Boston Injury Lawyer Blog

Our Massachusetts legal malpractice blog, http://www.boston-injury-lawyer-blog.com/legal-malpractice/, tries to give updates to the law. In addition, we have undertaken a study of all of the lawyer disciplinary matters in Massachusetts for 2008-2010 which was published in our website. That study reviews all 57 admonitions and breaks them down into the types of cases, years in practice and discusses the aggravating and mitigating factors. We reported that study on our legal malpractice blog on January 12, 2011.

In our new study, published today, we review the more serious Board of Bar Overseers cases. The cases we review are the ones in which an attorney in Massachusetts loses his or her license to practice law. In the 116 cases of public reprimands, term suspensions, indefinite suspensions, we examine what Massachusetts lawyers did to deserve the severe penalties.

The study examines all 116 severe discipline cases from 2010, analyzing the data using the following criterion: years in practice, fields of practice, severity of punishment, type of violation, severity of punishment, aggravating and mitigating factors, and others. The results are published on our website in the Legal Malpractice News section.
We have divided the investigation into six articles, each of which is, or will be, published on our website today:

1. Getting Disbarredbegins with the "juiciest cases" including those involving serious crimes, crimes that make headlines, and those involved with stealing client monies.
2. You're Suspended! discusses the suspension cases and the reasoning for the terms of suspensions, including why there are so many "year and a day" suspensions.
3. Failing to Learn from Experience reviews the disciplinary cases such as disbarment, suspension and public reprimand and compares the recent incident to the lawyer's history. We review "experienced lawyers" and "highly experienced lawyers" and see if we can differentiate when it comes to punishment.
4. The Punishment Fits the Crime?, to be published in the future, discusses cases where the resulting sanction seems either too harsh or too lenient for the underlying facts.
5. Private or Public Consequences, to be published in the future, discusses the distinctions between private sanctions (such as reprimands and admonitions) and public sanctions (such as public reprimands).
6. Data Mining, to be published in the future, is a statistical analysis of the raw data, with an eye toward spotting trends in bar discipline.

Undertaking studies such as these are the result of long and laborious reviews of hundreds of documents. We want to thank our extraordinary diligent researcher, Boston Attorney Ezra Reinstein, of The Reinstein Firm, for his focus, his attention to detail, and his hard work in this project. In addition to working in the area of corporate organization and litigation, Attorney Reinstein practices in the national and internationally growing field of renewable energy law.

The no texting law, formally called the Massachusetts Safe Driving Act, went into effect on September 30, 2011. A Boston car accident lawyer ponders whether it is working; from October 1, 2010 to May 30, 2011, there were 733 citations in Massachusetts for texting while driving. This amounts to approximately 3 per day throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In addition, 41 drivers under 18 have received citations for operation of cell phones.

Earlier this year we reported on the death of a Haverhill man, allegedly by a teenager texting while driving in Massachusetts. While that criminal case remains unresolved in the Massachusetts courts, the question remains: Is the law working as a deterrent? Are police officers able to enforce it? Of course, one problem for police officers is differentiating between texting and dialing. Is there any physical difference between texting a short message and dialing a phone number?

The ban on texting in Massachusetts forbids teenagers under 18 from using mobile phones and forbids all drivers in Massachusetts from texting, but allows adults the use of cell phones in motor vehicles. For those under 18, the ticket results in an automatic 60 day license suspension. The law was passed in 2010.

According to the National Highway Safety Administration study, 5,474 deaths in 2009 were as a result of distracted drivers. This is 16% of all motor vehicle fatalities. 995 of those deaths were a direct result of cell phone use. In addition, NHSA studies show that 20% of all motor vehicle collisions are as a result of distracted driving. Furthermore, the Naturalistic Driving Study undertaken by NHSA showed that over 22% of all crashes AND near crashes were associated with distracted driving.

The American Automobile Association of Southern New England, a proponent of the ban, says emphasis needs to be put on education. A study undertaken by the AAA Foundation concluded that 94% of drivers found it unacceptable to text while driving.

One study says that 11% of all drivers are talking on a cell phone at any given moment. That is more than one out of every 10 driver on the roads in Massachusetts!

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a technology and law program. The director, Nicholas Ashford, is urging new laws and new technologies to resolve the problem of the dangerous nature of cell phone use in vehicles. .

A proposed federal law, The Safe Drivers Act of 2011, filed by New York Representative to Congress Carolyn McCarthy, would require states to ban cell phone use while driving, except for emergencies. Could the federal government be today where Massachusetts was last summer when we reported on the upcoming ban on texting in Massachusetts?

The bottom line perhaps, as always, is economics. Text messages are sent approximately 4.2 billion times per day, resulting in over $60 billion in revenue for the phone companies. Do they have a vested interest in lobbying against anti texting laws? Further, 18-25 year olds are a disproportionate population of texters: they text 100 times per day! This is 95% of all texting. They spend a disproportionate amount of money to cell phone companies.