“We all like to save money — especially on legal matters. Millions of people are now using do-it-yourself online legal form services like www.legalzoom.com. To check it out, I went there, too. Their home page proudly raves, “Save time and money… created by top attorneys… helps you create reliable legal documents… we even review your answers and guarantee your satisfaction.” There is even a testimonial from an attorney who says, “As an attorney, I have been pleasantly surprised with the ease and efficiency of legalzoom.”

What is not as obvious, at the very bottom of the home page, is their disclaimer of liability. Go ahead and scroll down to the bottom of the page—you’ll see the disclaimer in very light print. It states:

“The information provided in this site is not legal advice, but general information on legal issues commonly encountered. Legalzoom’s legal document service is not a law firm and is not a substitute for an attorney or law firm. Legalzoom cannot provide legal advice and can only provide self-help services at your specific direction. Please note that your access to and use of legalzoom is subject to additional terms and conditions.”

The words “additional terms and conditions’ is a hot-link that if you click on it will take you to an even longer disclaimer! The disclaimer guts all of the assurances of reliability and suitability of use that you may have assumed were part of the “actual review of your answers and guarantee of satisfaction.” YOU ARE THE “LAWYER” WHO CHOOSES THE LEGAL FORM!

If you decide to be your own lawyer, please understand that legalzoom has the best of all worlds. They advertise that they will provide you with the best form of your choosing and save you money — but if you ever have a problem because of that document, they’re not responsible. You are the one who made the decision about which legal document was right for you and your circumstances.

Just yesterday in a meeting with a client, that client exclaimed, “Wow, I never knew that there were so many things to think about in our estate planning.” I responded, “You know, that’s what most people say when it comes to estate planning, disability, Medicaid, or veteran’s benefits. You don’t do this work every day, so you just can’t know all of the issues.”

The real value of what any professional counselor does is listen to your description of your circumstances and goals, and then choose the best course of action.

There is an old story about a factory which shut down due to an equipment failure. The owner of the factory called a renowned expert to rush to the factory to get things moving. The owner told him, “This shutdown is costing us $100,000 per day!” The expert arrived, walked around the faulty machine, then took out a screwdriver and adjusted a thing or two. Within moments the machine came back to life and the factory began to hum with activity. The owner was thrilled — until he was given a bill for $10,000. He roared, “But it took you less than 10 minutes to fix the machine — it cannot possibly cost $10,000!” The expert calmly responded, “No, it took me a lifetime to know exactly where and how to use that screwdriver. The bill is $10,000—but the value to you is $100,000 per day.”

Moral of the story: The right solution for the circumstances often requires a lifetime of preparation.”

- Rick L. Law, http://ricksblog.lawelderlaw.com

Thanks for reading – and thank you, Rick for the guest post!
Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

It’s the scale of money, big, big money that is being distributed in the stimulus and bailout packages by the U.S. government to jump-start our flagging economy.

Some things and concepts are so colossal, it’s difficult to wrap your mind around them. Like the distance to the sun, or the speed of light.

To help you wrap your mind around the size of the stimulus and bailout programs, I found the following descriptions of a trillion bucks:

• First of all, remember that a trillion dollars is a million, million dollars. Written out, it looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000. (Probably easier to stick to using just “trillion”.)

• A trillion dollars has a bit of a weight problem. In one dollar bills, it would weigh about 1.1 million tons. If you were using 100 dollar bills it would weigh about 11 thousands tons.

• A trillion dollars is one tall drink of water. It would take a military jet – flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out 1 trillion.

• A trillion dollars requires quite a commitment. You could earn a dollar a second for 32,000 years and still not quite earn a trillion.

• At Pagetutor.com, you can see a really fun visualization of a trillion dollars, created with Google Sketchup, a 3-D modeling program.

Thanks for reading,

Jim
_________________________________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll Free 1-800-943-3529
mailto:jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

Frustration is nothing new in accident and injury lawsuits. All the parties have something to complain about: insurance companies don’t like to pay high settlements, the courts are backlogged, and personal injury victims may have to wait years for their cases to be resolved.

Add to all these concerns the perception that the situation is getting worse.

In recent years, insurance companies have created the idea that there has been an explosion in the number of lawsuits. But a little history lesson puts that idea to rest. The Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog had an entry earlier this month about car accident lawsuits that really opened my eyes to the true situation.

The entry quoted a Time Magazine article, “Traffic Jam.” Here are some fast facts from that article:

• Car accidents account for more than half to three-quarters of personal-injury lawsuits. Tens of thousands of auto accident cases await trial in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.
• Car accident victims might wait years for their cases to get to the jury.
• Despite taking in huge sums in premiums, insurance companies suffer a net loss!

The pretty shocking truth is that the Time Magazine article was printed Jan. 10, 1964! That is more than 45 years ago.

I don’t write this in the sense of “Let’s all despair; things are never going to get better.” The reality is that the system is always being refined. Just because things aren’t perfect, let’s not forget to look at what is improving.

The truth is that there are fewer NY accident lawsuits per capita now than there were 20 years ago. In fact, statistics from the NY State Office of Court Administration show that there were actually more than 13,000 FEWER cases brought in NY Supreme Courts in 2006 than in 2002.

Will the legal system ever be perfect? Probably not, because “justice” is a perception to all the parties involved in a case. Most outcomes are likely to displease someone involved.

But it’s important to appreciate the fact that the law is continually being adapted to make things better. Maybe the law will never be perfect, but that is what it aspires to be.

Thanks for reading,

Jim
_______________________
James B. Reed, Esq.
Personal Injury & Malpractice Attorney
Ziff Law Firm, LLP
303 William St., Elmira, NY 14902
Tel. (607) 733-8866 Fax. (607) 732-6062
Toll-free 1-800-943-3529
mailto: jreed@zifflaw.com http://www.zifflaw.com

Shortly after I joined Ziff Law, Jim Reed, the firm’s managing partner (and frequent poster on this blog,) told me to sign myself up for the two-week National Session on Building Trial Skills offered by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy (NITA). “And by the way,” he remarked, “the program is located just outside Boulder, Colorado.”

‘Nuff said. As a former resident of Denver and Missoula, Montana, I am a true lover of the mountains and was ecstatic about the chance to spend some time savoring mountain life. Oh, NITA looked pretty cool as well.

I had no idea at the time that I was about to embark upon a career changing — if not life changing — voyage. Seriously. Two weeks at NITA equaled, for me and I suspect most of my classmates, at least five years of real world trial experience. Unfortunately, as most practitioners recognize, cases are not tried nearly as often today as they were fifty years ago. Increased pressures to settle matters quickly or engage in Alternative Dispute Resolution — such as mediation or arbitration — has created a professional atmosphere in which young attorneys wait years or even decades before ever getting a chance to see a case through to verdict. (The one notable exception is in the area of criminal law, where cases are tried on a somewhat more frequent basis.) (Watch an interview with The Honorable Jim R. Carrigan, one if NITA’s founders.)

I was fortunate to have tried a number of cases as a prosecutor before participating in NITA’s National Session. However, the skills and confidence I gained from NITA are unparalleled. I had an opportunity to test myself against some of the best up-and-coming attorneys in the country — and even the world! The faculty was comprised of seasoned practioners with practical, focused advice on how to become the very best trial lawyer possible, and the lecturers offered insight into cutting edge legal trends and technology emerging from all ends of the globe. (Read NITA’s Blog.)

The session itself was broken down into two mini week-long programs, each culminating with full jury trials performed in front of live mock jurors. Throughout the entire two week period the group of almost ninety participants was broken into three smaller groups, and each group was assigned a team leader and assistant. I had the absolute pleasure of working in a group lead by Temple University’s Beasley School of Law Professor Lou Natali and White Collar Criminal Defense Attorney Hayes Hunt of Cozen O’Connor. Attorneys Natali and Hunt are both no-nonsense, savvy litigators with seemingly endless knowledge and wisdom to share.

Each day of the first week began with warm-up execises led by communications specialist Brian Johnson. These were some of my favorite segments of the entire session. Brian is not a lawyer, but has been teaching lawyers to speak like REAL PEOPLE for the past thirty years. Brian spent an nearly an entire two hour lecture one afternoon teaching us what to do with our hands. Our hands. Where should we place them when asking questions on direct examination? What should we do with them while arguing during summation? What about our feet? Our voice inflection? How can we best use our core muscles to project strength? How to we best appear powerful?

The session focused greatly on critique — from the instructors, our peers, and, ultimately, ourselves. Every day at NITA was game day, and it was crucial to come prepared and ready to perform. Our presentations of various stages of trial — voir dire through summation — were videotaped and reviewed by a rotating crew of instructors, none of whom were afraid or hesitant to tell us EXACTLY what needed to change.

The results were stunning. I was assigned to try my first NITA case with Sydwell Shangisa, an advocate from South Africa who practices criminal prosecution. (Read about one of Shangisa’s recent verdicts,) the second case with Tomas Rodriquez, the Marshalltown, Iowa public defender. NITA invited dozens of local residents to sit in on the trial, and set up closed captioned television monitors which allowed us to watch the jury deliberate. Both cases were document intensive — giving me an opportunity practice using PowerPoint throughout in order to publish exhibits to the jury.

The bottom line is NITA is a must for all practitioners. Period. NITA’s philosophy is fairly straightforward — communicate simply, be entertaining and take risks. The results for me were nothings short of stunning. Two days after returning I began my first civil trial. It lasted eight days, and though 10 witnesses were called and over hundred exhibits admitted, it only took the jury nine minutes to return a verdict — in our favor. But that, I am afraid, is a topic for another post…

Thanks for reading!!

Christina Bruner Sonsire, Esq.

Thanks for watching and I hope this video made your day as much as it made mine!

Now back to fighting with these %#@! insurance companies…

Jim Reed
Injury & Accident Lawyer
jreed@zifflaw.com
Elmira, NY

As a personal injury attorney in the Elmira/Corning, New York area, I have now come to understand the true wisdom behind those words, especially when it comes to automobile maintenance. Accidents certainly do happen, but general awareness of basic automobile maintenance can go a long way toward preventing personal injuries and saving lives. Although I do not profess to be an expert mechanic in any way, I have decided to post basic auto tips periodically this summer to inform – or more likely, remind – readers of simple steps you can take to protect your families from injuries sustained in automobile accidents.To many people summer is synonymous with road trips and family vacation, and I hope my tips will help readers stay safe when hitting the roads.

Tip #1 – Check your Tires

Today is my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. My father, ever the romantic, decided to take my mother to the Sherwood Inn in Skaneateles, New York for a little getaway. Alas, as my parents pulled out of Horseheads to begin their journey, they got a flat tire. Luckily neither was injured and my dad had the tools to change the tire, though they may have been “spared” (I couldn’t resist) a short delay if only my dad had followed his own advice and checked car before getting on the road.

Tires are crucial to vehicle’s handling, traction, and stability, and can cause an automobile to loose alignment if they are not in proper working order. In general, you should check each of tire periodically, or about once a month.

When checking your tires, first look for obvious defects and damage, and visit a professional if anything looks seriously amiss.

It is very wise to carry a tire gauge in your automobile at all times, and you should check the pressure in each of your tires every time you check them. Tire pressure changes due to a variety of factors, though they are most commonly affected by changes in weather or air temperature. A decrease in air temperature often causes a loss in tire pressure, while an increase in air temperature often causes a gain.

Each vehicle has its own recommended air pressure, and information about it can likely be found in your vehicle’s owners manual. Although a tire’s maximum pressure is listed on its in fine print, you should never use max pressure as a guide when filling your tires because over-inflation allows tires to puncture more easily and can create instability for your automobile.

As an avid bicycle rider, I realize the importance of checking the pressure of my bike’s tires before every ride I take to avoid an accident (and make the ride more enjoyable!) Although checking a vehicle’s tires before every trip may be a bit overly onerous, it is something all of us could do a bit more frequently in order to stay safe.

Thanks for reading,

Christina Bruner Sonsire

As the newest addition to Ziff Law’s personal injury and malpractice litigation team, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself to the firm’s blogosphere community. Without going into too many details about my so-called “pedigree” and educational background – information about which can be found on Ziff Law’s website at www.zifflaw.com or a recent Star Gazette article at http://www.stargazettenews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080322/BUSINESS/803220302 – I want to provide you, the interested personal injury blog connoisseur, with some interesting (though not directly relevant to my practice) facts about me.

I was born and raised in the Twin Tiers and come from a long line of folks – going all the way back to my great-great grandparents – who were also born and raised here. I returned to Elmira after graduating from law school because I truly care about this area and want do my part to help it prosper and grow. One reason I was so attracted to Ziff Law and ultimately decided to come on board is its motto – “Local Lawyers, Big City Results.” The lawyers at Ziff have as many skills and much intellect as any attorneys you may find in a big city, yet they – like me – are sincerely committed to helping the people who live and work right here in our community.

You actually understand these jokes, and you forward them to all your Upstate New York friends and to those who used to live here and left. (We call them “chickens”!).