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Speeding Police Make Florida Roads More Dangerous

Friday, February 17th, 2012

A three part series of articles in the Sun Sentinel revealed that over 20 people in Florida have been killed or maimed by speeding police in the past seven years.The reporters were also able to get data from police car transponders, which revealed that over 800 police from various agencies in the state regularly drove between 90 and 130 mph, regardless of if they were responding to a call or simply driving home from work.The Sun Sentinel report (you can read the three part series here) suggests that there is a widespread attitude among law enforcement officers that they can get away with such dangerous driving habits. Worse, there has been a disturbing lack of reasonable punishment for the officers whose dangerous driving has left people injured or dead. Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter have successfully represented individuals and families injured by police ignoring the rules of the road. Attorney Nathan Carter was interviewed by the Sun-Sentinel for this series. We hope that these articles bring the attention needed to this issue, and that police agencies around our state begin disciplining the officers who are making our roads dangerous with habitual and reckless speeding. If you or a loved one has been injured in an accident that you feel was caused by the unsafe speeds or reckless driving of a law enforcement officer, contact Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter for a free consultation.

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10 Dead and Many Injured After I-75 Auto Accidents

Monday, January 30th, 2012

In the wee hours this Sunday morning, a disaster unfolded on a stretch of I-75 just south of Gainesville. A brush fire had begun burning on Saturday afternoon in Paines Prairie Reserve, and consumed approximately 60 acres. The smoke from the brush fires settled into low-lying areas, including the stretch of I-75 that runs through the prairie lands between Micanopy and Gainesville. As midnight passed, the early morning fog began to combine with the smoke from the brush fire, and resulted in conditions of near-zero visibility. According to this morning’s Gainesville Sun article, Florida Highway Patrol had closed the affected stretch of I-75 sometime around midnight. Sometime around 3 am, the FHP “assessed” the conditions and decided to re-open the highway. Less than an hour later, over 20 were injured and 10 people were left dead, after what many veteran law enforcement officials called the worst traffic accident of their careers. The fog and smoke had combined by that time to create horrible driving conditions, and survivors reported that it was like driving into a wall, beyond which all visibility disappeared. The crashes left a stretch of northbound and southbound I-75 littered with wreckage, as approximately 20 semi trucks, cars and SUVs piled into each other in the smoke and fog.

Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter are the premiere auto accident attorneys in Central Florida. We offer our deepest condolences to all of the families involved in Sunday’s tragic accidents on I-75. Our firm has represented dozens of major tractor trailer accident cases involving similar circumstances. If you or a loved one is injured in a tractor trailer accident, call our firm or visit www.thefloridafirm.com for a free consultation. For legal representation from experienced and aggressive accident attorneys, don’t rely on referral hotlines or gimmicky television commercials. Call the dedicated accident attorneys at Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter and let our reputation, hard work and experience work for you.

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More Distortions and Distractions From the Chamber of Commerce

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

Earlier this month, the US Chamber of Commerce continued its campaign to distort the truth and to distract consumers from the real problems facing the American court system. The Chamber of Commerce is a lobbying group for some of the country’s biggest corporate entities, and devotes much time and energy to various schemes designed to limit consumers’ access to the courts. The most recent spin campaign came in the form of a list published as the “10 most egregious examples of frivolous and abusive litigation”. The Chamber published this list to try and lend credence to their perennial claim that the court system is full of frivolous lawsuits, and that the cost of such litigation is devastating to small business owners in America.

Consumers’ rights watchdog group Public Citizen looked into the 10 cases mentioned, and found that in fact not a single one of them was filed against a small business. Beyond that, it turns out that eight out of the ten had been dismissed or withdrawn from the courts almost immediately. And to top it all off, not a single case from the list had resulted in an award to the plaintiff. Public Citizen’s Taylor Lincoln wrote a terrific blog about this which you can link to here. The little bit of fact-checking that Public Citizen did easily put the lie to the Chamber’s ridiculous claims. Our court system recognized that these 10 cases were frivolous, and they were weeded out accordingly in short order. None of the 10 “most egregious” lawsuits had been filed against small businesses to begin with, and none of them had the “devastating impact” on society that the Chamber of Commerce claims. Taylor Lincoln rightly points out that the true intent of this list must have been to serve as “a sideshow intended to distract people from the most important abuses in the courts…for example, the unprecedented flood of fraudulent filings by mortgage servicers…..that deliberately falsified paperwork they submitted to the courts in order to unjustly kick people out of their homes”.

The Chamber’s list of “ridiculous lawsuits” is part of an ongoing campaign to make average citizens believe that our court system is overrun with frivolous lawsuits that burden our courts and harm small businesses. When citizens fall for this disingenuous argument, they vote to enact “tort reforms” designed to infringe on our basic rights as American citizens. When those citizens later find themselves the victim of physical or economic damages as a result of corporate wrongdoing, they may find that they have been duped by propaganda into voting away their own rights and have no legal recourse. To point out that ten court cases were filed in a given year which seemed absurd on their face, and were then dismissed or withdrawn from the courts, does nothing to prove the Chamber’s point about meritless litigation and its costs to society. It just goes to show how desperate the corporate entities that make up the US Chamber of Commerce are to deny Americans their right to seek justice in the courts. That the Chamber of Commerce has invested untold sums of money and years of public relations work into these deliberately misleading ”spin” campaigns speaks volumes about their true goal, and about how much they would pay to attain it. That goal is nothing less than the harsh infringement, if not complete elimination, of American consumers’ legal rights.

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St. Petersburg Police Pursuit Leaves 1 Dead, 6 Injured

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

This Tuesday night, St. Petersburg police decided to pursue an individual who was supected of an unarmed purse snatching that had occurred the previous weekend. They knew the suspect’s name and address, but when the car he was a passenger in began to flee, the police did not decide that it would be safer to track him down later at his home. Instead, they began a high speed pursuit during the evening rush hour, which culminated in a multiple car collision. The suspected purse snatcher was ejected from the vehicle and died from his injuries, and 6 others were hospitalized with injuries from the accident. The St. Petersburg Police have announced that they will review the decision to pursue, but a police spokesman was already quoted by the Tampa Bay Times as saying “it appears this was a justified pursuit under the current policy”. You can read the Tampa Bay Times article here.

Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter support our state and local law enforcement officers, but are forced to wonder about the soundness of pursuit policies when we regularly hear of injuries or deaths caused by high speed pursuits. This feeling is compounded when the pursuit in question was being conducted at 5:15 pm during heavy traffic, in pursuit of a suspect whose name and home address were already known to the officers. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of those injured in this recent accident, with hopes for a quick recovery. We also hope that incidents like these will lead to a re-thinking of police pursuit policies, which could potentially reduce the number of Floridians injured or killed in such unfortunate circumstances as St. Petersburg witnessed on Tuesday night.

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Study Shows Insurance Industry Creates Crises

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Americans for Insurance Reform released a new study earlier this week showing how the insurance industry periodically manufactures crises to boost profits. The study, titled “Repeat Offenders: How The Insurance Industry Manufactures Crises And Harms America” shows that property and casualty insurers work together to create periods of crisis, known as “hard markets”. The industry often uses these periods of manufactured crisis to have their lobbyists argue for “tort reform”, feigning ignorance of the fact that the crisis and the resluting rate hikes were created by collusion amongst the insurers themselves. The study’s authors  say that the cycles of boom and bust “are national in scope and occur in every state irrespective of a state’s ‘tort’ law. Because the legal system is not responsible for creating hard markets, enactment of so-called ‘tort reform’ has done nothing to prevent them”. A thorough summary of the AIR report’s findings, as well as a link to the complete report, can be found here. The report warns that in recent months the insurance has been trying to create a new hard insurance market. The study has been sent to all 50 state insurance commissioners and the newly formed Federal Insurance Office, urging stronger regulation of the insurance industry and a repeal of the anti-trust exemption granted under the McCarran-Ferguson Act. For a good idea of how Florida has been affected by these insurance industry manipulations, read the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on property insurance in Florida here.

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FDA Adds New Warning to Multaq

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Multaq (dronedarone) is a widely-prescribed drug for patients with heart arrhythmias.Yesterday, the FDA announced a new warning about risks associated with Multaq.You can read the entire FDA warning here. A study found that in patients with permanent atrial fibrillation, use of Multaq doubles the risk of stroke, heart failure, and cardiovascular death. The FDA warning goes on to recommend that doctors should monitor all patients using Multaq by performing an electrocardiogram (ECG) at least once every three months. The FDA determined that for patients with nonpermanent atrial fibrillation, Multaq use is still safe and beneficial. If you are a patient using Multaq and have questions about the FDA’s recent findings you should contact your healthcare professional. If you or a loved one have been injured by your prescribed use of any pharmaceutical, you can contact Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter for a free evaluation of your potential claim. Call us or visit us on the internet at www.thefloridafirm.com

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Grand Jury Says ALF Reform is Overdue

Monday, December 19th, 2011

The most recent installment of the Miami Herald’s investigation “Neglected to Death” shows that a recent Miami Dade grand jury has demanded tough reforms on Assisted Living Facility (ALF) regulation in Florida. The grand jury’s report laid the bulk of the blame on Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) for failing in their role as the state’s primary enforcer of ALF regulations. ALFs that have been found guilty of the most egregious neglect and abuse have been allowed by AHCA to remain open, at the expense of our state’s most vulnerable citizens. In fact, the Herald investigation found that the past five years have seen more reports to state ombudsmen of ALF abuse and neglect than there were in the thirty years before that. However, AHCA failed to do an investigation of the majority of those cases, and meted out discipline on almost none of the violators. The Herald’s ongoing investigation sparked the recent grand jury, as well as a Senate investigation and a governor’s task force devoted to ALF reform. We applaud the Herald for their fine investigative reporting, and hope these reform efforts succeed in making the sorely needed changes to our ALF regulatory system.You can help ensure that the overdue reform of our ALF system occurs by writing or calling your representatives in Florida’s Senate and Congress to let them know your future votes will depend on the protections extended to the neediest and most vulnerable citizens of our state.

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Texting While Driving Ban Recommended

Monday, December 19th, 2011

If you glance around while you are in traffic these days, it can sometimes seem like half the drivers on the road are talking on a cellphone or sending text messages. It has become disturbingly common, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has recommended a nationwide ban on texting while driving. Texting, emailing, or dialing a telephone are extremely distracting and dangerous behaviors to engage in while driving. However, recent studies have shown that the number of folks who are doing it keeps rising. A national survey conducted by the NHTSA showed that more than half of their respondents between 21 and 24 had texted or emailed while driving. The Denver Post reported that many people feel they are driving safely while checking or sending texts and driving, but say that other drivers doing so are extremely dangerous. Feeling that you are an above-average driver does not minimize the dangers of distraction, though. Looking down at a screen for even a second while driving can easily result in disaster.

The NewYork Times has been reporting on this issue since 2009, in an ongoing series called “Driven to Distraction”.You can read the entire series here. The Times series cites a Harvard study that found 2,600 traffic deaths are caused annually by cell-phone distractions. The same study revealed that 570,000 accidents resulting in injuries occur each year as the result of such distractions. Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter urge you to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.

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Starbucks Gift Cards Are Bad For Consumers Rights

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Earlier this week several consumer advocate groups banded together to ask Starbucks to respect the rights of consumers. The massive coffee retailer recently added forced arbitration clauses and class-action bans to the terms of service on their pre-paid gift cards. These type of policies limit consumers’ access to our court system, and such policies fly in the face of Starbucks’ long history of portraying their company as a firm believer in social responsibility.

Use of forced arbitration clauses has skyrocketed in the past decade, and serve to protect corporations from accountability for their wrongdoing. In this case, if you are using a Starbucks gift card and find out you were charged hidden fees or being charged for items you did not receive, you will be forced to fly to Seattle and seek a refund from an arbitrator hand-picked by Starbucks’ corporate office. Obviously not many consumers would want to incur the travel and hotel expenses of such a trip just to be refunded a few dollars. If Starbucks uses this protection and charges ten million consumers a $2 hidden fee for using the card, that would create $20 million dollars of fraudulent earnings for the company. The consumers affected would be barred from joining a class action to seek redress of these losses. Starbucks would only have to answer to those consumers who traveled to Seattle to face the arbitrator that Starbucks selected. This type of corporate behavior is anti-consumer, and the hypothetical situation above is no fantasy. Just last month, the state of Massachusetts fined Starbucks for charging customers an added fee on every bag of coffee purchased, without disclosing the fee. If you want to read more, and sign a petition asking Starbucks to stop hiding forced arbitration clauses on their pre-paid cards, you can read the Public Citizen letter to Starbucks and sign the petition here.

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Actos and Bladder Cancer

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011

Bloomberg News reported this week that there may be as many as 10,000 lawsuits forthcoming against Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of the popular diabetes drug Actos. The plaintiffs allege that Actos use for prolonged periods has resulted in bladder cancer. Earlier this year, Takeda pulled Actos from the market in Germany and France, citing the increased cancer risk. No such steps have been taken in the U.S., although the safety information on the product inserts has been revised to reflect the risk of bladder cancer.

The evidence linking Actos to bladder cancer is persuasive, and American regulators found that the risk has been documented in studies sponsored by the drug manufacturer. Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter are representing people who have been diagnosed with bladder cancer after at least one year of documented Actos use. If you or a loved one have been affected by this drug or have questions about another potential pharmaceutical claim, call our law firm for a free consultation.You can read the Bloomberg News article on Actos and bladder cancer here.

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