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

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.

Here is the text:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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’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.

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.

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.

The way that these corporations are going about it is essentially the same way that malpractice insurance companies went about getting their protections. In 8 easy steps, here is the process:

1.       Drastically raise rates or prices on your products or services with the cooperation of your direct competitiors. “We’re sorry, but we have to charge you twice as much this month.”

2.       Blame the price hike on lawyers. “We get sued so much that the only way we can stay solvent as a business is to increase our rates!”

3.       Find overblown examples of lawsuits and present them as an everyday occurrence. “Remember that Judge who sued the dry cleaner for $50 million? That happens every single day.”

4.       Focus on an aspect of the judicial system that is not advantageous to you and pretend that this aspect affects everyone much more than it actually does. “Innocent, hardworking Americans all live under the threat of runaway, out of control punitive damages.”

5.        Claim that our judicial system is “in crisis,” utilize public relations, media outlets and lobbyists to hammer home the idea that something has to be done. “The National Lawsuit Crisis is making it impossible for hard working Americans to do anything. You can’t go get the newspaper without somebody suing you for punitive damages these days.”

6.       Lobby pro-business politicians for a legislative fix: “America cannot survive unless we enact strict limits on punitive damages.”

7.       Get caps on damages legislation pushed through sympathetic state assemblies. “The Americans for Liberty, Justice and Freedom Act has saved the country from utter ruin.”

8.        Celebrate the protections this legislation has provided your business by reducing your rates by about half of the amount you increased them initially. “See? Our rates have dropped! The system works!”

This is not an exaggeration. Medical malpractice companies pulled this stunt in the early 2000’s almost to perfection, and to this day there are still non-economic damage caps in multiple states. And while the rates have gone down, in many cases they haven’t dropped down to pre-“crisis” levels.

Before you start believing the tales of woe and horror of innocent, hard working businessmen driven to ruin due to punitive damages, here are a few things you should know.

In the first place, punitive damages are a fairly rare occurrence. It is very difficult to prove that a corporation (or even a person) did something grossly negligent on purpose. For instance, in the current Toyota recall cases, Toyota’s defense will be that they had absolutely no idea that so many of their cars were defective, and the burden of proving that will be on the prosecution. Secondly, in tort cases (injury cases,) only 3% of the tens of thousands of cases that happen every year involve punitive damages.

Nor is every punitive damage verdict an automatic seven figures in the bank account of the plaintiff. Most punitive damages are significantly less. In fact, the median punitive damage award is around $55,000. To be sure, that is a great deal of money if the defendant is a small business owner or private citizen, but when the plaintiff is a multi-billion dollar corporation, it is difficult to muster the sort of sympathy that the tort reform organizations seem to require of you.

So if the average monetary amount of punitive damages is so low, and punitive damages happen so rarely, why is it that corporations and insurers and tort reform organizations are trying to put lids on them? Probably because they know all too well that occasionally, there will be an Exxon Valdez. There will be a BP oil well leak. There will be a Dalkon Shield, or a Vioxx, or a Phen Fen. All of these corporations know that there will inevitably be a faulty product or an easily preventable disaster, but they don’t know when it will happen. So rather than face the music eventually, it’s better to fix the system now.

To understand the nature of punitive damages, you simply have to look at the word. “Punitive” means “to punish.” The most effective way to hurt a corporation is by attacking its wallets. A massive chemical conglomerate may come to the realization that there is a right way and a wrong way to do business if their actions cost them millions of dollars. If there is a “cap” on punitive damages, that cap can simply be factored in to whatever they choose to do. Punitive damages should not be written off as simply a cost of doing business. The amount should not be capped, nor should it be predictable. They exist to remind companies and corporations that their actions have consequences.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Maryland injury law firm. We are currently offering legal help to people who have been injured due to no fault of their own. That includes people in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. who have been injured in car accidents, injured due to medical malpractice, injured due to environmental or groundwater pollution, or injured due to dangerous and defective pharmaceutical drugs. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident, contact Greenberg & Bederman for a free legal consultation today.

The reasons that were given for the so-called “medical malpractice crisis” were (and still are) completely debatable. For instance, there was never any sudden onslaught of medical malpractice cases. The level of malpractice cases between 1991 and 2005 either dropped or remained relatively constant, while the amount of money paid out to medical malpractice claimants dropped significantly.

If that was the case, then why were so many medical malpractice insurance companies crying poverty and raising their rates? One study claims that it wasn’t a sudden avalanche of medical malpractice lawsuits or enormous verdicts that caused the rates as much as it was the fact that the medical malpractice insurers’ investments took a beating shortly before the medical malpractice “crisis” began. A poorly performing bond market does not make a very good villain from a PR standpoint, but the idea of “greedy trial lawyers” or the fiction of people winning millions of dollars over a stubbed toe works perfectly. And it worked quite well. There is now a limit on the amount of compensation that a medical malpractice victim can receive in many states, even though there is no such limitations on the amount of damage that a careless or incompetent doctor or surgeon can do. So in some states, it truly does not matter how badly a doctor messes up, or how much that mistake alters or even ends the victims’ life. Medical malpractice insurers have had their interests and profits protected.

The market reflects that change in the fortunes of insurance companies. Most medical malpractice insurance companies are seen as a smart investment, particularly if they only do business in states where there are legal limits to the amount of money that they are responsible for paying out. For instance, Warren Buffett’s investment group Berkshire Hathaway purchased malpractice insurer Medical Protective for $825 million. Mr. Buffett has a long history of making smart investments, and it appears that this purchase was a continuation of that trend. And FPIC purchased Advocate MD for $33 million, despite the fact that Advocate MD was only the fourth largest malpractice insurer in Texas. Since the purchase, FPIC’s shares have done nothing but increase in value. Exactly one year ago, FPIC was trading at $22 a share. Today it’s valued at $36.

The bottom line is that malpractice insurance remains extremely profitable, so much so to the point that the average profit for medical malpractice insurance companies is 31.2%, which is a ridiculously high margin for any business.

Despite these consistent profits and despite the legal system being essentially rigged to ensure that they remain vibrant, you would think that from public statements and lobbying efforts, those medical malpractice insurance companies are a beleaguered minority with wolves at the door. In practically every state legislature and in every session of Congress there are several bills where representatives are demanding more and more restrictions on the liability of medical malpractice companies. In every press release malpractice insurers make it seem like they are just barely hanging on as a business, even as their quarterly reports prove otherwise.

Greenberg and Bederman is a personal injury law firm located in Silver Spring, Maryland. We are currently offering legal assistance to people in the Washington, D.C. area who have been injured due to no fault of their own. That includes injury victims in Maryland and Virginia. Our practice areas include car accidents, motorcycle accidents, pedestrian and bicycle accidents, premises liability, defective product injuries, injuries due to pollution and groundwater contamination, and injuries due to surgical errors and other medical malpractice errors, bad diagnoses, delay of treatment and other forms of 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.

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.

As an example, let’s say for the sake of argument that you are walking across Wisconsin Avenue and you get hit by a car that ran a red light. The ambulance takes you to the hospital and you get treated. If you are like most injury victims, the last thing on your mind is sorting out which insurance company is going to pay for what. You simply hand over your insurance card and let them get on with it.

Once you recover and decide to pursue legal action against the person who hit you, that’s when things get tricky. If you end up winning a settlement or a judgment against the driver, your health insurance company will often place a lien on your personal injury settlement or judgment in order to recoup their costs for your medical treatment. The idea is that your insurance company rightly believes that since another party was at fault, they paid for medical services that they were under no legal obligation to pay for.

The legal term for this process is called subrogation, and it is a fairly common occurrence in injury cases. What is fortunate about the process is that insurance companies are only allowed to be reimbursed for what they paid for in medical expenses, and not all of what you received for medical expenses in your settlement or judgment. So if your insurance company paid $9,000 in medical expenses and you received $20,000 for medical expenses in your settlement, the insurance company is only allowed to file a lien for the $9,000 that they actually paid.

The question that many of you might be asking is “Why would I get a settlement for $20,000 in medical expenses if it only cost the insurance company $9000?” The answer to that question is that under Maryland law, there is an evidentiary rule that prohibits the admission of evidence that a victim will be compensated from a third party in a tort case. This prevents the person who was responsible for the injury from saying “What’s the big deal? He got his bills paid for. No harm, no foul, right?”

This part of Maryland law is known as the “Collateral Source Rule,” and it is a very important element of what the attorneys at Greenberg and Bederman are trying to do for our clients. When we represent an injury victim, our intention isn’t to simply get the bills paid and nothing more. The vast majority of our clients have been injured due to the negligence of someone else. They were hit by a driver that wasn’t paying attention, or their doctor made an easily preventable negligent error.

The Collateral Source Rule has been in place for as long as we can remember, and it is, of course, one of the main targets of tort reform organizations everywhere. They argue that it is unfair for a defendant to have to pay more for medical expenses that what the victim’s insurance companies paid, to which we say hogwash. For one thing, insurance companies carry negotiating weight that individuals do not. An insurance company that brings thousands of patients to hospitals and clinics can very easily ask for a lower price, while individuals carry no weight whatsoever. Nor do insurance companies negotiate lower prices on behalf of their patients. They do so on behalf of themselves. And again, a tort case is not simply a tit for tat accounting of dollars and cents. It is a legal way of both rectifying financial damages and bringing the responsible parties to account for their actions. It is important to remember that the driver hit you, not Blue Cross Blue Shield. And the Collateral Source Rule is the courts way of recognizing that.

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

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.