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Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog 

Maryland personal injury related material from Miller & Zois.
Post Frequency: 4.4/day Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 15:16:36 Recent Entries: 508
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Anne Arundel County Judicial Elections
Posted on August 18, 2010We have a big race in Anne Arundel County for Circuit Court that is getting surprisingly little attention in the media. Alison Asti is challenging sitting Circuit Court Judges Laura Kiessling and Ronald Jarashow. The problem with this election is that most people - I think most people - make a reasonably informed vote when voting for president, Congress, state legislatures and other elected offices in this Country...
Loss of Chance/Opportunity: New Opinion from Michigan
Posted on August 16, 2010The Michigan Supreme Court came out a few weeks ago with a very interesting opinion in favor of the Plaintiff in a malpractice claim that most likely would fail in Maryland. The doctor's malpractice attorneys argued that the allegation that the doctor's negligence caused a reduction in the risk of stroke from 10 to 20 percent to less than 5 to 10 percent was not enough to get the claim to a jury because the loss was not sufficient enough to meet the burden of proof on proximate causation...
Medication Error Verdicts
Posted on August 12, 2010A new Jury Verdict Research study found that the average verdict in an improper medication case is $3,539,541. The median, which many consider to be a more accurate number, is $1.2 million. Verdicts ranged from $2,074 to $35,500,000. But only 28% of medication error plaintiffs recover at trial...
Malpractice Verdict in Baltimore
Posted on August 12, 2010Miller & Zois lawyers Laura Zois and Rod Gaston obtained this afternoon a $1.1 million verdict for our client in a medical malpractice (lap chole) case in Baltimore City.
Trial Checklists
Posted on August 11, 2010Paul Luvera offers on his blog a good checklist for preparing a case for trial. Paul points out that checklists - seemly obvious things that have probably been around since man was carving into stone - have received renewed interest in other fields, most notably in medicine where some studies have shown that being a slave to the checklist is in some cases better than the doctor using their own judgment...
News of Interest for Lawyers on August 10th
Posted on August 10, 2010Johnnie Cochran Middle School (ABA Journal). If you name your child Adolf Hitler, you cannot have that child anymore (Above the Law). Broken bat lawsuit claim by a fan who sues the team, the batter and the player from whom the batter borrowed the bat (Legal Blog Watch)...
Nursing Home Arbitration Clauses in Maryland
Posted on August 09, 2010One case I have been meaning to write about for a few months is Dickerson v. Longoria, a recent Maryland nursing home opinion. The ultimate issue in Dickerson is whether a family member had the authority to bind a nursing home patient by agreeing to an arbitration clause...
iPad Application for Jury Selection
Posted on August 03, 2010http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/avatars_represent_jurors_in_new_ipad_app_for_litigators/Someone has developed an iPad application for jury selection. Let's just say this might not start a revolution.
Facebook Discovery in Litigation
Posted on August 02, 2010The Legal Intelligencer has a pretty comprehensive article about how to frustrate, annoy and pry into a plaintiff's Facebook activity. In a malpractice or car accident case, the primary purpose of Facebook discovery is to show that the plaintiff is not as seriously injured as claimed in the lawsuit or in discovery...
Baltimore County State Farm Verdict Article
Posted on July 29, 2010A few weeks ago, I reported on a verdict we got against State Farm in Baltimore County. I inadvertently stumbled on the Maryland Daily Record article on the case today.
Abolish Summary Judgment
Posted on July 28, 2010George Washington Law Review has published an article titled, appropriately, Against Summary Judgment. The premise of the article is that summary judgment is an archaic procedural device that usurps the role of the jury. Nonsense. Summary judgment resolves cases that juries should not have to decide because the law bars the claim...
Titans Lawsuit Against USC
Posted on July 27, 2010The Tennessee Titans have filed a lawsuit against University of Southern California and coach Lane Kiffin for "maliciously" luring away assistant running backs coach Kennedy Pola. The lawsuit claims the hire disrupted planning and "potential loss of confidence by players...
Doctors and Financial Records
Posted on July 27, 2010This doctor in a case John Bratt tried recently was not, ah, particularly comfortable with his own explanation of why he destroyed 1099s that came to him. Gee, I wonder why that would be? Could it be because there is not an accountant in history that actually recommends not looking at and then destroying tax documents? This is the testimony at trial: I'm not going to name the expert because I don't think it is right to raise these issues online because the expert does not get to argue his position...
Chain Reaction Car Accident
Posted on July 26, 2010I spent a good portion of last week preparing for a trial scheduled for today that settled on Friday. It is a little depressing how many man hours our firm spends every year preparing cases for trial that settle. But every time you really prepare for a trial, you learn and, sometimes more importantly, relearn law and strategies that help you down the road...
Feedburner
Posted on July 19, 2010If you are a regular Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog reader, I want to keep you. I've read so many good blogs that I stopped reading because I just kinda forgot about them. This is one more way to subscribe.
Maryland Long Arm Statute Opinion
Posted on July 16, 2010U.S. District Court Judge Roger W. Titus writes an interesting opinion on the applicability of the Maryland long arm statute to a defendant who runs a music camp in New York but has a website that obviously reaches Maryland residents. The battle in the case was over the rights to the phrase "Bach to Rock...
Debt Collection Lawyers Up Pressure on Consumers
Posted on July 16, 2010Serious personal injury clients in accident and malpractice cases often understandable get put behind the 8 ball in their personal finances. This means every now and again I find myself dealing with a collection lawyer. The New York Times takes an honest look at the practice of debt collection...
I Sued Someone Famous
Posted on July 15, 2010I wrote earlier today about my concerns about celebrity lawsuits and how they distort the public perception of merits of a typical personal injury case and of lawyers generally. By coincidence, Jay Hancock underscores this problem in the Baltimore Sun today, poking more than a little fun at a Maryland law firm that sent out a "look who I sued" press release that ended up sounding like a press release for the musician the law firm was suing (Ne-Yo)...
Lawyers and YouTube
Posted on July 13, 2010Since the Supreme Court found in 1977 in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona that lawyers have a right to advertise on the grounds of the public has a right to information from lawyers, the general public has been accustomed to awful commercials from lawyers, mostly personal injury accident lawyers replete with sirens and crashing cars...
Permissive Use of an Automobile
Posted on July 12, 2010When an insurance company gets a claim, the first thing it does is look for ways to deny the claim before getting to the merits. I don't say this derisively. This is how the game is played. One insanely overused method of avoiding getting to the merits of a case is claiming the defendant driver was not a permissive user...
State Farm Verdict
Posted on July 06, 2010Good news for plaintiffs to start of the week. Rod Gaston, a lawyer in our office, tried a regional pain disorder case in Baltimore County last week against a State Farm insured. The offer in the case was $37,000. After hearing evidence for three days, the jury returned after an hour with a $663,821...
Kagan Confirmation Hearing
Posted on June 28, 2010I can't stop working to listen to the Elena Kagan confirmation hearing. But there has been so much talk of the questions Elena Kagan will get, it is hard not to check in. NPR is live blogging through Tom Goldstein's SCOTUSblog. I love the NPR disclaimer on this: "While SCOTUSblog has relationships with the law firms of Akin Gump and Howe & Russell, it covers the work of the Supreme Court as an impartial, journalistic entity...
Michael Jackson Wrongful Death Lawsuit
Posted on June 28, 2010Michael Jackson's father has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against his son?s doctor. The lawsuit alleges what you would expect: the doctor's negligence was the cause of Michael Jackson's wrongful death. This wrongful death case is arguably worth over $1 billion because of the potential future lost wages...
Maryland Lawsuits: We Are Having a Sale
Posted on June 25, 2010The fee to file a lawsuit in Maryland will rise $30 to $155 on July 1st. Sue now at the low, low price of $125.
Cross Examining Insurance Company's Medical Expert
Posted on June 23, 2010Paul Luvera provides a really good outline on cross examining experts on bias. Our firm has spent a lot of time, effort and energy trying to be able to effectively use this outline by getting the answers to the question defense experts sedulously avoid: how much do you make testifying in accident cases and how much have you made from this law firm/insurance company? I think we have fought this issue as hard as anyone in Maryland, recently getting a helpful Maryland Court of Appeals opinion that makes more clear what Maryland law is on the scope of the expert's obligation to produce financial records...
Shoulder Surgery Verdicts
Posted on June 21, 2010Metro Verdicts Monthly graph this month is the median verdict and settlement value of shoulder surgery lawsuits that have gone to trial over the last 23 years. The average settlement/verdict in Washington D.C. is $59,500. Maryland is less than half that: $42,636...
Allstate Claims
Posted on June 15, 2010If you polled personal injury lawyers who handle car accident cases, most would chose Allstate as the "worst of the worst" among insurance companies to deal with on accident claims. Personally, while I would not put Allstate at the top of my list of insurance companies I want to draw, I certainly would not put them last either...
Foot Injury Lawsuits: Settlements and Verdicts
Posted on June 14, 2010Obviously, there are a lot of vexing injuries that occur in car and truck accidents. Foot and ankle injuries rank high on this list of hard to solve accident injuries. There are so many bones in the foot and the bones are so small. Just too many things can go wrong...
Average Knee Injury Accident Verdicts and Settlements
Posted on June 08, 2010Ask any accident lawyer about the use of statistics in valuing personal injury accident cases, and you will get an almost universal answer: they have little or no utility. Yet I've never looked away from average verdict data and I've never known a personal injury lawyer who did...
Settling Soft Tissue Car Accident Injury Cases Without a Lawyer
Posted on June 04, 2010Statistically, I think accident victims are always better off hiring a lawyer for many reasons not worth fully exploring here. But if there is any type of accident claim where an injured victim can justify proceeding without a lawyer, it is in the classic soft tissue/whiplash injury accident case with clearly no permanency...
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Summary Judgement for Dismissal of Personal Injury Lawsuits Require Establishment that Defendant didn't Create the Dangerous Condition of have actual or Constructive Notice of its Existence.
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Brain Injury Caused by Stanley Works Nail Gun Results in $3.4 Million Verdict
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Injury Verdict Upheld in Chicago Police Department Auto Accident
A verdict awarded from a personal injury case in Chicago against t...
Maryland Residents Are Among Lacrosse Team Plaintiffs Suing Duke University for Handling of High Profile Rape Case
38 members of the 2006 Duke Lacrosse team and 9 family members are...
Faking Personal Injury Accidents Won't Lead To Recovery
I would like to think that I can procure a recovery for one of my ...
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Can a probation officer make a decision that involves a medical decision and prohibit a person from leaving a state to get medical help?
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