RUDE BEHAVIOR BY THE LAWYERS. A lawyer can be a strong advocate for her client without being rude to the other side. By the way, jurors don't like rude behavior, either, and a lawyer makes a BIG mistake if she irritates the jurors.

ARGUING WITH THE JUDGE. There's a scene in A Few Good Men whre Demi Moore, a novice militiary lawyer, is trying to make her point and get the judge to change his mind.  The judge has just ruled against her, and her response is, "Sir, the defense strenuously objects and requests a meeting in chambers so that his honor might have an opportunity to hear discussion before ruling on the objection." NOTE: The judge has already ruled on the objection, so why would he want to hear more discussion before ruling on the objection? If you don't like how a judge has ruled, make sure you make a record -- you have clearly made your objection adn the basis for it -- and then move on. By the way, jurors don't like lawyers arguing with the judge, and a lawyer makes a BIG mistake if she irritates the jurors.

USING THESE PHRASES:

• "To be perfectly honest. . ." You are supposed to be perfectly honest ALL the time, so why say it now? Frankly, it makes a judge suspicious -- and a jury, too.
• "With all due respect, Judge . . ." This phrase makes a judge feel like you are calling her something like a nincompoop. Is that the impression you want to leave with the judge? Frankly, it gives the jury that impression, too.

Just some hints from a personal injury/medical malpractice lawyer who has seen a few courtrooms and judges and juries.

But he also works hard in the community. He established the Roswold Foundation for Injured Children to raise funds for seriously injured children. He recently put on the Rock and Roll Riders Benefit for children. He has spoken to teens about the dangers of distracted driving.

If you need an injury lawyer in Kansas City, I would rate James Roswold at the top of the list. 

People who suffer from some form of dementia are confused; they do not have a strong sense of where they are and even how old they are. So, they are not capable of looking out for their own safety.

A resident in a nursing home is there because she needs help. She needs to rehab from an injury, or she needs more constant care than her family can give her. The nursing home agrees to provide that care.

If the nursing home agrees to accept her as a resident and one of her conditions is some sort of mental incapacity, then the nursing home is responsible for caring for that person, the one with diminished mental capacity. And, the nursing home is in the best position to know how to keep that person safe.

Ask lots of questions, especially about the facility's elopement prevention procedure. If it accepts residents who are elopement risks, someone should be stationed at every door, every day and every night. No one can accurately predict when someone will decide to take a walk, and someone must be there to stop her.

If you have a loved one who eloped from a nursing home and was injured or died, you should speak to a nursing home lawyer. Give us a call at 703-260-6070, or email Raymond@RohrstaffLaw.com. We can answer your questions and share information that will be helpful to you.

Did you buy MEDICAL EXPENSE BENEFITS when you purchased your automobile insurance policy? Maybe you never heard of it. Maybe nobody told you about it. Maybe your adjuster didn’t mention it. 

Medical expense benefits – often called “medpay” – is a great deal for consumers. In exchange for a (small) premium, your car insurance covers your medical expenses in the event of an accident. What is a “small” premium? Depending upon how much protection you buy, your additional premium could be $20 – per year.

That’s a great deal for consumers because the insurance company will pay your medical expenses regardless of who was at fault in the accident. You were at fault? Your medical expenses are paid. The other driver was at fault? Your medical expenses are paid. You have a passenger in your car? Her medical expenses are paid. You (or a family member covered under the policy) are hit by a car while you are a pedestrian? Your medical expenses are paid. You (or a family member covered under the policy) are injured while in someone else’s car? Those medical expenses are paid.

Find out if you have medpay coverage by checking out the Declarations Page of your policy. Better yet, call Rohrstaff Law Firm and ask for Janelle, or send her an email. She will tell you how you can get your policy reviewed for free. We think this coverage is so important, we want to tell people about it and help them make good decisions at no charge.

Janelle can be reached at 703-260-6070 or at Janelle@RohrstaffLaw.com.

We promise: It will be well worth your effort to find out if you have enough medpay coverage.

Bloomberg.com published a recent article that includes reports of large corporations controlling costs by understaffing that results in gross and even criminal mistreatment of residents – and bilking us all by charging Medicare for it. 

The first to suffer from understaffing are the residents themselves.Residents fall when there are not enough caregivers to help with transfers from bed to toilet. Residents are left soiled in their wheelchairs lined up along the hallways when there are not enough caregivers to clean them. Residents die when there are not enough caregivers to assist with feeding. 

Who is looking out for our elderly? One organization that advocates for the rights of the elderly is The National Consumer Voice for Qualitiy Long-Term Care.

BIG MISTAKE!

When you make a claim for compensation for an injury caused by someone else, the lawyer for the person who injured you will want to know your medical history. Think about it. The person who injured you is only responsible for what she did to you, not for what ailments you may have had before the injury. So, you must give that information to your lawyer who can decide how your medical history affects your claim.

We once represented a woman who suffered an injury to the very same body part that had  been injured in the collision we represented her for. She did not tell us she had been in an earlier collision and, more importantly, she did not tell us that she had injured the same knee in the same way in that other wreck. Luckily, we discovered that old injury when we were reading her old medical records we had gotten from the doctor who was treating her at that time. UNLUCKILY, she had already answered written questions under oath and had not disclosed that earlier injury or treatment. Luckily, we found out in enough time to prepare her to answer the questions the defendant's lawyer would ask her at her deposition. Sure enough, the other lawyer had also read all the old records and knew about the earlier knee injury. Our client answered truthfully in her deposition, but her explanation that she had "forgotten" about that old injury did not sound credible.  Her case settled for much less than she had wanted, but she had not been truthful with us so we had not been able to help her correctly evaluate the case. Plus, the jury would have heard that she tried to hide her earlier knee problems and blame it all on this collision. The defense lawyer would have made her out to be a liar and not worthy of the trust of the jury.

Here is a link to an article I wrote about a recent case (not our case mentioned above) where a judge dismissed the entire case, partly because the plaintiff lied several times under oath about his injuries.

You were injured in a collision. It wasn't your fault. An adjuster from the other driver's insurance company calls you. The adjuster is nice. He sounds reasonable, willing to "help" you. 

THINK ABOUT IT: You are speaking to someone who represents the other driver’s insurance company. If it really was his driver's fault and you really are injured, is he really "on your side?"

***

He tells you he can help you more easily get the case settled if you will sign some documents that allow the company to get information it needs to evaluate your claim. He wants you to sign a “release” so the company can get your medical records.

THINK ABOUT IT: Your medical records are, well, YOUR medical records. You can get them yourself by asking your health care providers for them. Often, the release offered to you by the insurance company allows it to get all your medical records, including those that you might want to keep more private and are not needed to prove your injury.

***

The adjuster says he can offer you a certain amount of money if you accept his offer as soon as possible.

THINK ABOUT IT: What is the insurance company’s “job”? It has a duty to its shareholders, the owners of the company, to minimize the amount of money the company pays you for the injury its insured caused. If it can get that number down to $0, it is a good day. The insurance company wants you to take the money it offers as soon as possible, before you know the long range effects of your injuries, because once you take its money, your case is over. You cannot go back and get more, even if it turns out your injury was much worse than you thought early on.

***

Many adjusters are nice people. They have a job to do. They have been trained to do their job. But, their job is not looking out for your best interests.

Read more in Sandra's book NOW WHAT?, a guide to how to be treated fairly by the insurance company after you are injured. IT'S FREE TO VIRGINIA RESIDENTS. Check it out by clicking on the VIEW DETAILS button on the right.

There are laws, both federal and state, that govern what a health care provider can claim from your accident case. Those laws are complicated and confusing. You should not sign any forms that require you to pay the health care provider in full from what you recover from the person who injured you until you are sure the health care provider is entitled to full payment. (I'm just going to say "doctor", but it also means hospital and other kinds of health care providers.)

Liens -- The great monster that could be lurking in your case.

Often, if your medical bills were paid by health insurance that you get through an employer, the health insurance company or plan may be able to require you to repay it out of any personal injury recovery. Although the insurance law in Virginia generally prohibits such claims by insurance companies, they often make the claims anyway. After all, they sometimes get paid when people do not know what the law is. (Frankly, the law covering these types of liens is VERY complicated. Even some lawyers get it wrong - which is why you need to consult an experienced injury lawyer who can help you figure it out.)

Added to the already confusing insurance lien picture, though, is the form that lots of patients are told to sign when they first seek medical treatment for their injuries. These forms typically include a promise to pay the doctor her full fee from your personal injury recovery -- not just the fee that the doctor and your health insurance company agreed upon. That is not fair to you, and you should not agree to sign the form that guarantees the doctor will get more from you that she could get from the insurance company that you or your employer has already paid premiums to.

If you have questions about forms you may have signed in your case, contact us at 703-260-6070, or fill out the CONTACT US form on the right, or send an email to Janelle@RohrstaffLaw.com. Better yet, SPEAK TO A LAWYER BEFORE YOU SIGN THE FORM. It may be too late once you have already promised to pay the full amount instead of the contracted amount.

• For your lawyer to cherry pick your doctor for you because the doctor will say what it takes for you to win your case.
• For your lawyer to instruct you hide the fact of the referral at your deposition.

Why? First, jurors are very suspicious of lawyers and doctors who have close referral relationships. They are suspicious of injured claimants and their lawyers to begin with, so if they hear that your lawyer always refers clients to one particular doctor, your credibilitiy - and likely your case - go down the tubes.

Secondly, you should run as fast as possible from any lawyer who encourages you to lie under oath. An experienced Virginia lawyer was disbarred because he told his clients to lie at deposition about the fact that he referred them to his favorite chiropractor. 

Third, although you may not know that your lawyer always refers clients to a certain doctor, you can be sure that the insurance company will know or will find out. Who do you think the jury will believe?

What MAY BE okay:

• If you  have a special need for a doctor with a specialized expertise. It may be legitimate for your lawyer to suggest someone who can help you. But beware if the lawyer always send clients to the same chiropractor or orthopedist.

Ask questions so you fully understand the business relationship between the lawyer and the doctor.The doctor may be perfectly competent to treat you. That is not the problem here. The problem arises if the relationship between the doctor and lawyer looks fishy.

UVA Medial Center claims it has made improvements in certain areas since the hospital was ranked poorly: catheter-associated bloodstream infections, air embolisms, falls and trauma, deaths from serious complications after surgery, wounds split open after surgery, and other categories. Frankly, I would that those categories are pretty serious. After all, people are in hospitals because they need significant treatment - and hospitals ought to perform well in those categories. Interestingly, one area in which UVA Medical  Center is doing worse is stage 3 and 4 pressure ulcers. Pressure ulcers are commonly caused by poor nursing and are considered to be NON EVENTS by Medicare. That is, Medicare will not cover the cost of treating pressure ulcers.

The Daily Progress article has details about the Hospital Safety Score.

To compare hospitals' safety rankings, visit Hospital Safety Score.

At the next General Assembly session in Virginia, legislation sponsored by Delegate Scott Surovell will be proposed to make texting while driving a primary offense with severe penalties. Not everyone is a fan. There were 34 comments on Surovell's Facebook page when one of his FB friends announced the legislation. Many of them were harshly critical of the proposal. Lawmaking is messy business, and I am certain changes will be made to the proposal as the legislation goes through the process. None of the critics, though, said that texting while driving is a good idea.

AT&T, whose millions of Droid and Blackberry customers can now text while driving, has a new campaign that asks the most important question: Look at the last text you sent. Would that text be worth dying for?

As part of its campaign to stop texting while driving, AT&T is offering a new app - DriveMode - that reples to texts received while the car is moving 25 mph or more to let the sender know you are driving and cannot respond. AT&T is also urging drivers to Take the Pledge to never text and drive. It even has a texting while driving simulator. 

Lie to your lawyer about your medical history and give false sworn answers to questions asked by the defense lawyer.

In Call v. Harrison, a case in the Western District of Virginia, the judge threw out the plaintiff's case because he had left out large chunks of his personal medical history when asked for that information by the defense lawyer. Even though Mr. Call said he had forgotten about that medical history and it didn't have anything to do with his injuries in the car accident that resulted in the lawsuit, the judge said, "Not so fast." A faulty memory is no excuse and failing to disclose that information means you're out of here.

Here's a link to the Opinion of Judge Michael Urbanski.

When a person files an injury lawsuit, her medical history is open for investigation. After all, she is blaming the driver of the other vehicle on her pain and other injuries, and the other driver's lawyer has a right to try to find something in her history that may have caused or at least contributed to her complaints. Mr.  Call did not do that and the judge dismissed his case.

Judges take their responsibility very seriously and do not cotton to letting people try to play the system. If you have an injury and hire a lawyer, tell her the whole story. Lawyers can only help their clients when they know the good, the bad and the ugly. It does you no good to try to put one over on the court or your lawyer.

Fairfax County is developing a county-wide bicycle master plan. however, it will be years before it is approved and implemented.

Biking is an enjoyable activity. I loved biking when I was a child. It gave me freedom and responsibility. My children loved riding when they were young, and my grandchildren are beginning to learn the challenges and joys of bike riding.

It is more dangerous than ever out there for bicyclists who now compete for road space with motorists, some of whom still have not learned the lesson that driving while texting or talking on the phone is dangerous (and stupid).

• MAKE SURE your children wear helmets.
  
• MAKE SURE you do, too.
  
• MAKE SURE your children know the rules of the road and where and when it is safe to ride.
  
• FIND PLACES for them to ride that reduce their exposure to automobile traffic.
  

Get a copy of When the Bough Breaks, a guide for parents of injured children. Click on the red "VIEW DETAILS" button on the right and fill out the order form, or call Janelle at 703-260-6070.

Some long term care facilities - including nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, assisted living facilities - "upcode" care (that is, code care that has a higher reimbursement rate that the care that was given) and perform unnecessry therapy treatments in order to increase Medicare reimbursements.

Life Care Centers of America is now being investigated for such fraud. Evidently, whistleblower employees in Florida and Tennessee reported the activity that is being investigated.

Life Care Centers of America have 200 facilities in 28 states, including Virginia.

Is it possible that the Virginia Supreme Court could also decide that having an affair with a patient was malpractice? To be held for hurting a patient, a doctor or other health care provider must have "breached the standard of care" of a doctor in a similar practice -- in this case, a family doctor. I doubt that anyone would think that it was within the standard of care to have a nine-month-long affair with a patient. However, one of the questions raised in the trial was whether the affair was even part of the medical treatment of the doctor. For instance, he was not the patient's psychiatrist and was not in a therapeutic/counseling relationship with her. The jury found against the doctor on that issue and the higher court agreed.

New York law is different from the law in Virginia, however. The jury also found that the patient was 25% at fault for her own injury, so the amount of the verdict in her favor was reduced by 25%. (The punitive damages portion of the award was also removed by the higher court.) That is, New York law allows for the jury to compare the fault of the parties and if the plaintiff (the patient in this case) is partly at fault, the jury decides the percentage of fault and the whole verdict is reduced by that amount. That is called "comparative negligence."

Virginia does not have comparative negligence. Here, if the injured person is negligent to any degree and that negligence contributes to her injury, she loses. In Virginia, the injured person must always be 100% careful or she cannot be repaid for her losses, no matter how serious they are.

So, I'm not sure what a jury in Virginia would do in a case like this. It could very well find the patient was somewhat at faut because the evidence was that the affair lasted so long and she participated in seeking out sexual encounters with the doctor.

But, I think a doctor's having sex with a patient is not within the standard  of care. I'm just not sure that in Virginia the patient would win at trial.

I wrote about them over a year ago, and now they have arrived in Northern Virginia.

Although the idea may sound like a great alternative to placing your aging family member into a nursing home, they are not without controversy.

• Will your neighbors shun you for putting an unsightly "trailer" in your backyard because it will lower property values?
• Is the cost (around $125,000) prohibitive for most families?
• Will the elderly family member feel like she is being put outside in a dog house?
• Why not just build an addition to your house and solve these problems?
• Why not just hire an au pair to come in to take care of the elderly person?

Nursing home care is expensive (and not without its own, serious controversy), often there are few acceptable alternatives (elder neglect in nursing homes is a well-known problem), and families may want to keep their elderly family close by.  This approach is an outside-the-box alternative.

The recent article in The Washington Post gave an interesting insight into one family's decision to put a Medcottage in the back of their Fairfax County home. More interesting, however, are the 250+ comments on the article and the concept - and the politics of it all.

What do you think? Medcottage or nursing home or spare bedroom for our elderly?

How would a senior’s name be put into the system?

Your senior’s location must be unknown, must be over 60 and suffer some type of impairment – such as being diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s.  After some old fashioned police work is completed and the senior is not found, the name will be entered into the missing persons file and then a Missing Senior Alert can be activated.

BE PREPARED

If you senior is missing, having the following information readily available will help police and others:

1.  Background information on the senior: DOB, Social Security number, and an accurate description including hair style, eye color, identifiable traits or features, also include anything they might have with them such as a walker or cane, or a certain handbag.

2.  If your senior is driving, have their driver’s license number, description of the car (include any stickers, dents and any other noticeable marks on their car), and license plate number. 

3.  Enlist all parties involved with your senior such as caregivers, friends, and visitors – anyone who could help find your senior.  Sometimes the senior maybe having an ‘off’ day where they were speaking about their old home, school, or place of work, and that could indicate where they would have wandered off to.   If possible, have a list of old address and locations that were special to your senior. 

4. A current picture so police and others can recognize your loved one

For more details, visit Virginia's Senior Alert System website.

However, if you are there because of an injury from a car accident, you may have signed a ASSIGNMENT that allows the hospital to bill your car insurance company under your MEDPAY coverage instead of your health insurance. That's a real problem.

Most arrangements between a hospital and a health insurance company require the hospital to treat that company's insureds for a negotiated amount that is lower than the full charge for the service. The hospital is willing to accept a lower amount from the insurance company in exchange for the insurance company covering for fees if the patient goes to that hospital. Hospitals will charge lower fees to insureds of the company because they know they will have a large pool of people who will come to the hospital for which they will get paid. They won't have to hire a collection agency or lawyer to collect the debt if the patient cannot pay.

BUT, the hospitals are trying to get around that promise by billing patients' auto insurance policies. If you are at the hospital because of a car accident, you may be asked to provide your car insurance, and the hospital will try to get the full amount from your car insurance -- with whom it does not have an agreement to take a lesser amount for its services.

So, what do you do? COMPLAIN TO YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANY! The provider (hospital or doctor) is trying to have its cake and eat it, too. They are violating standard provider agreements and should be called on it.

Our advice to everyone -- even before they become our clients -- is DON'T PUT ANYTHING ON FACEBOOK OR TWITTER THAT YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO BE READ AND SEEN BY EVERYONE.

It is hard to explain to an injured client why she must turn over all that private information. Some courts are allowing it, others are not. So, there is no way to be sure which way a judge will decide when a client gets the demand for the information.

After we get such a demand for access to social media, we resist and make the defense justify its demand to a judge before we will turn over the information. Here is an order from Davids v. Novartis, in which a New York federal judge denied the defendant's access to the plaintiff's log-in information to all of her social networking websites so the defendant could "inspect all documents that relate to her claim." In this case, the judge said the defendant did not have enough information from which the court could infer that there was relevant information on the plaintiff's private page.

However, if a judge decides there IS enough information to suggest that an injured plaintiff has put relevant information on her private page, everything would have to be disclosed.

This is a hard lesson for young and old. We have learned that we have privacy rights, and we do. It's just that now it is easier than we have thought to give up those rights, especially when we put pictures and comments on social media websites.

That's the question every family asks when they are looking for care for their elderly loved one. Here is one source that can help.

FindtheBest is a website that has data-driven comparisons of products and services -- without advertisements -- to help people make their important decisions. The data is collected from public databases, primary sources and experts and uses its own team of researchers to verify. Here is the link to its list of best nursing homes  and assisted living facilities.