New York Personal Injury Lawyer Information

This blog post is about New York Personal Injury Lawyer Information.

Charlie Crist, Personal Injury Lawyer

You may remember Charlie Crist. He was the governor of Florida. He’s moved on from politics now and gone to work for Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury firm in Florida.

Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Based on what I do for a living, you would expect me to support those that fight on behalf of consumers against behemoth insurance companies that treat people like files.

But I do have a bone to pick. It’s about his 10-second commercial:

I’m Charlie Crist. If you need help sorting out your legal issues as a result of an accident or insurance dispute, visit me at Charlie@ForThePeople.com.

Now I understand it’s tough to create a quality personal injury commercial (and also tough to create a decent PI website, as I’ve discussed). But it can be done. And with that, I return you to the best PI commercials I have ever seen, from the New York firm of Trolman, Glaser & Lichtman:Power Company, Machete, and Song Stuck in Head.

And so, a note to Morgan & Morgan. You spend enormous sums of money advertising in Florida. You can do better than having a former governor do a 10-second spot that says “visit me.” If your ad agency lacks the creative juices to break out of the tired mold of “If  you’ve been injured, blah, blah, blah,” then find a new agency where people have some imagination.

Linkworthy

Things I would write about if I only had the time…

Traffic deaths are at a stunning 60-year low.Can we blame the lawyers a little?

The New England Journal of Medicine onmedical malpractice liability “reform;”

A New York appellate court upholds a multi-million dollar verdict for a man on the tracksthat was hit by a subway;

Fantastical’ 9/11 Lawsuit Could Lead to Sanctions for Lawyer, 2nd Circuit Says; anda 9/11 wrongful death case goes to trial like a speed-chess match;

Twitter art. To Scott Greenfield. Part of Charon’s art series;

And Greenfield again on clients being referred to as “leads” by marketers. And he ain’t happy ’bout that;

From the “You learn something new every day Department,” my former lawyer Ted Frank wasone of the people that vetted Sarah Palin for the Vice Presidency. And had I known that about Ted when I hired him, well, uhh, I would have hired him anyway (via Point of Law);

Today’s trial practice tip: Learn how to tell a story. A subject I visited four years (!) ago: Telling the story from the middle;

The press reported that Obama released his birth certificate. But they all seemed to blow the story. It was Hawaii that did;

Want to run a half-marathon trail race near New York City? What the hell, I’ll plug a race I created, which this year hopes to send 750 people racing across one of the great half-marathon race tracks in the northeast: Paine to Pain Opens Registration. And if you insist on some kind of legal angle, I wrote previously about how you meet real people and make real friends by doing this (as opposed to pseudo-follower-friends), and also about assumption of risk. But really, it’s mostly about running around in the woods like a kid.

Barney Frank: Injured People Must Sacrifice Even More

Frank: The injured haven't suffered enough.

Rep. Barney Frank has decided to join the tort “reform” movement, asking that those who’ve been catastrophically injured should pitch in more to help with national financial troubles caused by others. In an article today in The Hill, he had this to say:

“I also am ready, as a liberal, to look at the whole question of malpractice and liability reform,” Frank said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, according to a transcript. “People who are injured ought to be compensated, but I do think that that’s something that I would throw in if we had an otherwise overall compromise [on the national debt], because I recognize everybody’s got to give something to get this.”

In other words, those who have been most badly injured (the ones most likely to be most affected by restrictions on civil suits) haven’t sacrificed enough by virtue of their disabilities, diminished (or lost) employment, and destruction of lifestyle.

Now, according to Frank, they also need to give some level of immunity to those whose negligence caused them to be injured in the first place.

And somebody in his office ought to give him a copy of the recent study from Columbia Presbyterian/Cornell. That’s the one where the obstetrics and gynecology department lowered their malpractice costs by over 90% by improving patient safety.  You see, the best way to lower malpractice costs is to lower the incidents of malpractice. But if you choose immunity instead,  you will only end out killing patients by killing the incentive to improve.

See also: Why Medical Malpractice “Reform” Will Increase the Deficit, Not Reduce It (Joanne Doroshow @ HuffPo)

Photo by Martin Schoeller, The New Yorker

iPhone GPS Data Will Open New Doors in Litigation 

Like having a private investigator in your pocket

When I heard the news last week while on vacation, the first thing that hit me was this: The courts have a new discovery issue for personal injury lawyers to deal with. That news, as you can guess from the subject heading, is that Apple iPhone users have their movements tracked by GPS so long as the device is on.

And while much of that data may have existed before, and been accessible particularly to the police, Apple will make it much easier to obtain. Why? Well, because there’s an app for that.

These are the basics:

The tracking seems to have begun in June 2010 with the iPhone 4 update to the OS and the data is stored on the phone but is automatically transferred to a computer when the iPhone is synched without the user’s knowledge.

So the info is on your phone, on your computer, and on Apple servers somewhere out there in the digital world.

Think this through for a minute with me, to see how the data can be used for a simple accident case:

It may tell you how long someone was driving before the accident. Important for a 10 minute trip and an intersection collision? Perhaps not. But if it was a truck or bus traveling for 12 hours? Now we have another story. Can it tell you how fast you were going in the 60 seconds before the accident? Many judges might well think that relevant information for a jury.

How long did that witness testify they were at the bar/restaurant before the accident? It better be accurate, because if the phone was on it will rat you out. And those phone are almost always on.

It can also be used for criminal prosecutions. And defense to support an alibi. Matrimonial is a no-brainer for the cheating spouse. It’s like putting a private investigator in your pocket.

iPhone GPS data litigation; coming soon to a courthouse near you. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Updated: Well, that didn’t last long. Steve Jobs has admitted a mistake (why can’t politicians do that?) and a software update is in the works to make this go away.

NY Appellate Court Bars Discovery of Facebook Materials

Yesterday, New York’s Appellate Division, First Department, reversed a lower court judge in refusing to allow broad discovery regarding Facebook and other social media sites. Discovery of data from social media sites is as hot a subject as can be found among litigants, and this is now the second of New York’s four appellate divisions to weigh in on the subject.  In November 2010, the Fourth Department similarly shot down a Facebook demand in McCann v. Harleysville Insurance.

Yesterday’s decision in Abrams v. Pecileresulted from semi-nude photos of the plaintiff that the defendant possessed, and an allegation of attempted extortion. According to the court, the:

plaintiff alleges that defendant, a former employee of plaintiff’s husband, retained, without permission, a copy of a CD containing seminude photographs of plaintiff taken by her husband during their honeymoon. Plaintiff further alleges that defendant refused to return the CD and photographs unless plaintiff’s husband paid defendant $2.5 million to settle her sexual harassment claims brought against plaintiff’s husband and his brother.

New York, it seems, is firmly putting the brakes on out-of-control discovery requests. There was no new disclosure standard used, with the court using the time-tested:

“the method of discovery sought will result in the disclosure of relevant evidence or is reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of information bearing on the claims” … Nor has defendant shown that broad discovery concerning plaintiff’s finances, education, immigration status, and educational background is “material and necessary” (CPLR 3101[a]).

Linkworthy

My RSS feed has almost 7,000 posts sitting in it. That’s what happens when you try to follow a lot of blogs and you also have work to do for actual clients.

But if I had more time, these are some of the things I would like to write about:

“Tort Reform” Exposed for What It Is – Immunity (The Pop Tort)

…Take what’s happening in North Carolina, which is now considering atrocious legislation that would provide immunity not only to negligent emergency room personnel, but to the entire pharmaceutical industry.  Forget that more preventable errors occur in an ER than in any other place in a hospital, or that in states like Texas where a similar immunity law was passed, ER’s have now become even more dangerous.  Meanwhile, no patient has any recourse if they or their child is permanently disabled, disfigured, brain-damaged or killed.  This bill would essentially make “negligence in the ER legal” in North Carolina, too…

Bill Precluding Punitives for Undocumented Immigrants (TortsProf): That’s right, in AZ there seems to be no difference between acting negligently and deliberately hurting someone, so long as the person you pick on doesn’t have the right papers. Hey, why not just put “kick me” on their shirts?

The HuffingtonPost Bloggers Class Action Lawsuit Won’t Go Anywhere (Litigation and Trial):

…But nobody hated the Huffington Post as much as its own bloggers, the folks who generated a ton of its content without compensation in a spirit of, I suppose, political activism, just to watch it be sold off to AOL for $315 million….

And Max Kennerly agrees with me on the all-important subject of what to wear to court:

…I wear what I wear because I do not want what I wear to get in the way of what I am saying…

The NYS Commission on Public Integrity tries to muzzle blogging lawyer Andrew Barovick.

Veteran NYPIRG lobbyist Blair Horner, one of New York’s most well-known good government advocates, has taken a position with the American Cancer Society of NY & NJ as vice president for advocacy

A personal injury law round-up at Torts Prof.

And I barely made a dent in my RSS feed….I need more hours in the day….

Lawyers and Advertising (The New Frontier)

I broach the subject of lawyer advertising every so often, because there seems to be so many different things to write on the subject. It covers constitutional law, ethics and plain old good (bad) taste.

Ethics and constitutional issues butted heads in recent years over New York’s new attorney advertising rules, which went up to the Second Circuit in Alexander v. Cahill, about which I’ve written often as it tracked its way through the judicial system.

Ethics also comes into play with deception, as evidenced by one Joseph Rakofsky, a New York lawyer with scant experience, but whose website sung his praises in oh so many ways. Then he got a real client. Defending a murder case. Which of course, he was utterly incompetent to do and after being exposed in the Washington Post, the story is now buzzing around the blogosphere (Gamso; Bennett; Elefant; Greenfield; Tannebaum; Mayer; Koehler, Above the Law).

And in the plain old bad taste department, I’ve written of lawyer advertising on a funeral home website and, in what I previously thought was the ultimate captive audience spot, over a urinal. All of this  is part of a never-ending race to the bottom, as Scott Greenfield describes it.

Which brings me today to The Buffalo News, and an op-ed by Jeffrey Freedman, and the next round of bad-taste advertising, and the fact that there was an even more captive audience that I hadn’t even thought of, but others, apparently have:

…Captive ads, in case you missed it, is the new Metrodata Services advertising program that allows defense attorneys, bail bondsmen and anyone else who would like to advertise to the captive audience of the recently arrested on big screen TVs in the Holding Center….

So if you thought standing at a urinal and seeing an ad in front of your nose made you a captive audience, then this brings us to the next level: An audience that is captive in the most literal sense of the word, in the local lock-up.

Freedman wonders where this will ultimately lead:

Erie County Medical Center is a potential gold mine of space. Picture the possibilities for hospital gowns. Give patients a choice: Viagra or Cialis today, Mr. Smith?

And just imagine elevators and waiting rooms papered with the faces of compassionate, personal injury attorneys. “We don’t charge a fee unless we win your case.”

I thought that when lawyers dug down deep to advertise at a funeral home website, that this was as low as they could go. But perhaps there are new avenues to be explored in bad taste.

April Fool’s Day Deconstruction (A 23-Blog Conspiracy)

Is it April 2nd already?

It shouldn’t be legal. To have so much fun.

OK, so today is April 2nd and that means a deconstruction of the April Fool’s Day hoax on this blog, and as it happens, the blogs of 22 others.

I had one big problem in doing an April Fool’s joke, of course, that I discussed in the set-up for the posting: If people are looking at this site to see what stunt I will pull, based on my past April Fool’s Day conduct, how will I hoodwink anyone? Doesn’t a prank work best when it’s unexpected? Answer: Divert the readers to let the hoax play out elsewhere, and make sure the story is plausible.

The premise was simple. The New York Times gotpranked a couple of times last year. And loads of people chuckled at the “Paper of Record” for being sloppy. So this time, I figured, let’s go after the chucklers; we’ll try to get those who most like to see others get got. We’ll just claim another Times fail, certainly plausible given the past, and see who chases the bait. It would be a prank about a prank.

And with that, a wild goose chase was born with one blog after another ostensibly providing the magic link to where readers could get their laugh at the expense of the Times. No one, of course,  actually had the goods since there were no goods to be had.  In all there were 15 bloggers feeding readers into a circle that contained eight blogs. All chasing a phantom punking.

I figured most people would realize they’d been hustled after three or four links because at that point plausibility has been substantially diminished. So the best way to prolong the ruse was to keep actual facts to a minimum, because actual facts could not only be cross-checked with a Google search, but worse,  could conflict with the “facts” in the next blog. So I asked my co-conspirators to use very few facts, much to the dismay of some very creative writers with implausible concepts — just to give a little bait to keep people hunting.

And it only took a couple hundred emails to get this going.  Some bloggers, of course, were toocowardly professional to play along and declined. I can now taunt them forever for having missed a good time. In private. Unless they tick me off. I’ve got a blog, you know, and I know how to use it.

The execution was choppy, but this was the plan: Everyone would post at 7 am sharp, New York time. And most did. We were either awake and at our keyboards, or had set up urls in advance along with an auto-post. This was critical in order to create a full circle.

But a couple of Texans, who shall remain nameless, messed up the time zone differences when they set their blogs to auto-post. And one blogger that was part of the planned nine-blog circle not only messed up his timing, but also mistakenly posted backwards to the blog leading into him. That meant a dead end. He was either playing an April Fool’s joke on me, or this was the clearest case of prankster malpractice the internet had ever seen.

In addition to that dead end, there were also blown urls that had been created in advance. And so, April Fool’s Day morning, there was a dizzying deluge of email with bloggers editing links to make it all work, as some folks went off to do that thing they call “work.” One blogger actually edited his outbound url using an iPhone while standing outside a courthouse, to bypass the dead end blogger and close the circle to eight.

All told, we had 23 blogs in on the game, which included law, medicine, gaming, and politics, as well as personal/quirky blogs. I had hoped to find a tech blog to add in, but never made a connection with anyone. And it would have been great to have had the Fail Blog involved — just think of all those readers that like to laugh at others chasing a phantom fail.

These were the eight inside the circle:

Turkewitz–> Simple Justice –> Patterico –> Ted Frank –> Popehat –> Dr. Wes –> Lemon Gloria –> Marc Randazza –> Turkewitz

And these were the 15 that fed readers via daisy chains into the vortex at various points, without whom this stunt wouldn’t have been nearly as successful:

Gamso –> Seddiq –> Tannebaum –> Bennett –> Frank

Movin’ Meat –> Suture for a Living –> Lemon Gloria

Grunt Doc –> Dr. Wes

Wise –> Barovick –> Crime and Federalism –> Popehat

Kill Ten Rats –> Frank

ABA Journal –> Simple Justice

Above the Law –> Popehat

Wendy & Jason –> Turkewitz

Windy Pundit –> Turkewitz

I hope I didn’t miss anyone, but we had late additions and a couple of late deletions and my head just about spun off its moorings.

Was it a success? You betcha, as we had many thousands of people chasing the phantom, just itching to see the Times get taken. How many were actually taken depends on your definition of gotcha, but I think anyone that clicked more than three links probably qualifies. Many, I assume, figured out early it was a prank but kept clicking out of amusement to see if there was treasure at the end of the rainbow, only to find the never-ending rainbow.

It’s worth noting that one media outlet was duped (or were they?) though that wasn’t the goal: The Village Voice. They did a round-up of April Fool’s media stories, debunking jokes and letting their readers know which ones were real or not (Did the Huffington Post Steal Their April Fool’s Day Joke? Plus More Media Gags!) Despite specifically looking to critique jokes and pranks, they got caught (?) by Scott Greenfield:

Today, almost every media operation in the world has already attempted or will soon attempt to make a joke at the expense of their readers, viewers, visitors, or customers. Most will actually fool very few, while even less will be funny…

…

Not a Joke: The New York Times got fooled by an April Fool’s Day story, just like last year. This one’s really good.

The Wall Street Journal wasn’t so hot on fact-checking either, when doing a story about this year’s April Fool’s Day hoaxes. They quoted and linked to last year’s punking of the Times to make fun of it:

Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate 

“Note: an earlier version of this column had an item about a blog post by a personal-injury lawyer, Eric Turkewitz, announcing that he had been appointed the White House law blogger. Blogospheric chatter indicates a high likelihood that this post was an April Fool hoax. Mr. Turkewitz declined to give us a straight answer on this score, so, pending callback from the White House, we’ve taken the item down.”–New York Times website, April 1

When you check the date, fellas, you also have to remember the year. That sort of reminds me of commenters that make fun of spelling mistakes, while making their own.

And here’s an interesting bit about the visitors yesterday from the data I looked at: The lawfirm with the most people to visit was….wait for it….the Department of Justice. I know I speak for many in saying we sleep better knowing our tax dollars are well spent. And I would also like to welcome my visitors from the Supreme Court, Senate and White House.

The comments at many blogs were fun, as were the emails, and many happily conceded they’d been had. But the award for best comments goes to….Popehat. Really. Especially “JB” and “Scott Jacobs.” Instant classics.

Final note: As I type, the economy still stinks and we’re engaged in 2.5 wars. Those who read blogs such as this probably know more than their fair share of people suffering hardship. There is an earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan. So it’s probably healthy to take a moment out of the day to laugh at yourself and count your blessings. And on behalf of my co-conspirators, we were happy to help you get to that point.

Same time next year?

(No clients were hurt in the perpetration of this hoax.)

NYT Gets Punked Again on April Fool’s Day (But not by me)

Oy. Again Gray Lady? It didn’t seem to take that long, though I guess that’s old media for you. The Times got suckered again on April Fool’s Day. And it was just before bed last night that I wrote:

But, fear not, someplace out there on the web there are hoaxsters and pranksters of all stripes, and someplace, somewhere some folks will get gotten either because they weren’t wary, or if the gag is good enough, despite it.

Despite being punked twice last year by April Fool’s gags, and despite even doing that editorial mea culpa on the subject, the New York Times seems to have been snared again. That’s what they get for putting up a paywall.

Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice fame has the link.

April Fool’s Day is Here (Sorry, No Joke Today)

I’ve got a small problem this April Fool’s Day. Each of the last three years I’ve run a gag. I started with a decent one about the Supreme Court and fantasy baseball that nabbed a bunch of people who didn’t see it coming here, and followed up a year later with a lame one about selling this blog on eBay.

But last year, when the gag snagged the New York Times with that bit about me being appointed White House law blogger, I also learned something else; readers were actually checking in that morning to see what kind of stunt I would pull.

How early did they check in? Well, the ABA Journalratted me out at 6:46 a.m. central time. I was lucky that the joke still had legs, thanks to all those that were in on the conspiracy and “confirming” my appointment, and that the Times didn’t find the ABA posting with a simple Google search.

But when you add in the considerable post-joke kerfuffle that took place about whether such jokes are ethical violations, that it was the subject of a Disciplinary Board comment from the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and then add that the joke was part of a New York Times mea culpa editorial,  it became clear to me that my days as an April Fool’s day gagster were done.

You need a well trained magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat while everyone is watching, not some guy with a law degree who got lucky a couple times when people were taken by surprise. (Though my screenwriter brother wanted me to continue my streak and write of a local strip club offering up a bikini-clad driver to lead-footed Justice Antonin Scalia, who caused a four-car wreck the other day.)

But, fear not, someplace out there on the web there are hoaxsters and pranksters of all stripes, and someplace, somewhere some folks will get gotten because they weren’t wary, or if the gag is really good enough, despite it. But it won’t be here.

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

New York Personal Injury Lawyer

Posted in: New York Personal Injury Lawyer Information