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When a driver gets sued for injuring somebody in a car accident, they don’t have to go out and spend their own money hiring a lawyer to defend the case. They call up their car insurance company and tell it that they have been sued. They send in the papers, and the insurance company provides them with a defense attorney.

Sometimes this is an “in-house” insurance defense lawyer, other times it is an outside lawyer selected and paid by the insurance company. Either way, the insurance company picks and pays for the driver’s defense attorney. So what you have is a three-sided (or “tripartite”) relationship- insurance company, defense attorney, and defendant driver.

Whether in-house or outside counsel, the defense lawyer has a paramount ethical duty to act in the best interest of his or her client- the defendant driver. This is true even though the insurance company selected the lawyer, is paying the lawyer’s fee, and controls most of the important decisions in the litigation, including whether to settle and on what terms.

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As the Internet Age progresses, personal injury litigation will continue to change. This extends to the “toolkit” that lawyers use to prove liability in car accident injury cases.  Technology creates more weapons for and against us.

What is Google Earth

Google Earth is a computer program that allows users to get a bird ‘s-eye view of almost any place on Earth.  Google obtains its images from NASA’s Landsat 8 Satellite system, taken from far above the Earth’s surface. You can type in GPS coordinates or manually add a marker by clicking any spot on the map.

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As you can tell by some of my recent blog posts, I have been spending a lot of time lately cross-examining defense medical experts. Today I want to talk about using defense experts to bring in favorable opinions.

Related Information

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If you are a truck accident attorney for victims, you have to know how you will deal with the truck’s black box after a crash.  It can make a difference between winning and losing the case.

black box truck accident

What Is a Black Box?

Trucking companies often equip their vehicles with a “black box” that records vehicle data, such as speed, location, and movement.

In 2020, a black box is really not a black box. It is "electronic control modules" (ECMs) or "event data recorders" (EDRs) that tracks all of this information with a computer.

Trucking companies do this to promote efficiency in terms of scheduling, cargo tracking, route determinations, and other efficiencies. Companies monitor their drivers, too, to make sure they are where they are supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to be doing, while they are out on the road.

Preservation of electronic data from any of these sources is vital to the defense of litigation arising from an accident, as it may be the most reliable and objective source of information about the events that occurred just prior to a crash.

Why Does an Experienced Truck Accident Lawyer Matter?

Many lawyers think a trucking accident case is just a car accident case on steroids. As I have written about on this blog, it is not. The intricacies of dealing with a black box is just one example of many. Experienced Maryland truck accident lawyers know to ask for things like vehicle data recorder information in discovery requests.

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Medicare liens are a topic of concern for most competent personal injury lawyers. It looks like Medicare is set to begin enforcing a federal law requiring reporting on injury claims made by individuals receiving Medicare.

Medicaid Liens in Personal Injury Cases

Medicaid is a government-funded health insurance plan for low-income families and individuals. Medicaid is jointly funded by both the federal and state governments but the program is administered at the state level.

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I am working on a few cases involving corporate defendants of various sizes. One of the most effective discovery devices around for these kinds of cases is the corporate representative deposition.

Md. Rule 2-412 allows a corporation or other organization to be deposed through a designated representative. The federal rule is 30(b)(6). The way it works, is that the party seeking the deposition sends a notice, where they “describe with reasonable particularity the matters on which examination is requested.” Then the corporation must designate one or more people who will be prepared to testify regarding those matters “known or reasonably available” to the corporation.

The Benefits of a Rule 2-412 or 30(b)(6) Deposition

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Today the Court of Appeals of Maryland issued an opinion addressing the extent to which expert witnesses who are retained solely for litigation may be forced to produce documentation of the amounts they earn providing expert witness services.

There are actually two cases, which were consolidated on appeal. The first is Falik v. Hornage, No. 60; the second is Falik v. Holthus, No. 90. They are both Miller & Zois cases.

Dr. Joel Falik

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The Baltimore Sun’s Peter Hermann reports about a criminal case in Baltimore City that raises questions about juror disclosure and impartiality.

Apparently, this particular case ended in a mistrial because one juror was holding out for an acquittal. After the mistrial was declared, prosecutors learned that the holdout juror was employed as a lawyer by the Office of the Public Defender.

The prosecutors are mad because this juror merely listed her occupation as “attorney.” They think she had some sort of obligation to disclose who she worked for during the jury selection process.

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Our firm obtained a verdict of $1,063,807.37 for our client this week.  Great win for a wonderful 22-year-old mother of a one-year-old at the time of the accident.

Facts of This Truck Accident Case

This was a hotly contested liability case. Our client contended she was injured when the Defendant, driving a full gasoline tanker, ran a red light. The defendant claimed he had a green light, and that our client must have had the red light. The accident happened at the intersection of Pennington Avenue and Church Street in Baltimore City. Our client’s car was totaled, and the gas tanker was damaged, which caused a gasoline spill. Our client had her one-year-old son in the car when the crash happened and had to watch him scream for his mom in a stranger’s arms while our client was trapped in her car due to her badly broken leg.

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