States

October 17, 2011

Alabama man awarded $1.5 million for electrical shock

An Alabama jury awarded $1.5 million to a man shocked by low-hanging power lines. The Plaintiff was paving a road in Alabama when his vehicle struck Black Warrior Electric power lines, sending 7,600 volts of electricity through his right arm.

Suffice to say, that is a lot of electricity, although voltage alone is cause for injury, it is the voltage multiplied by the current. Obviously, his insulation in the vehicle would be important. Still, it has to affect a jury to learn that the guy got shocked by an amount of voltage that is substantially less than the voltage given in the electric chair (about 2000 volts).

Plaintiff’s successfully argued at trial that this accident would not have happened if the power company had complied with national codes require that power lines that carry that amount of voltage be placed a certain height above the ground. The jury apparently agreed.

September 8, 2011

Tort Reform in Pennsylvania: More Proposed Anti-Victim Legislation

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

Max Kennerly writes about a lot of new bills being proposed in Pennsylvania. Any legislature can propose a bill and there is always someone in every legislature – on both sides of the aisle – who likes to put out radical bills so they can brag to their constituents about how crazy they are. Still, these proposed bills do not give you a warm fuzzy feeling about the political climate right now for injury victims.

Ultimately, I think the problem is that people want jobs or more stability in their jobs and that fear distracts them from thinking about the unlikely possibility that they will be seriously injured and want to be compensated for those injuries. Politicians love blaming personal injury lawyers because they are an easy target. Often, the people throwing the punches don’t really feel like oppressing tort victims is going to solve anything but they can’t resist grabbing the low hanging fruit of blaming lawyers. To make matters worse, we have a minority of personal injury lawyers who are more than willing to live up to the stereotype.

August 29, 2011

Indiana Personal Injury Verdict Statistics

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

Jury Verdict Research has come out with some new data that underscores how hard it is to rely on verdict statistics in a particular jurisdiction to prove how that venue values cases.

JVR found that the median compensatory award for personal injury trials in Indiana is $25,036 and injured plaintiffs recover damages in 57 percent of cases that go to verdict. This is different – in opposite ways – from the national data. The national median is approximately $40,000 and the nationwide plaintiff recovery probability is 9% less. To be sure, the differences are statistically significant. Are we to believe that juries in Indiana are trusting people who take plaintiffs at their word but just don’t think their claims are worth as much? (Actually, this is possible when you think about it.)
But the statistics get even crazier. Indiana awards twice as much for head injuries ($30,000 v. $15,000) as the rest of the country, but then awards only half of the national median for shoulder injuries ($25,000 v. $49,418). It makes no sense, really.

August 8, 2011

How Much Are California Juries Awarding in Personal Injury Cases?

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

A Jury Verdict Research study found that the average personal injury verdict in California is 1,635,327. The median, which takes out huge verdicts like one in the study for over $100 million, is California.

California juries are tougher on liability: plaintiffs receive damages in 45 percent of cases that go to trial.

July 26, 2011

Aluminum Bat Wrongful Death Verdict Affirmed

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

The Montana Supreme Court affirmed an $850,000 award to the parents of a baseball player who tragically died after being struck by a ball hit with an aluminum baseball bat.

If your kids are playing baseball – particularly if they are pitching – you have thought about these facts. An 18-year-old boy is pitching in an American Legion baseball game and gets hit in the head. Just an awful case that makes you question whether or not your kids should be playing any sport. There is no completely safe game.

July 18, 2011

Hepatitis C Trial

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

A medical malpractice lawsuit on behalf of a Florida veteran will begin this week against the Miami Veterans’ Administration hospital. In the lawsuit, the plaintiff claims he contracted hepatitis C from an unclean medical device used in a 2007 colonoscopy. This may be the bellwether trial on this issue: there are a dozen similar lawsuits that have been filed in Florida and more have been filed in Tennessee. (Certainly, Tennessee – even with their new malpractice restrictions – is a more hospitable place than Florida for medical malpractice lawsuits.)

June 27, 2011

State Farm Holds Back Settlement Pending Medicare Lien

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

In Wilson v. State Farm, a U.S. District Court in Kentucky found that an insurance carrier did not act in “bad faith” by delaying payment of the settlement in a car accident case pending plaintiff’s lawyer squaring away a Medicare lien.

In Wilson, the plaintiff brought an uninsured motorist claim and the insured tendered the policy of $50,000. Plaintiff said, “Okay, we settled the case, pay me.” State Farm withheld payment, worried that it would be responsible for the Plaintiff’s Medicare lien. Plaintiffs’ lawyers deal with this issue every day.

Plaintiff’s lawyer understood State Farm’s position and tried to marry the two, demanding that State Farm put the settlement in an escrow account from which Medicare’s conditional payment amount would be payable. The plaintiff (and probably his lawyer, I don’t know) also promised to hold the insurer harmless regarding any potential claim asserted by Medicare.

May 13, 2011

$459 Million Junk Fax Verdict Reversed

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

The Georgia Court of Appeals has tossed a $459 million junk fax verdict on Wednesday, finding that the trial judge erred in concluding that the defendant sent 306,000 unsolicited fax advertisements because plaintiffs did not prove the faxes had been received.

Wow, $459 million for faxes? Juries are crazy. Well, actually, this was a bench trial but let’s not ruin the tort reformers narrative. I’m sure all the tort reform folks will pretend that (1) a jury decided this, (2) this was a tort action, and (3) there is a chance this is a collectible verdict against a siding, window, and gutter installation company that was in business between 2002 to 2004.

But, look, I think these junk faxes lawsuits are a little ridiculous myself. The idea of plaintiffs – or frankly their lawyers – getting money because they got a junk fax just seems ridiculous to me. I realize there is an economic burden associated with junk faxes and these claims might not be as petty in the macro picture as their are in the micro-picture. But on some human level, it is a fax, it is a cold call, let’s not get so worked up about nothing.

March 25, 2011

Mississippi High Court on Experts and Collateral Sources

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed a directed verdict for a hospital in a nursing medical malpractice action in which the plaintiff suffered IV infiltration – leakage of fluid from an IV into the patient’s tissues from an IV line – and burn injuries.

The directed verdict from the trial court struck Plaintiffs’ expert from testifying as to the standard of care even though the expert had already been accepted as an expert on the nursing care given by the hospital. Had the expert been permitted to testify, she would have testified as to the standard of care for IV infiltrations and that the hospital breached that standard.

The Mississippi high court also make a good call for plaintiffs on the question of the collateral source set off when the amount of the liens/bills have been reduced.

March 14, 2011

New York Car Accident Verdicts

by Ronald V. Miller, Jr.

The average car/truck/motorcycle accident verdict in New York is $837,020, which is stunningly high compared to most other jurisdictions.

Why is this? Are New York jurors just that much more generous than, say, jurors in Maryland?

The answer is that New York’s no-fault accident law requires that plaintiffs suffer a “serious injury” before a lawsuit can be brought against the at-fault driver. While there is some question that having a magical threshold that needs to be crossed is going to be fraught with great flaws, there is no question that this New York scheme, as desultory as the justice it might bring, keeps minor personal injury car accident cases out of court.

What’s my point? My point is that this completely distorts average car accident verdicts in New York. I read Metro Verdicts Monthly and Mealey’s which provide a lot of individual verdicts in car accident cases in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. It is amazing how many jury verdicts there are for $10,000 when, if you look at the case, is really not such a bad result. New York has none of these cases deflating their average.