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

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 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.

Another danger is the design. The safest container for a cup of boiling water and noodles would be one where the base is wider than the lid of the container. Failing that, you would at least want a container where the base and the lid are equal with one another, like a coffee cup. Instead, these containers are built with the top significantly wider than the base. They are quite literally “top-heavy,” and that is absolutely the worst way for a container of boiling water to be built, particularly if the directions advise you to pour boiling water all the way up to the rim.

The results of this flawed and dangerous design are very predictable. As the doctor mentioned in the NPR story, they get at least two three cases of serious burns a week that stem directly from these cups. That’s over 100 burn victims just in that hospital from one specific product. We are sure that there are similar numbers in other burn units all over America.

With soup burns happening with such frequency, we simply cannot imagine that Nissin (the company that manufactures Cup Noodles) is unaware of the problem.  That leads us to believe that Nissin is simply engaging in some arithmetic. The formula probably goes like this: How much would it cost to settle with every person burned by our product who sues us? How much would it cost to redesign our container, and then implement the new manufacturing process for that container? We have to imagine that it’s simply cheaper for them to write checks to burn victims.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before. It was definitely seen in the Stella Liebeck case, in which a woman suffered severe burns from a cup of McDonald’s coffee. It turned out that McDonald’s had been serving coffee that was significantly hotter than any other chain of restaurants, and had also been settling with victims of their too-hot coffee for years. The general public didn’t really learn about this aspect of the case. Instead, all they hear about was “the lady who spilled coffee on herself and won $1,000,000.” Ms. Liebeck was hampered by a gag order and couldn’t respond.  Her case was used as an example of our so-called “broken court system,” and was used to push through laws that effectively curtailed the Seventh Amendment rights of all of us.

It would be a complete shame if Nissin attempted the tactic of ridiculing the victims here as the McDonald’s corporation did to Ms. Liebeck. Since this story broke out, we think they (or any tort reform organization) would be unable to paint hundreds of burn victims as “money-hungry.”

Instead, Nissin should view this as an opportunity. They are in the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons, and they have a chance to commit to making new and safer containers. If they did that, we would certainly buy them. The soup is pretty good, after all. If Nissin took this chance to show the world that they value the safety of their customers more than the robustness of the profit margins, they would be setting the best possible example. Now is their chance. We hope they take it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone in the Washington, D.C. area who has been injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes people who have been injured due to faulty products. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been hurt in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for afree consultation today.

Indiana is one of those states with “caps” in place on the amount of damages that a plaintiff can receive in a case. And in the event that someone wants to sue Indiana, the limit that they can get is $5 million. That seems like a lot, except we don’t mean $5 million per person. We mean $5 million per incident.

With seven people dead and forty-five people injured (many of them seriously,) a hard ceiling of $5 million will not be enough to cover the medical bills of the survivors, or to compensate the families of those who died. If you don’t count the seven deaths and consider just the forty-five injured, divvying up $5 million would give each injury victim around $111,111, but that’s assuming that the state will be willing to go all the way up to the limit of $5 million. And if you only count the seven deaths and not the forty-five injured, the family of each victim would get around $714,000, again assuming that the state will allow the maximum payment to be made. Or perhaps they will figure it out some other way. Maybe the people who survived but are injured will get a little bit of money, and maybe they will give more of the share to the families of the people who died, or maybe they should do it vice versa.

Do you see the sickening sort of arithmetic that has to take place once there are damage caps in place? Rather than allowing each case to be determined on its merits and centered on the needs of the victims or their loved ones, Indiana has forced all of these victims of negligence to scratch and scrape for inadequate funds. The severely injured will be left with overwhelming medical bills and will probably have to turn to Indiana for aid anyway, or they will have to apply for Social Security Disability payments or Medicaid.

To us, this appears to be the same old story. Everyone in a state is sold on the idea that there is a plague of frivolous lawsuits, they agree to caps on what plaintiffs can be awarded, and then due to an accident, negligence or simply any unforeseen event, they find out the hard way what these caps really mean. People in Indiana are learning this lesson now, and unfortunately so are the victims of the State Fair stage collapse.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to victims of car accidents, medical malpractice, negligence or defective prescription drugs. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Washington, D.C. or Virginia has been injured in an accident, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Here’s the law about crosswalks in Virginia:

§ 46.2-924. Drivers to stop for pedestrians; installation of certain signs; penalty.

A. The driver of any vehicle on a highway shall yield the right-of-way to any pedestrian crossing such highway:

1. At any clearly marked crosswalk, whether at mid-block or at the end of any block;

2. At any regular pedestrian crossing included in the prolongation of the lateral boundary lines of the adjacent sidewalk at the end of a block;

3. At any intersection when the driver is approaching on a highway or street where the legal maximum speed does not exceed 35 miles per hour.

Here’s the law about crosswalks in Maryland:

§ 21-502. Pedestrians' right-of-way in crosswalks.

(2) The driver of a vehicle shall come to a stop when a pedestrian crossing the roadway in a crosswalk is: 

(i) On the half of the roadway on which the vehicle is traveling; or 

(ii) Approaching from an adjacent lane on the other half of the roadway. 

It’s a pretty simple premise. If you are driving down the road and you see a pedestrian or bicyclist in the crosswalk, you stop and let him continue. You don’t floor it in the hopes that you can make it past him before he gets to your lane. You don’t swerve into the oncoming lane to get past him. You stop and let him continue.

On July 25^th, there was a three car accident on the George Washington Parkway. A driver stopped at an intersection to allow a bicyclist to cross at the intersection, which is exactly what a driver is supposed to do. The bicyclist was about to cross when he saw a pickup truck approach without changing its rate of speed. The pickup truck then slammed into the back of the car of the driver who was obeying the law. Two people were injured, and fortunately the bicyclist was not one of them.

There are a great many crosswalks on the GW Parkway that don’t have any signals on them. A lot of people assume that they can just breeze past them without giving any consideration towards joggers, pedestrians or bicyclists. This misconception is not being helped by what the National Park Police have been doing lately.

A man named Andrew Beaujon, who is a reporter at TBD, was crossing the GW Parkway on August 2^nd. A driver slowed down to let him cross, and for his troubles this driver was pulled over by a NPP officer and reprimanded. The officer’s argument was that the driver might have caused an accident similar to the one that happened on July 25^th. This is probably the first time in our memories that we have ever heard of someone being reprimanded for obeying the law.

Is there something we have missed? Did pedestrians and bicyclists become second class citizens all of a sudden? Is preventing car accidents more important than preventing pedestrian and bicycle accidents? We were under the impression that all three are something that should be prevented.

One particular way that this could be handled would be to place either stoplights, stop signs, or at the very least a flashing orange light at the multiple unmarked pedestrian crossings on the GW Parkway. Surely something can be done to facilitate this, but in the meantime, National Park Police should not reprimand drivers for obeying the law, and drivers should continue to stop for crossing pedestrians and bicyclists.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington D.C. area personal injury law firm. Located in Silver Spring, Maryland, we are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured in car accidents, bicycle accidents and pedestrian accidents. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident due to no fault of your own, 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.

We’re pretty sure that the ATRA and the Chamber of Commerce have plenty of lawyers themselves, and we are willing to bet that they understand the definitions of “plaintiff” and “defendant.” The reassignment of the word “victim” is a clever juxtaposition of roles in a legal case, and if it gets hammered into the heads of the general public long enough, they will probably start to believe it.

We also have a problem with the idea that lawsuits are epidemic. They simply do not occur very often.  According to the Center for Justice and Democracy, only about ten percent of injury victims file a compensation claim, and only two percent of those that file a compensation claim go on to file a lawsuit. The National Center for State Courts states that tort lawsuits have declined 21 percent over a ten year period in 30 states, and they further mention that contract lawsuits (corporations suing corporations) have increased 25 percent in 13 states over that same period of time. Oddly enough, you never hear from tort reformers and the Chamber of Commerce complaining about the explosion in contract lawsuits. It appears those sorts of lawsuits are just fine and dandy.

What about the contention that lawsuits are the bane of the small businessman’s existence? The Chamber of Commerce claims to be the official spokesmen for businesses everywhere, both small and not so small. As far as the Chamber is concerned, every small business out there is terrified of lawsuits. But a recent poll suggests that they maybe they should ask the small businessmen themselves; mainly because it seems that fear of lawsuits is pretty far down on the list.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses surveyed a large group of small business owners in order to get an overall sense of their worries and concerns. The various problems faced by small businesses were ranked in order of concern, and to be sure, fear of lawsuits was on the list. However, it was listed at number 65 out of 75, with 36.7 percent of respondents claiming that it “was not a problem.” Above the “fear of lawsuits” was listed such concerns as “traffic,” “delinquent accounts,” “getting information on government assistance programs” and, “cost of health insurance,” which was solidly in first place.

Small businesses seem to be the watchword of the day over at the Chamber, along with “job-killing,” which is the term they hang in front of anything that they don’t like. As they push forward with more and more legislation on state and national levels, the rationale is that “caps” on damages and restrictions on who can go to court will “help small businesses”, but if the small businesses aren’t particularly worried about lawsuits, who benefits the most from these caps?

We suspect it would be the “non-small businesses.” Large corporations, chemical manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies, who interact with a much wider percentage of the populace, and therefore have more of a tendency to do more damage if they are negligent. If anything, these caps and restrictions could actually help prevent small businesses from receiving fair compensation if they are forced to go to court against a large corporation, to say nothing of the restrictions they already place on individual citizens.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in the Washington, D.C. area. We offer experienced and dedicated legal counsel to those who have been hurt due to no fault of their own. If you have suffered from a medical malpractice, been injured in a car accident, suffered an adverse effect from a pharmaceutical drug or medical device, or been hurt due to the negligence of someone else, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

The District of Columbia subway system was built on what was essentially a swamp. It is not exactly the firmest of ground. While they were building the Washington Monument back in the 19^th century, the structure started to sink and tilt until they extended the foundation to around 37 feet. If they had kept the original foundation, the Monument would look like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

It is for this reason that the subway tracks are much deeper here than in New York. There are places in Washington and Maryland where the tracks would have been unsupportable if they weren’t positioned deep underground. So when people have to walk up the escalator at DuPont Circle, they have to walk up 319 steps, which span 188 feet. And Bethesda is known for having the longest escalator in the entire western hemisphere, which spans 475 feet. To put that into context, it’s actually longer than the staircase that leads to the interior of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. And while none of the other stations have escalators that are longer than Bethesda’s, many of them are still pretty long.

Now, how many of you would like to climb up broken escalators like that, particularly when the temperature is 100 degrees outside? If any of you rode the Metro on June 1^st, you probably had to walk, whether you wanted to or not.

From the June 1^st edition of the Washington Examiner:

“One out of every five Metro escalators was out of service Wednesday, leaving riders hiking up and down what should have been moving staircases as temperatures soared into the mid-90s…As of 9:40 a.m., 126 of the agency's 588 escalators were out of commission. But that number wasn't an anomaly. On Monday, it was 113 at one point. Last Wednesday it hit 110.”

You should remember that public transportation is for everyone, not just young, fit people who can make a trip up a staircase like that with no problems. It is also for the elderly, and for people with injuries, and for travelers and shoppers who are encumbered with luggage and groceries. Forcing them to trudge up and down lengthy flights of stairs due to negligence of the system goes directly against the spirit of what a public service is supposed to be about.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal help to people who have been injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes people who have been injured due to the negligence of public transit officials and employees. If you or a loved one in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. has been injured due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free personal injury case evaluation.

It’s hard to say for sure. But considering that about 2/3rds of the population uses a cell phone on a regular basis, and has done so for almost a generation now, surely we would have all noticed if these things were particularly toxic and dangerous to our health. In fact, there was a recent study from the University of Manchester which states that while there was in fact an increase in brain cancer as cell phone use has gone up, the increase over that particular period of time was about .6 cases per 100,000 people per year.

That’s notable, to be sure, but it doesn’t seem to be an epidemic. Too much of anything can be bad for you. Consider the case of the woman who died after drinking too much water. Or for that matter, consider the spokesperson for Heart Attack Grill, who did in fact die of a heart attack. Overindulgence in water, alcohol or a fatty food is, in all probability, a much faster way to harm yourself than cell phone use.

Don’t get us wrong. We will certainly keep an eye on the dangers of cell phone use as it develops. But, the radiation dangers of cell phones are pretty far down the list in terms of ways that they can hurt people. While radiation and cancer are certainly nothing to scoff at, the danger of getting hit by a half ton vehicle moving at thirty miles an hour is certainly more immediate. And considering how many people in America think nothing of sending a text message on their phone while driving, that particular danger is much more real than getting a tumor from cell phone use.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, 5,474 people were killed in 2009 due to distracted driving. By the standards of DOT, distracted driving can occur in three ways. There is visual distraction, which is what happens when you take your eyes off the road. There is manual distraction, which is what happens when you take one or more hands off the wheel. And there is cognitive distraction, which is what happens when you let your attention wander. Texting while driving is one of the rare forms of distracted driving that manages to hit visual, manual and cognitive distraction all at the same time. And anyone who has a teenager or a child in his or her twenties knows perfectly well how much texting is going on. If the 5,474 people who got killed because of distracted driving doesn’t show the dangers of texting while driving, then maybe the half a million who got injured might make it a little more clear.

So while we aren’t completely discounting the idea that cell phones might cause cancer, we are thinking that the real threat to the health and safety of others is not necessarily the phones, but rather those who use them irresponsibly. Whatever message or piece of information that you need to send, we are sure that it can wait until you either get to your destination or at least can pull over to the side of the road. Please don’t text and drive.

Greenberg and Bederman is a car accident injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. who have been injured due to the actions of other drivers. This includes people who have been hurt due to someone texting while driving. If you or a loved one in the Washington, D.C. area has been injured due to a distracted driver, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

For instance, let’s say you are a public school teacher and get severely injured due to the actions of an enormous corporation. Would you like to run the risk of paying the law firm that this corporation hires to defend itself in the event that you end up losing your case? Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as a “slam dunk” lawsuit, corporations often drag cases out in order to make lowball settlement offers more appealing. Do you have any idea how much that would cost? Probably a lot more than it would cost to make you whole after your injury.

It is already difficult enough for people in Texas to access the courts in the first place. Tort reform laws for medical malpractice have essentially made it impossible for low income individuals to enter the courtroom. With strict damage limits on non-economic damages, malpractice lawyers (most of whom operate on a contingency fee basis) can’t afford to bring these cases to court. After court costs, hiring expert witnesses, and the general labor of bringing a case to trial, most attorneys would end up losing money on the case. And a cap on non-economic damages might not bother you if you happen to play first base for the Washington Nationals, but if you are like the vast majority of the rest of us, non-economic damages are a crucial part of an injury case. Plus, if you happen to get injured due to the actions of emergency room personnel, the only way they can be found guilty in Texas is if they admit that they meant to hurt you. And who in their right minds would do that?

So now that doctors (and their insurance companies) are squared away and protected in ways that don’t extend to their patients, Governor Perry has decided to make sure that the rest of the folks who need the least protection get the most of it. The code word is “small businesses,” which is actually just short hand for “large businesses.” Basically, it doesn’t matter how much damage they do. There are now a series of safety nets in Texas that allows businesses to do whatever they want, regardless of the consequences. I mean, what are you going to do if you get hurt? Sue them? Are you sure you want to do that? What if you lose? And if you win? You might be able to maybe keep your house with the winnings. But it will be back to business as usual for them.

It’s worth mentioning that in the press release, there is plenty of talk of judges and defendants, and how this new legislation will make everything easier for them. But there is not one mention of the rights of plaintiffs, injury victims or victims of medical malpractice. Mentioning injury victims wouldn’t be very popular with this bill.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to victims of medical malpractice in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been a victim of a surgical error, wrong diagnosis, prescription error or any other form of medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation. 

But there are two major differences between my experience with the coffee and Ms. Liebeck’s. In the first place, Ms. Liebeck accidentally spilled the entire cup into her lap. Secondly, Ms. Liebeck’s coffee was about 40 to 50 degrees hotter than the coffee that comes out of my coffee maker at home. It’s the difference between “hot” and “third degree burns.” Ms. Liebeck spent about eight days in the hospital, and her burns required skin grafts and painful recuperation. 

When you ask the tort reform people about this case, this is where they usually say “…and this woman sued McDonald’s for $1 million, and she won!”  But actually, that isn’t what happened at all.

Mrs. Liebeck asked for $20,000, mainly because she underwent painful skin grafts. McDonald’s refused her claim. If McDonalds had simply paid $20,000, they could have avoided the whole thing. Instead, they offered her around $600, which doesn’t seem like a lot for that much time in the hospital. So the case was essentially forced to move on to trial.

During the discovery portion of this trial, Ms. Liebeck’s attorneys discovered that between 1982 and 1992, more than 700 people had filed claims against McDonald’s because they had been burned by the coffee there. Ms. Liebeck’s claim was hardly an isolated incident. Upon further investigation, Ms. Liebeck’s attorneys determined that the coffee at McDonalds was kept heated between 180 and 190 degrees. Denny’s didn’t do that. Waffle House didn’t do that. Nor did Burger King, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s, or any other major restaurant chain. In fact, McDonalds had specially built heaters that kept the coffee at that temperature.

180 degree liquid can cause a full thickness skin burn in around 2 seconds. So essentially, Mrs. Liebeck was only one out of 700 people who had been injured by coffee that was kept dangerous due to a companywide policy. McDonald’s couldn’t claim that Mrs. Liebeck’s claim was unheard of or ridiculous, not with over 700 similar claims in their history.

The jury awarded Mrs. Liebeck $180,000 for her ordeal and stay in the hospital. The so called “million dollar verdict” was initially $2.7 million in punitive damages, which was later knocked down to $480,000. The punitive damages did not exist to make Mrs. Liebeck rich, but rather, as the term indicates, to punish McDonald’s for knowingly having a dangerous corporate policy in place. As a result of this verdict, McDonald’s has since lowered the temperature of its coffee, and nobody has been severely burned since.

We don’t find anything “frivolous” about third degree burns or eight days in the hospital. Nor do we find anything “frivolous” about a company that knowingly serves products in a dangerous manner. But for some reason, tort reformers everywhere latched on to this case and turned what Mrs. Liebeck went through into a joke, or portrayed it as a money grabbing con game.

From what we understand of it, Hot Coffee not only tells Mrs. Liebeck’s side of the story, but also delves into a few other notable cases where Americans have actually lost their right to a court hearing, thanks mainly to fake outrage and tort reform legislation that was ginned up after Mrs. Liebeck’s verdict came in. We would urge everyone to see this film once it is released nationwide.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury 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 no fault of their own. We help people who have been injured in car accidents, pedestrian accidents, and people 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 & Bederman for a free consultation.

One particularly glaring example of this sort of thing is called a SLAPP suit. SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation. A more understandable way of putting it would be to call it a “bury the defendant in legal costs to get him to shut up” lawsuit. As a small scale example, let’s say that a college student gets his car towed, even though he had the right to park his car where he did. This student then has to pay around $120 bucks to get a car back that should not have been towed. He then goes home and starts a Facebook page entitled “This Towing Company is Terrible.” Soon, the Facebook page has 800 people who like it, and the college student finds himself on the receiving end of a $750,000 lawsuit from the towing company.

The fact that the college student has every legal right to post or write or say whatever he wants thanks to the First Amendment means that this case should not have been filed in the first place. Nor is it likely that the college student has $750,000. If this lawsuit were to be successfully taken to its conclusion, the towing company is not likely to receive anything from the college student except ramen noodles and half of a twelve pack of Milwaukee’s Best. But that is not the point of the lawsuit. Court cases cost money, particularly if you are the one being sued. The towing company has the money to hire an attorney to prosecute the case. The college student most certainly does not have the money to hire a defense lawyer.  So he would have two options: beg for a settlement or go broke fighting the case that he would eventually win.

If that sounds like an unlikely scenario, bear in mind that all of this has actually happened to a student in Michigan, as reported in The New York Times. Justin Kurtz is staring down bankruptcy because he dared to speak out against a company that towed his car.

And it isn’t just towing companies that have engaged in these lawsuits. Property developers have filed them against citizens groups.Fast food chains have filed them against environmental activists.Religions have filed SLAPP’s against people who criticize them. Titans of industry. Big Business. In other words, the exact same groups and organizations that howl and moan and legislate against “lawsuit abuse” have no real qualms about actually engaging in lawsuit abuse. What else would you call filing a case that you know you can’t win?

When you go to the American Tort Reform Association website and type “SLAPP “into the search engine, you get no results, which we find strange considering that this organization purports to be against lawsuit abuse. Maybe they have a different definition of the word “abuse.” Maybe “abuse” means “when non-wealthy individuals dare to use the court system.” Maybe “abuse” means “any legal action where we aren’t the plaintiffs.” Regardless of which glossary the tort reformers are working from, we can certainly tell a double standard when we see it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping residents of Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been injured in car accidents, bicycle accidents, pedestrian accidents and cases of medical malpractice, as well as any instance where someone was injured due to the actions of someone else. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own, contact Greenberg & Bederman today for a free legal consultation.

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.

The report also claims that of the 1600 cases of acute liver failure each year, and acetaminophen is the leading reason. Also mentioned in the report are 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations, and 458 deaths over a ten year period. This is quite a number for something that costs about 10 cents a pill.

There are two elements of this problem, one of which is based on the ingredients. When it is taken, a small percentage of acetaminophen is converted into a metabolite, which in this case is toxic. In small doses, this is something the liver can manage. This is actually what the liver is for. Alcohol is a metabolite as well.

The problems start to happen when the metabolites build up faster than the liver can handle them. This is similar to the problems that occur with chronic drinkers. If a person has the occasional beer, it’s not a problem, but if he drinks a significant amount over the years, one of the more common medical ailments is liver failure. Likewise, if a person habitually takes more than the recommended dose of Tylenol or any other acetaminophen based pill, liver failure could easily be the result.

This brings us to the second element of the problem, which has been a lack of information on the part of Johnson and Johnson, which is the company that makes Tylenol. Most of us have a bottle of Tylenol in our medicine cabinets. If you take a look at it, you will most certainly see a warning label. But you have to look hard to find it. The website has more information, which reads as follows:

“Overdose warning: Taking more than the recommended dose (overdose) may cause liver damage. In case of overdose, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away. (1-800-222-1222). Quick medical attention is critical for adults as well as for children even if you do not notice any signs or symptoms.”

This is sound advice, but it seems a bit misleading. When most of us think of the word “overdose,” particularly when it comes to pills, we think of someone taking about twenty or thirty of them on purpose. You don’t necessarily have to have that printed on the warning label. We think what needs to be on there is a warning about chronic overuse.

Everybody knows somebody who always seems to have a headache, or knows someone who has a bad back, or a mild case of arthritis. They always have a jumbo size bottle of Tylenol in their desks, purses or glove compartments. These are the folks who take three or four Tylenols every four hours or so, and we believe they could use some straight shooting from Johnson and Johnson or any other company that makes acetaminophen based pain relievers. We hope to provide it to them now, because we seriously doubt Johnson and Johnson will.

If you are a person who suffers from chronic mild pain, please stick to recommended dosages when you take Tylenol. Don’t take more than what is printed on the label. While there is a definite risk to overdosing, there is also serious danger in taking even a little bit more than you are supposed to over a long period of time. There has been enough evidence over the years that taking acetaminophen in this manner is dangerous. All the FDA did was mention what Johnson and Johnson should have been warning people about all along.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have suffered from liver damage due to the use of Tylenol or other acetaminophen-based medications. We believe that Johnson and Johnson deliberately understated the danger that their product can cause, and we believe that they also failed to adequately warn the public about the consequences of taking this medication in the wrong way. If you or a loved one has been injured or hospitalized due to the use of Tylenol or any other medicine based on acetaminophen, contact Greenberg & Bederman today for a free legal consultation. 

It also would have gutted WMATA’s ability to make the changes and upgrades that the National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending for years, particularly so after the Red Line crash in 2009 that killed nine people and injured seventy six. It would have been fairly galling to have one element of the federal government recommend much needed improvements and then remove our ability to pay for them.

The DC Metro system needs new subway cars, and it absolutely needs to revamp the sensors that were the primary mechanical cause of the fatal train crash. It also needs to revamp the culture. The NTSB report also mentioned that there were multiple human factors involved in the crash, all of them stemming from an unfortunate institution-wide notion that passing the buck is how things get accomplished.

These are only two of Metro’s immediate needs. There are certainly other things that WMATA could put some of that $300 million towards. The first would be the escalators, and the second would be security.

There has been one high profile escalator failure at a Metro station in the past year. By “high profile,” we mean failures that result in people getting hurt. This failure happened at L’Enfant Plaza, on the same day as an enormous rally at the National Mall. Miraculously, only four people were hurt, which seems amazing when you watch the video. There was also an incident at Foggy Bottom where the last four steps on one of the escalators suddenly dropped through the bottom of the stair case, leaving a big hole that a woman fell in to. Again, fortunately, she was able to get pulled out before she got hurt. And just last month, there was another failure at DuPont Circle, where the escalator suddenly stopped, which caused people to fall. In case you didn’t know, the escalators at DuPont Circle’s north entrance are 188 feet long. While it is fortunate that nobody was seriously hurt, it would seem to be only a matter of time before there is a serious injury.

The obvious malfunctions are bad, but there are also the problems with keeping these escalators running in general. At any given time, multiple escalators aren’t working, which causes people to have to walk up and down the stairs. Would you like to walk up 188 feet, particularly during the summer months? And, how does this affect the disabled? The escalators don’t work for multiple reasons, chief among them being that WMATA does not have an adequately trained maintenance staff. This is another area where some of that $300 million could be used.

With regards to security, there have been multiple instances of violent crime taking place on our subway system. We aren’t talking about on occasional mugging. We mean multiple instances of random and severe beatings of innocent passengers. The police presence on the trains and in the stations has been severely lacking, and there have been extremely disturbing accounts of Metro personnel not even lifting a finger to help people who are being attacked right before their eyes.

We believe that operating costs will take up a fairly substantial amount of this money, but surely somebody over at Metro is aware of the multiple safety problems that exist on our subway system. These aren’t the sort of problems that you can simply ignore, because at this rate, it’s simply a matter of time before we have another serious crash, or an escalator breakdown that results in a death, or a crime that escalates into a murder. The safety of our public transportation system should be a priority.

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured on our public transit system due to no fault of their own. This includes escalator malfunctions, injuries due to sudden starts and stops, and instances of neglect by the WMATA Police. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been injured on the Metro, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation.

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.

One branch of law enforcement that is held to a particularly high standard is the FBI, which basically functions as our national investigative police force. They investigate bank robberies, terrorism, financial fraud, forgeries, kidnapping, or any crime that occurs over multiple states. It takes a lot more than standard police training to be able to join.

We were recently very shocked to learn about the following incident, particularly because it involves an FBI agent breaking the very law that he is supposed to uphold and enforce:

WASHINGTON - Law enforcement officials have identified the FBI agent suspected in a fatal drunk driving car crash in Brandywine, Md. Monday night as 37-year-old Adrian Norbell Johnson. The FBI says the agent has worked for the bureau for six years…Law enforcement sources tell FOX 5 Johnson's blood alcohol level shortly after the deadly crash was .25, three times the legal limit in Maryland. Prince George's County Police say that amount of alcohol in a driver's system is extremely dangerous.

Speaking as attorneys who help victims of drunk drivers, we can tell you  that a .25 blood alcohol level goes beyond “extremely dangerous” and veers right into “extremely reckless.” He would have had to consume at least 10 drinks in order to get to that level of drunkenness, and considering that the job of most law enforcement officers is to prevent people from drinking and driving, he must have known that drinking that much and then getting behind the wheel was both illegal and completely negligent. But he did it anyway.

If Agent Johnson had been pulled over by another police officer or got arrested at a sobriety checkpoint, this might have just been an unfortunate and embarrassing incident for the FBI. Instead it turned out to be an accident where one person died and another was left in critical care in the hospital. So this incident has turned out to be both a tragedy and an embarrassment, especially considering that Agent Johnson was meant to join the security detail for the Attorney General.

Drunk driving is a serious problem in this country, particularly in the Washington, D.C. area. There were 243 DUI fatalities in Virginia last year, 10 in the District, and 162 in Maryland. And the DUI accidents where people were injured numbers in the thousands. The cost of these accidents ranges in the tens of millions. Drinking and driving is a detriment to the safety of our society, and it is one that could be easily avoided if everyone simply exercised some basic responsibility.

There is a big difference between a run of the mill car accident and an accident that is caused by drunk driving. An accident can happen to anyone. But drunk driving is negligent behavior that is often the primary cause of an auto accident. You can’t blame a driver if a deer runs out in front of his car, but you can blame a driver if he drinks ten vodka tonics, and then attempts to drive home. Agent Johnson should have certainly known this, and why he decided to risk driving home after drinking that much is beyond us.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently helping people who have been injured in car accidents due to the negligence of drunk drivers. We can help anyone in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured in a drunk driving car accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident legal consultation.

According to the Washington Post:

For the Rev. Nathan J. A. Humphrey, the ordeal began when he stepped onto the base plate of the only functioning escalator at the exit to the station, only to be lifted into the air.

"There was a gigantic noise of grinding, clashing and clanging . . . and a gaping hole coming up," said Humphrey, vicar at St. Paul's Parish in Northwest Washington.

He looked up and saw a woman ahead of him falling backward.

"I remember thinking for one terrible second: She will be pulled underneath by these falling steps,'' Humphrey said. But the escalator jerked to a stop, Humphrey leapt onto stable ground and the woman landed on the steps behind her. Humphrey and another man pulled her to safety.

"She was really lucky; she will have only bruises," Humphrey said.

Lucky, indeed. For those who don’t know what the working machinery of an escalator looks like, please follow this embedded link. It is a series of chains, wheels, gears and sprockets that could easily crush a limb or end a life.

Memo to WMATA: We’re running out of miracles. That is two incidents where nobody was killed, but it was simply a coin toss that made it that way. The pile-up at the bottom of the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza could have just as easily ended up with a broken neck, or somebody getting smothered to death. The collapse of the stairs at Foggy Bottom could have easily resulted in that woman losing her life in an incredibly agonizing fashion. 

How these escalators have fallen into such a state of disrepair is a story that is literally decades long. The condensed version is that since 1991, Metro has been responsible for maintaining and repairing the escalators themselves. Prior to that date, escalator services were provided by either Westinghouse (which is the company that made and installed the escalators,) or Schindler (which is the company that eventually purchased Westinghouse.) The problem appears to have been that WMATA was attempting to create an escalator maintenance division from scratch. The results speak for themselves. Plus, if you combine the fact that they were doing it on the cheap (paying less for workers, meaning less experienced workers were the only ones available to do the job,) it isn’t that much of a surprise that the escalators are in disrepair. You can also factor in the standard WMATA budget woes, which only look to increase since Congress has made attempts to cut off federal funding. And b y “federal funding,” we don’t mean some of it, or a budget cut, but quite literally the entire $150 million in federal funds that was supposed to go to WMATA for repairs, maintenance and upkeep.

Maybe there are other avenues of revenue that WMATA should be exploring, especially since the current Congress seems to have a dire allergy to anything with the word “public” in it. Maybe full train car advertising? Maybe newsstands should be able to operate in the stations they way they do in New York? Maybe a flat rate ride instead of a per destination charge, which would get more people on the subway and possibly increase revenue?

The repairs need to happen. The escalators need to be fixed. The money needs to come from somewhere. But the current situation is untenable. Is only a matter of time before “escalator malfunction injuries” become “escalator malfunction deaths.”

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to no fault of their own while on the premises of a Metro facility or mode of public transportation. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been injured due to negligence on the part of a WMATA driver, technician or security guard, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident legal consultation.

According to the Washington Post:

For the Rev. Nathan J. A. Humphrey, the ordeal began when he stepped onto the base plate of the only functioning escalator at the exit to the station, only to be lifted into the air.

"There was a gigantic noise of grinding, clashing and clanging . . . and a gaping hole coming up," said Humphrey, vicar at St. Paul's Parish in Northwest Washington.

He looked up and saw a woman ahead of him falling backward.

"I remember thinking for one terrible second: She will be pulled underneath by these falling steps,'' Humphrey said. But the escalator jerked to a stop, Humphrey leapt onto stable ground and the woman landed on the steps behind her. Humphrey and another man pulled her to safety.

"She was really lucky; she will have only bruises," Humphrey said.

Lucky, indeed. For those who don’t know what the working machinery of an escalator looks like, please follow this embedded link. It is a series of chains, wheels, gears and sprockets that could easily crush a limb or end a life.

Memo to WMATA: We’re running out of miracles. That is two incidents where nobody was killed, but it was simply a coin toss that made it that way. The pile-up at the bottom of the escalator at L’Enfant Plaza could have just as easily ended up with a broken neck, or somebody getting smothered to death. The collapse of the stairs at Foggy Bottom could have easily resulted in that woman losing her life in an incredibly agonizing fashion. 

How these escalators have fallen into such a state of disrepair is a story that is literally decades long. The condensed version is that since 1991, Metro has been responsible for maintaining and repairing the escalators themselves. Prior to that date, escalator services were provided by either Westinghouse (which is the company that made and installed the escalators,) or Schindler (which is the company that eventually purchased Westinghouse.) The problem appears to have been that WMATA was attempting to create an escalator maintenance division from scratch. The results speak for themselves. Plus, if you combine the fact that they were doing it on the cheap (paying less for workers, meaning less experienced workers were the only ones available to do the job,) it isn’t that much of a surprise that the escalators are in disrepair. You can also factor in the standard WMATA budget woes, which only look to increase since Congress has made attempts to cut off federal funding. And b y “federal funding,” we don’t mean some of it, or a budget cut, but quite literally the entire $150 million in federal funds that was supposed to go to WMATA for repairs, maintenance and upkeep.

Maybe there are other avenues of revenue that WMATA should be exploring, especially since the current Congress seems to have a dire allergy to anything with the word “public” in it. Maybe full train car advertising? Maybe newsstands should be able to operate in the stations they way they do in New York? Maybe a flat rate ride instead of a per destination charge, which would get more people on the subway and possibly increase revenue?

The repairs need to happen. The escalators need to be fixed. The money needs to come from somewhere. But the current situation is untenable. Is only a matter of time before “escalator malfunction injuries” become “escalator malfunction deaths.”

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone who has been injured due to no fault of their own while on the premises of a Metro facility or mode of public transportation. If you or a loved one in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. has been injured due to negligence on the part of a WMATA driver, technician or security guard, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident legal consultation.

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.

It is a rare day indeed where natives of this city can point to a recommendation by a committee or a piece of legislation and say with great certainty that they will immediately feel the effects of it if it becomes a reality. But recently, we heard something in President Obama’s State of the Union that caused us a great deal of concern. As injury lawyers, we have seen firsthand how “caps” on medical malpractice damages have benefited insurance companies, but have left the actual victims of surgical errors and medical negligence with far less than they should have received in compensation for their injuries.

Here is the actual line in the speech, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

"I'm willing to look at other ideas to bring down costs," besides repeal of his health care bill, Obama said, including "medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits."

We have a real problem with the term “frivolous lawsuits,” particularly when it is coupled with “medical malpractice reform.” In the first place, it advances the fiction that anyone who brings legal action against a doctor or other medical professional is “faking it,” or is looking to be rewarded for nothing. This is absolutely not the case. Victims of medical malpractice are people who have placed their health and trust in the hands of doctors, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals, and have had that trust violated. And we aren’t talking about mere inconveniences. When we say “medical malpractice,” we mean severe and often life-threatening injuries. We mean limbs that have been mistakenly amputated. We mean patients who have been given the wrong blood type. We mean pharmacists who have misread the prescription. We mean doctors who gave a rushed and thoroughly disinterested diagnosis that resulted in real harm being done to the patient. The idea that the people who get seriously hurt due to instances like this are engaged in frivolity of any kind is disingenuous and insulting.

The solution that almost always accompanies talk of medical malpractice reform comes in the form of “caps” on non-economic damages. This means that an arbitrary and unrealistic ceiling is placed on the amount of money that victims of medical malpractice can receive for pain and suffering. In other words, there is a strict limit on the amount of compensation that they can receive for anything about the injury that did not directly cost them money.

While this might seem reasonable, consider what the end effects of these caps have done to the rights of victims. In Texas, for example, cases involving birth injuries or instances where the baby died due to the mistakes of doctors have virtually disappeared. They have not disappeared because mistakes by the doctors have suddenly stopped. They have disappeared because since infants aren’t money-makers, the only real compensation that a grieving family can receive is around $200,000. With this being the limit to the compensation, it becomes very easy for malpractice insurance companies to price plaintiffs out of the courtroom. All they have to do is file for delays and hire more expert witnesses than the plaintiff can afford to match, and all of a sudden the whole court case would end up costing more than the victims could possibly win in damages. When victims and their attorneys are facing this economic reality, often the cases are never even filed.

These caps do not benefit anyone except the people who need it least. Medical malpractice insurance is a multi-billion dollar business, and profits are soaring. We have no idea why President Obama seems to think that protecting these astronomical profits is more important than protecting the rights of medical malpractice injury victims. Perhaps it is a concession of some sort. But if these caps become a built-in part of Obama’s health care reform, “tough luck” will be the only advice available for most malpractice victims.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured due to instances of medical malpractice. This includes surgical errors, wrong diagnosis, pharmaceutical errors, and unnecessary delay of treatment. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the actions of a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

While the FDA dithered and failed to use its new powers, literally millions of people were still being prescribed propoxyphene based drugs. This makes the case of Kira Nicole Gilbert particularly tragic. Ms. Gilbert was a 22 year old Cincinnati-area woman who injured her knee while working at an orphanage in April of 2009. Her doctor prescribed her Darvocet for the pain. Eight days later she was found dead in her apartment. The autopsy ruled that cause of death was acute cardiac failure combined with pulmonary edema, which is a medical term for a buildup of fluid in the lungs. Ms. Gilbert was the picture of perfect health prior to her knee injury, and while the pharmaceutical company would be hard pressed to find some other cause for her death, we imagine that won’t stop them from trying.

Ms. Gilbert’s death happened long after the Food and Drug Administration suspected that there was something wrong with propoxyphene, and long after the FDA had the power to move faster to remove dangerous drugs from the shelves of American pharmacies and hospitals. Such behavior is practically expected of pharmaceutical companies, who will go to very great lengths to keep their products on the shelves regardless of the dangers to the people who use them. But regulatory agencies are meant to protect the general public from harm. In the case of Darvon and Darvocet, the FDA acted too late.

When the FDA finally removed these drugs from the shelves, they concluded that Darvon, Darvocet and other propoxyphene-based drugs can cause significant changes in the electrical activity of the heart, even when it is used in small therapeutic doses. This alteration of electrical activity can cause heart palpitations, irregular heartbeats and episodes of cardiac arrest.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal assistance to people in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. who have been injured and hospitalized due to the use of painkillers containing propoxyphene. We are also offering help to the families of people who have lost their lives due to the use of Darvon and Darvocet. If you or a loved one has suffered from a heart attack, heart palpitations, pulmonary edema or other health complications after taking Darvon or Darvocet, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free drug injury 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.

Generally speaking, the answer is that your insurance company and the insurance company of the other driver get together and hammer it out. In many cases, the solution ends up being that your insurance company handles your damages and the other driver’s insurance company handles their driver’s damages. This usually isn’t a problem if it’s a no fault accident with no injuries, but things get tricky if people get hurt.

Each state has minimum levels of insurance for drivers. This basically means that there is a minimum amount of coverage that you can have before you are allowed to drive. In Maryland, the minimum is $20,000 worth of coverage for one person injured in the car, with a $40,000 total for all passengers injured. In Virginia, its $25,000 for one person injured, with a $50,000 total for all passengers injured. In Washington, D.C, the minimum is the same as Maryland’s. That might seem to be a perfectly reasonable amount, but you should remember that $20,000 is not a lot of money when it comes to emergency room treatment. You should also remember that in Virginia, the “minimum” is actually just the insurance level. Virginia is one of the few states in the Union where you can simply pay a fee every year to the Department of Motor Vehicles and drive with no insurance whatsoever.

So what do you do? What happens if the accident is just one of those things, but the insurance doesn’t cover all of your physical damages? What happens if the car accident is in Virginia and the driver simply doesn’t have insurance? It has been our experience that insurance companies are profoundly hesitant to even get close to the maximum of what they are supposed to spend, and they often delay and deny payment in the hopes that their claimant will simply give up.

The smartest thing that you can do is contact an attorney for legal advice before it even gets to this point. Insurance companies are quite good at making it seem as if you have no options, when in fact you have several. An experienced attorney can help you determine the best course of action for you, and can also help you avoid the standard tricks of the trade of the insurance companies.

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 in car accidents in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. We also help people who have been hurt in motorcycle or trucking accidents, as well as bicycle and pedestrian accidents. If you or a loved one has been injured in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, D.C, contact car accident injury lawyers Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

As or right now, people in Connecticut are not able to make informed decisions about their health care; specifically because the state’s online medical database is omitting medical malpractice information:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The Connecticut Public Health Department's online doctor database frequently omits information about past malpractice payments, making it difficult for patients to make informed decisions.

The Hartford Courant reports Monday that there are more than 100 doctors on the site whose malpractice cases are missing. That's about one out of every six who have made payments in recent years for harming or killing patients who appear to have clean records.

If you happen to live in Connecticut, and you happen to be choosing a doctor or a surgeon, wouldn’t you want to know if this person has made a certain number of mistakes? Particularly if the number of doctors who have made serious or life-ending mistakes is one out of every six doctors? Those are about the same odds that you get with Russian roulette.

To be sure, you shouldn’t make the assumption that if your doctor has one malpractice payout in a twenty year career that he is a bad doctor. In fact, if a doctor had that kind of record we would be the first in line to make an appointment with him. But if a doctor has a seriously spotty record, with multiple lawsuits and multiple mistakes and multiple unnecessary patient deaths, wouldn’t you want to know that before you selected him to do the surgery? Wouldn’t you find that to be a crucial piece of information? We certainly would.

We aren’t sure why this information is being left off the new website. When they made the initial switch to the new website, they estimated that the profiles would be complete and updated (meaning that the medical malpractice information would be posted) by April of 2010, but then that date switched to June, then August, then October, and they finally just gave up giving an estimated date. We would hope that at some point in the near future they would update the site with all of the relevant information, because in the meantime, there are some doctors on the list who are having their professional histories whitewashed quite thoroughly.

For instance, there is one surgeon in Connecticut who failed to control bleeding in a patient who was known to have difficulties with blood clotting. There was also one doctor who had lost or settled four medical malpractice suits in the past seven years. Not to mention a doctor who was hit with a $36 million verdict due to a botched Caesarian section birth which led to the child having cerebral palsy.

Again, we think these are the sort of things that patients should know about before selecting a doctor. It’s a pity that Connecticut doesn’t feel the same way.

Greenberg and Bederman is a medical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we offer legal assistance to victims of medical malpractice in Washington, D.C, Virginia and Maryland. We have helped victims of surgical errors, wrong diagnosis, prescription errors, hospital infections and injuries due to unnecessary delay of treatment.  If you or a loved one has been injured due to the negligence of a doctor, surgeon or other medical professional, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The general argument would seem to be “Wait a minute, how is it that this ruling is now a law? Aren’t the legislatures supposed to create law? I didn’t vote for this. Nobody I voted for had anything to do with creating or passing this law.”

But sometimes, this is exactly the point of having a judicial system. As the saying goes, “What is right is not always popular, and what is popular is not always right.” State legislatures or even the federal government can pass and have passed laws that don’t always line up with the Constitution. For example, let’s say that Baltimore passes a city ordinance that states that everyone who attends a Ravens game has to wear the color purple or face a fifty dollar fine. This might be a particularly popular law in Baltimore, but there is no conceivable way that any court in the land would allow that ruling to remain in place. Our judicial system acts as a check to make sure that legislatures do not overstep their bounds, and sometimes that pleases Americans and sometimes that makes them angry, but at the end of the day we believe that a strong Judiciary is an absolute necessity for a functioning democracy.

We are bringing this up not to give you a civics lesson, but because the concept of “activist judges” and “judicial activism” has been on our minds lately. We are currently addressing a case that we hope will establish laws in Maryland that currently do not exist in our state, even though similar laws are established on the books of many other states in America. These are called “Dram Shop Laws.”

In a nutshell, dram shop laws exist to make sure that alcohol is sold in a responsible manner. It is no secret that people can do reckless and stupid things when they are drunk. They get into fistfights, they pass out in public, and they often drink and drive. While you can’t prevent people from consuming alcohol (nor would we want to,) you can hold businesses that sell alcohol accountable if they are selling alcohol to people who are already visibly intoxicated. Many states do just that. If it can be proven that a bar not only allowed but also encouraged a patron to become drunk, and that patron drives off and causes a serious car accident, that bar can be held liable for the damages. These laws aren’t on the books in Maryland, but we think they should be.

We are currently representing a family that lost a granddaughter due to a drunk driver. While this is a sadly common occurrence, what makes this case relatively unique is that the driver got visibly drunk at one bar over the course of an evening. One establishment served him beer after beer and shot after shot and simply let him leave.

As we mentioned, Maryland has no real dram shop laws on the books. There is nothing in Maryland’s legal code that could hold this bar even possibly responsible. We took this case because we believe that we can change that. We believe that a state court can and should rule that the victims of the irresponsibility of a business can hold that business accountable. It isn’t a law that would be made up out of whole cloth. There are examples of these laws on the books in several other states. And since there isn’t any sign of legislation about this issue moving forward in the Maryland state legislature, we believe that the only realistic avenue that is available to us is through the court system.  

We have no doubt that there are some who would call this “judicial activism,” or “legislating from the bench” or “judicial overreach,” most likely the alcohol and restaurant lobbies. But we believe that there is nothing overreaching about establishing protections for victims and liability for businesses when equivalent laws already exist in other states. All Maryland would be doing is catching up to the other states who have taken a more responsible view as to how establishments could conduct themselves.

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to the negligent and irresponsible actions of drunk drivers. We can help injury victims in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free 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.

However, In the case of Michael Eaton, telepathy was not needed.  On August 21, 2008, Mr. Eaton came into Dogfish Head Alehouse in Gaithersburg at around 4 in the afternoon.  He opened a bar tab, and in the course of six hours he ordered 14 Coronas and 2 shots that are called “Lemon Drops.”  Lemon Drops are essentially about an ounce and a half of vodka.  It could be argued that Mr. Eaton didn’t drink all of the alcohol that he ordered.  But even if he bought half of those drinks for other people his tally up to that point would have been 8 drinks.

After closing that first bar tab, he opened another, this time purchasing 3 more Coronas and a shot of tequila. Then he paid that off and left.

At no point did anyone at the bar cut him off.  At no point did anyone say “I think you’ve had enough.” It’s a safe assumption that the only thing that was said to Mr. Eaton by the employees at Dogfish Ale House was “Would you like another round?” or “Here’s your check.” They can’t make the argument that they didn’t know he was drunk. They were also responsible for getting him that way.

This is an important point. Because after Mr. Eaton left the bar, he got into his car and proceeded to drive down I-270 at around 90 miles an hour.  It was there that he slammed into a car carrying Jazimen Warr, a ten year old girl. Jazimen Warr did not survive the experience.

Mr. Eaton is now serving a term in prison for vehicular manslaughter, which is what he deserves.  But the underlying question is this: How much responsibility does Dogfish Head Alehouse have in the death of Ms. Warr? Mr. Eaton sat in that establishment for four hours and consumed enough alcohol to where there could have been no question as to his state. Establishments that sell alcohol should have a duty to do so in a responsible manner. So where does this leave Dogfish Head Ale House? Are they liable?

We believe they are. Unfortunately, Maryland believes that they are not.

Maryland is one of the few states in America that has no laws establishing liability for bar and restaurant owners for the actions of their customers, even if the amount of alcohol they consume is a direct cause for anything that happens later.  Considering what the Warr family lost, and considering how easy it would have been for the people at Dogfish Head Ale House to prevent what happened, we believe dram shop laws should be put into place. This is a position that we have held for quite some time, and it is one of the reasons that we are representing the Warr family.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to anyone in the Maryland, D.C. and Virginia areas who has been injured due to no fault of their own. If you or a loved one in the D.C. area has been injured due to a drunk driver, contact Greenberg & 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. 

In a nutshell, that’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill accident and an accident caused by negligence. We think it’s an important distinction. While an accident can be an “act of God,” negligence accidents are “acts of man.”

On October 30, the escalator at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station suffered a system failure. According to the Washington Post, the escalator started speeding uncontrollably, which essentially flung all the riders to the ground at the bottom. The entire Metro system was extremely crowded due to the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rally that was taking place on the mall. Just under a million people were riding the trains that day. If anything positive can be taken out of this, it can be that it was a lucky thing that only four people were hurt. Can you imagine what could have happened if the main escalator at Bethesda metro station suddenly sped up? Or the escalator at DuPont Circle? On the most crowded day Metro has had since the Inauguration?

The escalators in the DC Metro systems are notorious for being broken. It is a rare day where a regular commuter can get to work without having to climb up one broken escalator or another. But there is a difference between an escalator not working and an escalator actively malfunctioning while passengers are on it. And what should be mentioned here is that the escalator malfunction at L’Enfant Plaza wasn’t a random occurrence, nor was it unexpected.

A report performed by an independent firm weeks ago concluded that the escalators are dangerous, unstable and in need of repair or replacement. Among some of the more relevant passages:

• Major amounts of oil and lubricant on step treads and risers. Symptomatic of major leak at drive motor / reducer coupling.
• Significant accumulation of metal shavings around hand rail newel areas from worn newel wheels.
• Brake pads worn beyond usable life expectancy and out of adjustment allowing unit to freewheel to stop.
• Numerous switches in safety circuits were dirty, out of adjustment, and ineffective.
• Skirt panels were adjusted too tightly to the steps, creating metal shavings along the step roller tracks in the interior of the unit.
• Hoist ropes severely rouged [corroded] and worn beyond acceptable life expectancy.
• Sheet plastic being used to protect equipment from water intrusion. This is a critical life safety issue.

Metro authorities had this draft in their hands on September 30^th, which was a full month before the accident happened. So how can they make the standard defense against negligence, which is “We simply didn’t know?” They can’t make the claim that the escalator malfunction was a surprise to them when an independent report commissioned by them on the state of their escalators specifically warned that an incident like the October 30^th disaster was likely to happen. The argument could easily be made that WMATA was negligent in maintaining its escalators, and that they knew about the danger that these escalators posed to riders for a full month before the incident took place.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we are currently offering legal assistance to injury victims all over the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore areas. If you have been injured due to reasons that were not your fault, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation.

There are many things that don’t make any sense at all about this argument. In the first place, it completely misrepresents the relationship between hospitals and insurance companies. If it were true that insurance companies were contractually and legally bound to pay for every single healthcare expenditure made on a patient’s behalf, then perhaps the tort reformers would have a point. But insurance companies most certainly are not contractually and legally bound to pay for everything. They have agreed to pay for what they deem to be “medically necessary”, and not that which they deem to be “medically unnecessary.”  And “medically unnecessary” can mean quite a few things. In fact, “medically unnecessary” can be and has been applied to almost every single pill, bandage, test and procedure that exists underneath the roof of any hospital in America.

Insurers have refused to pay for aspirin, bandages, calcium pills, ambulance rides, helicopter trips to the emergency room for patients at deaths door, broken limbs, lab tests, surgeries both major and minor, limb or finger reattachments, meals, or quite literally anything medical that you can imagine. And these decisions are almost never made by the reasoned decisions of uninterested and unbiased medical professionals. They are made by insurance claims adjusters using insurance company software to guide their decisions of what is and what is not medically necessary.

In short, insurance companies do not simply receive an invoice and then meekly write out a check. They say “no,” and leave it to either the hospital or the patient to convince them to say otherwise. If the patient or the hospital fails to do so, the hospital simply bills the patient. So the idea of hospitals overloading patients with unnecessary tests to either avoid the lawyers or just to get rich is not an accurate one. No insurance company that we have ever faced in court simply acquiesced to anything. So it is very doubtful that they would simply fork over money for an MRI given to a patient with a headache.

This is another example of insurance companies inventing a “crisis” in order to create new laws that will only benefit them, even as they claim that these new laws will benefit everyone else. The “crisis” of “preventive medicine” putting an undue burden on insurance companies does not exist. Nor did the “crisis” involving medical malpractice, in which doctors were supposedly being run out of business due to a sudden increase in lawsuits.

The invariable solution to all of these invented panics is always “caps,” or arbitrary, unfair and unrealistic limits on the amount of money that victims of injuries or medical malpractice can receive. These caps will not prevent doctors from running unnecessary tests and they won’t cause medical malpractice rates to drop or raise or lower the amount of malpractice cases that are filed, settled, won or lost every year, and they will ultimately do nothing except benefit medical malpractice insurance companies, which are the one part of this equation that doesn’t need the help.

Greenberg and Bederman is amedical malpractice injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have helped malpractice victims in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. for 25 years. Our practice areas include surgical errors, missed or late diagnosis cases, prescription errors, birth injuries, and many other forms of medical malpractice. If you or a loved one has been injured due to what you believe to be medical malpractice, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation.

In a nutshell, that’s the difference between a run-of-the-mill accident and an accident caused by negligence. We think it’s an important distinction. While an accident can be an “act of God,” negligence accidents are “acts of man.”

On October 30, the escalator at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station suffered a system failure. According to the Washington Post, the escalator started speeding uncontrollably, which essentially flung all the riders to the ground at the bottom. The entire Metro system was extremely crowded due to the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rally that was taking place on the mall. Just under a million people were riding the trains that day. If anything positive can be taken out of this, it can be that it was a lucky thing that only four people were hurt. Can you imagine what could have happened if the main escalator at Bethesda metro station suddenly sped up? Or the escalator at DuPont Circle? On the most crowded day Metro has had since the Inauguration?

The escalators in the DC Metro systems are notorious for being broken. It is a rare day where a regular commuter can get to work without having to climb up one broken escalator or another. But there is a difference between an escalator not working and an escalator actively malfunctioning while passengers are on it. And what should be mentioned here is that the escalator malfunction at L’Enfant Plaza wasn’t a random occurrence, nor was it unexpected.

A report performed by an independent firm weeks ago concluded that the escalators are dangerous, unstable and in need of repair or replacement. Among some of the more relevant passages:

• Major amounts of oil and lubricant on step treads and risers. Symptomatic of major leak at drive motor / reducer coupling.
• Significant accumulation of metal shavings around hand rail newel areas from worn newel wheels.
• Brake pads worn beyond usable life expectancy and out of adjustment allowing unit to freewheel to stop.
• Numerous switches in safety circuits were dirty, out of adjustment, and ineffective.
• Skirt panels were adjusted too tightly to the steps, creating metal shavings along the step roller tracks in the interior of the unit.
• Hoist ropes severely rouged [corroded] and worn beyond acceptable life expectancy.
• Sheet plastic being used to protect equipment from water intrusion. This is a critical life safety issue.

Metro authorities had this draft in their hands on September 30^th, which was a full month before the accident happened. So they can’t make the standard defense against negligence, which is “We simply didn’t know.” They can’t make the claim that the escalator malfunction was a surprise to them when an independent report commissioned by them on the state of their escalators specifically warned that an incident like the October 30^th disaster was likely to happen. The argument could be made that WMATA was negligent in maintaining its escalators, and that they knew about the danger that these escalators posed to riders for a full month before the incident took place.

To understand a little about negligence law, please read our understanding negligence page.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we are currently offering legal assistance to injury victims all over the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore areas. If you have been injured due to reasons that were not your fault, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Cars with transponders are disappearing from parking lots and driveways just as fast as cars with alarms, clubs and OnStar. But the one big difference between the earlier thefts and the thefts that are happening now is that insurance companies are often refusing to cover the owners of cars with transponder systems. They are doing so on the grounds that they believe transponder technology to be unbreakable, so they are essentially making the assumption that everyone who has had their cars stolen is lying.

A 2006 article in Wireddetailed this problem quite clearly. There are multiple instances in this article where people had their cars stolen only to be treated like criminals themselves by the insurance companies. Most specifically, there is the story of Emad Wasseff, who got grilled by insurance adjusters over everything from the state of his finances to his marital troubles and still ended up paying around $800 a month for a car that he didn’t own anymore.

We found this article particularly interesting for a few reasons; Insurers know absolutely everything there is to know about cars. They know the fuel economies, the engine sizes, and safety ratings. They know how cars perform in certain types of weather, and even what the likelihood of hitting a deer is in every state in America. And you can bet that they know when transponder technology isn’t working. While we can’t comment on every case like this, we know enough about insurance companies to know that they put a lot of effort into avoiding claims that are often completely legitimate.

The second reason we found this article interesting is because we think it might have a direct bearing on quite a few Mazda 3’s that were sold in North America between 2004 and 2007. It turns out that these particular models had a defect in their door locks that made them incredibly easy to break into. You didn’t need slim Jims or lock picks or any sort of James Bond technology. All you needed was to drive your shoulder into a spot on the driver side door and it would simply pop open.

Quite a few of these cars were equipped with the so called “unbreakable” transponder technology, so while simply hot-wiring the car wasn’t necessarily an option, there are all sorts of ways to get around it, particularly if you can use the defect to enter the car multiple times. For instance, many independent companies sell blank transponder keys for Mazda 3’s, complete with programming instructions. The claim is that only an automotive locksmith or dealership can do the programming, but we have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t exactly a necessity. After all, having automotive skills does not necessarily mean that you will use them for good and legal purposes. Most major cities have more than a few chop shops.

So if a car is easy to get into, and a new transponder is easy to acquire, program and install, there isn’t anything “un-stealable” about the car, is there? Apparently many insurance companies are the only ones willing to maintain the belief that it is.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area, and we are currently investigating compensation claims lawsuits against Mazda on behalf of consumers who purchased these defective vehicles. We are offering legal assistance to those who had their cars broken into or stolen, and we are also offering assistance to consumers who were not told about the lock defect when they purchased the car. If you or a loved one is a current or former owner of a Mazda 3 between the model years of 2004 to 2007, please contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free 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.

The German pharmaceutical giant Bayer has essentially done just that.  A few weeks ago they announced a new birth control pill that is not really new at all. “Beyaz” is an oral contraceptive that contains vitamin b9 and folic acids, which apparently are good for pregnant women.  The idea is that once women decide to get pregnant and stop taking birth control pills, the vitamins and folic acids will actually make the process between being on birth control and not being on birth control easier for the woman and more conducive for a healthy pregnancy.

That’s all well and good, but we think that after suffering from a stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism or other blood clot related injuries, a healthy pregnancy is going to be last thing on the minds of the women who use Beyaz.

Beyaz is using the exact same ingredient as Bayer’s earlier birth control pills, which go by the name of Yaz and Yasmin.  This ingredient is called drospirenone, which is a synthetic variation of progestin. While Bayer made a very big (and sometimes misleading) deal about its apparent beneficial side effects, which included acne reduction, some weight loss and relief from the more troubling emotional effects of pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder, they failed to adequately mention that drospirenone had a tendency to raise potassium levels in the bloodstreams of the women who were using it.  This elevated potassium level can lead to deep vein thrombosis, which is the formation of large blood clots in the larger veins and arteries of the leg. These blood clots then break apart, and the pieces travel throughout the bloodstream, eventually causing blockages to the orderly flow of blood.

There have been thousands of cases of otherwise healthy women who have been hospitalized with strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms, and several women have died.  There have been thousands of lawsuits filed by women who took these pills in good faith and ended up hospitalized for their troubles. And the key to all of this misery was the drospirenone in the pills.  So now, even after all of the injuries and deaths and hospitalizations and lawsuits, Bayer has decided to give us another pill with the exact same ingredient, except this time it has extra vitamins.

While there have been hearings in front of the Food and Drug Administration regarding Yaz and Yasmin, the points of argument have been about misleading advertising rather than the obvious health risks to which women are being exposed.  But the FDA is surely aware of the number of hospitalizations, so it is beyond us as to why they would have allowed a “new” version of this pill on to the market.  And we are further puzzled as to why Bayer would continue to make, market and sell a pill that puts women at risk.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland.  We are currently offering legal assistance to women in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured due to the use ofYaz, Yasmin, or Ocella. We have offices in Baltimore as well. We can help anyone in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin, Ocella or Beyaz, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The writer of the Post article compares the settlement costs in D.C. to those of Montgomery County, which pays considerably less for lawsuit costs despite having a bigger population (and, it has to be assumed, more lawyers residing there.) The easy assumption would be that somehow lawsuits are easier to file in D.C, and as a result lawyers are flocking there to sue the city.

These lawsuits are not a reflection on the lawyers, or the victims that the lawyers represent. They are a reflection on how Washington, D.C. is maintained and administered. If a sidewalk is left in a state of disrepair for months at a time, are private citizens expected to fix it themselves? They would probably be fined if they tried. If someone injures himself as the result of those not responsible fixing the sidewalk, should he be expected to pay his own medical bills?

If a patient is neglected by the staff at a facility and is severely injured as a result, should he just shrug his shoulders and move on with his life?

If a family member dies while under the care of the state and the family is not told about it (or even given a body to bury) should they just write it off as “one of those things that happens?”

If someone is injured when a public worker is careless when performing his assigned tasks, should the injury victim shoulder the costs of that injury by himself?

If a group of people have their civil liberties violated by the police and are treated in ways that go directly against the United States Constitution, should they just forget about it?

Lawsuits aren’t filed for fun. They are filed because sometimes people get hurt due to actions that were careless and unnecessary. Sometimes bad things happen to people that are the fault of someone else. And when someone is injured, a simple apology won’t be enough. An apology from the sanitation worker who hit the bicyclist with the garbage can is all well and good, but it won’t pay the medical bills that the bicyclist faced. An apology from the orderlies and nurses who ignored the advice of the doctor doesn’t help pay for the mentally ill person who is now blind. So the question is this: Are all of these lawsuits happening because there are too many lawyers in D.C.?

Greenberg and Bederman is apersonal injury law firm located in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, one mile from the Washington DC line. We offer legal assistance to people who have been injured due to car, truck and motorcycleaccidents, pedestrian and bicycle accidents, premises liability cases, cases of medical malpractice, and people who have been injured due to the use of defective pharmaceutical drugs. We can help anyone who has been injured in Maryland, Virginia or Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has been injured due to no fault of your own,  contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free injury case legal consultation.

CHICO, CA - An 8-year-old boy crossing across to Citrus School was hit by a car this morning.

The student, Conrad Waters of Chico, was shaken with minor knee scrapes, according to E-R photographer Ty Barbour, who spoke to his mother, Sorrell Bobrink.

The incident happened at about 7:15 a.m. near Westwood Elementary School on the west side of New Castle.

Louisville, KY - A Bullitt East High student was hit by a car early this morning while trying to cross Ky. 44, which runs in front of the school.

The student was walking at about 7 a.m. when he was struck by a small sports utility vehicle, said Mount Washington Police Officer Stephen Hill.

As summer drags on, those of us who work for a living can almost be fooled into thinking that we live in a child free zone. If you are up and on the road at 8:00 AM, in an office by 9:00 AM and at work until 5:00 PM, it is probable that you don’t see a lot of kids. They are at summer camp, or at the swimming pool, or sleeping late. But once September rolls around, it’s a different matter entirely. You are going to work at exactly the same time all of these kids are going to school, which means that kids are on the sidewalks at about the same time that you are on the roads.

And judging from so many of these incidents, they aren’t exactly adhering to safe pedestrian behavior. They forget about the crosswalk and cross in the middle of the street. They text while they walk (as if there wasn’t enough of a problem with texting and driving.) They are wearing iPods that are cranked up to full volume. The teen sense of invulnerability can be staggering at times.

This is why it is incredibly important for adult drivers to behave like adult drivers and to be aware of their surroundings on their morning commutes. Since children and teenagers are often not taking precautions, adult drivers have to take up the slack. This means slowing down at school crossings, keeping your eyes on the road, not texting and driving, and maintaining a responsible rate of speed.

Bear in mind, those five examples listed above are just a few of the documented incidents of students getting hit by cars on their way to school. There has been at least one case in almost every state of the Union, and it’s only mid-October.

Your average midsize car weighs around 3000 pounds. Your average school age student weighs considerably less. The damage that even a slow moving car can do to a child is immense. Please be careful during your morning commute.

Greenberg and Bederman is an accident law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We offer legal assistance to pedestrians who have been struck and injured by negligent drivers.  At Greenberg and Bederman, we do everything we can to help injured pedestrians get their lives back on track.

If you or a loved one has been injured in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident legal consultation.

In this article, we meet a series of soldiers who have suffered from severe traumatic brain injuries, and these men serve as an example as to how complex both the human brain and injuries to the human brain can be:

“There's the Marine whose injury robbed him of the ability to understand speech even though he could still read, another who could no longer laugh, one who could see out of both eyes but only to the left, and one soldier who became dangerously impulsive and started spending thousands of dollars on junk he didn't need.”

Granted, these are the more severe traumatic brain injuries, but the article also mentions that even mild traumatic brain injuries can be enough to disqualify a soldier for service, and some mild TBI’s also require lifelong medical care.

We are certainly familiar with this. While there is certainly a difference in the way our clients receive their traumatic brain injuries (car accidents or slips and falls,) the end results are very much the same. Our clients find themselves unable to go back to their jobs, or find that they are unable to support themselves. Their relationships have suffered and their quality of life has plummeted. They find themselves suffering from mood swings or black depressions.

In other words, they go through the same things that these wounded veterans at Bethesda Naval Hospital are going through, but with one critical difference. Wounded veterans have the benefit of the United States government doing everything that they can to help them, while our clients are usually dealing with insurance companies that are doing everything they can to not help.

Our clients with traumatic brain injuries are often accused of faking it, or of exaggerating the difficulties that these injuries are causing them. In short, they are frustrated about receiving the funds that they will need for treatment, occupational therapy, job training, or even money to live on. This is why they come to see us.  It is our job to help our clients get past the denials and delays that insurers often use to avoid paying what they should.

If you simply accept what an insurance company offers you at the time of the accident, you most likely will be taken advantage of. Remember, the prime objective of any insurance company is to make money, which means that they will do everything they can to pay out as little as possible for injury claims and medical bills. Since brain injuries often have effects that last for decades or even throughout the lifetime of the victim, insurance companies do not want to be on the hook for those costs.

At Greenberg and Bederman, we have decades worth of experience in helping brain injury victims deal with insurance companies. We also have decades worth of experience in helping arbitrators, judges and juries understand the seriousness of brain injuries and how the effects of these injuries keep our clients from living normal lives. We take real pride in helping victims of traumatic brain injuries get the compensation that they need and deserve so that they can get their lives back on track. We can help anyone in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. If you or a loved one has suffered a traumatic brain injury due to the actions or negligence of someone else, contact Greenberg & Bedermanfor a free legal consultation.

The wonderful thing about living in a democracy is that our court system is designed to give a fair hearing to everyone, and unfortunately that includes the assorted cranks, attention grabbers and time wasters. The law doesn’t say that only certain types of people can petition the court for redress of grievances, or certain types of cases.  The law says that we all can. We view this as a good thing. If you could outlaw certain types of lawsuits, where would you start? Lawsuits against businesses? Corporations? Individuals? Would you just do away with lawsuits altogether? It might seem like a good idea when you listen to the stories about Mr. Riches or Judge Pearson, but it will certainly not seem like one in the event that you have to use the court system.

Another thing that should be considered is that in almost all of these stupid lawsuits, you will find that only a miniscule amount of them are represented by legitimate attorneys. In the case of Mr. Riches, for example, not only does he represent himself, but his filings are all scrawled out by hand on a tablet of paper. And Judge Pearson’s suit was so outlandish that the only possible person who could have represented him was himself. There are no “greedy trial lawyers” involved in these cases, because they aren’t cases. They are jokes.

For those of you who don’t know, trial attorneys operate on a contingency basis. This means that they agree to act as the plaintiff’s legal representation not for an hourly rate, but rather for a percentage of whatever money is collected. And that means that if the plaintiff gets nothing, his or her attorneys get a percentage of nothing, which is still nothing. With that in mind, why would any attorney who bases his livelihood on winning cases take on a case that has no chance of being successful?

Personal injury attorneys don’t throw cases against the wall just to see what sticks. Attorneys who represent the injured for a living know this is a bad business model and a waste of time. Sometimes we wonder if the ultimate goal of tort reformers in not just restrictions on some lawsuits, but restrictions on all lawsuits in general. And the best way for them to do that is to paint with the broadest brush possible, and to focus on the handful of actual frivolous cases as if they were the rule and not the exception.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and we offer legal assistance to injury victims all over Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. We help those who have been seriously injured due to car accidents, medical malpractice and dangerous pharmaceutical drugs. If you or a loved one has been injured, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Cincinnati Bengals receiver Chris Henry suffered from a chronic brain injury that may have influenced his mental state and behavior before he died last winter, West Virginia University researchers said Monday.

The doctors had done a microscopic tissue analysis of Henry's brain that showed he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is caused by repeated hits to the head. It is a disease that essentially causes the brain to deteriorate, and as it progresses there are multiple symptoms that can affect the victim. Among these are dementia, irrational and violent behavior, memory loss and a lack of impulse control. As a receiver in the National Football League, Chris Henry would have spent the majority of the years of his life playing football. There was probably no shortage of incidents where he received major blows to the head. So all of a sudden, it becomes clear that Mr. Henry wasn’t necessarily “wild” and “immature,” but was instead sick, and his accident becomes that much more of a tragedy. It also raises a very troubling question. Why didn’t it occur to anyone in the NFL, or the Cincinnati Bengals or in Mr. Henry’s immediate circle that his behavior wasn’t natural? Why didn’t anyone recommend that he see a neurologist, or at the very least a therapist?

The story of Chris Henry underscores two things: First, it emphasizes how brain injuries can drastically alter the behavior of the victim. Secondly, it emphasizes how brain injury victims can go for years without being properly diagnosed.

The human brain is the most complex organ in the body. Modern medicine and modern science is still trying to figure out all the ways in which it works, or how one part of the brain connects to another, or how they all balance out and work together. When a part of the brain is damaged even slightly, the repercussions for the victim in terms of movement, the senses or emotional stability can be enormous.

For instance, what happens if you are an elementary school teacher who all of a sudden loses her ability to control her temper? What happens if you are an air traffic controller who all of a sudden loses his ability to remember the order of things? How are you supposed to continue on in your career? How are you supposed to earn a living? How are you supposed to live a normal life?

For that matter, how are you supposed to even know if you have a brain injury? It obviously never occurred to Mr. Henry that he had one, even as he was getting arrested, flying into rages, or, tragically, jumping on to the back of a moving truck.

If you have been in any kind of accident where you received a blow to the head, no matter how minor it might have seemed, it is crucial that you tell your doctor. Something as simple as an x-ray could be the difference between a proper diagnosis and having your entire life fall into ruin because of an undiagnosed brain injury.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in Washington, D.C. Many of our clients are people who have suffered brain injuries in car accidents or due to falls. We understand the difficulties that traumatic brain injuries can cause people, and we also understand the difficulties in getting insurance companies to recognize those difficulties. Insurance companies have an unfortunate tendency to automatically assume that people who suffer from behavioral or other mental difficulties after an accident are just a number, the lowest number, they can try to pay out an injury claim on. We take pride in our ability to help our clients fight through the obstructionism of insurance companies and get the compensation that they deserve. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident and is suffering from the effects of a brain injury,  contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free brain injury legal consultation.

So as a result of this act of irresponsibility, two completely innocent people were badly injured. They went through painful and expensive medical treatment, they were unable to go to work and earn a living for themselves, and they had to go through a prolonged and painful recuperation process. And all they did to deserve this ordeal was to simply get in their car.

If you take the numbers available for drunk driving related accidents in Virginia as a whole, you actually get somewhat of an encouraging scenario. The earliest numbers available at the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles are from 1984, when the Old Dominion had a staggering 19,371 alcohol related vehicle accidents. This was 15.7% of all vehicle crashes. In other words, if you got into a car wreck in Virginia in 1984, there was just under a 16% chance that the other driver had been drinking.

Things have improved drastically over the following 26 years. In 2009, the total number of alcohol related crashes was 9,366, which is almost exactly 10,000 less alcohol related crashes in Virginia. We can take that to mean that raising awareness of the dangers of drunken driving and increasing the penalties for drunken driving have made a difference in Virginia. But sadly, the awareness in Virginia didn’t make enough a difference to stop Lisa Marie Schettler from getting behind the wheel of a car after nine drinks and a blood alcohol content of .44.

The definition of negligence is when one person or party does not live up to the reasonable expectations of keeping someone else from getting hurt. For instance, if you are in possession of a loaded gun, you would not fire it in public for no apparent reason. Similarly, if you have been drinking a large volume of alcohol, you would not get behind the wheel of a car. You can’t make the argument that you didn’t know that drinking and driving was illegal. You can’t make the argument that you didn’t plan on hurting anybody. A person who drinks and drives is a perfect example of someone engaging in negligent behavior.

As injury attorneys based in the Washington, D.C. area, Virginia is right in our back yard. In our twenty five years as an injury law firm, we have represented countless Virginians who were injured due to the negligence of another driver. So even though Virginia Beach is a few hours away from our offices in Silver Spring, the story of Ms. Schettler and Mr. and Mrs. Gay caught our attention.

We have dedicated a significant portion of our practice to helping car accident victims in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. get fair compensation when they get injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes people who have been injured due to drunk drivers. We help our clients get past the artificially low settlement offers and delaying tactics that insurance companies use to avoid paying injury victims what they deserve. If you or a loved one has been injured in a car accident in Virginia, Maryland or Washington, D.C. and you feel that you need legal counsel, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free accident injury consultation.

To learn more about auto accidents and auto injury, please read our auto accident page, or our injury page, or watch our accident videos on Youtube.

According to Metro Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein, this motion to dismiss the case was “partial” and “routine:”

“Even if granted, this would not deprive anyone of their day in court or their right to a jury trial. Neither of our motions separately or together seeks dismissal of the suit against Metro in its entirety."

Why bother to file a motion to dismiss at all? What about this lawsuit does WMATA find unfair or excessive? There are nine people who are no longer living because WMATA had not bothered to do proper maintenance on their outdated sensor system. There are sons and daughters, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who have lost someone due to utter negligence. Which “part” of that does WMATA not understand?

Judging by the progress that they have made in terms of making safety improvements, we suspect that there is a great deal that they don’t understand. They seem to be looking at this disaster not in terms of human life and human suffering, but rather in dollars and cents. It appears to be too expensive to make necessary safety improvements. It appears to be too expensive to compensate the families of the victims fairly. So put off the improvements and repairs. File those motions to dismiss. Just roll the dice and see if you can avoid responsibility altogether.

Call us crazy, but we’re pretty sure that’s not the attitude that a public transportation agency is supposed to take. We’re also pretty sure that anything that involves getting members of the public from one place to another should be as safe as humanly possible. Safety inspections and improvements should not be put off or deliberated. They should be done early and often. The consequences for not doing so became tragically evident exactly one year ago today.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in Washington, D.C. We are currently representing injury victims from the Red Line Metro crash, and are also offering legal help to anyone who has been injured while riding any form of public transportation in the D.C. area. If you or a loved one has been injured on a bus, streetcar or subway in Maryland, Virginia or D.C, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

This area in Southwestern Louisiana has the misfortune to be virtually surrounded by a string of 20 industrial facilities, with many of them routinely emitting extremely dangerous pollution into the air, water and soil. These pollutions are known as dioxins, and they have been known to cause cancer, damage to the reproductive system, and can be harmful to fetal development. There is absolutely no minimum level of dioxin that is safe for human beings to come into contact with.

This area is home to the following industrial plants and facilities, which have released the following amounts of pollutants into the air, water and soil:

 LOUISIANA PIGMENT CO. 3,122,196 lbs.

CITGO PETROLEUM CORP. 2,242,249 lbs.

FIRESTONE SYNTHETIC RUBBER 2,144,458 lbs.

PPG INDUSTRIES, INC. 546,705 lbs.

CONDEA-VISTA CO. (now GEORGIA GULF) 449,449 lbs.

ARCO CHEMICAL CORP. 228,885 lbs.

CONOCO LAKE CHARLES REFINERY 199,996 lbs.

WESTLAKE POLYMERS CORP. 182,981 lbs.

OCCIDENTAL CHEMICAL CORP. 153,788 lbs.

W.R. GRACE AND CO. 137,400 lbs.

OLIN CORP. 55,828 lbs.

CALCASIEU REFINING CO. 44,341 lbs.

MONTELL USA INC. 32,686 lbs.

CARBOLINE CO. 22,538 lbs.

BIOLAB INC. 17,494 lbs.

WESTLAKE PETROCHEMICALS CORP. 16,932 lbs.

WESTLAKE STYRENE CORP. 12,168 lbs.

RESIN SYS. INC. 9,070 lbs.

INDUSTRIAL PIPE AND PLASTICS 7,000 lbs.

CERTAINTEED CORP. 4,500 lbs.

There is practically no way that being surrounded by so much pollution from industrial and chemical facilities could not have an adverse effect on nearby residents. Health surveys in Mossville have shown epidemic levels of sickness, from respiratory problems to extremely elevated cancer rates to a very high level of young and untimely deaths. It would take a legendary amount of obtuseness to not be able to link the numbers of illnesses and deaths in Mossville to the surrounding chemical plants polluting the air, water and ground water, yet it has taken decades for the Environmental Protection Agency to finally declare this area as hazardous to the health of the residents.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the residents of Mossville. They have been trying for a few decades to get someone in the government to realize that they are literally being polluted to death by the surrounding chemical plants. And while it is certainly a positive development that the EPA is taking action and is in the process of designating the area for a Superfund cleanup, we can’t help but think that this is too little, too late for the residents of this town who have already become sick or who have already died. In scrutinizing all of the reports, we can’t help but wonder a few things.

What level of responsibility is Citgo, Firestone, Arco et al. prepared to accept? Pollution doesn’t just pop out of nowhere, after all. Are the responsible parties making every effort to lower pollution levels? Are they at least admitting culpability and making every effort to make things right for the citizens of Mossville? Are they paying the medical bills of those who became ill? Are they offering restitution to the families of those who died of their illnesses?

Most likely the polluters will deny responsibility. All of these polluters are in a unique position in that they can point the finger of blame at all the other polluters. It’s the equivalent of finding a burning house that is surrounded by fifteen guys who all have lighters in their pockets and empty gasoline cans at their feet. They all may look like they started the fire, but it might take some extra work to actually prove which one (or ones) actually did it. This task is made all that much tougher when each arsonist is simply pointing at the guy on his right.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. basedinjury law firm that is currently assisting those who have developed illnesses due to groundwater pollution. Americans have the right to live in areas that are free from the harmful effects of dioxins and other groundwater contaminants, and anyone who becomes ill as the result of irresponsible industrial practices should be fully compensated for medical bills, pain and suffering, and the loss of value of their homes and property. If you or a loved one has adversely affected by contaminated groundwater in Maryland, Washington, D.C. or Virginia, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free water contamination legal consultation.

 In all probability, an entire way of life down in the Gulf Coast is gone. People who run fishing and shrimp boats and the crews who man them will be out of work. People who offer tours into our now ruined marshlands will have to find another line of business. Restaurants all over the country that specialize in that wonderful regional seafood will have to either drastically alter their menus or go out of business. So will the wholesalers who deliver the seafood to them. Those who specialize in the tourist trade will be taking a beating, too. We can’t imagine that anyone would want to take their families to beaches that are covered in crude oil. So you can say goodbye to beachfront resorts in Alabama and Texas, as well as the smaller hotels and motels. Plus the rental home market is probably going to be nonexistent for the next few years.

The Federal Government recently secured a promise of $20 billion dollars from British Petroleum in order to help expedite the claims process for workers, business owners and property owners who will be adversely affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But if the spill continues (and there is no indication that it will stop any time soon,) $20 billion could be a mere fraction of what the overall damages could be. And we have a sneaking suspicion that getting fair value for your damaged property or ruined business will require a lot of paperwork and legal acumen. It is because of this that Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal assistance to people who live in the Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia areas who have legitimate claims of damages down in the Gulf Coast.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. We have helped injury victims and people who have suffered real financial damages due to the negligence or incompetence of others. Over the next few months, we will be reaching out to victims all over the country to see if we can help them receive the sort of compensation that they both deserve and are entitled to. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent oil blowout certainly qualifies as negligence and incompetence on the grandest scale imaginable.

If you or a loved one has suffered a serious financial loss due to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent oil leak, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

As personal injury attorneys who serve the injured in the Washington, D.C. area, we can tell you from experience that accidents rarely “just happen.” In fact, we have found that most accidents are caused. And when people get severely hurt as the result of these caused accidents, the last thing anyone should be able to do is write them off as “just one of those things.”

Yet this is exactly the scenario that injury victims often face when they attempt to seek fair compensation for their injuries. They often have to deal with insurance companies who have no interest in treating injury victims fairly, but are instead concerned with paying out as little as possible. Car insurance companies often offer injury victims settlements that are far less than what would be needed to cover the medical costs and any lingering effects, and most of the time they don’t offer anything for pain and suffering. Medical malpractice insurance companies are notorious for not wanting to settle, but rather take the issue to court. And, quite often when they do settle, it is a paltry settlement offer.  Pharmaceutical companies have no qualms about not offering any compensation for injuries at all unless they are forced to by a court.

An injury victim who tries to deal directly with the insurance company is risking not having their individual situation monitored and protected by an injury lawyer. The insurance company has lawyers to protect their interests, so should an injury victim. Facing an insurance company on your own means you have to know all the legal angles, understand a myriad of laws that if you don’t understand could harm your injury case, leaving you potentially being treated un-fairly. Despite all of the advertising about being a good neighbor, the truth of the matter is that insurance companies are not in the business of sending out checks for the maximum value. They make money holding down costs and adding new members.

The law firm of Greenberg and Bederman has been protecting the rights of injury victims in the Washington, D.C. area since 1985, and all of our injury attorneys are dedicated to helping our clients get fair and realistic compensation for their injuries. We make it a point to address all of our clients injury needs when we deal with the insurance companies.

Our attorneys are currently offering legal counsel for the following areas:

Car Accidents:Our attorneys have decades of combined legal experience in helping victims of all types of car accidents, including accidents caused by drunk drivers, accidents due to reckless driving, rollover accidents, pedestrians who have been hit by cars, collisions, and accidents due to automotive malfunctions, and passengers in a car accident. 

Medical Malpractice:John Sellinger is known and respected throughout the country as a medical malpractice attorney who puts his clients’ interests first. In his thirty five years of legal experience, this former President of the Maryland Trial Lawyers Association has helped hundreds of victims of medical malpractice, including victims of wrong diagnosis, surgical errors, wrongful death, delay of treatment and birth trauma.

Pharmaceutical Liability: For all the good things that modern pharmaceuticals have done for humanity, it cannot be denied that there is a dark side to the pharmaceutical industry. There have been several instances over the past few years where heavily marketed and prescribed pills have resulted in serious injuries among patients who used them in good faith. The most recent example is Yaz, which is a line of birth control pills that has caused strokes, heart attacks and gall bladder disease among women who use it. Our attorneys are currently representing women who were injured and hospitalized due to the use of these birth control pills.

Social Security Disability Denial: It is not uncommon to be denied for Social Security Disability Benefits.  If you are disabled by either disease or injury, and your disability is expected to last at least a year, you may be entitled to Social Security Disability Disability or SSI. To learn more about Social Security Disability law, please read our Social Security Disability FAQ page.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located one half block from the downtown metro in Silver Spring, Maryland, one mile from the Washington, DC line. We are perfectly situated to help injury victims all over the Washington/Baltimore metropolitan area. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

We aren’t sure what went wrong with Toyota. Every car manufacturer has safety recalls, some major and some minor, but we have never seen so many things go so drastically wrong on so many models from the same company at the same time. It wasn’t just that one model had problems with floor mats jamming the accelerator pedal in one model. Or it wasn’t that just one model had a few accelerator pedals stick in the down position. This was a systematic failure of multiple cars. It was as if the entire Toyota Corporation all took a vacation at the same time and missed some very important meetings.

It was a failure of the engineering developers to not notice that the accelerator pedal was sticking. It was a failure of the design team to not notice that the floor mats were causing the pedals in other models to stick. It was another failure of the engineering team to not notice that there was an inconsistency in braking and steering when the Prius shifted between the electric and gas motor.

It was a failure of the company to “negotiate” a lesser recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which might have saved Toyota millions in costs, but cost hundreds of people pain, money, time, and in some cases, their lives.

It was only a matter of time before all of these failures caught up with Toyota. There were too many bizarre and high profile accidents involving Toyota for the government to ignore. One recall came after another, and the Capitol Hill testimony of both crash victims and the President of Toyota itself did practically irreparable damage to the Toyota brand.

So you would think that after all of this, the Toyota Corporation has learned its lesson, right?

Apr 15, 2010: Toyota now says it will investigate its entire SUV lineup for safety problems uncovered by Consumer Reports earlier this week. 

The automaker announced Tuesday it would stop selling the 2010 Lexus GX 460 temporarily as it looks into handling problems that could make it unsafe.

Consumer Reports said the Lexus GX 460 slides around too much when drivers lift their foot off the gas pedal while negotiating around a tight curve. The vehicle can actually slide sideways, Consumer Reports says, which could result in the SUV hitting a curb or leaving the road.

Right on the heels of the worst year in Toyota’s history, yet another completely unsafe vehicle is put out on the market. It is a bad sign when the staff at Consumer Reports catches a potential major safety hazard before the engineering department at a major automobile manufacturer does. It appears that whatever overhauls that were promised by Toyota during the recalls and hearings on Capitol Hill have yet to take place.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. area injury law firm that helps those who have been hurt due to no fault, or negligence,  of their own. The recent Toyota malfunctions have injured thousands of people all over the country, including people in Washington, Virginia and Maryland. If you or a loved one has been injured due to a Toyota that did not work as it should have, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free toyota injury legal consultation today.

To learn more about personal injury law, please read our personal injury lawyer page, or watch our personal injury lawyer videos.

Police are also under strict procedural standards. A “Dirty Harry” shoots first and asks questions later type of police officer would not be on the force for very long, and would probably end up in prison. The use of physical force by the police is tightly regulated. They aren’t supposed to beat people up for no reason, they aren’t supposed to use a taser or pepper spray on people who are not resisting arrest, and they most certainly aren’t supposed to use their clubs to pummel someone who is simply standing on the sidewalk.

It should be mentioned that for every instance of police brutality that occurs, there are tens of thousands of instances where police maintain their composure and do their jobs with professionalism, patience and restraint. What happened recently in College Park, Maryland is certainly NOT an example of this high professional standard.

For those of us who live in the Washington, D.C. region, we are familiar with how rowdy things can get after a Maryland Terrapins basketball game. The students in the area seem to create quite a ruckus whenever the Terps win (or sometimes when they lose) an important game. In 2002, College Park erupted in a riot after Maryland won the NCAA Basketball Tournament. And it does seem that burning mattresses in the streets seems to be the preferred method of celebration of victory or protest of defeat. It is a pointless way to celebrate, but the Prince Georges County Police certainly can’t say that they were unaware that such a thing was possible.

The celebrations after a victory against Duke got out of hand, and the police were called in, and there were some arrests, but the video footage of this beating (and really, there is no other word for what occurred) shows that the police reacted in exactly the wrong way. Without any apparent physical provocation, two officers slammed a student against a wall, threw him to the ground, and clubbed him repeatedly over the head until he was unconscious.

Was the student drunk? He might have been, but that alone is no reason to have beaten him senseless. Was he threatening? That seems doubtful. Literally seconds before the beating he was dancing a goofy celebratory jig with a friend. It didn’t even look like he knew the police were there. In fact, it seems like he danced down the street, looked up and found himself feet away from a mounted police officer. It certainly didn’t look like he made any threatening gestures.

Did he perhaps say something threatening? It is impossible to tell. But even if he had, surely four Prince Georges County police officers could have arrested one student without delivering such a brutal beating. You can’t hear anything that was said over the noise of the crowd, but what is significant is that on the audio of the tape (which was shot from some distance away,) you can hear the sound of a nightstick repeatedly smacking this student’s head and body.

This was a complete breakdown of officer discipline. And to make matters worse, it appears that the officers responsible for the beating trumped up charges and claimed that the student “..struck mounted officers and their horses, causing minor injuries.” They further claimed that the reason that the student was injured was because he had been kicked by the horse. The video proves all of these statements by the arresting officers to be completely false.

This is the sort of behavior that you would expect from the police force in a country living under a dictatorship. A brutal and unnecessary beating followed by trumped up charges is not something that is supposed to happen in America, and it certainly isn’t supposed to happen in a suburb of Washington, D.C.

The student has obtained the services of an attorney, which is his right, and he is currently seeking financial damages against the Prince Georges County Police Department, which is something that he is completely justified in doing. He received an unnecessary and brutal beating, for which there was no warning or proper explanation given by the police. This is one of the most obvious cases of police brutality that we have ever seen.

Greenberg and Bederman is an injury law firm that helps people in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured due to no fault ornegligence of their own. This includes those who have been unnecessarily injured while being arrested or while in custody of law enforcement. Being arrested by the police does not mean that you surrender your rights as an American citizen. There is no excuse for unwarranted force by law enforcement. If you or a loved one has sustained injuries from the police, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free consultation.

Second would be full disclosure. Toyota should be more forthcoming with their crash data and reports than they currently are. Allowing this data to be independently analyzed would go a long way in not just determining the problems, but would also help Toyota avoid making these mistakes in the future. It is sometimes much harder to see your own errors, especially when there is a financial incentive to not see them.

Toyota should be responsible financially for the injuries and damages that they’ve caused. If someone has been killed or injured in a Toyota, someone has to pay the medical bills. For a large corporation like Toyota, the only way for them to actually feel the weight of what they have done is to make them responsible for the injuries and damages they’ve caused.   If a spouse who is counting on income suddenly is left alone due to an acceleration defect car accident, how will that spouse be able to survive financially? Is it fair to the surviving spouse to have to figure it out alone? Toyota should be held accountable for that loss of income. Doing so would not only give Toyota every reason to clean up its act, but it would also serve as an example to other automakers who are  manufacturing cars that are shown to be unsafe.

With that principle in mind, we feel that the fine of $16 million that the NHTSA recently levied against Toyota to be a good start in the right direction but falls quite short for the injured and killed, especially considering that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood issued a statement saying that the release of these defective automobiles was no accident:

“We now have proof that Toyota failed to live up to its legal obligations,” said LaHood on Monday. “Worse yet, they knowingly hid a dangerous defect for months from U.S. officials and did not take action to protect millions of drivers and their families.”

Even after the costs of issuing the recalls, Toyota still remains a wealthy corporation.  $16 million is not even a dent in their coffers. This is hardly the incentive needed to get them to improve its faulty vehicles, and compensate the injured or killed.

It appears that the only way to make this automotive giant accountable for its actions is for the victims to take their cases to the courts. If the NHTSA will not stand up and demand substantive penalties from Toyota, those who have been injured or have lost family members due to this act of negligence will have to do so themselves.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. area personal injury law firm that is currently offering legal assistance to those who have been injured due to malfunctioning Toyotas. This includes drivers of faulty Toyotas, passengers who were riding in faulty Toyotas, drivers in other cars who were hit by faulty Toyotas, and cyclists, motorcyclists or pedestrians who were injured due to malfunctioning Toyotas. Our personal injury attorneys have decades of experience in both auto accidents and product liability, and accidents involving these malfunctioning Toyotas fall under both of those legal categories.

If you or a loved one has been injured due to an accident with a Toyota, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free Toyota Accident legal consultation today.

The vehicle that the astronauts were travelling in had to essentially break in half, and then one of the two sections had to do a 180 degree turn, and then gently thrust back towards the other section, where they re-attached. Bear in mind that this had to be done while they were travelling through the vacuum of space at thousands of miles an hour. Another stunning feat was the reattachment of the lunar module, which essentially launched itself from the surface of the moon (with two astronauts inside) and attached itself to the orbit module which was zooming along at thousands of feet above the surface. If you want a real life equivalent of how difficult that is, try hitting a bird flying overhead with a rock. If you also consider that these amazing things were done in the late sixties, which was practically the Stone Age in terms of computer technology, that gives you an idea as to how smart the NASA people are.

Any endeavor into outer space has to involve all manner of computers. All of the systems on any spacecraft are run by them, including steering, thrust, life support and navigation. Without the advent of computers, it would be impossible for us to imagine getting into space at all. If you consider that your average space craft is run by electronic systems that are often controlled from thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of miles away, you would have to assume that NASA knows what it is doing when it comes to computers.

This is why we consider it a good thing that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has brought in scientists from NASA to investigate the recent alleged unintended acceleration incidents that have occurred in so many Toyota vehicles. The NASA scientists are specialists in computer controlled electronic systems, electromagnetic interference, software integrity and hardware. In other words, they are the folks who you can expect to get to the bottom of what has been going wrong.

It might seem a little drastic, bringing in space shuttle mechanics to examine the inner workings of a Toyota Tercel, but one of the reasons that they have to be drastic is that Toyota itself isn’t talking. They are fiercely protective of their design and data, and are equally tight lipped when it comes to allowing crash data to be studied. Part of this might be because they are genuinely concerned about somebody making off with proprietary software or design, but we suspect it also has something to do with Toyota not wanting to directly provide any evidence of culpability on their parts. In other words, they want to make it as difficult as possible for any victims of random accelerations, brake failures or steering problems to be fairly compensated for their injuries and damaged property.

Toyota has shown a willingness to put profits over driver safety before. In what was probably one of the darkest moments in government consumer protection history, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration allowed Toyota to “negotiate” a 2007 recall that was limited to defective floor mats rather than move forward with a more extensive recall that could have possibly saved quite a few lives. Internal documents from Toyota referred to this as a “win.”  

We aren’t sure what the outcome will be of this NASA investigation, but what we are sure of is that too many people have been injured or even killed due to defective Toyotas for this to be considered a random, freak occurrence. Based on the evidence that has been gathered and the incidents that have been reported, we believe that Toyota not only put out a defective product, but also were aware of these defects and the dangers that they posed to the general public.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. based injury law firm that is currently offering legal assistance to those who have been hurt due to Toyota malfunctions. We can help anyone in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, D.C.

If you or a loved one has been injured in a Toyota accident, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

Avandia works by making the cells more sensitive and responsive to insulin, which reduces the body’s need for the stringent blood sugar monitoring that diabetic patients require. If it works like it is supposed to, it allows diabetes patients to live their lives without going through the constant testing and monitoring that takes up so much of their time. But you have to think that if people had to choose between less blood testing and a massive heart attack, they would be willing to accept the inconvenience of the testing.

As important as the FDA’s actions are, they didn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone. A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine had already suggested that users of Avandia had an increased risk (by as much as 43%) of heart failure as opposed to diabetics who were treating their condition with regular insulin. And the FDA has further issued a so-called “black box warning label” for the medication, which is a way for the FDA to let the general public know that there are some real concerns about the medication that patients are about to take.

GlaxoSmithKline, who designed, manufacture and market the drug, went into full damage control mode, which meant an onslaught of press releases, as well as “rejecting the conclusions” of the New England Journal of Medicine, the FDA, and anyone with any teeth who had anything negative to say about their type 2 diabetes drug. To give you an idea of GSK’s overall game plan (as well as give you an idea as to how nervous this drug was making people, all you have to do is look at the titles of the numerous press releases that they put out in the wake of all of these negative studies:

o    24 Feb 2010: GlaxoSmithKline responds to US Senate Committee on Finance report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions of Senate Committee on Finance Staff Report on Avandia

o    20 Feb 2010 - GSK rejects conclusions reported in The New York Times story on Avandia

o    6 February 2008 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to findings in ACCORD study

o    3 December 2007 - GSK response to Nature Medicine article on rosiglitazone and bone in mice

o    11 September 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline responds to JAMA articles

o    27 July 2007 - GlaxoSmithKline statement in diabetes care study thiazolidinediones and heart failure: a teleo-analysis

o    5 June 2007 - GSK response to New England Journal of Medicine editorials

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to NEJM article

o    21 May 2007 - GSK response to US Senate Committee on Finance

In case you aren’t keeping count, that’s ten solid denials of studies and warnings by the official digest of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and the Senate Finance Committee.

One thing that GSK seems particularly adept at is refuting any studies that portray Avandia in a negative light and creating a more positive outlook on the side effects of Avandia. As personal injury attorneys who represent product liability injuries, this is certainly something familiar with. Quite often, when we present one expert witness, the attorneys for the defendant will provide two or three expert witnesses claiming the opposite.

Over two hundred studies were sent to the FDA by GSK. These all contradicted any negative reports of Avandia, whether it was articles in medical journals, independent studies, or even editorials in newspapers. Rather than just accept that both the NEJM and the FDA had been buried in an avalanche of contradictory news, the British Medical Journal not only took a look at the data in these positive studies, but also at who was responsible for writing and researching them.

What the BMJ found out was that of these, a full 45% of these studies were done by people who had authors with serious financial conflicts of interest. This means that they were essentially on the payroll of either GSK or other competing pharmaceutical companies, either through research grants or consulting fees. There was more:

“Moreover, in an era of “seemingly ubiquitous” requirements for disclosure of financial interests in medical journals, only 53% of the articles reviewed included a competing interest statement, noted the authors from the Mayo Clinical in Rochester, US.”

“…Of these 90 articles, only 69 (77%) included a statement disclosing the conflict of interest in the article itself, while three of the 21 articles that did not disclose the relationship published a statement declaring no conflicts of interest.”

This is hardly unbiased research. If your next grant or paycheck depends on positive reviews, what are the odds that your reports will be, if not skewed in favor, at least carefully neutral?

This isn’t the first time such conflicts have been brought to light. In the wake of the Vioxx scandal, the New York Times discovered that the FDA’s independent advisory committee (which essentially makes or breaks controversial drugs) was populated with scientists and researchers who had similar conflicts of interest. This is profoundly interesting to us, especially if you take a look at the following press release from GSK:

July 30, 2007 — Philadelphia, PA

GlaxoSmithKline [NYSE: GSK] today welcomed the nearly unanimous recommendation of a US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) advisory committee to support Avandia’s (rosiglitazone maleate) continued availability to patients in the US. The company said it will continue to provide information to the FDA to assist in the Agency’s final decision-making.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering free legal consultations to people in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured and/or hospitalized due to heart complications from taking Avandia.  For a free legal review of your Avandia bad drug injury, please fill out a free legal Avandia form, or call Andrew Bederman at (301) 589-2200 for a free legal consultation.

While there were minor differences in the chemical make up of each of these drugs, they were all marketed as “bisphospenates,” which, in a general sense, meant that they were drugs that were supposed to increase bone density.

Just as with many other drugs, things apparently did not go according to plan. Some of the first noticeable problems occurred when some people who were taking Fosamax began to suffer from what is known as “osteonecrosis of the jaw,” or “bone death.” This is as bad and as painful as it sounds. Most of the Fosamax users who suffered from bone death in the jaw had undergone dental surgery, which means that it is possible that Fosamax could strengthen the bones in the legs, arms, hips and ribs at the expense of the strength of the bones in the jaw.

Or maybe it’s simply bad for both. According to an article in USA Today, two recent studies have shown that women who take these bisphosphonates over a long period risk having the medications stop working, which means that the bones would be just as brittle as they were before the women started taking the pills in the first place. According to the study done by Columbia University:

"In the early treatment period, patients using bisphosphonates experienced improvements in all parameters, including decreased buckling ratio and increased cross-sectional area," Melvin Rosenwasser, an orthopaedic surgeon for Columbia University Medical Center, said in a statement. "However, after four years of use, these trends reversed, revealing an association between prolonged therapies and declining cortical bone structural integrity."

The problem here is that these pills are essentially made to be taken for long periods of time. Osteoporosis is the sort of condition that isn’t cured, but is managed. People who take these pills fully expect to take them for the rest of their lives. If the shelf life of effective treatment with this medication is only a few years, then the makers of these drugs have a responsibility to tell their customers that this is the case.

As of right now the Food and Drug Administration is currently running a safety review of Fosamax, Boniva and other bone building drugs in order to see if there is an increase of femur fractures among people who have been taking the drug over extended periods of time. But thousands of people who have been hurt as the result of using Fosamax for years have already filed lawsuits against Merck and other pharmaceutical companies.

A jury trial in New Jersey will be held on July 12, 2010, and this case is meant to be a “bell-weather trial,” for victims of Fosamax and other bisphosphonates all over the country. Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. law firm that is currently offering legal assistance to people who have suffered from osteonecrosis of the jaw or other bone fractures due to the use of Fosamax, Boniva, Actonel, or any of the generic versions of these drugs.

Greenberg and Bederman have offices in Silver Spring, Maryland and Baltimore, and are capable of representing injury victims in the entire Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area. That includes Northern Virginia.

Our attorneys have decades of legal experience, and have helped thousands of injury victims in the D.C. area receive fair compensation for their injuries. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the use of Fosamax or any other bisphosphonate, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free Fosamax legal consultation today.

To learn more about fosamax injury, please see our fosamax page on our website.

As a result of these injuries and deaths, over 1100 lawsuits have been filed nationwide, with many of them falling under Multi District Litigation, which is a way to place cases with similar backgrounds against the same defendant under the same ground rules. A few class action suits (in which one group of attorneys represents multiple plaintiffs under the heading of one case) have also been filed.

Bayer has, of course, vowed to fight any and all yaz lawsuits regarding their line of birth control pills, and we certainly believe them. With profits of Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella reaching $1.7 billion dollars in 2009, Bayer can afford to wage as many court battles as they see fit. Even with all the justified bad publicity, Yaz is still Bayer’s top selling product.

The Bayer Corporation has already given some clues as to what they expect their defense to be. They recently made an attempt to allow past birth control history of the plaintiff’s to be used as evidence, which was quite rightly denied. And based on public statements by Bayer, we are expecting them to center their defenses on the warning label that is currently in place on the products themselves.

Bayer will probably wear the current label as a shield against any liability, with the premise being “Look, we have a warning label on the box, and the doctors who prescribe it have their warnings as well. If you didn’t read it, we can hardly be expected to be blamed for that.”

There are a few things wrong with that premise. In the first place, the warnings weren’t mentioned very prominently in the enormous and splashy advertising campaign that Bayer used for Yaz. The focus on these ads was all about what Yaz could do for you besides keep you from getting pregnant. In the second place, while the warning on the doctor’s labels does admit that there is a risk of hyperlykemia (elevated potassium levels,) it fails to mention that drispirenone has a higher risk of causing hyperlykemia than any other progestin based oral contraceptive on the market. Since hyperlykemia is a possibility with most other pills, this warning label basically makes it seem as if Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella are no different than any other pill on the market when it comes to risk, and this is simply not true.

An equivalent here would be if a gun manufacturer was selling a pistol that has a higher tendency to fire accidentally than any other gun on the market, but since there is a slight chance that many guns on the market will fire accidentally, their particular gun is no different than the others.

When you study the injuries associated with yaz Bayer’s warning labels should produce a list of conditions that should discourage you from taking any of their drispirenone based pills:

Yaz should not be used in women who have the following:

·         Renal insufficiency

·         Hepatic dysfunction

·         Adrenal Insufficiency

·         Thrombophlebitis or thromboembolic disorders

·         A past history of deep-vein thrombophlebitis or thromboembolic disorders

·         Cerebral-vascular or coronary-artery disease (current or history)

·         Valvular heart disease with thrombogenic complications

·         Severe hypertension

·         Diabetes with vascular involvement

·         Headaches with focal neurological symptoms

·         Major surgery with prolonged immobilization

·         Known or suspected carcinoma of the breast

·         Carcinoma of the endometrium or other known or suspected estrogen-dependent neoplasia

·         Undiagnosed abnormal genital bleeding

·         Cholestatic jaundice of pregnancy or jaundice with prior Pill use

·         Known or suspected pregnancy

·         Liver tumor (benign or malignant) or active liver disease

·         Heavy smoking (≥ 15 cigarettes per day) and over age 35

·         Hypersensitivity to any component of this product

This is all well and good, but that doesn’t explain the hundreds of women who are suffering from none of these symptoms who are still being injured and hospitalized. And aside from that obvious red flag, these symptoms all more or less appear as disqualifications on the warnings for practically every other birth control pill out there. This again makes it appear that Bayer’s line of birth control pills are just the same as every other oral contraceptive, when they are in fact not, and that is one of the major reasons for all of these yaz lawsuits.

The “read the warning label” argument doesn’t carry any water unless that warning label clearly states that drispirenone increases your chances of hyperlykemia, which increase your chances of DVT, which increases your chances of heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms and gall bladder disease. The increased chances aren’t mentioned in a clear manner at all. Bayer did not say “Here is a birth control pill that can prevent acne and the symptoms of PMDD, but it increases the odds that you will suffer from blood clots. Take it at your own risk.” They simply said “Here is a standard, run of the mill birth control pill, except it can prevent acne and the symptoms of PMDD!”

Greenberg and Bederman is currently offering legal assistance for people in the Washington D.C. area who have been injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella. Our attorneys are working diligently to help women in Virginia, Maryland and the District who have been hospitalized due to Bayer’s line of birth control pills. If you or a loved one has been injured in this manner, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free yaz legal consultation today.

To learn more about yaz birth control, please read our yaz lawyers website page, or watch our yaz video on Youtube.

From here, it’s just a matter of arithmetic. A 6.3 fold increase might not seem like much, but if you consider the full on advertising blitz that Bayer put on in order to sell this drug, then it stands to reason that the number of women who take this drug without knowing about the additional risks will increase, which therefore increases the number of women who are suffering from adverse effects. And that’s been an obvious problem. Thousands of otherwise women all over the country are finding themselves hospitalized with strokes, heart attacks or pulmonary embolisms, and the only consistent factor among these women is that they have been taking Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella.

Considering the increased risk of health problems that drospirenone can bring with it, we would urge any woman considering taking an oral contraceptive to avoid Bayer’s line of birth control pills and to consider some of the many alternatives that are available on the market. While there is still a risk of blood clotting with most birth control pills that are based on hormone replacement, the risks are significantly lower with pills other than Yaz. In fact, some of the safest pills on the market are the so-called second generation pills that contain low doses of estrogen and variations on progesterone that are much safer than drospirenone.

Lybrel: This is a pill that contains a hormone called levonorgestrel, which has been shown in most studies to have the lowest risk of deep vein thrombosis (clots.)

Nordette: This is another low dose estrogen/levonorgestrel combination pill, and Nordette is in fact just one of the many brands that use this combination. And again, levonorgestrel has the lowest incident rate of deep vein thrombosis.

Seasonique: Another levonorgestrel pill, which comes with additional benefits in terms of regulation of menstruation.

The injury law firm of Greenberg and Bederman has taken an active role in the Washington, D.C. area in both warning women of the potential hazards of Bayer’s line of birth control pills and offering legal help for women who have already been injured because of them. We are currently representing women who have been hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms, strokes or heart attacks after using Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella. Thanks to recent actions by the federal courts, the process of getting your case through the legal system has been streamlined, which is making it that much easier for your case to be heard relatively quickly. Rulings have also been made that will safeguard your privacy throughout the process.

If you or a loved one in Baltimore, Maryland, Virginia or Washington, DC has been injured due to Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, contact our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, for a free yaz legal consultation.

There are several reasons for the occurrence of a birth injury, but one of the more common causes is a mistake in the delivery process by the attending physician. And considering that doctors are now working under the ethos that “time is money” instead of “patient safety first,” it isn’t much of a surprise that the numbers are so high.

What follows are two of the more serious injuries, and descriptions of the long lasting effects that they have on their victims.

Cerebral Palsy: CP is essentially a blanket term that covers a myriad of damages to the brain of a newborn child. These damages can result in impairment of movement, cognitive ability and physical abilities. What essentially happens is that the flow of blood to the brain is either slowed or impaired. While this could be bad enough for an adult, it can prove devastating to a newborn infant, especially considering how crucial steady brain function is to development. There are dozens of medical mistakes that can lead to neurological damage, including:

• Leaving a child in the birth canal for too long of a period of time
• Failure to detect an umbilical cord around the neck
• Improper use of vacuum extraction or forceps

Shoulder Dystocia: This occurs when the shoulder of the infant is unable to pass below the pubic bone, essentially leaving it stuck in the birth canal. This is actually a very dangerous situation for both the mother and the infant, as prolonged time in the birth canal can lead to a deficiency of oxygen. Episodes of shoulder dystocia happen on a fairly regular basis, occurring in approximately 1% of vaginal births. Another major concern with shoulder dystocia is that the brachial plexus nerves can be damaged. These nerves are crucial to the ability of the arms and hands to move and feel. A serious case of shoulder dystocia can leave an infant with Erb’s Palsy, which means paralyzed arms and shoulders for the rest of his or her life.

There are certainly cases where victims of cerebral palsy or shoulder dystocia brachial plexus have suffered due to no real fault of the doctor, but if the doctor fails to adhere to the medical community under what is called the standard of care in the delivery of a baby, then that doctor may have perfomed negligence in the delivery. A failure to recognize umbilical cord placement, a delay in necessary treatment or ignoring inherent risks and dangers can and have contributed to serious and life long injuries to newborn infants.

At Greenberg and Bederman, we provide experienced and dedicated legal counsel for those who have been injured due to acts of medical malpractice, including negligence that resulted in a baby being born with cerebral palsy or erbs palsy. We have helped families all over Washington, D.C, Maryland and Virginia get the compensation they need to help care for their injured child for life. If you or someone you love has had a child born with a birth injury, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free birth injury 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.

The problem is that with health care, there is no such thing as a “Usual and Customary” rate. Big insurance companies are able to negotiate lower costs for services because of the volume of care seekers that they bring to hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices. Once you go out of network, you no longer have the weight of your insurance company’s negotiating skill behind you. So the costs for your treatment vary wildly from place to place. A sprained ankle in Tacoma, Washington might cost much more than the same injury in Yuma, Arizona. It depends on who owns the hospital, whether the facility is independent or whether an HMO runs the facility, or what their billing policies are. Health care is quite literally wide open. There is no “invisible hand of Adam Smith” keeping the price of services up or down.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say you are on vacation in rural Vermont and you break your leg. The non-negotiated, out-of-network costs might be a lot higher than the costs of the same injury at the hospital you would go to in Bethesda, Maryland, Arlington, Virginia or Washington, D.C. So if you paid extra on your policy every month for out of network costs, you would probably assume that your insurance policy would pick up 80% of whatever the hospital in Vermont is charging you. But instead, your insurance policy is picking up 80% of what Ingenix decides is “Usual and Customary.”

And that’s exactly what the problem was. Attorney General Cuomo discovered that Ingenix was skewing its “Usual and Customary” rates so that everything was reported as much cheaper than it was in real life, which lowered the amount that insurance companies were obligated to cover. So if the guy with the broken leg in Vermont is presented with an out of network bill for $4000, the insurance company can say “According to our calculations, the Usual and Customary rate for your injury is $2500, of which we will pay $2000.” This leaves you on the hook for $2000, as well as all the extra money you had been paying each month for the out of network coverage, which was evidently completely useless due to Ingenix.

It wasn’t only the policyholders who were getting stuck with huge medical bills. Most people don’t have the amount of cash on hand that it takes to pay for enormous medical expenses (this is why they had insurance, after all,) so the providers end up selling their debt to bill collectors for nickels on the dollar just so they can recoup some of their losses. So both the policy holder and the healthcare provider lose out, but guess who doesn’t? The insurance companies that use Ingenix software for their out of market billing. Which is to say almost all of them.

All of this is bad enough, but what makes the whole scenario even worse is that Ingenix was actually a wholly owned subsidiary of United Health Care, one of the biggest health care insurance providers in the United States. This is like a professional football team being allowed to bring its own referees to the Super Bowl. Who do you think is going to win out?

We would like to say that this case of price fixing was an isolated incident, but we can’t for two reasons. The first reason is that this rigged software was used by practically the entire American health insurance industry. How “isolated” could something be if the entire system is using the same flawed data? The second reason is that this is not the first episode of big insurance using skewed data in their software to maximize profits at the expense of their policyholders. Auto insurance companies are still to this day using a program called “Colossus,” which uses skewed data to “average out” the costs of physical injuries. Just like Ingenix, Colossus also leaves policyholders on the hook for thousands of dollars worth of medical costs that should have been paid by the insurer in the first place.

While it’s a good thing that Ingenix was essentially forced out of business by Mr. Cuomo, and it is good that users of Colossus are facing similar investigations, these changes have come a little too late for the hundreds of thousands of patients and medical professionals who have been ripped off as a result of these skewed computer programs. We think that the country would be better served if the states or federal government were more proactive about examining healthcare billing software. It’s good that we have firemen, but we have more of a need for Smokey the Bear.

The data that these companies use to determine pricing should be open to review, not kept as a trade secret. Nor should any companies that develop similar software have any financial ties to insurance companies. The fact that Ingenix was owned by one of the biggest health care companies in America is a massive conflict of interest, and one that cost Americans millions of dollars.

Greenberg & Bederman is a personal injury law firm located one half block from the SIlver Spring metro station.  We have been handling personal injury law since 1985.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please read about Andrew Bederman, Roger Greenberg, or Jason Fernandez, or watch some of our personal injury videos on Youtube.

But every so often, even staunch advocates of tort reform find themselves in instances where they need the aid of the courts, and that makes them rethink their whole outlook, especially when they discover that the tort restrictions that they supported have prevented them from receiving fair compensation for their damages. Former senator Trent Lott (R-MS) serves as a perfect example of this.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi found themselves with their homes ruined by the devastation of a category three storm. Katrina lasted almost a week, and at its peak the wind speed was moving at 175 miles an hour. The preliminary damage estimates in terms of property was $100 billion.

Among those who found themselves with lost property was Senator Lott. He owned a beach house in Mississippi that was deemed a total loss as a result of the hurricane. Like thousands of people all over the Gulf Coast, he filed a damage claim with State Farm. And, like thousands of people all over the Gulf Coast, he had his claim promptly and utterly rejected by State Farm.

It’s important to note that prior to this rejection, Senator Lott was one of the biggest advocates of tort reform in the Senate. Here are just a few of his quotes and press releases on the subject.

"The Democrats seem to think that the answer is a lawsuit. Sue everybody."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 7/20/01

"I'm among many Mississippi citizens who believe tort reform is needed."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 5/8/02

"You know, obviously we should [enact tort reform]...Someday it will happen, and the sooner the better."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 1/24/01

"Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi today credited the agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and tort reform initiatives passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Bush with the overall upturn in the national economy."
- Sen. Trent Lott press release, 12/2/05

"If their answer to everything is more lawsuits, then yes, that's a problem, because I certainly don't support that."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/2/02

"It's sue, sue, sue... That's not the answer."
- Sen. Trent Lott, 8/4/01

But once Senator Lott got a taste of how the very industry that he backed through speeches, votes on the Senate floor and legislation actually operates, he didn’t much like it. So he filed a lawsuit against State Farm, in which he hoped to force the insurance company to pay for his damages.

A more recent and even more high profile defection from the tort reform movement occurred on June 6, 2006, when Judge Robert Bork fell and injured himself while getting ready to deliver a speech at the Yale Club in New York City. According to the Wall Street Journal:

“Bork was at the Yale Club last June to speak at an event sponsored by The New Criterion, a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life. According to the suit filed in federal court in Manhattan, the club failed to provide steps and a handrail to climb onto the dais. Bork fell backward as he was attempting to climb the dais, striking his leg on the stage and his head on a heat register, the suit says.”

The physical damages involved a massive bruise to his leg that, according to the complaint, required surgery and months of physical therapy to heal properly. Judge Bork believed that the Yale Club was negligent in that it didn’t provide a suitable railing or staircase on the way up to the speaking dais, thus directly contributing to his injuries.

Prior to his accident, Judge Bork was very much for tort reform. In fact, one of his more famous quotes on the subject compared the United States civil justice system to piracy on the high seas:

“Courts are now meccas for every conceivable unanswered grievance or perceived injury. Juries dispense lottery-like windfalls, attracting and rewarding imaginative claims and far-fetched legal theories. Today's merchant enters the marketplace with trepidation - anticipating from the civil justice system the treatment that his ancestors experienced with the Barbary pirates.”

This quote was from 1995, but it basically encapsulates Judge Bork’s entire judicial career. He held the tort system in very low regard, and actually lost his chance to be a Supreme Court Justice in part due to his extreme views on tort law and punitive damages. Yet there he was in 2006, filing not only a lawsuit to cover his damages but also seeking punitive damages in his complaint.

In the space of three years, two major proponents of tort reform have learned a very valuable lesson, which is that perhaps our tort system isn’t nearly as “broken” as it seems to be. The initial reaction would be to call Senator Lott and Judge Bork hypocrites, but we actually view it as an example of how ideology doesn’t always line up perfectly with reality. They believed something, and real life proved their beliefs wrong. They believed that our court system was broken right up until the point where they discovered that they would need it.

To learn more about personal injury in Maryland, please read our maryland personal injury page.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please read about Jason Fernandez, Andrew Bederman, or Roger Greenberg, or view our personal injury videos on Youtube.

Serious Car Accidents:Any accident that involves a complete loss of your car and/or a stay in the hospital should not be handled without legal counsel. When medical treatment is involved, insurance companies will often try to deny liability outright or offer an artificially low settlement in order to minimize the payout. Handling a car accident injury claim without an injury lawyer is practically a guarantee that your needs will not be realistically met.

Accidents with Trucks or other Commercial Vehicles:Tractor trailers and other commercial vehicles are on the road for no other reason than to make money, and as a result the laws regarding commercial insurance coverage are different. A commercial vehicle might have multiple policies, with the driver having one policy and the freight company having another. What often happens in the event of a commercial vehicle accident is a game of “pass the buck,” where one insurer will claim that the other insurer is more liable than the other and vice versa. Commercial insurance companies are also notorious for being closed mouthed and difficult during investigations. An experienced personal injury attorney can help you sort out the liability issues, determine who was at fault, and help you receive fair compensation for your injuries and property damage. And considering the harm that a truck or tractor trailer can do, it is a safe bet that there will be both serious injuries and major property damage. The stakes are too high in a situation like that to go it alone.

Medical Malpractice: Doctors make mistakes all the time, but not all medical mistakes are necessarily a medical malpractice. If a medical provider deviates from the standard of care, and causes harm to the patient, with damages, there may be a negligence claim against the medical provider. Even if the doctors are upfront about the mistake and the insurance company offers you a settlement, there could be elements of that settlement that are inadequate. An experienced personal injury attorney should be able to tell fairly quickly whether or not your settlement offer is a decent one.

Falls:On the surface, slipping and falling might seem to be more comical that damaging, but the reality is that falls are a major cause of serious injuries and deaths. Because slipping and falling can be embarrassing, even people who are severely injured are sometimes hesitant to consult with an attorney. But businesses, hotels and rental properties are required to maintain safe premises for customers, guests and tenants. Unmarked wet floors, poorly lit staircases or cracked flooring are only some of the examples as to how negligent maintenance by an owner or manager has resulted in serious injury. A fall might be embarrassing, but if you were seriously injured due to circumstances that were not your fault, you have every right to seek compensation for your damages. An injury attorney can conduct an investigation and help determine whether or not your injury happened due to negligence.

Despite the sunny advertising about being a “good neighbor,” the average insurance adjuster is not in the business of writing big checks. In fact, most insurance adjusters, whether they work for auto insurance, commercial vehicle insurance, medical malpractice insurance or property insurance, are actually financially rewarded for paying out less in claims. It is therefore in their best interest to pay you as little as possible. To that end, they routinely offer artificially low settlements, and engage in manipulative tactics to get you to accept them. A good rule of thumb for dealing with insurance adjusters is that if there is any element of your injury that goes beyond the concrete arithmetic in front of you, then any settlement that is offered to you should be thoroughly scrutinized by a personal injury attorney. For instance, if the injury was particularly painful, then that pain and suffering should be compensated. If you are unable to return to work because of your injury, then you should be compensated for your lost income. If you will have to go through rehabilitation to recover from your injuries, the rehabilitation costs should be covered.

If your adjuster offers excuses for not providing for these costs in the settlement, or if it seems that he is trying to steer the blame for the accident over to you, or if he says things like “We don’t want to make mountains out of molehills,” you can be absolutely sure that this means you aren’t being treated fairly.

Any experienced personal injury attorney should be able to take a look at your settlement offer and determine whether or not it is adequate to cover your damages, both present and future damages. If insurance companies would simply be forthcoming and generous from the beginning, we injury lawyers may go out of business. An experienced injury lawyer can judge what any settlement is lacking and the  best way to proceed.

In any accident requiring medical treatment, it is simply better to be safe than sorry. Consulting an injury attorney after a serious accident can keep you from becoming victimized a second time. You shouldn’t find out that your settlement is inadequate after you’ve already signed it.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. Our attorneys have provided legal counsel for the injured of Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. since 1985. We have helped secure high settlements and judgments for those who have been injured due to car accidents, medical malpractice, or other types of personal injury. If you or a loved one in the greater Washington, D.C. area has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

To learn more about personal injury law, please read our personal injury page on our website.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please see our personal injury videos on Youtube.

Suppose the juror has no preconceived notions about either the claim or the parties to the case, yet once he or she leaves the courtroom at the end of each day, the juror is surrounded by people or the media offering opinions and information on the matter that is being adjudicated. Once the juror leaves the courthouse, he is not supposed to communicate with others about the case, nor acquire or attempt to find any extraneous information.  But, with free access to internet sources such as Google,Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, many jurors cannot withstand the temptation to dig deeper, to get more information, or to share the experience with their friends. Some jurors post updates on cases while the cases are still ongoing. As recently as last week, a juror in a big federal drug trial in Florida admitted to the judge that he had been doing research on the case on the Internet, despite the judge’s instructions. After 8 weeks of trial, the judge had no choice but to declare a mistrial, because it turned out that many of the other jurors were doing the same thing. 

Jurors are not supposed to see the evidence that was excluded by the judge or have access to prejudicial information, but what’s to stop them from doing so. Although judges have long since revised their jury instructions to include warnings about using internet sources, some jurors just don’t follow them. 

Jurors have always been on their honor not to look up the facts of the case. The difference now is that, with Facebook and Twitter, it’s easier to find out when a juror has broken the rule. Cell phones and BlackBerrys are here to stay so we need to develop new mechanisms to ensure that jurors do not access them, before justice is decided by the vote of “twitterers”.

To learn more about personal injury law please read our personal injury law page.  To learn more about our personal injury trial lawyer, please read about Jason Fernandez, or watch Jason's personal injury video, or contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free case review.

While this might be a great thing for the insurance companies, it most assuredly isn’t a positive development for accident victims.

According to the website, the purpose of Colossus is to:

“…interpret medical reports and look up definitions of injuries, treatments, complications and permanent impairments using AMA 5th edition data. Through a series of interactive questions, Colossus guides the adjuster through an objective evaluation of medical treatment options, degree of pain and suffering, degree of permanent impairment to the claimant’s body, and the impact of the injury on the claimant’s lifestyle.”

What this means is that Colossus uses data from the American Medical Association to lump your injury into a specific injury category, whether that category is accurate to your circumstances or not. As far as Colossus is concerned, a broken leg is a broken leg, no matter if the victim is an office worker or a construction worker or a fire fighter.  Obviously, no two injuries are exactly the same. There is no such thing as an “average” broken leg, or an “average” rib fracture, or an “average” head injury.  Lumping them all together as if they were identical is disingenuous at best.

Another problem is that Colossus uses pricing data to determine exactly how much your injury should cost, regardless of how much it actually costs. For instance, if you receive a broken leg in an accident, Colossus determines the amount of money that an average broken leg settlement costs in your state, and that is the amount of money that is put towards your settlement. Where they happen to be getting this pricing data is anyone’s guess, as many insurers who use Colossus consider that information a “trade secret,” and have even taken former employees to court over allowing that information to be made public. 

Aside from all of these serious shortcomings, there are two aspects of this software that we find even more disturbing. The first is that Colossus makes no allowances for physical pain and suffering or emotional damage. The pain that your injury caused you or the possible detrimental mental effects of the accident is, as far as Colossus is concerned, worth absolutely nothing.

The second shortcoming goes back to the idea of simply automating injury claims. As we mentioned earlier, insurance adjusters used to be experienced human beings who could hear arguments from injury victims and could be made to see reason. Now, insurance adjusters are shackled to the results that are given to them by a computer program, which often leads many injury victims with the choice of either accepting an artificially low settlement or taking their case to court.

At Greenberg and Bederman, we have spent the past few decades fighting for fair treatment for injury victims in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. A significant part of that process is helping those who have been hurt due to no fault of their own get past the disingenuous practices of insurance companies, including the use of software that automatically stacks the deck against the injured.

If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident anywhere in the D.C. metropolitan area, contact the law offices of Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

If you want to learn more about personal injury please read our personal injury page. 

“First, the company evaluates claims with a computer program designed to reduce payouts by as much as 20 percent of what the company once paid for the same injuries.

Second, Allstate pushes policyholders to accept quick settlements without the help of lawyers. Policyholders who try to fight for more money face Allstate attorneys coached to refuse to negotiate and to drag out litigation.

The approach often forces car accident victims to take what Allstate offers right away or spend years in court while their bills go unpaid -- a strategy Allstate spelled out in guidelines for claims adjusters that ‘forces the claimant and attorney to think about the obstacles they must overcome’ ..."

Some insurers aren’t even that clever. In some cases they will simply deny the claim, often referring to fine print in the contract, and sometimes not even offering an explanation at all.

A perfect example of a high profile claim denial would be State Farm’s blanket refusal to help any of their policyholders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

“Thousands of families who lost everything to Katrina's fury last August are now facing a second disaster: their insurers won't pay them a dime. The homeowners say they were led to believe they'd be covered when they signed up for their policies. The companies insist they're off the hook because of exclusionary clauses that distinguish between damage caused by wind (covered) and water (not covered). The courts will decide who's right: hundreds of homeowners have sued their insurers, among them U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, who lost a house in Pascagoula, Miss., and Congressman Gene Taylor, whose home in Bay St. Louis was destroyed.

While it's hardly unusual for homeowners and insurers to find themselves at loggerheads after a disaster, the wind vs. water debate has been especially rancorous. Earlier this month, 669 plaintiffs sued State Farm for allegedly denying their claims without properly investigating the cause of the damage to their homes. And last year, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood launched a suit against five big insurers--State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide, United Services Automobile Association and Mississippi Farm Bureau Insurance--for allegedly tricking Katrina victims into signing forms stating that their homes sustained flood damage, which isn't covered. ‘The robber barons of our time,’ Hood calls the insurers.”

These abhorrent and unfair practices fall quite neatly under the heading of what is called “bad faith insurance,” and quite often the best way past them is to acquire the services of an attorney. These insurers are banking on what you do not know about the law, and having a lawyer who knows how insurance companies work as well as what your rights are as an injury victim can put you back on equal ground.

By contacting Greenberg and Bederman, thousands of residents of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area were able to get past these abhorrent insurance company practices, and were also able to receive the compensation that they needed to get their lives back on track.

We have law offices in Silver Spring, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia, and as long as insurance companies believe more in their profit margins than their obligations to policy holders, we’ll be here to help.

Contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

 To learn more about personal injury law, please read Greenberg & Bederman's personal injury page..

Most states follow a fairer system of ‘comparative negligence,’ which allows for reduced recovery, taking into account any negligence on the part of the injured party, and subtracting it from the final award. If you live in Maryland, D.C. or Virginia, you should be aware of the defense that contributory negligence may raise by the insurance company against those bringing a claim for personal injury. If the defendant is successful in raising this defense, the injured party is barred from any recovery. For example, if one did not exercise reasonable care, such as looking both ways before crossing the street and was subsequently hit by a car, they may not recover.
Many criticize this approach for its unfairness and inflexibility towards the plaintiffs. Despite the continuous lobbying efforts in an attempt to abolish the antiquated system, it remains in place due to support from insurance and business lobbyists. Insurance companies who want to take a chance in convincing a jury that the victim was partially at fault, instead of paying for injuries, may be willing to take a chance in litigating the case, because they may end up paying nothing. You should consider contacting an experienced personal injury attorney if you encounter reluctance on the part of the other driver’s insurer to compensate you for your injuries and/or damages. You should not communicate with the other driver’s insurance company without first contacting an attorney, as any statements made by you regarding your fault may serve as the basis for contributory negligence defense in court. Be wary when attempting to navigate the system on your own, as there are many avenues of harm that may bar you from recovering. Contributory negligence is one of them.
 

To learn more about personal injury issues, please see our website at G&B website and click on the personal injury tab.

"Case of the Flying Shrimp of Death"

Defendant’s Spin:

A Long Island widow claimed that her husband’s death resulted from an injury sustained while dodging a piece of flying shrimp at the Japanese steakhouse Benihana. The man’s widow alleged he injured his neck while trying to avoid a hot shrimp playfully tossed at him by a table-side hibachi chef at Benihana, the Japanese steakhouse chain, that the neck injury required an operation, that an apparent infection necessitated another procedure and ten months after dodging the shrimp, he was dead of a blood-borne infection.
 

Actual Argument:

Certainly, no one would find fault with someone attempting to dodge an object flung directly at them, whether that object is a shrimp or a rock. Even though Benihana is supposed to be "a fun place to eat" I certainly do not think that "fun" includes having food thrown directly at me. If I wanted that, I could go eat dinner with my cousin’s family (3 boys under the age of 8). The basis for this case being deemed frivolous undoubtedly stems from the injuries suffered as a result. The man hurt his neck when he jerked it to dodge the wayward crustacean. In American tort law, we have the doctrine of the "eggshell Plaintiff." This doctrine holds that a defendant is responsible for a plaintiff’s injuries even if that particular person was more susceptible to injuries than the average person. In short, we injure someone, you take them as they are – injurer beware! The man may have been more susceptible to neck injuries. He suffered an injury that required an operation. It is well settled in American law that should an injury require surgical correction, the defendant assumes all risks inherent in surgery, including death. This is merely a case of the comedy (the fact it was a shrimp as opposed to any other object) hiding the tragedy of the circumstance. Without the neck injury, the man would not have needed surgery. If he had not had surgery, he would not have died of a blood-borne infection.
 

To learn more about personal injury, pleasee see our website at personal injury law.  To learn more about our personal injury lawyers, please click on personal injury lawyers maryland, and read our firm bios on Andrew Bederman, Roger Greenberg, or Jason Fernandez.

First, most claims are not frivolous. Hospitals self-report injuries that occur due to doctor malpractice. There is an extreme difference between the number of cases reported by hospitals and the number of claims actually filed (an estimated 1,000,000 injuries per year versus 85,000 lawsuits). This statistical gap leads to two conclusions. Most injured patients do not pursue a claim against the responsible doctor(s). Also, the system filters claims – preventing the frivolous from coming to court.

No doubt the greatest signal barrier to reducing the number of frivolous claims is the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Because plaintiffs’ lawyers frequently work under a contingency fee arrangement, there is a strong economic incentive to pursue only those claims that have a high likelihood of recovery and a high potential recovery value. Professor Herbert Kritzer of the University of Wisconsin surveyed plaintiffs’ attorneys in Wisconsin regarding acceptance rates of medical malpractice cases. Professor Kritzer found that 80% of all medical malpractice cases were declined at the initial contact with attorneys. Another study looked at how particular attorneys handled such inquiries. The lawyers’ office received calls from 730 people over 10 randomly selected days. Only 1 in 30 calls resulted in litigation – lawyers rejected 97% of potential plaintiffs. Greenberg & Bederman has accepted only 5% of medical malpractice inquiries in 2007. Additionally, cases that are initially accepted by lawyers are dropped because they turn out to be weak. In short, lawyers must screen potential cases because:

• the contingency fee economic model requires that lawyers select only those cases that have a high likelihood of succeeding.
• the costs of pursuing a claim are extremely high – court costs, discovery costs, expert fees, etc.

• medical malpractice claims take longer to resolve than other types of civil cases.

• provider-defendants win at least 73% of all cases taken to trial

These facts create an incentive system for lawyers to only select the most meritorious claims.

Second, there has not been an increase in the amount of medical malpractice pay-outs. As stated before, when insurance premiums spike the go-to explanation is an increase in claim pay-outs. A Texas study from 1988 to 2002 found that no sudden changes in the number or amount of pay-outs occurred during the period of dramatic premium spikes in late 1999. A Florida study from 1990 to 2003 found that pay-outs per 100 doctors dropped from 3.98 in 1990 to 3.33 in 2003. These studies (and others) have lead researchers to claim that "factors outside the medical malpractice system were responsible for the premium spikes." One can only speculate then as to what those outside factors might be. Personally, I favor two explanations:

1. insurance companies are corporate entities and thus seek to maximize profits. Increasing premiums will effectuate this goal. The negative publicity this generates can be safely passed on as the work of legal boogeymen

2. insurance companies need to compensate for poor corporate investment strategies (sub-prime markets, dot-coms, Enron, etc.)

Either way, doctors should not look to plaintiffs’ lawyers as the cause of premium increases. Instead, the AMA should require insurance providers to explain the need for premium increases based on actual statistics rather than rhetoric. And, voters should ask politicians to find real problems on which to base campaigns.

Citations:

Prof. Herb Kritzer's article is Risks, Reputations, and Rewards: Contingency Fee Legal Practice in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Suggested Reading:

David A. Hyman and Charles Silver, Medical Malpractice Litigation and Tort Reform: It's the Incentives, Stupid, 59 Vand. L. Rev. 1085 (May 2006).

Jason Fernandez

To learn more about medical malpractice issues, please see medical malpractice.  To learn more about our medical malpractice lawyer, John Sellinger, please click on medical malpractice lawyer maryland, and read his firm bio.