Car Crashes

Car crashes are miserable!

This is the part of the website where I am supposed to tell you how important it is to call me immediately (like all other personal injury websites).  Well I am going a different way.  Here goes:

Car crashes are miserable! I have been in several myself, and I have been helping people who have been hurt in car crashes for years. I am way past the point of sugarcoating it, I would be happy if there were never any car crashes again.  I am happy to see that the automobile manufacturers are putting all sorts of new technology in place to protect us from ourselves, because we have done a poor job in our society of eliminating car crashes by simply being careful.

Saying that car crashes are miserable is not a terribly profound thing to say. If you have been hurt in one that was your not your fault, you realize that car crashes are miserable because they should never happen. I think people on the outside looking in too often take the easy way out and say, “Oh well, accidents happen, you can’t prevent them all.”  NO!  Accidents do not just “happen”.  People crash into each other because one or both were not paying attention, or following too closely, or driving too fast, or not looking before they turn, etc. Sometimes they happen because the city, state or county have not maintained a road very well, or designed it poorly in the first place. Sometimes strange things happen, like a truck with an unsecured load dropping debris on other cars or in the road, causing big crazy chain collisions. Sometimes a tire will blow out because it was poorly made, or the owner of the car did not inflate it or replace it when it was too old. The point is, there is always a reason; a story behind every car crash.

My job is to investigate what happened and tell that story for you.  The story does not end with the car crash itself, that is only the beginning, especially if someone has been injured.  Some people get better in days after a car crash, some get better after months of suffering and medical care, some of people are horribly permanently injured, and as we know all to well, some people die in car crashes.  It is my job to get to know you and what you have been through, and tell that story.

But wait Mike, you said: “I would be happy if there were no more car crashes.” THEN what would you do for a living?  I am an attorney who paid his own way through college and law school by delivering pizza and teaching guitar.  If that day comes, trust me, I will find a different kind of law to practice, or another way to make an honest living.

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Tractor-Trailer/Big Rig Crashes

When Big Rigs crash into cars, motorcycles or even other Big Rigs, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

Tractor-Trailer/Big Rig crashes happen way too frequently, even though this is a heavily regulated industry.  The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations provide strict rules concerning the number of hours a trucker can drive, how long they must wait to drive after consuming alcohol, the pre-trip and post-trip inspections of the tractor and trailer, the maintenance of the tractor and trailer by the trucking company or owner, and the record keeping to prove they are really doing all of this stuff.  Unfortunately, many truckers don’t follow these rules, and many trucking companies do not follow the rules themselves or do a poor job making sure their truckers are following the rules.

Truckers are professional drivers, and they are held to a higher standard.  If you want to see what I mean, take a look at the CDL Manual;  truckers are taught to be way more proactive in avoiding crashes than the average driver.

The reason truckers are so heavily regulated is obvious:  when Big Rigs crash into cars, motorcycles or even other Big Rigs, BAD THINGS HAPPEN.  You do not need to be a physics major to figure that out.

Truck crashes happen when truckers do not follow the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, or get lazy about applying the safe driving skills that they have learned.  Truck crashes happen when truckers drive too long and get tired, or take drugs to try to keep themselves awake.  Sometimes, it is the trucker himself who is to blame, but there are lots of trucking companies that do not do what they need to do to make sure their truckers are operating safely.

When I started my career, I used to defend truckers and trucking companies.  I was even part of a team that would be called in by the insurance companies to start investigating these crashes right away. Our job was to gather all the evidence to make sure it was not lost, and figure out what had happened, but more importantly, why it happened.

There is a lot of evidence that needs to be gathered at the very beginning of a trucking case. For instance, tractors all have these Electronic Control Modules (black boxes) now, and if those are not downloaded right away, the ECM might record over the data from the crash.  You would be amazed at what the black box can tell you about what the trucker was doing before, during and sometimes even right after the crash.  Those black box reports can make or break a case.There are a lot of other documents that tend to “disappear” if the trucking company is not reminded to preserve them.

The bottom line is that a Tractor Trailer / Big Rig case is not an ordinary car crash case and needs to be handled more aggressively at the very beginning.

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Premises Liability

Some people think that Premises Liability pertains only to slip/trip and fall type cases, but in reality, it refers to anything that happens to you when you are on another person or company’s property. For instance, if you are at a store, bar or restaurant and there are dangerous people there, the business owner might have a duty to remove the dangerous people, or warn the other patrons. Falling merchandise in a store is a premises liability issue. But let’s be honest, most premises liability cases are slip/trip and fall incidents.

People trip. It’s part of being human. Unlike a car accident, which some manage to avoid for an entire lifetime, everyone trips occasionally. Many times, it is because someone was not paying attention to where they were walking. That seems to be the default view of the average juror in Arizona. There is a real bias amongst the public against these cases. That is why I am very picky about the premises liability cases that I take on.

There are many instances where a person trips or slips and falls, and it is not their fault. There is a whole body of engineering science relating to premises safety. Certain building features are known trip hazards. Sometimes, when constructing new buildings and walkways, contractors go for style over safety. Engineers have been writing papers and doing studies warning about how dangerous these hazards are for years. Yet the business owners and contractors frequently do nothing about them – until they are forced to do something about it.

When I was an insurance defense attorney, I had the opportunity to represent many businesses in trip and fall accidents during his career as an insurance defense attorney. I have since helped many people who have been hurt due to the negligence of premises owners. I understand the law and the science applied in these cases. I am happy to talk about your premises case with you, but please understand that I accept only about 20% of the premises cases that are referred to me.

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Construction Site Injuries

There is very little excuse for construction workers to get injured on the worksite anymore.

We have all heard the stories about the workers who built the skyscrapers and bridges of the 1800’s and 1900’s. The accidents, the deaths, the injuries. Working conditions were horrible, and people got hurt all the time. There was very little recourse for the injured workers and their families.

By the latter half of the 20th Century, the people had enough. Congress enacted the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970, (OSHA) in order to put an end to these types of injuries and deaths.

With modern technology and safety developments, there is very little excuse for construction workers to get injured on the worksite anymore. Unfortunately, it still happens.

These days, the law places a strict duty on general contractors to make sure that the work site is safe. It is a duty they are not allowed to delegate. The big contractors know this, and they spend a lot of money on safety engineers to write up Company Safety Plans, which they use to convince developers that they will complete projects safely. However, many times, the big contractors ignore their own safety plans. Other times, the general contractors do not police the subcontractors closely enough, and one subcontractor will make a safety mistake and hurt an employee of another subcontractor.

As a defense attorney, I defended several high profile general contractors in lawsuits resulting in catastrophic injuries. I have also had several of these cases since I started representing Plaintiffs. I know OSHA well and I know Arizona law on the subject inside and out. There has been a lot of political drama over these issues in the past 7-8 years, at one point the Federal OSHA office almost came in and took over State OSHA due to some lax fall protection rules that were put into place by the Arizona legislature. I stayed current on all of those developments.

If you or a member of your family has been injured on a construction site, you need an attorney who understands these issues. This is one area of law in which time really is of the essence. The general contractors and their insurance companies hire lawyers and investigators right away. Your lawyer needs to get involved right away to make sure evidence is preserved. These cases are very fact-based and doing a proper investigation from the start is critical.

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Motorcycle & Bicycle Crashes

Insurance companies and their attorneys frequently try to blame the motorcyclist/bicyclist.

I put Motorcycle and Bicycle Crashes as a separate category because there is more to the average car versus motorcycle or car versus bicycle crash. Motorcyclists and bicyclists are subject to the same basic traffic laws as automobiles, but there are some laws in place to protect bicyclists and motorcyclists from automobiles, and from themselves. Some of these are state laws, but many towns have specific laws about where and how a motorcycle or bicycle may be ridden.

There are also inherent dangers and limitations in riding a motorcycle or a bicycle that sometimes make these cases more difficult. It is much more difficult to bring a bicycle or a motorcycle to a quick stop than an automobile. To make matters worse, people usually get hurt a lot worse when they are hit on their motorcycle or bicycle than if they had been in an automobile. Insurance companies and their attorneys frequently try to blame the motorcyclist/bicyclist to avoid paying money for large medical bills and bad injuries.

I have handled hundreds of motorcycle crash cases and dozens of bicycle crash cases. My paralegal has handled over a thousand. Needless to say, we feel very comfortable representing motorcyclists and bicyclists in injury cases.

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