The holidays are here. More people are on the road and that means more accidents. We cover some of the safe holiday driving tips to try to help our San Antonio neighbors avoid crashes and make sure everyone stays safe on the Texas roadways.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast where we not only talk about what's going on at our firm, we also talk about ways to not need a law firm like mine, safety tips, how to live a safer life, how to drive safer, how to be safer on the roads and in your home and in the work. Today, we're talking about holiday driving. It's right around the corner and actually, Thanksgiving holiday is already behind us. If you drove then and you're fine now, good for you.

We're glad you were able to drive safely. As the Christmas holidays approach, we hope you also drive safely. The CDC, we all know a lot about CDC now that we have lived through this pandemic, but they also do injury prevention and control and they've released some tips for holiday safe driving. They also started by pointing out that it looks like 2020, we'll see a 7% increase in deaths, roadway fatalities which is surprising to everybody because actually, there were less miles and time driven by people in 2020.

In 2019, they said there was about 36,000 people killed in crashes. I expect it to be closer to 39 in 2020. Even less people on the road has not led to less traffic fatalities. Be careful out there. San Antonio has a lot of roads, a lot of people on the roads, and the holidays just make for even more traffic. Some safety tips they recommend for everybody to follow.

Number one is, the real obvious one, is do not drive when you are impaired. In 2019, alcohol-impaired driving was part of- or contributed to over 10,000 crashes in the United States. That's not just alcohol, drugs, marijuana. If you're on medication in which you shouldn't drive, don't drive, call a taxi, call an Uber, have a friend drive. Number one tip that we've been hearing our whole lives. Remember it and plan ahead.

Also, distractions. That's the new thing that's leading to a lot of crashes that we see here at our law firm, a lot of people in San Antonio. If you're just driving around or sitting on the phone, one of the things the CDC points out that- if you are receiving a text message and reading it, driving at 55, that you are likely keeping your eyes off the road for almost the distance of a football field.

Five seconds not looking at the road is almost the length of a football field at 55 miles an hour. Just remember, put your phone down, pull over if you need to use your phone. Also, check the weather. Us in San Antonio saw one of the worst traffic backups mass casualty events. It's probably the worst that I've ever seen or heard of was the Fort Worth pile-up last year with the ice on the road.

I have hit ice in Fort Worth before. It is a very scary thing to hit that unexpectedly. Check the road safety tips, check the weather on the road. Make sure before you head out, you got a plan. Make sure you know what to do. If you do hit bad weather, get a hotel, stay the night, try to avoid it. Some child passenger safety tips they recommend. Make sure your kids are in the age-appropriate seatings whether it's a car seat or a booster seat, make sure the seat belts fit them properly.

There's a lot of analysis that goes into properly restraining a child in a vehicle. Make sure you're up on that and make sure you've got the right booster or car seat. Make sure you take off their...

Your San Antonio Personal Injury Law Firm, Hill Law Firm, has been very busy the second half of 2021. From new cases, to settlements, to community involvement, we have a lot to share. This short update covers mostly the injury lawsuits that have settled recently. Sexual assault, on the job, car wrecks, and other cases have been part of our recent settlements.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: Welcome back to Hill Law Firm Cases. We haven't had an episode in a while. I wanted to update everybody on what's going on over at our law firm. First, happy holidays, happy Thanksgiving, and a Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah, and whatever you celebrate, we hope you have a good holiday. We wanted to update everybody on what we've been up to. The firm has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of months. We've been very busy from a work side, from a staffing side, from all types of things going on.

It's a very busy time of the year as it relates to lawsuits. It's also very busy as it relates to our involvement in the community and our work with nonprofits. We recently attended Restore Education, big fundraiser, a spelling bee in which me and Gabriel from the Hill Law Firm were able to take home first place. It was a lot of fun, but we've also been involved in zoo activities and San Antonio Bar Association activities, and other fundraisers.

It's important for us to be involved in our community, but not just from some of the vanity type charities and where people want to put their names on, but real small charities that need the help and need donors and need people who can put in hours to help. We're really involved in those as well. I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we've been going through in the last couple of months in terms of our cases. What kind of cases we've been working on, how those cases have been turning out for us, and I think it's good to just start and walk through some of the settlements we've had over the last 45 days.

Some of them have been real victories for our clients and for our law firm and for the justice system as a whole. To start, we recently settled a case against a major insurance company that really had in bad faith and in a really bad way treated our client poorly. She was rear-ended in a car crash in San Antonio. No fault of her own. The other driver said she was messing with her cup of coffee. When she rear-ended our client, our client ended up requiring a shoulder surgery.

Now she had had a shoulder procedure just months before this. We had imaging and doctor's notes and everything showing that she was fully healed before this crash, but the insurance company, as they tend to do, lodged frivolous defense that was trying to allege that even though we had records and notes and doctors saying she was fully healed and fine with complete range of motion and no pain prior to the crash, they tried to say that the previous issue is what required her to have surgery after this crash.

They hired a doctor who charged about $17,000 to agree with them. I don't think he was in any way impartial. In his deposition, he said that he had given 20 to 40 depots over the last three years, but whenever he was pushed and we got documents on it, he had actually been deposed over 120 times over the past couple of years. This was a real victory because after the deposition of this expert, we increased our demand from our demand at mediation, and that's pretty abnormal when the insurance company will agree to accept an increased demand. We settled it for more than we were willing to...

Recently, H.E.B. grocery stores have announced a massive recall of millions of pounds of chicken products due to the risk of listeria contamination. Listeria is a deadly pathogen that can cause illness and is of particular risk to pregnant women. If you have purchased these possibly listeria contaminated HEB chicken products, return them immediately. If you ate one and feel ill, seek medical attention now.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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There are not many law firms in San Antonio that handle as many food poisoning cases as we do and we have. Probably the most recent largest food poisoning lawsuit in San Antonio revolved around a outbreak at Pasha in San Antonio. That involved hundreds of people who were injured and became sick as a result of eating contaminated food. That case recently resolved. Recently in the news was a story that HEB was recalling some 8.5 million pounds of ready-to-eat Tyson Food chicken products that included some of their Meal Simple products.

If you live in San Antonio or you shop at HEB, you know what these Meal Simples are. They're ready-to-eat meals, you buy them and heat them up. Also, included in the recall, were some Tyson grilled chicken breasts, fajita chicken, grilled and ready pulled chicken, a bunch of Tyson products, a bunch of Meal Simples to include Meal Simple buffalo chicken, pepper trio chicken, barbecue chicken, curry chicken.

Then even some of their SoFlo products, which is pizza, their buffalo chicken pizza, and their crustless Buffalo chicken pizza had been recalled.

They've all been recalled as it relates to a potential outbreak of Tyson chicken with a pathogen known as Listeria. You may know of Listeria from the Blue Bell recall a few years back that almost shut down Blue Bell. Listeria is a really nasty illness. Listeria can and does kill hundreds of people in America a year.

It's something that can be through proper food handling techniques eliminated or very, very limited from contaminating food. One of the bad things about Listeria is that it can be a very, very deadly, and very dangerous sickness specifically for pregnant women. Pregnant women are 10 times more likely than other people to get a Listeria infection.

On top of that, it can cause all kinds of complications with the pregnancy and really anybody who would be at risk from other illnesses, older people, people with weakened immune systems, but in particular, pregnant women have a real risk with listeria. Some of the facts include that pregnant Hispanic women are 24 times more likely than the general population to get a Listeria infection. This is straight from the CDC website.

According to the CDC is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness or food poisoning in America and that approximately 260 people die per year. What we know right now is that HEB has taken on upon themselves to withdraw some and recall some 8 million pounds of chicken. If you have any of these products, you need to throw them away or go back to HEB and get a refund. If you think you have eaten some of them and you feel sick, please go to the doctor.

Food poisoning is something people talk about like it's a tummy illness, but in reality, food poisoning is very dangerous and can kill people and does kill people. If you think you have been part of the Listeria HEB food poisoning outbreak and you'd like to seek counsel, please reach out to us. if you have not been injured by this, but have some of the products, call HEB, get a refund, and let them properly dispose of any products you have.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We'll try to keep you...

Vehicles can be very dangerous places for children. A lot of the dangers are unknown or less publicized. In this series, we are trying to cover and discuss some of the most common dangers in vehicles for San Antonio and Texas residents.

Transcript:

Justin Hill, San Antonio Injury Lawer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin: Welcome to another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases where we talk about what's going on at the Hill Law Firm, but we also talk about ways to keep yourself and your family safer on the roadways, on the job, in everyday life. One of the things we want to talk about today is keeping our kids safe in the vehicles. If you get on the internet, there's all kinds of information about properly installing and fitting car seats and children's helmets or bicycles, all types of information about how to increase the safety of your child in a range of environments and in a range of situations.

One of the things we want to talk about today is some of the more uncommon, I'll say, but very serious dangers associated with vehicles that we typically hear in the one-off story, the tragic story that you hear in the news and think, "That couldn't happen to me," but are real dangers and really happen to normal people doing their best every day.

In San Antonio, one of the things that people know about our city is it's very hot. You come around the San Antonio River Walk during the summer holiday when you get a lot of families down here going to SeaWorld, and I still look around and think, "Jeez, how is this a holiday for some people?" Because I'm very hot-natured, and I sweat, so I do not enjoy being out those really hot two or three months during the summer.

One of the things to consider in those hotlines or really all the time of the year, especially in South Texas, where it never gets too cold, is the risk of heatstroke. People talk about this oftentimes, and you hear about this in the media where people leave a dog or leave a child, unfortunately, in a vehicle, even for a short amount of time, and it can lead to heatstroke.

It's one of the leading causes of non-crash-related causes of death for children, and it can happen when kids are left in a hot car alone, and it doesn't take long to leave them in there for the vehicle to get so hot that their core body temperature gets too hot, and it can just overwhelm their little bodies. For example, the inside temperature of your car can rise almost 20 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 minutes.

If it's 100 degrees outside, you're talking, it's 120, 130, within 10, 15 minutes. Once a child's body temperature gets above 104, it's a very bad deal, and once it gets above 107, it can be fatal. These are really serious concerns. There's lots of things that we need to think about. We're going to talk about a few of those things, but one of them is just habit. As it relates to your vehicle, get in the habit of checking all of your seats before you lock the door and walk away. Make sure that you keep your vehicle locked if you have young children.

3 out of 10 heatstroke deaths in vehicles involve children just crawling into a vehicle and accidentally closing themselves into it. It's not being left. Almost 30% are preventable just by locking your car and keeping your keys away from your children. Third, pay attention to other vehicles you see. If you see a child or a dog, in my opinion, in a vehicle in a hot day or, really, any day, make sure to call the authorities if it looks like, or you even suspect a slight risk that the child could be in danger.

Never leave your kid in the car. Even if you just

On this episode, we discuss the use of seatbelts in Texas. The statistics, the law, and the campaign to increase usage are discussed. In San Antonio, it is important that everyone follows the Click it or Ticket campaign when possible. We cover some interesting details about seatbelt usage.

Transcript

Justin Hill, Injury Lawyer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast where we typically talk about what's going on at our law firm here in San Antonio, Texas. We talk about our cases, we talk about results, we talk about personnel and just good things that are happening as well. One thing we really try to focus on as well is safety. We're a law firm that represents people injured through no fault of their own, in most cases. We're in a practice area where if people, companies, government agencies enforced and implemented safety procedures, we'd be out of business.

That's the long-term goal of our industry, to regulate safety such that it becomes economically responsible and the right thing morally for businesses and people to do. For example, automotive safety has increased significantly over the last 20 or 30 years in large part due to lawsuits. Everybody's familiar with Ford, Firestone and some of those lawsuits, but everything from airbags to rollover safety to the strength of your roof to the way tires are manufactured now, all of those things have been affected for the better through lawsuits and litigation forcing industry to be held responsible when they either take shortcuts or just ignore safety altogether.

Too often and many of those industries, the marketing department had more say than the safety people. Did a feature sell was more important than did it save lives. If you've been driving around Texas, you know that our state also works to improve road safety in the state of Texas. Just here in San Antonio, driving around, you see a lot of billboards talking about the number of fatalities on the roadway and injuries on the roadway.

Click It or Ticket campaign, it's one of the things we're going to talk about today. In preparing for this, a statistic that really stood out to me as shocking is that November 7th of 2000, more than 20 years ago, was the first or was the last day in Texas in which there was not a roadway fatality as a result of an automobile accident or some sort of accident on the roads. As a result of that, Texas has taken up the Click It or Ticket campaign and not as a direct result but due to the fact that our roads have a long way to go to be safer, one of the things that state of Texas has done is create and implement this Click It or Ticket campaign.

It is passed and pushed by the Texas Department of Transportation and according to NHTSA, which is the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They said that the Click It or Ticket initiative in Texas is estimated to have saved over 6,000 lives, prevented over 100,000 injuries and saved Texas almost $25 billion since the campaign began just 18, 19 years ago. It's been a highly successful campaign. As the run-up to the new year, the state of Texas renewed their push and published a lot of data to talk about why wearing your seatbelt remains a very important piece of contributing to roadway safety.

It reduces the risk of dying in a crash by 45% for people in the front seat and it reduces the risk of dying in a pickup truck crash by 60%. Mostly as a result of rollover vehicles being much more prevalent in pickup truck accidents. Through some data and analysis, the state of Texas said that more than 90% of Texans...

Join us to hear about some of the dog bite and dog attack cases we are currently handling at Hill Law Firm. Both involve our San Antonio neighbors being attacked and injured by dogs that were not properly restrained or handled.

Transcript:

Dog Bite Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill, and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing what we have going on at our firm, safety information, general information about our cases, and really just whatever I think will be helpful for our listeners, helpful for our industry, and helpful for you and your family just from a safety perspective. If you keep up with our law firm, either on social media or through this podcast, you know that I love dogs. We have Winston, he's been my dog for 12 years, we even have a Meet-the-Team episode on this podcast with Winston. It was done as a joke, but also he's part of the team. He's in the office quite a bit.

He's my best friend and it's great that I have an office where I can bring him in. When we bring him in, we're careful with him. He's a nice dog, we know he's a nice dog, but when he's outside, he's on leash. I make sure that I monitor him around people. If I'd ever seen him show any sign of aggression, I would not let him be around people, he would just be sitting in my office with the door closed with me and probably leashed or something. Luckily, he is not one of those dogs, he's a good dog, goes around and gets belly rubs.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have dogs that aren't like him. My personal views aside on why people keep dangerous or aggressive dogs is neither here nor there, but people do have them. For many reasons, there are duties under the law by which they have to keep them leashed, safe, away from people. Texas actually has causes of action by which you can file a lawsuit against somebody who doesn't maintain their dog in the correct way. For example, Texas has a cause of action, which is a way to sue somebody, there's a cause of action for negligent handling of animals.

If you can prove the defendant was the owner or the possessor of an animal, and we've seen that before, we've had people that say, "Well, I didn't own it, I was just babysitting the dog." Well, Texas doesn't care. If you're a owner or possessor of an animal, you owe a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent that animal from injuring others. If you can prove they breached that duty of reasonable care, you can hold them responsible for any injuries that they caused. You see this often, for example, where somebody has a dog that, has either been aggressive or bit somebody before, they have house guests over and the dog bites somebody.

They weren't reasonable on allowing a dog that had a history to be around people and injure them. Or you have instances in which a dog has a history of getting out of the yard and attacking people. Well, the fact that it got out the 10th time is enough for us to hold them responsible, not because they knew it was going to attack but because they knew it could get out of the yard and then all bets are off if it was going to attack. There's also causes of action under the law for what's called negligent per se. If you can show that the dog owner violated a law or city ordinance or municipal code related to a dog, you may be able to hold them responsible under those provisions.

For example, in Texas, in San Antonio, there's a leash law that if you have a dog it needs to be on a leash, and we've sued many people

Damond Garza has been a defense and a plaintiffs attorney in San Antonio for almost 20 years. He has tried over 40 cases to juries and leads San Antonio's trial lawyer association. He is a good friend and offices next to us at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. All right.

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Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. Today, I've got Damond Garza with me. Damond is a lawyer in San Antonio, a friend, and he's also a lawyer that we work with on some cases. He is the current president of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association and his reign ends tomorrow, right?

Damond Garza: I think officially on the 21st, actually.

Justin: He's also a stickler for technicalities as you will learn. I asked Damond to come on and talk about practicing law. Really, the point of these has been younger lawyers. That's been the thought process and that's been the response from people. When I tell you who will respond about you being on here, then you'll understand. You'll be like, "Oh, okay. I understand your audience now." You're not the first SATLA president I've had on there.

Damond: That makes me a little-

Justin: Second.

Damond: -less special feeling, but that's okay.

Justin: First [unintelligible 00:01:22], I mean. I think that's what they say in that one show. Javier was on. I think he's the only one that would have been SATLA president. Bill Marler was on. There's been books written about him. Mikal Watts was on. He's been indicted and has a book and movie coming.

Damond: No books or movies based on me yet, unfortunately-

Justin: Indictments?

Damond: -or fortunately. No indictments that I'm currently aware of.

Justin: I think you would know. What is SATLA?

Damond: SATLA a local trial lawyers association that is comprised of a little bit over 400 members these days. Primarily lawyers here in the Bexar County area, but we have a good contingency out of South Texas and we have members really spread as far as Alaska, even because it's a group of lawyers who represent folks, who represent people against companies, organizations, insurance companies who tend to have a lot more power and influence in the courts. We represent those folks against those powerful folks whenever they suffered a loss, injury, death, economic loss, something like that.

We put our minds together to share information, to help each of us better represent our clients. The folks who usually defend injury cases have large organizations, they share information to help strengthen their defenses. We try to pool our resources to better combat against those forces who would otherwise deny the availability of the courts to regular people who have suffered a loss.

Justin: San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association is not limited to San Antonio lawyers. I think there used to even be in Alaska person.

Damond: We still have a very active member from the State of Alaska, we've got people from the East Coast, the Midwest, the Southeast, and everywhere far-flung in between.

Justin: A very robust idea and document sharing through our Listserv, but the rules are just lawyer and do not regularly represent insurance companies. Is that basically the...

Texas trucking crashes and commercial motor vehicle accidents are a product of a booming transportation and oil and gas industry. We discuss some of the lies and dishonesties about these crashes being used to push tort reform.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Two professors at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway completed research recently using hair and urine samples for drug testing, and they were also studying whether hair drug testing has any racial bias to it. One of the things they found was that if we move to hair drug testing instead of urine, more than 300,000 truckers would be removed from the roadway. They would be unable to pass their drug test because they will have used illicit drugs in whatever time allowed to show up on a hair drug test.

The authors were asked to do this by a trucking industry association because the trucking industry associations were considering hair drug testing. This really shocking finding came out of their research that basically said that urinalysis is insufficient to really pick up illicit drug use after some amount of time. If we really want to crack down on people who think it's okay to drive 80,000-pound vehicles and also use drugs that we should use hair analysis.

Now, the obvious import for the industry is we can't lose 300,000 drivers overnight. What would we do? Where would we find those 300,000 people to make up for those jobs? That would likely mean they'd have to raise wages and make their jobs more appealing. The researchers went on to talk about how all those people should be pulled off the road, and they don't care what the industry has to do to fix that problem. That it's really just so reckless for trucking companies to have this information. To know that if they did a hair test that they would find some of their truckers were using drugs or alcohol, and they still don't do it.

This is a study that came out this year, just six months ago. This is really important right now because what's happening in Texas is a coalition of trucking companies and trucking industry trade groups, and highly most likely also insurance companies are pushing for reforms of our legal industry so that they're held less accountable when they cause crashes. Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the trucking association here in Texas have teamed up, and they say that lawsuits and people injured on the road are putting them out of business. Texas doesn't even have close to the highest trucking insurance premiums, but the trucking industry is saying we can't afford these premiums so we have to get legislative changes to our legal system.

It's worth noting that they're not discussing changing the way insurance is handled in Texas. They're not discussing changes to their own industry that allows for a lot of trucking crashes in Texas that involve texting and driving, alcohol-related driving, and lots of really egregious gross negligence. It is criminal, but almost homicidal behavior. If you were behind an 80,000-pound vehicle and you're texting and driving or drunk, you know that you've got a really high likelihood of hurting somebody or killing somebody. But the industry isn't trying to address that. What they want to do is say, "Hey, legislators. Please shield us from lawsuits because we're not self-regulating," which is leading to a lot of bad lawsuits and a lot of injured and killed Texans too that people forget to talk about, so they want the legislator to fix it.

Just for some background information, Texas has had an explosion in the oil and gas industry which has led to an explosion in the support industry for that, supporting oil and...