As reported in Law 360 … The Florida Supreme Court’s recent decision not to reinstate a nearly $31 million jury award against a bar that served alcohol to an underage person who later crashed into a pedestrian was the right call, experts said, and provided much needed clarity on the state’s dram shop statute. Read […]
One of the better trial judges I have appeared in front of started as a math teacher. This lawyer did that in reverse. When I entered the classroom each new school year, I became responsible for teaching a group of strangers who may not have wanted to be there, about a subject that they may […]
Defense lawyers who convince a judge to keep out evidence of prior similar accidents don’t get to argue to the jury that there is no evidence of similar accidents. “The misconduct of Appellant’s counsel has resulted in unnecessary expense to his client and to Appellee, a waste of judicial resources, and inconvenience to the jurors […]
I was trying a Georgia med-mal case involving an infant with injuries caused by hydrocephaly when a juror brought a medical textbook into the jury room on the first day of trial. The Court discharged that juror the day it happened. This Tennessee case is like that except nobody noticed until it was too late. […]
Law students who would traditionally experience only a few courtroom scenarios over a semester have begun working with programs that can provide an entire array of courtroom curveballs, thanks to large language model artificial intelligence technology. Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1804884?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2024-02-21&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=1?copied=1 Based on real-life experiences, I have suggestions for “curveball” fact patterns to throw at these […]
I have had State Farm adjusters sitting in the venire eager to get on an auto accident jury. In one case, I remember a State Farm adjuster on the venire panel. I used internal State Farm documents with the Judge showing that the insurance carrier encouraged their employees – when called for jury duty – […]
A Florida jury tacked on $50 million in punitive damages to a roughly $211 million award to the family of Maya Kowalski, the child at the center of the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya,” against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for mistreating Maya to the point that her mother took her own life. Read […]
When I was a young lawyer, jurors were not routinely allowed to ask their own questions of witnesses. When the jury instructions and other trial rules were modified to make this a regular feature of trials, most of us came to believe that juror questions were an important and useful change to the way trials […]
My favorite football coach is famous for his mantra: “The standard is the standard”. In court, however, proving negligence often depends upon establishing a “standard of care” that may be vague. In medical malpractice cases, expert witnesses often testify to a national minimum standard 0f care that applies in all communities. In this interesting Florida […]
In Florida, there is a presumption that the driver of a vehicle that rear-ends another is at fault. That presumption may be overcome by evidence of a sudden stop, sudden entry into traffic or cutting off traffic. Given that, you might rightly wonder why the carrier of the sand truck in this recent case in […]
