Suppose you’ve recently been in an automobile accident. Not only do you now need serious repairs to your vehicle, but you’ve also been feeling a little sore. Your physical soreness may not feel much different than a day after going to the gym, and even though you aren’t a doctor, nothing seems to be broken or causing too much trouble.

Shortly after reporting the claim for the incident, your insurance company reaches out to “make things right” by sending someone over with a check to cover your urgent care visit and a couple missed days of work. Considering the stress that you’ve been through, you might be feeling relieved that the company you’ve been paying each month is “coming through” for you. Finally, something seems to be going your way.

Not so fast.

Assuming a hypothetical scenario like the above, accepting the first offer from an insurance company is very often a sub-optimal choice.

The insurance company has a vast array of actuaries who are paid to crunch the numbers and ensure the organization stays profitable. Therefore, it makes sense from a business perspective for them to underpay whenever possible. In addition, the insurance company nearly always requires you to sign off on closing the claim to receive payment.  Closing your claim prevents you from pursuing the claim further should you find out you have additional damages.

This brings us back to our initial hypothetical situation. Only a medical professional would be qualified to assess the victim’s physical state after the incident. It is completely plausible that general “soreness” or something else seemingly innocuous, could be an early sign of a larger underlying injury. This person would have no recourse to seek further justice if they closed out their case for a quick (and likely undervalued) check.

If you’ve been in an automobile accident it is advisable to seek both a medical and legal consultation prior to speaking with an insurance company.

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While “statute of limitations” is a phrase many people are familiar with, not everyone is sure of the details or how the statues may work in their home state. A statute of limitations is a law that sets a specific time limit on the right to file a case in civil court. If the plaintiff files a claim after the set cutoff date, a defendant can use the statute of limitations as their defense. Under many circumstances, a court can completely dismiss the case when the plaintiff misses the deadline.

Below is a chart broadly detailing the statute of limitations for a variety of civil claims in the state of Washington. While we’ve listed the relevant statutes, please be aware that statutes can change over time, and court rulings can determine the way statutes are interpreted.

As this article covers Washington State’s statutes of limitations in broad terms readers are encouraged to research the actual laws and contact a reputable law firm to see if your situation is impacted in any way by your state’s statute of limitations.

Cause1 Statute
Assault and battery: 2 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.100(1) (2016)
Contract (in writing): 4 or 6 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.040(1) (2016); Wash. Rev. Code § 62A.2-725 (2016)
Contract (not in writing): 3 or 4 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(3) (2016); Wash. Rev. Code § 62A.2-725 (2016)
False imprisonment: 2 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.100(1) (2016)
Fraud: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(4) (2016)
Legal malpractice: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(3) (2016)
Libel: 2 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.100(1) (2016)
Medical malpractice: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.350(3) (2016)
Personal injury: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(2) (2016)
Product liability: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(2) (2016); Wash. Rev. Code § 7.72.060(3) (2016)
Property damage: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(2) (2016)
Slander: 2 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.100(1) (2016)
Trespass: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(1) (2016)
Wrongful death: 3 years Wash. Rev. Code § 4.16.080(2) (2016)

1: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/research/washington/washington-statutes-of-limitations.html

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Two earthquakes hit the Puget Sound region early Friday morning (7/12/19). The quakes measured 4.6 and 3.5 magnitude respectively. The earthquakes began near Monroe, WA and no news outlets have reported any damage in the region.

While Washington State experiences frequent low-magnitude earthquakes and tremors, larger ones can result in risks to public safety and property damage. Many in the region may recall the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake in 2001 as proof of an earthquake’s destructive potential. The Nisqually quake caused over $1 Billion in damage, leaving many roads and older buildings in shambles.

The Seattle Times reports that there as of 2016 there were over 1,100 buildings in Seattle alone that are “earthquake-vulnerable” and that “at any moment, at least 26,500 people in Seattle may be within unreinforced walls that have never had a seismic upgrade”.1 With experts predicting the region could one day have an earthquake as large as magnitude 9.0, these buildings pose a large public safety risk.

Neither the state of Washington nor Seattle requires strict retrofitting standards.  In 1973, Seattle’s City Council did implement seismic standards after various earthquakes in prior decades resulted in multiple fatalities. However, the standards were lifted 5 years later due to the pushback on retrofitting costs.2

1, 2: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/buildings-that-kill-the-earthquake-danger-lawmakers-have-ignored-for-decades/

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In Washington State, those that are injured at work may file a claim to be eligible for workers’ compensation. Also referred to as L&I, workers’ compensation pays for medical care that is directly related to your workplace injury. Further, it may allow you to recover a portion of lost wages should you be unable to work due to injury.

While the details regarding workers’ compensation may vary based on your employer’s insurance status, if you are injured on the job in the State of Washington, know what you have rights. Also, know that your employer has some responsibilities that need to be addressed immediately.

Washington State Department of Labor & Industries outlines what your employer needs to do should you become injured at work[1]:

  • Make sure you receive prompt medical attention.
  • Complete the employer section of the accident report form.
  • Consider keeping you at work in a light-duty job, if medically approved. This can help maintain your salary, and speed your recovery while keeping claim costs down for them.

If you are injured at work, please be sure to get first aid, the medical attention of a doctor, and tell your employer about the incident as soon as possible. It may also be in your best interest to contact Washington State Department of Labor & Industries as well as a reputable attorney.

[1] https://www.lni.wa.gov/ClaimsIns/Claims/Guide/phase1.asp

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A long-time employee of Kiewit-Hoffman has died this morning after a tragic fall from a light rail column at a Sound Transit East Link extension construction site in Bellevue. According to the Department of Labor and Industries, the construction company has been cited in the past for safety violations as recent as 2015 after another employee was killed while working on the 520 floating bridge, also due to a fall.  The company was fined $14,400.  At the time of the incident, Kiewit was not partners with Hoffman.

This morning’s accident happened about 3:00 a.m. when the man fell about 30-40 feet from one of the Sound Transit columns. It is unknown what task he had been performing at the time, other than girder placement.

Of the 520 bridge incident, Labor and Industries stated “The employer did not ensure that the appropriate fall protection system was implemented”, and also said to have found that fall protection systems had not been properly inspected, a lifesaving skiff was not available to the workers and that some tools were in sub-par condition.

The Washington Department of Labor and Industries is already on the scene this morning conducting an investigation, focusing on circumstances and potential violations.

“Everything is on the table”, the agency’s spokesperson said.

Unfortunately, this is not the first fatality during the Sound Transit light rail program, the first occurring in 2007 at the Beacon Hill tunnel.

Labor and Industries cites about 12,000 fall-related injuries between 2007-2016.

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If you downloaded the app “thisisyourdigitallife” in 2015 or were a Facebook friend of someone who did, you may recall seeing political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign that favored Trump. The app, which purported to offer a personality prediction in the form of “a research app used by psychologists”, allegedly collected personal profile information in violation of Facebook’s data privacy policies to attempt to sway voters in the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

On March 17, 2018, the New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica, a startup voter-profiling company, had improperly obtained the personal profile data of more than 50 million Facebook users through app “thisisyourdigitallife”.  The company then allegedly used that data to target articles and advertisements to voters who may or may not be backing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.  Interviews with several Cambridge Analytica employees and contractors supported the allegations and said that the company was still in possession of the data at the time of the writing on March 17th.

One former employee of Cambridge said, “rules don’t matter for them, this is a war, and it’s all fair. They want to fight a culture war in America. Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

The New York Times published one such political advertisement used in the 2016 presidential campaign supporting Trump, below:

Capture

Number May Stand at 87 Million

In an article by money.cnn.com on April 4, 2018, they stated that “previous reporting had put the number of people whose information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica at around 50 million” and that Facebook had “announced its own [higher] estimate” in a blog post.

According to Facebook, their calculation has estimated a maximum number of 87 million users that could have been impacted after analyzing the number of friends app users had at that time.

Facebook Admits Mistake

In a Facebook post by a company vice president Andrew Bosworth, he wrote “we thought that every app could be social. Your calendar should have your events and your friends birthdays, your maps should know where your friends live, your address book should show their pictures. It was a reasonable vision but it didn’t materialize the way we had hoped.”

Can Duruk, a technology consultant and software engineer, questioned Facebook’s permissiveness of data collection and the ramifications of Facebook’s loose policies, “it seems insane that you can make haphazard decisions about so many people’s data” and called Facebook policies “extremely lax with what kind of data they allowed people to get.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called it a “major breach of trust” and said he was “sorry that happened” in a CNN interview, here.

Data Breach Statistics

In a recent article published by TechBeacon, the company showed the following data breach statistics for 2017:

  • 1,579 publicly disclosed data breaches; 44.7% higher than 1,091 in 2016
  • 1,946,181,599 records containing personal data were compromised between Jan. 1, 2017 and March 20, 2018
  • 75% of data breaches were caused by external hackers (i.e., cyber-crime groups, state-affiliated groups), 25% caused by malicious insiders – per survey of 1,200 companies that reported at least one data breach
  • 71% of U.S. enterprises reported suffering at least one data breach in the last few years
  • $3.62 million was the average cost of a data breach
  • 191 days was the average length of time it took an organization to identify a data breach
  • 66 days is the average time needed to contain a data breach

Data Breach Notification Requirements for Washington State

There are laws and requirements that businesses must abide by when they own or maintain data such as consumer names, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial records, credit card numbers, passwords, etc., whether stored electronically or on paper.  A breach of such is defined as unauthorized access which may compromise the data’s security.

In Washington, consumers must be notified within 45 calendar days of the discovery of a breach.  If more than 500 residents receive notice, government notification is also required.

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Counsel Financial is proud to announce its continued headline sponsorship of the Mass Torts Made Perfect™ (MTMP) Business of Law program. The full-day session will take place Wednesday, April 11, 2018 to jump-start the three-day seminar tailored specifically to plaintiffs’ law firms. As a long-standing supporter of MTMP, Counsel Financial is set to lead an educational program regarding the business challenges confronting contingency law firms.

Over 1,000 lawyers from 450+ law firms nationwide will attend MTMP in Las Vegas. The event draws prominent plaintiffs’ attorneys who convene to share industry knowledge on the latest mass tort cases, expanding personal injury practices, procuring leads, handling lien resolution, marketing for law firms, financing strategies and more.

Joseph DiNardo, Esq., founder and director of Counsel Financial, will present on Wednesday, April 11 at 10:25 a.m., during the Business of Law program. He will impart practical insights on the various funding models utilized by plaintiffs’ firms. Of his involvement, Mr. DiNardo stated, “It’s an honor to again be invited to speak in front of the nation’s top trial lawyers. The decision to utilize financing is a big step and requires careful research. I will offer multiple strategies to navigate that process in order to make an informed decision that will best benefit your firm. It can be the decision that takes a firm to the next level.”

Counsel Financial’s President & CEO, Paul Cody, is set to speak on Friday, April 13 at 9 a.m., as part of the Finance sessions on day three of the seminar. Joining him will be preeminent mass tort attorney Glenn Phillips, Esq. of Sanders Phillips Grossman. This exclusive and highly informative presentation will analyze the advantages and downsides to applying various financing methods to a law firm, complete with case studies and real-world applications.

According to MTMP, the conference has become the key gathering point for mass tort litigators, with many of the major plaintiffs’ law firms and lawyers in the field attending the event. Additionally, the bonus day program provides attorneys with working knowledge on the business aspects of running a law firm and education on the resources available for marketing and financing.

About Counsel Financial
Counsel Financial is the largest provider of working capital lines of credit to plaintiffs’ attorneys in the industry, having loaned over $1.5 billion exclusively to plaintiffs’ attorneys in its 15-year history. Counsel Financial sets the standard for innovation and flexibility in its loan offerings, structuring terms that are conducive to the unique demands of contingency-fee practices. Leveraging 200+ years of internal legal experience, Counsel Financial has financed the growth of firms in every area of plaintiffs’ litigation, including personal injury, mass torts, class action and labor and employment. The company is exclusively endorsed by multiple national and state trial organizations, including the American Association for Justice and The National Trial Lawyers.

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What is this new law about?

On March 7th, Governor Inslee signed House Bill 1723 that broadens the criteria for Hanford workers to qualify for workers compensation claims. That means people who have been denied claims previously may now qualify and it may be easier for new claims to be approved.

 What is the definition of a Hanford worker?

Per HB 1723, “a Hanford site worker is any person, including contractor or subcontractor, who was engaged in the performance of work, either directly or indirectly, for the United States, on projects and contracts at the Hanford nuclear site and worked on the site for at least one eight-hour shift while covered under the state’s industrial insurance laws.

What types of diseases and conditions may be covered?

The bill states that a prima facie presumption of occupational disease will now apply.  That means certain diseases and conditions will be accepted as work-related unless proven otherwise, instead of the other way around.  These potentially covered diseases and conditions are to include:

  • Respiratory disease;
  • Acute and chronic beryllium disease;
  • Heart problems, experienced within 72 hours of exposure to fumes, toxic substances, or chemicals at the site;
  • Certain cancers specified in the bill; and
  • Neurological disease

What types of cancers may be covered?

The bill states that “regarding cancer, the [prima facie] presumption only applies to a worker who has cancer that develops or manifests and who was given a qualifying medical examination upon becoming a Hanford site worker that showed no evidence of cancer”, including:

  • Leukemia;
  • Primary or secondary lung cancer (with certain limitations);
  • Primary or secondary bone cancer;
  • Primary or secondary renal cancer;
  • Lymphomas, other than Hodgkin’s disease;
  • Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia and mycosis fungoides; and
  • Primary cancer of the:  thyroid, male or female breast, esophagus, stomach, pharynx, small intestine, pancreas, bile ducts, gall bladder, salivary gland, urinary bladder, brain (with certain limitations), colon, ovary and liver (with certain limitations).

Are claims allowed for survivors of a deceased workers?

Yes, the bill states “a worker, or survivor of a worker who has died from one of the conditions or diseases, whose claim was denied by the L&I, the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals, or a court, may file a new claim for the same exposure and contended condition or disease.”

When do these changes take effect?

The bill will take effect 90 days after it is passed but it may be advisable to have an attorney review your potential claim in advance to ensure all provisions of the new bill are followed correctly as your appeal or new claim is processed.

Where can I see a copy of the new bill?

Click here to download a copy of HB 1723.

Watch – “Governor Inslee Signs New Bill into Law”:

k5 hanford

Read:  New Law Allows Hanford Workers Compensation Claims

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We are proud to announce that Glenn Phillips has been nominated for America’s Top 100 Attorneys Lifetime Achievement award for Washington State, an award that less than one-half percent (0.5%) of attorneys in the United States will receive.

“Membership among America’s Top 100 Attorneys is meant to identify the accomplishments of the nation’s most esteemed and skilled attorneys in all areas of practice. While selection for any award, honor, or exclusive membership organization is always subjective in nature, we have developed a comprehensive multi-phase selection process involving proprietary algorithms and Qualitative Comparative Analysis in an effort to help ensure that only the most skilled and exceptional attorneys in the community are selected for membership.” – America’s Top 100 Attorneys.

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Black Friday shopping injuries may happen more often than you think. According to blackfridaydeathcount.com, there have been ten deaths and 105 injuries reported since 2006.

In 2013, one woman who was trampled at a Walmart “early Black Friday sale” sought $75,000 in damages for her injuries through a lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit stated she was “toward the front of the group of people and reached for the [$49.99] tablet when she was suddenly thrust forward from behind” and suffered injury to her neck, head and back.

The lawsuit also claimed that Walmart should have known this could potentially happen “because of past incidents of violence and trampling during previous Black Friday sales.”

Most Common Black Friday Injuries

According to findlaw.com, the five most common Black Friday injuries include:

  1. Parking Lot Injuries
  2. Stampedes
  3. Shopping Cart Injuries
  4. Falling Boxes
  5. Fights

When a Black Friday Injury Occurs, Who is Responsible?

Store owners have a responsibility to make sure that the premises are safe from hazardous conditions and any dangers that could cause injury. For example, floors must be kept clean of spills, walkways clear of tripping hazards and fallen objects, stairs and railings must be in good repair and there must be sufficient lighting at all times.

To prove that the store is responsible for the injury, findlaw.com says that it must be established that “the store owner knew (or should have known) about a dangerous condition on their property; 2) the store owner did not regularly inspect the store for dangers, or provided inadequate maintenance; 3) that the shopper would not have been injured if there was not a dangerous condition on the property; 4) there was a relation between the dangerous condition and the shopper’s injury, and; 5) that the shopper suffered actual “damages” as a result of it.”

Some typical defenses a store owner may use are:

  •  not knowing there was a dangerous condition
  •  they made an effort to fix the issue
  •  the danger was too obvious not to avoid
  •  the injury was not caused by the dangerous condition
  •  the injury occurred in an area that was off-limits to customers

Can I Sue For a Black Friday Injury?

You can sue for Black Friday injuries just like any other day. To prevail, it will be a matter of proving negligence, or that it was the store owners fault that you were hurt.

Especially in the event that you are injured to the extent you miss work or incur medical bills, we recommended seeking the assistance of an attorney experienced in personal injury and negligence claims.

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