CGWC Orlando Injury Attorney Blog

DOT Rules Would Restrict Use of Car Info Systems

mel wright — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 22:54:27 +0000

New Department of Transportation guidelines for car information systems, like navigation and hands free telephone systems, are aimed at preventing distracted driving. The new guidelines would restrict the driver’s ability to use navigation and other information systems while the car is in motion. The new rules would limit car features that distract drivers. The rules would be aimed at reducing the time it takes to perform certain tasks on the systems, reduce the complexity of performing the tasks, limit the driver to using one hand to perform the tasks, limit off road glances in performing information system tasks to 2 seconds or less, limit the amount of input information required to perform tasks, and reduce unnecessary visual information in the driver’s field of view. These proposed rules are a good start by the National Highway & Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees the Department of Transportation, in attempts to eliminate distracted driving caused by drivers fumbling with automobile information systems. The DOT says that distracted driving is a national epidemic with over 3,000 people dead in 2010 alone as a result of distracted driving.

Injured in an automobile accident? Contact CGWC for a free consultation about your legal rights.

Our Founder Inducted To Florida Workers Compensation Institute Hall of Fame

mel wright — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:56:25 +0000

It gives us great pleasure in announcing that Stewart L. Colling (1959-2009) was recently inducted posthumously into the FLORIDA WORKERS COMPENSATION HALL OF FAME. The Florida Workers Compensation Institute (FWCI) recognizes that many individuals dedicated their legal careers to making the Florida workers compensation system work. In recognition of those efforts, The FWCI established its Hall of Fame and elects those recognized for having devoted their careers to the betterment of the Florida workers compensation system. Judges, attorneys and workers compensation industry individuals are all eligible to be elected to the FWCI Hall of Fame.

We are proud to announce that Stewart L. Colling, the founding senior partner of CGWC, is one of eighteen (18) elected to the charter class of the FWCI Hall of Fame in January 2012. The charter class of the Hall of Fame was unanimously elected by the Board of Directors of the Florida Workers Compensation Institute.

Insurance Company Giving You The Runaround?

mel wright — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:54:13 +0000

Is an insurance company giving you the runaround? Insurance companies are in the business of giving customers and legitimate claimants the runaround on valid claims…denying claims, delaying payment, lowballing with settlement offers, etc. You may have a claim against the insurance company for another driver who was at fault in an automobile accident; you may have a life insurance company refusing to pay benefits of a recently deceased relative; or you may have a homeowners or business insurance policy denying a property damage or business loss claim. Whatever the reason an insurance company is giving you the runaround, there is only one answer to your problem. You need an attorney experienced in insurance law and insurance claims. Insurance companies employ legions of professional claims analysts and claims adjusters, as well as teams of insurance defense attorneys to make sure you don’t get what you deserve because that’s how they make larger profits…denying claims and lowballing settlement offers.

Insurance company giving you the run-around? Call CGWC for a free consultation about your personal injury, death or property insurance claim.

Speeding Police Make Florida Roads More Dangerous

mel wright — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:52:25 +0000

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.

Who We Are and What We Do

mel wright — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:48:08 +0000

Personal injury attorneys: despite all of the years of efforts by corporate spin-mongers and lobbyists to tarnish our name, personal injury attorneys play a crucial role in protecting the American way of life. People tend to recognize this when they are catastrophically injured, or lose a loved one, due to a defective product, a truck driver who has not slept for days, or a doctor’s surgical error. America’s founders enshrined the right of citizens to seek redress in the courts, when they are injured due to the negligence of another. In the past decade, many wealthy and powerful groups have attempted to convince Americans to throw away such rights. They usually do this by claiming the courts are clogged with “frivolous” lawsuits, or arguing that industries function more effectively when allowed to “police themselves”. The devastation of the American economy (by rampant fraud within the banking and mortgage industries) and the devastation of the Gulf of Mexico (by oil companies’ wanton dismissal of environmental concerns) are two of the most recent examples of what happens when corporations “police themselves”. And when it comes to frivolous lawsuits? The very idea is a red herring designed to misinform the public into supporting so-called “tort reform”. We have recently pointed out in this blog how swiftly meritless lawsuits are dismissed or withdrawn from the courts, and the nearly nonexistent impact such claims have on the alleged ”clogging” of our legal system.

In the face of such sustained, heavily-funded attacks on our profession, personal injury attorneys have continued to seek justice for individuals and families harmed by defective products or unsafe buildings, negligent healthcare providers, or insurance companies handling claims in bad faith. At Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter we are proud of our record, and proud of our reputation. We use our experience and expertise at litigation to seek justice for those who have been injured.

Unfortunately, some personal injury firms play into the negative stereotypes that corporate interests have spent so much effort and time to create. They do so by producing clownish advertisements, or by working with referral companies who use actors dressed up as police officers or doctors in their own barrage of advertising. At Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter, we spend our time and our money on litigating our clients’ cases, not on filling highways with our faces on billboards, or on endless TV commercials. We get the majority of our clients referred to us by the satisfied clients we’ve represented successfully in the past, not by shady 1-800 numbers selling referrals to the highest bidder. Because we have practiced law with integrity and dedication for many years, our reputation remains one we can be proud of. Corporate defense attorneys and insurance companies don’t know our names and faces from the back of their phone books; they know us because we face them in court on behalf of our clients, and win. If you or a loved one are hurt and need to seek justice in the courts, don’t hire an advertiser. Hire a litigator.

10 Dead and Many Injured After I-75 Auto Accidents

mel wright — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:02:33 +0000

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.

More Distortions and Distractions From the Chamber of Commerce

mel wright — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:43:32 +0000

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.

St. Petersburg Police Pursuit Leaves 1 Dead, 6 Injured

mel wright — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:20:26 +0000

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.

Most Hospital Errors Remain Unreported

mel wright — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:57:40 +0000

A new study by the Department of Health and Human Services has found that only one out of seven adverse events affecting hospitalized Medicare patients is reported. Adverse events can include bedsores, hospital-acquired infections, medication errors and surgical errors. Despite an initiative by the Obama administration to curb medical errors, the new study finds that adverse events are rarely reported. This makes corrective action that much more difficult for regulators or administrators who seek to cut down on medical errors. The New York Times reports that even in the cases where adverse events were reported, very few hospitals made changes to existing policies to try and address those errors.
One of the conditions for hospitals accepting payments from the Medicare system is that they track medical errors and their causes to improve the standard of care. Not only are the majority of errors going unreported, but the HHS study shows that many hospital employees “do not recognize what constitutes patient harm”. These types of excuses are unacceptable, and despite numerous studies with similar findings it seems that many hospitals are incapable of addressing the declining standards of the care that they provide. Colling Gilbert Wright & Carter have spent years representing families who have been harmed by medical errors and negligence. If you or a loved one have been harmed by avoidable medical error or a negligent healthcare provider, call us for a free evaluation of your potential claim or visit www.thefloridafirm.com .

Dangerous Assisted Living Facilities Do Not Deserve State Funds

mel wright — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:39:22 +0000

Instead of yanking funding from an assisted living facility after an elderly resident died from burns after being left in scalding tub water, the State of Florida imposed a relatively small fine. Later, when it was learned that a caregiver punched a mentally ill resident, at an ALF the State of Florida issued a warning, instead of stopping funding. Similar tales occur commonly in the assisted living facility and nursing home communities in Florida, and things seem to get worse every year.

If a loved one is a victim of neglect, negligence, or abuse in a nursing home, call the experienced nursing home negligence and abuse lawyers at CGWC. Our team of nursing home lawyers are skilled and exquisitely experienced at suing nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Unlike many law firms, we have chosen to continue representing residents even when nursing homes and assisted living facilities are commonly operating uninsured. Call for a free consultation.