Eric Turkewitz is contacted by the press with some frequency on personal injury matters. Often it is to assist with background information on the law so that stories are accurate and the public becomes better informed on legal issues.
Below are a few selections from times he’s been quoted:
New Jersey Law Journal (11/22/17) – City, State Will Have to Answer for Foreseeable Hazard in Claims Over Truck Attack:
Claims filed this week against the city and state of New York over the Oct. 31 truck attack on a bike path along the Hudson River are strong enough to survive a motion to dismiss, but whether those entities can be made to pay for injuries caused by a terrorist act is ultimately seen as a jury question, observers said.
The city and state could face liability from the truck attack because they had advance notice of vehicles venturing on to the pathway where eight people were killed and 12 injured, New York personal injury lawyer Eric Turkewitz said. That makes the terrorist attack a foreseeable hazard, and the path where the deaths occurred is small enough that the government defendants could be held liable, Turkewitz said.
Government entities can be held liable in New York for design defects that lead to accidents on roadways, Turkewitz said. The claims say no barriers and only minimal signage are in place to prevent motor vehicles from driving onto the pathway. The city might tend to assert in defense that it can’t be held liable for the acts of a terrorist, but that would be an issue for a jury to assess, he said.
Wall Street Journal (12/26/14) – Notable and Quotable (Opinion page)
Excerpting a significant part of this blog post: Will Google Cars Eviscerate the Personal Injury Bar?
Forbes (1/5/15) Personal-Injury Lawyer Gets Personal About Lawyers Who Sue Him
Eric Turkewitz is a personal-injury lawyer, the kind many Forbes readers would rather see out of business. He writes a popular blog that opposes tort reform and celebrates the power of juries to award his clients tens of thousands or millions of dollars in damages for medical malpractice and other sympathy-inducing personal tragedies.
So just listen to Turkewitz talk about the lawyers who sue him. Twice he’s been hit with lawsuits by people who didn’t like what he wrote in his blog, and he’s furious. Furious at the lawyers who sued him, furious at the legal system that allowed them to keep their cases going long after they should have been dismissed, and furious at judges for failing to sanction the lawyers who cost him so much time and money…
Lest you think Turkewitz is being two-faced when he complains about being on the receiving end of a lawsuit, let me assure you he is consistent on this topic. That’s one reason I read his blog. He calls out shoddy lawyering when he sees it, as well as shady ethical practices like trolling for clients after plane crashes and other tragedies.
Sometimes the most important word a plaintiff lawyer can learn, he said, is no.
U.S. News and World Report (4/3/15) Tesla’s Next Hurdle: Who’s to Blame if a Self-Driving Car Crashes?
Risks that could lead a driverless car to crash may include inability to function in rain, snow and fog, or inability to predict obstacles on a route. Judges in car crash lawsuits consider whether an accident resulted from a combination of factors caused by both the automaker and the driver, explains Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury attorney in New York who has handled auto accident and medical malpractice cases. When a judge rules they don’t ask whether a factor was “the cause” of an accident, but whether it was “a substantial cause of an accident,” he says.
David Goodman, who writes New York Online, an aggregation of news from many sources, bit on a claim by Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer and blogger, that he had been appointed official White House law blogger. Goodman tossed in a short item at the end of his April 1 post. Turkewitz wrote the next day that he had been hoping to catch political bloggers, “whose reputation is to grab any old rumor and run with it,” but instead bagged “the vaunted New York Times.”
Goodman, who said he knows he should have checked it out, especially on April Fool’s Day, said that because several prominent legal blogs also had the item, he gave it more credibility than he should have. What he did not know was that the other bloggers were in on the hoax. Corbett said the episode pointed up the risks of news aggregation and the need to rely on trustworthy sources.
Charlie Sheen got himself into a pickle. I know, you’re all shocked! The question we try to answer today: Just how big is his pickle?
The nature of his confession is he is HIV-positive, he has known this for four years and that while knowing he was HIV-positive he had sex with many women. This includes prostitutes and porn actresses. He claims that he told all the women about the HIV….
ABC News (6/13/07) Tearful Testimony in $54 Million Pants Lawsuit
A Washington, D.C. law judge broke down in tears and had to take a break from his testimony because he became too emotional while questioning himself about his experience with a missing pair of pants.
Administrative law judge Roy Pearson is representing himself in civil court and claimed that he is owed $54 million from a local dry cleaner who he says lost his pants, despite a sign in their store which ensures “Satisfaction Guaranteed.”…
“Frivolous lawsuits like this one are an embarrassment to the profession,” said attorney Eric Turkewitz, who writes a personal injury law blog.
“I see he has a claim for $500,000 in emotional damages. I don’t doubt that he has some emotional suffering, but I don’t think it’s related to the pants. I suspect he’ll be sanctioned.”
AARP News (May 2016) Counterfeit Drugs Are Flooding the Nation’s Pharmacies And Hospitals
Victims of black-market drugs face daunting legal obstacles. Patients must prove that the medication was compromised and that it physically harmed them. “One reason it’s hard is the evidence [in many cases] is destroyed as soon as it is injected or ingested,” says New York lawyer Eric Turkewitz. In 2006 he settled a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed sum on behalf of Timothy Fagan, a New York man who as a teenager suffered severe muscle cramps after an injection of counterfeit Epogen to treat anemia following a liver transplant. “You will see no uproar until a counterfeit drug kills 100 people,” Turkewitz says. “And it will happen eventually. You won’t see any public outcry until there are dead bodies.”
Mother Jones (6/13/07) When Tort Reformers Slip And Fall
So-called “tort reform” is one of the Republican Party’s favorite issues, and this administration in particular has done a lot to limit the power of employees and victims of government, industrial and consumer discrimination and negligence to bring lawsuits against employers and corporations…
Eric Turkewitz, who publishes the New York Personal Injury Law Blog, describes Bork’s lawsuit as “frivolous,” and you can read his reasons here.
Think Progress (12/27/14) Google Just Unveiled The First Fully Functional Driverless Car
Just before Christmas, Google announced the “first real build” of their self-driving vehicle, a button-nosed smart car that looks like it could’ve been a friendly police officer in Disney’s Cars’ movies. Driverless cars could savethousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone and also provide significant economic and environmental advantages. But the road to these benefits is full of technological and regulatory curves…
…
This shift in responsibility will be felt in the legal industry as well. Legal blogger Eric Turkewitz, a personal injury lawyer with the Turkewitz Law Firm in New York, wrote that while “the potential for error in such heavily software-dependent systems is extraordinary … the issue of lawsuits regarding the cars will, I think, be vastly overwhelmed by a huge reduction in collisions that result from the most common forms of human error.”
Turkewitz writes that aside from the obvious human-error associated with drunk driving, there are many other accidents due to failure to stop in time and changing lanes without looking — unfortunate events made more likely with the distractions of “email, texts, phone talk and GPS devices.”
