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How Dangerous is Your Car? Safety Institute Unveils Watch List

February 26, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

2007 Toyota Camry. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Buyer beware.

The Safety Institute, a Massachusetts-based not-for-profit investigating injury prevention and product safety, has released its quarterly Vehicle Safety Watch List, featuring the top 15 potential vehicle defects to look out for in 2015. It’s the third consecutive report since the Institute began rolling out its influential catalog in June 2014.

Topping this quarter’s list is the 2012 Ford Focus (steering); the 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt (electrical); the 2008 Toyota Sienna (power train); the 2011 Chevrolet Cruz (service brake), and the 2007 Toyota Camry (speed control). The Safety Institute’s assessment describes these designations as “areas that need more investigating,” as opposed to defects. The report is largely intended as a frame of reference for “lawyers, researchers and analysts,” who mine data as a way of studying persistent problems of motor vehicle flaws.

Still, according to the Safety Institute, none of these designations have been investigated by the National Highway Safety Administration or fixed by the original manufacturer. By ignoring the data collected by the Safety Institute, carmakers and the regulatory bodies designed to protect drivers and passengers are potentially leaving consumers in a precarious position.

Toyota alone has suffered through very public recalls with model years 2005-2011, resulting in class action lawsuits and settlements related to accelerating motor pedals. The suit claimed that Toyota knowingly failed to correct a dangerous problem that could have led to fatalities. In Ford’s case, the NHTSA has long been involved in a process that involves the stalling and surging of engines in the Ford Escape model. The Ford Focus produced in model years 2012-2014 was recalled recently for stall-like conditions and unexpected losses in power.

The Safety Institute’s analysis is based on death and injury claims of the early warning reports system designed by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration. The analytics aim to identify “continuing potential failures to effectively fix issues that are already known,” says the report.

“The Vehicle Safety Watch List is an example of leveraging already available data to help prioritize investigative resources,” Sean Kane, The Safety Institute’s founder and president of the board, said in a statement. “This type of tool can help identify and potentially prevent costly safety crises that not only cause harm to consumers, but take extra resources to manage.”

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Institute’s report is the extent to which several commonly owned vehicles go unchecked by federal regulators. Granted, some of this information functions more as a watchdog than an objective presentation of facts. But a takeaway from this list and for potential victims of recall-related injuries is that they have recourse as consumers, especially when a defect is known and goes unaddressed.

Many of the listed defects have resulted in class action lawsuits against car manufacturers like Toyota and Ford. Whether your vehicle’s problems – and perhaps your injuries – are the result of a defect like those described in the report, and whether you may be part of a class, are questions often more easily answered with the guidance of a lawyer. An assessment can help determine if a class action or another lawsuit is the route for you. If you’ve been injured due to a faulty product and you believe there are others in a similar situation, a class action might be appropriate, and you should consider consulting with an attorney.

Your particular accident may not result in significant injuries, but collectively, the value of a class action suit is that it carries weight in the courtroom by consolidating resources. If you’re a victim of a faulty or recalled product, you may qualify for a class action claim. By offering free, one-on-one consultations, we can help you determine if this might be the route for you.

Election Day 2015: Don’t Forget to Vote

February 23, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Chicago Vote — Original image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a Chicagoan, it’s time to vote. On Tuesday, February 24, Chicago polls open starting at 6am for the mayoral and aldermanic elections of 2015. There’s no denying the importance of your contribution in this election. Your vote will help determine the next four years of Chicago policy and several matters of long-term importance: pension reform, minimum wage, the future of Chicago Public Schools, and even snow removal.

Use these helpful resources to find your polling place and brush up on editorial endorsements. We even have a Twitter handle in the mix, so learning about the candidates and polling information is easy as can be.

BetterGov.org
This handy resources gives you a quick, poignant snapshot of Chicago mayoral candidates and their stances on hot button issues like public education, the Chicago police and fire departments, plus answers to more complicated questions with written responses from the candidates. For the most important vote of the day, BetterGov.org is equipped to help undecided voters make a more informed decision.

The Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners
The Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners offers a user-friendly portal to help you verify your voter registration, locate your polling place, obtain sample ballots and find contact information for public officials. Get a list of all local polling places by ward and precinct to find out where you’ll need to be on Election Day. The commissioner’s site also provides handy answers to FAQs, including what to do if you’ve accidentally made a mistake on your ballot. Polling places are beginning to adjust to more digitally friendly ways of gathering votes, so if you’re accustomed to the traditional paper ballot, this might be the time to brush up on what to expect come Tuesday by using the board’s instructional PDF on how to cast your vote with pen and paper or a swipe of the screen.

Chicago Tribune
The Midwest’s largest newspaper conducts mayoral and aldermanic surveys, led by its editorial board, serving as the basis for the Tribune’s endorsement process. Every candidate is accounted for, with survey answers in their own words. You can read candidates’ responses to the editorial board’s questions on City Hall spending and answers to the Tribune’s “Plan of Chicago,” a 12-step blueprint of action culled together by more than 1,000 ideas submitted by readers. The Tribune has made endorsements for each respective race, so this is your opportunity to see how the city’s most influential paper is making its calls.

DNAinfo.com
Chicago’s Aldermanic races often take a back seat to the higher profile mayor’s race, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted. Your alderman, after all, is the middle-person between you and the higher-ups at City Hall. Take a look at DNAinfo, one of the best (if not THE best) source for hyper-targeted local news, brought to you by reporters with a dedicated beat on neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, the Loop, South Chicago, etc. Scan for election-day updates and brush up on your neighborhood’s local highlights in time for Tuesday.

@GregHinz
Here’s our sleeper pick. If you happen to be a Twitter user, you’ll want to follow Crain’s Chicago Business political writer and blogger. Hinz is arguably the foremost critic on Chicago politics. We have no doubt he’ll be tweeting out some interesting information and follow up on the biggest day in local politics.

Happy voting, Chicago!

Do You Need A Child Injury Lawyer?

February 20, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

A growing percentage of children suffer significant injuries at the hands of their favorite toys, according to the Center for Injury Research and Policy.

Based on a study by the CIRP, several emergency room-related mishaps involving children have jumped a noteworthy 40 percent in the U.S since 1990. Kids under the age of 15 accounted for nearly nine out of ten injuries. This eye-popping rate has some people analyzing the impact of such a dramatic rise.

An estimated 3 billion toys are sold annually in the U.S., most of which prove to be harmless. Some toys, however, pose higher risks than others, a fact that the CIRP was quick to point out with foot-pedal and high-powered motor scooters, a long-time popular commodity for kids.

The report pointed out that scooters helped make categories like “falls” and “collisions” the most common type of injury. The total percentages: 46 percent for falls; 22 percent for collisions. Accidents involving scooters tended to be more severe than any other, which has proven to be the case ever since toys like the Razor scooter became one of the most popular toys on the market at the turn of the Millennium.

In 2000, Razor sold an estimated 5 million scooters in six months. A report in the journal of Clinical Pediatrics reported that nearly 110,000 kids were admitted to the hospital because of scooter-related injuries in 2001, up from 25,000 in 1999. That’s more than 4 times the amount of injuries! Despite these staggering statistics, the popularity of scooters continues to extend all over the world, even as similar injury numbers are reported. Israel banned children from bringing scooters to school earlier in the fall due to a serious scooter-related head injury.

When a child is injured, as a parent your first instinct is to wonder what went wrong. That could mean any number of things: carelessness, negligence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If it happens to be the result of a defective product, then your next feeling is likely anger, frustrations and a vigilant pledge to get even with the company that allowed a defective product to go unchecked, ultimately inflicting harm upon your child.

What’s important to know is that every child injury case is different. Dealing with a defective product, especially, can be tricky a battle to wage; if the defective toy is the merchandise of a big company, your odds of litigating in a timely, cordial way are almost slim to none. That’s because big companies prepare for – and save money for – cases like this, working with seemingly unlimited legal resources at their disposal. You’ll want to ask yourself some questions:

Can you determine whether the accident was the result of defective equipment?
What were the circumstances of the accident (i.e. who was involved, how did it happen, where did it happen)?
Do state laws protect me in matters like this?
How do I objectively evaluate the situation?

But one of the most important questions you should ask yourself is, “Do I need a lawyer”? Getting answers to the above questions, and any other questions you may have, can help save you time and money, and a lawyer can help you sort out the situation. Our firm offers free consultations for families of child injury victims, and we’re happy to give you the guidance you may need.

Are Nursing Homes Inflating the Numbers?

February 18, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Nursing home resident Edna Irvin became the source of controversy late last year. The 80-year-old Irvin, a guest of the Chenal Heights Health and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, was the featured anecdote in an eye opening-read from the Center for Public Integrity. The Center found widespread reporting discrepancies among nursing homes in the U.S., including the home where Irvin had been living.

Based on several accounts and an analysis of government resources, the CPI discovered a laundry list of inflated, self-reported staffing numbers, some of which had been recorded just weeks prior to federally mandated inspections. The article points out that Irvin was a victim of a flawed system.

Over the first few months since she began living at the residence, Irvin endured a series of mishaps and injuries, according to the article. She suffered a laceration to her head related to a fall and fought through a severe bowel obstruction. In a later medical report, a rehab nurse noted that Irvin had traces of bacteria in her intestine and did not receive appropriate care for the obstruction. A law firm, acting on behalf of Irvin, obtained the nurse’s documents for an impending lawsuit filed by Irvin’s daughter, Lisa Sanders.

Sanders eventually had her mother transferred to a new facility, only after learning disturbing details about the staff, the home’s hours of operation, and the method by which the home monitored its residents. She discovered some wildly inaccurate numbers, a shock that ultimately set the move and the lawsuit in motion.

Irvin’s story is not unusual. The Center for Public Integrity uncovered an all too common if not systemic problem that has plagued nursing homes for many years. The process of self-reported data has been widely criticized by government agencies and the public, not least for its lax standards and shoddy reporting. Almost 100 peer-reviewed, academic studies, according to the Center for Public Integrity, showed that the amount of care was most strongly connected to quality care; lower levels of care showed higher risk for injury and, in some cases, death. By skewing the numbers, homes are, inadvertently or not, perpetuating bad practice and misleading prospective residents about the care they should be receiving.

The Center for Public Integrity also pointed out that self-reported data has historically been a crucial metric for government agencies that rank homes based on staff numbers, a metric that often helps the public make consequential decisions on behalf of their loved ones. But relying on self-reported information comes with a price. Irvin paid the price, and now her case is in the hands of litigators.

Improvements have been made since 2010, resulting from a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires many homes to change from a self-reporting method to a payroll-based method. The payroll-based system utilizes an electronic data collection system—practically standard in today’s digital world—that ensures more accurate tracking. But if anything, the report by the Center for Public Integrity reminds us that there’s much more to be done.

Why Truckers Ignoring Hour Limitations Is a Serious Problem

February 16, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

It’s a problem that’s rumbled its way to the top of local and federal totem poles, generating substantial controversy along the way.

Commercial truck drivers continue to stretch their limitations, according to findings by WFIR 23 in Rockford, IL, which earlier reported that operators of large rigs knowingly neglect the industry-mandated (and federally mandated) restrictions on driving hours to A) make up for lost time B) lessen the pressure of a deadline and/or C) make extra money by logging more miles. Because truck drivers are often paid by the mile, they have incentive to drive as much as possible to increase earnings.

The benefits of breaking the law and going over hours, however, definitely do not outweigh the costs. When truck drivers are driving while over-hours, they drive exhausted, rushed, or both. Think about a semi truck like the one pictured above, pushing down the freeway, say 5 pm in the winter – it’s dark out, and the driver’s been on the road for hours, but he knows he has another hundred miles to his destination. Big rigs are hard enough to control as is; and hoping the tired, hungry, hurried, distracted driver is able to stop the truck to avoid a collision is not a situation you want to find yourself in, ever. Do you feel safe with these drivers on the road?

In this case, the troublesome trend of driving while over-hours is made even more troublesome by virtue of its clandestine nature. WFIR points out that the Illinois State Police dedicates a group of officers to keeping drivers in check by monitoring food and gas receipts and driving logs. The problem: Not everyone tells the truth.

One Rockford officer said he’s come across instances in which drivers keep two separate logs: one for the official books and one to present to law enforcement upon inspection. Hundreds—if not thousands—of drivers, the report continues, forge time sheets to make it appear as though they’re within the legal limit. Between January and September of 2014 in the state of Illinois, more than a 1,000 truckers were caught driving too long without taking a break.

The F ederal Motor Carrier and Safety Administration, which allows drivers to work a maximum 11-hour driving day following 10 consecutive hours off the road, recognizes the risks facing the public. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has compared long stints of driver fatigue to drinking and driving; Bloomberg, in a December article that detailed provisions of the new fiscal budget (which includes a rollback of mandated hour regulations for truckers), wrote that truck crashes resulted in 3,912 deaths in 2012, and that the fatal-crash rate has increased each year since 2009.

As a law firm that represents truck crash injury victims, it’s hard not to cringe when we read statistics like the ones above.

In December of 2011, the FMCSA announced efforts to curb driver fatigue by augmenting provisions to the already-lengthy rules. The agency identified chronic fatigue as leading cause of injury among drivers, a result of long daily and weekly hours. At the time of the new regulations, the agency estimated that the new safety regulations would save 19 lives and prevent 1,400 crashes and 560 injuries annually.

Driver fatigue has since become the basis for several proposals, most prominently one that would incorporate e-logs as a means of monitoring drivers’ hours more closely. But one doesn’t need to look far to find opposition. Lobbyists for the trucking industry insist that long hours is the nature of the business, and as it stands, an 80-year-old pay system rewards truckers by the mile, giving truckers incentive to stay on the road for longer stretches of time.

The controversy, it seems, will rage on, but we will keep fighting against those who play fast and loose with rules designed – and proven – to keep the public safe.

App Essentials For a Safe Winter Travel Season

February 11, 2015 by Levinson and Stefani Leave a Comment

Winter in Chicago. From Flickr user inthe-arena

With the winter season comes sloppy road banks, black ice, freezing rain and any number of treacherous scenarios that can cause trouble on the road (providing you can shovel your car out from under all the snow!). Now that we’re in the midst of the most travel-intensive part of the year, it’s nearly guaranteed that one of us will find ourselves in a precarious situation due to inclement weather. Even the most cautious drivers can can’t avoid the unpredictability of Mother Nature.

Of the average 5,870,000 vehicle crashes each year, 23% of crashes are weather-related, according to the Federal Highway Administration. And in 2013, USA Today reported the United States alone suffered nearly 7,000 fatal collisions as a result of weather-related wrecks.

Below are five apps to keep you safe and help out in a pinch.

Road Trip Weather
For $1.99, iPhone users can purchase this sleek app developed by Garafa, LLC, a small-scale meteorological weather center that helps travelers plan accordingly using real-time weather data to predict where and when a potential storm may turn ugly. Simply plug in your travel departure time and anticipated travel route, and Road Trip Weather gives a snapshot of what’s in store on the roads. Tweak your travel plans accordingly and find the safest routes possible.

Weathermob
Think of it like your own Facebook or Twitter dedicated solely to the weather. Like searching your newsfeed, this handy weather app gives you a quick glimpse of what others are experiencing outside, i.e. pictures of snow-buried cars, golf ball-size hail, or the unenviable task of digging a car out of a ditch. Say you’re considering a trip through Lincoln, Nebraska, only to find out that the clouds are pitch black, ominous, and generally uninviting, thanks to a quick selfie on behalf of another Nebraska-bound driver.

Winter Survival Kit
Of all the apps available for download, this may be the most useful of them all, complete with customized alerts and several key options to help you through the worst of times: Alert friends and family to your whereabouts with a push of a button; guesstimate how long you can keep your car running to stay warm; and anticipate how much energy you have before it’s time to abandon ship.

AAA Mobile
This dedicated app is especially handy for AAA members, providing roadside assistance with only a press of a button, but there’s lots to enjoy for the average app user. Get maps of the area and locate the nearest cell phone charging stations, gas stations, and the nearest hotels. There’s also an option to join AAA right then and there, in case the situation proves more dire than expected.

Tow Truck Finder
For just $0.99, you can download this app from by Exact Magic Software, LLC, which tracks your location and displays the nearest tow truck and service stations on Google Maps. You’ll instantaneously be able to find addresses, phone numbers and other info for local tows, potentially saving you some wait time in frigid temperatures.

Have any other life-saving winter apps we should know about? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook!