Richard N. Shapiro (Rick) is a personal injury trial attorney, American inventor, and international award-winning fiction author. One of his co-authored legal treatises was published in the American Jurisprudence “Trials” Law Encyclopedia.
We have reached the top five civil justice stories of 2018. This is Part II of Legal Examiner’s annual compilation of the 10 most important civil cases of 2018, created by Virginia Beach, VA attorney-author Richard N. (Rick) Shapiro and his research assistants, a year…
2018 was a big year for civil justice (and injustice). This top-10 lists highlights massive jury verdicts, including multi-million dollar pending lawsuits and verdicts in the field of personal injury, faulty products, dangerous medical devices, toxic substances, and other civil wrongs involving corp
Fentanyl has overtaken heroin and oxycontin as the leading cause of fatal drug overdoses in the United States. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers revealed this on Dec. 12, 2018, while also noting that the prescription painkiller claimed more lives than cocaine and meth.…
Imagine you are recovering from surgery. A doctor you don’t recognize tells you, “unfortunately, there were complications.” You and your family begin wondering if your selected surgeon did the surgery or whether a resident or intern may have done the part that went wrong. These…
Attacks by dogs hospitalize hundreds of North Carolinians each year. Family pets inflict the overwhelming majority of those injuries, which often require more than a tetanus shot and a couple of stitches. Under North Carolina law, dog owners have strict liability for the harm (and…
In early April 2018, jurors in Brunswick, New Jersey (NJ), made legal history by finding for the first time that asbestos in talcum powder products sold by Johnson & Johnson caused a plaintiff’s mesothelioma. The jury ordered the personal care products giant and one of…
Correlation is not causation, but the concomitant rises of smartphone use and deadly crashes involving pedestrians sure seem to be related. This is a top-line insight from Governors Highway Safety Association’s latest Spotlight on Highway Safety report, which estimates that, during 2017, 5,984 pedes
Fourteen automakers have announced even more vehicle models to add to the already massive Takata defective airbag recall list. This comes a month after Takata added an additional 3 million more vehicles which have faulty airbag inflators. These latest recalls now become part of what…
The North Carolina State Police reported December 12 that a driver in Gaston County fell asleep behind the wheel and caused a fatal accident. Police stated that the driver of a Dodge pickup truck, 33 year-old Jamison Rodgers, apparently fell asleep while driving south on…
One person died Jan. 31 when an Amtrak train carrying Republican lawmakers to an annual retreat collided with a truck at a railroad crossing and derailed near Crozet, Virginia. The White House has confirmed the train crash fatality. One person also was seriously injured. According to White…
Fentanyl robbed the word of two irreplaceable musical geniuses in less than 18 months. Prince unintentionally overdosed on a combination of fentanyl and the similar, though less-powerful opioid, U-47700 on April 16, 2016. Then, on October 22, 2017, Tom Petty experienced fatal cardiopulmonary arrest
In the wake of a deadly Amtrak passenger train derailment in Washington shortly before Christmas 2017, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that a long-mandated automated braking system would have prevented the deadly wreck. The agency has reached the same conclusion repeatedly since t
