I was going to give you some of these but I want for you to read all of them at Paul's excellent blog.

Thanks Paul for good stuff there!

John Watts
Birmingham, Alabama

A settlement in a personal injury case (car wreck, truck wreck, slip and fall, etc) is where money is paid to you by the defendant or the defendant's insurance company.

A verdict is where a trial has occurred and the court and jury have reached a decision.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding this - 205-879-2447.

John Watts
Birmingham, Alabama

Fraud law in Alabama is a powerful tool to stop companies that have cheated you and to force them to compensate you for your losses.

The four basic requirements or elements of fraud in Alabama are:

1. Misstatement or lie;
2. About a material fact or an important detail;
3. You must properly rely upon the lie - you can't be overly naive or close your eyes to the truth; and
4. You must have suffered damages.

I hope this video is helpful to you and if you have any questions feel free to contact me through this site or you can pick up the phone and call me at 205-879-2447.

John Watts
Birmingham, Alabama

First, it was solely focused on the lawyer and how wonderful the lawyers are and rarely mentioned anything about you, the person that has been injured.

The other thing that caught my eye was various inaccuracies related to the law. For example, in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), the question was posed to the effect of “If I am partially at fault, can I still recover damages for my personal injury case?

The answer started off “Under Alabama’s comparative negligence rules …” Unfortunately, Alabama does not have comparative negligence. Instead Alabama has contributory negligence which means if you were even 1 percent at fault, this will completely bar your recovery if you have sued under negligence.

Note - if you have sued under wantonness or recklessness then contributory negligence is not a bar.

I mentioned this to say for several persons. One is to be very careful about what you read and just because it is online and by a lawyer does not mean that it is accurate. The second reason is to provide a little bit of additional education on our rather strange law concerning contributory negligence which is one of only about three states in the nation that have the rule of contributory negligence barring your recovery. In every other state there is some variation of a formula used that, in essence, takes the degree of fault on your part and reduces the jury verdict by that percentage.

I hope this post has been helpful to you. You are welcome to have our free book - "Alabama Car Wrecks - 7 Ways To Lose Your Credibility Which Will Cause You To Lose Your Case" - just let us know if you would like this... Simply pick up the phone and call me at (205) 879 2447 or send me a message through our website here.

We hope this short blog posts answers these questions by providing a simple overview of the law.

Defamation encompasses libel and slander. Normally we think of libel as "written defamation" and slander as "spoken defamation."

For either form of defamation, here is what is needed:

Publication
Defamatory statement
Specific to Plaintiff
Intentional

Here's the quick breakdown of each of these:

Publication
The statement must not have been only made to Plaintiff (injured party) but must have been made to others. Thus, there is no law against saying untrue things about someone if you only say that to the person.

Its when that false statement is told to others that we have this element of "Publication" present.

Defamatory Statement
The basic idea is a false statement that a reasonable third party (i.e. someone other than the Plaintiff) understands to be damaging to the reputation of the Plaintiff.

The words are judged according to their natural (normal) effect upon the mind of the person who hears or reads the words.

Specific to Plaintiff
The false statement has to be specific enough to let the third party know it is likely directed at the Plaintiff - not just a vague statement that could include anyone or everyone.

Intentional
This means the Defendant intended to say or write this false statement that has been published and is about the Plaintiff and not someone else.

We hope this overview of Defamation in Alabama has been helpful and we will follow this up with other posts that go into Defamation in more detail.

If you have any questions, please feel free to call us at 205-879-2447.

We look forward to hearing from you.

John Watts
Birmingham, Alabama

This is similar to contributory negligence and is also a favorite of defendants who are sued in Alabama for negligence.

The basic idea is if you, as the injured plaintiff, do the following:

1. See a dangerous condition;
2. Appreciate the danger of it; but yet
3. Put yourself in that dangerous condition anyway

Then the defendant will argue you are not entitled to recover any money because you "assumed the risk" of the injury.

We'll talk more about this but this gives you the overview of this defense.

Please call me at 205-879-2447 if you have any questions regarding this defense.

John Watts
Birmingham, Alabama

Start the story with the defendant and not the plaintiff:

When a series of focus studies were done across the country the outcome confirmed what was already an accepted fact. That fact is that people apply "availability bias" as listen to a story and immediately begin to fill in the blanks by asking themselves questions about the behavior of the activity they are told about. They immediately raise issues in their own mind about the conduct of what went on focusing on negative possible factors that might explain what happened. If you start your story by talking first about the defendant’s conduct, the Jurors will construct their understanding of the case in the context of the defendant’s behavior. Questions about why the defendant did or didn’t something that caused it to happen are raised as you describe the conduct. You want the initial focus on the negligent conduct of the defendant.

You need to create a "good guy vs. bad guy" picture in the jury's heads in which the plaintiff should have known better and seen the accident coming. Also, if the plaintiff goes first, they control the sequence the story of the incident is told as well as the order of witnesses.

Plan the order in which to tell the story:

"Sequencing" your timeline is very important. The story has to make sense so the jury can fill in the blanks in their minds. It's suggested you begin with the defendant's conduct. As jurors concentrate on that, they will develop their own story and seek evidence to support it.

The sequence of proof strongly influences decisions. Therefore, the first witness is most important. This is the witness that should connect facts, give them meaning and influence decision makers. The principles of primacy and sequencing go hand in hand. Sequencing is about the order of topics in a story, not the order of facts. Primacy deals with the fact we tend to believe what we first hear.

The normal story sequence is:

(1) Step one: What happened? who, what, when, where and how?
(2) Step Two: How could it happen? Why - what went wrong?
(3) Step Three: What were and are the consequences?

The plaintiff who goes first in trial basically has complete control over the jury's first impressions of the "evil" defendant.

In 2004, the FDA published an article that summarized 40 injuries that were reported due to pain pump use after surgery. The injuries consisted of things like wound infection, tissue necrosis and cellulitis. "45% of the surgeries were orthopedic, typically total knee replacements. 20% were for podiatric surgeries, including bunionectomies, plantar fasciotiomies, and others."

The local anesthetic Bupivacaine, also called Marcaine, was used in all injury cases.

The consequences of these adverse events were typically severe and required intervention and additional medical and surgical treatment. The authors’ review of the literature found little had been written to support a causal link between pain pumps and the complications that had been reported to the FDA. Therefore, the authors’ conclusion was tentative and stated the reports may represent sentinel events, i.e., an early warning that is representative of a widespread problem, or alternatively, these may be isolated incidents.

Before pain pumps were commonly used, local anesthetics were administered in small doses and harm to tissue was more rare because "cells damaged by local anesthetics typically regenerate and surgical pain and dressings may have masked such harm." But pain pumps put in a much higher concentration and dosage of medication, thus magnifying the possibility of tissue damage.