Virginia & D.C. Car Accidents: In Which Court Should You File?

How do the court systems work in Virginia and D.C.? That’s the question we asked Doug Stevens, an attorney who has practiced law for 30 years and whose firm focuses on personal injury and car accident matters in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, to explain. Here’s what he told us:

• District of Columbia. In the District of Columbia, I can sue you for $5,000 in Small Claims Court. The laws of evidence are relaxed, which means I’m definitely going to get your medical bills into evidence before the judge and I’m almost certainly going to get your medical reports in when dealing with a Pro Se action. The defense lawyers will usually keep the reports out, but there’s a chance the rules of evidence are relaxed in the small claims division. If you sue for more than $5,000, you’re in Superior Court, where the filing fees are more and the other side can beg for a jury. In D.C, the defense can demand a jury, regardless of the amount sued for – which is a big pain in the neck.
• Virginia. In Virginia, you can sue for $15,000 in District Court, but we have what’s called a trial de novo provision, which means no matter what happened in District Court, you get to start all over again in Circuit Court. In a lot of ways, this means that the District Court system in Virginia is really a mirage. For example, last year we got a $15,000 verdict for a little girl, the other side appealed it and that verdict just didn’t exist. It became extremely difficult thereafter to convince the parents that they should settle for $10,000, which in fact was more like the fair market value of the case. I had to explain to them that the $15,000 verdict from a judge was really a mirage under Virginia’s trial de novo rules.
  Virginia also has what’s called the plaintiff’s parachute – which is a non-suit statute. That means the plaintiff can simply announce to the court that he is taking a voluntary non-suit anytime before a verdict is returned. At that point, everything stops. The plaintiff’s lawyer can go home and the plaintiff has six months to reinstate a cause of action, even if the statute of limitations has already run. In a substantial case, I want to have that non-suit “in my pocket” during the trial in case our crucial witness doesn’t show up.
  
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Virginia & D.C. Car Accidents: The Importance Of Adhering To Statutes Of Limitation

When you’re in a car accident, the law provides you with an opportunity to bring a lawsuit against the person, or persons, who injured you. However, each state sets time limits in which you can do so. Known as statutes of limitation, these time limits are important to adhere to – or you may risk losing the chance for your day in court.
Attorney Doug Stevens
Doug Stevens, an attorney who has practiced law for 30 years and whose firm focuses on personal injury and car accident matters in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, knows which statutes of limitation apply like the back of his hand. He explained how these limitations are applied in the District of Columbia and Virginia:

• District of Columbia. In the District of Columbia, you have three years to file suit for negligence. Of course, if you represent a minor, the three years doesn’t start to run until his 18th birthday. That changes when the accident involved a wrongful death – and only a fool would wait more than a year to file a wrongful death case in the District of Columbia, but again, when someone dies in the District of Columbia, there are two causes of action. There’s a wrongful death action and a survival action. It has been held that a survival action can be filed after a year goes by, but it would be unwise to do so, absent special circumstances.
• Virginia Virginia is the trickiest of the three jurisdictions that I practice in because in Virginia, you have two years to file suit for injury, which is a full year less than Maryland or the District of Columbia. However, you have five years to sue for property damage. If you split a cause of action and take that action to verdict, you are barred from subsequently bringing the cause of action on the other part of the claim.
  What do I mean by that? What I mean is that if you sue me for bodily injury and get a verdict for that and then subsequently sue me for property damage, I would be successful in saying to your lawyer that he or she should not have split your causes of action. Since the property damage arose out of the same occurrence, he or she should have brought the property damage action in the personal injury suit – even though there was a separate five-year statute of limitations on property damage. So, this comes into play when someone is only suing for property damage.

Don’t miss the deadline
Stevens can’t stress the importance of not missing the deadline enough. He says that he even gets calls from his colleagues sometimes because, unlike him, they’ve missed the date. He explained:

I had a colleague that mailed the suit in, but mailed it to the wrong address and it wasn’t filed. I was one of his first calls because he was lamenting. I explained to him that although he had given up his client’s injury claim in the case, the property damage piece was actually worth more than the injury claim. He was overjoyed to realize that he still had a property cause of action.”
In addition, there’s another issue that comes up when you’re disengaging from representing a minor. Let’s suppose I’m representing you for your three-year-old injury claim. Do I tell you that you are free to wait 15 years to file a claim? Only a fool would wait 15 years to file a claim and risk an adverse witness disappearing, but that’s the law. That’s the rule and it gets very complicated.

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Virginia Car Accidents: What Is Contributory Negligence?

Liability for car accidents in Virginia is based on contributory negligence – a term which is often misunderstood. In a recent interview, Doug Stevens, an attorney who has practiced law for 30 years and whose firm focuses on personal injury and car accident matters in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, explained this type of liability.
VA Liability
Virginia is a negligence and contributory negligence state, according to Stevens, a legal theory that generally prevents a party from recovering for damages if he or she contributed in any way to the injury. In Virginia, the contributory negligence of the claimant must be a proximate cause of the accident – which means that it was the substantial cause of the accident. Stevens provided some insight:

In the old days, when comparative negligence came along, a lot of people thought it was going to be a much better system because people had been faced with the heartbreak of being only a small percentage negligent for an accident and having the other person being severely negligent. In that case, the victim ended up with nothing.
The idea came along that if a case was worth $100,000 for a broken arm and the plaintiff was 20 percent liable, then the jury could reduce the amount of the reward from $100,000 to $80,000. It sounds like a wonderful system, but unfortunately in practice, it’s turned into a system whereby people yearn for the old days of contributory negligence instruction.

Stevens says that the main reason for that is that the proper instruction and ruling of a judge is that the plaintiff’s contributory negligence has to be a substantial or proximate cause of the accident. So that gives the jury the chance to actually do justice and then you don’t have to be faced with the diminution of your verdict. Virginia is part of only a handful of states that continue to use contributory negligence, so if you’ve been involved in a car accident in Virginia, make sure to retain an experienced Virginia car accident attorney in order to maximize your recovery.

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State should pass reform

North Carolina has been among the four remaining places in the US which enforce this law. It has been costly financially and emotionally to accident victims and their families in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington.
All other states have had for a long time No Fault or Contributory Fault laws that have protected the citizens of their states from being denied their claims.
I know about this from personal experience. On Sept. 1, 2005 I was hit by a car as I tried to cross an intersection in Hendersonville. Even though the light was with me the insurance company said I contributed to my own accident because I risked crossing an intersection that had no marked crosswalk.


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