO v. Comer, another appellate case that dives into the Serbonain Bog of whether uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage kicks in when trying to get coverage in an accident under an insurance policy for a vehicle was not in the accident that caused the injuries.

Plaintiff was in an awful motorcycle accident in Calvert County. The Defendant cut in front of the Plaintiff who suffered a myriad of injuries, as is typically the case with motorcycle collisions, including a fractured femur and an open head injury. He incurred over $200,000 in medical bills and suffered permanent injuries. Everyone agrees, an awful case.

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medicare liensI’ve never filed a motion to enforce a settlement and I don’t think anyone in my firm has. I think as far as I’ve come is threatening to file a motion, but it never comes to that.

That streak may not survive as insurance companies continue to overreact to their risk of Medicare or Medicare coming back to haunt them after a settlement. Sure, there are theoretical potential penalties if Medicare and/or Medicaid liens are not dealt with out of the settlement funds. I don’t have a problem with insurance companies trying to reduce their small risk. But some insurance adjusters handling claims in Maryland are cementing their reputation of being unreasonable by taking extreme positions on what post-settlement hoops plaintiffs’ lawyers must jump through to get a check.

Torts Talk, a defense lawyer oriented blog I just stumbled upon, talks about how a Pennsylvania judge dealt with this issue. Plaintiff’s attorney filed a Motion to Enforce a Settlement when the insurance company refused to issue a settlement check after a car accident settlement until the Plaintiff produced documentation confirming the status of any Medicare/Medicaid lien.

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John T. Sly and Christina N. Billiet from Waranch & Brown write an article for the Maryland Defense Counsel newsletter about how to best attack plaintiffs’ experts out of the gate. One key tactic they advise is trying to get two depositions of the plaintiffs’ medical expert. Interestingly, they name drop the judges they say have approved this tactic and ordered plaintiffs’ experts to sit through two depositions: Judges Leo E. Green and Thomas P. Smith, both in Prince George’s County.

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It kills me how so many folks hold up the New England Journal of Medicine as the gold standard for anything and everything until it speaks up about preemption or medical malpractice reform. Then they become hacks for… well, nobody, really. Just hacks.

The NEJM put out a recent article that looked at traditional malpractice tort reform:malpractice tort reform

Our review yielded two main conclusions. First, evaluations of traditional tort reforms have remained heavily focused on metrics related to liability costs, with most care-related measures receiving relatively short shrift. Second, the evidence reveals that, with few exceptions, traditional tort reforms have not proved to provide many improvements in these liability metrics.

So we have decided as a society in many jurisdictions, including Maryland, to limit how its citizen juries can award and deprive malpractice victims sometimes what we would all agree to be the fair value of the injuries or death because of the case’s true value exceeds the malpractice cap. Oh, yeah, we also look the other way on the Constitution’s due process and equal protection requirements. Continue reading

The 10th Circuit yesterday decided a Ford F-150 product defect case in which it reversed the trial court’s entry of summary judgment but sent the case back down to the District Court. I love it when courts do that.

The issue in this wrongful death case was whether plaintiffs’ expert could flip his deposition testimony after getting boxed into a causation corner. The 10th Circuit said they could not, adopting a line from the District Court that I like: “[Plaintiffs] treated the deposition as a ‘take home examination.'”

This case’s issue is like the issue addressed in Pittman v. Atlantic Realty, a lead paint case I won on summary judgment for the defendant before Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge David B. Mitchell that was reversed by the Maryland Court of Appeals.

I started my argument in Pittman with this line about how the Plaintiffs were delivering their case the way Nathaniel Hawthorne delivered his novels; sending out one chapter at a time. I thought it was so clever. Boy, I was stupid. (And I don’t even think I ever completed the full Cliff Notes of a Hawthorne novel.) I could have saved 10 pages of transcript by saying, “Plaintiffs treated this case like a take-home deposition.” Still, I won.

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Is it just me or does every get excited seeing everyone’s crazy aunts and uncles come out of the basement and try to top each other with a more ridiculous, insane proposals for dealing with frivolous lawsuits? The Overlawyered commenters are out and about after reports of a lawsuit over the right to wear unbelievably awful t-shirts to public school.frivolous lawsuits excitement

Can I play too? We should execute anyone who we suspect is thinking of filing a frivolous lawsuit. There is a precedent for this. Remember the Minority Report?

I agree with the implied premise of the post that people shouldn’t be filing lawsuits defending the right of kids to wear offensive t-shirts to a public school. (Particularly if the girl’s parents are making her wear the shirt. Good golly.) Truly, it is a beyond insane lawsuit. It should be renounced. (I guess. We could also just look away, I suppose. We have 300 million people in this county. Do we have to report on every random idiot who burns the Koran?)

But the feeding frenzy that follows reports of these outlier cases operates under the assumption that frivolous lawsuits are the rule rather than the exception. The “free market” that I’m sure the commenters idolize takes care of lawyers who are recidivist filers of frivolous lawsuits: it puts them out of business. Continue reading

The parents of a 13-year-old girl that committed suicide have sued a school system alleging the school should have been able to prevent her suicide.sexting suicide lawsuit

Teenagers have been taking their own lives as long as history can remember. This tragedy has a modern twist. The girl did something that lots of young people are doing now: sexting. She texted a topless photo of herself to a boy. You know what happened. Teenage boys are not known for their discretion. Then the media picks up the story. Now, they don’t name names but anyone within 5 miles of the girl knows who it is. All of this culminates in the girl’s suicide. The parents’ wrongful death lawsuit alleges the school did not do enough to prevent the girl from committing suicide.

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