The immediate aftermath of an accident might not seem to be the best time to be patient. After all, the hospitals certainly aren’t patient when sending out their medical bills, nor does the bank holding your mortgage note seem very patient about not getting its monthly payment because you couldn’t work.

But it is important to understand that hardly any accidents are simple affairs. Even a car accident can take a long time to unravel. One driver will swear that the accident occurred a certain way while the other will swear something different happened, and in the meantime there are multiple witnesses who are all contradicting each other.

There are also other things to consider. What condition were the roads in? Was it raining? Did the accident happen at night? Was it a driver error or a mechanical error?

These are all aspects of an accident that should be determined with great certainty before moving forward with an injury case. While it might seem to be a good idea to move forward in the immediate aftermath of a highly publicized accident, filing a lawsuit before all the facts are in could prove very detrimental to your case.

For instance, if you are at a stoplight and a car slams into you from behind and injures you, your initial thought would be to sue the other driver. But if you file the lawsuit immediately and it turns out that the reason the car slammed into you was because a mechanic did a poor job on servicing the brakes, the opposing counsel could successfully have the case thrown out before it even gets to the jury stage.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The entire D.C. region is still coming to grips with the horrible accident that occurred on Metro’s Red Line on Monday. With the death toll at nine, and with 80 people injured, it’s the worst accident that DC transit has ever seen.

There seems to be a lot of stories involving fate with this crash. We have heard stories of people who managed to get through the crash unscathed while passengers who were sitting one car forward suffered horrible injuries. We have heard stories of people who were initially angry that they missed the train, only to be profoundly relieved once they found out that missing that train might have saved their lives. An event like this brings home the random uncertainty of daily existence, which, as accident attorneys, we are reminded of on a daily basis.

One random element of the crash was its location. The two cars collided just outside of the Fort Totten Metro stop, which is approximately 3,000 feet within the borders of Washington, D.C. Had the train been on the green line heading east, or if the crash had happened two stops away in Silver Spring or three stops away in Forest Glen, the accident would have occurred within the state of Maryland.

On the surface, that might not seem to be that big of a deal, but if you consider the differences between the laws of D.C. and Maryland, the site of the metro crash makes all the difference in the world.

The best way that we can put it is that under Maryland law, the victims of the crash are only really recognized as numbers, while in D.C. they are recognized as people.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

June 24, 2009

Reprinted from The Washington Times, in the "news/local -- Local" section.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

“The Metro train car that slammed into another on the Red Line yesterday evening was two months past due for scheduled maintenance on its brakes, and the car was an older model that federal officials had recommended be replaced because of concerns about its safety in a crash, officials said today.” – Washington Post, 6/23/09

There isn’t a lot to say about this just yet. The National Transportation Safety Board is still examining the wreckage of the two trains at the time of this writing, so we don’t know whether or not the two months lateness on the brakes of the car was a factor or not.

In fact, the reports are varying. In this morning’s Washington Post, staff writer Lyndsey Layton wrote the following:

“Experts familiar with Metro's operations focused last night on a failure of the signal system and operator error as likely causes of yesterday's fatal Red Line crash….Metro was designed with a fail-safe computerized signal system that is supposed to prevent trains from colliding. The agency's trains are run by onboard computers that control speed and braking. Another electronic system detects the position of trains to maintain a safe distance between them. If they get too close, the computers automatically apply the brakes, stopping the trains.”

It seems obvious now that the “fail-safe” system was anything but. And we still don’t know what role driver error had in the crash. The operator of the train that hit the stopped car was killed, but the driver who stopped is scheduled to be interviewed at the time of this writing, so there might be some answers there.

But in the meantime, what everyone in the D.C. area has to contend with is the fact that nine people are dead, among them a former Commanding General of the D.C. National Guard. There is also the fact that seventy-six people were injured, in ways ranging from minor to critical.

The best that we can hope for right now is that the people who were injured are able to make full recoveries as soon as possible. And we also hope that whatever recommendations that the NTSB comes up with after their investigation are fully implemented.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In the twenty five years since we began our practice, one constant that we hear quite often from many of our injury victim clients are worries about “Pre-existing conditions.”

The style and syntax of the worries vary from person to person, but if we were to average them out into one sentence it would be this:

“The insurance company says that they won’t pay for the needed treatment because they say that the reason the injury was so bad was because of a pre-existing condition.”

If that seems a little hard to follow, here is a more concrete example.

Mr. X is driving down 395 at fifty miles an hour. A car in the lane to his right suddenly swerves into his lane without signaling. Mr. X’s car is sideswiped and is sent careening into the highway divider. Mr. X suffers a dislocated shoulder when his body slams up against the seatbelt.

Mr. X already has a particularly weak shoulder due to the fact that he used to be on the wrestling team in high school and suffered from a torn rotator cuff. Because of this previous damage, it will take surgery and physical therapy in order to get Mr. X’s shoulder back to normal.

The insurance company of the driver that hit Mr. X tells him that they will only pay for a pre-determined amount, which is usually an “average” of what they think a similar injury would cost. As far as they are concerned, the costs of the extra surgery and the physical therapy are not their problem, because these conditions were “pre-existing,” or, Mr. X had these problems before the accident occurred.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

On June 15^th, President Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association in Chicago. Considering that a big part of the President’s agenda involves health care, it can be assumed that he attached a great deal of importance to this speech. Any kind of health care reform would be very difficult to pull off without the support of the biggest and most influential medical advocacy group in the country.

Right off the bat, Mr. Obama offered a real example as to the realities of our health care system when he described the working day of a doctor in New Hampshire:

“Our costly health care system is unsustainable for doctors like Michael Kahn in New Hampshire, who, as he puts it, spends 20 percent of each day supervising a staff explaining insurance problems to patients, completing authorization forms, and writing appeal letters; a routine that he calls disruptive and distracting, giving him less time to do what he became a doctor to do and actually care for his patients.”

He also gave an example as to how things were going among those of us who have to pay for the premiums:

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

John J. Sellinger a Super Lawyer

Super Lawyers, an independent magazine adhering to a selection process that is objective and independent of any advertising or payments to nominate its candidate, has named John J. Sellinger a Super Lawyer in its Maryland and Washington DC 2008, and 2009 editions. Lawyers were asked to nominate the best lawyers they've personally observed, were not allowed to nominate an internal lawyer without nominating an external lawyer, and lawyers were not allowed to vote for themselves. This evaluation led to a final selection of our medical malpractice attorney, John J. Sellinger. Congratulations on a job well done!

To learn more about our medical malpractice attorney, John J. Sellinger, read about John or watch his medical malpractice video on Utube.  To learn more about medical malpractice law in Maryland, read our Medical Malpractice FAQ, or contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free medical malpractice case evaluation.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

There doesn’t seem to be much you can do to avoid the high cost of health care these days.

In 2008, total spending on health care was $2.8 TRILLION. In case you aren’t sure how much that is, it’s enough to pay for all the goods and services produced in Australia in one year. It’s enough to fund the military of every country in NATO combined. It’s more than the value of every stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

It is, in short, a whole lot of money.

For those of us who have health insurance, that $2.8 trillion doesn’t just factor in the trips you make to the doctor or the deductibles that you have to pay. It also factors in your monthly insurance premiums, and any prescriptions that you have to have filled. Those of us without health insurance are also contributing a great deal to the overall total.

The vast majority of us in this country aren’t too thrilled about this, but we can tell you with great certainty that HMO’s, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are as pleased as they could possibly be with those numbers.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The odds are that you have never heard of a woman named Janine Sugawara. And the odds are that after a few months, her name will completely slip your mind.

But it is entirely probable that her recent lawsuit will put her in a somewhat notorious pantheon of “frivolous lawsuits,” which means that she will be given a title rather than a name by tort reform organizations. And she can expect this title to be bandied about for the rest of time.

As a bit of background, Ms. Sugawara recently filed a class action lawsuit against the Quaker Oats Company. Her gripe was that after four years of purchasing and eating Crunch Berries brand cereal, she discovered that there was no actual fruit involved.

Through the law firm that took her case, Ms. Sugawara’s intention was to collect damages not just for herself, but for everyone else who was bamboozled at the breakfast table. It should be noted the law firm that she was working with had previously filed an unsuccessful suit against the Kellogg’s corporation over the lack of actual fruit in Fruit Loops.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks