So, you are walking down the street, minding your own business. You are not on your phone, you are not listening to music, you are paying attention to where you are going and watching for traffic at crosswalks and driveways. A perfect pedestrian walking down the sidewalk in a perfect way. Then your toe catches on something and you fall forward to the ground. You look back and you see that the corner of the concrete slab of the sidewalk is much higher than one before it. Who is at fault? While a pedestrian is responsible for watching where they are going and paying attention, there is no requirement to constantly scan the ground for hazards. There are many factors […]

Insurance companies are in business to do one thing: make money. Laskin Balma Attorneys at Law in Sacramento CA has fought for its clients for many years. When the insurance company digs their heels in and refuses to offer a reasonable settlement, we go to war. We recently had an interesting case where our refusal to bend to pressure to settle for less than what a case was worth really worked to our client’s advantage. She had medical bills over $38,000.00. The third-party policy was only $100,000.00 and it seemed pretty reasonable to us expect to be offered the policy limits immediately. That was not the case. The insurance company refused to offer the policy limits and in fact made […]

The other day I was asked how to get an insurance company to stop calling. This young lady had been getting phone calls every day from three different adjusters from the same company. Once you hire an attorney, the calls should stop immediately. You can tell the adjuster you have hired someone and give them the attorney’s contact information and they should not call you again. Other than that, there really is no way to make them stop. There is a reason they keep calling. Adjusters get rewarded monetarily for settling claims quickly and under reserve. A reserve is the amount of money the insurance company sets aside to pay out a claim once a claim is filed. The company […]

Since the introduction of electric vehicles, many questions have been posed concerning their safety. The most prevalent concern seems to be fires. Because these vehicles use batteries there is an opportunity for what scientists call thermal runaway. Thermal runaway is when an increase in temperature changes the surrounding conditions in such a way that it leads to another increase in temperature and continues in that vein until the temperature becomes destructive, ie: causes a fire. In electrical engineering, thermal runaway typically means an increased current flow did not dissipate correctly, heating the electrode in the battery cells until a chemical reaction causes more heat and then ignites the electrolytes in the battery cell. Most fully electric vehicles have the type […]