I’m sure the title of this blog must strike readers as a little curious.  Enabling drunk driving car accidents?  Who in the world would want to do that?

Well, as you’re probably already aware, there are lobbyists against everything under the sun operating in Washington D.C. – including technology that might prevent wrongful death and personal injury from occurring due to a car accident caused by alcohol.

In my new article, “New Hi-Tech Weapon Against Drunk Driving,” I write about the new Driver Alcohol Detection Systems for Safety (DADSS for short), currently being developed at an R&D company in Massachusetts.  This is technology that could automatically stop an inebriated person from driving a car.

Even though this technology won’t actually be used in vehicles for 8 to 10 years, Sarah Longwell, a spokesperson for the American Beverage Institute, is already criticizing it, saying the technology would never be perfected to the point where it wouldn’t stop some completely sober people from driving.   That’s because Longwell represents the financial interests of those who want to sell alcohol at bars and restaurants.

What Longwell isn’t talking about is there is a very good reason that it will take almost a decade to get these systems into our cars;  that reason is to ensure that it works correctly.  As it is, at a public demonstration last month, they tested the DADSS with a woman who drank as one would socially, but  not to excess.  She started the demo car without a problem.

And that directly contradicts Longwell’s statement that the DADSS  would “…eliminate the ability of people to have a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at a ball game and then drive home, something that is perfectly safe and currently legal in all 50 states.”

As a personal injury lawyer practicing in the Seattle, Washington area, I’m for anything that has the potential to prevent the over-10,000 deaths that happen in this country because of car accidents caused by alcohol.  I suggest we all wait and see to the final incarnation of this new technology – and then judge for ourselves whether it’s practical or not.

Please feel free to visit my website at www.straighttalklaw.com , where you can order free books on personal injury and wrongful death lawyers, Washington auto and motorcycle accidents, auto insurance, and other valuable legal information, offered as a public service by myself and my law practice in Seattle, Washington.

By Jonathan Widran

It’s strange to think how a single man’s apparent moment of misfortune could so positively impact the lives of hundreds of people in similar circumstances years later. While attending law school at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, Jason Epstein was in an auto accident. The recent graduate of USC retained Marina Del Rey based attorney Doug Schiffer to handle his case, and after it was settled, he began working for the veteran lawyer as a legal intern.

The funny thing about law school is that graduating only provides the young lawyer with a general competency degree, not necessarily a specialty. Sometimes, as Epstein discovered, extraordinary life circumstances lead to a great discovery, or in his case, a lifelong mission. Schiffer’s mentoring taught the Seattle native all the ins and outs of personal injury law—and led him to see that he could make a difference in this arena as a David helping his clients take on the Goliath-sized insurance companies.

After several years of working for plaintiff law firms in Seattle, Epstein – currently honored for the third year in a row as a “Rising Star” by Washington SuperLawyers – joined Premier Law Group as a partner in 2007. Establishing himself as a top personal injury attorney specializing in auto accidents, serious injury, and wrongful death cases, Epstein created Straight Talk Law as a branding segment of the firm in 2009.

Straight Talk Law represents “real people” against insurance companies and large corporations. Epstein and his team of attorneys fight for those that have been injured, so they can focus on recovering physically and mentally. The firm also represents families of wrongful death victims and cases involving employment law, wrongful termination and sexual harassment.

The key to Epstein’s success is handling things differently than most Seattle personal injury lawyers—i.e. “when you hire us, you get us.” Rather than pass off cases to a case manager, his lawyers are hands on, focused and selective about the cases they handle. They have experience in dealing with all the physical and emotional issues connected to these accidents and commit to going the distance to seek justice.

Part of the “Straight Talk” Epstein promises includes telling prospective clients something most attorneys won’t dare: that, depending on their unique circumstances, they may not even need an attorney at all!

Over the past two years, he has written a total of five books (available through Amazon.com) that have helped him achieve his goal of putting people in a position to make better decisions when they need assistance with a personal injury claim. He offers the books, mostly geared around Washington State law, free to residents. His flagship Straight Talk Law item is “The Truth about Washington Auto Accidents,” subtitled “The Ten Secrets Insurance Companies Don’t Want You To Know.” The others cover different areas of Epstein’s wide ranging expertise: “The Truth About Buying Washington Auto Insurance”; “The Shocking Truth About Lawyer Advertising”; “The Truth About Washington Motorcycle Accidents; and “In Case of Death: Straight Talk on Washington Wrongful Death.”

“I wanted to write books geared towards consumers, so that people could come in to lawyers’ offices with knowledge that would even out the conversation,” says Epstein. “The bottom line is that the best relationship between attorney and client is one where the two understand each other and that the clients know what the lawyer can do for them. The idea was to give the average citizen a framework of what these different cases are about. This information shouldn’t be held in an ivory tower somewhere. In any personal injury case, we’re dealing with real people in their worst moments.

“I want people to know I’m on their side, and I don’t mind giving the information away for free,” he adds. “Typically we find that without this kind of knowledge, people will generally trust insurance companies that are actually working at cross purposes to them. They often come to a lawyer like me after a negative interaction with an insurance company that they thought would be more cooperative.”

Epstein feels that imparting these necessary facts is a way to correct the disparity of power that often exists when a client in a precarious position (physically or emotionally) comes to a lawyer. It was an even greater need to balance the scales of power that motivated his interest in personal injury law in the first place. His feeling was that when such a disparity exists in life, there are very few places where a single person can set it straight and make things right. One place, he realized early on, was in the law.

“The glaring thing to me,” he says, “is that insurance companies make hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars, yet make no bones about their purposeful desire to squash small claims and personal injury lawyers in order to maximize profits.”

As a budding lawyer, Epstein learned of a fascinating revelation about the insurance industry that came about in the McKinstry Documents, which were uncovered in the late 80s by a lawyer who was litigating a bad faith claim against Allstate Insurance. The docs give the history of personal injury claims in the United States in the years following World War II. When soldiers came back home, people had more spare time and there were more drivers on the road—thus, more accidents. Insurance companies saw their profits decreasing because they were paying regularly on accident claims. So they started to come up with a systemized way to increase corporate profits.

Instead of doing what was fair and right, Epstein learned, they decided that it would benefit them to squeeze the bottom, low level claims. For every million dollar accident settlement, there are a million thousand dollar claims. So they would squeeze on the small claims and make it so lawyers couldn’t afford to front money to take on these contingency cases. The insurance companies did this by forcing smaller cases into trial.

“They knew that to go on trial even in a minor case lawyers had to front five to ten thousand dollars,” says Epstein. “Lawyers didn’t get paid if they didn’t win, so the companies’ goal was to make everything harder for the lawyers to handle. In these documents, Allstate adopted a change in slogan: when someone brought a claim, they went from ‘good hands’ to ‘boxing gloves.’”

This powerful, disillusioning story led Epstein later to model his practice in such a way that he would fight the behemoth insurance companies as often as necessary in the one realm where everything is even: the courtroom. “A lot of lawyers take low settlements right away because they’re afraid of the financial and emotional risks of going to trial,” he says. “The way I do things, I will go to trial if I don’t feel my client would be getting fair compensation by settling. The only way to achieve a fair settlement is to be prepared to go to trial. If the insurance company sees we have a great case, they may make a better, more appropriate offer.”

“We’re not just trying to take a fee to get short term gain,” Epstein adds. “We want to create long term trust. For better or worse, we are motivated by our hearts and correcting perceived injustice.”

One thing Epstein sees a lot of when insurance companies are forced to go to trial is their employ of biomechanical engineers. Typically in cases when there is not a lot of property damage, they will have an engineer take the stand and say he has examined the cars involved in the accident and in his opinion, “only minor G forces were imparted on the occupant,” not enough to cause the injuries that the victim is suing for. Of course these ‘experts’ make a lot of money testifying almost exclusively for insurance companies.  Epstein sees this as intellectually lazy and junk science.

“The law provides certain remedies,” he says, “like making the person who causes the accident pay for all reasonable medical treatment. But in smaller cases, the insurance company will say, yes, you needed it but your condition wasn’t caused by the accident because the G-force wasn’t severe enough. It’s crazy what they will do to try to avoid paying what is right. Our job is to tell the story of our client to the jury and hope that we’ve conveyed the truth about what would merit fair compensation.”

Besides his books, Epstein has amassed a list of impressive accolades in his decade as a personal injury lawyer. He has the highest possible rating (10.0) on Avvo.com; is a graduate of legendary trial attorney Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyer’s College (an intensive 3.5 week course with limited enrollment); is a frequent lecturer to other attorneys; is a graduate of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy; and was rated AV (highest possible rating) from Martindale in 2010.

But at the end of the day, his greatest satisfaction is being able to look his two children, ages six and two, and tell them that despite the way things may seem, the world can be a fair place—or at least, that the ideal is one worth fighting for. “You tell your kids certain things about life,” he says, “how they should act, about fairness and doing things right. I feel like a lot of my work as a personal injury attorney is, in my own way, an extension of telling my six year old that fairness matters. I’m trying to help make the world the way I’m telling him it can be.”

Last month, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood took a firsthand look at what could be an important technological advance in the fight to stop car accidents, as well as the many tragic wrongful deaths and cases of personal injury, that result from drunk driving.

QinetiQ North America, a research and development company located in Watham, Massachusetts, held the first public demonstration of its new technology, The Driver Alcohol Detection Systems for Safety (DADSS for short), which employs automatic sensors that instantly gauge a driver’s fitness to take the wheel.  The new devices have the potential to save thousands of lives.

The most commonplace devices used today are the ignition interlock systems that require drivers to blow into a breath-tasting device before the car will start.  These systems are often mandated by judges for convicted drunk drivers.  However, ignition interlock systems are very intrusive to the everyday driver and would never gain widespread acceptance for usage in all vehicles.

The DADSS, in contrast, is a passive technology system that measures blood alcohol content through two ways – either by analyzing the driver’s breath, or through the skin using special touch-based sensors that are placed either on steering wheels or door locks.

The analysis is done without the driver having to take any extra steps.  Thus, a sober driver can go on his way without even thinking about the device doing its job; the device, however, would stop that same driver from operating a vehicle if, on a certain occasion, he or she happened to be inebriated.

LaHood called the technology “another arrow in our automotive safety quiver, ”  although the company behind it estimates that it would not be available to the general public for another eight to ten years.

The head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), David Strickland, also attended the DADSS demonstration.   He predicted the new hi-tech systems could prevent as many as 9,000 fatal alcohol-related car accidents a year in America.  The DADSS is the result of an exploratory $10 million research effort, funded by the NHTSA and the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety.

It’s estimated that over 10,000 wrongful deaths will occur this year as a result of car accidents caused by alcohol.  It’s also estimated that a motorist arrested for driving drunk has done it before an average of 87 times prior to the police pulling him or her over.   Also, one in three of all drivers will be involved in an alcohol-related car accident at some point in their lives.

For more free “Straight Talk Law” information, please visit the website of Seattle, Washington Personal Injury and Wrongful Death Attorney Jason Epstein at www.straighttalklaw.com, where you can order free books on personal injury lawyers, Washington auto accidents, auto insurance, and other valuable legal information, offered as a public service by Mr. Epstein’s law practice in Seattle, Washington.

It’s in the blood of a lot of us Washingtonians to enjoy a bike ride here in the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, riding in areas where there is automobile traffic can sometimes pose a great risk. Many drivers are unaware of bicyclists, and are never on the lookout for them. As a Renton bicycle accident attorney, I have seen how a split second loss of focus by a car driver can lead to seriously injuring a bicyclist. If you ride bikes in Western Washington, take a look at this article on safely riding bicycles in the city. Sometimes it is impossible to avoid a distracted driver, but as the following story shows, wearing a helmet can prevent even more serious injuries from resulting.

Around 1 pm yesterday, Allan Raichart, a 70-year-old from Port Hadlock, was struck by a 1996 GMC Suburban while riding his bicycle. The accident occurred a couple miles south of Port Townsend, when the driver of the Suburban left the roadway before striking the bicyclist. Raichart was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center where he is being treated for an arm injury, but fortunately he was wearing a helmet and his injuries are not life-threatening. The SUV driver was not hurt in the crash, and police do not believe that alcohol or drugs played a role in causing the accident. He will face charges of second-degree negligence.

Almost any accident involving a car and a bicyclist will result in an injury, but I am very relieved to hear that the injuries sustained in this crash are not serious enough to be considered life-threatening. As a Bellevue injury lawyer, I deal with a lot of cases like these where there is simply nothing an accident victim could do to prevent the collision from happening. As we approach spring and more people will be on the streets riding bicycles, it is important to learn from this accident and always be aware of bicyclists on the road and bike lanes.

If you have been injured in a Seattle bicycle accident and would like to speak with an experienced Washington bicycle injury lawyer, feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

This information is provided by Straight Talk Law, where you can order free books on Bellevue auto accidents, purchasing Washington car insurance, and other valuable legal information, offered as a public service by Seattle personal injury attorney Jason Epstein and his Washington auto accident, Tacoma motorcycle accident, and King County wrongful death law firm in Seattle, Washington.

Until becoming a Tacoma personal injury attorney and Kent wrongful death lawyer I did not fully realize the tremendous responsibility we hold as drivers. A 2000 pound hunk of metal can do a considerable amount of damage to the driver, innocent bystanders and the other passengers inside the car, and if the vehicle occupants aren’t properly restrained the injuries become even greater.

Friday, February 7^th a Lacey texting while driving accident lead to the facial injuries of a 2-year-old girl and 29-year-old woman. The accident happened at the 600 block of School Street Southeast in Lacey, Washington when 29-year-old Tanya M. Bowers struck another vehicle. Bowers informed state patrol that she was texting while driving a 2002 Nissan Altima traveling south on School Street Southeast. The Altima left the road and veered toward the shoulder where it smashed into a parked Ford F-350 truck.

In the backseat of the Altima there was a 2-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy. The 2-year-old suffered facial injuries when her face hit the back of the front passenger seat due to not being properly restrained. The 4-year-old boy was properly restrained and was not injured in the accident. Bowers had also failed to use a seat belt leading to her own facial injuries as she struck the steering wheel in the collision.

Bowers faces several charges in this texting while driving accident including: using a wireless device while driving, failure to use a child restraint and failure to wear a seat belt. It was not immediately clear what Bowers relationship to the children was.

The worst part about this horrible accident is how easily it could have been prevented. Not only would the damage to the car and passengers been avoided had the driver not been texting while driving- if seat belts and proper child restraints were used these injuries could have been avoided all together. Always remember to wear your seat belt, and properly restrain children in the car.

Red light cameras – which record snapshots of motorists running red lights and enable the police to ticket them without having personally witnessed the traffic violation – have been in use for over a decade, with a great deal of controversy surrounding their usage.

Many citizens and lawmakers alike have accused local communities of using the cameras as municipal ATM’s, to spit out more money from fines without hiring more manpower.   They also have targeted the cameras as untrustworthy and even the cause of more car accidents.

A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has what I consider to be a pretty good final verdict on the cameras – they save lives. You can read more about what the study has to say in my new article, “Red Light Cameras Save Lives,” – but the bottom line is that the cameras have prevented hundreds of wrongful deaths,  not to mention an untold amount of personal injury cases.

Here in the state of Washington, however, where I practice in the Seattle area as a personal injury attorney, the debate over red light cameras rages on.   Initiatives have been filed in Bellingham, Longview, Monroe and Wenatchee to require public votes on the usage of the cameras as well as placing limits on the amount of fines allowable for traffic violations caught by the devices.  State Representative Chris Hurst is also sponsoring legislation that has similar objectives in mind.

To be fair, all of these efforts were begun before the results of the IIHS were released on February 1^st of this year.  I’m hopeful, now that the enormous safety benefits of the red light cameras are fully proven and documented, that the red light camera rhetoric will cool down and their usage can continue unabated.    We can argue the particulars of that usage, but not the life-saving results.

Please feel free to visit my website at www.straighttalklaw.com , where you can order free books on personal injury and wrongful death lawyers, Washington auto and motorcycle accidents, auto insurance, and other valuable legal information, offered as a public service by myself and my law practice in Seattle, Washington.

In many urban areas, motorists are all-too-familiar with the split-second flash that comes from cameras placed at heavily-traveled intersections with traffic lights.

These “red light cameras” have been called cash cows by some, because they allow local police departments to ticket motorists for running red lights without having to witness the traffic violations in person.  Lawsuits against the devices have been filed even here in Seattle, Washington alleging that the cameras instigated excessive fines and improper tickets, and, as recently as January of 2011, Washington state lawmakers have tried to put the usage of these cameras to a public vote in an effort to ban their usage.

It turns out those cameras do more than take pictures, however; they also save lives.  According to a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), red light cameras saved 159 lives in 2004 through 2008 in 14 of America’s biggest cities.  Not only that, but, had these cameras been operational in all of our country’s big cities, a total of 815 deaths could have been prevented.

“The cities that have the courage to use red light cameras despite the political backlash are saving lives,” says IIHS president Adrian Lund.

The cameras also lowered car accident rates, as well as cases of wrongful death and personal injury.  The rate of all fatal car accidents at these intersections fell 14% in camera cities – as opposed to that same rate rising 2 percent in cities that don’t use the cameras.  The researchers looked at 99 U.S. cities with populations over 200,000 for the purposes of this study.   A previous study by the IIHS found that red light cameras reduced personal injury car accidents by 29 percent.

Red light cameras have been used since the 1990’s.  Although only 25 communities used them in 2000, around 500 cities have them in place today.  Only about half the states allow red light cameras to be installed.

Running red lights is a dangerous and widespread traffic problem.  In 2009, car accidents that resulted from running red lights caused an estimated 113,000 cases of personal injury and 676 wrongful deaths.  Only a third of those deaths involved the drivers who actually ran the red lights – the rest were of pedestrians, bike riders and passengers in other cars who were victims of the traffic violation.

“Somehow, the people who get tickets because they have broken the law have been cast as the victims,” commented Lund. “We rarely hear about the real victims — the people who are killed or injured by these lawbreakers.”

Red light cameras may cost motorists more in terms of traffic tickets – but it’s clear that their life-saving presence is more than worth the price.

For more free “Straight Talk Law” information, please visit the website of Seattle, Washington Personal Injury and Wrongful Death Attorney Jason Epstein at www.straighttalklaw.com, where you can order free books on personal injury lawyers, Washington auto accidents, auto insurance, and other valuable legal information, offered as a public service by Mr. Epstein’s law practice in Seattle, Washington

As a Personal injury attorney in Seattle, Washington and founder of Teens Against Distracted Driving (TADD) I am frightened by the texting while driving epidemic and the number of fatal auto accidents it is causing. Last week Oregon was torn apart trying to find the driver in a fatal hit-and-run accident and now we come to learn it was yet another fatal case of texting while driving.

The hit- and-run driver that killed a Selem, Oregon man turned himself in to Oregon police a week after the fatal accident. On January, 27^th around 11:30 pm Salem resident Morales Singer was walking home from trivia at a local bar when he was struck by an oncoming vehicle on 47^th Ave NE in Salem, Oregon. The driver, now identified as 19-year-old Jake Montano, fled the scene with extensive damage to his Honda Accord- including missing the right side mirror and a broken headlight along with extensive damage to the front and hood.

Singer, a 37-year-old father of three, was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after emergency aid arrived. Police were on the lookout for the vehicle involved in the crash until February 1^st when Jake Montano turned himself in.

According to Montano he was driving at roughly 45 miles per hour when the accident occurred. Montano has admitted he struck Singer as a result of texting while driving.

As cell phone technology continues to grow and becomes more integrated in our lives the number of texting while driving accidents also continues to grow. More and more cell phone users are upgrading to Smartphone’s- bundling e-mails, calendars, text messages and navigation all into one device dramatically increasing the number of distractions. The only way to prevent these fatal texting while driving accidents is by putting the phone down!

I started Teens Against Distracted Driving to reach out to teens about the dangers of texting while driving, but now adults too are guilty of checking e-mails, fiddling with the navigation system etc- so I challenge everyone to take the pledge to not text while driving. Click on the image below to sign the pledge and receive your free TADD bracelet to remind you of your commitment.

Being an Everett auto accident attorney and Bellevue wrongful death lawyer it is my goal to help those injured or killed in severe auto accidents get justice, but with this comes facing the horrible fact that fatal auto accidents happen all too often. What is even more tragic is how many teens die every year in car crashes. In fact, the leading cause of death of teenagers is auto accidents and over 35% of these fatal auto accidents are caused by excessive speed.

Just before 10:30 am on February 1^st there was a 3 car accident in Bellevue that claimed the life of a high school student. The 17-year-old from Issaquah was driving northbound on I-405 just north of the Interstate 90 interchange when the accident occurred. The boy was driving his Dodge Neon in the left-hand lane, but decided to change lanes when the traffic in the lane in front of him slowed to a stop. He quickly moved toward the lane to the right of him when he hit the left-rear end side of a Chevrolet Suburban.  The neon lost control- rotating sideways where it was smashed by a Honda on the driver’s side.

The 17-year old Issaquah boy was quickly taken to Harborview Medical Center, but died from the injuries sustained in the accident. The driver of the Suburban was taken to Overlake Hospital in Bellevue for treatment of his injuries and the driver of the Honda only had minor injuries.

Police are investigating the fatal car crash, but they have stated that speed appears to have played a role in the crash.

The Issaquah teen was on his way to the Crysalis School in Woodenville when the accident happened. Traffic had been stalled due to a previous accident on the freeway.

My thoughts go out to all the people affected by this horrible tragedy.

Auto accidents are never fun, but for the victims of a hit-and-run accident the stress and anguish is taken to a whole new level wondering who will pay their medical bills. As aRenton personal injury lawyer working on Seattle car accident settlements I understand how quickly medical bills can pile up after a serious car crash. Hundreds of thousands even millions of dollars in medical care can quickly rack up when dealing with severe head or body trauma. A Yakima man faces these types of bills if the hit-and-run driver that crushed his car is not located.

Early this morning a Geo Metro was demolished in a hit and run accident, trapping the driver inside. The accident occurred on Interstate 82 just south of Ellensburg, Washington early February, 1^st just after 4:30 am. Emergency crews arrived at the scene to find Yakima resident Gregory Meyers trapped inside his Geo Metro.

According to police a Peterbilt semi truck hit the Metro while both vehicles were traveling West on the interstate. The metro suffered extensive damage as seen in the pictures below, but the semi truck fled the scene without so much as stopping.

It took emergency crews an hour to remove Myers from the crushed vehicle. He sustained a broken arm and broken leg in the incident and was transported to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle via helicopter for treatment.

Police are currently on the search for a Peterbilt semi truck with considerable damage- if anybody has any information about this incident they are asked to contact Detective Dave Snider with the Ellensburg WSP office at 509-925-5303.

Hit and run accidents are a motorist worst nightmare- and sadly the reason they usually occur is because the at-fault party is not insured. Auto insurance is required in Washington state, yet still thousands of people refuse to pay a premium, if is because of these drivers that PIP and UM/UIM insurance is so important. For more information onWashington State auto insurance and what types and levels of coverage you should have read my FREE book “The Truth About Buying Washington Auto Insurance” available FREE to Washington state residents through the link above.