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.

[music]

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.

[music]

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.

[music]

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...