Getting motor vehicle accident reports is a hassle, but is appears that it will be getting easier.
BuyCrash.com makes accident reports from Georgia, Indiana, and Kentucky available for purchase over the Internet. Accident reports from Tennessee will be available in the future.
Thanks to Chris Simon and the Atlanta Injury Attorney Blog for making me aware of this service.
The Springfield Injury Law Blog has given us a great post titled "8 Ways to Help Your Personal Injury Lawyer Help Your Case." Obviously, the post informs personal injury clients how they can help their lawyer obtain a better result in their case.
It is so good I am going to reprint it here:
1. Give your lawyer the whole story
The Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance has released the forms for reporting on medical malpractice claims for the 2009 calendar year.
The reports are due March 1, 2010.
Here are the instructions for filling out forms as a representative of the claimant. Here is the link to the reporting form.
Thompson Hine is a 99-year old law firm with offices in eight different cities. Its products liability lawyers work do work in the aerospace, automotive, chemical, electrical, mechanical, medical device and pharmaceutical areas.
And they are concerned about the implications of Section 212 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which requires the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to implement a publicly accessible, searchable database of consumer product incident reports.
The firm reports that:
The Nevada Supreme Court has ruled that a pharmacy does not owe a duty of care to unidentified third parties who were injured by a pharmacy customer who was driving while under the influence of controlled prescription drugs.
In reaching the decision, the court rejected the arguments that pharmacies have a duty to act to prevent a pharmacy customer from injuring members of the general public and that Nevada’s pharmacy statutory and regulatory laws allow third parties to maintain a negligence per se claim for alleged violations concerning dispensation of prescription drugs and maintenance of customers’ records.
Here is the court’s summary of the facts:
David Cline, the paramedic who was killed when the private ambulance he was driving slammed into the back of a TDOT roadside help truck on Interstate 65 on October 22, 2009, had a history of medical problems, including narcolepsy and epilepsy. Investigators are unsure why Cline left the highway but believe that the he suffered a "seizure or some type of medical condition that [incapacitated] him and led to the fatal crash, according to the final report released by Metro Nashville Police Department on December 28, 2009. The story was reported in The City Paper.
The article reports that "after performing a toxicology examination, police determined Cline had an elevated level of amphetamines in his bloodstream from his prescribed medication for narcolepsy, Adderall. The same report did not find indications his prescribed epilepsy medication, Depakote, was in his system." The article also reports that
Cline did have previous incidents involving seizures and car crashes. On Christmas Day 1999, Cline ran off the road and struck a utility pole after he had a seizure, and following the incident, his driver’s license was suspended. His credentials were reinstated in March of 2000. He suffered another seizure while working his day job as a Franklin firefighter, "three or four years prior" to the deadly crash.
Today’s Tennessean has an article originally published in the Los Angeles Times that reveals a problem with nurses moving from state to state and leaving behind a bad disciplinary record.
The article reports that "using public databases and state disciplinary reports, reporters found hundreds of cases in which registered nurses held clear licenses in some states after they had been sanctioned in others, often for serious misdeeds. In California alone, a months-long review of its 350,000 active nurses found at least 177 whose licenses had been revoked, surrendered, suspended or denied elsewhere."
This problem can be avoided. "By simply typing a nurse’s name into a national database, state officials can often find out within seconds whether the nurse has been sanctioned anywhere in the country and why. But some states don’t check regularly or at all."
NHTSA has released a report concerning fatal crashes by young drivers. The report shows that
Dianne McLeod says a debt collector killed her husband Stanley.
According to CNN, Ms. McLeod alleges that " her mortgage company, Green Tree Servicing, for the wrongful death of her husband. McLeod said she thinks he would be alive if not for the stress caused by Green Tree’s debt collectors. She said they sometimes called up to 10 times a day and also called the McLeods’ neighbors." Stanley , a heart patient died of heart failure.
The CNN story does not reveal the cause of action being employed in the Florida litigation. In Tennessee, the Supreme Court has ruled that debt collectors may be liable for damages caused if they engage in intentional infliction of emotional distress, as known as the tort of outrageous conduct. The case applying this tort to debt collectors is Moorhead v. J.C. Penny, Co. 555. S.W. 2d 713 (Tenn. 1977). Whether conduct is "outrageous" and whether the conduct caused an injury or death is very much dependent on the facts.
According to NHTSA’s National Center for Statistics and Analysis there were 1035 people killed on Tennessee roads in 2008. Of those fatalities, 327 of them involved at least one driver who had a blood alcohol level of 0.8 or greater.
This is an alcohol-related death rate of .47 people per 100 Million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). The death rate per VMT is down 11.3% from a year earlier.
In 2008, Montana had the highest alcohol-impaired fatality rate in the Nation – 0.84 fatalities per 100 million VMT while Vermont had the lowest rate in the Nation – 0.16 per 100 million VMT.
Day on Torts