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distracted driving accident attorney.jpgAT&T conducted a survey of 1,200 teenagers (ages 15-19) to learn more about driving behavior and attitudes toward texting and driving. Here are some of their conclusions:

  • 97% of teens know that texting while driving is dangerous
  • 70% of teens believe that texting while stopped at a red light is dangerous
  • 54% of Hispanic teens admit to texting while driving
  • 41% of Caucasian teens admit to texting while driving
  • 42% of African-American teens admit to texting while driving
  • 80% of Hispanic teens admit to using their phones while at red lights
  • 71% of Caucasian teens admit to using their phones while at red lights
  • 70% of African-American teens admit to using their phones while at red lights
  • 46% of teens send between 21 and 100 text messages per day

AT&T’s Infographic is pretty good–it highlights a lot of information designed to help promote their “Texting & Driving: It Can Wait” campaign. Two things that caught my eye:

  • At 65 mph a car travels the length of a basketball court in a single second
  • Texting takes your eyes off of the road for an average of 5 seconds

Like many providers, AT&T has designed a mobile app (DriveMode) to prevent text messages from reaching a driver.
For more information on distracted driving, check out our Charm City Lawyer Blog posts and past Maryland Car Accident Lawyers Blog posts. If you believe that you have been injured because another driving was driving while texting, contact us at 443.850.4426, or online for a free consultation.

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Distracted pedestrian.jpgNone of them should be texting. We’ve blogged before about distracted driving and even distracted doctoring. Now, Fort Lee New Jersey is issuing tickets to pedestrians who ignore traffic signals or who jaywalk while looking down at their phones.

There were 117 tickets issued in one month, at $85.00 a pop. The question here, as with all governmental cell phone regulation, is whether the government should be taking this parental role? Opponents of regulation say that the government should just leave us alone, and that if we are stupid enough to text and walk across the street, we deserve to get run over. Proponents say that the problem does not just affect those who text–it affects the motorist who hits us, the person who hits them, and costs taxpayers money when someone isn’t insured and needs medical care.

The problem is of course, widespread. A New York State Senator commented in an ABC news article on one of two deaths in Brooklyn:

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iPad Jobs.jpgThe iPad is great–you know it, I know it. It’s slick. It’s refined. It just oozes “cool.” Lawyers are now starting to use the iPad for work. Many use it to complement their laptops. Some use it now instead of a laptop. It’s even making the rounds at depositions, used to hold thousands of pages of documents and potential exhibits.

When it comes to trial, though, most attorneys ruin the cool. They have an iPad. They have a projector. The iPad is connected to the projector, by ugly wires (an iPad to HDMI adapter, and HDMI cables). They are tethered to the projector, by ugly wires. At that point, it doesn’t look nearly as sophisticated.

Lawyers: there is one way to present your case, and to maintain the ability to walk anywhere you want in the courtroom, with your iPad in hand. The jury will marvel at your grace, and will respect your technological sophistication. Especially compared to the defense lawyer who is using a foam-core blow-up and a slide rule.

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Honda Civic Peters.jpgThe ongoing saga of one woman’s pursuit for justice against Honda is finally at an end. Heather Peters opted out of a class action lawsuit, and took her case to small claims court in California. She alleged that her Civic Hybrid did not receive anywhere near the gas mileage as claimed by Honda; and that the vehicle was harmed by software updates. She prevailed at the small claims court level, with a verdict of $9,867.19.

Honda appealed the decision to the Superior Court, where the court heard the case from the beginning (called a de novo trial). A three-day trial was held. Honda convinced the judge that Honda was permitted to advertise the EPA-approved gas mileage numbers, even though the numbers were later adjudged inflated by the EPA. Interestingly, the Court found that “[t]he majority of users report mileage very close to the EPA estimates.”

In her press release, Ms. Peters commented that:

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Self-driving car.jpgWe’ve all heard about Google’s research into self-driving cars. Now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is getting into the mix, believing that 80% of automobile accidents can be prevented if vehicles are given the ability to communicate with each other (see article, Detroit Free Press).

This “vehicle-to-vehicle” communication and related technologies can be used to implement crash-warning systems, and lane departure alerts. According to the NHTSA’s Administrator:

Our research shows that these technologies could help prevent a majority of the collisions that typically occur in the real world, such as rear-end collisions, intersection crashes, or collisions while switching lanes.

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WC poster.jpgIf you are injured while seeking medical treatment that is required in order for you to go back to work, when the original injury was a Maryland workers’ comp injury, is the second injury a workers’ compensation claim, as well?

The Court of Special Appeals answered that question no. Here’s what happened in Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority v. Jan Williams, just decided last week.

The claimant injured his back and left knee while on-the-job on April 15, 2008. A year later, he was attending a specialized type of physical therapy known as work hardening. He had a session, and went to his truck during the lunch break. After the lunch break, he got out of his truck and walked back to his therapy. While in the parking lot, another driver backed up into him.

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distracted driving accident attorney.jpgU.S. Secretary Ray LaHood is continuing his crusade against cell phones and upping the ante, proposing a nationwide ban talking, texting and e-mailing while driving. His latest forum (see the news story by Reuters) was a distracted driving summit in Texas last week. His main argument centers around the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s estimate of 3,000 fatal traffic accidents in 2011, caused by distracted driving. The NHTSA also states that cell phone use delays reactions just as much as a BAC of 0.08.

According to LaHood:

It used to be that if an officer pulled you over for drunk driving, he would pat you on the back, maybe call you a cab or take you home, but he wouldn’t arrest you. Now that has changed, and the same enforcement can work for people who talk on cell phones while driving.

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A blog post by a State Farm Employee has been making the rounds on a few lawyer listserves that I belong to. It is an entirely reasonable and well-written post titled “The Do’s and Don’ts of a Minor Car Accident.”

One point stated by the employee:

Don’t assume there aren’t injuries.

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18-wheeler truck accidentTruck drivers are subject to a great deal of regulation, and rightly so. These are huge machines, and the smallest errors, whether because of driver fatigue, inadequate pre-trip inspections, or distracted driving, can cause life-altering destruction. There is always an incentive by truck companies to cut corners, cut costs, and improve their bottom line. The good trucking companies ignore those incentives, and play it safe. The bad ones skirt the federal and state regulations, and cause Maryland truck accidents.

Here’s the story of one really bad one. Unfortunately, it’s a local business, based out of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. In November 2011, trucking company Gunthers Transport LLC was forced by the federal government to close up shop. Gunthers, an “imminent hazard to the public,” was cited for safety violations and seven collisions within a one-year period. The company was caught falsifying driver logs to circumvent driver rest and sleep requirements. In the 1990’s a prior version of the company recently lost a civil lawsuit from a situation where one of its drivers killed one person and left another permanently disabled. The company declared bankruptcy, and still owes its victim a substantial amount of the $16.5 million judgment.

Just a few weeks later, a new company was born–Clock Transport LLC. Interestingly enough, it had the same address as Gunthers, and the person in charge was the son of Gunthers. Maryland State Police quickly noticed this, and made it a point to pull over every single truck from that address to check for safety violations.

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Beer.jpgMany clients come to us expecting that they will be entitled to punitive damages in their Maryland auto accident. This is especially true in cases where the negligent driver was drunk, or tried to flee the scene of the auto accident, or was driving while texting. Sadly, punitive damages are rarely available, even in these extreme examples.

Punitive damages are “damages on an increased scale, awarded to the plaintiff over and above what will barely compensate him for his property loss, where the wrong done to him was aggravated by circumstances of violence, oppression, malice, fraud, or wanton and wicked conduct on the part of the defendant.” (Black’s Law Dict., 1991 ed., pg. 390). These damages are intended to punish the defendant, to make an example of him.

Every state has its own law on punitive damages. In Maryland, the purpose of punitive damages is to punish the defendant for egregiously bad conduct toward the plaintiff, and also to deter the defendants and others contemplating similar behavior. The standard in Maryland is gross negligence or actual malice.

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