Quick investigative work lead to a pretrial settlement and payment of the policy limits of $2 million in a Duplin County wrongful death case.
In June 2011, the defendant was driving 63 mph in a 55 mph zone on Highway 117 in Duplin County. He crossed a double yellow line to pass a car stopped in front of him at an intersection and collided head-on with a car approaching from the opposite direction, killing the 21-year-old driver, and injuring his 20-year-old wife and three-year-old daughter.
“Trust your adversary” isn’t the first rule of settlement negotiation, but a little faith in the opposing attorney recently helped a Raleigh attorney secure a $1 million settlement for a client injured in a car wreck.
Two Raleigh attorneys helped a man who was seriously injured in a bicycle crash quickly collect a $2.3 million settlement to improve the quality of his medical care. Benjamin H. Whitley and his father, Robert E. Whitley, both of the Whitley Law Firm, represented a 35-year-old man who suffered traumatic brain injuries in June 2011, when a bicycle he was riding collided with the side of a car. He was hospitalized for three months following the crash and continues to recover at a rehabilitation and nursing center.
William Sanders was not yet 60 years old when the state Department of Transportation first identified his 700 acres as being in the path of the planned Fayetteville outer loop highway.
This November, his lawyers, George and Stephanie Autry (pictured), finally settled the state’s claim on his property for an unprecedented $15.8 million. Sanders is now 78.
Though he received a fair price, Sanders suffered from the passage of time. For close to 20 years he was deprived of the use and enjoyment of his property, prohibited by state law from selling, developing or disposing of it as he wished.
An arbitration panel awarded more than $3 million to a married couple after a fertility clinic helped them conceive without warning the mother that she carried a deadly disease which could be passed on to her child.
Reproductive Endocrinology Associates of Charlotte mishandled the results of a medical screening test that showed Sally Ware was a carrier of cystic fibrosis, and her daughter ended up inheriting the disease, according to Ware’s attorneys, William H. Elam (pictured) and David S. Rudolf of Charlotte.
There are no refunds in condemnation actions.
That’s the hard lesson the Onslow County Water and Sewer Authority learned recently when it tried to back out of a deal for some 350 acres needed to expand a wastewater treatment facility.
In April 2008, the authority condemned four tracts of land just outside of Richlands, owned by the Rogers and Boggs families. The authority appraised the tracts as farmland, and deposited $1.9 million as just compensation. Shortly after, the owners discovered that two of the tracts had significant limestone deposits underneath, and brought in a geologist to take samples.
Seventeen years after the state Department of Transportation first identified her property as in the path of Raleigh’s 540 Outer Loop extension, Blanche Morris will finally get her just compensation.
Morris, now almost 90, lived in the same farmhouse on Jenks Road in Apex for more than 60 years and moved out last year, after the Turnpike Authority filed its condemnation action and deposited $1,216,500. At that time, the authority took only a 27-acre parcel that fronted Jenks Road and through which the roadway passed directly.
In January 2007, when Teresa Henson first checked in as a patient of dentist Robert Labusohr, she already had a mouthful of problems. Almost two years and $16,000 later, those problems had only multiplied.
“This was a single mom who saved her money to go into this dentist’s office, to the tune of $16,000 and a hole in her mouth,” said her attorney Jodee Sparkman Larcade of Raleigh’s Larcade & Heiskell.
After five days of trial in November, a jury awarded Henson $200,000 in damages on her dental malpractice claims.
A jury in Cleveland County Superior Court has decided that a vascular surgeon was not to blame for a patient’s leg amputation.
The Nov. 16 verdict cleared Dr. Harry D. Hobson of any negligence in his treatment of 64-year-old Marian E. Green. She sued Hobson in March 2010 after he failed to restore circulation to her left leg, which later had to be amputated above the knee.
A different doctor had performed knee surgery on Green, and an artery near her knee was damaged during the procedure. The injury restricted blood flow to Green’s lower leg and foot. After realizing that Green was having complications from the surgery, her physician called on Hobson to save her leg.
Isaac N. Northup (pictured) of Asheville was Hobson's trial attorney.
Ignorance of the law is no defense. But how about the facts? How long, for example, can a lender feign ignorance of the facts and collect on a mortgage loan after the underlying debt has been satisfied by a deed in lieu of foreclosure?
The answer: As long as the borrower continues to pay, U.S. District Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. held recently in Martin v. American General Finance Inc., a case that aptly depicts the confusion resulting when a note and mortgage go their separate ways.
