Articles Posted in California

A San Mateo County jury ordered the California Department of Transportation to pay a 17-year-old girl injured in a pedestrian accident $12 million. As is the case in too many pedestrian accident cases, the plaintiff’s injuries were catastrophic: she sustained a brain injury that put her in a permanent vegetative state. No matter what the facts are, it is just an unbelievable tragedy that happens far too often.

Plaintiff’s attorneys’ case rested on the premise that uncontrolled intersections with designated crosswalks are more dangerous than unmarked crosswalks because they give pedestrians a false sense of confidence that they can cross.

These pedestrian cases against state entities are tough and few accident lawyers will take them. Plaintiff’s lawyers, in this case, deserve a lot of credit.

Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo filed a lawsuit accused Anthem Blue Cross of California of attempting to pay off plaintiffs involved in a class action over insurance rescissions.

Paying off plaintiffs with money? How awful! Wait, I thought that was the point…

In the insurance law class that I teach, we are often discussing the fine line between accidental acts covered by insurance and intentional acts that are generally not covered in most policies. The reality is that coverage in most states is interpreted very broadly and, as a result, acts that we all agree are intentional in the vernacular are not intentional in the insurance law context. The San Diego Injury Lawyer Blog has an excellent post about a recent California case where the insured’s son threw someone into the shallow end of a pool at their home and fractured the victim’s clavicle.

The son was charged and later pled nolo contendre to a misdemeanor so, obviously; it was a little more than negligence because battery – by definition – is an intentional tort. The court does an end-run around this – as most courts do – by finding that the son did not intend or expect the consequence. Obviously, in the world of torts, this does not negate an otherwise intentional act.

The classic case on this premise in the torts context is the one we all remember from law school: Garratt v. Dailey, 279 P.2d 1091 (Wash. 1955). In that case, a 5-year-old boy who pulled a chair out from under his aunt committed a tort if he knew that the likelihood of his action was that she would fall to the ground. Obviously, the insured in this case knew that the person he threw in the pool would land in the pool and that there was not consent for the act.

The Desert Sun has an editorial on “tort abuse” that provides the following statistic: “Tort (sic) costs amount to $865 billion nationally each year — or 6.5 percent of the gross domestic product. That’s a lot of lost economic output.”

Can we get a footnote? And while I don’t want to get too demanding, how about citing the actual study that supports this figure? It is absolutely outlandish. Does the Desert Sun have any criteria for what it will publish?

Here’s another great one: “California also ranks near the bottom when it comes to farm owners’ tort losses — that is, how much farm owners pay when an outside vendor sues them for an injury incurred on the farm owner’s property. These losses translate into higher food prices for consumers everywhere.”

The San Diego Injury Lawyer Blog (post since removed) reports that the California Court of Appeals has extended the protections given to doctors under the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) to emergency medical technicians (EMTs) transporting patients because EMTs were “inextricably identified” with the health and medical care of their patients.

The Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act of 1975 was ostensibly enacted in California to provide for affordable medical malpractice insurance for doctors because, you know, doctors are so poor and all. MICRA limits medical malpractice jury awards $250,000 in noneconomic damages and staggers payment for verdicts over $50,000 future medicals and lost wages. Making matters worse, doctor defendants in medical malpractice cases can introduce collateral sources to show medical payments made by insurance companies.

I don’t question MICRA, including EMTs. I question the logic of MICRA itself.