latent injury

Lame-duck Illinois legislature gives asbestos attorneys, claimants early holiday gift

December 25, 2014 | 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?”

Madison County, Illinois accounts for .08-percent of the nation’s population, but the tiny county just east of the Mississippi River accounts for 25-percent of asbestos lawsuits in the United States.

Critics allege that personal injury attorneys have had “cozy relationships with Madison County judges,” which has turned Illinois into “a haven for frivolous lawsuits.”

The Madison Record has reported that 90-percent of plaintiffs who file asbestos-related lawsuits in Madison County do not live or work in the county. On a recent day, 181 asbestos-related lawsuits were set for trial. Only one of the plaintiffs named in the lawsuits lived in Madison County.

The Record reports that “in one memorable instance,” a judge was given $30,000 in campaign funds by asbestos law firms a few days after the judge gave the firms coveted trial dates for upcoming court sessions.

Personal injury lawyers and their allies stepped up their game during the Illinois legislature’s recent fall “veto session,” a session controlled by a lame-duck legislature taking action on vetoes issued by a lame-duck Governor. Governor-elect Bruce Rauner has promised to make lawsuit reform a top priority when he takes office next year.

Man gored by running bull—and many others—have no case in North Carolina

July 10, 2014 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matthew R. Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question “What if the accident was my fault?”

A 32-year-old American author who wrote a survival guide for Spain’s Pamplona bull-running festival was gored on Wednesday by a 1,320-pound bull named Brevito during the annual San Fermin festival.

The man, Bill Hillman, was skewered in the right thigh by the bull’s horn; the bull also gored a 35-year-old Spanish man in the chest. A friend of Hillman’s said the bull’s horn had missed the artery in Hillman’s right thigh and that Hillman had undergone surgery at a local hospital and was expected to survive.

Hillman co-authored a 2014 e-book called “Fiesta: How to Survive the Bulls of Pamplona.”

Dozens of people were injured in the annual bull-running, held on a narrow, half-mile course. The bulls took under four minutes to run the course before being led into a bull ring to face matadors and death. The most recent human bull-run fatality came in 2009, when a Spanish man was gored to death.

Hillman may be lucky, but if he thinks he has any legal claims, he is out of luck. Of course he couldn’t sue the bull, but could he sue Pamplona or the outfit that organizes the bull runs? No. The reason why may seem obvious, but in the law, sometimes obvious answers lead to absurd results.

Woman grows nose on her back eight years after stem-cell surgery

July 8, 2014 | AS Personal Injury Lawyers

Charlotte Personal Injury Attorney Matt Arnold of Arnold & Smith, PLLC answers the question: Can I wait a few months to pursue a personal injury claim?

Medical treatments involving stem cells have been hailed as holding the promise of a new generation of treatments for a variety of diseases, ailments and disorders. Now an American woman is learning that experimental stem cell treatments performed in Portugal eight years ago may have produced some unintended results.

The woman was suffering from paralysis. Doctors had used a similar method on some 20 other paralysis patients; more than half reported recovery of movement or sensation. The American woman’s treatment did not involve the controversial method of transplanting of embryonic stem cells; instead, doctors removed tissue from her nose and implanted it in her spine. Doctors hoped the cells would turn into other cell types similar to cells near the site of the woman’s injury, acting as a kind of bodily “repair kit.”

Instead, after the stem-cell operation, the woman experienced increasing pain. In 2013—eight years after the stem cell operation—doctors discovered a three-centimeter-long growth made up mainly of nasal tissue on the woman’s back. Doctors also found small pieces of bone and nerve branches that had not connected to the woman’s spinal nerves.

Doctors said this circumstance occurred in less than one-percent of operations and that many patients receiving the treatment had seen a “remarkable recovery.”