Are Plaintiffs’ Lawyers and Prosecutors Best Friends?
You would think that plaintiffs' lawyers (read: the attorneys for victims) and prosecutors (read: the government attorneys who punish bad guys) would always be on the same side. After all, both seek to hold wrongdoers accountable for actions that harm people in the community. In an ideal world, when a drunk driver hits someone, the...
Scam Alert: Don’t Give Money to Naomi Llanes
One of the downsides of being a well-known business that is respected in the community is that scammers like to glom on to our good name and cheat people out of money. Recently, we learned that someone using a social media platform (LinkedIn) is impersonating a Grossman Law Offices employee in an attempt to scam...
The Media Is Missing Serious Accidents: What Is to Be Done?
In the course of litigating cases over the last few years, my staff and I have incidentally come across more and more crashes that the news media isn't reporting on. These aren't just minor fender benders, but major crashes where people died or suffered serious injuries due to commercial vehicles or drunk drivers. That's not...
Client Stories: 2 Restaurants Pay a Very Steep Price for a Drunk Driving Accident that Injured a Child
In Spring 2020, a drunk driver changed one north Texas family's lives forever. A mother, father, and their 2-year-old son were driving home on a Monday evening, when at a non-descript intersection, a speeding drunk driver ran through a stop sign and t-boned their vehicle. As a result of the crash, the mother lost one...
How to Use the Texas Workers’ Compensation Database to Find Out if Your Employer Has Workers’ Comp Coverage
If you're hurt on the job in Texas, one of the first things you need to do is figure out if your employer has workers' comp coverage. The reason for this is because Texas does not force companies to participate in the workers' compensation program. What that means, practically speaking, is that your employer could...
More Regulation Isn’t Going to Shut Down Trucking School Scams
August 11th, 2015, federal and California State officials said that at least 100 commercial truck drivers paid up to $5,000 each in bribes to state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) employees for fake California commercial drivers licenses (CDLs). Immediately following the news and after further investigation, the DMV revoked over 600 CDLs that they found...
How Can New Crash Tests Make Automakers Increase Backseat Safety?
Automobiles used to be literal metal death traps, so crash data scientists and automotive engineers naturally spent decades examining crash patterns and innovating safer vehicles. By necessity, auto manufacturers focused on the most deadly aspects of cars, so front seat safety was a higher priority over the relatively safer back seats. "Relatively" is the key...
Violations Found During the Roadside Inspection Blitzes Are Nothing to Brag About
Admittedly, truck safety inspections are one of those topics (like tax law, insurance coverage, and federal regulation) that doesn't stir up a lot of excitement. Enforcing truck safety regulations is something that largely takes place outside of the general public's consciousness, but that doesn't make it unimportant. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA) is a...
How Concerned Should I Be about News Reports of Electric Bicycles Catching on Fire?
I first heard about electric bicycles (aka e-bikes) catching fire when a writer for the United Kingdom-based newspaper The Guardian wrote a piece stating that in 2022 there were "about 200 fires and six deaths" in New York alone due to e-bike fires and that, in November 2022, an e-bike fire in an apartment "became...
Is This The Worst Truck Company in Texas?
Last week, I told my boss, attorney Michael Grossman, "I think I may have found the worst trucking company in Texas." It's a bold claim to make to a man who has litigated truck accident cases longer than I've been alive. However, when he looked through what I found, he couldn't help but agree that...
Insurance Providers May Deny Your Claim if You Admit to Speeding
Personally, I have not spoken to a single person in my whole life that doesn't speed. Sure there are some folks blatantly going 20 to 30 miles over the speed limit, but most people only go about 5 to 10 miles faster. People driving 20 to 40 miles above the speed limit know what they...
How Badly Hurt Do I Have to Be to Pursue a Product Liability Claim?
People have some pretty extreme ideas and opinions about lawsuits. On one end of the spectrum, there are individuals that believe a lawsuit is a horrible, evil mechanism that allows people to unjustly cheat others out of money. These individuals tend to view lawsuits as frivolous and assume a smooth-talking lawyer could help anyone with...
Pedestrian Accidents—Not Poisoned Candy—Are the Real Risk on Halloween
A brief intro from Michael Grossman: Many of us here at Grossman Law Offices are parents. Like most parents, we worry about our kids. Unlike most parents, however, we are confronted daily with painful reminders of just how often children perish in traffic accidents. The one takeaway from our years of representing families who have...
What Do I Do If a Uber or Lyft Driver Hits Me?
Ridesharing services such as Uber and Lyft are a fact of life in many areas. Given the rideshare company's recent arrival on the scene and its unconventional business model, many questions arise from crashes involving a rideshare driver. What happens if a rideshare driver hits you? Who is a fault, the ridesharing company or the...
Did a Car Seat Defect Cause My Child’s Injuries?
Every parent wants the best for their child, and that includes car seats. While many parents spend hours researching the safest car seats for their little ones, I think many wouldn't even consider that the highly-rated car seat they purchased at the end of that search still might fail when it's needed most. To make...
Waiving Hours of Service Rules for Hurricane Ian Relief Doesn’t Mean Those Rules Shouldn’t Exist
During the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) relaxed hours of service rules to ensure an uninterrupted supply of goods during the crisis. This led some in the trucking industry to suggest that the waiver meant that rules weren't necessary in the first place. Their thinking went, "If...
3 Types of Rollover Crashes and Why They Matter to Victims
Rollover crashes are frightening and often fatal. Most people know a rollover accident when they see one, but part of our government's work to prevent these crashes involves defining and classifying what a rollover is. The National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA), defines a rollover as any crash where a vehicle impacts the ground on its...
How 5 Cases (Mostly) Made Product Liability Law in the United States
That you can hold a manufacturer accountable for a defective product is as obvious to anyone alive today as the fact that Americans elect their leaders. Modern product liability law is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget just how new it is. Less than 200 years ago, caveat emptor (buyer beware) was the prevailing...
Are Automakers Liable if a Roof Collapses in a Rollover Crash?
Rollover crashes account for less than 3% of all passenger vehicle accidents, but are responsible for almost 35% of all highway fatalities, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Of course, automakers cannot create vehicles that will never be in a rollover crash; however, most people assume that rollover crashes will be deadly...
Are Vehicle Fires Always Product Liability Cases?
In July 2018, the United States Fire Administration (USFA) published a Fire Report Series that found that the US averages 345 deaths and 1,300 injuries due to vehicle fires every year. Additionally, the report found that 80 percent of these fires occur in our everyday passenger vehicles. What is most startling though, is that "unintentional actions...
