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

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.

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.

 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.

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.