Palm Coast Injury Law Blog : Florida Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Philip J. Chanfrau

If you have been in a low speed "fender-bender" with minor or negligible damage to your car you might be wondering how that affects your potential injury claim.  Good question.  Most people (read jurors) intuitively think that the bigger the crash, the more likely it is someone got hurt, and the smaller the crash, the more likely it is no one got hurt.  Again, it is not the speed that causes injuries, but the sudden change of speed, either due to a sudden stop, or sudden acceleration.  That is called Delta V in scientific circles.

Living in the Daytona area, and having seen NASCAR races in person and on TV for years, I know that some accidents like the one which killed Dale Earnhardt did not look that "bad" while drivers in other NASCAR accidents which looked much worse walked away without injuries. 

There is a whole defense named after small accident crash cases. It is called the MIST defense.  MIST stands for Minimum Impact-Soft Tissue.  It was started about 20 years ago by Allstate Insurance to fight back against claims in low speed rear enders.  There are special biomechanical experts who claim to be able to predict at what speeds humans can be injured and below those speeds (usually 5-10 mph) there can never be an injury.

The problem with the MIST defense is that there is no scientific evidence using live persons to reliably predict the speed necessary to cause injuries.  Courts will not allow junk science and have fortunately refused to allow so called "experts" from polluting the trial with junk opinions. 

So, if you have a significant injury due to a low speed, low crash accident case, be heartened.  There is a legal right to recover for your injuries, despite folklore to the contrary.

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I have had a run of clients in the last few weeks all with slip and fall cases. I have not written any blogs about these types of cases before so this will be new.

What does it take to have a good slip and fall claim?  This is a short description:

1. The person in charge of the place where the slip happened must either have caused the dangerous, unsafe condition, or
2. had adequate time to discover and fix the danger regardless of who caused it, and failed to discover it, and
3. failed to correct the danger or warn about the danger.

Let me give you a couple of examples of good cases I have handled meeting the litmus test above:

1. Trip and fall at Volusia Mall.  Mall hired a painting crew to re-blacktop the parking lot. In so doing, the crew used nails and string  to help paint the yellow parking  stripes, and forgot to remove the nails when they were done.  RESULT:  client tripped on a nail while crossing the parking lot and had a bad fall.
2. Slip and fall at grocery store:  Store employee discovers a puddle of milk on the floor and leaves the puddle unattended to go get a Warning sign.  While he was away a customer comes around an aisle and slips in the milk.
3. Slip and fall at Mall:  Roof leaks every time it rains.  Rain drips from ceiling tiles to floor below and puddles.  Mall knows of leaking roof, and knows about puddles when it rains, and fails to fix the leak or put out warning signs.  Customer slips in the puddled water and falls sustaining a head injury.

So, if you have had a bad fall and wanted to know whether the property owner is at fault, here are some good rules of law for you know about!  An experienced personal injury lawyer can explain it in a few minutes.

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Let's be honest with each other.  Clients do not know how good or bad their case is.  All they really know is what their lawyer tells them, and how hard their lawyer appears to be working for them. Personal injury lawyers compete for clients and sometimes the ones who hold out the highest promises get the client even though the case is weak or meritless.  In such cases the day of reckoning comes when the jury returns a Verdict much smaller than the client was led to expect, or is given a small offer at mediation. The result is an angry client who feels like his lawyer lied to him, and makes for bad feelings against the legal profession in general.

I do not believe it is in my client's best interest to candy coat their cases.  As I said in an earlier Blog I do not believe in Veterinary law:  my clients are human beings (not kitty cats or puppy dogs) and deserve to know what the law is and how it is likely to impact their futures.  They deserve to get candor, honesty, and hard work.  Not inflated evaluations, guesses and a legal mill.

It has been my experience that clients do not always want to hear the truth about their cases.  When that happens, they are sometimes in a state of denial and do not like it when their lawyer is "up front" about their cases.  They have the right to change lawyers and often do, thinking another lawyer who has higher expectations is likely to get a larger verdict or settlement. Lawyers owe a duty to their client to fight hard for their rights. Being candid about the real facts is a two edged sword:  on the one hand they can't make exorbitant promises, and then after the client is aboard, force the client to settle for peanuts.

So, when you are asking for an evaluation of your case, ask your lawyer what his experience with cases like yours has been, whether he has actually tried cases like yours and what the downside really is. You are paying for his advice and experience, not BS.

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