| Arleen Lazarus | 0 Comments | Distracted Driving in Florida |

Distractions are Dangerous and Deadly, so Please Drive Without Them

What if you were about to have surgery, and as you were being placed on the table you noticed your surgeon holding a scalpel in one hand, and texting someone with the other hand. Florida Distracted DrivingPersonally, I would run out of the room and call an Uber to take me home as quickly as possible so I could Google for a new doctor. A surgeon is supposed to focus on the operation!

And a driver is supposed to focus on the road.

Yet every day drivers all over Florida risk their lives and the lives of others when they take their focus off the road by texting, putting on makeup, drinking a cup of coffee, turning around to speak with someone in the back seat, or any number of other distracting activities. Florida lawmakers are fed up with this behavior and the serious accidents it causes and they are finally committed to do something about it.

Florida has for years been one of the weakest states when it comes to legislation prohibiting distracted driving. For example, you can hold a phone in your hand in Florida but you’re not supposed to use it to text or send emails. This is obviously difficult to prove, and an officer must have another reason for stopping a driver before they can even look into the possibility there was a text message sent while driving. In many other states you can’t hold a phone at all when driving.

Currently in Tallahassee legislators are considering very broad legislation that would actually make Florida laws among the strictest in the nation. They are considering enacting statutes that would ban many different types of distracted driving including personal grooming, petting a dog, and even eating if it distracts the driver.

Distracted driving killed 3,450 people in 2016

Florida Distracted DrivingWas the human brain designed to multitask while driving?

Here is a line from a job search on Indeed.com: “Strong organizational skills with the ability to multitask and prioritize work.” So you may be very popular at work if you can accomplish many tasks at the same time, and the boss may be very pleased but please don’t do it behind the wheel. Everyone is in a hurry to get too many things done, but as sophisticated as our brains are, they simply cannot handle it.

The human brain, according to many psychological studies, is not designed to handle multiple challenges at the same time, especially while driving. The act of driving is keeping your brain extremely busy, and when you throw in a totally separate action like reading an email the brain disconnects from it’s main focus. This is why there have been cases of people getting on the highway going the wrong way or slamming into stopped vehicles. Make no mistake about it, no matter how smart you may think you are your brain will not handle distracted driving, at least not for very long. If you are driving with distractions now and you haven’t crashed yet, you’re running on luck. It will end someday, and you may hurt someone very badly.

South Florida Vehicle Accident Attorneys

Gary and Arleen Lazarus have worked for many injured victims of serious accidents over the past 25 years and many of the crashes have been caused by distracted drivers. We have watched clients suffer through terrible, permanent injuries that never should have happened. Please don’t wait for a new law to do what you should be doing now: put your phone away when you drive, don’t answer calls, and don’t text. There is nothing on earth that can’t wait a short while for you to get off the road, park in a safe place, turn the car off, and take care of your calls and messages.

If you have questions or need someone to help you with a personal injury issue please call us st (954) 356-0006, and thank you for your attention.

Would you like to talk with your representatives and tell them how you feel about distracted driving? Click here and enter your address – the website will then give the contact information for your representatives. Please reach out to them and tell them you want to see and end to dangerous drivers who don’t focus on their driving.

South Florida Accident Attorneys
| Arleen Lazarus | 0 Comments | South Florida Accident Attorneys

Good News! Car Crashes are Down and so are Auto Insurance Rates – South Florida Accident Attorneys

We love to see and share good news, especially when it deals with an important issue like safety and savings. The Sun Sentinel reported recently that vehicle accidents in Florida decreased 0.6% state-wide and fatal accidents decreased 2.2% which is even better news. In south Florida (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties) the total crashes declined 2.2% while fatal accidents went down only 0.9%, but still a decrease of any amount is good news.

It seems reasonable to hope that insurance rates will go down because accident rates have gone down, and here’s more good news: They are going down! The largest provider of private auto insurance in Florida, State Farm, is lowering rates 5.1% which is a pretty significant number.

Because most people are inclined to pay their monthly bills and not really shop around for better prices, this might be a good time to do an auto insurance check-up. Ask yourself some questions and then ask your insurance company the same questions:

  • Do I have enough coverage?South Florida Accident Attorneys
  • Am I covered if someone with no insurance hits me?
  • Do I have enough coverage for medical bills if I am seriously injured?
  • Is my whole family covered?
  • Will you pay for a new car if mine is destroyed?
  • Am I covered in another state?
  • Am I covered for damage from a storm?

Then do some shopping around, and see if you can get a better price for the coverage you need.

Another thing to think about regarding the lower number of accidents:

There are 15 million licensed drivers in Florida and there were 400,000 accidents in the state last year. If you do the math, there was one accident for every 37 drivers.

The nice thing is that you can make those numbers better if you follow some common sense rules:

Never Text and Drive. It is estimated that as many as 30% of all accidents involve some type of inside-the-car distraction.

Never Drink and Drive. Many accidents also involve impaired drivers.

South Florida Accident Attorneys

We’re very pleased with the latest accident statistics because the injuries we see happening to people are absolutely heartbreaking and many times they could have been prevented. Our goal, for people injured due to someone else’s carelessness is to return them to the life they had before the incident. We are painstaking in our efforts to see that justice is delivered to injured people, and every client gets our promise to work hard until we get results. You may reach us by calling (954) 356-0006, and thank you.

 

 

| Arleen Lazarus | 0 Comments | Personal Injury Attorney

The History of Personal Injury Law – South Florida Personal Injury Lawyers Lazarus and Lazarus

Many people in America take for granted our laws, our system of justice, and our rights. They don’t understand that not long ago in our nation’s history and in other countries today, the freedoms wePersonal Injury enjoy were not and are not available. If you are tempted to complain about our legal system being slow or unfair, take a look back at history and you’ll see we have come a long way!

10,000 to 500 B.C. • In ancient times “an eye for an eye” was a widely accepted method to settle instances where one person had harmed another and the judges were in most cases incompetent, cruel, and biased. We won’t describe some of the punishments, but you can imagine.

500 B.C. to 395 A.D. • During the Classic Greek and Roman eras, the practice of bringing a companion to trial to help in a person’s prosecution or defense became the norm, and while they were not supposed to be paid for their services, they usually were anyway. The people may be thought of as the first lawyers, and in time they became specialized in understanding the rules and laws of the different cultures and geographical area in which they lived. Laws were ambiguous and were rarely applied fairly.

1490’s • As new worlds were discovered, Europeans began to export their Canon Law – based on Roman Catholic Doctrine – on new colonies they established. These laws usually favored the rich over the poor, and so if you didn’t have a lot of money, justice was very hard to come by. England, however established a system known as “Common Law” in the 16th Century and that became the foundation for most laws in North America as the British settled here. But they were still very unfair to many people.

It would be good to point out here that as legal philosophies and laws themselves advanced, criminal courts became separate from civil courts, and the concept of tort law came to exist. A tort is defined as a wrongful act or an infringement of a right (other than under contract) leading to civil legal liability.

Some legal principles such as res ipsa loquitur (Latin for “the thing speaks for itself”) became important to understand tort issues and can be described as the principle that implies “the occurrence of an accident implies negligence.”

Res ipsa loquitur is a doctrine of law that one is presumed to be negligent if he/she/it had exclusive control of whatever caused the injury even though there is no specific evidence of an act of negligence, and without negligence the accident would not have happened. Example: a load of bricks on the roof of a building being constructed by High Rise Construction Company falls and injures Paul Pedestrian below, and High Rise is liable for Pedestrian’s injury even though no one saw the load fall.

1760 to 1830 • The first industrial revolution in England saw many workers injured by improperly designed or careless operation of machinery, but the concept of paying compensation through a judgement in court had not been developed. Therefore most people were left to deal with injuries, pain, and suffering on their own.

1860 to 1940 • The second industrial revolution in the United States saw more injuries to workers and finally there were laws enacted to protect people from injuries resulting from the negligence of others. This might be seen as the beginning of personal injury law.

Modern Personal Injury Law – Believe it or not, it was a snail that ushered in the modern era of personal injury law. In 1932 the case of Donoghue vs Stevenson involved Mrs. Donoghue drinking a bottle of ginger beer in a café in Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland. A dead snail was in the bottle. She fell ill, and she sued the ginger beer manufacturer, Mr Stevenson. The House of Lords held that the manufacturer owed a duty of care to her, which was breached, because it was reasonably foreseeable that failure to ensure the product’s safety would lead to harm to consumers. There was also a sufficiently proximate relationship between consumers and product manufacturers. This case was the foundation for many future decisions, and modern personal injury law was born.

Through the 1900’s many attorneys began to specialize in personal injury law because it involves many unique and complicated issues. People started to move about the country and the world faster and more frequently, computers have made a major impact on society, and while medical care has advanced, the costs have skyrocketed. The goal of a good personal injury attorney is to see that a serious injury doesn’t drastically alter a person’s life as they know it, but rather try to return them to the life they had before.

Today, a network of excellent law schools in the United States graduates lawyers who understand modern personal injury law and ethics. The American Bar Association as well as local and state bar associations keep watch on attorneys so the public is assured competent, ethical representation and our courts are staffed with judges who are held accountable by voters or by other elected officials to ensure equal justice under law, as inscribed on the United States Supreme Court.

The Lawyers at Lazarus and Lazarus are very proud to represent people who have been injured because of the carelessness, negligence, or malpractice of others. We have developed a sterling reputation for giving our clients competent, personalized service and we never give up until we have exhausted every means of seeing our clients receive the maximum compensation under the law for their injuries, pain, suffering, and lost wages. Please call us at 954-356-0006 for a confidential and free consultation if you have any questions.