Articles Posted in General

“Waiter, bring me a latte and a churro please.”

Your Central and Syracuse New York personal injury lawyer is writing this blog post from a quaint little café in Barcelona, Spain. I have come here to visit my daughter. It’s a lovely city. I’ll be here for two weeks. It’s good to get away from the office for a while.

If I am handling your New York personal injury case, don’t worry! I have not dropped the ball in your case! Modern technology allows me to handle it from here. The technology lawyers have at their disposition these days is dazzling. These days I can read all my files from my laptop from anywhere in the world! I just click a few icons and I am into my law office server in Auburn, NY, where my electronic files are stored. I can read every piece of mail, pleadings and deposition transcripts, on all my New York personal injury cases. My adept staff scans my mail into my files daily, so I can read all my new mail, new pleadings, etc. I can then email draft responses to my staff, review the drafts and approve them, all while sipping a Latte in this quaint little cafe in Barcelona.

Here’s a little Halloween quiz from your Central New York personal injury lawyer: What are the three most common childhood Halloween injuries? If your answer included the word “candy”, you were wrong (hey, you aren’t alone — I would have thought so, too).

Actually, the most common types of injures seen in emergency rooms across this spooky land on October 31, according to the American Association of Pediatrics, are: (1) Eye injuries from sharp objects, (2) burn injuries from flammable costumes and (3) traumatic injuries from collisions with vehicles.

Are you spooked yet? Now that we know the scary injuries, let’s talk about how to avoid them.

I blogged the other day about how good it feels as a lawyer to get a “thumbs up“. In that blog post, I was talking about a nice email I got from a Rochester New York personal injury lawyer who heard me lecture to a room full of other New York accident lawyers about New York personal injury law issues.

It is nice to get validated by a judge, a jury, and other lawyers, but what I love most is when clients praise me. They are what’s most important to me.

What am I talking about? There is a website, “AVVO“, which is growing more and more popular, and which gives clients a place to write reviews of their lawyer. I am proud to say that I have a “perfect” (10 out of 10) AVVO rating. But I am even more proud of what my former clients have written about me on my AVVO site. Here are some selected quotes:

It’s nice to get a thumbs up. This is true when I bring my New York personal injury cases to the jury, and it is true in life generally. And I got a nice one yesterday. After I gave my annual update lecture on the topic of Municipal liability (how to hold a City, Town, Village, County, etc. liable in New York for personal injuries or wrongful death) to a room full of Rochester lawyers yesterday, I found this email awaiting me when I back home to Geneva:

Hello Michael. I . . . was in attendance today at the Academy’s 2010 update. Despite it being such a long day, it was worthwhile. And you were definitely a highlight of the day’s presenters. I thoroughly enjoyed your insights, and especially, your enthusiasm for your topic. You ‘read into’ the judicial mindset (I love to do that too) to get the largest sense possible of where the court is going …that makes law more like a philosophy course, or at least, a true barometer of the way we humans organize ourselves! As always, it is fascinating. Found your website to tell you so–too bad you are not in Rochester full time! Our loss….thanks again.

Needless to say, that email made my day. And I obviously hope juries and judges find my New York personal injury case presentations equally compelling! Although I have had great results, so far no emails from them!

The top personal injury blogger in New York State, Eric Turewitz, had an interesting blog post today. He wrote about how, according to an ABC News article, the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest corporate lobby group in the USA, plans to throw $10 Million at pro-“tort-reform” candidates this November. “Tort reformers”, by the way, are people, usually insurance or corporate types, who don’t think regular people should be able to seek justice in court against, among others, corporations whose defective products injured them. They want to put personal injury lawyers like me out of business.

But as Eric points out, there is hypocrisy in the Chamber claiming, on the one hand, that there are too many lawsuits (of the personal injury variety, or course), and on the other hand, the Chamber’s threatening to sue the Obama administration’s government to block any rules that hamper business. The Chamber’s head honcho is quoted as saying, “litigation is one of our most powerful tools for making sure that federal agencies follow the law and are held accountable”.

There sure is some irony in that position. And that reminds me of another Chamber of Commerce irony. Last year the Geneva NY Chamber of Commerce awarded me its “Citizen of the Year” award (you can read about it here). My partners in law, all terrific Central New York personal injury lawyers, found it hard to believe that the Chamber, which lobbies so hard against personal injury lawyers like us, was honoring one of us with its highest award. Go figure!

Hate to tell you, but I told you so! I previously blogged about the dangers of Facebook and similar social media for injured plaintiffs in New York personal injury lawsuits. I explained that, as a Central New York personal injury lawyer, I advise my clients to be very careful about what they post on Facebook and other social media sites. Why? Because insurance companies can, and will, search plaintiff’s Facebook page for evidence that he or she is not as disabled or in as much pain as claimed. They will look for Facebook comments, posts and photos depicting plaintiff as a happy, healthy normal person with no injuries. Never mind that the injured person is trying to put on her best face to the public, and never mind that some of those photos might be from before she was injured. I also advised that no one should think that the privacy settings on Facebook will prevent a determined insurance company from getting into his or her private posts and photos.

Now a New York Court has made a ruling ordering a personal injury plaintiff to give to defendant (more precisely, the lawyer hired by defendant’s insurance company) access even to her private postings (i.e., ones that plaintiff only allowed to be viewed by her Facebook “friends”) from Facebook and MySpace that could contradict her personal injury action claims. The same Court has ordered Facebook itself to disclose the entire history of plaintiff’s Facebook postings.

The judge found that the private pages were likely to lead to relevant information that might contradict plaintiff’s claims because some of the information on her public pages already displayed material that seemed to contradict her claims and deposition testimony with regard to her activities and enjoyment of life. In ordering the disclosure, the Court held that the private Facebook pages must be disclosed so as not to “condone Plaintiff’s attempt to hide relevant information behind self-regulated privacy settings”

I read in the Syracuse Post Standard today a story about a Syracuse firefighter who fell into a 12-foot shaft while searching a smoke-filled, burning building on James Street yesterday. The firefighter had opened a door he assumed would lead to a stairwell, took a step in, and — well he was wrong — it did not lead to stairs, but rather to a shaft for a “wheelchair lift”. He plunged to the floor 12 feet down and got injured.

Reading this story reminded me of the special rights New York firefighters and police officers have to bring New York personal injury claims against building owners who fail to follow building codes and other statutes and regulations. New York’s General Municipal Law (GML) section 205-a (for firefighters) and 205-e (for police officers) basically say that if the officer or firefighter is injured on the job because a statute or regulation (usually a building or fire code) was violated, he or she can bring a claim against the building owner.

What makes GML 205-a and 205-e so special is that the building or homeowner who violated the regulation or statute can’t use the defense of “comparative negligence” against firefighters or police officers in court. This means that even if the firefighter or police officer was partly at fault for the accident, he or she still gets 100% compensation for his or her injuries, medical expenses, lost wages, etc., from the code-violating building owner, with no reduction at all for his or her own comparative fault. All the officer or firefighter has to show is that the building owner was negligent in violating the building or fire code, and that this violation was at least “indirectly” a cause of the injuries he or she suffered.