The first thing to remember about workers’ compensation is that you are entitled to make your claim for any accidental injury. What exactly is an “accidental Injury” is clearly spelled out in the Workers’ Compensation Statutes, but our normal everyday definition will normally suffice. Even if the accident was your fault you are entitled to make the claim. Now if you did something on purpose – that’s a no-no and you will not recover.

I had two different callers last week, who were involved in auto accidents and the police came. It was kind of a convoluted accident, not a simple rear-end collision.  There were witnesses involved.  And in both cases, the clients ended up going to the hospital, so they didn’t get to stick around.

After a recent jury trial we spoke to the jurors and I can understand why, in the end, the jurors really know so little about how the jury trial actually works and worked.

So we are in the midst of a trial and we discover that there is a medical malpractice issue that could be involved in the case. What do we do about that medical malpractice component? You may or may not need to involve the malpractice issue depending upon how much coverage there for the underlying accident but assuming that you don’t know for sure and you’re the lawyer, you’ve got to look at the medical malpractice because as we discussed the statute of limitations for medical malpractice is different than for the auto accident.

We’re doing our closing arguments and the issue in the trial has been whether or not the elephant in the room has been addressed. The elephant usually is one of two things. Either there was no property damage, so how in the world could our client be injured, or the client had a prior injury and that’s really what was causing the injury –  didn’t have anything to do with this accident.

One of the things clients who are being deposed are told at the beginning of a deposition is that there might be objections by the client’s lawyer and then the client may be told to go ahead and answer anyway. That can be a little bit confusing – why the lawyer would be objecting and then telling saying to go ahead and answer. These depositions of course are under oath and therefore, whatever is said is testimony and can be brought up in court. Now if a possible objectionable question is asked by the opposing lawyer at a trial I would object right then and there and the trial judge might sustain the objection and the answer to that particular would never see the light of day.

Let’s say you have your client on the witness stand, you’ve spent hours training and going over all the questions and all the scenarios that could come about and then…and then,your client says something in response to cross examination that is from "left field",completely not expected, and something not good that could substantially damage the case. Possibly your client loses his or her temper and in so doing says something that is either inaccurate or somethingthat just doesn’t come across right. What do you do then?

We have spoken about jury trials, jury instructions, and then started talking about proximate cause and how that plays a role in jury instructions. We have spoken about the auto accident that brought us to the trial and a potential overlap of medical malpractice and how that would work.

The House of Delegates will be working on a measure to expand gambling as a special session continues in Annapolis.