There are many things you should look for in a lawyer. First, you should determine if he or she practices in the area of law which you need. What area do you need? If you have suffered personal injuries, you need someone who practices in that area and who really specializes in it. If you have been injured on a cruise ship, you need someone who practices in the area of maritime personal injury. If you have been injured by a product, you need a lawyer who knows product liability. If you have been injured in a slip and fall accident by the negligence of a storeowner, you need a lawyer who handles slip and fall accidents.

Anyone can say they practice in a certain area or handle certain cases, but what is the extent of their experience in the area? What kind of results have they gotten? Are they the type of lawyer who settles quick and cheap or do they really take cases to trial and if so what are their results? These are some of the questions you should ask; these are some of the things insurance companies look at when they decide how much to offer in settlement on a case.

Look for the following in a lawyers background:

Was he or she ever on the other side, in other words representing the insurance companies, cruise lines, and railroads in the past? If so, for how long? This can be a huge advantage. This lawyer knows the case from the perspective of the other side and knows the players on the other side.

How long has he or she been in practice? It takes years after law school to train as a lawyer and to know how to do what it takes to get results.

Has this person been a leader in the community or among lawyers? If so, this lawyer may be well known and respected by the Judges, the other lawyers, the insurance companies, and the juries. Look at whether the lawyer has been the president of a bar association and whether he or she has chaired committees of the bar associations.

Is the lawyer Board Certified as a trial lawyer? The Florida Bar (the body which licenses and regulates all lawyers in Florida) has a Board Certification process which only a few lawyers have. This process requires a certain number of trials and experience, and passing an all day examination. The American Bar Association also recognizes the National Board of Trial Advocay for national certification.

Has the lawyer written articles or lectured in the area? Some lawyers write articles and lecture for other lawyers explaining the law in the area or trial techniques. The law is always changing and lawyers are required to take courses. Look for the lawyers who lecture at these courses.

Has the lawyer been recognized by organizations which rank or recognize the outstanding lawyers in the area, the state, or the nation? There are many such organizations like: Martindale Hubbell (international directory of lawyers with a rating system in which the lawyer ins rated by other lawyers, i.e., his/her “peers”; A/V is the highest rating); Who’s Who which lists lawyers based on their backgrounds and accomplishments overall; Superlawyer.com which again ranks or lists lawyers based on reviews by other lawyers; South Florida Legal Guide, which has categories for areas of practice and ranks according to what other lawyers say; Florida Trend Magazine which names its “Legal Elite”.

What results at trial and in settlement has the lawyer gotten? Results speak for themselves. But look at the severity of the case compared to the result. In other words is there a million dollar recovery in a case in which the client was put into a wheelchair after the accident or in the case of a less serious injury?

This just in about the victims and the families of people who were killed in a boating accident one year ago on Columbus Day. Every year in the waters off of Miami there is a Columbus Day Regatta. It is a fun event and a beautiful sight. The Regatta takes place on Sunday and Monday of the weekend. It is a beautiful sight to see all of the sail boats in a precosseion as they race down to Elliot Key. They then spend the night there and race back the next day. The Regatta is for sailboats but there are also motor boats who join the festivities especially the partying. At Elliot Key, on the night of the race, there is always a party and it can get wild. As you can imagine there is sometimes some drinking and driving of motorboats.

When accidents do occur on the water with any kind of motorboats, yachts, Jet Skiis, Wave Runners, Seadoos, sailboats, commercial vessels including tankers, freighters, cruise ships, and any other vessel or boat, maritime law applies. This is a specialized area of the law. For this type of case, you need a maritime lawyer who handles personal injuries.

Last year, on the Columbus Day weekend, there was an accident where a rental boat broke down, was being towed, and was hit by another boat. This caused the wrongful deaths of two of the boaters and many personal injuries. Some of those who suffered personal injuries were students at Florida International University (FIU). Here are some more details from the FIU student newspaper:

One year after the boat accident during the Columbus Day Regatta that killed two FIU students and injured many others, some of the survivors - together with friends and relatives -returned to the regatta site, but this time with a different purpose.

Need help? Just light the way is the name of the campaign they founded to create awareness about the dangers of the ocean, which they believe will help prevent more accidents such as the one that killed students Monica Burgera and James Noel Pou last year.

“We couldn’t let this happen again, so we though that by telling other people what happened to us and informing them about boat safety was the best way to prevent it,” said Andres Perez, who survived the accident that took the life of his girlfriend for more than four years, Burguera; and his roommate, Noel Pou.

The accident took place when their broken-down rental boat, which was being towed back to shore, was hit from behind by a 35-foot powerboat.

Together with Burguera’s family and about 100 volunteers, Perez spent last weekend’s regatta distributing flyers, t-shirts, hats and flashlights at 14 different marinas throughout Miami.

“We went through such a hard time that we don’t want anyone else to go through the same. Saving one life will make the effort worth it,” said Mayra Burguera, the mother of Monica Burguera.

Need Help? was financed by the Burguera family and supported by friends and relatives.
A Web site and a Facebook.com group helped spread the word about it and quickly found solidarity among the FIU community. The Facebook group reached over 1,000 members in just three days.

Also as part of the campaign, the Burguera family decorated a boat with Burguera’s and Noel Pou’s picture and approached regatta boaters to hand them safety information and remind them of the dangers of the ocean.

This just in about the crash of a 40 foot walkway leading to the Queen Mary II when she was in dry dock in France. On November 15, 2003, the shipyard which built what was at the time the world’s largest cruise ship hosted a party on the ship. The day before the reception, the yard built a make shift walkway leading to the ship. It was built not according to any written plans but according to memory. When the reception was underway and hundreds of people were crowded onto the walkway, it collapsed sending the people down some to their deaths. There were 16 wrongful deaths and 29 personal injuries. The ship builder and the subcontractor which built the walkway were put on trial in France for manslaughter. Here are the details:

Shipbuilder on trial over gangway deaths on liner
SUSAN BELL
IN PARIS
THE French shipbuilder of the giant luxury liner Queen Mary 2 went on trial yesterday charged with the manslaughter of 16 people and injuring 29 after they fell 18 metres to the ground when a walkway collapsed during a visit.

The shipbuilder, Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, Endel, which it subcontracted to build the walkway, and four employees of each firm face up to three years’ imprisonment for involuntary injury and manslaughter.

However, a lawyer for the 130 civil parties in the case asked yesterday for the charges be requalified as “a deliberate fault”, for which the maximum sentence is five years in prison.

The accident, on 15 November, 2003, took place while the Queen Mary 2 - the world’s largest liner at the time of its construction - was in dry dock at Saint Nazaire in western France undergoing pre-delivery sea trials.

The shipbuilder and its subcontractor are accused of failing to carry out obligatory security checks before allowing hundreds of guests to use the narrow 14 metre-long walkway to board the ship for a guided tour. The two companies are also accused of having employed insufficiently trained personnel.

An investigation into structural reasons for the accident concluded that the design of the walkway was deficient. It was installed “without plans and from memory” the day before the tragedy, said the president of the court, Alain Le Dressay.

Among the 45 victims of the accident were 26 employees of a cleaning firm and 19 guests who had been invited to visit the liner.

“I want justice to be done,” said Marlene Cassard, a survivor who lost her husband, a senior executive at Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, her brother and three close friends.

“I thought it was the end. I fell on people and people fell on me,” she said. “I opened my eyes and found myself in the midst of torn bodies and heaps of metal.”

Her son, Eric, added: “We just want the defendants to say ‘yes, we messed up’, for them to assume their responsibilities.”

Yves Violette, a representative of the 130 civil plaintiffs, said: “We are well aware that nobody wanted to kill anyone, but the victims need to know the truth.”

The husband of a woman who died in the tragedy said: “How do these people sleep at night?”

Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique maintains it had full confidence in Endel. The contractor has claimed the walkway was being used in conditions for which it had never been intended. “The walkway should never have been used by members of the public,” Endel’s lawyer, Thierry Dalmasso, told the court.

Patrick Boissier, the head of Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, said: “We have undeniably a moral responsibility for the accident.”

The trial is due to continue until 23 October.

AN OCEAN GIANT
THE 150,000-tonne, 17-storey, Queen Mary 2 ocean liner entered service in January 2004 with her maiden voyage from Southampton to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, followed by a series of Caribbean cruises and a trip to Rio de Janeiro.

She was overtaken last year as the world’s largest cruise ship by the Finnish-built Freedom of the Seas, which can carry up to 4,400 passengers compared to the Queen Mary’s 2,620 - but her height, length, and waterline breadth still remain unsurpassed by any other passenger ship.

Approximately 3,000 craftsmen in Saint-Nazaire, spent some eight million working hours on the ship, and a total of 20,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in her design, construction, and fitting out.

In total, 300,000 pieces of steel were assembled into 94 “blocks” off the dry dock, which were then stacked and welded together to complete the hull and superstructure.

This just in from researchers in British Columbia. This was a research project to compare the affects of day of injury intoxication on traumatic brain injury (TBI) with longer term ree injury alcohol abuse on TBI: Overall, the results suggest that pre-injury alcohol abuse, compared with day-of-injury alcohol intoxication, had the most influence on short-term neuropsychological outcome from uncomplicated mild TBI. However, the influence of pre-injury alcohol abuse was considered small at best.

This just in from a British paper about the cruise ship passenger in England who fell overboard Sunday morning. She was a 67 year old grandmother. She died from the fall of 80 feet. This raises again the question of the safety of railings on cruise ships. We have seen over the last two years alone numerous cruise ship passengers falling overboard over the railing. The media attention started with the George Smith case, but there have been others before and many more since. Some have involved heavy alcohol drinking but others have not. This one does not seem to have involved alcohol.

Death of gran ‘not seen as suspicious’
By Lynn Morris

OCEANA TRAGEDY: Mrs Pang’s body was found in the Solent
POLICE are not treating the death of Karleen Pang as suspicious.

Grandmother Mrs Pang, 67, died after falling overboard from cruise liner Oceana early on Sunday morning.

Her body was recovered by the Calshot RNLI inshore lifeboat from the Thorne Channel in the Solent later that day.

A spokesman from Hampshire Police said: “We are no longer treating the incident as suspicious. The post mortem examination revealed she died as a result of injuries consistent with falling into water from an 80ft drop.

“Our investigations have not revealed anything suspicious. If we do get more information then we would reopen the investigation.

“The family has been informed.”

This just in from the Sun Sentinel Newspaper here in Florida. This is the accident where the man in a motor boat at night crashed into the damn over a canal in Broward County, Florida. His blood alcohol level was three times over the legal limit. He was alone in the boat.

Hollywood man fatally injured in boat crash was legally drunk
October 4, 2007

A Hollywood man who was critically injured when he crashed his boat in a canal on Sunday has died, the Broward Sheriff’s Office said.

Mark Edward Babinec, 37, had been navigating the Dania Cut-Off Canal Sunday night when he hit his head on a set of pipes that hang low over the canal and then crashed into the embankment at State Road 7 and Orange Drive, officials said.

Babinec’s blood alcohol level at the time of the crash was .242, about three times the legal limit, according to the Sheriff’s Office. In addition to alcohol, officials said speed also was a factor, with witnessing saying Babinec was going 40 to 50 mph when the crash occurred.

He was taken to Memorial Regional Hospital, in Hollywood, where he died Tuesday afternoon.

Lights Out on Cruise Ship; Passengers in the Dark

The Island Star cruise ship, a ship which until last year sailed as the Celebrity Horizon, lost all power for a time last week somewhere off of the coast of France. The entire ship was plunged into darkness. The captain said that the cruise line was flying technicians to the ship for repairs. After the technicians arrived, they apparently repaired the problems for a while. Then less than a day later the same thing happened. Then the captain declared that the cruise was over and called for the 1476 passengers and an undisclosed number of crew to abandon ship. After all of the fear and anguish by the passengers that meant to get into the life boats with their luggage and be ferried to shore. Many of the passengers were elderly. At least two collapsed in the process of abandoning ship.

Island Star cruises is a joint venture between Royal Caribbean Cruise Line and First Choice Holdings. Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines owns Celebrity Cruise Lines. That means that the ship went from one arm of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (Celebrity) to another (the joint venture).

This just in from Las Angeles.

LOS ANGELES — “For all of the right reasons, there has been an increase in awareness about traumatic brain injury in soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan,” says David Hovda. As professor and vice chief of research affairs for UCLA’s Division of Neurosurgery and director of the UCLA Brain Injury Research Center, Hovda has several years experience in treating patients who have suffered traumatic brain injury (TBI) in sports injuries, car accidents and many other life-threatening situations. And Hovda and his neurosurgery team have made a number of breakthroughs in the field of brain injury.

Working in cooperation with Walter Reed Naval Medical Center over the last several years, Hovda says treating the soldiers who return from the Iraq war has yielded some interesting revelations. These have reframed TBI beyond sports medicine and tragic community folklore into a new way to treat head injuries from combat.

“Although severe TBI does occur in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters, the most recent concern has been focused on the mild-to-moderate level of injury to the brain,” he says. “Commonly referred to as concussions, these mild brain injuries often are due to individuals being in close proximity to blasts set off by improvised explosive devices. What is troubling is there is little being done to diagnose if an individual has sustained a mild or moderate TBI.”

Orthapedic Injuries in Personal Injury Cases; Motion Analysis

The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery has recently published an article about a study by orthopedic surgeons about motion analysis. Apparently, this is the study of the gait and walking changes of someone who has suffered an orthopedic injury to the leg. This would include the foot, ankle, lower leg (tibia or fibula), knee, upper leg (femur), the hip or the pelvis.

We have found in our practice here at Hickey Law Firm, P.A. that whenever someone injures their leg or in some other way alters the way they walk, that is their gait, this alters and affects other parts of their bodies. Most commonly, we see back problems after this. Oftentimes the back injury can become as bad or worse than the initial injury which sets off the chain reaction to make the back hurt. That is why measuring the altered gait is so important.

Motion Analysis and Dynamic Electromyography
Top
Introduction
Motion Analysis and Dynamic…
Amputation Surgery and…
Heterotopic Ossification
Spinal Cord Injury
Diabetes and Involvement of…
Chronic Wounds
Jacqueline Perry Award and…
References

Motion analysis is an important tool that is used to understand the complexities of movement and lower extremity function. Such a detailed description of function has been valuable for determining both nonoperative and operative management guidelines for individuals with abnormal gait patterns1-4.

Gait-evaluation protocols involving the use of instrumented treadmills are likely to be used in the near future. Riley et al. performed a kinematic and kinetic comparison of overground and treadmill walking in a study of healthy subjects and demonstrated that treadmill gait is qualitatively and quantitatively similar to overground gait and that the mechanics of treadmill and overground gait are very similar5. Having demonstrated the essential equivalence of treadmill and overground gait, the authors proposed the possibility of incorporating treadmill-based protocols into clinical movement analysis.

TBI Can Cause Neuroendocrine Dysfunction. This just in from the newest edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assorciation.

Hypothalamopituitary Dysfunction Following Traumatic Brain Injury and Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage
A Systematic Review

Harald Jörn Schneider, MD; Ilonka Kreitschmann-Andermahr, MD; Ezio Ghigo, MD; Günter Karl Stalla, MD; Amar Agha, MD

JAMA. 2007;298:1429-1438.

Context Neuroendocrine dysfunction following traumatic brain injury and aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage may occur with a much higher prevalence than previously suspected. This sequela is a potentially serious but treatable complication of brain injury.