List of Washington, D.C. numbered highways (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Laura Zois points out on her Maryland Accident Lawyer Blog the very obvious: Progressive Insurance is not so progressive in dealing with accident claims.
This is the time of year that the number of motorcycles on Maryland highways seem to proliferate. I'm turning this post over to a lawyer in California, Michael Ehrline, who handles a lot of motorcycle accident cases who sees these kinds of cases year round.
Ehline, a biker himself, says that motorcycle accidents in California have been steadily going up. And since the rising price of fuel, and the fact that a motorcycle gets incredibly good gas mileage, there have been many more motorcycles on the roads as of late in California cities like Los Angeles, Venice Beach, and Santa Monica. Ehline went on to say that: "Most of these newer riders are not as experienced in watching out for negligent motor vehicle operators such as those in a passenger car". Invariably, Ehline says, "this means that new riders are at a disadvantage." But he went on to say that: "Even experienced riders from other states are at a disadvantage when riding here. People in general, don't watch out for us riders in crowded towns like LA and Santa Monica."
What If I Am Injured in a California Motorcycle Accident?
If you are conscious, you may ask yourself, "what do I do?" If you are knocked out, there is not much you can do. You will in all likelihood go to the hospital and spend some time there. If from out of town, when you awake, you will probably not know anyone. You will be scared and vulnerable. You could do a Google search for: "Los Angeles personal injury attorney", or you could look in the phone book, or ask a doctor. And although it is true, the case usually starts with medical professionals, or a phone book, the internet is a better choice because you can vet the lawyer by looking at their reviews, youtube videos, user ratings, and so forth. Of course beware that sometimes people will give fake bad ratings, especially jealous competitors. There could also be fake positive reviews. But if you go the California State Bar website, you can see if there has at least been any discipline against the lawyer, for example.Other Methods of Vetting a California Motorcycle Lawyer
One other way to find a great Los Angeles car accident attorney, is to ask other lawyers. I would call a few lawyers and ask them, "If I don't send the case to you, who are the five lawyers I might also consider. Another way to do this is to go to a site like Avvo.com, or look for blogs by other lawyers, like the one your reading now. So these are some of the ways of getting help in setting up your case from the start, so you can pay for your medical care, your bike, and travel back from whence you came.What the Motorcycle Lawyer Can Help With
Ehline says that when a motorcycle accident happens, it is usually due to negligence of a motor vehicle driver. But sometime there is police bias in writing a negative report against the biker, or a witness doesn't want to "get involved", etc. And since the injuries are usually very severe, the rider can lose big without help in getting an investigator, taking photos and gathering witness statements quickly. The is post accident protection. After all during the accident, the rider has no real protection, other than the helmet they have on to protect their head. And yes, they may also wear chaps or riding gear. That may help with avoiding some injuries like frictions burns, but not impact injuries like slamming against the pavement at high speed. There are no seatbelts, and no airbags for protection from the roadway when the motorcycle collides with another vehicle or object. The motorcycle lawyer can help navigate through these common issues and keep your damages claims strong. These are common things the motorcycle lawyer can help you with.Other Tips
Motorcycle accident help should start with the medical professional to treat the severe injuries, and then it should be the legal professional that takes over the other part of the injury treatment. In California, you may not have insurance, and thus, Medi-Cal or Medicare may come in to pay part of this. But what about your future medical bills, lost wages? Well, this is where the motorcycle lawyer comes in with tips to help you. He will instruct you to get medical care, physical therapy, and even help you find a doctor in some cases, who can work on a lien basis (get paid later.) This is how we lawyers work to hold the negligent driver responsible. Our job is to recover compensation for lost wages, help pay medical expenses and other damages. When a motor vehicle driver causes a collision with a motorcyclist because of careless or reckless actions they are negligent under the law in California. Keep in mind that California is a "pure comparative negligence state". This means, your compensation is reduced according to your varying degree of fault. So if you were partially negligent, your recovery would be reduced by that degree of fault. This sounds simple, but is actually complicated litigation work, and requires the experienced motorcycle accident attorney. This will sometimes entail the use of investigators, expert witnesses, and so forth. The driver is not always the only one that will be held responsible. Ultimately, if they have coverage, their insurance company will also be held accountable, and they will always have a team of expert lawyers. And in California, according to Ehline, they have very good, high paid defense attorneys. The skilled plaintiff's motorcycle accident attorney specializes in this area of the law and typically has the resources to thoroughly investigate the accident to prove negligence occurred. Being held negligent will mean that if their actions had been different, the collision could have been avoided and the rider of the bike would not have been injured. Ehline will discuss more tips in future articles regarding wrongful death recovery in California. The help that the rider needs is expert medical treatment and expert legal representation to ensure their rights to recover fair compensation. This is crucial after suffering severe injuries that can mean not being able to work for an extended amount of time or not ever being able to return to work. There can be ongoing medical care necessary and financial stress caused by this accident that could have been avoided. The injuries that bikers suffer can include traumatic head injuries, spinal cord injuries, neck and back injuries, broken bones, internal organ damage, amputations, cuts and gashes, along with severe skin scrapes that require skin grafts. This is why it is crucial to have the motorcycle accident help of an experienced lawyer. If you are injured in a California motorcycle accident, you also have a choice of calling Ehline Law Firm PC at 213.596.9642.We hope you liked this quick, informative California motorcycle accident primer. We are hoping to add more guest blogs in the future from Mr. Ehline and other lawyers around the country.
Our law firm does not handle bankruptcy cases. We had a lawyer that we refer our clients to if they have questions about bankruptcy. So this post is in general terms; you want a bankruptcy lawyer to evaluate the specifics of any particular case.
But this we can say. Generally, car accident claims are exempted in bankruptcy. The key is to make sure you disclose the pending claim as property in the bankruptcy. This puts the onus on the trustee. If the trustee does not timely object to the exemption claim, then the exemption should be allowed.
The most used exemption is the personal injury exemption of $21,625 from a personal injury award or settlement, not including pain and suffering or compensation for monetary losses.
The biggest thing that can screw you up based on my limited experience with bankruptcy seeking clients is bad communication between the acci
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dent lawyer and the bankruptcy lawyer. If they don't know each other and have not worked together, the client may have to be the facilitator between the two. Conversely, many claims lost for failure to disclose accident claims that would have been exempt if only the debtors had listed them.
Best advice here is easy: talk to your lawyers, disclose everything, and you will have the best chance of success.
Fortunately, truck accident lawyers in Maryland representing injury victims have more weapons in their arsenal to prove liability against a trucking company and its driver. Black boxes, which are found on large commercial trucks (and, parenthetically more frequently in passenger cars) are one of these tools. Black boxes are on board information recorders that can capture operational data from the truck's electronic network. A black box records data from an accident that can lead a truck accident lawyer investigating a trucking accident to a wealth of information as to how the truck accident occurred. Most notably, black boxes can often provide information as to the condition of the truck after the accident. It can also provide information on how the truck was operated, such as engine speed, brake applications, throttle position, vehicle speed, seat-belt usage, and airbag performance data. Because the black box's data storage ability is rather limited, the old data usually rewrites over the new data in a loop. Some trucks have very short loops where data is destroyed every ten minutes. On these commercial trucks, if an accident does not occur, the old data is erased and replaced with new data.
Truck accident lawyers in Maryland need to make sure after the truck accident that anyone who has custody of the truck does not try to repair the truck or even move the truck's black box. The possibility of the trucking company retrieving the black box data unilaterally should also be fought. Instead, the parties should either agree (or the injured victim's truck accident lawyer should seek a temporary restraining order from a Maryland Circuit Court) to a joint inspection of the vehicle so that the black box data can be recovered with all parties of interest present. While it is generally accepted that the vehicle owner owns the data, the truck company cannot knowingly destroy data it believes is relevant to a civil lawsuit in Maryland. Truck accident lawyers in Maryland should also know that some truck insurance polices contain language that gives the insurance company the right to retrieve the black box data. If the truck has been destroyed or the black box data has been erased, truck accident lawyers should still request the information because either the trucking company or the insurance company may have preserved the data after the truck accident. If the lawyer does not ask for the information, the trucking company and their insurance company has no obligation to provide it.
Black boxes can also be used by plaintiffs' truck accident lawyers as a weapon against trucking companies that do not you use black boxes to their fullest potential. Almost all of large trucking companies in 2006 use wireless communication and satellite technology to track their trucks and communicate with their truck drivers. But some companies use this same technology to help keep tired truck drivers off our highways. To prove they are complying with Maryland and federal law, truck drivers are required to keep a log of their hours. As you can imagine, some truckers either keep poor logs or fill them out long after they had a real memory of their trips (defense lawyers for trucking companies have the same problem with their time sheets). But at some more progressive truck companies, the black boxes can compute this information for the trucking company. For the truck accident lawyer bringing a claim against a company that has this technology, if the black box provides evidence that the truck driver was involved in a truck accident while driving more than federal law allows, it is powerful evidence of the trucker's and the trucking company's liability. If the trucking company does not employ this technology, it is a fair question to asking on cross examination of the trucking company's designee as to why the company does not employ this technology to make its fleet safer.
You can't run away from the scene of an accident. It is a pretty simply proposition that is reflected under Section 20-105(a) of the Maryland Transportation Article. Under this law, it is illegal for the driver of a vehicle to fail to stop after an accident that results in damage to an unattended vehicle or other unattended property. See Conboy v. State, 155 Md. App. 353 (2004) (making reference to the proscriptions provided for in Md. Transp. Art. § 20-105).
If you get in an accident and the other driver leaves the scene, you have a potential uninsured motorist case. How do you know the other driver was uninsured? You don't. But the law typically assumes that the driver was uninsured to pay for an losses that may occur.
So, in Maryland, if you get hurt in a car accident suffer personal injuries as the result of the negligence of a hit-and-run driver, you may still recover get a settlement for your lost wages, medical bills, and pain and suffering as if you knew the identity
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of the driver by bringing a claim under your own insurance policy's uninsured motorist provision. Essentially, the law treats that phantom vehicle as an uninsured driver.
Many states require actual contact with the phantom vehicle in order for a Plaintiff to bring a personal injury claim. Under Maryland law, however, contact is not required. Maryland courts will not enforce any policy provisions from out-of-state insurers that require physical contact between the injured party and the at-fault hit-and-run driver.
Twenty years ago in October, Maryland enacted its first universal helmet law. The number of wrongful death motorcycle in Maryland dropped precipitously. The statistics: motorcycle fatality rate dropped from 10.2 per 10,000 registered motorcycles prior to enactment of the law to 4.5 per 10,000 registered motorcycles after enactment of the law.
I don't have the statistics but I think it is reasonable to assume that there were less traumatic brain injury motorcycle accident after the helmet law was passed.
Still, it is worth noting. You are unlikely to get penalized for not wearing a helmet when bringing a motorcycle accident claim for the same reasoning that it is not contributory negligence to not wear a seat belt in a car accident. (t does not make the victim any less stupid for not wearing a helmet or a seat belt.)
In Maryland, the issue of contributory negligence is generally a jury question. Judges are loathe to make calls as whether the plaintiff's conduct contributed the the injuries suffered.
One challenge juries face is dealing with the question of contributory negligence of children in pedestrian accident cases. How do you judge the reasonableness of, for example a 5 year-old child?
Maryland applies the tender years doctrine to these cases which instructs juries to evaluate children for purpose of contributory negligence by considering the child's "age, experience and training.'"
The law begs another question. Are their some ages at which a child cannot be negligence. Many jurisdictions that apply the tender years doctrine set out age limits as to when a child is presumed to lack capacity for negligence. The age seems to very largely between 5 and 7 in jurisdictions that have the tender years doctrine.
Illinois would seem to have the best law for plaintiffs. In Illinois,a child under seven years of age is conclusively presumed to be incapable of contributory negligence as a matter of law. Taking it a step further, children between 7 and 17 years of age have a rebuttable presumption that they were not negligence. It is hard to say how the Maryland Court of Appeals would address this issue. I don't believe there are any Maryland high court opinions on point.
Three Maryland Cases Worth Reading
- Taylor v. Armiger, 277 Md. 638, 649 (1976)
- Richards v. Goff, 26 Md. App. 344 (1975)
- Oddis v. Greene, 11 Md. App. 153 (1971)
Requests for Admissions are a useful tool to figure out what defendants are really arguing in car accident cases. The reflex is "deny, deny, deny." This is fine. You can hammer them at trial for denying the obvious. Requests for Admissions can also be very practical in reducing costs in auto accident cases by figuring out what is really at issue and what you have to get in discovery and in your investigation.
Sold? Good. Here are sample requests for admission you can propound on defendants in car accident cases.
There are two fundamental limitations on how much a plaintiff can recover in a wrongful death car accident case in Maryland. The first is Maryland's cap on non economic damages which is anywhere between $755,000 and $1,887,500 for accidents occurring today (the high includes a survival action, another claim that can be brought when someone is killed by a negligent driver of a car or truck.
The other practical limitation is often the insurance policies. Generally not a problem with truck accident cases because commercial policies are larger (by law) and because trucking companies usually have assets to pay settlements and judgments.
But there are some car accident cases in Maryland where there are insufficient insurance from the at-fault driver and also insufficient uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage. The key in these cases is to uncover every possible stone to find additional insurance coverage. But that is not always possible. We have had clients is wrongful death cases whose recoveries are topped out at $30,000.
The take home message: get high uninsured motorists limits to protect yourself and your family.
