Litigation & Trial - Legal articles by personal injury attorney Max Kennerly

One of my main purposes of writing this blog is to dispel the myths that surround trial lawyers and personal injury law.  There's a myth, for example, that every time some sort of chemical exposure or defective product might be more dangerous than suspected, trial lawyers fabricate tens of thousands of fraudulent claims and then extract millions of dollars from poor, helpless corporations that somehow cannot defend themselves. Consider this silliness from a law professor invited to speak before Congress: When in the distant future, we look back at asbestos litigation, we will surely include it among the great scandals in our ... Continue Reading

My post on the potential civil lawsuits arising from the Jerry Sandusky molestation scandal at PSU still generates a fair amount of traffic, mostly from people looking for updates on the latest legal developments. If the internet asks, it shall receive. There have been four major developments relating to the case: A preliminary hearing for the criminal charges against Tim Curley and Gary Schultz; The filing of another civil lawsuit against Sandusky, Penn State, and The Second Mile; The filing of a declaratory judgment action by Federal Insurance Company of New Jersey, the insurance company for The Second Mile, to obtain a ... Continue Reading

Between our catastrophic injury and birth injury practices, we spend a lot of time at the firm immersed in the science and medicine of brain damage. Just as consciousness and dualism have vexed philosophers for ages (* see my comment), the real causes and treatment of brain injury have remained elusive for generations. There's a reason for the phrase 'not exactly brain surgery' — brain surgery is notoriously unpredictable. After reading Jane Rosett's compelling article in The New York Times about 'starting again' after injuring her right temporal lobe in a car accident (sample: "traumatic brain injuries destroy connections between and ... Continue Reading

It's an old story, but one that bears repeating again and again, this time by Discover Magazine. People don't make decisions the way computers do. They don't calculate risks and rewards and weigh them against each other.  They routinely think with their guts (the "affect heuristic") and, even if they do some basic probabilities in their heads, they'll still get them wrong: Our hardwired gut reactions developed in a world full of hungry beasts and warring clans, where they served important functions. Letting the amygdala (part of the brain’s emotional core) take over at the first sign of danger, milliseconds before ... Continue Reading

In the blink of an eye, Jimmy Leeward’s P-51 Galloping Ghost went from rounding the last turn at National Championship Air Races in Reno to sharply pitching upward, rolling over, and then diving straight down into box seats full of spectators. Strange as it is to say, there are reasons to be grateful — had his airplane hit the grandstands, there would have been hundreds, not dozens, of injuries. Flying in general and P-51s in particular have a special place around our firm; Jim Beasley, Sr., was an FAA-certified flight instructor who flew several WWII-vintage planes, including P-51s, and Jim ... Continue Reading