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

We aren’t sure why people have this strange idea about how much public broadcasting costs in America, but we have one idea. Public broadcasting makes a popular target for groups and politicians who want to reduce federal spending, and when they attack it they continuously refer to it as a waste of money without specifically referring to how much it costs. People hear it being discussed constantly and assume that if it’s that big of a topic, then it must cost a lot. The politicians and groups who are against publically funded broadcasting know very well that it doesn’t cost all that much in comparison to defense or subsidies, but it makes for a good symbolic piñata, and so they rail against it every chance they get. And their constituents, who have heard nothing different, assume that the premise must be true.

It’s a neat little trick, and lots of people do it. You overstate or exaggerate the cost of something you don’t like, and all of a sudden this thing you don’t like is a “problem.” If you spin it the right way, then you can turn it into a “crisis.” And if people think it’s a “crisis,” then it will be much easier for them to act on this thing you don’t like.

Medical malpractice insurance companies don’t like medical malpractice lawsuits. Why would they? It costs them money. It costs them money even if the person filing the case loses. They have to pay for the legal costs and the experts and court fees. In a perfect world, they would simply collect premiums and simply never have to go to court at all.

Believe it or not, this is practically the set up they have for themselves in a few states. For instance, Texas is so loaded with damage caps and exemptions on who can be found liable for malpractice that most people can’t even afford to file a malpractice lawsuit anymore. And it got to be that way because the medical malpractice insurance industry was able to convince people that this thing that they didn’t like (our civil court system) was actually a “crisis.”

They jacked up their premium rates and blamed it all on a deluge of frivolous lawsuits. They claimed that our court system was being log jammed with worthless cases involving people who weren’t really injured at all. And they claimed that people were just making millions of dollars on medical malpractice lawsuits. Legislatures then enacted restrictions and caps on damages not just in Texas but in states all over the country. So now malpractice insurance companies don’t have to worry about actually performing the business that they elected to go into of their own free will.

The obvious problem with all this (besides the fact that legitimately injured medical malpractice victims have either diminished recourse or none at all) is that this “crisis” wasn’t legitimate at all. There never was an onslaught of malpractice lawsuits, and the courts weren’t log jammed with frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits. In fact, the numbers that are out now are not significantly different than the numbers then, yet for some reason the insurance companies received protections that citizens aren’t entitled to.

Medical malpractice cases account for less than 8% of tort cases, and less than 2% of civil cases nationwide. That doesn’t sound like a “logjam” to us. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of medical malpractice cases actually dropped 18%. That doesn’t sound like an explosion to us. And even if the verdict is for a headline grabbing “millions of dollars,” the plaintiff’s in a medical malpractice case usually actually collect much less.

But that wasn’t what you heard, was it? And it certainly isn’t what you hear now. These folks have figured out that if you just repeat the same thing over and over again, people will eventually believe it. After all, NPR gets tens of billions of taxpayer dollars a year, right?

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. based medical malpractice law firm with offices in Silver Spring and Baltimore, Maryland. We also offer legal assistance to those who have been injured by doctors in Northern Virginia. If you or a loved one in D.C, Virginia or Maryland has been hurt by a doctor, nurse or other medical professional, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free medical malpractice consultation.

In other words, a doctor, nurse or other medical professional has to pay a great deal of attention in order to both help you and keep from harming you. So how is he supposed to do that if he is been working for 36 hours straight?

This is actually how a lot of doctors operate in this country. To be a doctor is to be sleep deprived most of the time. It is an ingrained part of medical culture. It is also incredibly dangerous.

Shifts often last 24 hours, particularly for first year medical interns. That isn’t 24 hours where you simply have to be at the hospital. That’s 24 hours where you are constantly moving, constantly on your feet, and constantly looking after the needs of your patients. There are also doctors who work shifts of up to 36 hours, sometimes catching an intermittent hour or two of sleep in an on-call room, but often getting no sleep whatsoever.

Does anyone remember pulling an all-nighter in college, or working the night shift for a few days? Do you remember how disoriented and frazzled you were? Doctors are required to be that way on multiple days a week.

There are some reasons to make a doctors shift longer than the average workers. It is often better for the patient if he has one doctor following the course of his treatment. But there has to be a point where the lack of sleep outweighs the potential benefits of a single doctor’s care, particularly when you start getting into hour 16.

This isn’t exactly news to the medical establishment. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that sleep deprived doctors made twice as many errors as doctors who had gotten some rest. This study was published 40 years ago. Much like a man with lung cancer who continues to smoke even though he knows it’s bad for him; doctors continue to work incredibly long shifts and continue to make mistakes. But the metaphor doesn’t work completely. The smoker is hurting himself. The sleep-deprived doctors are hurting us.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. medical malpractice law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal representation to those who have been injured by a doctor, nurse, or other medical professional. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been injured due to medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation

Despite this lack of a problem, the Alabama state government decided that they needed a draconian solution, so this proof of legal status requirements was put into place. They are working. Immigrants are leaving Alabama. Some go back to Mexico, while others go to states with a less restrictive atmosphere.

We found this to be an interesting development, mainly because a state that didn’t have a serious problem with immigration came down the hardest on its immigrants. Politicians magnified the scope of the problem and then “came to the rescue” with solutions that were much more drastic than they needed to be.

This sort of thing happens more often than you would think. The great American writer H.L. Mencken summed it up perfectly:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Business groups and insurance companies in Texas have done the exact same thing, except they have done it with the Seventh Amendment rights of their citizens rather than illegal immigrants. Their government made the claim that so-called “frivolous lawsuits” were ruining the economy of the state and scaring businesses and doctors away, even though none of those things were happening. Medical malpractice insurance companies were blaming a sudden severe spike in premium costs on an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits, even though the numbers of medical malpractice lawsuits had remained constant for a decade.

With a newly invented “crisis,” Texas set about instilling a draconian set of “solutions” that weren’t needed, and effectively shut down the ability of most Texans to even get to the courtroom. The first “fix” was capping the amount of non-economic damages that victims of medical malpractice could receive. The number ended up being $250,000. That might sound like a lot, but non-economic damages are where plaintiff’s attorneys (the only attorneys that many injury victims can afford to take their cases) earn their fees, which are based on a contingency. The plaintiff’s attorney also fronts the expenses of running the trial, which can be quite costly. There are expert witnesses to find and depositions to run, not to mention all the research there is to be done. With the ceiling at $250,000, many personal injury attorneys would lose money trying a medical malpractice case. A cap on $250,000 has essentially priced poor people out of the courtroom.

The second “fix” is also for medical malpractice cases, and it is meant to “protect” emergency room workers. It’s a fairly simple rule. If you get injured by an emergency room physician, you can’t sue him for any monetary damages. It doesn’t matter if he makes a patently obvious error. Because he works in an emergency room, he has immunity. The only way he can be found guilty in court is if he admits that he meant to do so, and what doctor in his right mind would admit that?

An invented problem, which led to unneeded “solutions,” and as a result it is practically impossible to file a lawsuit in Texas. Imaginary hobgoblins, indeed.

Many pundits give Texas the benefit of the doubt (when they bother to speak about it at all,) and claim that this state of affairs was an unintended consequence of a well meaning law. But we take a dimmer view. We believe those legislators knew exactly what they were doing. Making money is nice, but making lots of money is better. And if a few thousand lives get ruined in the process, that’s just too bad, isn’t it?

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to the actions of doctors, surgeons or other medical professionals. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been hurt due to a case of medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman today for afree medical malpractice legal consultation.

So we can’t really be mad at insurance company software. It was designed to minimize settlement offers and maximize profits. However, we can get mad at the insurance companies that use it.

Awhile back, we mentioned that there was software called “Colossus” that a lot of insurance companies were using, and still are to the best of our knowledge. It basically averages out the costs of an injury and then provides the insurance agent with an appropriate offer of a settlement. For instance, if a driver gets hit by another car and breaks his leg, the insurance agent would type in “Broken Leg” and get the average cost of fixing a broken leg in that area. Then he would offer the injury victim that amount. We know that sounds perfectly reasonable, but there are a lot of things wrong with this. In the first place, each injury is different and affects different people in different ways. There is no way to “average” the costs of any injury. Secondly, where are they getting these numbers? Since they won’t let anybody look at the workings of the software due to “trade secrecy concerns,” we have no idea if these are accurate averages, or averages with 30% shaved off, or just random numbers.

A similar incident is happening now. An insurance company in Florida has been using software called Value360, which according to a lawsuit being filed, has caused the value of homes to double. That might sound great, except these houses aren’t being valued for sale. They are being valued for insurance purposes, sometimes by as much as twice as what the home is actually worth. This is causing the insurance rates to skyrocket.

To give you an equivalent, let’s say you drive a 2001 Honda Accord with 140,000 miles on it. What Value360 is allegedly doing is saying that car is worth as much as a 2011 Honda Accord with 70,000 miles on it. All of a sudden, your car is worth more on paper, even though it clearly is not in real life. This allows the insurance company to charge you twice as much on your premium. So transfer this practice over to home ownership, and you have a sense of exactly how much of a sudden financial burden homeowners all over Florida are facing right now.

As we said earlier, if these allegations are true, we can’t blame the software. It’s simply filling its function. But if the people using the software are using it to purposely over-value homes, that’s practically stealing. We will be keeping an eye on this case as it progresses.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal consultation to those who have been injured due to the actions of others. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been hurt in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free personal injury case evaluation.

We were concerned to read in The Washington Post that some of the victims’ families that settled felt that their settlement was too low. The mother of one victim was quoted in the article as saying “It was lower than I expected… No money in the world could bring back my daughter. Her kids deserve to live a better life like their mother was trying to give them.”

This is one of the key points of any wrongful death suit, particularly one where a parent dies and leaves children behind. You have to understand that there is a severe ripple effect that occurs whenever children are orphaned. Immediately their lives and the lives of the immediate family are changed in ways that are incredibly difficult to handle. We aren’t sure about the financial situation of the mother of the victim in this case, but we know that she now has a lot more financial responsibilities to deal with than she did before the accident. We would hope that Metro (or at least Metro’s insurance company) would recognize that and would compensate them accordingly.

We have a hard time understanding why Metro is being tight-fisted in its settlement offers, considering the wreckage that crash made out of so many people’s lives. If they want to use an excuse of financial hardship, we simply aren’t buying it. About one day after the article in the Post was published, there was another article in the Examiner about what WMATA is willing to spend money on, even as the Post tells you what they are unwilling to spend money on:

WASHINGTON - A newspaper report says Metro is paying more than $51 million to consultants to help better run the transit agency.

The Washington Examiner, citing data obtained through a public records request, says Metro is spending $51.9 million on current consulting contracts with 18 different companies.

Metro spokesman Dan Stessel says the figure represents about 2 percent of the agency's budget for fiscal year 2012.

It baffles the mind to consider that WMATA is willing to spend almost $52 million on consultants who are, according to the article, “…analyzing fare cards, escalators and crafting requests for other outside contractors…” We understand the need to spend on escalators, but fare card analysis and contractors to help find other contractors seems extraordinarily wasteful. And when you consider that this $52 million only represents 2% of WMATA’s budget, it is insulting to the victims of the Red Line crash that they are being low-balled in settlement offers.

It is further insulting that with $52 million being 2% of their annual budget, much-needed repairs and improvements in infrastructure were put off for so long. Sensors were left to rot, rails were left cracked, escalators were left to collapse, and ultimately, dozens of people were left to be injured and eight people were left to die.

There is no doubt about what happened here. This accident happened as the result of negligence. And low-ball offers to the victims of this accident are being offered from the top of a pile of money.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to circumstances that were beyond their control, and that includes injuries caused on public transit systems. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

We weren’t particularly surprised by this article. One of the most popular chain e-mails is one involving so-called frivolous lawsuits. It’s called “The Stella Awards,” and it’s been around for about twelve years. Despite its age we are still getting it forwarded to us at least three times a year.

Here is what it says:

This is what’s wrong with America.

Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $780,000 by a jury after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running amuck inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving tyke was Ms. Robertson's son.

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran his hand over with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice someone was at the wheel of the car whose hubcap he was trying to steal.

Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Penn., was exiting a house he finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up because the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, so Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. Dickson sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of half a million dollars and change.

Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced-in yard, as was Mr. Williams. The award was less than sought after because the jury felt the dog may have been provoked by Mr. Williams who, at the time, was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her coccyx. The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson threw it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a nightclub in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

These are all terrible cases of injustice, aren’t they? It’s enough to make you immediately support whichever legal restrictions on the Seventh Amendment are put in front of you. This is exactly what the e-mail is designed to do.

It is effective.  It evokes outrage in the reader, and it is utterly and completely false.

We don’t mean that these cases are exaggerations, or that the numbers were stilted one way or another. We mean that not one of these cases actually happened. They are fictions.

It wouldn’t occur to most people to search a legal database for proof of these cases, and even if it did occur to them, they probably wouldn’t know where to begin. So for a great many people out there, this completely fraudulent e-mail stands as concrete evidence that our legal system is out of control.

What compounds this insult to the truth is the fact that these so-called “Stella” awards are named after Stella Leibeck, who was equally slandered as a filer of “frivolous lawsuits” after she burned herself quite badly from near-boiling McDonald’s coffee.

To be sure, there are cases where people who are essentially victims of their own bad behavior of folly file lawsuits, but in 99,999 out of 100,000 instances, these cases are thrown out before they get anywhere. So not only are these cases fiction, but even if they weren’t fiction, the awards would never be given to the plaintiff’s. These would never even be put before a jury, and we would be amazed if there were any attorney who actually agreed to argue these cases.

The next time you see a story of someone filing a lawsuit over completely foolish reasons and then winning a ridiculous amount of money, remember the “Stella Awards” e-mail, and think about who would benefit from a greatly diminished 7^th Amendment. It most certainly wouldn’t be you.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Maryland. If you or a loved one has been hurt in an accident in Virginia, D.C. or Maryland, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

It’s actually a question we have for a lot of bars and restaurants these days. Drive down any major road, or take any exit off of the beltway, and you will see a place where you can buy and drink alcohol where practically the only way in or out is to drive a car. If the Washington, D.C. area is committed to ending drinking and driving, our zoning boards have a strange way of showing it.

We aren’t suggesting that everyone who goes to these places gets drunk and then drives home. But one of the reasons that we focused on Dogfish Head Alehouse is because of a particularly egregious drinking and driving accident that  happened there in 2008.

A man named Michael Eaton went to the Dogfish Head Alehouse in Gaithersburg, which is in the middle of a parking lot and surrounded by a series of major roads. Mr. Eaton went to the bar and started drinking, and he didn’t stop for hours. By the end of the night, he had consumed 17 beers and three shots of hard liquor. In other words, he was extremely drunk.

There was absolutely no way on earth that the bartenders who provided him with all of that alcohol can claim that they didn’t know that Mr. Eaton was drunk. They work in a bar. They know what even three drinks can do, much less 17 beers and three shots of liquor. They were also perfectly aware of the local geography. Mr. Eaton couldn’t have left the place and gotten on the subway. He couldn’t have stepped out onto the street corner to hail a cab. His only options were to call a cab himself (which he didn’t do,) call a friend for a ride (which he didn’t do,) or to walk home.

He didn’t do any of those things. He walked out to his car, which was in the middle of the parking lot, and drove home. And the bartenders who served him 17 beers and 3 shots over the course of an evening simply let him.

The consequences of this inaction by Dogfish Head Alehouse were tragic. Mr. Eaton slammed into a minivan carrying Jazemin Waar and her family while they were both traveling down I-270. Ms. Waar did not survive, and Mr. Eaton is currently serving 8 years in prison.

So what punishment did the establishment receive? The bar that provided Mr. Eaton with enough alcohol to put him well over the legal limit for alcohol consumption and then sent him out to the parking lot? Well, nothing much really happened to them.

There are no laws establishing liability for bars and restaurants that over-serve their customers in Maryland, even if the bar is located in the middle of a parking lot with no public transportation in sight. This means that whatever happens after their customers leave the premises is of no importance to them whatsoever. This is why you have happy hours that last four hours, or “dollar shooter” nights, or any of the other countless promotions that are designed to get people to drink more. There are no consequences for the owners.

We believe that this is wrong, and it is why we are currently representing the family of Jazemin Waar in Maryland’s courts. We believe that her case is the clearest example of why Maryland needs so-called “dram shop laws.” It is our hope that this case will begin the process of establishing dram shop laws in Maryland, as it is in place in other states.

As car accident injury lawyers in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia, we have seen more than our share of people getting hurt in easily preventable car accidents, and unfortunately, alcohol was a factor in some of them. While dram shop laws won’t stop drinking and driving, they would certainly make it harder to accomplish. If bars realize that there could be financial consequences for the reckless behavior of their customers, they might take a few minutes and call that patron a cab, or not serve him that fourth drink. And as a result, we might see fewer cases like Jazemin Waar’s death in Maryland. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would certainly be better than this.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. who has been hurt due to the recklessness of another driver. If you or a loved one has been in a car accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident case evaluation.

You might be asking yourself if this is the accumulation of years of drivecam video footage, considering how many incidents there are. In fact, these are just the noteworthy clips from July to August of 2011. That’s two months with over 150 “incidents.”

We have talked about the various problems with the public transportation available in the D.C. area. Chiefly, we talk about Metro. There are all sorts of smaller public transportation systems available in Maryland and Virginia, but none of them even proportionately come close to having the appalling safety record that exists with the bus system in Metro. It isn’t exactly a secret that there are many bus accidents in D.C. WMATA apparently aren’t very good at getting them off the road and out of the system. For instance, here is a list of the offenses and “punishments” of a particularly bad Metro bus driver: (Bear in mind, the following list falls under “alleged,” but the sources at this website are usually quite reliable.)

• Hired as a bus driver and is involved in an accident
• Gets "fired"
• Gets reinstated as a bus driver
• Gets "fired" again for another accident
• Gets transferred to become a TRAIN OPERATOR! (Safety first)
• Accumulates enough infractions (wrong side doors, platform overshoots, running signals) to be disqualified from ever being a train operator again
• Becomes the face of Metro as a station manager and as such:
• Gets a 5-day suspension for disrespecting a Metro Police Officer
• Gets a 5-day suspension for using a cell phone while on duty
• Gets a 5-day suspension for regularly taking 2-3 hour lunch breaks
• Gets a 10-day suspension for locking someone in the station after closing (This was overturned because Metro lost, or couldn't find, the film from the video cameras at the station.)
• Gets a 12-day suspension for falling asleep on the job after his picture was posted on this blog. (He apparently successfully fought that punishment off after going to the doctor and afterward claiming he had sleep apnea. The other station manager pictured claimed the same thing and got off as well, the source said.)
• But none of that mattered because he took several months of disability leave after "spraining" his ankle.

Again, this is an alleged list. But if it is true, it is absolutely appalling.

Getting hit by a car is bad. Getting hit by a bus is infinitely worse. A city bus is an enormous, and it carries a lot more weight and momentum than even the largest of SUV’s. A bus that is only traveling at a few miles an hour is capable of doing enormous damage to a human being. We know that, so it goes without saying that WMATA officials know that as well. Why it is they continue to allow unsafe operators to arrive in the system is beyond us. We can only hope they get their act together before more people get hurt or worse.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident law firm. We offer legal counsel to those who have been injured by being hit by a car, truck or city bus. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been hurt by public transportation due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today. 

The business lobbying titan that is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also engages in Flat Earth behavior, particularly when the subject is climate change. Their official position is that 99% of climatologists and researchers are either wrong or simply making it up when they claim that our planet is getting warmer due to carbon emissions. And they are pleased to present you with a list of the dozen or so scientists who don’t believe in global warming.

The major difference between the Flat Earth Society and the tobacco and manufacturing companies is that the Flat Earth Society actually believes in what they are saying whereas big tobacco and the Chamber of Commerce are simply pretending to believe. They know that tobacco is dangerous, and they do know that global warming exists. They are doing the Flat Earth routine because the alternative is more regulations on their industries, and regulations cost money.

Here’s the Flat Earth method: Deny. Deny again. Dispute the evidence, and then the providers of that evidence. Question the motives of the people who provide the evidence. Find someone willing to present your evidence, no matter how flimsy. Claim that the question is still in doubt because of this flimsy evidence. Repeat as often as necessary.

Medical malpractice insurance companies use the Flat Earth method as well. Their premise is that the United States court system is simply overrun with frivolous medical malpractice suits. Anybody who walks into the hospital can go to the courthouse and sue an honest doctor for millions of dollars. Why, there must be hundreds of thousands of frivolous medical malpractice cases going on at this very moment. And here are some of our experts to prove it.

Of course, none of this is true. All you have to do is look at the actual numbers, all of which are easily available.  Nobody is getting rich off of medical malpractice suits, and there aren’t hundreds of thousands of them, whether they are viewed as “frivolous” or not. And considering the expense of putting a medical malpractice case through court, an attorney would have to be willing to throw money away to attempt to try a case with no merit.

But never mind the facts, say the malpractice insurance companies. The earth is flat. Those numbers are stilted and fake. The real numbers (our numbers) are skyrocketing. All the cases are frivolous. Won’t someone in the government step in and help us?

Aside from merely pretending to believe what the Flat Earth Society actually does believe, another key difference is that medical malpractice insurance companies are able to get others to believe them as well. Hundreds of state and federal legislators believe, despite all the evidence and numbers to the contrary, that there is a medical malpractice crisis that needs to be regulated. There are now incredibly restrictive laws that favor the insurance companies rather than the injured patient in almost every state in America.  Sadly, none of this will come out until the victims stories are told one by one.

Fortunately, Maryland, D.C. and Virginia are not under the draconian restrictions that exist in Texas. There are some obstacles here, such as caps on pain and suffering, but fortunately they are relatively minor compared to Texas. As experienced medical malpractice lawyers, we are well versed in the obstacles that have been placed in the way of the injured. But bear in mind that the Flat Earth mindset is working for medical malpractice insurance companies. It can work in the state houses in Richmond and Annapolis and it can certainly work on Capitol Hill. We would urge you to contact your state or federal representative and remind them that despite what they might have heard, the earth is still round.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington DC Metropolitan area-based medical malpractice firm. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone in the Washington, D.C. area who has been injured due to the negligence of a doctor or other medical professional. If you or a loved one has been a victim of medical malpractice in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The anti-safety argument always seems to drift into that area. They turn it into a matter of “freedom” and “liberty” when in fact it is simply a matter of economics. Perhaps what really was happening is that Ford didn’t want to implement airbag technology because General Motors held the patents on most of the airbag technology. Ford and Chrysler would have had to pay General Motors for every airbag that they put in its cars. And after all the delays generated by Ford and Chrysler, GM projected that the money they would have made from patent royalties would not have been as extensive as they thought, so they decided that airbags would be a bad idea. So one of the major reasons that airbags didn’t become standard until 1989 was because that was when most of the patents on airbags had either already expired or were about to expire.

Again, it seems as though there was no “freedom,” “liberty” or “personal choice” at play here. It appears that it was all about money. It usually is. And recently, we have seen another example of the bottom line being more important than safety. We find this one particularly interesting, mainly because this is the first time we have ever seen the manufacturers being completely honest about its motives.

Everybody knows what a table saw is, right? They are fast and sharp and effective and completely and utterly dangerous. Every year they cause hundreds of serious injuries on construction sites. These injuries include deep lacerations, finger amputations, the entire ghastly lot. And this is one of the few circumstances that we can think of where the reason for the vast majority of these injuries is inattention on the part of the people who use them. All the training in the world will not keep them safe if they take their mind off what they are doing, even for an instant.

So if the entire table saw industry was presented with a device that would make it impossible for people to cut themselves on the blade, they would jump at the chance to install it, right?

Of course not. That would cost them money.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has extended the public comment period for developing a table saw safety rule by 60 days.

CPSC commissioners voted 4-0 to accept comments through Feb. 10, 2012. The original comment deadline was Dec. 12.

One of the reasons that the CPSC has extended comments is due to intense lobbying by the Power Tool Institute, which is the lobbying group of Black and Decker, Snap On, and all the other companies who make power tools. What they are against is that the CPSC has voted in favor of making a new piece of safety technology mandatory. And as far as safety technology for table saws go, this one is the Holy Grail.

The SawStop is a brand of saw that has something called “flesh-detecting technology.” It is based on the fact that while wood does not conduct electricity, flesh does. The blade is given a very small electrical charge and is fitted with a sensor. If it detects that it is cutting into anything that conducts electricity, it stops instantaneously. You could put your hand against the moving blade of the SawStop and get nothing more than a scratch.

The inventor of the SawStop has made it so that the ten table saw amputations that happen every day will not happen anymore. He has saved countless fingers and countless trips to the emergency room. He should be given parades, but predictably he is being given nothing but scorn.

The problem is money, as it always is. None of the other table saw makers have that patent, and just like airbags, they will have to pay a royalty to the inventor of the SawStop if that technology becomes standard in table saws. This will eat into its bottom line. If these manufacturers are able, they will most likely drag the fight out until the patent expires, at which point they may accept the new standards.

To the credit of the PTI, they are at least being honest about their reasons for opposing the SawStop mandate:

"Now is the time for table saw users to make their voices heard on a proposed government-mandated rule that could impose a specific patented technology on consumers and industry, creating a monopoly and raising prices for consumers. PTI is urging CPSC not to advance the rule and instead work with the industry to offer a suite of solutions that make sense for the entire range of products."

Translation: This will cost us money. They definitely get credit for that, and also for not putting the words “freedom” or “liberty” in the press release.

The point of all of this is that manufacturers don’t fight safety improvements because of “liberty and freedom,” or because of a desire for “small government.” They do it because they like money and want more of it, even if the end result is many mangled hands a year.

Greenberg and Bederman is an accident law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have been providing legal assistance to injury victims all over the Washington, D.C. area for 30 years, and that includes people who have been injured in car accidents and construction accidents. If you or a loved one has been hurt on the highway or on the job site in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

The Fortuna Police Department, the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office and the California Highway Patrol have been working together between Dec. 16 and Jan. 2 to arrest anyone caught driving while drunk. DUI/driver's license checkpoints, multi-agency DUI task force deployments and roving DUI patrols are scheduled statewide during the Winter Holiday Anti-DUI Campaign. Checkpoints are placed in locations that have the greatest opportunity for deterring drunk or drugged driving.

It is difficult to fathom why it is that so many people continue to think that they can drink and drive. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite all the terrible and real examples of what can happen to someone when he gets behind the wheel of a car after he has been drinking.

Drinking and driving accidents already happen with alarming frequency in this country, with one drunken driving accident happening every three minutes on average, and with one drunken driving fatality happening every 40 minutes.

Our area isn’t exactly the worst in the country when it comes to this sort of thing. D.C. is actually listed as the place with the 2^nd best environment in terms of a lack of drunken driving fatalities and multiple offenders, but considering that size of Washington, D.C, that might not be a fair comparison. Virginia and Maryland are pretty firmly in the center of the pack, listed at 23^rd best environment and 26^th best environment, respectively.

For instance, Virginia had 211 DUI traffic fatalities last year, which is 29% of all the traffic fatalities in the state. But this number represents a 13% decline in the number of traffic fatalities. Maryland had 154 DUI fatalities, which is 31% of all traffic fatalities. Maryland also has a pretty large number of repeat offenders on the roads, with over 25,000 drivers with three DUI’s, and just under 4,000 drivers with five DUI’s. (Clearly, some Maryland drivers have not learned any sort of lesson from their experiences with the Maryland legal system. Virginia keeps information about repeat offenders confidential, but if the overall rank is better than Maryland’s, you can make the assumption that there are less repeat offenders on the roads. However, since the overall rankings aren’t that different, you have to imagine that there are at least comparable levels going on between the states.

Nobody can use the excuse that they weren’t aware of the fact that drinking and driving is both dangerous and illegal. There has been no shortage of studies and evidence of the dangers, and there has been no shortage of publicity on the fact that it is illegal. We can only conclude that your average drunk driver has an entirely misguided sense of optimism. “This won’t happen to me.”

It’s the wrong mindset to have, particularly because it isn’t just the drunk driver who is put in danger. Quite often, people get struck and injured or killed by drunk drivers, and these people had the common sense to not drink and drive. People who drink and drive not only seem to deny that there will be any consequences for themselves, but also not any for anyone else. This theory never seems to bear out.

At Greenberg and Bederman, we have offered legal assistance to the victims of drunken driver accidents since 1985, and our attorneys have been helping victims of Maryland, Virginia and D.C. If you or a loved one has been hit and injured due to the actions of a drunken driver over the holidays or at any other time, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free DUI accident consultation.

There are multiple questions that need to be answered. The first to ask is what is wrong with the friction discs? Is this a problem on that particular car only? Is it a system wide problem?

Next we need to ask about the standards of communication. While we know that the Metro trains move very fast, they certainly can’t move faster than a telephone call. Why wasn’t the dispatcher told about the obstruction on the track? Why wasn’t the driver of the Orange Line train told about the obstruction in front of him and his train full of passengers? The driver of the Blue Line train must have known that leaving something on the track was a possibility. There were apparently sparks flying from the side of the train. The only two options that can be considered here are that there was a communication breakdown between the Blue Line train, the dispatcher and the Orange Line train, or that there simply is no communication possible between the three parties. And if there is no communication possible, then why isn’t there?

If you want to know how Metro has performed over the years, the list of incidents is not pretty. There was a terrible crash that killed 9 people and injured countless more; there have been fires on the tracks, there have been random beatings where no police or security made an effort to help the victim, there have been escalator collapses, and now the brakes are falling off the trains.

Public transit is not supposed to be a risky proposition. You shouldn’t be putting your safety at risk when you get on the Metro, or even when you enter the facility and get on the escalator. Yet this is what Washingtonians do in the hundreds of thousands on a daily basis. We ride the Metro. It’s a risky proposition.

We’ve gone into this countless times, and yet will continue to keep bringing it up, as long as there continues to be dangerous failures with Metro.

Greenberg and Bederman is an accident law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to the carelessness or negligence of someone else, and that includes those who have been injured on the Metro. If you or a loved one in Northern Virgina, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been hurt in an accident, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The hip replacement in question is made by a company called DuPuy, which is a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson. A study determined that the ASH hip implant had a failure rate of 13% after five years. That means that about 1 in 8 of the patients who had a hip replacement can expect something to go wrong with their hip replacement at some point in the future.

For those of you who do not have an artificial hip, you should be aware that it is a long and often quite painful procedure. Anyone who has gone through the process probably doesn’t want to go through it again. But because this DuPuy ASH hip implant is defective, people who have the implant in them when it goes wrong will have no other choice but to go through the surgery again. Surgeons will have to go in, remove the defective hip implant and replace it with one that isn’t defective.

While all of this is bad enough, DuPuy’s handling of the situation (and by extension, Johnson and Johnson’s handling of it) left much to be desired. We would go so far as to make the claim that their delay towards taking action has made circumstances even worse.

According to an article in the New York Times, DuPuy kept marketing and selling the ASH hip implant, even after they were made aware that there was a higher than normal failure rate. Rather than call a halt to distribution until they could be sure about the safety of their products, it was business as usual.

One of the major consequences of this defective hip implant is that the defect causes the ball part to rub improperly against the cup if the two parts are not properly joined together. This causes metal debris (shrapnel, essentially) to separate from the implant. These metal shards are then free to travel around the body cavity of the person with the implant. When the muscles are exposed to this debris, the tissue can become inflamed and the muscles can be damaged. The only way around this is, as we said earlier, to re-do the surgery, which means re-opening the leg, taking out the implant, replacing the implant, and closing the leg.

It is our belief that anyone who has been forced to go through this process a second time should not have to pay for it. They shouldn’t have to open their wallets for one second in the hospital, or to the insurance company. They shouldn’t even have to pay the deductible. Anyone who has a defective hip implant is completely absolved from any financial expenditure whatsoever as far as we are concerned.

We also believe that anyone who has suffered from a defective hip implant should be compensated for their time, and most specifically, their pain and their suffering. Going through a hip replacement twice due to the negligence of someone else is not something that you should just forget about and let go.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured due to DuPuy’s ASH hip implant. If you or a loved one has been adversely affected by this defective hip replacement, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

Believe it or not, it seems that the truth is the exact opposite of that claim. We are getting this information from a study that was published in 2006 by the American College of Emergency Physicians. While we realize that the study is five years old, what makes this study important is that it gives grades in two categories. The first would be quality and availability of care, and the second is what is called “liability environment.” “Liability environment” means the extent to which emergency room physicians are legally liable for damages. If there are caps and other restrictions in place in that particular state, the state is more likely to get an A or a B. If there are few or no restrictions, the state is likely to get a D or an F.

So here are some interesting results from the two-category grading system used by ACEP:

                                            Access to Care                          Liability Environment

District of Columbia                    A+                                                     F

Pennsylvania                               A                                                        F

Massachusetts                             A                                                        D

Maine                                          A                                                        D

Rhode Island                               A                                                        F

Ohio                                            A-                                                       D

Connecticut                                 A-                                                       F

As you can see, all of these states have a liability grade of either D or F. As far as the ACEP is concerned, these states are terrible places to practice medicine. There are either no caps on damages or the caps are on the higher end of the spectrum. There are no so-called “good Samaritan laws” or any other form of immunity for emergency room workers. Yet when you look over at the Access to Care categories, where you would expect to see equivalent bad grades, all you can see are a row of A’s. This means that there are plenty of emergency room workers, low waiting times and a high quality of care received. This goes directly against the standard argument of tort-reformers and insurance companies. There has been no exodus of emergency room physicians due to their fear of being sued.

So what do you think happens if you take a look at the other end of the spectrum? What is the quality of care like when the doctors (and insurance companies) are protected by caps and immunities?

                                            Access to Care                          Liability Environment

Texas                                          D+                                                    A+

California                                   C                                                       A+

Montana                                    C+                                                      A

Nevada                                       D+                                                     A

South Carolina                           C                                                       B+

Georgia                                      D+                                                     B

Colorado                                    C+                                                     B-

Again, we see the exact opposite of what tort reformers and insurance companies expect you to see. No fear of lawsuits, but no real spike in the amount of doctors or the quality of medical care.

Since we very much doubt that any of the tort reformers will give any sort of explanation for these findings, we would like to venture one. Medical malpractice lawsuits do not exist simply to make people money. They exist to help people who have been injured by the mistakes of doctors receive some sort of compensation. They also exist to help keep doctors on top of their game. If there are no consequences for bad medicine, bad medicine will thrive. Look at the doctors in Texas. They have no fear of being sued, so why bother going that extra mile? Why bother double checking? Why bother taking a second to make sure that the diagnosis is correct? What’s the worst that could happen?

Nothing will happen to the doctors, so the patients are on their own.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Maryland-based Medical Malpractice law firm. Our main office in Silver Spring allows us to serve the entire Washington, D.C. area, as well as Baltimore, Maryland. If you or a loved one in Washington, D.C, Virginia or Maryland has been injured due to the actions of a doctor, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

These exaggerated claims caused Yaz and Yasmin to become one of the best selling birth control pills in the country, which led to more women unknowingly placing themselves in danger.

Normally when you think of blood clots (if you happen to think about them at all,) you would think of them as positive things. They are part of a naturally occurring mechanism that keeps us from bleeding to death. If you cut yourself, the blood in the area of the cut begins to thicken, making it easier for the flow of blood out of the body to stop. But the problem with drospirenone is that it is apparently creating blood clots where there is no reason for them. These clots generally form in the deep veins of the legs, which causes pain and swelling (deep vein thrombosis.) The real danger happens when these clots break into pieces, because then they are small enough to travel through the bloodstream. They can cause blockages in blood flow to the heart, which is what causes heart attacks, and they can cause blockages in blood flow to the brain, which is what causes strokes. They can also cause pulmonary embolisms, which are blockages in blood to the lungs.

Blood clotting has always been a concern with birth control pills, but the numbers weren’t that high. Our main concern is that Bayer put out a drug that elevates the risk of clotting, and engaged in misleading advertising in order to market it. The sheer number of women taking these pills makes Yaz and Yasmin a very real health risk.

Greenberg and Bederman are currently representing women in the Washington, D.C. area who were taking Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, which is the generic version of the drug, and were injured or hospitalized as a result. Many of these health problems have effects that can last your whole life, and if the cause of the problems was a prescription drug that you took in good faith, then you shouldn’t have to bear the costs of your injury. If you live in Virginia, Maryland or Washington D.C. and you have been hurt due to Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

Here is the text:

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

What this means is that if you feel that you have been wronged or injured due to the actions of someone else, you have the right to have your case heard in court. This is an important facet of our society. In the first place, it prevents us from deteriorating into the law of the jungle, and secondly, it keeps people from ripping you off, taking advantage of you or hurting people with no consequences whatsoever.

Many large corporations find the Seventh Amendment decidedly inconvenient, at least when it comes to people suing them. They are big fans of the Seventh Amendment as long as they are on the “plaintiff” side of the lawsuit. So many corporations have found all sorts of interesting ways to get past the hassle of the rights of Americans. For instance, one of them happens to be what is called “the mandatory arbitration clause.”

This usually exists in the fine print of contracts, and we can almost guarantee you that you have signed one without even knowing it. Many cell phone companies have them in the small print of your service contract. What this means is that even in the event of a cell phone-related catastrophe that causes serious injury that is undeniably the fault of the cell phone company, you have signed away your Seventh Amendment rights without knowing it, and therefore cannot file a lawsuit against the company. Instead you get a hearing in front of an “arbitrator,” which is someone who makes a decision that has the full weight of the law behind it. The problem is that the arbitrator is hired by the cell phone company. There is nothing impartial about this process.

Many employers also have mandatory arbitration clauses in their employee contracts. So, again, no matter what happens, you cannot sue. You have to go through mandatory arbitration, with someone who is hired by your employer making the final decision. One particularly notorious example of this was Jamie Leigh Jones, an employee of Kellogg Brown and Root who claimed that she suffered a particularly awful case of sexual assault when she was employed in Iraq. There was some doubt as to whether rape occurred or not, but thanks to KBR’s mandatory arbitration clause, it took her three years to get her day in court, which she had to fight for every step of the way.

On top of mandatory arbitration, other methods have been used to circumvent the Seventh Amendment rights of Americans. One in particular is called “caps” on damages, which place a limit on the amount of non-economic damages that a plaintiff can win in court. Tort reform advocates would argue that they aren’t preventing Americans from going to court, but rather simply placing a limit on how much they can win. But since it often costs more to try a case in court than a plaintiff could win with many of these damage caps in place, it often amounts to the same thing.

So how did we agree to all of this? Effective public relations are certainly a big part of it. And perhaps the biggest tool that corporations use is yet another circumvention of a constitutional amendment. In this case it is the First Amendment.

There are occasions where corporations simply get caught red-handed, and in order to minimize the damage they agree to a settlement. What this means is that there isn’t a judgment involved. The defendant agrees to pay a certain amount of money to the plaintiff, and the matter is considered dropped. But quite often, these settlements come with strings attached, and the most common string that is used is called a gag order.

Gag orders prevent you from speaking publically about the terms or the amount of your settlement. And quite often, they only go one way. So while you would be unable to speak about the lawsuit or what caused you to sue in the first place, nothing prevents them from saying whatever they want.

You may have noticed that in the annual list of “frivolous lawsuits” that many tort reform organizations go into great detail about how ridiculous certain court cases are. These examples are picked up by the media, talk radio hosts, newspaper editorials and magazines, and everyone reads them and thinks it’s a crying shame, and as a result they don’t think twice about agreeing to more and more restrictions on their Seventh Amendment rights. But if you look carefully at these “frivolous” cases, you never hear from the plaintiff. You only hear one side of the story. The defendant can make things up, or the defendant can leave out crucial information and the defendant can minimize the extent of the injuries or harm done, and the plaintiff will not be able to correct the record at all, because if he or she does, they will lose the settlement.

So please, the next time you take a look at one of those “examples of ridiculous lawsuits,” please consider the source, or rather consider the source that you aren’t hearing. It might alter your thinking quite a bit.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to the actions of someone else. This includes victims of car accidents, medical malpractice or injuries due to defective drugs or products. Please call or email ourpersonal injury lawyers for an evulation of your case.If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

The FDA had been keeping an eye on this line of drugs, initially for valid reasons but reasons that overlooked the real dangers of the drug. The FDA’s first problem with Yaz was not the clotting dangers of drospirenone, but rather the advertising campaign that Bayer attached to the product. The advertisements inferred that Yaz would help women lose weight, would cure their acne and would cure all the symptoms of PMS. This was a gross overstatement of what Yaz can do for some users. In the first place, it doesn’t help all women lose weight. Some women reported that they lost weight, but some also reported that they simply didn’t gain any weight, while some women reported that they did in fact gain a pound or two. If you ran a survey of practically every woman who was on birth control pills you would probably get the same results.

Secondly, while Yaz provided some relief of severe acne, it didn’t do much for minor to moderate acne. Nor would it “cure” PMS. Instead users who were suffering from Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) reported experiencing some relief, but it should be mentioned that there is a big difference between PMS and PMDD. It’s the equivalent of the difference between a mild headache and a crippling migraine. It was disingenuous at best for Bayer to advertise that these pills would simply take care of conditions that women find troubling as well as providing them with contraception.

Disingenuous or not, the campaign worked. Yaz became the #1 selling birth control pill in the United States, which became alarming considering the damaging and potentially deadly side effects of this birth control pill. The FDA is finally getting around to considering what to do regarding pills with drospirenone, but in the meantime the product is still on the shelves, and is still being prescribed at an alarming rate.

At Greenberg and Bederman, we have been providing legal counsel for several victims of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, and are still offering legal services for women who have been adversely affected by Bayer’s birth control pills. But we are still concerned about this rogue ingredient drospirenone, which Bayer doubled down on in the new pill called Beyaz, and has been picked up by other manufacturers of birth control pills. This includes the brand names Syeda and Loryna, as well as Zarah. We would urge any woman in the D.C. area who has been prescribed these pills to please re-think your prescription and ask for a different method of birth control, preferably one that does not contain drospirenone.

If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been injured or hospitalized due to injuries suffered from Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella, Syeda, Loryna, Zarah, or any other form of birth control with drospirenone, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

This means that if you ride a Metro bus to and from work every day, you have a two out of seven chance of being involved in an “incident.” Those odds are terrible for any sort of transportation, much less a public bus service. To be fair, most of these “incidents” are either fender benders or situations where the bus hits a curb or other object that isn’t a person or a car. About 3% of these accidents end up causing injuries, while the rest mainly cause inconvenience and damages to properties both public and private. But one thing that concerns us is that Metro itself says that their drivers could have prevented about 41% of these accidents. Is this a statement on a lack of training for bus drivers? Or is it perhaps a reflection on the relative inexperience of so many of Metro’s bus operators? About 28% of Metro’s bus drivers have been on the job for less than five years.

We aren’t laboring under the delusion that Metro should have a completely spotless record when it comes to car accidents or car crashes in the D.C. area. But 6.8 crashes a day seems like the sort of number you would get for transit in Guadalajara or rural China.

The main point of public transit is to allow those who don’t own their own cars to get from one point or another, but another point is for this to occur in as safe a manner as possible. You shouldn’t be putting your safety at risk when you get on the bus or the subway, yet it seems that is what everybody who rides the bus in D.C, Maryland or northern Virginia is doing.

If you consider that the infrastructure of our subway system is also in particularly dire straits, then we are having a hard time recommending the use of our transit system at all. Let’s consider the following scenario: Say you have to commute from Arlington, Virginia to Bethesda, Maryland every day. Every morning you take the 7A bus from North Fairlington to the Pentagon. That puts you at risk of what Metro calls “an incident.” If you manage to get to the Pentagon, then you would take the escalator that might be working or might not be working down to the platform, where you would wait for the Yellow Line train. The Yellow Line train will move along at a high rate of speed on a track where the sensors are in dire need of replacement and the tracks are prone to catch on fire. You will take the Yellow Line to Gallery Place, and then transfer to the Red Line, again using escalators that might be running or might not be, and are also prone to the occasional brake failure and collapse. You would follow the Red Line all the way to Bethesda, where you would exit the station via the longest escalator in the western hemisphere, which is presumably held to the same standards of maintenance and care as the rest of the escalators in the Metro subway system.

Now that you have that information, doesn’t the daily commute seem a lot less mundane? The problem is that the daily commute is supposed to be mundane. It isn’t supposed to be a scenario where you are white-knuckling it from one end to the other. It should be up to everyone who utilizes our public transportation system to remind the people who operate and maintain it of that fact. Please contact WMATA and urge them to tighten up the standards for the bus drivers, repair the escalators and upgrade the sensors on the tracks.

If you or a loved one has been hurt in a transit accident on the Metro, Metro buses or any other bus system in Northern Virginia, Maryland or D.C, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

Insurance giants like Allstate, State Farm or GEICO didn’t get to be insurance giants by signing a lot of big checks. When you get into a car accident, the first question they ask isn’t “How can we help?” but rather “How can we get out of paying for this?” And they are very good at getting out of it. Harry Houdini had nothing on your average insurance company.

MSN recently published an article about some of the more notorious insurance adjuster tricks of the trade, and you would be well advised to learn them. Knowing how they work might be the difference between getting reimbursed for your damages and getting stuck with the bill entirely.

One of the more common insurance tactics is offering you a check as soon as possible. And when we say as soon as possible, we mean as soon as possible. Some insurers have adjusters on the scene before the wrecks are even carted away, and in some cases they even show up at the hospital if you have to go there. You might be thinking that the adjuster is using his amazing damage appraisal skills to do an instant financial calculation, and to a certain extent, that’s exactly what he’s doing. The rub here is that when he offers you that check, it may be for significantly less than what the damage will cost. And when you accept that check, you essentially absolve them of any further financial responsibility. You will be footing the bill for the difference between what the insurance company paid you and the actual cost of the car accident.

That’s the obvious trick. Some of the others are a lot more subtle, and most of the time it involves just sitting back and letting you talk.

If you just got into a car accident, your nerves are probably shot. Your adrenaline has kicked in. You might not always mean what you say, or even know what you are saying, for that matter. So if you say something like “I’m so sorry!” or “That was stupid of me!” or anything that can be misconstrued as you having anything at all to do with the causing of the accident, you are giving the other driver’s insurance company an out. Your best bet is to make sure that everyone is ok, and then don’t say anything.

The aversion that insurance companies have towards paying for damage claims is nothing compared to their loathing for paying for medical bills, and people who have been injured in an auto accident often aren’t immediately aware of their injuries until hours or even days later. Just because you feel ok after an accident doesn’t mean you are ok. If your injury manifests itself after you have already told the adjuster that you are fine, you will have a very difficult time getting the insurance company to cover your medical costs. If the adjuster asks if you are injured, the smart thing to do is say “I don’t know yet.”

Bear in mind that we aren’t encouraging anyone to be obstinate or unhelpful after a car accident. But you should know that insurance adjusters have a very specific job to do, and that job involves minimizing their financial responsibilities. If you get into a car accident, you should always keep that in mind. Keep what you say to the bare minimum, and don’t sign anything until you have a clearer understanding of the real costs of your accident, or have retained a lawyer.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Maryland car accident law firm located in Silver Spring, but we can help car accident victims in Virginia and Washington, D.C. as well. If you or a loved one has been injured in an auto accident anywhere in Maryland, Virginia or the District, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of damages that an injury victim can receive in the event that his or her case is successful. The first category is compensatory damages, while the other is punitive damages. Compensatory damages are meant to both restore your finances after the expenses of your injury and to provide you with monetary compensation for non-material losses. We’ll get more specific in a moment. Punitive damages are meant as a financial penalty against the person, persons, group or corporation that was responsible for the injury. Punitive damages are somewhat rare.

Getting more specific, here are the sorts of damages that fall under the compensatory column, but please bear in mind that just because you could win some or all of these damages doesn’t mean that you will win all of these damages, or that you will even win at all. There are absolutely no guarantees in a courtroom.

Monetary: These are for the obvious costs to you due to your injury. It means medical expenses (including any future care or rehabilitation that you might need,) as well as any costs that might occur due to your getting accustomed to a disability. Learning to live with any disability costs money, whether it’s training and rehabilitation or completely altering the way you live. For instance, someone newly confined to a wheelchair shouldn’t have to bear the costs of making his home wheelchair accessible if someone else was responsible for his injury.

You should also be able to recover your lost wages. That doesn’t only mean the money you lost when you weren’t at work. It could also mean the amount of money that you would have earned at that job had you not been injured. You should also be able to recover the value of any damaged or destroyed property.

If this was a particularly bad accident, you should also be able to recover the funeral costs of burying your loved ones.

Non-Monetary: These are the sort of damages for which there was no material loss. In other words, these damages aren’t paying for any money that you might have lost or any costs that you had to bear due to your injury. These damages are meant to compensate you for any pain that you went through, either physical or emotional.

These damages are commonly known as “Pain and Suffering,” which is supposed to compensate you for exactly that. In the event that the suit is being filed by widows or widowers rather than victims (in other words, if the incident involved death rather than injury), either the husband or wife could receive what are called “Loss of Consortium” damages. “Loss of Consortium” is basically compensation for the loss of companionship, affection, or any of the immeasurable emotional losses that occur when someone loses a spouse.

An important thing to remember about the non-monetary damages is that they are the sort that fall under “caps” in many states. For instance, Texas has a limit of $250,000 in non-monetary damages that can be awarded in medical malpractice cases. For a list of which states carry caps on non-economic damages, please follow this link.

A case illustrating how an individual is harmed through damage caps is that of Mrs. Connie Spears. According to the NY Times, Mrs. Spears suffered as a result of a medical malpractice in the state of Texas. She went to the emergency room with pain in her legs. Pain she’s felt before. They sent her home. Now she is in a wheelchair as a double leg amputee due to a misdiagnosis at the emergency room. “For Mrs. Spears, the double amputee, the double amputee, the frustration- and the humiliation- is daily. She used to cook, clean and care for her elderly mother, but now she needs help to go to the bathroom, to shower, to get around. “I’m dead weight”, Mrs. Spears said. “And the more I peive things together, the more angry I get.” Due to the damage caps in Texas, Mrs. Spears cannot find a lawyer to help her.

We would like to re-iterate that should you decide to move forward with a personal injury case, there is no guarantee about receiving any of these forms of compensation, nor of winning your case. However, the lawyers at Greenberg and Bederman have been fighting for the legal protections of the injured in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. for over twenty-five years now, and we will fight for our clients. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

What really happened to Stella Liebeck was that she suffered extremely severe burns to the inside of her legs, so much so to the point where there was speculation that she might not survive. Secondly, she didn’t try to sue for millions of dollars. She merely sued for her medical fees, which were around $20,000. (Skin grafts are quite expensive, as it turns out.) McDonald’s offered her $800.

There are a few more elements of the case that you never hear about when the case is discussed. You never hear that McDonald’s kept its coffee heated between 180-190 degrees as a matter of company policy. That temperature can cause third degree burns in seconds. You never hear that there were about 700 other people who had suffered severe burns from McDonald’s coffee. And you never hear that McDonald’s had settled in court cases over instances that were quite similar to Ms. Liebeck’s.

For some reason, the McDonald’s Corporation decided to toe the line with Ms. Liebeck, but since there was a history of settlements (which means that they had previous knowledge of the coffee being too hot for safe consumption) and since there was no effort to change the corporate policy of scalding hot coffee, that meant that McDonald’s both knew that the coffee was dangerous and flat out didn’t care.

It should also be mentioned that Ms. Liebeck didn’t demand $1 million. The jury came to the conclusion that it wasn’t that Ms. Liebeck necessarily deserved $1 million, but rather that a company that knowingly put out a dangerous product deserved to be penalized, and should be penalized in the only way that they would understand. And since Ms. Liebeck happened to be the one who was severely injured, and since she was the one who happened to be filing the suit, the money went to her.

However, it wasn’t $1 million that Ms. Liebeck eventually received. It was a little under $600,000. But that isn’t what everybody heard. That wasn’t what the news stories, speeches, bumper stickers and references on Seinfeld talked about. They all talked about the “McDonald’s Coffee Lady,” or “The Million Dollar Boo-Boo.” It even got to the point where a writer started “The Stella Awards,” which are given to people who file “ridiculous lawsuits.”

It goes without saying that there are some frivolous lawsuits out there, but Stella Liebeck should not be the person that is synonymous with them. She was seriously injured by a dangerous product. Naming a satirical award after her is practically the equivalent of naming it after someone who died of asbestos poisoning, or someone who died due to the chemical leak at Bhopal, India.

It is about time that someone brought the truth of Ms. Liebeck’s case to a wide audience. And while this film certainly does that, it also tells us about other ways in which our rights as Americans are slowly but surely getting chipped away by well funded corporate interests. “Damage Caps” that extend to compensation to corporations but not to the injured, mandatory arbitration and the railroading of an anti-tort reform judge all serve to paint a very accurate picture of what the less wealthy are facing if they ever decide to go court.

The main premise of this film is that the legal system is meant for all of us. It is not a perk for the rich. We urge you to see Hot Coffee as soon as possible.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to the negligence of others. If you or a loved one in D.C, Virginia or Maryland has beeninjured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for afree consultation.

Treating someone who is deep in the throes of mental illness can be a daunting task. In the first place, one of the chief hurdles is the frame of reference of the victim. A person suffering from insanity will adamantly swear that there is nothing wrong with him. An additional problem in treating the mentally ill is that our for-profit medical system makes treatment cost prohibitive. An insane person can’t hold a job, so he has no money, so he has no health insurance, so he can’t see a doctor, so he can’t get the treatment or prescription drugs that he needs, and his condition gets worse and worse. It’s a fairly vicious cycle.

When someone who suffers from mental illness is fortunate enough to have the resources to get medical treatment, he or she relies almost entirely on the skills and professionalism of the psychiatrist. It’s the psychiatrist who determines the form of the illness, it’s the psychiatrist who determines how severe the illness is, and it’s the psychiatrist who determines what course of treatment to take. And while any medical doctor can make a mistake, a psychiatrist is the only medical doctor whose mistakes can get people who are not the patient hurt or killed.

Here is an example:

ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia's top court is allowing the family of a man charged with stabbing his mother to death during a psychotic rage to file a medical malpractice lawsuit against his psychiatrist.

The lawsuit claims Dr. Derek Johnson O'Brien committed medical malpractice when he ordered two of Victor Bruscato's medications be discontinued.

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that a jury should decide the lawsuit brought by Bruscato's family in Gwinnett County. The ruling settled a debate about whether the lawsuit should go forward that had divided Georgia courts.

Authorities say Bruscato smashed his mother in the head with a battery charger and then stabbed her 72 times.

It would be one thing if this very sick man had not received any treatment whatsoever and then committed this crime. But the fact is the doctor involved knowingly altered an effective course of treatment which resulted in his patient’s psychosis getting worse. It would be hard to imagine that Dr. O’Brien had no inkling of what his patient was capable of, and why he simply cut off two medications in his patient’s treatment regimen without at least looking for substitutes is beyond our understanding.

When most people think of medical malpractice, they think of instruments being left in a body cavity after surgery, or a doctor who doesn’t recognize an obvious diagnosis when it is staring him in the face. But psychiatrists are medical doctors, too. They went to med school, they took gross anatomy, they did their internships, and they passed their medical boards. They are just as capable of medical malpractice as a surgeon or regular doctor. And as we said before, their mistakes can have consequences that go way beyond just the patient.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Maryland medical malpractice law firm that serves the entire Washington, D.C. and Baltimore area. We are currently offering legal counsel to those who have suffered severe injuries due to the negligence  of a doctor, surgeon, nurse or psychiatrist, contact a Greenberg & Bederman lawyer for a free consultation. 

It seems to be working. If you browse the internet, listen to talk radio, read newspaper columns or even look at billboards on the highway, you will see a concerted effort to change the definition of what entitlements are in the hopes that the United States will simply stop having them.

The fiction is that our “entitlements” (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,) are simply giveaways, funded by those who work hard and received only by those who don’t. They also like to push the idea that the monetary benefits that people receive from these programs allow them to live in luxury when in fact it isn’t much money at all.  It’s the myth of “the welfare queen” that many conservative politicians have used so successfully so often.  

However, “handouts” isn’t what government entitlements are. The reason you are “entitled” to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is because you paid into them. This money isn’t removed from your paycheck for fun. It’s removed to both pay for current recipients and to determine exactly how much you will receive in the future when you become eligible to receive these benefits. It is the exact opposite of a “handout,” and “privilege” doesn’t apply either. A “privilege” implies that you are getting something that nobody else gets, which isn’t the case for Social Security, Medicaid or Medicare.

Warren Buffet is a multi-billionaire. He is also 81 years old. He receives a monthly Social Security check, even though he doesn’t need it. Is he a welfare queen? He is also eligible for Medicaid or Medicare should he need it (although it is doubtful that he ever will.) He doesn’t receive any of that money or medical care because he is privileged or worth billions. He receives these things because he is 81 years old and has been paying into the system for his entire working life.

A public school teacher who makes significantly less than Warren Buffet will also be receiving Social Security checks when she is 81 years old. She will also be eligible for Medicaid or Medicare. She won’t be receiving that money or medical care because she is lazy or didn’t work hard. She will receive these things because she is 81 years old and has been paying into the system for her entire working life.   

It doesn’t matter where you started or where you ended up in terms of finance, luck or personal responsibility when it comes to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. As a tax paying citizen of the United States, you have paid into them for your entire working life. They are not charities, they are not handouts, and they are not “entitlements” in the pejorative sense of the word.

Included in this is Social Security Disability Insurance, which is financial coverage that you can apply for if you get injured or become ill and are no longer able to work. You have paid into this fund for your entire working life. It isn’t charity or being a leech on the system if you apply for SSDI coverage. In fact, not applying for Social Security Disability Insurance if you get injured and can’t work is like getting into a car accident and not using your insurance to help handle the damage. Your car insurance isn’t charity, and neither is your Social Security.

At Greenberg and Bederman, a significant part of our practice is helping Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. injury victims get through theSocial Security Disability Insurance process. That means our lawyers help you apply, deal with the paperwork, and represent your interests in any hearings that occur. If you or a loved one has been injured or has suffered an illness and cannot return to work, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

It is a sad state of affairs when you can find more information about the people you hire to hang your drywall than you can about the person who will be doing your bypass surgery. For one thing, the consequences of utilizing the wrong doctor can be life threatening. And when it comes to medical malpractice, it’s the repeat offenders that you have to watch out for.

Before they locked the public out of the NPDB, a group called Public Citizen took a look at the records and determined that of all the cases of medical malpractice that resulted in verdicts or settlements, about 50% of those instances of medical malpractice were committed by only about 5% of the doctors. In other words, there are a few bad doctors out there, but they happen to be really bad. Since 1990, about 4.8% of practicing doctors have had two or more medical malpractice cases go against them. 1.7% of those doctors have made three or more malpractice cases, and combined this 1.7% accounts for a little over a quarter of all medical malpractice payouts.

If your doctor or surgeon was part of the 1.7%, wouldn’t you want to know? If you had a surgery scheduled, wouldn’t you want to know if the person cutting you open had a history of medical malpractice, particularly if they had made three or more medical malpractice payouts? One malpractice payout can be considered an anomaly. Two would make us suspicious. Three or more is a sure sign of someone we would question before going under this person’s care.

Here are just a few of the doctors and surgeons whose records have been sealed from public view (all of these were taken directly from the Public Citizen report):

• Physician Number 94358, licensed in New Jersey, settled or lost 33 medical malpractice suits involving improper diagnosis or treatment between 1988 and 1993, inflicting over $400,000 in disability costs to his patients. This doctor has not been disciplined by authorities in New Jersey.

• Physician Number 64625, licensed in Pennsylvania, paid 24 medical malpractice claims involving improper performance of surgery between 1989 and 2001. Damages to this doctor’s patients exceeded $370,000. This doctor has never been disciplined by Pennsylvania authorities.

• Physician Number 125457, while licensed in Nevada, paid 5 malpractice claims involving improper performance of surgery between 1995 and 1997, with damages totaling $2.3 million. Recent news accounts have reported that doctors are fleeing from Las Vegas to other states to avoid high malpractice insurance premiums. Physician 125457 was ahead of the curve in moving his practice to California. There he paid another 8 malpractice claims with damages exceeding $7.5 million. This doctor has never been disciplined by authorities in either Nevada or California.

• Physician Number 37949, licensed in Texas, settled or lost 13 medical malpractice suits involving improper treatment or improper performance of surgery between 1990 and 1997. Two of the suits involved the same allegation—a foreign body left in the patient during surgery. Damages to this doctor’s patients exceeded $2 million. This doctor has never been disciplined by authorities in Texas.

What is sticking out at us here (aside from the obvious multiple cases of medical malpractice) is that none of these doctors were disciplined. Not by the American Medical Association, not by their state medical boards, not by anyone. Thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services for closing our eyes so we can’t tell if our doctor is one of the “fortunate” who has something to hide.

Tort reform organizations like to use the word “lawsuit lottery,” as if malpractice victims were actually quite lucky to be able to get injured by their doctor and sue them. We can tell you with great certainty that there is no such thing as a “lawsuit lottery,” as every single one of our medical malpractice clients would rather have their lives back to normal rather than fight through a multi-year malpractice trial. So no, there is not a “lawsuit lottery.” But because the National Practitioner Data Bank has been shuttered, there is now a “physician lottery.” Who knows who you might get when you book a surgery? Who knows what you might get when your doctor writes a prescription? Your doctor or surgeon might be the model of competence and professionalism, but then again, he might not be. As of right now, you have no way of knowing.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Washington, D.C. or Virginia who have been injured due to the negligent actions of a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional. If you or a loved one has been injured because of medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

The citizens of Spelter filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont, and after a series of losses and appeals on behalf of DuPont, the citizens actually won. In a settlement deal, DuPont offered to pay $70 million in damages and pay a further $80 million to establish a 30 year medical monitoring service for citizens who live around the smelting plant site. That might seem like a lot, but if you consider that in the original verdict that was subsequently appealed by DuPont, they were ordered to pay $380 million in punitive damages. And even after the West Virginia Supreme Court dropped that number to $196 million in punitive damages, there were still the healthcare costs for the victims to worry about.

So by settling, DuPont got off a lot lighter than they should have. While the health care costs were nothing to sneeze at, the punitive damages were what DuPont was worried about. And it seems like DuPont is always worried about punitive damages. They are members of the Chamber of Commerce, who support capping punitive damages. They are members of the New Jersey Lawsuit Reform Alliance, who also support capping punitive damages. As far as all of these groups are concerned, punitive damages (in other words, damages that are levied against a defendant to specifically hurt them financially as a reminder that laws and regulations are to be followed) are the bane of the existence of everyone who does business in America.

Except when they aren’t.

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Kolon Industries Inc. lost a $919.9 million jury verdict to DuPont Co. over the theft of trade secrets about the manufacture of Kevlar, an anti-ballistic fiber used in police and military gear.

Jurors in federal court in Richmond, Virginia, deliberated about 10 hours over two days before finding Gyeonggi, South Korea-based Kolon and its U.S. unit wrongfully obtained DuPont’s proprietary information about Kevlar by hiring some of the company’s former engineers and marketers. The award yesterday is the third-largest jury verdict this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

If anyone is interested in the math, DuPont received $769 million more in punitive damages for trade secret violation than they paid out in punitive damages for poisoning an entire town for thirty years. This should give you an idea as to how the judicial system slants when it comes to the rights of corporations to earn a profit vs. the right of citizens to compensation for injury.

If it weren’t for the fact that it isn’t very funny, we would barely be able to suppress a laugh whenever one of these tort reform organizations talks about how “flawed” the justice system is. We currently live is a system where corporations wage hundred-million dollar lawsuits over dolls and bullet proof vests, and where corporations can feel no compunction about receive punitive damages themselves over trade secrets while howling bloody murder over having to pay significantly less for causing provable physical harm to people. This is a system where the legal protections are given to malpractice insurance companies rather than the victim of the medical malpractice. This is a system where the “People in Theory” (i.e. the corporations) are given all the advantages, and the actual, real, living people are left to struggle against “caps” and “limits” which effectively keep them from going to court at all. If you happen to be a corporation, there is nothing “flawed” or “broken” about this system. It’s perfect. It isn’t so great for the rest of us.

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal help to anyone in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. who has been injured or made ill due to the actions of a manufacturer or industrial corporation. This includes toxic waste exposure, lead exposure, or contaminated drinking water. If you or a loved one has been injured due to industrial pollution, contact Greenberg & Bedean for a free consultation.

We saw a huge demonstration of that during Hurricane Katrina. Before that storm even made landfall, insurance companies were preparing press releases offering their condolences for “The Gulf Coast Flood,” which let everyone know how they were going to respond before there was any damage at all. They essentially offered a blanket denial of every claim in Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and practically the entire Southeastern United States. They were even denying damage claims in areas that were not even remotely close to standing bodies of water. Their motto was “It was a flood. Prove it wasn’t.” And when it wasn’t possible for insurers to claim that it was a flood that did the damage, they used the argument that it was a “storm surge,” which, to the best of our understanding, is not like wind because its origin point is a water-based hurricane. So, if it was wind that tore your roof off, they would be happy to replace it, but because the wind came from a hurricane, that renders your claim invalid.

This strategy brought hundreds of people to court, including a pro-tort reform U.S. Senator. Many of those cases involving Katrina and denied claims are still pending to this day. There is a chance that insurance companies in Vermont, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut might behave in a more even handed and fair manner after Hurricane Irene, but we doubt it.

We don’t expect insurance companies to pay for things that they aren’t responsible for. If a house has seven feet of water in the basement after days and days of steady rain, the damage may not be the insurance company’s responsibility. But if the wind from a hurricane causes a tree to fall on a house, thus destroying it, you can hardly expect anyone to believe that a “water based storm surge” is the culprit. 

We hate to be cynical about insurance companies, but we didn’t just pull this mindset out of thin air. As injury attorneys in the Washington, D.C. area, a great many of our cases involve going to court against insurance companies. It has been our experience and the experience of our clients in D.C, Maryland and Northern Virginia that they don’t have a “good neighbor,” they aren’t in “good hands” and nobody is “on their side” except us. The initial reaction of your average insurance claims adjuster isn’t “how can we help,” but rather “how can we get out of this?”

Who knows? Maybe we’ll be wrong. Maybe the insurers will give damage claims their due consideration and will treat each one individually. If they did that, maybe they would put us out of business. 

We hope there won’t be blanket denials that are delivered sight unseen.

Greeberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. As part of our injury law practice, we often help deal with insurance disputes. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own and is experiencing resistance from any insurance companies, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Many of you have probably become accustomed to the quicker morning commute, particularly when you are getting out of your neighborhoods and moving towards the highways. We would urge you drive with a little more caution on your way to work.

This means continuing to obey the standard rules of the road, but it also means a few other things that you don’t necessarily have to deal with during the summer months.

School Bus Rules: While you don’t necessarily have to stop when a commuter bus pulls over to pick up or drop off passengers, you absolutely have to when you are behind a school bus. That’s the reason that big stop sign comes out of the side of the bus when it stops. You also have to stop even if your car is on the other side of the street. Failure to do so will earn you a hefty fine. But the point is that kids are crossing the street to get on or off the bus, and the last thing they need is hurried and impatient commuters driving around the bus at thirty miles an hour.

Crosswalks: A lot of school districts have crossing guards to direct the flow of traffic at intersections near schools, but not all of them do. For those of you who are unaware of this rule, pedestrians always have the right of way at crosswalks. With school now in session, there are bound to be more pedestrians using crosswalks, so please exercise caution.

Speed Limits: You should always obey the speed limit wherever you happen to be, but the speed limit drops dramatically when you get near schools. Bear in mind, kids don’t always exercise the most amount of common sense, so children darting into the street without looking are not unheard of in front of schools. Make sure you drive slowly and carefully when you are in the vicinity of schools.

Common Sense: Washington, D.C. is a very busy town, with lots of people doing very important work. Many of us are juggling multiple projects, and many of us are in a rush to get to work, or to the next meeting. But no matter where you need to be, or what you need to get done, or who you need to talk to, none of that will matter if you get into an accident or hit a pedestrian. Being alert, turning off your cell phone, following the speed limit and never texting while driving should be the rules you follow the entire year around, but during the school year they take on a special sort of urgency. Out of every 100,000 traffic injuries, around 40 of them are school age pedestrians between the ages of 5 to 15. That might sound like a small percentage, but try telling that to the parents of one of those 40 kids who got hit by a car on the way to school. You should always drive carefully, but you should redouble your efforts at this time of year.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm in the Washington, D.C. area. We are offering legal assistance to pedestrians who have been hit by cars in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been hit by a car in the Washington, D.C. area, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

People who get severely injured and experience a severe decrease in the quality of their lives are certainly unlucky, but as far as we’re concerned, they are only unlucky if the injury was the result of a random occurrence, or as insurance companies call it, an “Act of God.” If somebody gets severely injured due to the negligence of someone else, then that person is not “unlucky.” That person is a victim.

Here is an example:

Everybody knows Martha Stewart, right? Whether you like her or not, you know who she is. You’ve probably bought or cooked something that she designed or dreamed up without even realizing it. She is not just a person. She is a brand name. She has lent her name to everything from sweaters to pots and pans to dishes to furniture.

The furniture is where the injuries come in. Ms. Stewart’s company designed, built and marketed a line of patio furniture. The problem was with a certain brand of deckchair. The chair was built in such a way that the legs slip forward when you sit down, which means that if you happen to have your fingers underneath the chair, your fingers could very easily get sliced off by the hinges.

This isn’t conjecture on our part. This has actually happened to people. For at least one case, three people either lost or badly damaged the tips of their fingers, and this happened because they bought a specific type of deck chair. It wasn’t a power saw, or a belt sander, or a set of sharp steak knives, or a product where you can assume that there is some risk of injury. It was a deck chair, which shouldn’t be a dangerous product by any stretch of the imagination.

If you buy a belt sander, and you slip while using it and mangle your hand, that’s “bad luck.” If you buy a set of extra sharp knives and you cut your fingertips off while dicing an onion, that’s “bad luck.” If you buy a chair and use it exactly as you are supposed to, but end up losing the tips off of your fingers, that isn’t “bad luck.” That’s negligence.

To Ms. Stewart’s immense credit, she thought so too. Her company ended up settling with three injury victims for an undisclosed amount. But there are many corporations, insurers and tort-reform organizations who feel differently. Their advice for the three people who mangled their hands would be to walk it off. Let it go. Move on with your life. Sorry you lost three fingers, but hey, accidents happen, right?

We don’t buy that premise. If you get injured due to no fault of your own, and if the fault can be squarely placed on the actions of someone else, why is it considered “weak” or “greedy” to expect financial compensation for your medical bills? Or for money to make up for the pay that you lost when you had to recuperate in the hospital? Or to simply make up for the fact that you don’t have finger tips anymore? How is that an unreasonable set of expectations?

Do not let anyone tell you that seeking compensation for your injuries is the wrong thing to do. Nobody asks to get hit by a drunk driver, or to get injured due to medical malpractice. Nobody asks to be hospitalized because of a dangerous prescription drug or a faulty product. The day that medical treatment is free and the banks start adopting a “don’t worry about it” policy regarding your mortgage, then maybe we can start telling you to “walk it off.” But until then, we recommend contacting a lawyer.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. injury law firm. We are currently offering legal counsel to those who have been injured due to no fault of their own. If you or a loved one has been hurt in a car or truck accident, or if you have been injured due to medical malpractice, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

As a real-world example as to how bad an idea privatization can be, consider what happened to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. This is an independent government agency that has a function similar to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, except that while FDIC guarantees bank deposits up to $100,000, the PBGC guarantees pension programs. In other words, if your pension plan goes belly up due to bad investments, the PBGC is there to guarantee that you will receive your retirement money.

One of the reasons that the PBGC is able to do this is because they keep their money in bonds and securities, specifically bonds and securities that are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. At least, they did until 2008. It was at this point that PBGC head Charles Millard thought that it would be a good idea to create a new “investment strategy,” which involved moving 45% of the PBGC’s assets into the stock market. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

From theAssociated Press, October 24, 2008:

WASHINGTON — The federal agency charged with backstopping pension benefits for 44 million Americans lost almost $5 billion from investments in stocks in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, the agency head acknowledged Friday.

The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. will lose 6 percent to 7 percent on its entire investment portfolio, PBGC Director Charles Millard told the House Education and Labor Committee. It lost a significantly higher percentage of its investments in equities.

In other words, Mr. Millard thought it would be a good idea to put pension guaranty funds into stocks instead of boring old bonds. And as everybody knows, stocks can turn valueless practically overnight. Can you imagine what would have happened to the retirement savings of millions of Americans if they had put their money in the stock market? What if their investor told them that mortgage backed securities were the way to go? Or to pool their resources so they could get in on what this guy Bernard Madoff had going on?

Privatization or turning the retirement money of Social Security over to everyone in America is not any way to “save” it. In fact, we aren’t even convinced that it needs to be “saved.” Many people are under the impression that when the money for Social Security is taken out of your paycheck, it is then put in a specific account for you. But that isn’t what happens, any more than an insurance company would take your premium dollars and put it aside for you specifically when you get into an accident. The money that you put into Social Security is used to pay the benefits of current recipients, and what is left over is put into the Social Security Trust Fund.

To be sure, sometimes the government borrows money from the Social Security Trust Fund. But they pay it back with interest. And while the mass retirement of the baby boomers might cause the United States to occasionally dip into the trust fund, the only way that it could be completely depleted would be if it were completely deprived of income. If you can foresee a future where absolutely nobody in the United States is working at all, then you can imagine Social Security “running out of money.” If you can also make the assumption that absolutely everyone in America will live to be 100 years old, then you can imagine that Social Security will run out of money. And if you can further make the assumption that absolutely everyone in America will make it to the age of 65 to begin collecting Social Security benefits, then you can imagine that Social Security will go bankrupt. If you can imagine that the economy will continue to be in bad shape for the next 40 years and nobody will pay in as much, then you can imagine that Social Security will go bankrupt.

We don’t practice disability law with the vision of all of those scenarios taking place, so we can’t imagine Social Security going bankrupt. When we help our clients get Social Security disability benefits, we do so with full confidence in the funding.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury and Social Security disability law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to the newly disabled, particularly those who have been injured due to no fault of their own. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or D.C. needs the services of an injury lawyer, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

One of the main principles behind Social Security is that it is not a charity. It is a fund that you pay into throughout your entire working life. The amount of money that you receive every month once you turn 65 depends on how much money you earned over the course of your career. But aside from a retirement fund, Social Security also exists as a way to provide some sort of income for those who become disabled and can no longer work.

This was a smart and compassionate thing to do. Not everyone who gets into an accident or suffers a debilitating injury has independent financial means. In fact, the vast majority of us do not. And not everyone thinks of buying long term disability insurance. In the event that you are injured and cannot return to any meaningful employment, Social Security Disability Insurance can provide you with some income, provided that you have a history of consistent employment.

There are also options for people who do not have a history of consistent employment. Economically disadvantaged people have also been known to have accidents and become disabled as well. So people who fall into that category can be eligible for what is called Supplemental Security Income.

Here are the major differences between the two programs. Social Security Disability Insurance is for disabled people who have fully paid into the Social Security trust fund for 20 quarters (with a quarter being a three month period) over the past ten years. Supplemental Security Income is for those who have become disabled, but don’t have a history of regular employment and don’t have very many financial resources.

Here are the specifics:

Social Security Disability Insurance:

·         Available to the disabled and blind, their spouses and their children.

·         The amount of money that you receive is based on your work history.

·         Eligible for Medicare after two years of disability payments.

Supplemental Security Income

·         Also available to the disabled and blind, their spouses and their children.

·         “Need based,” meaning that you have to be below a certain income level to qualify.

·         Less than $2000 in resources if single, $3000 if married.

·         You are allowed to own one home and one automobile.

·         Automatically eligible for Medicaid.

While this might sound straightforward enough, you should remember that the process for applying to either Social Security Disability or Supplemental Security Income can be a complicated legal process, particularly if you are attempting to go it alone.  A newly disabled person has a lot to deal with already without having to worry about the Social Security process. It can be a time consuming and contentious and more than a few applicants are rejected on their first application. Having an experienced Social Security disability lawyer can help you get through the process in less time and with better results for you and your family.

Greenberg and Bederman is a social security disability  law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping newly disabled people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. get through the Social Security disability application process. If you or a loved one needs assistance with either SSDI or SSI, contact Greenberg & Bederman for afree consultation today.

Believe it or not, this is what’s happening in Texas right now.

Depending on your perspective, Texas is either a “great” or “terrifying” place in which to receive medical care. If you happen to be a doctor or insurance company, it’s great. If you happen to be a patient, it most certainly is not the best. Under the guise of “tort reform,” people in Texas who seek emergency room treatment have essentially no legal recourse if the doctor treating them makes an error. The fine print of the 2003 tort reform law in Texas states that unless an emergency room physician acted with “willful and wanton negligence,” no victim of emergency room malpractice is eligible for civil damages at all. This means that it has to be proven that an emergency room physician meant to make a mistake, which is about the biggest legal oxymoron we have ever seen. On top of that, the main thrust of the 2003 tort reform capped non-economic damages at $250,000 for medical liability, which might seem like a lot, but is actually about what it costs to get a medical malpractice case through the court system in the event that a malpractice insurance company wants to settle. (They very rarely do.) So what you have in Texas is a system where people who have been clearly injured due to medical negligence are unable to bring their cases to court, either because they were injured in the emergency room and are therefore ineligible for civil damages, or because the restrictions on compensation make it financially impossible for plaintiff’s attorneys to take the case.

This has made life great for insurance companies in Texas. It has also made life great for doctors, who have had their chances of being brought to court dramatically reduced, even if they have committed medical malpractice. By limiting the options of what victims of medical malpractice can do after they have been hurt, doctors are free to practice their profession without the fear of being sued, and malpractice insurance companies are free to insure doctors without the fear of having to pay malpractice claims.

So now that Texas has essentially no consequences for medical professionals who make mistakes, guess what happens? The standard of care drops, for starters. And doctors, nurses and administrators start taking advantage of the legal protections in new and clever ways.

From the Associated Press:

The federal government said after an inspection at Parkland Memorial Hospital found conditions that were a "serious threat" to patient safety, the public hospital will not be able to participate in the Medicare program without coming up with correction plans.

Among the reasons for this potential removal of Medicare money are violations of infection prevention protocol, as well as a practice of moving the majority of patients to the emergency room to be screened, regardless of whether their condition required urgent care or not. The reason for that is probably to cover all the bases in the event that someone screws up. Remember, emergency room equals no liability. So if you check into a hospital in Texas with a manageable and minor ailment, don’t be surprised if they make you go down to the emergency room first.

So what do the patients in Texas get out of all of these protections for doctors and insurance companies? Not much. Rather than focusing on actual instances of malpractice, Texas decided to focus on restricting or removing the legal options of people after they have been hurt, which will do nothing to lower the rate of medical malpractice, wrong diagnoses, surgical errors, prescription errors or hospital infections. If anything, it would allow doctors, surgeons and nurses to practice with less care and concern, mainly because the consequences for negligent or sloppy medical care have been removed.

The next study that needs to be performed is to learn whether the cap on medical damages has resulted in lower medical malpractice premiums for Texas doctors and healthcare providers.

This is something to keep in mind in the event that any legislators in Virginia or Maryland point to Texas as an example of the “good” that tort reform can do.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to surgical errors, wrong diagnoses, hospital infections or other preventable forms of medical malpractice. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or D.C. has been injured due to the negligence of a doctor or medical professional, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today. 

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

This is a good thing to have if you happen to find yourself accused of a crime, but for those of you who are pursuing a civil remedy to a personal injury or a breach of a contract, there is no real time line for your case to get to court. You will get there eventually. But quite often, it benefits the defense to drag out the process as long as possible.

Here is an example: We have been discussing the serious health problems that have occurred with women who have been using Bayer’s line of birth control pills for about two years now. The issues with Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella have been going on for a lot longer than two years. It has been pretty well established that otherwise healthy women have been hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms, deep vein thrombosis, strokes, heart attacks and gall bladder disease, and the one major thing these women had in common was that they were taking Bayer’s line of birth control pills, each of which contain a synthetic variation of progestin called drospirenone. This ingredient can cause an increase in potassium levels in the bloodstream, which leads to a more active clotting mechanism. Clots form in the bloodstream, and then they start to travel, which leads to blockages in the bloodstream. This is where the pulmonary embolisms, strokes and heart attacks come from. The contention of the majority of these lawsuits is that Bayer failed to adequately research the effects that this new ingredient would have on the women who used their birth control pills.

As we said before, we have been discussing this for over two years now. In fact, we have a few clients who have been injured due to what we believe are these defective yaz birth control pills, and thousands of other women all over the country have filed suit for identical reasons. A few of these cases have finally been scheduled for October of next year:

 “The first trial dates for any Yaz lawsuits, Yasmin lawsuit or Ocella lawsuit pending in New Jersey state court will begin in the fall of 2012, with at least two cases to be selected as test cases out of hundreds of claims pending in the state.”

If this were a criminal case, the delay wouldn’t nearly be this long.

In many respects, defendants in injury cases use this delay to their advantage. The longer it takes for an injury victim to get to court, the more likely it is that this person will either accept a settlement that is much less than they can deserve, or will give up the case entirely.

For instance, let’s say you get hit by a car and have to spend six weeks in the hospital. During these six weeks, you aren’t working. You have no source of income. This does not matter one bit to the utilities, the bank that holds your mortgage, and the credit card companies. They expect to get paid. The insurance company of the driver that hit you has no such financial worries. Ultimately, they have you at a disadvantage, and many insurance companies will offer you much less than you will need to support yourself. If you refuse that offer, they have all the time in the world. They can request delays in the court proceedings, and often do. In the meantime, your financial situation gets more precarious with each passing day. All of a sudden, that initial lowball settlement offer starts to look pretty good.

One of the major problems with the Sixth Amendment is that it does nothing to address the delay that injury victims have to face to get their cases heard. While having an experienced attorney to help you navigate the legal process in your injury claim ensures your rights are protected, there is unfortunately, no such thing as a “speedy trial” for injury victims.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes car accidents, medical malpractice, defective drugs, and pedestrian or bicycle accidents. If you or a loved one has been injured due to someone else, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Investigators found the skeletal remains of Caylee within a short walk from the Anthony family home. The child had duct tape over the remains of her mouth. A search of Ms. Anthony’s computer found that she was entering phrases like “chloroform recipe” and “shovel” and “home weapons” into a search engine at around the same time that Caylee had initially disappeared. All of this, combined with the lying about seemingly everything and the strange behavior, was certainly enough for the authorities to take her into custody.

But as the whole country saw just a few weeks ago, it wasn’t enough to convict her in a court of law. Ms. Anthony was found not guilty on all counts of murder. The only counts she was found guilty on were the charges of lying to the police.

Predictably, the reaction by the public was one of pure outrage. There was anger directed at the jury for not drawing the obvious conclusion, and there was (and still is) an enormous level of fury directed towards Ms. Anthony. If you were watching some of the more apoplectic commentators on cable television, you would think that the jury was a parcel of simpletons unable to see the nose in front of their collective faces.

We don’t see it that way. It is our opinion that the jurors acted entirely appropriately, and while they might not have come to the conclusion that would have pleased the general public, they came to the only decision that they could have based on the evidence that was presented to them. And while there was a great deal circumstantial evidence in this case, there wasn’t one shred of it that could say with certainty that Casey Anthony was responsible for the death of her daughter.

The coroner couldn’t say exactly what caused her death. There was no DNA from Ms. Anthony anywhere on the remains of Caylee. We will say that there was plenty of evidence that made Ms. Anthony look extremely suspicious, but there wasn’t any that could have said that she was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

If Ms. Anthony is in fact guilty of murder, the burden of proof lies with the police, the forensics team, and the prosecution team. It is the job of the police to gather the evidence and come up with a plausible theory as to what happened. It is the job of the forensics team to examine the evidence to back up that plausible theory and turn it into something that can be proven. And it is the job of the prosecution to relate that proof to a jury and convince them that the person on trial is in fact guilty of the charges. The prosecution team failed to do that.

If there is anything to be learned from this, it is that the skills and judgment of the attorneys very much matter in any sort of court case. It doesn’t matter if it is a contract case, an injury case or a criminal case. The prosecution team from Orange County, Florida handling the Casey Anthony case moved forward with evidence that was circumstantial, trusting that the jury would be able to “read between the lines.” But that is not what juries are supposed to do, particularly when the prosecution is planning on calling for the death penalty.

There is no such thing as a “guaranteed win” in the courtroom. Any number of factors could cause the case to go against you. The attorneys prosecuting this case knew that, the attorneys defending Ms. Anthony knew that, and now, the general public knows it all too well.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We are currently offering legal assistance to people who have been injured due to no fault of their own. Our attorneys can help you if you have been injured in a car accident, truck accident or pedestrian accident. We can also help those who have been injured due to medical malpractice. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today. 

We were hoping the next replacement will be at L’Enfant Plaza, where what is about the worst case scenario for an escalator failure actually did happen on Halloween of 2010. Right after Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity (which was one of the biggest crowds the National Mall has seen in years,) the brakes on the escalator that leads down into the station failed, causing a pile up of humanity at the mouth of the station. Four people were seriously hurt. You can see the video here.

The next new escalators scheduled for installation are three at Foggy Bottom, three at DuPont Circle and three at the Pentagon. The rest will be going into what WMATA is calling “a major rehab.”

While we completely understand replacing the escalators at the South exit of DuPont (a collapse there would be a monumental disaster,) we are having a hard time understanding why the escalators at L’Enfant aren’t being considered a priority. If there is a total brake failure on an escalator, it would seem that replacing the entire escalator would be a priority. Plus, L’Enfant Plaza is a very high traffic Metro station, at least as equally high traffic as Foggy Bottom. But at this point, we have given up trying to figure out Metro. We just cross our fingers and hope for the best. And replacing some escalators is a good start.

However, we are worried about how this escalator refurbishment will take place. According to the article in The Washington Post, all of the escalators in the Metro system were made by seven different companies, four of whom are currently out of business. And the quote from Deputy General Manager Dave Kubicek makes us somewhat nervous:

“Vendors couldn’t service what was in there. No matter what we did, we weren’t going to be able to service them to the level of expectations.”

Further disturbing bits of information appear shortly below that particular quote:

“Metro used to contract out its service and maintenance of escalators and elevators but brought these back in house in spring 2010. If parts can’t be found on the market, Metro makes them or takes ones from elevators no longer in service.”

So basically, it appears as if in the interest of saving money, Metro brought the escalator maintenance in house, despite not having people with the skills to do the work or the resources to get new parts. They then resorted to cannibalization of no longer existing escalators and elevators, which makes about as much sense as saying, “Hey, why don’t we use the plug from this leak and move it over to the new leak? What could possibly go wrong?”

A great deal can go wrong, apparently. This is the sort of thing that you would expect from a subway system in a third world country, but not Washington, D.C. We urge WMATA to get moving on fixing or replacing all of these escalators before somebody gets hurt.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance for those who have been injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes injuries due to falls. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation today.

The overall premise of the article in the News-Sentinel is that even though Ms. Heath received a multi-million dollar settlement, she is still struggling to make ends meet. Tort reform organizations like to refer to multi-million dollar settlements like Ms. Heath’s as “jackpot justice” or “winning the lawsuit lottery,” but from our perspective (and certainly Ms. Heath’s,) it doesn’t seem like she could consider herself a “winner” of much of anything. What she received for her injuries was enough to cover some of her medical issues, but certainly not all of them, and this will last only as long as the money from the settlement does. There are no mansions, sports cars or trips to Bermuda in the equation here.

Also mentioned in the article is a piece of legislation that passed the State Judiciary Committee in Tennessee last week:

“Last week the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill proposed by Gov. Bill Haslam that would cap damages at $1 million in cases involving serious spinal cord injuries, severe burns or the death of a parent of minor children.”

If Ms. Heath is barely able to keep her head above water after a multi-million dollar settlement, how do you think those who have suffered severe spinal cord injuries are going to do on $1 million or less? You can also consider that many settlements don’t come all at once. They come in payments often spread out over ten or twenty years. If it’s a million dollars spread out over twenty years, that’s $50,000 a year before taxes, and significantly less after. This would be manageable if you happen to be a healthy person, but what if you happen to be confined to a wheelchair and are in a more or less constant precarious state of health? How does your financial picture look now?

For that matter, how do you think things are going for injury victims who live in states where the damage cap is $250,000? How do you think those “justice jackpot winners” are able to pay for their needed care with $250,000? We would guess that they aren’t doing so well.

On the other side of the coin, all of those insurance companies that benefit from damage caps are doing quite well. So what we are seeing put into place all over the country is help for those who don’t need it and punishment for those who do need it. To us, that makes absolutely no sense at all.

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people who have been injured due to no fault of their own. This includes people who have been injured in car accidents, injuries due to medical malpractice or surgical errors, pedestrian and bicycle accidents and injuries on public transit. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the negligence of others, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

To add insult to extensive injury, the victim walked back in to the station and asked to use the phone to call the police and an ambulance. Station personnel would not let him use the phone, and instead gave him 50 cents to use the payphone. Your taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

Sad to say, this is not the only recent instance of violence on Metro premises. Back in August, a fight turned into a 70 person mini-riot at Gallery Place-Chinatown. In January, a 47 year old man was beaten severely by a group of teens, some of whom recorded the video, which was then placed on the internet. Suspects still have yet to be arrested. Plus there was the brawl between two teens that happened on the Orange line, with other teens encouraging the fight. Again, no arrests. No police presence.

There has also been an increase in the number of robberies and thefts that have taken place at stations and on the trains themselves. On December 23^rd, a group of young men stormed an Orange line train and robbed several passengers, delivering a few beatings along the way. A teenager was robbed at gunpoint and then stabbed on a Blue Line train in mid February. And the number of people who have had their iPod’s or other electronic devices stolen while on the Metro has spiked by about 40%.

We aren’t naïve enough to think that crime doesn’t exist. Nor are we naïve enough to think that the Metro Police can be everywhere at once. But the thing that we are noticing about many of these reports is not only the lack of police presence, but also the apparent indifference of other Metro personnel. We hear stories about employees who won’t even let victims of beating use the phone, or station attendants who watch beatings take place and do nothing to intervene, or calls on emergency phone boxes that aren’t answered. It’s getting to the point where a quasi-vigilante group like the Guardian Angels is starting to up its presence on Metro, because it appears that they have no faith in the official authorities’ ability to protect passengers.

If you combine this climate of fear with the antiquated sensor system and very real threat of crashes, as well as the crumbling infrastructure of the stations and escalators that have a tendency to suddenly stop working, the DC Metro system resembles not an urban transit system, but rather a large and elaborate game of Russian Roulette. It isn’t necessarily about getting from point A to point B anymore. Now it’s about taking your chances.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people who have been injured due to negligence on transit systems in the Washington, D.C. area. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been injured on the Metro or on any of the local transit systems due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

To add insult to extensive injury, the victim walked back in to the station and asked to use the phone to call the police and an ambulance. Station personnel would not let him use the phone, and instead gave him 50 cents to use the payphone. Your taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

Sad to say, this is not the only recent instance of violence on Metro premises. Back in August, a fight turned into a 70 person mini-riot at Gallery Place-Chinatown. In January, a 47 year old man was beaten severely by a group of teens, some of whom recorded the video, which was then placed on the internet. Suspects still have yet to be arrested. Plus there was the brawl between two teens that happened on the Orange line, with other teens encouraging the fight. Again, no arrests. No police presence.

There has also been an increase in the number of robberies and thefts that have taken place at stations and on the trains themselves. On December 23^rd, a group of young men stormed an Orange line train and robbed several passengers, delivering a few beatings along the way. A teenager was robbed at gunpoint and then stabbed on a Blue Line train in mid February. And the number of people who have had their iPod’s or other electronic devices stolen while on the Metro has spiked by about 40%.

We aren’t naïve enough to think that crime doesn’t exist. Nor are we naïve enough to think that the Metro Police can be everywhere at once. But the thing that we are noticing about many of these reports is not only the lack of police presence, but also the apparent indifference of other Metro personnel. We hear stories about employees who won’t even let victims of beating use the phone, or station attendants who watch beatings take place and do nothing to intervene, or calls on emergency phone boxes that aren’t answered. It’s getting to the point where a quasi-vigilante group like the Guardian Angels is starting to up its presence on Metro, because it appears that they have no faith in the official authorities’ ability to protect passengers.

If you combine this climate of fear with the antiquated sensor system and very real threat of crashes, as well as the crumbling infrastructure of the stations and escalators that have a tendency to suddenly stop working, the DC Metro system resembles not an urban transit system, but rather a large and elaborate game of Russian Roulette. It isn’t necessarily about getting from point A to point B anymore. Now it’s about taking your chances.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people who have been injured due to negligence on transit systems in the Washington, D.C. area. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been injured on the Metro or on any of the local transit systems due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

What is puzzling to us about the fatality cases is that there seems to be a lack of interest on the part of the police to charge the drivers for the accidents. Out of the ten fatalities, only one driver was charged, and  he was drunk and tried to flee the scene. Nobody was charged when Constance Holden was hit by a military truck on her way home. Nobody was charged when David Williams was hit from behind by two cars, one of which fled the scene. Nobody was charged when 9 year old Rebecca Johns was hit and killed as she tried to cross a road in Franconia.

We aren’t sure why this is.  If you ride a bicycle in D.C, Maryland or Virginia are you expected to just take your chances? Are motorcycle riders treated the same way? What about pedestrians? Can you expect to receive no justice from the law when you are not in a car?

One example of this occurred very recently in Arlington on Clarendon Boulevard, which is incidentally one of the streets where there was a fatality in 2010. A bicyclist was travelling down the street when a car owner opened the car door. The bicyclist was “doored,” as the cyclists call it. This is when you collide with a suddenly opened door and then are essentially catapulted over it onto the street.

The police arrived at the scene and questioned both the car owner and the bicyclist. The cyclist claimed that he wasn’t really hurt, so the police sent them both on their way. The problem here is that the cyclist actually was hurt, but didn’t discover this until later.

This is a common occurrence. We have served many clients over the years that didn’t learn about the extent of the damage done to them until much later. Brain injuries often work that way, as does spinal damage or deep bruises. The effects aren’t immediately felt.

Later, when the cyclist realized that he was injured and would need medical care, he contacted the police and found that the officer at the scene had not filed a report. So there was no way for the cyclist to get any insurance information from the man who opened the car door.

Although there is somewhat of a happy ending here (Arlington PD have followed up personally with the bicyclist,)  the end result could be that the victim here might have to go out of pocket for medical expenses, which could be considerable. If you couple that with the fact that he would have to pay for injuries he sustained due to the negligence of someone else, you have to wonder why it was that the police didn’t file a report.

Bicyclists have as much right to our streets as cars and motorcycles do, and if they are struck by motorists, they need to receive the same care as a motorcycle or auto accident victim requires. Your responsibilites don’t disappear when you climb on to a bike, and neither should the responsibility of motorists or the police.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to bicyclists and pedestrians who have been injured due to the actions of motorists. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been injured in a bicycle accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation.

A recent study in the Netherlands backs this up:

In the current study, the researchers identified the main reasons for errors in 294 successful claims related to surgeries from 2004 to 2005. They then compared those to the items on a comprehensive surgical checklist called SURPASS, which is now used in several hospitals in the Netherlands.

It should be mentioned that this checklist is not an immensely complicated document. It includes simple things like making sure that the procedure is scheduled correctly, and that all of the needed instruments are available, or even marking which side of the patients body is going to be operated on. It’s not unlike the pre-flight checklist that a pilot and co-pilot go through before they take off.

When the researchers compared the successful medical malpractice cases to the items on the checklist, they found that 29% of the malpractice cases were directly related to something that was left off of the checklist. It wasn’t a daring surgical procedure that went wrong. It wasn’t a random action of the body that was blamed on the doctor. It was an easily preventable mistake that could have been prevented if someone had taken the time to make sure that the procedure was properly set up. It was a lack of communication among the hospital staff. It was misread handwriting. It was a scalpel that wasn’t available.

Since patients can’t be expected to handle these things themselves, the responsibility for all of this lands directly on the hospital staff. If a patient or the family of a patient comes to us and explains that their loved one was killed or injured because of a breach of the standard of care, and this was something easily preventable, it’s hardly “abuse of the system” if we try to hold the people responsible accountable.

According to the article, only 25% of American hospitals use any kind of pre-op checklist at all. And while we absolutely dispute that the rate of medical malpractice cases in America is somehow overblown or unsustainable, we have to wonder what the results would be if more hospitals made some sort of pre-op checklist a mandatory part of their practices. After all, medical malpractice cases aren’t filed for fun. They don’t fall out of the sky. They happen because of preventable mistakes, and it appears that by using these checklists, doctors and surgeons all over the country could lower the amount of those preventable mistakes by a considerable margin.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured by a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional. If you or a loved one in Washington, D.C, Virginia or Maryland (including Baltimore) has been injured due to medical malpractice or surgical errors, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

But it absolutely is in Texas. If you get treated by an emergency room doctor down there, and he makes a critical mistake, essentially all he has to do is say “I didn’t mean to,” and that keeps the victim of that mistake from collecting any damages, regardless of how bad the damage is.

The fine print in the law that capped non-economic damages at $250,000 had special protections for emergency room doctors, each of whom are now protected from penalties in court unless it can be proven that their negligence was “willful and wanton.” That phrase essentially means that whatever you did, you did so knowing that it would harm other people. And you are more likely to find Bigfoot riding a unicorn than any doctor anywhere who will admit to that.

Here is a real life example as to how this protection has further victimized people who have been injured by doctor’s mistakes. A woman with a history of blood clotting went to the emergency room of a San Antonio hospital because of leg pain. The ER doctor there sent her home with a diagnosis of “bilateral leg pain,” and advised her to follow up with her primary care physician. Three days later, she was in a different hospital, this time with tissue death in her legs and kidney failure. A filter that she had had placed in one of the veins in her heart was clogged up, which led to incredibly bad clotting.  Doctors had to amputate both of her legs.

Ultimately, the doctor who initially saw her and told her to follow up with her primary care physician must bear some responsibility. He didn’t ask the right questions, or he didn’t take the time to look into her case as thoroughly as he should have, and as a result this woman is a double amputee. But since he didn’t do any of these things on purpose, he gets a pass.

When you read about this case and others like it in Texas, you almost want to scream to the heavens. “Of COURSE he didn’t do it on purpose! He’s not a monster! He’s simplynegligent!” Medical malpractice suits aren’t filed because lawyers hate doctors. Medical malpractice suits are filed because sometimes doctors make easily preventable mistakes, and these mistakes have serious consequences. No lawyer would make the argument that a doctor gave the wrong diagnosis just to be mean. The argument is not “Did he mean to do it?” The argument is “Could have this been prevented if reasonable standards and practices had been used?” But the fine print in the laws of Texas essentially shifts all of the arguments into unwinnable territory for anyone who walks into an emergency room and is the victim of a doctor’s mistake.

These laws were not put into place to make things better for doctors or patients. They were put into place so malpractice insurance companies could continue to have profitable years. Call us crazy, but we think the financial health of an insurer should be the last thing on the list of priorities when you walk into a hospital.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured due to the negligence or incompetence of doctors or surgeons. If you have been injured due to the actions of a doctor, contact a medical malpractice attorney for a free malpractice legal consultation today.

Falls: Christmas lights are a proud tradition in America, and some people take great pride in having the biggest and flashiest displays in their neighborhoods. Usually this means a lot of climbing ladders and hanging around on the roof, which can certainly lead to falls. In fact, a three year report from the CDC claimed that “…The majority of falls were from ladders (e.g., while hanging holiday lights), followed by roofs (e.g., while mounting an artificial Christmas tree on the roof).” There were also plenty of indoor falls, as the report mentions that many falls come from “…furniture (e.g., while standing on a table decorating a Christmas tree, standing on a chair hanging holiday decorations, or standing on a step stool when hanging a tree topper), stairs, and porches. Other falls were caused by tripping over or slipping on holiday-related objects (e.g., tree skirts or ornaments).” The most severe injuries seem to come from falls off of ladders, which were responsible for 51% of all fractures. So the obvious lesson to take from that is to be as careful as you possibly can while hanging or taking down your Christmas lights.

Drinking and Driving: The Holiday season brings with it holiday parties, which inevitably brings irresponsible behavior. A report from the U.S. Department of Transportation claimed that between 2001 and 2005, an average of 45 people died from drunken driving related causes during the holiday season.  And according to MADD, alcohol is involved in 52% of collisions on Christmas Eve and 57% of collisions on New Years. The tough part about this information is that while you may not drink and drive, others might have no compunction about doing so. So saying “be careful” can only get us so far.

Others: This is a batch of statistics from England, and although you might think that these don’t apply, you should keep in mind that these are not “British accidents.” All of those that are listed are just as capable of happening to us here in the States.

·          3 Brits die each year testing if a 9v battery works on their tongue.

·          31 Brits have died since 1996 by watering their Christmas tree while the Christmas lights were plugged in.

·          142 Brits were injured in 1999 by not removing all the pins from new shirts 58 Brits are injured each year by using sharp knives instead of screwdrivers.

·         19 Brits have died in the last 3 years believing that Christmas decorations were chocolate.

·          British Hospitals reported 4 broken arms last year after cracker pulling accidents.

·         101 people since 1999 have had broken parts of plastic toys pulled out of the soles of their feet.

·          18 Brits had serious burns in 2000 trying on a new jumper with a lit
cigarette in their mouth.

·         A massive 543 Brits were admitted to hospital in the last two years after opening bottles of beer with their teeth.

So yes, Christmas is “the most wonderful time of the year,” but it’s also more dangerous than other times. People are in a celebratory mood, they are euphoric, they are busy eating and cooking and decorating and drinking. So by all means, enjoy the Holiday season, but please do so responsibly, and exercise precaution when necessary.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. area personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We offer legal assistance to those who have been injured in car accidents, pedestrian or bicycle accidents, and those who have been injured due to medical malpractice. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Since we know how dangerous lead can be, we found this article in The Washington Post quite disturbing:

The water in almost 15,000 D.C. homes that received repairs during a massive effort to remove lead pipes may still be contaminated by dangerous levels of the metal, according to a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

If those residences are home to small children, pregnant women or anyone with a compromised immune system, the water should be tested, said George Hawkins, general manager of D.C. Water.

The CDC concluded that homeowners who had pipes only partially replaced may have made the problem worse. The center also confirmed that children living in the District were exposed to an increased risk of lead poisoning from 2000 to 2006 as an inadvertent result of efforts to disinfect the water supply that caused lead pipes to corrode and leach into the water that flowed through them.

We also found D.C.’s reaction to this report from the CDC to be somewhat alarming:

George S. Hawkins, director of D.C. Water, said the report merely confirms previous findings that partial lead replacements, which the authority suspended in 2009, may have lead to short-time spikes in lead levels in those homes.But Hawkins said ongoing monitoring indicates the "vast majority" of the 13,000 homes where partial lead line replacements took place have nothing to worry about.

Even minor exposure to lead can cause painful and severe symptoms, so we aren’t too convinced that spiking lead levels somehow don’t cause a threat.

While we realize that D.C. isn’t exactly awash with money right now, these lead water pipes represent a serious health risk to tens of thousands of its residents. It needs to be addressed, and quickly.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to residents in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. who have suffered health problems as the result of exposure to pollutants or toxic materials, such as groundwater contamination. If you or a loved one has been injured due to lead or groundwater poisoning, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free contamination legal consultation today.

While the chemicals involved certainly did their job, they also wreaked havoc on the rural civilian population of Vietnam. Tens of thousands of civilians died early of cancer, and tens of thousands of children were born seriously deformed. And among the helicopter pilots, vehicle loaders and Special Forces units who handled the herbicide, the rate of cancer and birth defects skyrocketed.

There were two sorts of chemicals that were used to defoliate the jungles of Southeast Asia. One was called Agent Blue, but the chemical that was deemed the most effective and therefore saw the most use was called Agent Orange.

The Vietnam War was close to 40 years ago, and Southeast Asia is practically on the other side of the world, but if you think that the use of Agent Orange by the United States is not something that you should be concerned with, you should think again. Particularly if you live in the Baltimore-Washington area.

Frederick News-Post, 11/18/10: The Army sprayed about 17 pounds of a main Agent Orange ingredient on sections of Fort Detrick between 1944 and 1968, an official announced at a meeting Wednesday night. Randal Curtis, program manager for the St. Louis district of the Army Corps of Engineers, presented the preliminary Archives Search Report to the Fort Detrick Restoration Advisory Board. The findings were based on technical reports, standard operating procedures, lab notes, maps and photos uncovered in archive and records locations around the country. Curtis' office was tasked with sifting through these documents for any information on 2,4,5-T, one of two main ingredients in Agent Orange.

According to the preliminary report, Fort Detrick was the headquarters of the Chemical Warfare Service's special projects division during and after World War II, making it a hub for offensive and defensive biological research and development. 2, 4, 5-T was tested at Fort Detrick in three main time periods: 1944-1951, 1953 and 1961-1963.

As you can probably infer from that story, Agent Orange was not the only chemical that was tested on the grounds of Fort Detrick. But Agent Orange was sprayed into the ground, and the harmful effects of this chemical is well documented. And if you consider that Fort Detrick is currently the site of Army medical research, and that it used to be the headquarters of the Army biological and chemical weapons program, you can well imagine that the health of the surrounding residents is probably considerably worse than those who do not live near there.

The EPA has designated Fort Detrick a Superfund Cleanup Site, which means that in terms of the level of toxic waste and the potential harm that this place can do to the environment and the health of people around the area, its cleanup is an absolute priority. But that is small consolation to those who have already gotten sick, or worse. Frederick County is currently determining whether or not the surrounding area will officially be designated a cancer cluster, but even if they determine that it is not, it is impossible to imagine that sixty years of chemical and biological weapons testing and medical waste dumping had no effect on the groundwater or air quality for nearby residents.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal help for residents around Fort Detrick, Maryland who have suffered from unexplained illnesses, including birth defects, throat cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer or other serious diseases. We believe that the groundwater and air around Fort Detrick has been responsible for a high level of diseases and illnesses, and it is our hope that we can secure compensation for the victims. If you or a loved one has been affected by the pollution near Fort Detrick, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation. 

One man in Minnesota even spent almost four years in prison after his Toyota slammed into another car, killing all three of its occupants. Toyota’s policies of denial and not allowing any attorneys to access company information or the on-board computers that all Toyotas have, effectively helped keep this man in prison.

According to the New York Times, this quick response is part of Toyota’s new “global safety initiative,” and while we certainly have no problem with that (or any problem with the speed and efficiency of this recall,) we do have a problem with the behavior that made this new efficiency and commitment to safety necessary. A commitment to driver safety should be the first priority of any auto company. Safety recalls should not be plea bargained, and crucial information should not be kept from the public.

We also have a problem with Toyota swearing up and down that all of these instances can be chalked up to “driver error,” when there are simply too many examples of this not being the case.

The recalled models are as follows:

2005-2006 Toyota Avalon

2004-2006 Toyota Highlander

2004-2006 Lexus RX330

2006 Lexus GS300

2006 Lexus IS250

2006 Lexus IS350

If you own any of these vehicles, and yours has been affected, you should expect notification via e-mail or postcard from the Toyota Corporation. It is very important that you take your car in for the necessary repairs.

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. For twenty five years we have helped injury victims all over the Washington and Baltimore areas, and that includes Northern Virginia. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to a malfunctioning Toyota or other defective vehicle. Dealing with any injury case is not something that you should face alone, particularly if the injury was caused by the actions of a large corporation. Let Greenberg & Bederman handlle your personal injury negotiation. Contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

We completely understand how some people might find such advertising a little disconcerting, but we would like to point out that anyone who has any sort of business engages in advertising, be it a law firm or hardware store or ice cream parlor. Business owners who do not advertise will probably not be business owners for very long. And having represented the injured in the D.C. area for so long, we can tell you with great certainty that injury victims who choose to go it alone usually get treated very poorly by insurers or business owners. Our advertising is not just a way of getting business; it is letting the injured know that they have options and legal rights that they might be unaware of.

Word of Mouth and Professional References: The next time you are at a dinner party, ask any of the guests if they have been involved in a serious car accident. There will probably be more than one person who says yes. You may further ask if any of the guests had difficulties with their insurance company, and we can bet that more than one person will say yes. It is usually the bad behavior of the insurance company that causes the inured to look for an injury or accident lawyer. We have provided legal services for injury victims in the D.C. area for a little less than twenty five years now, and in that time we have built a good reputation as ethical, AV Martindale rated, knowledgeable injury lawyers. Quite often we get calls or e-mails from people who have been hurt, and they say that they were referred by a cousin or a co-worker that we have represented, or by other attorneys who don’t practice injury law.

Our Website: The internet is a crucial element of any modern marketing strategy, and we do our best to keep up with the rapidly changing pace of technological advancements. To that end, we update our website and our blog with new information constantly, not only to attract potential clients but also to keep the average citizen informed on legal issues and changes in the law that might affect them.

Other Internet Marketing: We engage in PPC (pay-per-click) advertising campaigns on Google,Yahoo and Facebook, in which those who type in specific key words will be shown a prominently placed link to our website at the top of the results.

So in a nutshell, we use all of the above mentioned methods to market our services. What follows is a list of what we don’t do.

WHAT WE DON’T DO:

Unsolicited Approaches: We do not and have never contacted injury victims without being contacted first.  We find that unsolicited approach to be profoundly unethical, in bad taste, and, in many cases such methods are against the law. In fact, we wrote a strongly worded article expressing that very same sentiment on this blog a week ago.

Visiting the Scene of an Accident:  An accident scene is usually chaotic, whether it is a major accident or a minor crash. The last thing the police or paramedics need is people  getting in the way, whether they are onlookers, insurance adjusters, or personal injury attorneys. We have never visited the immediate aftermath of an accident for the purposes of “drumming up business.” Frankly, we find such behavior repulsive.

Guarantees: We have never offered guarantees of a successful verdict or settlement to our clients, and we believe that anyone who is approached by attorneys who make such guarantees should find other legal counsel immediately. We also don’t encourage people to take legal action where there is barely any basis for doing so. Quite often, we end up telling people who come to see us that the settlement that they were offered was a fair one and that the matter should end there. We NEVER talk people into filing lawsuits.

Any lawsuit is a serious matter, and is not something to be taken lightly. We make sure that all of our potential clients know the pros and cons of taking their case to court, and we make sure that they know what to expect when they initiate legal action.

If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident in the D.C. area due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free consultation today.