Attorney Toolbox
As an attorney who practices civil trial work there are many practical things you have to know or to be able to calculate. Let's talk about a few.
Auto accidents are general area of litigation that most civil trial lawyers become involved. This area requires the attorney to be capable of presenting evidence of vehicle speeds long after the vehicles have been removed. The attorney’s job is to present admissible evidence. The attorney must have a working knowledge of first, making a rough calculation and second questioning experts that reconstruct accident scenarios. Knowing how to take physical evidence, like a skid mark and with the length measurement to extrapolate an approximate speed is very handy and can save you a lot of wasted time and money. A place to start and to become familiar with the terminology is the short paper by James O. Harris who wrote Determining Vehicle Speeds From Skid Marks. In this offering Mr. Harris discusses basic concepts, like "First, let's define a skid mark." He discusses shadow skid, average skid distance, drag factor, speed combined, along with perception-reaction time distances. Mr. Harris includes Skid Mark Evidence that discusses impending skid or visible skid and limitations or opinions due to the collection of evidence being performed by the investigating police officer rather than the re-constructionist.
What if you want a quick and dirty estimate? You could use a speed chart such as the one offered by Technical Services - Forensic Engineering. TSFS offers course for attorneys for The Science of Accident Reconstruction, Rollover and Roof Crush, Firestone tires and the Ford Explorer and How to Drive an SUV. Granted the last few are more in the line of product liability cases, but I thought it wise to show you what is out there. Which brings up another point? As a trial lawyer you can't have too much knowledge. Visit this website to see what else they discuss and you might learn something useful. They cover subjects like fires, brakes, engines, agricultural equipment, air brakes, human factors, reaction times, visibility, conspicuity, warnings, instructions, airbags, failure analysis, rollover propensity and much more.
There are sites having to do with motorcycle collisions, such as the Motorcycle Tips & Techniques Safety Forum where they discuss skid marks in the forum. There are discussions about safety, training courses, physics, improving skills of riding and a section that offers many calculators. See the section titled Models. The Models section has discussions of Critical Speed Calculator, Speed from Stopping Distance Calculator, Stopping Distance Calculator, Skid Mark Analyzer, Speed Calculator and several other calculators. Most of these links will take you to an Excel Spreadsheet form allowing you to do a quick and dirty calculation within seconds. They are the product of James R. Davis.
As a young lawyer just starting the journey of a trial lawyer in 1981 I worked in a firm that did a lot of defense work. My job was to handle the plaintiff's work. The defense lawyers belonged to the Defense Research Institute or DRI. I regularly read the monthly DRI magazine because those articles would list all the cases that were working against defense interests. Thanks for doing my research! The lesson in all of this is to use when available defense Internet tools. Tools like ClaimsPages.com, Claims-Portal.com and the related Resource pages will provide free tools and education. They have a user friendly skid/speed calculator that includes a drop down menu for road conditions along with the length of the skid mark that allows you to estimate the vehicle's minimum speed before impact. The tools section includes calculators for the value of money, speed conversion, coinsurance, blood alcohol analysis, social security number decoder, motorcycle skid mark analyzer, paint area, distance, depreciation, telephone search and more.
It's a numbers game. Did you know that numbers we commonly use can tell us something about the person or product of the case? Social security numbers can tell you where the person probably lived when the SSN was issued. The first three digits of a SSN tell us geographic area. Vehicle identification numbers, commonly referred to as VIN numbers can be decoded and will provide a wealth of information. If all you knew was the VIN you would know the manufacturer, where the vehicle was assembled, the car line or series, the engine, restraints, gross vehicle weight, body style, year the car was built, the plant where it was assembled and the type of model. Product codes or the Universal Product Code, the bar code on every product is a 12 digit coding system for tracking items. It's a different system than the one used in other parts of the world. There is a different coding system for pills and other drugs. The FDA and the Office Of Regulatory Affairs (ORA) use Product Codes. There is the Product Code Builder including an online Tutorial. If you wish to search for an FDA Product Code you would need portions of the Product Name and Product Code. We are all aware of zip codes used by the US Postal Service and area codes. Codes are a way of communicating a lot of information using numbers and letters. Computers use codes such as ASCII code and file name codes like .doc, PDF, wav among others. ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The bottom line for lawyers is that you can't afford to ignore numbers and letters written in code. Just because you don't understand what it means doesn't mean it can be ignored.
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