Once again, I took some time off, this time with my children. We made our annual pilgrimage to Wisconsin. We drove back yesterday – 875 miles in 14 hours.
There have been a bunch of exciting developments in the law of torts in the past 10 days. Brandon Bass covered the blog for me while I was out of town and alerted you to many of them; I will comment on some of his posts over the next few days and add a few other things I came upon during my trip.
It feels good to be back in the saddle.
I posted an entry recently concerning access to municipal codes in Tennessee. I mentioned that I did not know how to find the code for Nashville on the Web.
Tony Duncan knew – here is the site.
Thanks Tony
Merck tried – and failed – to postpone the first Vioxx trial. The case will be tried starting next week in rural Texas courtroom.
Merck said they sought a continuance because of pre-trial publicity. The judge said he would not grant a continuance before looking responses to the jury questionaires.
Merck had earlier agreed in writing that it would not seek a continuance except for illness of one of its lead counsel. Oh well.
So-called black boxes capture lots and lots of data of importance to lawyers in motor vehicle litigation. The information contained in these devices can literally make or break a case. In trucking cases, log books are now kept on computer by some trucking concerns.
This article talks about the fight in the trucking industry over these on-board data recorders, an issue coming to a head because the federal government may order that trucking logs be keep via computer rather than paper.
As one would expect, major resistance is coming from owner-operators. Many large trucking companies who insist that their drivers follow the law are already using on-board recording devices.
For Independence Day, why not read about another affront to the civil justice system, this one via a bill sponsored by Texas Republican Lamar Smith? There is a good article on the dangers of the bill over at law.com. It is amazing that the bill not only attacks a nonexistant problem, but does so with all the precision of a drunken sumo wrestler in high heels. It’s like trying to kill a housefly with a shotgun.
Thanks to Robert Ambrogi for telling us about an interesting study from the Rand Corporation.
Rand studied asbestos payments, and found that 42 cents of every dollar went to victims, 27 cents went to their lawyers, and 31 cents went to defense costs. See an executive summary of the study here.
While it is a shame that “administrative” costs eat up such a large share of the asbestos dollars, it is interesting to see it actually documented that defense costs exceed the monies paid to the lawyers for the victims. This study helps document why it is so unfair to cap attorneys’ fees on one side of the “v”.
Ok, you may think this is boring but …
Trying to get your hands on local ordinances in other cities and counties is a challenge. Here is a site that offers the codes in some Tennessee cities for free. The cities included are Brentwood, Clarksville, Gallatin, Germantown, Kingsport, Knoxville, and Memphis. Also included are the ordinances for Shelby County.
The site is offered by the publisher of the codes in those locales. The publisher has codes for over 1400 cites and towns. Visit the publisher’s home page here.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation has a terrific web tool that lets you view the amount of traffic on state roads. You can click on any county in the state, then zoom around the map to find the highway you are looking for. This is a great tool for checking the traffic volume on a road based on Average Daily Traffic (“ADT”). This information is invaluable in dangerous roadway cases.
Branham & Day is happy to announce that our firm is now running another legal blog, medmalblog.com. Several of the attorneys at our office, as well as our nurse-paralegal, are posting entries on the new site. Rebecca Blair, a shareholder at Branham & Day, is leading it. The blog is focused on the plaintiff / patient’s side, and we are planning to provide legal forms, resources, case law summaries, and notes on the tort reform movement. Check it out (in your mythical free time).
From over at the Med Mal Blog: The Eastern Section Court of Appeals held today that Givens prevents a trial court from issuing an order that allows ex parte communications with a plaintiff’s treating physicians. The Court of Appeals rejected the argument by the defendant doctors and Tennessee Medical Association that a patient waives confidentiality by filing suit. Although there is a good chance this case is going up to the Tennessee Supreme Court, this resolves the issue for now in favor of patients.
This issue has been popping up in numerous cases across the state, so the Court of Appeals decision is an important one. Many defendants request “authorizations for medical records and information” with written discovery. Think hard before you allow your client to sign on to any medical release that might be read to allow the defendant to skirt Givens.
