Perlmutter & Schuelke, LLP » Blog Posts

Why Doesn’t The Texas Education Agency Care About School Bus Safety?

brooks — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:08:21 +0000

Those of you that follow my blog know that I’m rarely excited about what goes on in the legislature. But the 2007 legislative session brought one great change. Following a tragic 2006 school bus crash, the legislature mandated that all school buses purchased after September 1, 2010 must have lap and shoulder belts to protect our kids.

That law was obviously slated to go into effect yesterday. But now, the Texas Education Agency has slashed funding for the program, threatening its effect. I’ve written a lot about school bus safety (and charter bus safety), and it really upsets me that the TEA is threatening the enforcement of this critically important legislation.

KXAN news reporter Josh Hinkle had a wonderful story about the issue last night, and he’s continued the good work in his blog, where he summarized the Texas Transportation Institute’s study on the implementation of the bill. For any of you interested in this, I urge you to read his blog and do what you can to help protect our kids.

His story is below:

After A Car Wreck, Am I Entitled To Compensation For The Reduced Value Of My Car?

brooks — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:27:08 +0000

Back to the property damage video series today. Today I answer the question, “After a car wreck, am I entitled to compensation for the reduced value of my car?” (And just a little disclaimer: all of these are based on Texas law. If you’re out of state, talk to a lawyer in your own state. If you don’t know anyone, feel free to give me a call, and I’ll try to get you a recommendation for someone in your area.)

After A Car Wreck, Am I Entitled To Compensation For The Reduced Value Of My Car? from brooks schuelke on Vimeo.

If you want to know more about the companies discussed in the answer, feel free to call or email me, and I’ll pass along that information.

What Can You Learn About Brain Injuries And Concussions From The NFL?

brooks — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:56:59 +0000

Joe Smith, a client, was injured in a wreck. He came to me much later, and we were talking about the changes in his life after his car wreck. He mentioned several things, including the fact that he felt like he was upset with his wife and kids all the time. I asked if he had seen a neurologist, and when he said, “no,” I suggested he see one.

A couple of weeks later, Joe called me back and told me that the neurologist had diagnosed him with a head injury.

This isn’t unusual. In my experience, a head injury is the most often over-looked injury resulting from car wreck cases.

And now we can learn something about it from the NFL. With football season fast approaching (this is game week, after all, for all of us Texas fans), the NFL is waging a campaign against head injuries, and their poster is one of the best aids I’ve seen to help players (and other people) protect themselves by making sure that brain injuries are diagnosed and treated.

For those of us in the personal injury business, the key part of the poster may the portion that describes symptoms. The poster says:

Different symptoms can occur and may not show up for several hours. Common symptoms include:

Confusion

Headache

Amnesia/difficulty remembering

Balance problems

Irritability

Dizziness

Difficulty concentrating

Feeling sluggish, foggy or groggy

Nausea

Sensitivity to noise

Sensitivity to light

Double/fuzzy vision

Slowed reaction time

Feeling more emotional

Sleep disturbance

Loss of consciousness

It’s important that people injured in car wrecks also look for those symptoms. And if you find those symptoms, even if they appear mild, tell your doctor. You can never be too careful when it comes to your brain.

What Is My Car Worth?

brooks — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:53:13 +0000

Today is the second part of our video series related to car wreck property damage claims.

When negotiating with the insurance company, it’s important to know the value of your car. In today’s short video, I discuss how you can learn what your car is worth.

What Is My Car Worth? from brooks schuelke on Vimeo.

Sioux City Sewer Workers — Another Example of The Dangers Of Working In Confined Spaces

brooks — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 13:28:16 +0000

What is the most dangerous part of most construction jobs?

Working in confined spaces.

Confined spaces present a number of dangers, including risks of fire, risks of suffocation, and risk of collapse (particularly in trenching situations). These types of injuries become all too frequent when employers try to cut corners on safety rules.

Recently, a tragedy in Sioux City, Iowa really brought those dangers to light. Several workers in North Sioux City were working to unclog a sewer line when the men were overcome by sewer gas, resulting in the death of two of the workers. As is often the case in these types of tragedies, the early reports indicate that safety rules were being ignored, leading to the risks. OSHA and IOSH (Iowa’s equivalent of OSHA) will be investigating the confined space issues.

Most in the construction industry know the risks associated with working in confined spaces, and there are a number of regulations and safety rules designed to make these situations as safe as possible. If these rules are followed, these types of deaths don’t have to happen. And yet, they do. Instead of trying to figure out ways to cut corners, Texas construction companies would do well to take a minute and look at the Iowa situation to see what we can learn from that tragedy.

My friend Steve Lombardi, of the Lombardi Law Firm in Des Moines, is doing a good job of covering the story. If you’re interested in learning more, check out his blog. You can also check out the following:

Austin Balcony Collapse: A Case Study — Liability of the Engineer and/or Architect

brooks — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 12:35:24 +0000

Can the engineer or architect who designed the collapsed balcony be sued?

Yes. In many cases involving improper construction of a structure, the case against the designer (whether it’s an engineer or an architect) may be a better case than the case against the person that owns or is occupying the property.

The case against the designer is a negligence case. To prevail, the injured person must prove that the engineer or architect designed the project improperly. Those claims can show up in a host of ways. For example, the designer may have made a miscalculation of the maximum load that the balcony would support (or the designer might not have done any calculations at all). Or the designer might have made an error or inconsistency in the blueprints (we just settled a case like that last week). Regardless of the error, the designer of a project can be liable for a victim’s injuries if the error was a cause of the problem.

The reason that these cases may be easier is that in a case against the owner/occupier of the premises, as we discussed yesterday, the injured person likely has to prove that the owner/occupier knew or should have known about the dangerous condition. In a case against the designer, the injured person doesn’t have that burden — they don’t have to prove that the designer knew that it made an error in the design process. That makes a big difference in some claims.

Claims against architects and engineers do have their own special rules in some instances (for example, you have to file a special expert report when suing them, you may have less time than normal to sue them, and there may be protections for injuries that occur to construction workers during construction of the project), but none of those seem to apply in this case yet.

Books For Brooks

brooks — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:11:08 +0000

This post is way off-topic, but bear with me.

How can you help out some deserving kids while ridding your house of clutter?

For the last 3-4 years, my wife and I (with a lot of help from another volunteer) have set-up and run a program where we distribute books to kids at Pickle Elementary in East Austin. Pickle Elementary is like a lot of schools in East Austin. It is an under-privileged school — just over 97 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunch. And the last statistics I saw found that over 65 percent of the kids come from primarily Spanish-speaking homes.

Three or four years ago, we were approached by the principal of the school about helping out. We asked what she needed, and she said the number 1 thing they wanted to do was put books in the hands of their kids. She had research showing that one of the best predictors of school success was whether a child was on reading level in the second grade.

Armed with her request, we went to work. Since that time, we have set up a program where we collect books and then go to the school 3-4 times per year to distribute the books to the kids. In the time that we’ve done it, we’ve distributed over 10,000 books to these children.

And you can’t imagine how appreciative those kids are. Whether finding the perfect mystery, the perfect book for a younger sibling, or, in one of my favorite memories, finding that perfect book about leaches, these kids appreciate what we are doing for them.

But the program doesn’t work without A LOT of help from others.

Including some of you.

As we all gear back up for the start of the new school year, we’re starting to plan our first book drive of the year. And we need more books. That’s where you come in. If any of you have any gently-used children’s books that you’re looking to get rid of or that are just sitting on bookshelves unused, please consider donating them to this worthy cause. You’ll be helping these kids in ways you can’t imagine, and cleaning out your house at the same time. What a benefit!

So if you can help, please let me know. If you’re in the Austin area, I’ll come pick them up from you to make this donation as painless as possible.

Thanks.

Brooks

Weary Truckers Create A Risk For I35 Trucking Accidents

brooks — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:23:02 +0000

IH 35 is a bit unique in that it spans from the southern border with Mexico to the northern border with Canada. But no matter where you are along the highway, you face a grave danger of being involved in a trucking accident. And yesterday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune had a good article, based in large part on an I35 truck wreck, about one of those risks — tired truck drivers.

For the most part, truck drivers are supposed to be limited in the number of hours they can drive. In 2005, the hours-of-service rules were amended to require a little more rest for drivers. Since that time, the number of fatal trucking accidents has decreased. But it’s still a problem. From the article:

While things are headed in the right direction nationally, annual fatalities in big truck wrecks are still the equivalent of a jetliner crashing once a week, said Steve Keppler of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

“If that many plane crashes were happening,” Keppler said, “people would be up in arms and the air traffic system would be shut down.”

And a lot of these trucking accident fatalities are caused by fatigue. You need look no further than the 2005 legislation to see how fatigue contributes to trucking accidents. While the 2005 legislation lowered hours-of-service for most drivers, it also exempted a number of drivers, including those in the agricultural, utility and construction fields. While the rate of fatalities have gone down since the new rules, the accidents involving utility trucks are up 57 percent since their drivers were exempted.

And much of the trucking industry continues to put its head in the sand and say that weary drivers aren’t a problem. In the article, the spokesman for the American Trucking Association called wrecks caused by fatigue “a very small problem.” The trucking industry also sued the Minnesota State Patrol in 2009 to stop police from using a “fatigued driver checklist” to keep truckers off the road.

It’s this attitude that makes trucking cases so interesting. Because of regulations, drivers are required to keep a log of their driving time. But in many cases, the log is altered or the drivers maintain two or more logs to help hide the amount of time that they’re really driving.

Maybe the problem was best summed up by an unidentified driver in the article:

I don’t get paid while I’m sitting waiting to load and unload. My fixed costs doesn’t allow me to run legal…I sleep four hours a night. It isn’t out of choice. It’s finances.

I beg to differ. It is a choice. And it’s a choice that’s putting all of us at risk.

Ask Your Personal Injury Lawyer To Visit The Scene Of The Accident (Or What We Can Learn From Jimmy Buffett)

brooks — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:53:03 +0000

In almost all of my cases, I try to make at least one (and often multiple) trips out to the scene of the accident. Earlier this month, the Winning Trial Advocacy blog had a great post that emphasized the importance of getting out to the scene, and the post was inspired by Jimmy Buffett’s lyrics, “Don’t try to describe the ocean if you’ve never seen it–Don’t ever forget that you just may wind up being wrong.”

If you’re a lawyer, go read the post. If you’re an injury victim, make sure your attorney has been out to the scene of your accident.

h/t to John Day for finding the link on a near-holiday post.

John Stossel – Tort Reform Hypocrite

brooks — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:56:48 +0000

There is something that Americans love about the story of the hypocrite. The anti-corruption policitian that eventually gets busted for taking bribes; the anti-gay preacher busted for being gay; and John Stossel.

Stossel is the tort-reform movement’s favorite “journalist” because he’s always willing to “report” on the evils of trial lawyers and personal injury suits. True to form, on last week’s Fox Business Report, Stossel was more than willing to report on “Parasitic Tort Lawyers”, where he was willing to talk about the evils of personal injury lawyers and personal injury lawsuits.

Problem is, Stossel is a hypocrite. While doing a report on professional wrestling, wrestler David Schultz objected to Stossel’s line of question by hitting Stossel a couple of time.

At that point, was Stossel offended by personal injury lawyers or personal injury lawsuits? No. Of course, not. Instead, he was willing to file his own suit, not only against Schultz, but also against the World Wrestling Federation, that reportedly settled for over $400,000.00.

I could go on and on with my complaints about Stossel, but my friend Eric Turkewitz has written a great post, John Stossel — You Gotta Love Him, that is better than anything I could ever do. I encourage all of you to venture over there for a few minutes for the real investigative reporting.