How Drunk is a .32 BAC and How Dangerous Is It?
The news is often full of people who seem to have disregarded the maximum legal blood-alcohol content (BAC) of .08, drinking so much they violate not just the law, but common sense itself. Their tox-screen results suggest that many people arrested for intoxication have a BAC in the range of .15 to .30--well over the...
How Does a Texas Jury Apportion Responsibility Between a Bar and a Drunk Driver?
I talk a lot about Texas dram shop law, wherein an establishment that serves alcohol may be held liable if a drunk person causes injury to himself or others, but it's definitely important to keep individual accountability in the equation. Dram shop laws don't excuse the drivers themselves; it only acknowledges that the bars who...
Whodunnit: Evaluating An Accident With Several Possible Causes
There's a common misconception that accident attorneys will often sue anyone even tangentially related to a wreck--especially if those distantly-involved parties have deep pockets. The idea of course is that profit, not prudence, guides the attorneys' decision-making. It's a deeply cynical stance that is perpetuated by pop culture's insistence on portraying attorneys as vultures and...
How Trucking Companies Hide Behind Intentional Tort Arguments
By paying a monthly fee to an insurance agency, people essentially place a bet that something bad will happen to them or their property. To "win" on that bet, the insured must first actually lose by incurring serious damages. Depending on the policy in question, that could be anything from a home ruined by a...
Seeing the Signs: How We Spot Possible Dram Shop Accidents
Drunk driving appears to be a blind spot in our national consciousness. I cannot think of a single person, no matter how contrarian, who could compellingly argue that this practice has positive benefits. It's dangerous, it's illegal, and it flies in the face of common sense. I doubt I need to be worried about some...
Are Wet Road Conditions Grounds for an Act of God Defense?
While crashes due to inclement weather are not uncommon across the United States, I recently learned of an incident here in Texas, which prompted me to write a little more in-depth about the phenomenon. In wet, foggy conditions, a tractor-trailer hydroplaned just outside of Midland. It entered oncoming traffic and collided with a passenger vehicle,...
Intoxicated Driving Study: Harris County, TX and DUI Crashes
The first reported drunk driving accident in the United States happened in 1904. Automobiles were still very new technology when these matters started to arise, and yet similar incidents started to be published with increasing frequency. Further evidence that people love to drink in exotic situations and locales, as though we needed any more confirmation....
A Quick Refresher on Texas Dram Shop Law
Texas dram shop cases are seldom cut and dried. It's an important element of tort law; after all, bars and restaurants that over-serve their customers deserve to be held accountable for putting profits before safety. While the intoxicated individual most certainly owns a significant share of the responsibility--failing to observe his or her own limits,...
The Case of Caden Nieneker: How Do Texas Dram Shop Laws Relate to House Parties?
On the surface, house parties tend to seem like a great idea. However, they can have downsides: With less room it's harder to escape a boring conversation, the bathroom line can be ridiculous, some people don't know when to stop drinking (often with disastrous results), and depending on your guest list there's a risk of...
Stopping the Buck: Rose City Tragedy and Truck Accident Liability
President Harry Truman famously had a placard on his desk that read "The Buck Stops Here." The phrase ultimately means that one must take responsibility for his decisions and actions, and can't "pass the buck" to dodge any consequences. That idealism is laudable, of course, but ducking blame has been practiced for millennia and shows...
How Trucking Company Lawyers Shift Blame Following an Accident
Defense Attorneys Say The Darndest Things About a year ago, one of our firm's attorneys, Keith Purdue, was taking the deposition of a trucking company's "safety manager." This deposition was a fairly heated affair, wherein we were essentially accusing the man being deposed of having a largely ceremonious title and/or a job that merely existed...
How Can Human Perception Affect A Motorcycle Accident Case?
Perception is tricky. Two people can parse an image or a situation differently even when receiving identical input. Take this classic example: Or try this: Visual tricks like these have been around for years and illustrate a crucial point known to cognitive scientists and illusionists alike: In some instances, our senses lie to us. This...
Do Trucking Companies Need Safer Delivery Rules In Residential Neighborhoods?
Commercial trucks are serious business. Freight needs to get all over the country, and every year over $9 trillion in freight is hauled to and fro by trucks. We can talk all day about some glimmering future of electronic drones making deliveries (thanks for the raised expectations, Amazon), but our infrastructure right now depends largely...
Liability for Highway Obstructions in Texas Law
We have noticed a lot of news reports lately about motorists who for one reason or another collide with the rear of a tractor-trailer. Fault in these instances is always case-specific. Sometimes it falls on the passenger vehicle's driver; in other instances, fault lies with the trucker. There are even accidents where inclement weather or...
iFault: Should Apple Be Implicated in Distracted Driving Injuries?
Most people are passingly familiar with the psychological theory of classical conditioning; it's the process behind the famous "Pavlov's Dog" experiments. In that classic example, the researcher takes an object of strong positive stimulus (food) and an object of neutral stimulus (a ringing bell). Over the course of the experiment, the dog is neurologically conditioned...
Walk the Line: Pedestrians and the Texas Transportation Code
Texas is a pretty driving-intensive state, given its span of almost 270,000 square miles. Texans are used to sort of sprawling out horizontally, which means a lot of vehicular travel to get from living space to work space to activities and leisure destinations. That said, we're not without our share of pedestrians. They're not as...
What Do I Do If I’m in an 18-Wheeler Chain Reaction Accident?
On December 30, 2016, a chain-reaction collision begun by a 2001 Freightliner tractor-trailer led to one fatality and ten injured people on westbound Interstate 40 in St. Francis County, Arkansas. According to the official report filed by the Arkansas state highway patrol, six passenger vehicles were moving slowly in a line as traffic passed by...
Who Is Liable for the Amarillo Phosphine Gas Deaths?
On January 2, 2017, accidental exposure to phosphine gas led to the deaths of 7-year-old Felipe Balderas, 9-year-old Johnnie Balderas, 11-year-old Josue Balderas, and 17-year-old Yasmeen Balderas. In addition, 5 family members, including 45-year-old Martha Balderas, who is in critical condition, and 10 first-responders were injured. According to initial reports, it is believed that a...
Robert Cornish’s Wrongful Death Lawsuit and the Law
It should be noted that Grossman Law Offices has no involvement in the case I am about to discuss. No one in our firm is privy to inside information and no one is working on the case, or knows any of the participants. It's just an interesting case from a legal standpoint that happened to...
Trigger Warning: Remington Arms Co. Discloses Files Showing Trigger Defects in Model 700 Rifle
Transparency is on the whole a very important thing to exercise when something conceivably could go wrong, yet time and time again it is revealed that corporations deliberately conceal known risks in order to continue selling malfunctioning products. I know we aren't just talking about cranky cats when it comes to the potential millions (or...
