The VLW Blog

A Newport News judge has set aside a multimillion dollar personal injury award on the grounds the verdict was excessive. This past August, a jury awarded $5,225,000 to Michael Chavis, who was injured after a forklift ran over his foot at a Best Buy store. Chavis was diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome as a [...]

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A Newport News jury has awarded $5,225,000 to a man who was injured after a retailer’s forklift ran over his foot. On July 22, 2006, Michael Chavis was at a Best Buy store in Newport News looking at a television on display. Nearby, a store employee had left a battery-powered forklift switched on. Another store [...]

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A former Maryland lawyer implicated in a Washington-area insurance fraud investigation was sentenced Friday to seven months in prison for submitting faked medical records to bolster his own personal injury claim. A. Ryan Lahuti also was ordered to reimburse GEICO for his $17, 435 claim settlement and to pay a $25,000 fine.  He will be [...]

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Saying the motive appeared to be “pure greed,” a federal prosecutor recommends at least a year and a half behind bars for a former Maryland lawyer who admitted padding his own personal injury claim with phony medical records. Ryan Lahuti was accused in connection with the alleged long-established Washington-area practice of recruiting auto accident victims [...]

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A 20-year career connecting accident victims to lawyers, which included helping fabricate and exaggerate claims, has ended with a 26-month prison sentence for a Maryland man. Kenny Williams was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis for his role in a personal injury operation that included at least one dishonest lawyer and a complicit [...]

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A federal jury in Richmond has awarded $212 million, including $200 million in punitive damages, to a Fredericksburg-area man who suffered severe medical complications from the drug Botox. Douglas Ray Jr. received an injection of the drug to treat a hand tremor and writer’s cramp. He alleged that complications from that injection resulted in total [...]

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Loudoun County Circuit Judge Thomas Horne will allow a plaintiff to pursue his auto accident case despite the earlier “settlement” of the claim by a dishonest lawyer acting without the client’s authority. Woodbridge lawyer Stephen Conrad, now disbarred and imprisoned, settled hundreds of claims without authority, usually pocketing the proceeds. A string of decisions held [...]

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A full-time telecommuter was not acting within the scope of his employment when he drove from his home office to a government office to meet with colleagues. The telecommuter was on his own time when he had a traffic accident on his way to his employer’s office, an Alexandria federal judge said. Virginia law on [...]

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Fairfax Circuit Judge Jane Marum Roush reminded those at the Virginia Trial Lawyer Association’s annual convention on Saturday, “The Supreme Court has a lof of faith that, if given the opportunity, the jury will get it right.” The court had re-emphasized the point barely 24 hours in an unpublished order, Thompson v. Home Properties Seminary [...]

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Simplifying the concept appears to have worked in the initial wrangling over House Bill 93, the effort by personal injury attorneys to streamline cases in which the primary insurer pays its policy limits and additional underinsurance coverage is available for the plaintiff. The attorneys long have complained that settlement of such cases gets dragged out [...]

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