Missing your court date for your NC speeding or traffic ticket can have drastic consequences.  I know, they seem like harmless pieces of paper, but they aren’t.

When you miss your court date, generally the clerks in that county will hold your ticket for 20 days.  There are some counties where, depending on the offense, they might issue a warrant for your arrest.  And that’s a whole other set of problems.  But if there’s no OFA, then after that 20 days they will report your absence to DMV.  Then a bit later DMV will send you a letter telling you to handle your business by a certain date or they will indefinitely revoke your license until you do.

This is where most people get caught up in a snowball.  They might have forgotten to update their address with DMV, so DMV sends this letter to an old address, so there is nothing to remind the defendant of their missed court date.  Then, the next time they get pulled over – either next week or next month, or whenever, they get charged with driving while license revoked, and then it gets even uglier!

The moral of the story is this: Don’t forget about your ticket!  Better yet, hire an attorney – like me! – to handle your ticket so it gets resolved timely and in the best way possible under the circumstances.  Make that call early so you don’t have to worry about forgetting.

The cost of non-compliance is high.

Quick reality check: You probably are guilty.  I know, I know.  You don’t feel guilty, and you didn’t mean to break the law.  But here is the deal about speeding tickets…speeding is a strict culpability offense in NC.  If you are driving above the speed limit, you are guilty of the offense.  They don’t have to prove your intent to be speeding.  They don’t have to prove you new the speed limit.  If you are exceeding the posted speed limit, you are guilty.  No, “I was just trying to pass that semi!” is not a defense.  Nor is, “But that guy was tailgating me!”  And of course, “But I had to use the bathroom really badly!” is also unrecognized as a defense to speeding.

Because of this, hiring an attorney to help mitigate the consequences of this ticket is probably your most prudent option.  Yes, you’ll pay a little bit for the service, but you will more likely than not cut your losses in that the attorney can probably get a reduction to help reduce or even eliminate insurance points that would raise your insurance rates for three years!

Having said that, some times you aren’t guilty.  I have seen a few tickets issued that simply shouldn’t have been.  There are the identity theft tickets where someone is using your name; there are the confused cop at the accident scene tickets where they cite the victim; and then there are the just plain wrong charges.  And there are more.  But these are generally the exception, not the rule.  Still, if you need help with a ticket like this, where you simply need to prove your innocence, you need an attorney even more.  This sort of service might not be quite as affordable as hiring an attorney for a plea deal, but it may be worth the fee for getting to prove your innocence!

If you have a ticket, call me!  919-929-2992.

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If you or a loved one has suffered the ill-effects of taking this drug, please call me now for a free consultation.

919-929-2992

The big variable in valuing most injury claims is your pain and suffering award.  How much should you get for pain and suffering?

The reality is that in North Carolina personal injury claims there is no precise formula espoused by law or insurance companies to define how much money you should get for pain and suffering related to your injury.  It is totally up to a jury.  There is the old “three times the medical bills” rule which is completely and utterly arbitrary and obsolete and is not to be mentioned in my presence.  You can also ask for a per diem jury instruction where you might request a certain amount per day of suffering, but that still doesn’t tell you how much.

There is no exact way to value personal injury, but there is one thing you can do for your claim to document your pain and suffering and therefore help to better illustrate and maybe more accurately value your pain and suffering award, and that is to keep a pain journal.

For your pain journal, I would suggest you write an entry every day, starting with the day of the accident moving forward, and write about three things each day: what hurts, how badly it hurts, and how it affects your daily activities.  This helps to flesh out your pain and suffering argument so that an adjuster, and maybe a jury, will better understand how this accident and its associated injuries affected you.  How long do you do this?  You do this until you have nothing further to write about.

So keep that pain journal up to date and call me if you have an accident claim. 919-929-2992

If I have represented you in an injury claim before, you know what I say: USE YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE!  THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR!

Now that I have that out of the way, let’s talk about a few of the particulars regarding health insurance and your injury claim.

THE GOOD: If you have health insurance, you’re lucky!  This is exactly why you have it.  Health insurance helps to bear the brunt of your health care costs.  In an injury claim, my job is to help reimburse you for the costs of this care.  In the North Carolina injury claim context if you don’t have health insurance, you’re responsible for all of your health care costs up front, and that can be quite a burden to bear.  So if you have it, use it!  Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and we can talk more in detail about  those exceptions (when you might not want to use your health insurance) if I represent you.

THE BAD: There are two bad things about health insurance and your injury claim that immediately spring to mind.  First, thanks to our insurance-friendly republican legislature (those culture warrior geniuses who brought us HB 2, the most financially disastrous legislation for NC businesses ever passed), the at-fault party in your claim gets a credit for the discounts that your health insurance has negotiated with your provider.  Sucks, but there it is.  Second, there are SOME health insurance plans (ERISA plans, Medicare, Medicaid, NC State Employee Health Plan, for example) that have a right to get paid back from your settlement the amount that they paid for your care.  If you have one of these plans or a plan with a similar right (most NC plans disallow this, but there are exceptions) then that serves to substantially reduce your recovery.  It’s not the end of the world, and if you didn’t have the coverage your costs would likely be higher AND they’d just go to the provider anyway.  But still, this can be a drag.

THE UGLY: The worst is when you have a Cost Plus plan.  I won’t bore you with what that means, but the short version of the ugliness is these plans come from a statute that is worded somewhat vaguely (thanks again, legislator ding dongs) and as a result the plan administrators claim that they, too, enjoy the right of subrogation/reimbursement that ERISA, etc. plans claim.  This is not what the statute says, but it’s what they think it might be interpreted to say.  This is, to say the least, a wishful stretch on the part of these plans.  So if you have one of these, you may likely end up in a fight about what, if anything, they have a right to get back.  So far, I haven’t seen any mandatory case law on this issue that serves to settle the statutory interpretation, but it will come one day, and this may not be so ugly anymore.  Or it might get uglier.

Of course, always look to your attorney for legal advice specific to your claim, and don’t do stuff just because I wrote it down in my blog.  This piece is just for general information and is not legal advice specific to your claim.  Call me and hire me for that!

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/aug/30/bernard-victorianne-settlement/

THIS is interesting…inmate dies of meth overdose in prison.  Meth overdose.  In prison.  And his family gets $2.5 million.

This might smell a little funny to some of you.  Why would they be responsible for him overdosing?  It’s not like they gave him the drugs and/or didn’t dose him correctly.

But having worked on similar jail negligence cases, I can understand it.  Focus on these things:

The prison officials have a duty to keep these things out of the jail.  They failed.

The prison officials have a duty to monitor the health of their inmates and make sure they get medical attention when needed.  There is evidence that they failed in this duty big time.

So when you think of it in those terms, there is negligence, there are damages, so it’s a solid case.

It’s frustrating to see taxpayer dollars go to this, but it seems like the right call.

What do you think?