Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

The Washington, D.C. mass transit system is not as safe as it should be. We wish we could believe differently, but we can’t. The overall number of accidents, injuries and fatalities over the past few years is the sort of number that you would expect from a transit system in a third world country without proper safety regulations, and certainly not from the transit system of the capitol city in the United States of America.

It isn’t just the disastrous Red Line accident in July that we are referring to. The past few years the dc metro system has experienced an extensive list of injuries and deaths on both the subway and bus lines, plus several maintenance incidents which underscore how our dc metro transit system is badly in need of upgrade or repair. We have to wonder about the commitment of the people who are in charge of our dc metro transit system.

The most recent tragic event was the death of two Metro workers who were killed by a large equipment truck that was backing down the track. The two workers were not new to the job. Jeff Garrard had been working at his position for WMATA for twenty years, and Sung Duk Oh had been on the job for twelve. With that much experience on the job they had to have known what was considered safe behavior and what wasn’t. According to an article in the Washington Post, Mr. Garrard left behind a wife and daughter, both of whom have congenital heart defects, and Mr. Oh had a family as well.

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Personal Injury Legal Terms       

Being injured due to the negligence of someone else can be (and often is) a terrible experience. You have to deal with the pain of your injuries, the possible loss of the ability to do your job properly, the  possibility that you may not be able to work again, and lost income from the time that you missed from work. In all probability you are also dealing with an uncooperative and seemingly completely uncaring insurance company.

It is usually when the insurance company becomes uncooperative that many of our injury victims from the Washington DC metropolitan area call us. They come to the realization that simply accepting what has happened to them is now unacceptable, and they realize that they will need legal help in order to get justice and fair compensation for their injuries.

The prospect of meeting with a lawyer can be an intimidating prospect, although most of our clients are shocked that they actually speak to Roger Greenberg upon hire, and throughout the duration of their case have close contact with Andrew Bederman, or our other personal injury lawyers at Greenberg & Bederman. In spite of our reputation in the legal community for customer service and congeniality, most people discover the whole legal process to be confusing. The law almost seems like an entirely new language. You are suddenly called one thing while the person who was responsible for your accident is  called something else.

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It’s quite easy to define what a traumatic brain injury is. You could go to the New England Journal of Medicine or a third year medical textbook if you so desired, but a TBI is so straightforward that going to Wikipedia should suffice:

“Traumatic brain injury (TBI, also called intracranial injury) occurs when an outside force traumatically injures the brain.”

That’s simple enough. Traumatic brain injuries happen when people hit their heads very hard. Somebody falls, or gets into a car accident, or something falls and lands on them, and the brain takes some damage. And even though they sound like rare occurrences, traumatic brain injuries actually happen with astonishing frequency.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 1.4 million people suffer from traumatic brain injuries every year. Of these 1.4 million, 50,000 people die, while 235,000 of them suffer injuries that are severe enough to cause them to be hospitalized for an extended period of time.

So the occurrences are often enough, and the definition is easy enough to sort out, but when it comes to how a traumatic brain injury affects the victim, there is no such thing as an easy definition. The reason for this is that the brain is an incredibly complex organ that even modern medicine is still attempting to figure out. It controls all of the functions of the body, from sight to balance to movement to breathing to speech to the ability to eat. The brain handles literally everything. So if there is damage to the brain, there is no shortage of things that can go wrong with the body.

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Non-economic damages in a medical malpractice case are essentially a way for you to be compensated for elements of your injury that were not directly financially detrimental to you. It’s the idea that you have been forced to go through real pain and real hardship as the result of the negligence of a medical provider, and as such you should be financially compensated. For instance, if the mistake of a doctor required you to have a lengthy and painful recuperation, having the doctor pay for the cost of that recuperation would not be enough, mainly because if it hadn’t been for the initial mistake in the first place, you wouldn’t have had to go through the painful recuperation at all. Spouses of victims of medical malpractice can also be compensated for non-economic damages, particularly if the malpractice resulted in the death of the victim.

Thanks to years of false assumptions, many people actually support caps on non-economic damages. The doctors and insurance companies have done a good job convincing many in the public that non-economic damages are driving up medical malpractice premiums and lining lawyers pockets. These same theorists will continue believing in the false public persona until they themselves become injured and realize what “caps” actually mean, especially if the injury is severe and the consequences are long lasting. What medical malpractice caps do for the injury victim in some cases is cause the severely injured to not be able to receive the money that they will need for a comparatively normal life, much less a life of “luxury.”

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One of the reasons that scare people away from litigation is the amount of time that it takes for many cases to come to a conclusion. Many corporations and insurance companies make it a point to delay the litigation process as much as they can, solely in the hopes of wearing out the plaintiffs. In the midst of the judicial process, there are all sorts of opportunities for both sides to file motions about one aspect of the trial or another, and corporate defendants often take many of these opportunities. They are in a good position to do so. Most plaintiffs in injury cases are facing real financial hardship, like medical bills or an inability to go back to work due to injuries. Insurance companies or major corporations aren’t facing any such difficulties, and can more easily afford the legal costs of delaying a trial.

A product liability trial most often takes a long time; especially if there have been multiple victims from the same product. Fortunately for the victims of Bayer’s line of birth control pills, the process has been streamlined by the judicial system, so women who have suffered from strokes, heart attacks, gall bladder disease or pulmonary embolismshould not have to suffer as long from unnecessary delays.

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Being an injury law firm based in Washington, D.C, we’ve never litigated any medical malpractice case in Tennessee. But upon reading a piece in the Memphis Daily News, we couldn’t help but notice some consistencies in the way that medical malpractice cases are both considered by the general public and reported by the media in general.

The article in question was written by a man named Scott Sheppard, who did an admirable job on presenting a balanced and fair piece. Regardless, the piece still gave the reader the sense that despite everything about the legal system being in the favor of doctors, medical malpractice insurance companies and the attorneys who represent them, somehow medical malpractice cases are still unfair.

Within the text of the article the reader learns how the majority of medical malpractice cases end:

Physicians and their insurance companies traditionally close up to 85 percent of malpractice cases without paying a penny to plaintiffs.

It is also stated in this article that one of the “problems” is the costs of defending these cases, mainly because the tactic of most medical malpractice defense attorneys is to completely outspend the plaintiff’s attorneys:

“Defendants have superior resources, usually hiring two or three times as many experts on each issue than the patient can afford; this impacts results,” said John A. Day, a personal injury and malpractice attorney at the Nashville firm of Day & Blair. “You can see defense costs are increasing – defendants and their lawyers are fighting harder.”

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Whenever there is a high profile legal action against a manufacturer or corporation, there is almost always an outcry from some in the public who think that the biggest victim is the manufacturer or corporation.

Even if the legal action in question involves a major consumer catastrophe where hundreds of people get injured or worse, die, some people manage to portray the perpetrators as the victims. They moan about the “expense of the legal procedures,” or they complain that the courts are being clogged up with “unnecessary” or “frivolous” cases. They may also claim that lawsuits “force” businesses to raise their prices, which will impact all the consumers, and not just the ones who were injured.

We have a particularly hard time buying these arguments, especially when they come from multibillion dollar earning pharmaceutical companies. In the first place, the only thing that can “force” a pharmaceutical company to do anything is either the pharmaceutical company itself or the law. Nothing “forces” a pharmaceutical company to charge fifteen dollars for a pill that costs eight cents to manufacture. Nothing “forces” a pharmaceutical company to put out products that are dangerous to the public. Nobody “forces” pharmaceutical companies to “grind out” any and all legal proceedings when a simple admission of wrongdoing and a reasonable offer of compensation to the victims would be more than sufficient.

But the narrative is quite often sympathetic to the poor, beleaguered pharmaceutical companies who are being attacked by opportunistic and ungrateful patients and lawyers, demanding unreasonable rewards for medical problems that were “dubious” at best.

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