Charlotte Injury Lawyers Blog

Gym membership revoked after complaint about transgender woman in women’s room

February 24, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question ” I have been injured on another person’s property. What should I do now?”

Last week Charlotte’s City Council voted against an ordinance that supporters said would have ended sexual discrimination. Opponents of the ordinance—many of whom turned out to comment publically at the council’s meeting on the issue—said interest groups behind the proposed ordinance want to “force their idea of gender” on the public.

The most controversial part of the ordinance “would have allowed transgendered people to go into any public bathroom they chose,” according to Charlotte’s WSOC-TV. That language was removed from the proposed ordinance prior to the council’s vote, leading ordinance supporters like council member John Autry to vote against the proposal. The bathroom portion of the ordinance was too important, Autry told WSOC-TV, to leave out.

Many private companies, including New Hampshire-based Planet Fitness, allow transgendered persons to use facilities of their choice.

Last week, a Michigan woman—Yvette Cormier—complained to Planet Fitness staff at the company’s Midland, Michigan location that she witnessed a man changing in the woman’s locker room on two occasions. According to the Daily Mail, Planet Fitness staff members told Cormier that the individual was transsexual and was permitted to use the woman’s locker room.

Lawyer says state got off easy on settlement after man was falsely declared dead

February 19, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What exactly is a wrongful death claim?”

Dr. J.B. Perdue says “ambulance-chasing lawyers” are to blame for the first known settlement of a lawsuit ever made by North Carolina’s medical examiner system.

The lawsuit was filed after Dr. Perdue declared a living man dead.

Larry Green was found by emergency responders lying face down beside a road in Franklin County, North Carolina on January 24, 2005. Green had a noticeable head wound, and one paramedic could find no vital signs.

Dr. Perdue was summoned to the scene. After examining Green, Perdue ordered the man to be placed in a body bag and transported to a morgue. A paramedic suggested to Dr. Perdue that Green might be breathing, however Dr. Perdue dismissed this by saying that left-over air was merely escaping Green’s body.

According to court documents, some eight witnesses saw Green’s chest and abdomen move while on the scene. In addition, as Green was placed into the body bag, witnesses saw his right eyelid twitching. Dr. Perdue attributed this to a muscle spasm, saying it was “like a frog leg jumping in a frying pan.”

N.C. among minority of states continuing to install deadly guardrails on state highways

February 17, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What if a loved one dies from the injuries sustained in a serious accident while the case is pending?”

State officials have rebuffed calls to stop installing guardrails that activists say have caused dozens of deaths and injuries in accidents across the United States. California became the 41^st state to ban the guardrails this week after a Texas jury levied a mammoth fraud verdict against the company that makes the guardrails.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation is aware of safety concerns raised about the ET-Plus end terminals, but the agency said it is leaving the decision of whether to pull the terminals from state highways to federal officials.

NCDOT spokesman Steve Abbott said his department has not seen any evidence of the end terminals’ danger, despite its awareness of “a couple of incidents.”

On Wednesday, federal regulators approved new safety testing of the end terminals. The NCDOT said it will await the results of new safety testing before making a decision on removing the terminals.

Even if the agency does decide to remove ET-Plus end terminals that have already been installed, it has not kept a database of the locations of the terminals. The state has installed different types of guardrails in different locations throughout the state, and the NCDOT has not kept track of which guardrails are where.

Dismissal of $2.5 million lawsuit upheld because filing fee was two-dollars short

February 12, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “How can an attorney help me with my Divorce or Separation in North Carolina?”

A parcel placed in the mail is just that: placed. Placement in a mailbox does not guaranty delivery.

Of course, most—maybe all—postal services provide a “guaranteed” service. Ask any lawyer the meaning of “guaranty,” however, and one is liable to hear a list of hypotheticals in which the guaranty is broken. Things get lost in the mail. It does not happen often, but it happens.

We live in a society in which people and businesses have the ability to engage in the near-instantaneous exchange of communications and documents.

The law is catching up. Many county Registers of Deeds in North Carolina now accept online submission of deeds and other legal documents. Clerk’s offices in the state’s judicial circuits are moving in that direction. Much of appellate and federal-court filings are made online.

Most lawsuits, however, are still filed in person, whether by litigant, by attorney, by paralegal, clerk, or courier. And some holdouts still rely on the good old mail service.

Pop Warner youth-football-concussion law suit first of many, lawyer says

February 10, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What exactly is a wrongful death claim?”

Joseph Chernach started playing in a Pop Warner football league in 1997, when he was eleven-years-old. By the time he stopped playing three years later, his brain had been so badly damaged by repetitive trauma that as a young man, he developed a form of dementia only normally seen in much older adults.

Chernach’s troubles began during his sophomore year at Central Michigan University. His mother, Debra Pyka, told the Daily Mail that Chernach’s behavior began to grow “increasingly bizarre.” Eventually, he stopped attending university classes and began living with his brother and some friends.

“He just could not stay in one place at once,” Pyka said. Chernach became moody, paranoid and distrustful even of close friends and family. On June 6, 2012, he committed suicide in his mother’s shed. An autopsy revealed that Chernach had suffered from a degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy and post-concussion syndrome.

Following Chernach’s death, Pyka brought a wrongful death lawsuit against the organizer of the youth football leagues where she claims her son sustained his brain injuries.

Hoaxers “SWAT” online streamers with prank emergency calls

February 5, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What can you sue for in a personal injury case?”

Joshua Peters was streaming the popular online games RuneScape and Clash of the Clans when his ten-year-old brother answered a knock at his family’s front door.

Within seconds, Peters told The Guardian, a London-based paper, his face was flat on the floor and police officers armed with rifles were towering over him. Peters said officers also pointed guns at his mother and little brother.

When he returned to his online games some fifteen minutes after a police SWAT team raided his family’s home, Peters tearfully told the some 60,000 gamers who were online that his mother and little brother could have been shot.

“They could have died,” Peters said, “because you chose to swat my stream.”

North Carolina law would discriminate against Richard Sherman’s son

February 3, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “Are the laws or rules applying to a wrongful death claim different from a personal injury not involving death?”

If he knew any better, Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman’s son would be praying his dad never gets traded to the Carolina Panthers.Sherman’s son Rayden, born Feb. 5, does not know any better. He could not know—nor could any infant—that in North Carolina, unless his father takes certain legal steps to “legitimate” him, he cannot inherit from him.

Sherman is not married to Rayden’s mother, Ashley Moss. Media reports refer to Moss as Sherman’s “girlfriend.”

North Carolina law used to call Sherman’s son a “bastard.” That term was replaced by “illegitimate,” a term employed until 2013, when the legislature removed “illegitimate” from the general statutes, replacing the same with the phrase “child born out of wedlock.”

Injury lawyers voice concerns over specter of non-lawyer ownership of law firms

January 29, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “Should I trust the insurance adjuster?”

The American Bar Association—prodded by American businesses like Legal Zoom, Inc.—is studying the issue of non-lawyer ownership of law firms.

In the United States, lawyers are generally prohibited from “creating, owning or managing law firms” with non lawyers. Multidisciplinary practices—or those practices that combine the provision of legal services with non-legal services—are greatly restricted.

This is not the case in the United Kingdom, the fount from which the United States’ Common-Law legal tradition sprang. In the United Kingdom, restrictions of non-lawyer ownership interests in law firms have largely been eliminated, leading to the development of so-called “alternative business structures.”

The United Kingdom lifted its restrictions on alternative business structures in 2007. Since then, by most accounts, it has encouraged the establishment of alternative business structures for largely the same reason that they are prohibited in the United States: for the benefit of clients.

The 2007 Legal Services Act—which lifted the prohibition against alternative business structures—was passed after a study of the legal industry in the United Kingdom revealed a glut of unmet but nonetheless needed legal services. The new Act focused on the functions of advocates as opposed to the identity of law-firm owners, restricting the performance of certain activities to authorized lawyers. Those activities include the right to appear as an advocate in court, to certify documents and transactions, to probate estates, administer oaths, cause the consummation of a transfer of real property and to conduct litigation.

Google exec’s Seeking Arrangement hookup leads to heroin-injection death

January 27, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “Are the laws or rules applying to a wrongful death claim different from a personal injury not involving death?”

It took three months and a court order, but the Santa Cruz, California Police Department tracked down video taken onboard the yacht owned by Google X executive Forrest Hayes. Google’s top-secret “X” office is “where the firm makes unimaginable inventions like Google Glass and driverless cars a reality,” according to the Daily Mail and New York Post. Hayes worked there until his sudden death in November 2013.

Hayes, a 51-year-old father of five, met 27-year-old Alix Catherine Tichelman on the website Seeking Arrangement. Some media reports on the Hayes case say he was married at the time of his death, while others say he was divorced. CBS News reports that Hayes’ wife sounded the alarm when he did not return home on November 22.

No one disputes that Hayes met Tichelman on Seeking Arrangement. That site pairs wealthy so-called “sugar daddies” with younger, attractive “sugar babies” for “mutually-beneficial relationships.” The site pairs almost exclusively older men with younger women, according to the Huffington Post.

Hayes, a native of Dearborn, Michigan, had worked in the auto industry before joining Apple and then Google. After meeting Tichelman on Seeking Arrangement, Hayes exchanged texts and emails and met with her several times before an encounter on his yacht on November 22, 2013.

Even personal-injury lawyers are against frivolous lawsuits

January 22, 2015 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What can you sue for in a personal injury case?”

A personal injury attorney who has found himself on the other side of at least two lawsuits—as a defendant—says he does not like the feeling and says lawyers who bring frivolous lawsuits should be sanctioned more often.

During a contentious trial in Queens, New York City in 2013, Dr. Michael J. Katz testified that he took ten to twenty minutes, on average, to conduct an examination of a patient. The plaintiff’s lawyer in the case “unveiled a surreptitiously recorded video [of Dr. Katz’s examination of the plaintiff] that lasted six minutes,” leading Judge Duane Hart to call Dr. Katz a “no good liar,” a “thief” and a “spy” with “little beady eyes,” according to Forbes.

Lawyer and blogger Ed Turkewitz reported accurately on what happened between Katz and Judge Hart, but he also “teed off on insurance doctors who perform ‘quickie exams that serve only to deny benefits to the injured[,]’” according to Forbes.

Katz sued Turkewitz, claiming that his blog post falsely implied that Katz had committed perjury. Turkewitz answered, claiming he had reported on the case accurately, and a judge agreed, dismissing Katz’s lawsuit.