What is Mesothelioma and What are These Ongoing Cases Being Shown on TV?

First thing is first. What is mesothelioma? It is an aggressive cancer that attacks the lining of your lungs, specifically the epithelial cells, typically associated with asbestos which was a product that was used both in construction, early 20th century, i.e. tile or sheetrock, which is the stuff that makes up the actual walls of your home.

It was used early in the 20th century in these particular instances. Later in the 20th century, it was used as a flame retardant as well as insulation before fiberglass became the primary use for installation as we all know today.

The byproduct of the use of asbestos is this particular form of cancer, mesothelioma, which has ravaged the American public and unfortunately the chemical companies that were responsible for creating and using this particular substance went to great lengths to keep its potential carcinogenic or cancer-causing agents a secret from the American public and they successfully did so for the better part of 50 years.

At the same time, they were aggressively marketing this particular product for all of the various areas that I’ve just finished mentioning.

The most common area of exposure was navy yards, dock workers, anybody who works in welding, anybody who works around boats or the like.

Those are the people who are most likely to have come into contact with asbestos. Asbestos causes this particular form of cancer, which is an extremely aggressive form of cancer. As far as survival rates are concerned, the survival rate for mesothelioma is about 40 percent once you’ve been diagnosed. In other words, you got a 40 percent chance of living for at least one year after you’ve been diagnosed with mesothelioma.

It’s actually one of the longest ongoing mass tort claims in American history because the litigation and claims against them have been ongoing I would say the better part of 30 or 40 years ever since it became clear that this in fact was a cancer-causing agent.

The common symptoms that are associated with mesothelioma is actually going to be something similar to either pneumonia or potentially bronchitis. You’re going to have a hacking cough, potential sputum or phlegm, blood and just an overall feeling of sickness like you’ve got pneumonia or something along those lines.

The significant thing to take away from all of this is if you’ve experienced that or you think that you’ve been exposed in any way to asbestos in the context of your job or just generally speaking in your house if you’ve got an older home. There’s a possibility that you may have a potential mesothelioma case.

If you have questions about mesothelioma or any other questions that you may have, please contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600 today.

What is the South Carolina Tort Claims Act and why is it important to you?

The South Carolina Tort Claims Act dictates what sort of damages you can get against any state entity or federal entity for that matter specifically in South Carolina.

What is included in that category is going to be schools or hospitals in the medical malpractice context or any potential state building that you might be injured in a slip and fall. That would be for example, if you were injured at the Medical University of South Carolina.

These particular caps are going to come and play and it’s a product of Tort Reform and the number is 300,000. For example, a client that I worked with several years ago, fell at a school in Beaver County and she had a very significant injury and the unfortunate thing was it was a sort of injury that we could have recovered a considerable amount. She was a young woman and it was something that she was going to be living with for at least another 30 to 40 years.

But because of these particular caps, the only amount of money that we could actually get because it was against the state was $300,000. Now the significance of that is, is that because it’s $300,000, the only way that you can actually get the money is if you got a death claim.

So it essentially minimizes the injury if you have anything other than that. In this particular instance, the client was bedridden for the better part of three months because if she had moved incorrectly, she would have been paralyzed from the waist down.

Fortunately, we were able to recover $240,000 for her, which was a good recovery. But as you can see, because you’ve got the cap there, and the insurance adjuster is aware of it, it actually works against you in the context of negotiations.

Therefore, if you have been injured in any state entity, be it a medical university or you slipped and fell at the courthouse or wherever it may be, you are going to be dealing with a $300,000 cap regardless of what your injuries may be or how grievous they may be.

You need a lawyer to get the best result for you because they’re going to have knowledge of these caps and they’re going to be aware of it and they’re going to be able to walk the line that you’re not going to know as a layman.

If you have questions about the Tort Claims Act or anything else, contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600 today.

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Can you get a loan based on your auto accident claim and more importantly should you?

This is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because invariably, I would say 50 to 60 percent of the people that I represent in car accident cases call me at some point usually at the beginning portion of their claims and they’re asked – they want to ask me for a loan.

Unfortunately South Carolina law prohibits personal injury lawyers or lawyers generally for providing loans to their clients based on any expected recovery that they might get from a personal injury claim which leaves my clients a little bit out in the cold.

Because of the fact that your lawyer cannot provide you with a loan directly, there are a lot of companies that have moved into this particular vacuum that want to provide my clients with loans while they wait for the cases to settle.

Classic examples would be 877 Cash Now, JG Wentworth, Blue Sky, which is the Indian reservation, Peachtree Lending, and a whole host of other companies that have moved into that particular area.

They obviously serve a purpose and they’re talking about structured settlement, this, that and the other. What they’re really kind of gearing that towards, where it really needs to be used is when someone is going to be receiving an extraordinarily large sum of money, i.e. a medical malpractice action or a large settlement based on mass tort. But it’s going to take them two to three to four years to actually get the thing processed.

That’s an instance where these particular companies might actually serve a purpose. The people who are in car wrecks unfortunately – obviously their cash reward is going to be considerably less and so what they’re ultimately going to walk away with is going to be – it’s not going to be millions of dollars. It’s going to be thousands of dollars.

So if you go out and you borrowed $1,000, but you’re doing it at 120 percent interest rate which is the part that they fail to mention to you, then you’re going to be paying out the nose and what I often see is my clients are the victims of their own success in the sense that they go and they get this particular loan. They tell me about it. I facilitate it in some way, shape or form or basically just wash my hands off it. Then when it comes time to settle, invariably, I’m giving the overwhelming majority of their money to the company that they actually borrowed money from to begin with.

So let’s just say for example, they were going to walk away with a $3,500 amount of money after I paid their medical bills and I take my legal fee.

But they’ve got a $1,900 outstanding loan plus interest with Bridge Loan, which is a local company. They’re looking at maybe $1,300 in their pocket and that is a really bad situation not only for them to be in but for me to be in, because my job is based on good customer service and providing my clients with great results.

They’re not real happy at the end of the day when they’re walking with $1,300, even if on some level they realize that the reason why that occurred is because they insisted on getting a loan that I told them really was a bad idea.

You need to be aware of these particular companies and you need to weigh the pros and cons about whether you actually want to borrow money, because there’s a distinct possibility that at the end of the day, you walk away with nothing or very little. I don’t want you to find yourself in that situation.

If you have any questions regarding a car accident claim or loans in general, contact the Hartman Law Firm at (843) 300-7600 today.

Where should you look to find the age of your tire?

If you look at your tire, you need to look for the letters D, O, T that will be followed by anywhere between 10 to 12 numbers after the letters D, O, T.

Those last four digits that follow D, O, T are going to give you the week and the year in which your tire was made. So let’s say it’s the second week in 2012. It would be 02012. It would be the four digits that you would see on your tire.

This is significant because a lot of people, when they go and they get replacement tires at Gerald’s or wherever it is you have your tires replaced, those tires could have been sitting there for three, four, five, six years. There’s no telling how long they’ve actually been on the shelf.

Whether you realize it or not, tires are just like anything else. If they sit around, they can dry rot and if they dry rot, then they’re more likely to explode.

If they’re more likely to explode, then your car is more likely to roll over and that can be a real issue and it can be a negligence issue on the person who installed your tire to begin with and on the manufacturer themselves. As a last thought, if the tire happens to be on your rear axle and that’s the one that actually explodes when you’re rolling down the road, that can be catastrophic because it has been show in studies that particularly on the rear axle, if you have a tire explode there, the car is likely to – the person – what you’re going to find is the person typically over corrects and then goes back the other way and then the car flips and the injuries that can result from that can be catastrophic.

If you’ve been in a single car accident, you’ve been injured, and you’re wondering what you can do about it, contact the Hartman Law Firm at (843) 300-7600 today!

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What is a Medicare set aside or open medicals as it relates to your worker’s compensation case?

Open medicals is an option that someone would pursue in a worker’s compensation case if they have been injured permanently as a result of their injury that occurred on the job.

What I mean by that is something that it’s an injury that’s going to linger forever into the future. It’s not something like a broken leg or something that will heal and then ultimately you will be fine and you can go on with your life. It’s more along the lines of maybe you’ve got a degenerative back problem that you’re going to be living with for the rest of your life that is essentially a permanent impairment.

When that sort of thing happens to you and it’s something that they have to account for as it relates to your worker’s compensation case, they can opt for something called open medicals. What that means is that when they close your worker’s compensation case and you get your final payment for whatever your injury is, they can actually “leave your medicals open” and that means that from that point forward, you will always be able to come back to the worker’s comp doctors for treatment for the injury that brought that worker’s compensation case to the forefront. 

This is an important aspect of a worker’s compensation case that the typical layman is not familiar with and it’s something that only an attorney is going to be able to pursue for you and ultimately get.

A Medicare set aside is something that has come about fairly recently as Medicare has become – well the federal government and Medicare generally has become more interested in trying to get the money that they spend on people’s medical care back.

Medicare set aside means that as it relates to your injury, your lawyer and your doctor have to anticipate what your future medical costs are going to be as far as the treatment is concerned for the injury that you sustain in your worker’s compensation case.

So you have to anticipate that as far as the entirety of that person’s lifetime. Set aside, i.e. Medicare set aside, that amount of money as part of your worker’s compensation case in some sort of trust or escrow account to be used as is necessary for ongoing treatment.

This is a secondary aspect of worker’s compensation case and it’s also something that a lawyer that’s familiar with that law is going to be able to work better simply because he’s familiar with it and he has been through the process whereas your typical layman or somebody who’s going unrepresented isn’t going to know about these things.

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The question that you’re naturally wondering at this point is, “Well, why is this important to me?” Well, the reason why it’s important to you is if you don’t have a lawyer to help you with these, that knows about these particular issues, chances are you’re not going to be asking for them and you’re not going to get them. That’s a real problem because once you close your worker’s compensation case, you’re not going to be able to go back and get a second bite at the apple.

So I would strongly encourage you, if you’ve got a worker’s compensation case that is significant and certainly has resulted in a permanent injury, you need to go and obtain representation because there are rights that you’re probably not aware of that you need to protect. 

If you have an ongoing worker’s compensation case or you have any general questions, contact the Hartman Law Firm at (843) 300-7600 today.

Why you should hate GEICO

In the context of an auto accident claim, insurance companies typically use three and sometimes four tactics when dealing with a client.

Those tactics are delay, denial and defend. What I mean by that is when you as a client contact them as a potential claimant and you’re unrepresented by an attorney, they are going to find a reason to delay the payment for your bodily injury claim by saying they didn’t get your medical records or they didn’t get the last voicemail that you left.

A lot of people have a tendency to want to call as opposed to sending letters and that’s the biggest issue that I see or they deny your claim based on liability, essentially saying that for some reason, factually speaking, they did not think that their driver was at fault or they defend. By defend, I mean that you actually have gotten a lawyer and really without basis or without reason, they insist on whether it’s a value-driven decision or whether it’s a liability-driven decision.

They make you get an attorney and they defend the lawsuit as opposed to actually paying on legitimate claims. The fourth thing that I want to talk about and a tactic that I’m starting to see is what I like to call ignoring.

When you call and you attempt to make a claim with them, this is what you can look forward to when they offer you certain options.

Example:

[Upon calling the company, the customer service auto response recording answers]

One option is “further assistance” which is what I would like is to get a customer service rep on the phone.

[Customer service auto response recording continues]

When I press zero, it essentially restarts the entire process over again and I can never actually get a customer service representative on the phone. Let’s try it again.

[Customer service auto response recording continues]

I then dial zero.

[Customer service auto response recording continues]

Now just imagine being a claimant out there and all you want to do is talk to somebody so that you get your car fixed or a rental car or tell them how you’re hurt. Do you want the fax number? Let’s dial zero again.

[Customer service auto response recording continues]

This is a tactic that is being more and more commonly used by insurance companies and the reason why they’re doing it is they want you to give up on getting your car fixed and specifically your bodily injury claim. They don’t want you calling. They don’t want to pay it and they know that if you run into these road blocks and you get frustrated enough, there’s a decent possibility that you’re just going to walk away entirely and you’re not going to call me, which is exactly what you should be doing.

If you have any questions or need help don't hesitate to contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600.