The Injury Litigation Blog

August is a Slow Month for Litigation

By Byron Warnken

August is a slow month for a lot of things in the business, corporate, financial, and legal worlds.  Except vacations.  August is not a slow month for vacations.

Litigation is no exception.  The numbers of new lawsuits filed is notably low for August of 2015.  Here are the stats:

• 12 medical malpractice lawsuits filed
• 55 cases listed as “workers’ compensation appeals” filed in Circuit Courts in Maryland.  (There were an additional 92 administrative agency appeals filed, some of which are actually workers’ comp cases.)
• 225 car accident lawsuits filed

That’s a slow month.

The medical malpractice lawyers who were busy working were the usual suspects.  Schochor’s office, including Jon Schochor, Kerry Staton, Scott Kurlander, and Phil Federico were busy, filing three med mal suits.  Stuart Salsbury himself filed three medical malpractice lawsuits in as diverse a set of counties as you will see – Allegany, Frederick, and Wicomico.  From the same office, Paul Bekman also filed a suit in Baltimore.  A serious of other attorneys filed one med mal suit on behalf of clients.

Some of the defendants being sued in August medical malpractice cases:

• Johns Hopkins
• Franklin Square
• Advanced Radiology

July’s Maryland Medical Malpractice Cases

By Byron Warnken

There were 15 Maryland medical malpractice lawsuits filed in July, as you can see from the table below.  Note, multiple entries have the same case number.  Often, an entry is listed twice – once with the plaintiff’s attorney, the other time with defense counsel. Case Number Name Court Case Caption 03C15007300 Schochor, Jonathan Esq Baltimore […]

Maryland’s Best? Lawyers

By Byron Warnken

A lawyer can’t tell you he’s the best.  In fact, he can’t tell you anything that compares himself to another lawyer unless it’s objectively true.  Why don’t we tolerate puffery in legal services the same way we do in nearly everything else in our capitalist society?  I’m not sure.  We’re lawyers.  We’re sticklers for the […]

Medical Malpractice Makes Up Less than 1% of All New Civil Cases

By Byron Warnken

This stat is brought to you by PopTort and The Center for Justice and Democracy’s Medical Malpractice briefing book.  It’s also completely consistent with what we reported in our Medical Malpractice Inforgraphic here. Also highlighted in PopTort’s post: Imaging costs (a marker of defensive medicine) do not go down in states with non-economic damages caps. […]

May 2015 Maryland Circuit Court Lawsuits Filed

By Byron Warnken

May of 2015 saw very few medical malpractice cases, as is clearly the norm.  In all, there were only 19 lawsuits listed as medical malpractice or, as Anne Arundel County lists them, MEDMAL.  Per usual, our monthly report on torts including med mal does not include Montgomery County or Prince George’s County cases, as they […]

April 2015 Maryland Litigation Statistics

By Byron Warnken

April 2015 saw 6699 different cases filed in Maryland Circuit Courts. Of these cases, only 10 were listed as medical malpractice. This is completely consistent with numbers from the first quarter. We highlighted those stats – medical malpractice made up less than one half of 1% of all circuit court cases – in this medical […]

The Medical Malpractice Crisis Myth – Maryland Edition

By Byron Warnken

    Medical Malpractice Cases in Maryland In simply quantity, cases listed as medical malpractice in Maryland are almost a rounding error.  They represent less than 1/2 of 1% of all circuit court actions in Maryland, not including PG and Montgomery Counties.  (Those two counties report their stats differently, making it more difficult to parse […]

Last Month’s Judiciary Stats

By Byron Warnken

In March, circuit courts of Maryland were, per usual, quite busy.  There were 8723 listed actions, not including criminal cases.  Of these, there were 6633 different case numbers assigned. Also as usual, the number of cases listed as personal injury or related, was only a small fraction of the whole.  There were 30 medical malpractice […]

The Maryland Judiciary’s Budget Request and Last Month’s Stats

By Byron Warnken

The Maryland Judiciary has requested $549 million dollars for their 2016 operating budget. According to the Daily Record, this is approximately a 10% increase over the current fiscal year. On first blush, this might seem like a large number. However, consider, for a moment, last month’s figures that we now report. There were 5410 cases […]

January’s Workers’ Compensation Appeal Statistics

By Byron Warnken

A week ago, we discussed last month’s medical malpractice lawsuit statistics.  There were only fourteen different suits filed in the Baltimore metro area.  In contrast, January saw 193 workers’ compensation appeals brought to circuit courts around Maryland, not including PG and Montgomery Counties.  Of the 193, 142 came from Circuit Courts in the Baltimore metro […]