Delay, Delay, Delay, Delay………..

 Posted on April 12, 2024 in Case Matters

Delay of Game

Delay is pernicious. For many lawyers, it is a bit of a sign of success. You are too busy to get to even your most important cases because there are fires to be fought on other cases. My clients don’t care that I am successful or that I am over busy or that I am working on someone else’s case. Clients just are not used to waiting for the time periods that are routine in litigation.

My clients are respectful of my time. Most conversations start off with “I am sorry to bother you.” To me, that is the sign of a good client. They respect my time but understand that delay does not help them. Delay also does not help me or my business.

Who does delay help? Really, delay helps two participants. It generally helps the Defense in any individual case. It also helps the Court system and lawyers as a group.

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Patient Steals Operating Device from Operating Room

 Posted on April 12, 2024 in For Lawyers

So, this is lawyer humor for when surgeons unintentionally leave surgical material behind in patients and stitch the patient up and send them home. Neither the patient nor the doctor realize that a sponge, clamp or other item was left inside the patient until the patient starts having pain in the area. Sometimes, the pain will not appear for months or years. Once the retained instrument is identified, surgery is almost always the only proper response.

These are called Never Events by Medicare and all others in the hospital field. They are never supposed to happen.  There was a recent Inquirer article reporting that these incidents still occur with some regularity.  The recent data I have seen reports that 1 in 1600 surgeries have a patient with a retained item.  This sounds pretty high to me.

I am working on a case where a piece of a robotic surgical device fell off inside a patient and was not recognized as missing. A year later, the patient has severe pain in the area and needed a second surgery. Easy case, right? Yes. In the past, the most common device left behind was a surgical sponge. The Operating Room teams learned that they had to count sponges going in to make sure that the same number came out.  Many items are metallic and xrays detect them before closing a patient. Other items can be radio tagged. However, for now it seems that having a robot performing the surgery allows for pieces to fall off and be stolen by the patient!

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WHAT MY CLIENTS GO THROUGH

 Posted on March 14, 2024 in Auto Accidents

Here is a typical scenario. Rick was driving his motorcycle to work at his job as a bookkeeper for an auto parts store. He had always liked motors and machines and loved riding a motorcycle on a nice sunny day. On this particular day, he was stopped at a red light on a small side road when a kid driving an F-250, which is a large pickup truck, turned left in front of him off the main road. The kid did not leave enough room or did not see him and Bam! Rick was hit head on. Thankfully, the windshield and front tire took some of the impact and the truck wasn’t going more than 25mph. But, Rick had an instant thought of OMG I’m dead, then a rush of pain as his nose was hit by the windshield of his bike. His nose was instantly broken and bleeding everywhere. After the crash he jumped to the side of the road but could not get his left leg freed from the bike easily. A bunch of people jumped out to help him and brought him off to the side of the road. The other driver was very nice and apologetic and said he did not see Rick. Rick was just pissed off and covered in blood. The police took his bike and EMS took him to the hospital. Rick now had to begin the process of healing. He spent a week dealing with his bike insurance claims and explaining the situation. He went to work with two black eyes and a swollen face. He got better over the next month but could not walk up his stairs. His wife finally got him to go see a doctor about the stairs problem. It turns out that while nothing was broken, the big quad muscle was injured and was not working properly. So, surgery was recommended. Rick was no fan of doctors and chose physical therapy but that simply did not change the fact that his leg could not lift up easily. So, six months after the crash, he had surgery to repair the torn quadricep muscle and began physical therapy again. All because the other driver had to have a big truck and was simply not paying attention.

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ARE YOU ROTTING? TIK TOK BANS AND WHAT THE HECK ARE WE DOING WITH OUR TIME?

 Posted on March 14, 2024 in Best of

My teens call it rotting when you are sitting on your phone watching videos for large chunks of time. Sometimes slang gets it right. While getting ready for work today, I heard on CNBC that Americans use tiktok 75 minutes a day! Wow.  That is a lot. I would guess that I only use about half that, but still it’s ridiculous. What does this have to do with personal injury?

Well, truly, people are attached to their phones and it’s causing havoc. If you are checking ticktok or snapchat while driving, you are endangering everyone around you. It’s just the truth. Nevertheless, people do a lot of stuff that is dangerous to themselves and others. That’s what I am here for.

The scary thing is watching people driving and realizing that they are on their phones as you pass them. Most of the weird inexplicable crashes these days are caused by people on their phones. What used to be drunk drivers causing crashes in the middle of the night on a weekend is now something that occurs in broad daylight on a Wednesday.

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Dangerous Dogs – People love their pit bulls but they make an awful mess when they bite

 Posted on March 05, 2024 in Case Matters

I settled a case recently for $300,000 involving a really savage bite by a pit bull. The dog had never bitten anyone before, but his bite was so bad that it took a year to heal, left my client with permanent cramping in her torn muscle, and it looked like she had been bitten by jaws. The dog was, of course, named Hercules.

Pit bulls are loved by their owners as I hear in every dog bite case I handle with serious injuries. However, for the most part, they are not used by police forces for two reasons that directly intersect with my cases. They have a strong prey drive and a very forceful bite. This means that unlike a german shepherd or other similar dogs, they have a crushing bite that causes injury regardless of situation and they attack like predator to prey rather than working dogs doing a job to subdue. Most articles about pit bull training reveal that police don’t use them because they are hard to train, hard to restrain, and do unacceptable damage when they engage someone. Same goes for rottweilers if you want another breed.

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Judge Alito Gets Schooled By Sen. Markwayne Mullin

 Posted on March 05, 2024 in Courts

So, following hard on the heels of Judge Alito’s decision that Roe v. Wade was no good, our friends on the bench in the deep south just decided that fertilized embryos were also people.

None other than esteemed meathead Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, quickly piped up that he and his wife had used IVF to have children and that the fertilized embryos are people was not the position of the Republican party. Now Markwayne is not exactly who you want setting Republican policy or responses to Judge Al

 

ito but that is what we have come to.  Markwayne has four biological children, so figure a whole bunch of IVF was used to get his wife pregnant and hence a whole lot of fertilized eggs were lost/killed/died in the process. Further, Markwayne believes that there should are no exceptions for abortion.  Life is life and rape, incest, life of the mother be damned. Markwayne never graduated college, so the whole science thing is probably lost on him. Also, the whole notion of a slippery slope is plainly lost on him as well.

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French Lawmakers Enshrine Access to Abortion in Constitution

 Posted on March 04, 2024 in Uncategorized

French Lawmakers Enshrine Access to Abortion in Constitution

Legislators passed an amendment giving women the “guaranteed freedom” to end their pregnancies, which experts called a global first.

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Blue Cross/Blue Shield is a bad corporate citizen for my clients

 Posted on February 22, 2024 in Case Matters

 

Imagine this situation happens to your friend, Sally Slipper. On a lovely spring day, Sally walked to a nearby bank on her lunch hour. She rarely took time for lunch from her job as an Administrative Assistant. As she was going to cross a busy intersection, she was watching traffic, the changing lights, and the blinking walk signs. Sally trips and falls on the sidewalk next to the walk sign. She is embarrassed at being on the ground in the middle of the day. Her pants are wet and dirty and her knee is bleeding through her pant leg. But, her right wrist really hurts.  She looks down and sees the sidewalk is all broken up around a manhole cover and cement pieces are missing. She didn’t see the broken sidewalk before she fell and thinks to herself that she would have seen this and avoided it if she were paying attention. Her wrist is really tender and starting to swell. She calls her boss and he tells her to go to the ER. At the hospital, she is told she will need surgery. She is embarrassed and scared that she will lose time from work. Sally needs her paycheck but can go for a few weeks without it.  But, she cannot type without her wrist being in good shape and she will be in a brace or cast for a while. She is going to have to cancel her weekly tennis match. Her tennis buddies are her social network and she will miss playing and dinner after. She goes home in a sling and tells her son about her day. He says call a lawyer. She refuses as she is embarrassed and still thinks this is all her fault. Ten days later, after having surgery, she decides to call the lawyer. She has never sued anyone before and it is a big decision to even make the case.  She just doesn’t want this sidewalk to hurt someone else and she is going to be without a salary and friends for a while.

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What is Great Customer Service in the Legal Profession?

 Posted on February 22, 2024 in Case Matters

Great customer service is a critical element of my business. I cannot compete with Morgan and Morgan for stupid ads. I cannot offend people like Top Dog Law. I cannot gather as many negative yelp reviews or complaints to the disciplinary board of Pennsylvania as my larger competitors. But, what I can do is listen to what you are going through, connect the dots to what I think your future medical condition will look like, and coach you through the process of getting better and getting compensation for your injuries. People come to me disappointed in other large law firms because they simply could never talk to a lawyer. Their calls were “managed” by a claims paralegal and nobody took the time to update them on what was going on in their cases.

I was born in New York City. I am impatient and demanding by nature. To call me contrary bear is a badge of honor. When I was in my first semester in law school my contracts professor called on me in one of the first classes of the year to grill me about a case in our homework assignment. The professor called randomly on me in front of a class of my fellow 1L’s or first year students. He asked me questions and I gave him my responses. In his sardonic manner he finished the questioning by saying, “You are planning a career in litigation, Mr. Neuwirth?” I had no idea what he was talking about. To me, being confrontational or contrary was simply the way I was. It is who I am. I ended up in the Queens District Attorney’s Office in New York City. The professor was right and more insightful than me.

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Paul Frankel Died

 Posted on February 22, 2024 in Best of

A 93-year-old friend of my family’s died recently. His death was expected and to some extent a relief. He had spent the past five years or so in a difficult state. However, he was a Holocaust survivor and his story needs to be repeated and not forgotten. Paul lived to age 16 in Transylvania, Romania of Dracula fame. His father was a doctor and he lived with his mother, father, and brother. When the Nazis came to town, they kidnapped all of the Jewish residents and sent them off to Auschwitz. Paul’s father and mother were killed there. Paul and his brother were shuttled around to a variety of concentration camps and ended up escaping the Nazis during a transfer. Neither knew the other had escaped and they eventually reconnected in the United States after the war. Paul ran a successful dairy business servicing the US Military for much of my youth. He was a large serious fellow with a loving family and always a handful of dogs around and opera playing in the living room. Paul liked messing around with lawyers and was very supportive of me as a young lawyer. He will be missed, but sadly, his formative teen years and the awful circumstances of the Holocaust to some extent transcend him as a person and make him a symbol for all right-thinking people to remember that there is evil out there in the world.

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