Metro Verdicts Monthly reports on a jury verdict in a five car rear end chain reaction car crash in Cecil County, Maryland. The case was not exactly an accident lawyer’s delight. Cecil County is a tough jurisdiction for personal injury cases because, historically, jury verdicts have been relatively low. Adding to the concern, there was a soft tissue/exacerbation of a previous injury which means there is no real objective evidence that the Plaintiff was injured in the car accident.

The jury awarded $103,130 which is a pretty good verdict for a soft tissue/exacerbation of a prior disc injury case. It probably did not hurt that the Defendant driver was driving a commercial vehicle, which allowed the Plaintiff’s lawyer to point to a concrete company instead of just the driver. Moreover, the Defendant driver was also driving a Ford F-350, which helps further the argument that Plaintiff suffered injuries in the accident. (I wish MVM would include how much property damage was in the accident.)

Is this a good verdict? I think so. We don’t have all the facts. We do know that the verdict actually came back closer to the way the defendants’ accident attorney viewed the case. The offer was $40,000; the demand was $300,000.

Metro Verdicts Monthly this month provides a graph on its cover showing the median verdicts and settlements in motor vehicle accident death cases. In Maryland, the median is $457,152; Virginia’s death case median is $487,500.

Why so low? While a death case in a truck accident case is probably three times this number, many auto and motorcycle accident claims have smaller insurance policies. We have handled death cases in car and motorcycle accidents where the victim’s family walks away with $20,000 or $50,000 in a wrongful death/survival action case because the insurance is limited and the at-fault driver does not have significant assets. These settlements are included in the data which drags down the median number.

It bears repeating that sometimes the most significant battle for plaintiffs’ attorneys in wrongful death car accident claims in Maryland is not at trial but before trial when they are digging through insurance policies trying to find coverage for the death.

One big issue for clients in car and truck accidents – particularly in cases where the injuries are extremely serious or fatal – is whether the at-fault driver is convicted of the traffic offense(s) for which the driver was cited. In wrongful death car accident cases, the clients are usually interested in one more thing: a manslaughter charge.

Accident victims and their families care about this for two fundamental reasons: (1) the desire for some measure of justice and, (2) because they believe it impacts their civil case. But, in most cases, a criminal conviction for conduct relating to a car or truck accident is inadmissible to establish liability in the civil lawsuit stemming from the wrong committed in the accident.

The logic of this escapes me. Maryland courts reason that there is a difference in the parties, objects, issues, procedures, and results in civil and criminal proceeds. But all of these things actually make it harder to get a conviction in a criminal case than a finding of primary negligence (setting aside contributory negligence) in a civil case. I think the real logic is quite practical: most of the time this situation arises in auto accident cases and our courts want defendants to just pay a fine without an admission of guilt in a civil action.

The Maryland Court of Appeals issued a 5-2 decision this morning in a workers’ compensation case, WalMart v. Holmes.

The Plaintiff in this Baltimore City case sought to collect permanent partial disability benefits under the Maryland Workers’ Compensation Act on behalf of his wife, who died of causes unrelated to her work injury. Plaintiff testified he needed their combined income with his wife’s disability benefits in order to meet their living expenses.

The Maryland Workers’ Compensation Commission found that Mr. Holmes did not present evidence to show that his decedent wife had “a legal obligation to support” him at the time of her death and, accordingly, her claim for permanent partial benefits did not transfer to him.

Maryland’s new DWCP (Driving While on Cell Phone) law starts tomorrow. Here are the details:

1. What is Maryland’s Cell Phone Law?

The new Maryland law will prohibit all Maryland drivers from using a cell phone without a hands free device while operating a motor vehicle in motion on a street or highway. So, apparently, you can still get in a quick chat at red lights.

The underlying premise of uninsured motorist coverage insurance in Maryland, as it is in most states, is to put the car accident victim in the same position they would find themselves in had the at-fault driver had liability coverage equal to the coverage to that of the accident victim. I’m oversimplifying a bit because you can have UM coverage in some instances that is less than your liability coverage. But, in the vast majority of cases, your liability coverage mirrors your uninsured motorist coverage.

So in a pure uninsured motorist case where the other driver either cannot be identified (hit-and-run or phantom vehicle are the most prominent examples) or has no insurance, your own insurance company essentially steps in the shoes of the defendant, assuming the at-fault driver’s liability for the accident but also his damages.

This is a simple concept, but for Maryland accident victims, it is conceptually difficult to get your mind around. Why is my insurance company defending the guy who hurt me? Why is my own insurance company now essentially my adversary?

Everyone hates people who text while driving. Everyone. Even, notably, those who text while driving themselves. In response, we have passed a lot of laws to ban texting while driving.

How are they working? The early returns are not good. The recent report by the Highway Loss Data Institute listed car accident data in four states – California, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Washington – that have banned texting while driving and found that there was no decrease in the accident rate. The study further found that instead of a decrease in texting-related car accidents, “there appears to have been a small increase in claims in the states enacting texting bans” suggesting “that texting drivers have responded to the law . . . by hiding their phones from view.”

Who funded the study? The report is by the Highway Loss Data Institute, an insurance industry-funded research group that opposes laws banning text messages for reasons that escape me as I write this post. I don’t think they have a lot of credibility. But, look, I don’t disagree with the premise. The law is new and public awareness as to the scope of the distracted driver problems (over 5,000 deaths a year in this country) has not waded its way into the public consciousness beyond the reflex of hating everyone who texts and drives except yourself. But over time, anti-texting laws will be an important weapon to underscoring the risk of texting and driving. The other big weapon, sadly, will be continued reports and understanding of the bloodshed that results from people texting while driving.

Baltimore drivers are among the worst in the country, according to the Baltimore Business Journal.

The Baltimore Business Journal’s source is Allstate, which would normally make me, ah, question the source. But Allstate has no real motivation to spin this (besides justifying the obscene car insurance prices they charge in Baltimore).

Allstate ranked 200 of America’s largest cities using car accident statistics. Baltimore drivers are in an accident an average of every 5.6 years. Of course, the vast majority of these accidents are property damage only accidents that are relatively minor.

USA Today has an article on how states are increasingly requiring rear-seat passengers to wear seat belts. This is the classic “brother’s keeper” v. individual rights issue. I fall into the former category on this subject as most Maryland accident lawyers do because they have seen what a projectile a person can become when launched from a back seat because they were not wearing their rear safety belt.

But what I found interesting about the USA today graph is the extent to which states don’t fall in line on this issue as you think they would. When I think of the West with a capital “W” I think of rugged individualism and a desire for self-determinism on these kinds of things. But the opposite is true: the wild west seems to almost uniformly accept the idea that rear seat belts should be law. Why is this? I have no idea.

What I do know is that Maryland law needs to be changed to require all rear-seat passengers to wear seat belts. At the risk of having every naysayer scream “slippery slope,” please remember we are requiring it for front-seat passengers, we require helmets on motorcycles, and this law would make just as much sense.

I have never been the victim of a hit-and-run accident. But I have represented numerous clients who have been injured as the result of a hit-and-run accident. It is particularly frustrating for injury victims involved in hit-and-run accidents because, absent physical evidence or eyewitness, the hit-and-run driver gets off and never faces even a modicum of justice.

Fortunately, in Maryland, there is a mechanism of recovery for accidents that are caused by drivers who leave the scene of an accident. Uninsured motorist insurance – which is available for all insurance policies written in Maryland – also covers claims made for victims involved in accidents where negligent or drunk drivers leave the scene of the accident. In other words, Maryland law essentially finds that a hit-and-run driver whose identity is never uncovered is uninsured for the purposes of making a claim.

From the perspective of a car accident lawyer, hit-and-run uninsured motorist claims hinge on the credibility of the injured witness. Rarely are there witnesses to report what happened other than the injury victim on the victim’s passengers. If the injury victim is believable, the Plaintiff will generally win the case. If the victim lacks credibility or is untruthful on the stand, it is almost impossible to win the case.