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Just read an article in the New York Times titled, “How to Know if You Have Enough Auto Insurance“. The article gave some interesting statistics: Nationally, the average jury award for motor vehicle accident injuries is $181,197, and about 5 percent of car accident injury claims in 2010 were for more than $100,000 while only about 2 percent reached $300,000.

Then there are those occasional multi-million dollar jury verdicts. How do you protect yourself against those?

Anyone can make a mistake driving, including you. Do you need to protect yourself against such judgments? Is it expensive to do?

I was both surprised and delighted to spot an article in the Syracuse Post Standard titled, “Five Things Drivers and Cyclists Need to Know about Each Other”. As an avid cyclist and a Central and Syracuse New York accident lawyer representing injured cyclists, I applaud the Post Standard for bringing to a wider audience some safety tips I have been blogging about for years:

For cyclists, (1) be predictable, not weirdly spontaneous, so motorists will know what you are about to do. You can be predictable simply by following the same rules of the road a motorist must follow: obey all traffic rules/laws, for example, drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights and stop signs. (2) Imagine you are invisible (you are!) so that you drive totally defensively; (3) try to make eye contact with drivers at intersections; (4) watch out for those parked car doors opening!; (5) don’t have music plugged into your ears (the law in New York requires you to have one ear un-plugged, but that’s not good enough, keep them both free to help save your life!); (6) always wear a helmet (required by law for those under 14, but required by love-of-life for all); (7) be visible; where bright colors in the day, and use bike lights at night (I recommend flashing lights even in the daytime — you are that much more visible – but remember to PRETEND you are INVISIBLE); (8) no sidewalk riding; (9) you are allowed to ride two-abreast, except when traffic wants to pass you, and then you must go single file.

For motorists: (1) Look out for us cyclists! Hey, we are here!; (2) Reduce speed when encountering cyclists; (3) give us room when you pass us! (4 feet at least); (4) if you can’t pass us safely, wait!

We should learn from our mistakes. Actually, a famous New York law professor and commentator, David Siegel, always says that we should learn from others’ mistakes. That’s a much less painful way of learning.

Having practiced as a Central and Syracuse New York personal injury and medical malpractice lawyer for many years, I sometimes get the impression that corporations, hospitals and doctors do not learn from others’ mistakes (the pain-free way) or even from their own (the painful way). They just repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Sure, that keeps someone like me in business, but wouldn’t it be better for the rest of us if hospitals and others learned from their mistakes, minimized them, and put me out of business? (Don’t worry about me – I can always be a greeter at Walmart, if they don’t mind that I have sued them a couple of times).

For a 57 year-old Central New York personal injury lawyer, I’m pretty social-media savvy. I blog, I tweet, I google, I post on Facebook, etc. So when I read some twitter chatter about an article titled “Juror Misconduct in the Age of Social Networking”, I googled the article and read it. It was a good read, and since you might not have the time or inclination to read the whole thing, let me summarize it for you.

It starts with this quote from Albert Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”. I assume Einstein was thinking of the atomic bomb, not social media. I don’t think you can call social media an atomic bomb, though its impact on juries is certainly somewhat explosive.

The article goes on to describe how jurors are “tweeting”, “Facebooking” and googling with smartphones during jury duties, often in defiance of the judge’s order not to. If they are posting information about the case, or discussing it at all, or googling for information about the lawyers, their clients or witnesses, well, they are violating their juror oath. Jurors have been caught posting things like, “it’s gonna be fun to tell the defendant he’s GUILTY”. Other jurors have been caught trying to “friend” witnesses on Facebook. They have also conducted improper “investigations” online, for example, regarding the distance between two relevant locations, or the yearly profits of a defendant corporation.

If you are a New York personal injury lawyer like me, you need your stress relief. From my observations, the two most popular ways for litigation lawyers to “de-stress” are (1) exercise and (2) drink. I have chosen the first (although I also occasionally engage in the second, in moderation). When I work out hard, I can feel the stress peeling away, like when you peel back the layers of an onion.

Mostly I run, bike and swim, though my knees are giving out and so I do a lot less running than before. And every year I do at least one short triathlon (swim-bike-run race). This year is no exception. Saturday is my annual Geneva NY “Musselman” triathlon.

My goal is to beat my time from last year. I am racing only against myself. Can I win? In the glass-half-empty department: (1) I’m a year older, (2) low back pain, and (3) knee issues sabotaged my run-training. In the glass-have-full department: (1) in better swim shape, (2) faster bike, and (3) down 7 pounds or so. So it’s a toss-up. In the why-the-hell-do-I-care department, all I can tell you is, good question!

The Syracuse Post Standard reports that the top 5 cell phone carriers in the U.S. receive a total of 1.3 million requests from law enforcement agencies for personal and location data. Cell phones have built in GPS tracking devices that record the cell phone’s whereabouts. Police use of cell phone data is now widespread, even among small, local police departments.

What the Post Standard article does not say is that New York car accident lawyers like me also use cell phone data in our cases. Here’s how:

Say I have a car accident case where the defendant driver, at deposition, tells me he was not at all distracted when he entered an intersection against a stop sign and collided into my client’s car. Let’s say he claims my client “came out of nowhere” and therefore “must have been speeding”. My next question? “Sir, do you have a cell phone” (answer: yes). My next question: “were you using it at the time of the collision or just before the collision” (Answer: “no”). Next questions, “what carrier do you use”, and “what is the phone number”.

I never knew I was a Tea Party kind-a-guy, but in at least one respect, I am. I found this post, titled “A Hollow Liberty“, on the website for “Tea Party Nation“. I agree 100% with it!

The article warns that Mitt Romney and other Republicans are planning an assault on our sacrosanct Seventh Amendment constitutional rights. The Seventh Amendment is the one that guaranties us the right to a civil jury trial.

To the Tea Party’s chagrin, Mitt Romney wants to impose Federal Tort Reform throughout the nation. Tort Reform of any kind has only one true purpose; to sap the life out of our constitutional right to a civil jury trial for personal injury claims brought against careless corporations, drunk drivers, dangerous doctors, and a host of other wrongdoers.

Two recent tragic New York boating accidents have me blogging about boating safety again.

First, a cabin cruiser carrying 27 passengers capsized off Long Island on July 4th, killing three children. The boat, traveling in darkness, was carrying an extended family from watching a fireworks display near Oyster Bay. On the trip home, another boat’s wake apparently hit it, causing it to suddenly flip. Some witnesses from other boats say the boat took a sharp left turn before it flipped, so the steering might have been a cause, too.

But the boat may also have been overloaded. The problem with boats this size is that they usually don’t have any signage indicating a passenger limit. There is a general rule of thumb, though, for figuring out how many passengers a boat can handle: multiply the boat’s length by its width and divide by 15. It is not yet clear whether this boat was “overloaded” by that calculation, but 27 people on this 36-foot boat does seem excessive.

Should undocumented Mexican and Guatemalan farm workers who cross our U.S. border illegally, work in New York illegally, then get seriously injured through the negligence of others, then file a personal injury lawsuit in New York against those others, then go back home because they can no longer work or afford to live here while they await their trial date, and then can’t get visas to get back to the U.S. for their depositions or trial, be allowed to give video-taped deposition and trial testimony from their home countries? After all, the general rule is that a plaintiff must present him or herself for depositions and trial testimony in New York where they filed the lawsuit. But still, should their cases be dismissed for failing to appear in New York when they can’t get visas to get back here, even if the visas were denied because they came here illegally to begin with?

This was the question I recently presented to a trial judge, and then to an appellate court. I argued that a “balancing of the scales of justice” required the court to allow the testimony of my injured migrant farm workers by video-conferencing from abroad. I argued that, on one side of the scale of justice, if testimony was allowed to be taken from abroad, both plaintiffs and defendants would have their day in “court”, sort of, and justice would be served, although there would be quite a bit of inconvenience to the parties and the Court, and of course it would be better to have the plaintiffs testify in person before the jury. On the other side of the scale, if the Court required plaintiffs to appear physically in Court in New York for depositions and trial, their claims would be dismissed when they failed to show up, no trial would be had, and no justice would be done.

In other words, on the one hand, there was a less-than-perfect forum for justice, but a satisfactory one nonetheless, and on the other, there is no justice at all.

Yesterday Jerry Sandusky was convicted of sexual abusing 10 boys. He will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in jail. Now comes the civil lawsuits for compensation for the victims. Sandusky will get sued, sure he will, but so will Penn State.

Will Penn State be held liable? In Pennsylvania as in New York, an employer is not automatically liable for sex abuse by its employees. Generally the victims must prove the employer knew or should have known what was going on, or else failed to screen new hires properly. Here Penn State ‘s goose is cooked. It knew way too much way too early and did way too little to stop it. You don’t have to have a crystal ball to accurately predict that Penn State will end up paying out millions of dollars to the victims. And rightfully so.

Maybe this very publicized case will dissuade other pedophiles from sexually abusing children. But I doubt it. Even those who are caught aren’t usually dissuaded from doing it again. Convicted pedophiles have an extremely high recidivist rate, which is why a sex offender public registry exists, and why, under New York’s Meagan’s law, they are not allowed to live within 2,000 feet of a school while on parole.

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