Martin & Jones Blog  filter by date: March 2010

Late last week, the Federal Reserve Board issued its proposed regulations (to be codified as Regulation Z) governing the final sections of the CARD Act, which will go into effect August 22, 2010.  Though the proposed regulations would significantly limit lenders’ imposition of penalty fees

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana and others criticized the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's annual "lawsuit climate" rankings as biased and unreliable. 

Anthony Tarricone, President of the American Association for Justice, addresses the hypocrisy of tort reform opponents only too eager to file lawsuits when it fits their personal and political agendas.

Last week, the Supreme Court of Georgia declared that a recently-enacted state law capping noneconomic damages violated the right to a jury trial bestowed by the Georgia Constitution.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals recently upheld a jury verdict that Martin & Jones obtained on behalf of two senior citizens who were defrauded in an investment scheme.

As new regulations governing overdraft fees will soon go into effect, the Federal Reserve Board has compiled a summary of the new rules. The Board’s publication “What You Need To Know: New Overdraft Rules for Debit and ATM Cards” can be assessed at the Federal Reserve Board’s website, www.federalreserve.gov.

Facing increasing pressure from consumer advocates and regulatory authorities, Bank of America has just announced that it will scrap overdraft fees on debit card purchases this summer.

The New York Times recently reported that a type of hip implant once widely used in as many as 80,000 out of the estimated 250,000 hip replacement and resurfacing procedures performed in the U.S. annually may cause complications for patients.

Even though malpractice awards are dropping to near-record lows, medical negligence -- the errors that injure and kill patients -- have not similarly dropped.  Calls for tort reform ignore the most important concern: improving patient safety by reducing medical negligence.

While I was visiting a neurosurgeon’s office in the recent past, he took the occasion to show me all the medical charts he was reviewing for medical negligence. As I gazed upon the many stacks of medical records, he asked me why there were so many medical malpractice lawsuits.

Investigators reviewed hospital discharge records from as many as 69 million in-patient hospital admissions between 1998 and 2006, and found that these infections lengthened admissions from eleven to fourteen days and added approximately $33,000 to $46,000 in costs to those admissions.