Articles Posted in Car Accidents

state car insurance costsMSN provides the average annual premium for car insurance by state. The numbers are provided below.

The numbers are interesting for their relativity but not for their absolute values. Because the numbers are based on a male driving a 2010 vehicle with slightly better than average coverage (100 (per person)/300 (per accident)/50 (property damage). Why not shoot for a more average driver who is not driving a brand new car? These are insurance company statistics and insurance companies want us to read this and say (1) my insurance company is not charging me that much, it must be cheap, and (2) rates are high all over so we must need tort reform to lower car insurance.

With those caveats, here are the numbers:

There is a fundamental problem with soft tissue injury cases that few plaintiffs’ lawyers will admit: some percentage of soft tissue injury plaintiffs are either completely faking the injury or exaggerating the symptoms.  Maybe you are not, dear reader.  But many do and the key – and the hard part – is figuring out who is who, both for lawyers considering taking a case and for judges and juries.

Whiplash Does Not Sound Like a Big Case

Make no mistake: judges, juries, and even insurance companies struggle with these cases. Whiplash. Car accident. What comes to mind when you hear these three words?   Now, wait.  Make sure you answer this question as you would before you got hurt.  It is probably a much different answer.

Personal injury victims want a calculator or formula to determine what their settlement should be. “How much is my case worth?” seems like a fair question. The human brain is averse to uncertainty. In lab experiments, our wiring in this regard is underscored: we prefer physical pain to uncertainty.

Regrettably, there is no formula or calculator that shows how much money you will get in your accident case. The real world is too complex for a personal injury settlement calculator. A car accident case is worth what a judge or jury would give the injury victim.

There are a lot of resources and statistics to look at values of particular injuries.  Here are some examples:

Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar was named in a lawsuit following a fatal alcohol-related car crash. In the lawsuit, plaintiff claims the bar over-served a man on the night of the accident and was negligent in the death of her daughter.

This is an awful case. The man’s pickup truck collided with a car occupied by three teenagers, killing two people of them and seriously injuring the third. The drunk driver was also killed in the car accident.

As tragic as this case is, I have some concern with dram shop laws that hold bars accountable in these cases just because I think it is so difficult to track who has been served what at a bar.

AIG will pay $18 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who suffered a serious brain injury after he was struck by a truck in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The settlement nullifies a $75 million judgment reached in a North Carolina superior court after an AIG subsidiary declined to defend the case. Why they declined to defend the case is anyone’s guess, but it certainly was a screw-up that probably increased the value of this case.

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Mr. Miller:

Hi, I am a Maryland attorney and would like to get little mentoring on any differences between an unidentified motorist claim and an uninsured motorist claim. Please call or send me an email and I promise I’ll be brief. Thanks so much for any help!

Dear Maryland Attorney:

Last week in Baddou v. Hall, the South Dakota Supreme Court either enunciated new law or affirmed existing law (depending upon your perspective) on whether South Dakota has a presumption of negligence in Rapid City rear-end car accident case. The court’s answer: it does not.

This is bad law, in my opinion, because it makes South Dakota car accident lawyer prove a negative. Rear-end car accidents rarely happen in the absence of negligence and the defendant is the one in the best position to know the nuance of the negligence. It is basically a technicality generating law.

I disagree with the Plaintiff that a rear end accident should be negligence per se. Instead, the better law, applied in many states such as Florida, Maryland, and Colorado, is that there is a rebuttable presumption of negligence in rear end accident cases.

If you have talked to a personal injury lawyer who handles many car accident cases in the last six months, you will hear complaints that these cases are drying up. Yet, unfortunately, there is no indication we have fewer automobile accidents in this country. So why?

I think the main reason is that car insurance companies are getting better at reaching out to clients before they find a lawyer. Insurance companies may absolutely do this. Moreover, I think this works mostly with smaller auto accident cases. The reality—and this is something many car accident lawyers don’t want prospective clients to know—is that you can often handle small auto accident cases without a lawyer.

Our car accident lawyers handling your case will increase the value of your case. In fact, the mere involvement of our law firm, given our reputation, will increase the value of your case. But how much? If you have a big case, it will increase the value a great deal. Our car accident lawyers have been referred cases by other lawyers that already have an offer and we have gotten more than 35 times the offer given to the original lawyer. But our accident lawyers’ ability to add value to your case is directly proportional to the size of the case. If you have a case with an ER visit and a few physical therapy sessions, our car accident lawyers will increase the value of your case. And it will make your life easier because you have someone to process everything for you. But is it enough to make it worth hiring us? The answer to that varies from case to case. Our car accident lawyers used to take these kinds of cases because we thought it was a bad idea to deny anyone the right to a lawyer if they had a valid claim. Now, I’m telling at least a third of the people that call us with legitimate cases that they certainly can hire a lawyer, but they also have the option to proceed without a lawyer, and we tell them what they should do to continue bringing their car accident claim without a lawyer.

This month, Metro Verdicts provides information on facial scarring settlements and verdicts in Maryland and Virginia. The median facial scarring verdicts in Maryland and Virginia are $20,000 and $32,500, respectively.

These numbers seem bizarrely low. Of course, I’m not sure about the inclusion criteria for this study. How do they define facial injuries? Are they permanent? Must they be visible? Because for what I consider facial scarring, these numbers seem shockingly low.

Remember, that these are the median verdicts and settlements.  The average is invariably higher, probably at least 2 or 3 times higher for facial scars. Continue reading

The Court of Appeals of Washington in Shoemake v. Ferrer, 182 P.3rd 992 (2008) considered an interested argument by a defendant in a legal malpractice case. The Defendant lawyers blew a statute of limitations by two days in a serious head-on car accident collusion case with a drug driver. This was a guy that needed a car accident lawyer in Washington that was competent to handle his case.

The problem was that he apparently did not find a competent car accident attorney. Instead, he found a lawyer that ignored State’s Farm’s $100,000 offer to pay on Plaintiff’s uninsured motorist claim because he was “was unsure of the legal ramifications of accepting that payment.” The lesson, as always: if you are not qualified to handle a serious car accident case, don’t to it. So many lawyers who don’t handle car accident claims regularly think they can. They think it sounds so easy. But it is not.

But that is not what is interesting about the case. What is interesting is the Defendant contended successfully to the trial judge that the negligent car accident lawyers were entitled to have the damages awarded reduced by the amount stated in the lawyer’s contingency fee agreement with the client.

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