Maryland Injury Law Center

January 4, 2010

SuperLawyers 2010

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 his New York Personal Injury Blog specifically questioned how much gravitas the Superlawyers award should have. Some awards are so powerful that it is impossible to question whether politics and other factors impact whether an honor is bestowed, such as the Nobel Peace Prize and the Time Magazine Man of the Year. Oh, wait, poor examples.

You get my point. Every honor is tainted with some measure of politics or something else that qualifies the purity of the award or accomplishment. So you graduated as your class valedictorian. But did you work harder than everyone else, or were you just good at taking exams? Yes, your child turned out great, but was it the luck of the draw or your spouse’s genes, or were you really a great parent? So I think when you get an honor, particularly one like Superlawyers that puts you in an exclusive class of Maryland lawyers, I think you should happily smile and be proud. (I say all of this the long-winded way because I do not want to give anyone the impression that we are defined by these kind of awards. We are defined by our clients and what we do for them.)

December 14, 2009

Settlement Mill Law Firms and Settlements

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 firms as “characterized by their high claim volume, aggressive advertising, significant delegation to non-attorneys, entrepreneurial focus, and quick resolution of claims, typically without initiation of suit.”

There are about 10 different facets of the article I find interesting. I found of particular interest the idea that settlement mills create a “one size fits all” (my words, not hers) kind of justice. Under this system, individualized pain and suffering does not exist for settlement purposes.

What matters for car accident settlement purposes in non-serious injury cases is the amount of the medical bills, what the injuries are, and how much damage they did to the vehicles. Plaintiffs’ car accident lawyers have blamed this on a paradigm shift in the thinking of insurance companies in the 90s, This article argues, convincingly, that many plaintiffs’ lawyers are unindicted co-conspirators in this system.

December 7, 2009

Speaking Engagement

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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.

December 1, 2009

Single Car Accident Opinion from Maryland Court of Special Appeals

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 the evidence did not establish that the negligence of the driver was a proximate cause of the fatal crash.

Defendant’s argument was essentially “hey, no one saw this accident so no one knows what happened.” Most of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals found a jury could have found that the unexplained loss of control by the driver and the driver’s excessive speed was the proximate cause of this fatal car accident. Continue reading

November 16, 2009

Rolexes and Introductions

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 how you begin your opening.

The conventional advice from noted trial advocacy authors I have read and respect, such as Thomas Mauet and David Ball, is to leave the Rolex at home. This literal advice includes its corollaries of dressing conservatively in a blue or black suit that you did not buy in Italy, no necklaces or bracelets, etc.

This is the conventional wisdom, and I buy into a part of the premise. Jurors will prefer trial lawyers they can relate to, and many of us do not relate to the guy with the Craig Sager suit jacket. But I think what really creates a disconnect between a trial lawyer and a jury is when the lawyer is not perceived as authentic. Any time you are stepping out of your box, you will be less comfortable in your own skin. Juries are people: they sense this like a shark senses blood.

November 11, 2009

Negotiating a Settlement with Car Insurance Companies

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 insurance claims adjuster to insurance claims adjuster. But each insurance company has its own history, policies, and “world view” of handling auto accident claims. There are some insurance companies — Progressive and MAIF come to mind first — that you can safely bet you have no chance of getting anything resembling a fair offer.

It is also worth noting that the similarities of individual insurance companies vary inversely with the severity of the accident. This is because larger cases invariably require more discretion by the insurance adjuster, and serious injury cases are given to more experienced adjusters who are given more trust from the insurance company.

November 10, 2009

Personal Injury Statistics

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 – 2005. But it is still interesting. Here is a sampling:

Personal injury lawsuits accounted for about 60% of the estimated 26,948 tort, contract, and real property cases. The big venues are trying fewer cases. The number of personal injury lawsuits conducted by state courts in our 75 most populated counties declined approximately a third from 10,278 trials in 1996 to 7,038 trials in 2005.
Verdicts are down a bit, but not much is changing. The median damage awards garnered by plaintiffs in personal injury lawsuits declined from $38,000 in 1996 to $31,000 in 2005. Personal injury plaintiffs prevailed from 1996 to 2005 consistently about half of the time. The percentage of plaintiffs prevailing in automobile accident cases increased a bit from 58% in 1996 to 61% in 2005, but medical malpractice lawsuits became less successful: medical malpractice plaintiffs won in 19% of malpractice lawsuits in 2005 and 23% in 1996.
Nearly 60% of tort trials were auto accident lawsuits. Wow.
Approximately 15% of tort trials were medical malpractice lawsuits. It takes six days to try the average malpractice lawsuit.
Approximately 5% of tort trials were product liability lawsuits. Of the product liability lawsuits that went to trial, plaintiffs prevailed in about 40%.
An amazing 25% of product liability lawsuits are asbestos claims or other toxic tort lawsuits.
Judges found for plaintiffs in 56% of tort trials, while juries ruled in favor of plaintiffs in 51% of tort trials.
Plaintiffs prevailed in less than a quarter of lawsuits involving medical malpractice, non-asbestos (other) product liability, and false arrest or imprisonment trials.
During 2005, plaintiff winners in tort trials in the national sample were awarded an estimated
$3.6 billion in compensatory and punitive damages (not shown in a table). The overall median final award of $24,000 in jury trials and $21,000 in bench trials did not differ statistically.

November 5, 2009

Maryland Drunk Driving Laws: Change We Need

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 not think of anything meaningful to add. We all get it. The drunk driver is the bad guy. The young woman who was killed had tons of potential that will never be filled on this Earth. Our judicial system let us down. We all get it. Do we need yet another lawyer with a blog post restating the manifestly obvious?

But why did our judicial system let us down? The laws we have are a function of political pressure we give to our politicians. Why do we allow people with nine drunk driving convictions to stay out of jail? Maryland law let us down more than the judicial system in this case.

How many people in Maryland do you think have over three drunk driving convictions? Take a guess. I’ll provide the answer after the jump to give you a chance to think about it.

November 4, 2009

Subsequent Remedial Measures: New Opinion from Ohio

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 claims involving the jack pin used on a boat trailer sound in negligence, rather than strict liability. Interpreting an Iowa law that, like Maryland’s law, is substantially similar to Federal Rule 407, the court held that Rule 5.407’s carve-out for strict liability in tort and breach of warranty claims does not apply to designed defect claims, but is intended only for product liability claims alleging a manufacturing defect.

Mr. Wajert supports the court’s holding in his blog post:

October 28, 2009

Which States Have Malpractice Damage Caps in 2018?

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

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 tort reform is not the answer—comes from a pediatrician. The doctor methodically and concisely attacks the premises behind the tort reform movement, including the idea that there is a pandemic of frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits:

Instead of a swamp of frivolous lawsuits, what the data shows is a system that functions. Insubstantial claims tend to collapse, while the medical industry usually opts to pay off injured patients instead of going to trial. The doctors and the insurers choose to fight to win when they think they can, and when there is enough money at stake, and usually do win.