Boston Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

With this week's approval of a bill in the Massachusetts House that would ban texting while driving, Massachusetts is poised to become the twenty-ninth state to impose such a ban.

Why it took Massachusetts so long to get a texting ban passed is almost beyond comprehension. The cell phone companies are not lobbying against these laws, nor are cell phone users banding together to oppose them. Practically no other safety measure out there can do so much to reduce car accidents as a texting ban. Just another example of the inertia on Beacon Hill, I guess.

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Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly reports in its June 14, 2010 issue that personal injury plaintiffs lost in the vast majority of cases tried in Massachusetts courts in 2009. Under Mass Lawyers Weekly's rather generous methodology, a "win" for a plaintiff was defined as a case in which the plaintiff received any money at all, even if it was only one dollar, and that dollar was less than what the defendants had previously offered to settle the case. Lawyers Weekly defined a "loss" as a case in which the jury awarded zilch to the plaintiff.

Using these definitions of a "win" and a "loss," Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly broke the data down by county and found the following percentages of plaintiff's wins in Massachusetts state courts in 2009:

• Suffolk County (Boston, Chelsea, Revere and Winthrop) - Plaintiffs won in twenty-five percent of the trials.

• Norfolk County - Plaintiffs won in fourteen percent of personal injury trials.

• Middlesex County - Plaintiffs won only twenty-seven percent of personal injury trials.

• Bristol County - Personal injury plaintiffs won only thirty-two percent of trials.

• Worcester County - Plaintiffs won twenty-three percent of trials.

• Essex County - Plaintiffs won thirty-six percent of jury verdicts.

• Cape Cod and Islands - Plaintiffs won eleven percent of jury trials.

• Hampden, Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampshire counties - the percentages of jury verdicts for plaintiffs in these counties ranged from twenty-nine to thirty-three percent.

The data are even worse for Massachusetts personal injury plaintiffs if you revise the definitions of a "win" and a "loss" to fit what most lawyers mean by those terms. Superior Court Judge Brady has kept a personal log of all the negligence trials he's presided over since being appointed to the bench in 1993. Judge Brady scores a case a "win" for the plaintiff only if the amount the jury awards the plaintiff is greater than the last settlement offer made by the defense. In the 151 negligence trials that Judge Brady has heard in his nearly twenty years on the bench, only 16 have resulted in wins for the plaintiff.

The odds of prevailing at trial may seem pretty dismal for Massachusetts personal injury plaintiffs but there are a few things that should be said about this data. First, there's an obvious selection bias at work in this study. About ninety-eight percent of cases are resolved by either pre-trial settlement or some form of pre-trial motion to dismiss.

The game theorists tell us that the two percent of cases that make it to trial are cases where at least one party is overestimating the strength of its hand. If you assume a rational defendant in a case, once the defendant is convinced of his legal liability and the dollar value of damages that a jury would force him to pay, the defendant will settle the case, simply to avoid the time and expense he would have to pay to defend the case through trial. The cases that don't settle tend to be troubled cases where there is vast disagreement about either the defendant's legal liability or the amount of damages. So the vast majority of personal injury plaintiffs in Massachusetts fare better than the trial data would suggest because the trial data represent the outlier cases that make it to trial.

Nevertheless, I don't think Massachusetts personal injury lawyers should be happy with those numbers. I think they reflect a certain level of complacency by some Massachusetts personal injury lawyers about how cases should be investigated and tried to a jury. I've previously blogged about how Massachusetts' largest medical malpractice verdict of 2009 - a $15 million case - was turned down by a number of Massachusetts medical malpractice law firms before being taken by a California attorney who was much more aggressive than most Massachusetts medical malpractice attorneys in terms of the number of depositions that he took and the theories that he pursued.

I sensed a lot of defeatism in the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly article about trying cases in certain counties, especially Norfolk County. I've lived the better part of my life in Norfolk County and I have no compunction about trying a case to a Norfolk County jury. You simply need to know who your jurors are and frame the issue properly for them.

Continue reading "Study Shows That Massachusetts Personal Injury Plaintiffs Are Losing Vast Majority Of Trials: Is That A Problem, And What's The Solution?" »

The passage yesterday in the Senate of a bill banning text messaging while driving and imposing visual and other medical tests on drivers over 75 years old is good news inasmuch as it presages a ban on hand-held texts, but the potential ban on hands-free devices and the medical review of seniors raise a lot of questions.

There really is no research data showing that hands-free wireless devices are anymore distracting than your car radio or carrying on a conversation with a passenger in your car.

The idea of having seniors' doctors pull their license also makes me uncomfortable. A doctor's duty is primarily to his or her patient, just as a lawyer's duty is to his or her client. I wouldn't like the idea of having to rat my clients' driving out to the RMV (such a law would represent an unprecedented abrogation of attorney-client privilege) and I don't think doctors should have to do it either. If the evaluating doctor is the driver's personal physician, it really represents an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship.

It appears that there are a lot of details to be ironed out about the medical evaluations of senior drivers. What happens if one doctor declares a patient unfit to drive and the driver gets a second opinion pronouncing him capable of driving? Why is the first doctor's opinion sacrosanct and inviolable? If this is going to work at all, there need to be objective criteria that are employed, rather than doctors' loosey-goosey opinions. Otherwise, there may be Due Process issues with the proposed law.

If Massachusetts passes the Senate version of the bill, we will be going further, perhaps, than any other state in regulating driving by seniors. According to this chart by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, the only jurisdictions that require anything more of seniors than eye tests or special renewal procedures are New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. and the Massachusetts bill would seem to be going even further than those jurisdictions.

This is something all drivers in Massachusetts will be keeping an eye on.

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Orin Kerr, at the libertarian legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, points to a new study claiming that laws prohibiting cell phone use while driving have not succeeded in reducing car crashes.

Kerr seems to suggest that, in light of the study's data, such laws should be repealed.

It seems to me that the data, if true, are consistent with a number of conclusions, other than the conclusion that it's perfectly safe to talk on your phone while driving. First, if these laws are ineffective, it may be because of underenforcement by the police. Having a law on the books is one thing, but in order to get people to change their behavior, the law has to be enforced. Maybe the police aren't enforcing the law, or they are underenforcing the law. For example, Massachusetts police generally don't stop cars to issue citations for violations of the state seat belt law; such citations are tacked on as add-ons, if a car is stopped for another reason, such as speeding.

Second, talking on a cell phone while driving might be such a ubiquitous phenomenon that, even in areas where police are enforcing the law, they are not making a dent in the number of people actually talking on their phones.

These competing explanations seem much more plausible to me than the conclusion that talking on a cell phone while driving is perfectly safe. Kerr's conclusion simply flies in the face of the research showing talking on your cell phone while driving is very dangerous and makes drivers much more likely to be involved in a car crash.

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In a move that the Department of Transportation should have made long ago, a new regulation will prohibit truckers from driving while texting.

The move follows on the heels of President Obama's October executive order prohibiting federal employees from texting while driving.

As the satirical newspaper The Onion jokes, the text messaging ban might be a boon for country music songs about how lonely it is for truckers on the open road.

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