Articles Tagged with car accident attorney

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With the vast majority of car accidents caused by error of the drivers involved, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration seeks to give motorists more automated features to increase their awareness of potential hazards. The latest effort involves the advancement of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication systems, which the NHTSA wants to make mandatory for all cars and light trucks in the U.S. 

The agency issued a notice of proposed rulemaking on the technology, which gives cars – and other devices – the ability to transmit their location, speed, direction and other information at a rate of 10 times per second. That lets other cars (and drivers) nearby know when a vehicle ahead is braking hard or about to run a red light or changing lanes or barreling fast around a blind curve. These alerts would give drivers enough time to react and prevent a collision.

Officials with NHTSA believe this technology has the potential to mitigate or prevent the severity of 8 out of 10 crashes that don’t involve drugs or alcohol (which is about two-thirds of the total 13 million accidents that happen every year). In essence, V2V has the ability to give drivers a total 360-degree awareness of what’s happening on the road.  Continue reading →

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A car accident can have a number of different causal factors. Almost always, there is some degree of driver error by at least one motorist. In some cases, these crashes might also be the result of poor road design.

Poor road design and poor road maintenance are two different things, but they can sometimes overlap in litigation.

Government agencies that own the streets, roads and highways have a responsibility to make sure they are reasonably safe for motorists. That means using the appropriate care in the design of the roads, and also in road maintenance. Continue reading →

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Although self-driving vehicles aren’t completely autonomous or vastly widespread at this point, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is moving in that direction. The agency not long ago crafted a formal Federal Automated Vehicles Policies that recognizes the way in which this technology could transform transportation, and the many dilemmas it faces. The policy outlines vehicle performance guidance, recommendations for national (rather than state) policies for testing, existing regulatory tools and potentially new regulatory tools.

One of those issues that has been raised – but not resolved – is how automated vehicles would handle a conflict in public safety, and how liability for resulting car accident injuries might be affected by this.

The New York Times recently explored this issue by asking who your car should save if an accident is pending? For example, what if a vehicle is faced with a situation in which it must either run off the road to avoid a head-on collision with another car or careen into a large crowd of people on the sidewalk? Whose risk should be minimized by the autonomous vehicle’s algorithm? Should the vehicle’s first priority be the protection of its own occupants? Or should it be the pedestrians who face a more serious risk of injury if struck?  Continue reading →

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The goal of any injury lawyer at trial is to win the case and obtain fair compensation for the client. Unfortunately, even the most skilled attorneys can’t promise they will win every case. Our Orlando injury lawyers strongly believe in our clients, and we will fight tenaciously for a favorable outcome. Part of doing that means preparing properly for an appeal – which actually starts even before the trial gets underway. It’s sort of like insurance: The hope is that you won’t need it, but if you do, you want to know it’s there. 

The reason this is important is that generally appellate courts will not take notice of issues and disputes that were not properly raised, challenged or preserved before the trial court.

There are many ways to do this. As The American Bar Association points out, preserving matters for appeal is usually an ongoing effort throughout trial. It involves:

  • Making sure the pre-trial record is clear and pretrial orders are carefully reviewed for error or oversight;
  • Making sure that the statements of fact are coherent, cohesive and interesting (because appellate courts will simply be reviewing the cold record of the case);
  • Making good objections to challenge to correct any misstatement of the court or defense counsel immediately;
  • Carefully reviewing/ requesting modifications to the jury charge;
  • Filing post-trial motions such as judgment notwithstanding verdict, request for a new trial, etc.

Continue reading →

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Recently, an appellate court in South Carolina ruled on a criminal appeal brought by a woman who was accused of causing a fatal car accident while intoxicated, based on toxicology reports that showed marijuana in her system, as well as cold and cough medicines. 

In the case of Kranchick v. State, defendant was challenging the expertise of the state’s primary witness, who asserted that while the marijuana in her system could have been consumed up to 24 hours previously if she was a regular user, the amounts of cold and cough medicines in her blood indicated she was not using them for therapeutic purposes. Initially, the trial court granted her request for post-conviction relief on this point, but the appellate court reversed and reinstated defendant’s original conviction and sentence – which was for 13 years in prison.

But the case raises the larger question of how much cold medicine is too much? Can driving with a cold really be as dangerous as driving drunk? What does that mean in terms of liability?  Continue reading →

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Authorities in Delray Beach are investigating an intersection crash at Federal Highway and Northeast First Street, where a fitness club mogul in a Lamborghini t-boned an 82-year-old Uber driver in a Buick. Investigators believe speed and alcohol were factors in the crash, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

But what if those two vehicles never needed to cross paths? This is the theory behind the traffic re-engineering proposed by Florida Department of Transportation. Although we typically think of “advancements” in travel these days as being technological or electronic, this has to do with good old-fashioned road design. It’s called the, “diverging diamond interchange,” or DDI.

The goal of this design is to not only reduce the amount of potentially hazardous left turns, but also to make it tougher to enter a highway on-ramp traveling the wrong direction. Continue reading →

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The mother of a child left paralyzed, brain damaged and forever scarred has filed a lawsuit against not just the man who was driving drunk that night, but also against the two bars that served him that night. 

This lawsuit, filed separately from the three others brought by the estates of three persons killed in the drunk driving crash that night, alleges the driver downed 13 beers – plus a free shot of liquor – at two bars in the hours before the crash. At just 26, he worked as an assistant baseball coach at Anderson University in South Carolina. But that night, instead of guiding youths to greatness, his actions ended the lives of three young people, a 17-year-old girl, a 20-year-old woman and a 22-year-old man. That same recklessness nearly claimed the life of an 11-year-old girl, and probably would have had it not been for the quick and brave actions of a sheriff’s deputy with paramedic training who was first on scene. He found a faint trace of life, and gave her an emergency tracheotomy, right there on the scene.

Now, according to The State newspaper, that defendant has been convicted of numerous felonies relating to his actions that night. The young girl whose life was saved? She is now 13 and requires around-the-clock medical care. Her mother is now seeking justice from the business establishments she say should have known better than to continue serving the defendant driver alcohol, knowing he was clearly already drunk.  Continue reading →

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It seems almost everyone has a story about that one time they were involved in a crash or encountered a serious hazard due to an unsecured load or debris cluttering the roadway. Florida Rep. Jamie Grant (R-Tampa) recalled his best friend’s mother was killed when an engine fell off the back of a trailer and flew through her windshield. Others have talked about encountering construction tools flying off the back of trucks, swerving to miss a mattress lying in the highway, losing control due to ripped tires on the roadside or a huge tree branch that was causing an obstruction. 

While these incidents can result in thousands of dollars in property damage, serious injury or even death for those who encounter these dangers, the person who was responsible, if they are caught, might expect a ticket with a few hundred dollars fine or, if someone dies, up to 120 hours of community service.

Many argue that’s simply not enough, particularly in light of a new report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, which reports this is a much bigger problem than we may have previously understood. According to the latest news, there are approximately 50,000 accidents reported every year that are caused in some way by road debris. That’s nearly double the number noted in a previous report from 2000 indicating there were 25,000 of these incidents every year.  Continue reading →

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Excess insurance coverage is an insurance policy that provides coverage that will be in excess of what was available under the underlying liability policy. Often, that’s an umbrella policy, but it could be an auto insurance liability policy as well.

The general rule with excess insurance is that it can’t be broader than the underlying policy, but it can create higher limits. So for example if the underlying policy won’t cover damages caused by a certain act, the excess coverage isn’t going to do that either. However if the underlying policy offers up to $50,000 in coverage, your excess policy could provide more than that.

The excess insurance policy was at issue in the recent case of Cincinnati Ins. Co. v. Estate of Chee, a complex case that pits the estate of a deceased woman against her surviving husband and the doctors who provided her medical care in the wake of a crash. Those doctors then pursued action against the husband, who sought indemnification from both his auto insurance company as well as his excess insurance firm, which had provided a policy that covered both him and his wife. Continue reading →

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F.S. 768.72 allows personal injury claimants in Florida to seek punitive damages against defendants for especially egregious wrongs. 

However, there are many limits on these damages. Although they are received by the plaintiff, they are not intended to compensate the plaintiff. Rather, they are intended to punish the defendant. Courts have to first grant plaintiffs permission to seek these damages in the first place. Beyond that, they cannot be “unconstitutionally excessive,” though there is no exact dollar-figure cut-off.

The recent car accident lawsuit of State Farm v. Brewer (consolidated with the appeal of Goellner v. Brewer) before Florida’s Second District Court of Appeals reveals how the courts can approach these cases to determine what is reasonable and what is excessive.  Continue reading →

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