• Vehicle accidents cost $100 billion in medical care and productivity losses every year. Almost 4% of the economic losses involve children.
• Every 10 seconds, a victim of a car accident is treated in an emergency room for accident related injuries. Almost 40,000 people die in accidents every year.
• Not surprisingly, motorcycle accidents cause the most significant injuries. Motorcycle accidents comprise 6% of the total but 12% of the overall costs. Pedestrians and bicyclists are in a similar boat, causing 5% of the motor vehicle-related deaths and injuries and 10% of the economic costs.
• Teenagers are four times more likely to be involved in auto accidents. New rules such as driving curfews and other restrictions are helping reduce the number of car accidents involving teenagers. But a few smart rules don't flip a number like "4 times as many." The only answer is to change the law that gives teenagers their licenses. But there is no real inertia for that because (1) it has always been this way, (2) it is more convenient for parents than having to continue to chauffer their kids, and (3) teenagers have jobs and their inability to get to their jobs would have economic repercussions. Oh, and yes, changing the law to not allow teenagers to drive could and would probably start an armed revolution. But the fact that nine teenagers a day die in car accidents - most of which are the teen driver's fault - is a bitter price to pay. I don't know of a single reasonable person who supports raising the driving age to 20. But still. It is a bitter price we pay. (And, yes, I know I just said that twice.)
• Male teenage drivers are twice as likely to be killed in crashes as females. This is another "what do you do about this?" statistic. We allow for insurance companies to charge higher premiums for teenage boys. Why can't we make different driving ages for boys and girls? Oh, forget it, I guess I know why we can't.
• One in every three teenage deaths is the result of a motor vehicle crash.

As usual, there are no easy answers to this problem. We all demand the use of cars and we have determined that teenagers of a certain age should be given the opportunity to drive. Like most really vexing problems, anyone who thinks there is a "no-brainer any idiot could figure it out" solution just is not giving the issue much thought. But I do think we need to give more thought as a society to this issue. We have so many "wars," two real wars and then our wars on poverty, drugs, cancer, and so forth. Everyone is war weary. But we have a lot of problems so there should be a lot of wars. A war against car accident deaths should be on the war list.

You can get more information here.

Although the number of lawyers who pad their bills is probably on the downside in 2010 as more companies are looking for more ways to trim legal budget fat, lawyers who bill by the hour have been padding their bills since Emperor Claudius lifted the ban on lawyers billing more than 2,000 years ago. Little known fact: Abraham Lincoln was a notorious bill padder, sometimes charging clients five times the number of hours taken to complete the task. There was scores of client complaints about Lincoln about his billing. (Before you pass this information along, consider the possibility that I'm completely making this up.)

Anyway, while most lawyers don't, the fact that one lawyer was caught ridiculously padding her bills in not actually a Page 1 story. But I found the defense to the crime particularly interesting: it was the the law school's failure to teach law firm management.

The first reason why this is so ridiculous is obvious. As Carolyn Elefant points out, if you can't figure out that you are not allowed to bill more than 24 hours in a day, a law school class is not going to set you straight.

But, in my opinion, the whole idea of Law Firm Management as a course is an exercise in futility. You have make believe lawyers pretend to run a make believe law firm with make believe problems. Students just are not going to really digest the problem. It is like suggesting the guy that won your fantasy football league three years in a row would make a great general manager.

Of course, now we have a cheat sheet with Facebook. Apparently, a Michigan juror pronounced a criminal defendant guilty while the trial was still, ah, ongoing. Everyone is so enamored with social media and its intersection with how it impacts jurors and lawsuits, so these stories make big news. But just how many times has this happened where it never leaked out? I'm pretty sure I could confess to a felony on Facebook and no one would really be paying that much attention.

While we are talking about Facebook, please join our Miller & Zois fan page.

• Above the Law provides us with what will be a Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog Top Ten Nominee for craziest lawsuit of the year. (Ignore the fact that there is not such a list.) I can't believe Overlawyered has not picked it up yet.
• The 11th Circuit wants experts to cite every study they have relied on in forming their conclusions. The Drug and Device Law Blog views this as a big win for defendants. But defense experts in any case - particularly in medical malpractice cases - love to cite unnamed studies and literature.
• A former medical malpractice lawyer in Maryland (Montgomery County) is sentenced to 5 years in jail for stealing $1 million from his clients. He has to go to jail for this. But it is a sad story. The insane part of the whole thing is how he got caught, falling for one of those email schemes that I get about 10 times a week. The lawyer is asked to collect on a non-existent claim for a contingency fee, he receives a big settlement check, and then sends the client a check. If the lawyer does not wait until the check clears and the scammer gets his portion of the check, the lawyer has made a disbursement on a phony check. In this case, his IOLTA account had a bounced check which sent off alarms that lead to his downfall. Think about it: this lawyer steals $1 million from his clients while handling malpractice cases (and I can't even figure out the scheme), gets away with it for years, and goes down by falling for an insane email scam that seemingly fools no one. It can't be easy for a malpractice lawyer to steal a million bucks. It would be like beating Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in tennis only to lose in straight sets to my 3 year-old son. I feel bad for the guy, I really do. But if he gets out in 15 months when he is eligible for parole, he is actually getting off pretty lightly for stealing $1 million. This case is also historic because it is the first good thing to come from spam email in human history.
• Unemployed lawyer goes on a hunger strike. Gets lots of attention. One minor detail: she is not going hungry and she is not unemployed. Setting these details aside and the fact that the whole thing was inane to begin with, she is a real American hero. But I love how the Huffington Post identifies her law school in the first paragraph as a "fourth tier" law school. The article never elaborates as to why it was relevant to the story or who designated the school as "fourth tier." It had to be U.S. News & World Report, right? Are these rankings such an infallible gold standard that they need no introduction? The irony is - and I subscribe to and enjoy U.S. News & World Report - I bet they would be out of business by now without this ranking of schools gimmick they came up with that seemingly everyone agrees is flawed (yet impossible not to read).
• Ford Rollover Verdict Overturned (citing myself)
• Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice reports on bartenders getting criminally charged for pulling stunts with fire. It is a good thing that Brian Flanagan and Doug Coughlin did not try to pull this stuff.
• Popehat points out that Laura Schlesinger has no clue what the First Amendment does. I don't have a link, but Jon Stewart also very comically did the same thing last night.
• Eric Turkewitz rounds up the legal round ups.
• Everyone loves a Top Ten list. Chris Earley provides one for why he likes arbitration as a means of resolving disputes.
• To get us to ten, I link back to my story on judicial elections in Anne Arundel County.

Obviously, a jury found that it was and sent a powerful message to Ford: $16 million in actual damages and $15 million in punitive damages.

The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the verdict for a lot of reasons. I won't go into all of them but there are two reasons set forth for the court's reversal that I think are of particular interest.

First, the court found that it is improper for lawyers in closing arguments "to arouse passion or prejudice." The court cites these statements made during the plaintiff's lawyer's closing argument as improper:

1. "This is how Ford looks at this. That little bit of thirty people being killed every year didn't matter. Those thirty people, those thirty extra people getting killed in a year didn't matter to them because it was just a little bitty number."

2. "It does matter about those people getting killed. Those thirty people do count. Those thirty people--that's thirty more people that got killed that year. If you expect these vehicles to last about twenty years, that's six hundred more people getting killed using this vehicle as opposed to a Chevy S-10 Blazer. That's serious."

3. "And that doesn't count the paralyzed people, the quadriplegics, the people with serious injuries, the thousands of people that have been in these events because of this rollover propensity of this vehicle that they knew about, and they knew it since day one but they chose profit over safety every time because they looked at it as numbers. They didn't look at it as lives, as people."

4. "I submit to you that the evidence is that they did it because they thought it was a little, small number. . . . [T]hey did not look at it as thirty lives a year[], they didn't look at it as six hundred lives. That's how they should have looked at it, but that was not how they did it."

5. "They got together at the highest levels of Ford Motor Company and they made a judgment that rather than delaying and improving the Bronco II, they were going to sell the vehicle as it was and that they were going to risk people's lives and they were going to risk serious injuries like we have here today. They were going to risk people's brains."

6. "Jesse Branham is here today with a brain injury and six hundred other people, or however many it is, lost their lives, and numerous others have brain injuries or are paralyzed, quadriplegic, have extremely serious injuries. We believe that you should tell Ford Motor Company what you think about this kind of thing."

The court found these improper because they relied on evidence that was inadmissible, because it asked for damages for harm to others, and because it improperly inspired the jury to act on passion as opposed to reason. All of these arguments are flawed.

If the evidence is inadmissible, then that is the basis to overturn the verdict. There is no need to tie it to an improper closing. Presumably, this would be true in any case where evidence was inadmissible.

Additionally, the court believes these statements led to asking for damages for harm to others. But the attorney is asking for punitive damages. We don't have punitive damages in Maryland without proof of actual malice - which eliminates 99.999% of cases like this from being considered for punitive damages. But if you are asking for punitive damages, it seems to me that you have to give the context of why there was a risk of harm to more than just the plaintiff. (Plaintiff's lawyer also got into evidence the salaries of certain executives at Ford which does sound pretty incredible. But, again, our law firm has never handled a punitive damages case so I really can't speak to the standard for admissibility in these cases.)

Most back factures come from some sort of trauma, usually from a car accident or falling. The reason the numbers may sound lower than you are might expect is because many back fractures are not as serious as the ominous sounding "back fracture" would suggest. When I was in high school, I hurt my back swinging a baseball bat at baseball camp in Florida. A chiropractor worked on me for a while but I made no progress. I went to an orthopedic doctor and, low and behold, I had a fractured back. It ruined my baseball season and I had to wear a back brace for eight weeks but I never suffered any ill effects after removing the back brace.