Accident lawyers can’t help but homogenize insurance companies. But the reality is that they are all very different with different models and agendas.
On our Maryland car accident claim overview on our website, we provide on the bottom right-hand side a summary of our lawyers’ thoughts on dealing with 18 – count them, 18! – insurance companies who handle claims in Maryland.
I have never thought about the correlation between the severity of injury in car accidents and the amount of congestion on the highway. But it certainly makes sense that (1) traffic jams lead to more accidents because the traffic is stop-and-go, and (2) high traffic means low speeds, which means less serious accidents.
A new study bears this out. Washington, D.C., which includes Maryland for the study, has the worst congestion in the United States. But the cost of car accidents is low compared to the rest of the nation. Some car accident lawyers like to pretend that there is no correlation between the impact and severity of injury because people get seriously hurt and killed in accidents with little property damage. But common sense tells us that serious accidents are likely to lead to more serious injuries and more deaths.
The overall national cost of accidents – which includes the fender benders, the medevacs, the lawsuits, and the lives lost, was estimated at a whopping $300 billion a year. Statistics like this are a little dry, but $300 billion is an amazing amount of money.
One interesting issue we encountered during our last trial was whether we could point out that the defense doctor was a frequent flyer for one particular insurance company in a case that did not involve the insurance company that was a party to our matter.
The defendant’s IME doctor was testifying by videotape. The doctor is one that can most generously be described as a frequent “independent” expert witness for State Farm. Obviously, as the plaintiff’s attorney, I wanted to make hay to the jury of the fact that the doctor makes over $300,000 a year from a limited number of lawyers and that this colors his testimony.
The defendant argued that we used the word “insurance” to tell the jury that the defendant has insurance. I don’t think it did that. The purpose of the cross on bias – which I later learned was meaningful to the jury – was to underscore our leitmotif of why this otherwise qualified doctor has it so wrong: he is in the back pocket of a small group of defendants.
Defense costs are rarely a big factor to the major insurance companies in 2011
I think there is conventional wisdom out there that insurance companies will settle cases because they fear litigation costs. I really think, on the micro-level in which Maryland accident lawyers deal, all they fear is verdicts. As a result, defense costs seem to be a factor of decreasing significance in settlement negotiations. Most large insurers have “captive” staff counsel offices in major metropolitan areas. Sure, this still costs real money. But the insurance companies don’t quite see it that way. Because these lawyers are direct employees of the insurer, and who do nothing but defend against lawsuits brought against that carrier’s insureds, the cost – the significant cost – get obscured.
Insurance companies – and the Baltimore Sun for that matter – seem sold on the cost savings on in-house lawyers. I get the logic. These lawyers (and their offices and staff) are a fixed cost, so adding one more case to defend does not appreciably change the carrier’s costs or its settlement analysis on any particular case.
An Illinois jury awarded $1.275 million to the family of a 25-year-old woman who had almost completed her nursing degree and was killed while driving to her job at a hospital. Tired driving appeared to be the cause of the car accident: the Defendant just fell asleep and hit the Plaintiffs’ decedent.
The damages only trial lasted four days. The jury heard four grueling days of testimony from the family. Not that a tragedy like this can get worse, but this young girl had already been through a lot: surviving two kidney transplants only to be senselessly killed by someone driving down the road.
You hate to say only $1.275 million. That is a lot of money. That said, it seems like an extremely low verdict for the death of a 25-year-old girl. In Maryland, jury awards are cut in cases like this – it is unlikely there were significant economic damages for the family of this young woman. Still, juries in Maryland and in most states are not told about a cap and I think, just symbolically if nothing else, the award should be higher for a 25-year-old girl who overcomes much adversity to survive and thrive.
In accident cases, our lawyers make sure we know what expert testimony defendants are will see at trial. One weapon in our discovery arsenal is a good expert interrogatory.
Identify any and all experts you intend to call as witnesses, and whose reports you intend to mention and/or introduce at trial or in any Motion, including his/her area of expertise, and identify and attach to your Answers any and all written reports prepared by said experts, and indicate the content of any and all opinions reached by said experts and the factual basis for each such opinion and the amount of compensation paid to each such expert.
In its response, State Farm says, “Hey, cool your jets, we will produce experts pursuant to the discovery order.” Technically, State Farm’s answer is not satisfactory. This interrogatory, served with the Complaint, is due within 30 days of service. But there is the rule and there is the way things are done. Filing a motion to compel to answer an expert interrogatory before the scheduling order requires expert designations would be just too ticky-tacky. It is a tell to State Farm and the judge hearing the motion that you are more interested in fighting for the sake of fighting than really trying to engage in legitimate discovery.
So, we wait for the expert deadline. We get a cut and paste document that tells us absolutely nothing.
How can you make your way to jail if you kill (or nearly kill) someone on a Maryland road? A Fort Washington man who nearly killed two people was sentenced yesterday to six months in jail and a year of house arrest. The key is being drunk. Otherwise, Maryland law continues – despite a bill pending before the Maryland legislature this year – to let you off with a few traffic citations. In this case, the man pled guilty to causing life-threatening injuries while driving drunk. As part of the plea bargain, other related charges were dismissed.
Personally, I think we could save lives by being tougher on drunk drivers that cause serious and fatal accidents. The more difficult call is the one Maryland legislators are dealing with now. Is there justice in letting people slide who negligently kill another person in a Maryland car accident? Usually, the at-fault driver is a good guy/gal who just made an awful mistake any of us could make. But, believe me, this nuance is often lost on the person who lost the love of their life, or their mother/father or son/daughter.
The obvious safety benefits of black boxes in cars should culminate in a decision by the feds by the end of the year to make black box data recorders mandatory in new cars.
Long term, this will decrease business for car accident lawyers because universal black boxes will give manufacturers and safety experts a ton on information to breakdown how accidents really happen and what can be done to make safety modifications to prevent serious accidents.
We will hear a lot of libertarian “big brother is watching me” junk but, ultimately, we can use these black boxes however we agree as a society they can and should be used. Clearly, using black boxes to figure out how to avoid accidents is a good thing.
The hardest car accident cases to try are he said/she said accidents where there are not natural facts that make one version more likely than another. The classic example of this scenario is lane change/merger accidents. Which car came over into which lane? Even a good accident reconstructionist struggles to put the pieces together. So it often comes down two factors: (1) which version seems more likely (incredibly subjective), and (2) which driver has more credibility (incredibly subjective squared).
According to a Jury Verdict Research study of jury verdicts in these types of cases, the results are what you might intuitively expect: 50/50. The JVR study found car accident plaintiffs win about 48 percent for lane change collisions and 45 percent for merging collisions. The average verdict is $47,807.
We have tried and won these cases. But our firm will turn down most lane change or merging crash cases unless there is something compelling that makes us think we will win the case. We need two things to move forward in a lane change or merge crash case: (1) a very serious injury (sad but true commentary on the real world), and (2) a client that is extremely credible.
Accident Analysis and Prevention published a study of 800 car accidents involving teen drivers and tried to find the common treads:
Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog