Category: Legal News and Oddities

The Choosing Wisely® initiative is a recent partnership between the ABIM (American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation) and Consumer Reports whose aim is to help encourage “physicians, patients and other health care stakeholders to think and talk about medical tests and procedures that may be unnecessary, and in some instances can cause harm.” A comprehensive (and sometimes  … Read more

The meeting of the 111th Congress was the one that saw Medicare Secondary Payer bill H.R. 2641 flop over and twitch.  The 110th saw that happen to H.R. 2549 also, and H.R. 5309 went the same way during the 109th. In case you don’t recall this particular bill in all its iterations, it addressed Medicare Set-Asides (“MSAs”) for  … Read more

You might expect investigators to be vigilant when checking up on the activities of workers whose workers’ compensation case they are administering.  What you wouldn’t expect is that they would be so vigilant as to incite the family of an injured worker to file a lawsuit against them. That’s what happened recently in Connecticut. A woman  … Read more

The state of Georgia requires most employers with three or more full-time, part-time or seasonal employees to offer workers’ comp benefits. Any business found in non-compliance with coverage requirements faces civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation as well as possible prison time. Some companies in Georgia seem to think that workers’ compensation insurance  … Read more

Listen. It’s perfectly okay to have the impulse to beat someone into a human stew. It’s perfectly okay to act on that impulse if it’s within the confines of a ring and the realm of a sanctioned bout. It would be to your benefit, though, to not claim to be disabled in any form or fashion, collect  … Read more

If you ignore a notice from the Georgia courts, it could cost you your case. Ready Mix USA found this out last month, when the Georgia Court of Appeals upheld earlier decisions by lower courts. Neither Ready Mix or their insurance company, Liberty Mutual, responded to a notice of hearing and failed to appear at a  … Read more

Okay, in an earlier post I was discussing the differences and similarities between types of law. I briefly outlined civil case procedure and was highlighting the basics of criminal cases. We left off at burden of proof, wherein a Plaintiff is responsible for proving a Defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt through the introduction of evidence into  … Read more

Erie County, New York got a jump on much of the rest of the state when they passed a law against texting while driving in 2009, and it’s pretty obvious that their law enforcement are all over following through on it. Between mid-July of last year and mid-February of this year, Erie County handed out  … Read more

By law, bartenders can’t let an obviously drunk person leave their bar and drive a vehicle. A city councilor in Boston, Massachusetts wants to add another stop-gap to drunk driving by making sure that the keys of drunk people stay in the hands of the valets to which they have been entrusted. It all started  … Read more

Remember back in January when I told you that where workers’ compensation cases are concerned, insurance company attorneys would look for information about a Plaintiff wherever they could…. including social media? Well, apparently Zakery Clement didn’t read that particular post, which wouldn’t be that much of a problem, except that he could have benefited from my second bullet  … Read more