Los Angeles Injury Lawyer Blog

This is part two in a two part series relating to social benefits from personal injury lawsuits.

Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died on February 12, 2010. He should not have.

Lawsuits remind people to take the care necessary to make sure they do not injure others.

The designer of the luge course and the International Olympic Committee knew in advance how dangerous the course was and still sent relatively inexperienced luge riders down the track. They knew athletes were crashing more often, and at higher speeds than normally occur in the sport.

Such dangerous conditions occur because the speed and danger of the track make the event sell better. It makes the race more exciting. It also saves the money that should have been spend on having an engineer review the course to determine how high that safety wall should have been, and the expense of making the course safer, including a higher wall and padding and barricading the steal beams next to the track.

Huffington Post blogger Marian Salzman wrote: “With 82 countries participating in the Games this year, shouldn't the course have been designed to be safe for all of them? Where were the safety wardens?”

Personal injury lawyers are part of the safety wardens in Southern California. Any business knows that when they produce a defective product or a dangerous product, and sell it, personal injury lawyers will hold them accountable. Personal injury attorneys will make them pay for their negligence. So, manufacturers are more careful.

Even when you drive on the freeway, people watch how fast they are going. Why don’t people speed more? Because they do not want to get a ticket. The reason people do not want to get tickets is because it will make their insurance rates go up. Tickets make insurance rates go up because speeding causes auto accidents. It places other people in unnecessary danger.

When drivers hurt people, car accident attorneys hold the negligent driver accountable. These lawsuits give people a reason to be more careful when they drive. Drivers are forced to think about the safety of others not only to protect other people (which is the right thing to do), but also to prevent their insurance rates from going up.

This is part one in a two part series relating to social benefits from personal injury lawsuits.

People in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California are hurt in auto accidents and through the negligent of others all the time.

Everyone hates lawyers. Juries tell us there are too many lawsuits. Governor Schwarzenegger is taking aim at lawyer with his supposed tort reform proposals.

The loss of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili highlights why the work of Los Angeles personal injury lawyers is so important.

The Vancouver luge track, has been described as the fastest ever built prompting safety concerns before the death. Why wasn’t it fixed? Nodar was competing in a sport with inherent risks, therefore the luge track owners may assert “assumption of the risk” as a defense and escape liability for causing the death of Nodar. Imagine how this story might have ended if the track builder knew they would have to pay for the harm they caused.

The new track had a reputation for causing crashes in all but the most experienced sliders. Most alarming was the fact that race officials knew that lugers were traveling at record speeds and crashing. They knew that this was a dangerous corner, and even erected a slight extension to the wall at the fatal turn. However, they did not take the simple and inexpensive additional precautions of erecting a higher wall and most importantly, protecting riders from the exposed steel beams next to the track. Had their responsibility for their decisions not been shielded from lawsuits, things would have been different.

Part two of this series will discuss how this tragedy relates to Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyers keeping people safe.

Too many Encino auto accident's result from Los Angeles driver's being selfish. Saving a minute for yourself may put someone else, or their children at risk.

Yesterday was the Halloween carnival at my children's elementary school. The school is at the top of a hill on a blind corner. A child was killed by a car at this location in the past five years. The school takes safety very seriously.

As I was walking my family to our car after the carnival, I saw a horrifying site.

A woman is picking up three children in front of the school. She parks her car on Lanai Road northbound (across the street from the school). She hits the button to flash her hazard lights because she knew she was creating quite a danger. She leaves her car and walks to the sidewalk and shoos the kids to her SUV. She sends them to cross Lanai Road by themselves at a blind corner as traffic backs up behind her SUV. They get in the car while the mother remains talking to someone in front of the school.

Other cars are waiting for because she is blocking the only lane of this blind corner at the top of the hill. Eventually traffic starts going around her car. Each car crosses over the center line into the on-coming traffic lane risking serious collision so that this mother is not inconvenienced.

Had there been a collision it would have been no accident. Had there been a collision, her kids probably would have been safe in that SUV. It would have been the other cars that would have crashed, and the force of the impact could have pushed them onto the sidewalk to kill someone else's innocent children.

I do not know who that woman is, and even if she reads this, I doubt someone that selfish cares enough to change her behavior.

Don't be that mother. Please think about how your actions put others at risk. I have to trust you to keep my kids safe. Take care of my kids and I will do the same for you.

Have a safe Halloween.

A Rhode Island Hospital has been fined for the 3rd instance this year of a doctor performing brain surgery in the wrong side of the patient's head. Last Friday, a chief resident started operating on the wrong side of an 82-year-old patient. In August, a similar error caused the patient's death.

These types of issues are not limited to Rhode Island as this issue is similar to battles we often face at Rice & Bloomfield. What is most frightening is that in Los Angeles, as in all of California, the most that could be recovered from litigation of this type of error is $250,000. From that amount must be paid litigation costs and attorneys fees. Because of that problem, many victims of medical malpractice often cannot find an attorney who will accept there case.

Although we are here to help people who have been injured, we must also make a living. We cannot continue to operate when faced with these type of limitations. This has become a common problem faced by injured patients throughout the state.

Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has frequently trumpeted Texas and California as models for providing access to health, citing an example of a doctor who moved from Maine to Texas and had his malpractice insurance premium reduced from $11,300 to $5,031. There is no evidence to tie the premium difference to the medical malpractice cap. Moreover, I find it hard to believe a doctor moved to Texas to save $5,000 per year. That amount would not even cover his moving costs.

Mitt Romney has joined in the insurance industry created hysteria about insurance premiums. He talks about the burden imposed by lottery-sized awards. However, he ignores the incredible burden put on a family who loses a loved one due to a doctor's neglect. Democratic hopeful John Edwards, a former trial lawyer, explains that the cap has little effect on premiums (less than 1%).

We feel that most doctors can certainly afford $11,000, instead of $5,000 to make sure that anyone they hurt is taken care of. I expect most doctors would prefer to make sure people hurt by medical errors are provided for. It is the insurance companies that do not want to take care of people.

We hear a lot about frivolous lawsuits and the havoc they supposedly wreck on - well - everything, if the politicians and pundits are to be believed. But, what is a "frivolous lawsuit"? I've never heard anyone try to define what this means. Maybe it's one of those things that we think we will recognize when we see or hear about it.

From a legal standpoint, a frivolous lawsuit would be one that is without any merit. Someone making a legal claim has the burden of proving his or her case. If there is no evidence to support the claim, it could be said to be without merit or frivolous. These cases generally do not get to a jury because there are various procedures the Court uses to dismiss such claims.

Many of us think the McDonald's coffee case is the perfect example of a frivolous claim. What we heard in the media was that a lady spilled hot coffee on herself and a jury gave her millions. That just sounds wrong. Why would a jury of twelve supposedly rational people make someone who has made a frivolous claim rich? The answer is simple - because there is a whole lot more to the story than you probably heard about in the media.

Continue reading "What is a Frivolous Lawsuit? Revisiting the McDonald's Coffee Case" »

I needed to have a physical examination done a couple of months ago, so I asked around and found the name of a respected internist in my community. When I appeared for my appointment several weeks later, I was given a clipboard with lots of documents to fill out and to sign.

One of the documents was a binding arbitration agreement. In effect, the doctor - whom I had not even met at this point - was asking me to agree to waive my Constitutional right to a jury trial in order to obtain health care from her. Because I am a lawyer and I understand why a patient should not be required to agree to binding arbitration, I was more than a little offended.

I told the nurse at the desk that no one had mentioned this to me when I made my appointment and that I objected to binding arbitration. She told me that the doctor couldn't see me unless I signed the paperwork, so I did - knowing that I had 30 days to send a letter to the doctor rescinding the agreement.

I liked the doctor a lot. She seemed genuinely interested in me and my health care concerns. I was impressed by her thoroughness. She reviewed some lab work I'd had done with me and we settled on a treatment plan for a possible thyroid problem. She gave me a prescription and we agreed I would see her again in three months. She also referred me to another doctor for some routine testing I knew I needed.

When I returned to my office, I wrote a letter to her office, rescinding the binding arbitration agreement and three days later, I got a certified letter dismissing me as her patient. Her insurance company would not permit her to treat patients unless they agreed to waive their right to a jury trial, her letter said.

Continue reading "Right to a Jury Trial? If You Need a Doctor, Maybe Not" »