By Andrew Ackley and Garth L. Jones
Published in the July/August edition of WSAJ Trial News.
For years, plaintiffs’ attorneys have routinely asked their opponents to admit the reasonableness of the amounts billed for an injured party’s medical and household expenses. And for years, the defense bar has routinely admitted such bills, unless there was a specific problem with a bill that warranted a denial or an objection.
Read MoreThat is what I told the Washington State House Judiciary Committee yesterday. Washington’s wrongful death laws are some of the worst in the country. There is generally no wrongful death claim for the death of an unmarried adult without children, so for example, most young people just starting out their lives.
Read MoreOn July 12 I wrote about predatory structured settlement purchasers who buy out periodic payments to the disabled–those who need the funds over their lifetime–for 30-40 cents on the dollar.
Read MoreWe recently handled a fraud and consumer protection case against two structured settlement purchasers that settled in about four months, one for a confidential amount and one for a several hundred thousand dollar gross recovery.
Read MoreSeveral news organizations are reporting that the death of Hank Williams Hoskins Sr. resulted from a “severed” air hose when he was diving off the San Juan Islands on October 26. Mr. Hoskins, 40, was apparently a commercial diver diving without a backup air supply (in many circumstances this is totally normal). The county medical examiner blamed the death on an “unsafe dive operation,” with disregard for emergency procedures, according to the Bellingham Herald.
Read MoreProbably for generational reasons, I have written and spoken at CLEs quite a bit about discovery of social media in civil litigation, in particular personal injury litigation. At the extremes, defense lawyers want an entire Facebook account, and plaintiff’s lawyers want a privilege that doesn’t even exist for personal diaries.
Read MoreOne of the most commonly misunderstood areas of tort law, including within the legal community, is the issue of the fault of the assailant. When a plaintiff files a lawsuit alleging that the business failed to use reasonable care to protect a customer from foreseeable criminal conduct, at the surface level it seems logical that the criminal should share blame. But that is not the case.
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