Ken and Jay Speak at AAJ Annual Convention and Continue Leadership Roles

August 10, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Levinson and Stefani is thrilled to recap last month’s American Association for Justice (AAJ) Annual Convention in Seattle, where both Ken Levinson and Jay Stefani gave presentations.

Jay guided fellow trial lawyers through office employment contracts during the AAJ Sole Practitioner & Small Firm Section’s CLE program. As the section’s Chair this past year, Jay provided guidance to trial attorneys across the country on topics concerning law firm management.

“I had a great time this past year working with our section. We started a monthly Book Club Webinar and put together an outstanding seminar at our convention. This next year, as Immediate Past Chair, I get all the fun of staying involved with a little less of the ‘hard work.’”

Ken’s presentations touched on focus groups and their value across multiple areas of litigation. He spoke at the Melvin M. Belli Society, as well as multiple other meetings and seminars throughout the week. Notably, Ken was elected Chair of the Trucking Litigation Group, an honor which he was humbled to receive.

“Taking over as Chair of the Trucking Litigation Group is one of the greatest honors of my career. To finally be elected after over a decade of working with this group is both deeply meaningful and fulfilling.”

As Chair, Ken has two main goals: the first is to provide the best educational and continued learning opportunities for trial lawyers through innovative programs such as the “Trucking College.” The second is to make sure any lawyer who handles trucking cases, regardless of background, has the opportunity to participate in this group.

Jay shares a similar passion in providing support for fellow lawyers.

“I’m always grateful for the opportunity to share my experience – successes and shortcomings – with other lawyers who manage their own firms. Each firm is a small business, so we have a lot of the same issues – but sharing our solutions is what lets us focus on helping clients.”

Ken and Jay have regularly attended AAJ’s Annual and Winter Conventions throughout their time at the firm. Both partners are active members of AAJ and have held numerous leadership roles within the organization. AAJ is the largest association of trial lawyers in the nation, and stand on the pillars of community, advocacy, and education.

JAY STEFANI LEADS DISCUSSION TO AID SOLE PRACTIONERS & SMALL FIRMS DURING UPCOMING AAJ WEBINAR

May 9, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Jay will be discussing “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” by Atul Gawande during the American Association for Justice (“AAJ”) Sole Practitioner & Small Firm Section “Book Club” webinar. He will touch on multiple subtopics including:

why checklists are needed in an increasingly complex world;
types of checklists;
what constitutes an effective checklist; and
how to create and implement checklists in your practice.

The webinar will be held on May 11, 2022, and will begin at 12:00pm (CST). Attendance is free for AAJ members, but advance registration is required.

Jay is the current Chair of AAJ’s Sole Practitioner and Small Firm Section, which focuses on supporting trial attorneys across the country who manage their own law practices. Jay frequently speaks on topics concerning law firm management and technology.

Traffic Death Numbers Increase, Buttigieg Calls for New Road Safety Strategy

March 3, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

“The rising fatalities on our roadways are a national crisis; we cannot and must not accept these deaths as inevitable,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “People should leave the house and know they’re going to get to their destination safely, and with the resources from the bipartisan infrastructure law, plus the policies in the National Roadway Safety Strategy we launched last month, we will do everything we can to save lives on America’s roads.”

Buttigieg’s comments come after a recently-released federal report’s crash data show 38,824 deaths occurred in traffic incidents throughout 2020, although shelter-at-home orders brought about fewer miles traveled overall. This is the highest number of roadway fatalities since 2007, and an overall 6.8% increase–while car and truck vehicle miles traveled dropped 11%.

The death rate per 100 million vehicle miles traveled rose by 21% from 2019–from 1.11 to 1.34, marking the biggest recorded percentage increase.

The Department of Transportation said in a report to Congress that it is focusing on prioritizing the health and safety of drivers in the modern era–that is: public transit users, rideshare and electric scooter users, and those delivering food and goods to households. Funding will be allocated significantly towards safer roadways, traffic roundabouts, bike paths, transit lanes, sidewalks, and pathways to bus stops.

The department, Buttigieg explained, is shifting from states’ previous prioritization of adding additional car lanes for congestion relief, which often reduces the quality of life for surrounding neighborhoods.

The report, which noted that “safety is consistently DOT’s top priority,” said that the adoption of the “Complete Streets” strategy by the Federal Highway Administration will “have a positive impact on the safety of all roadway users–reversing the trend of increasing fatal and serious injuries and creating a healthier, greener, and more equitable surface transportation system.”

The importance of focusing on these safety aspects is due to the report’s finding that around one-third of all American traffic fatalities have been deaths of those outside of motor vehicles, such as pedestrians and motorcyclists.

“A Complete Street is safe, and feels safe, for everyone using the street,” said the deputy head of the highway administration, Stephanie Pollack. “We can’t keep people safe on our roads if we don’t have safer roads and roads that slow down drivers to safe speeds. Through our Complete Streets initiative, FHWA will play a leadership role in providing an equitable and safe transportation network for travelers of all ages and abilities, including vulnerable road users and those from underserved communities that have faced historic disinvestment.”

This focus change will work to help cities that have struggled in funding economically-friendly transit improvements, as well as to slow traffic, reduce roadway deaths, and bring together communities initially separated by redlining tactics of the past. In fact, 2020’s data shows that lower-income, African-American residents more often live near common pedestrian crash areas and busy highways.

“The tragic loss of life of people represented by these numbers confirms that we have a deadly crisis on our nation’s roads,” said Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s Deputy Administrator. “While overall traffic crashes and people injured were down in 2020, fatal crashes and fatalities increased. We cannot allow this to become the status quo.”

For 2021, preliminary estimates for vehicle deaths show more than 46,000 deaths–an increase of 9% from 2020, according to the National Safety Council, which called these numbers “dark and disturbing.”

“Every crash and fatality on the highway is a tragedy,” said vice president of safety policy for American Trucking Associations, Dan Horvath. “So while it is good to see truck-involved crashes [fall], the overall trend in highway fatalities is distressing. We have long believed that driving behaviors like speeding, texting and aggressive driving–behaviors that anecdotally rose during the pandemic–are major contributors to crashes, and this data would support that conclusion. We urge federal regulators to do the important work needed to identify the true causes of crashes–particularly truck-involved crashes–and then work with law enforcement to enact strategies to curb these behaviors in motorists.”

While Insurance Rates Skyrocket, Safety Tech Can Help, ATRI Says

March 2, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

By keeping safety practices first and foremost in company culture and utilizing innovative safety technology, trucking carriers can mitigate the effects of rising insurance costs, according to a new American Transportation Research Institute report.

The report, entitled “The Impact of Rising Insurance Costs on the Trucking Industry,” was released in February and analyzed the data showing that the steep incline of insurance premiums between 2009 snd 2018 exceeds the overall rate of truck-involved crash number increases, although annual insurance costs are meant to take into account the company’s incident history.

“The largest percent increase in premium costs per mile was seen in very large fleets,” the report explained. “Even though very large fleets have the lowest premium cost per mile, this large percent increase poses significant challenges for operational planning.”

For its report, ATRI surveyed 82 motor carriers operating a total of 94,555 trucks, and found that per-mile insurance prices rose by 47% over the last 10 years–from 59 to 87 cents, and that small fleets had premiums that were twice as high per mile as those of larger fleets. Additionally, large fleets with between 101 and 1,000 trucks were found to be paying nearly double per mile as compared to very large fleets with more than 1,000 trucks.

90% of carriers also saw premiums rise between 2018 and 2020, although fewer than 13% of carriers actually increased their insurance coverage. 18.3% of large and very large fleets endured 50% increases in their premiums without increasing any coverage. Throughout the United States, the largest insurance premium increase was seen in the Southeast, while the Northeast continues to have the highest premiums overall.

According to ATRI, when insurance companies have to deal with litigation, those financial difficulties can end up affecting the motor carriers they cover. Additionally, insurance industry economic conditions have had a steady impact on premium rates, and commercial vehicle insurers saw a 50% increase in losses between 2015 and 2019. In states with higher frequencies of litigation involving truck registrations, loss ratios tended to be particularly high.

“External factors that go well beyond carrier safety force commercial trucking insurance costs to increase, which then requires carriers to redesign their business strategies,” explained chief insurance officer for the Insurance Information Institute, Dale Porfilio. “The higher premiums ultimately tend to be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. ATRI’s study corroborates the Triple-I’s research on rising insurance costs and social inflation—that increased litigation and other factors dramatically raise insurers’ claim payouts.”

Many carriers have been working to make up for the losses incurred with insurance premium increases by reducing maintenance spending, equipment purchases, wages, and bonuses–in addition to attempting to rework their insurance policies. Still, cutting spending in these areas may bring about a major increase in risk costs and allow for a worsening of long-term problems, including low productivity and exacerbated driver shortage issues, ATRI warned.

Carriers should instead begin prioritizing any safety-centric actions, such as investments in safety technology, litigation liability, boosted driver training, and improved hiring processes, ATRI said. This will help them better assess their total potential risk costs–and lower them.

“This comprehensive approach enables carriers to organize costs more effectively for the long-term by emphasizing the impacts that all cost centers have on safety and the relationships between them,” ATRI noted in its report.

Out of 92% of motor carriers surveyed by ATRI, the implementation of driver-assist safety technology has been the most steady trend. ATRI found that the most commonly-used tech included road-facing cameras, which are “a strategic tool for insurers, carriers, and drivers, as they provide irrefutable safety documentation, thus lowering claims and defense costs,” ATRI said.

Other helpful safety tech includes forward-collision warning, electronic stability control, blindspot detection, and lane-departure warning. Utilizing a variety of these technologies may allow for the mitigation or prevention of around 28% of all reported large-truck involved crashes, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

New Headlight Tech Will Avoid Blinding Drivers, Improve Road Safety

March 1, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Highway safety regulators are now moving forward with permitting a new kind of headlight in an effort to avoid the temporary blindness drivers can face when passing a vehicle with strong, high-beam headlights.

These high-tech lights can tailor beams automatically to focus only on dark areas without creating glare that can hurt the eyes of those in oncoming traffic. The final rule has just been published in the Federal Register after being issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which noted that it’s time to permit these “adaptive driving beam headlights.”

“The final rule will improve safety for pedestrians and bicyclists by making them more visible at night, and will help prevent crashes by better illuminating animals and objects in and along the road,” said NHTSA when it announced the rule.

The headlights utilize LED lamps to be able to specifically focus beams on dark regions of the road, especially within the driver’s lane and along the shoulder and roadside. When traffic is oncoming, the lights’ sensors can automatically diminish light beam intensity and focus the lights in specific areas.

“You have the ability to basically create a light pattern on the fly that is optimized for real-time conditions,” said principal mobility analyst for Guidehouse Research, Sam Abuelsamid. “You can cast the light where it’s most useful.”

Abuelsamid explained that the lighting technology uses light-emitting diodes that control in what direction and how strongly the light beams are positioned, and these diodes work much differently than commonly-used lamps that emit high beams all over. Although these new lights are already heavily utilized in Europe, they will take time to spread to mainstream vehicles in the U.S. and will likely be high-cost at first, Abuelsamid added.

Additionally, in vehicles with partially automated driver assist systems, the lighting tech will help this software allow cars to more easily avoid upcoming obstacles, objects in the road, and veering out of the driver’s lane.

Bringing about this new final rule regarding headlights follows a year and a half behind Congress’ bipartisan infrastructure law requirement, and NHTSA noted that its safety measures typically move slowly once Congressional mandates finally come to fruition. Currently, more than a dozen auto safety rules with Congress-passed deadlines are years overdue, as has been the case under the last three presidents presiding over NHTSA’s rule-making actions.

Since 2017, NHTSA has been awaiting an administrator confirmed by the senate, although President Biden has recently nominated Steven Cliff for the role. Cliff is a former air quality regulator for the state of California, and is waiting for full Senate confirmation before beginning his duties with the agency.

The decision to push forth this new rule is likely provoked by a months-long steep increase in overall roadway fatalities throughout the country. In the first nine months of 2021, the number of traffic deaths on American roads skyrocketed, reaching a government-reported number of 31,720 during that time period. These deaths align with the rising numbers of reckless driving behavior the country saw throughout the pandemic era, especially as shelter-in-place orders were issued and roadways cleared, causing many drivers to feel the need to speed excessively.

Between January and September 2021, the estimated number of vehicle crash deaths rose by 12% from the same period in 2020. The number of deaths during this timeframe was the highest within a nine-month span since 2006, and showed the sharpest increase in a nine-month period since 1975–when the Transportation Department first began keeping records of fatal crash data.

“People make mistakes, but human mistakes don’t always have to be lethal,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of these tragic numbers. “In a well-designed system, safety measures make sure that human fallibility does not lead to human fatalities.”

Many safety advocates and transportation industry members are hopeful that this new headlight technology will help many drivers see exactly what they need to while driving at night, and will allow for fewer drivers to become temporarily blinded by high beams and avoid potential crashes caused by this visual difficulty.

Bridge Improvement Funding Needs Expediting for Safety’s Sake, Industry Experts Say

February 28, 2022 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Federal funding for bridge-repairing projects is now critical to public safety, according to transportation experts at the American Society of Civil Engineers and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association.

Now, these leaders are pushing for the Biden administration and Congress to allocate federal funding to improve these deteriorating bridges, as current funds available to states for bridge projects still fail to include full transportation appropriations outlined within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

This legislation was passed in November 2021, and the most recent spending solution–which made funds available for certain surface transportation projects–ended in mid-February. Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $27.5 billion was set to be offered to states for bridge repair needs throughout the next five years. However, if spending approval is pushed back, project start dates will be further delayed–perhaps to the detriment of driver safety.

“We urge Congress to act forthwith so that the American people can begin to realize the benefits of the historic investments in the bipartisan infrastructure law,” said president and CEO of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, Dave Bauer.

This funding is indeed historic, and considered nearly unprecedented by many transportation organizations, including the American Society of Civil Engineers. However, it still may not be enough for all the improvements truly needed throughout the country.

As ASCE’s president-elect Maria Lehman put it, the investment is a “major plus-up,” and “a great start, but it’s not the silver bullet.” In fact, the funding should have been released earlier, as “infrastructure is a system of systems,” Lehman continued. ”It’s the weak link that brings everything down.”

Although bridges deemed to be in “fair” condition can just undergo repairs, if a bridge is considered to be in “poor” condition, it needs to be replaced as soon as possible. Currently, 36% of all 224,000 American bridges either need repair or replacement–78,800 of those need full replacement, according to ARTBA’s 2022 Bridge Report, which analyzed data from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database.

The states with the highest number of bridges classified as being in “poor” condition are: Iowa, with 4,504 such bridges; Pennsylvania,with 3,198; Illinois, with 2,405; Oklahoma, with 2,296; Missouri, with 2,218; New York, with 1,672; Louisiana, with 1,631; California, with 1,493; West Virginia, with 1,490; and Ohio, with 1,334.

“Our infrastructure is always there, doing its job,” said Lehman. “It’s not until something goes drastically wrong that people pay attention. Civil engineering failure is front and center because it’s important to people.”

Truckers should also be diligent in paying attention to bridge load postings, as this is a major aspect of overall bridge safety, Lehman added.

“Maybe it won’t collapse [if your truck has a heavier weight than allowed], but you are straining it,” she said.

Various organizational leaders collaborated on a letter sent to congressional lawmakers in February in an effort to persuade them to pass timely appropriations for the 2022 fiscal year, as a method of instilling “confidence in our residents as we navigate through the ongoing pandemic.”

The letter was signed by prominent members of the Council of State Governments, the International City and County Management Association, the National Association of Counties, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“The [Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act] represents a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure, and Congress must ensure that these new resources are made available to state, territory, and local governments as intended under the law,” said the group leaders in their letter.

Additionally, local municipalities, along with state transportation departments, should find ways of boosting their funding availability by utilizing economies of scale. For example, choosing bridge improvement projects within one regional area could bring lower overall administrative costs, Lehman explained.

“It’s really important that we start to think of system solutions instead of one-off solutions,“ she noted.