What do you do when you are driving in your car and find a deer standing in the roadway before you?

Deer cause many car accidents.  According to AAA of Michigan, deer were directly or indirectly responsible for approximately 60,000 car accidents last year in Michigan alone.   Hundreds of people every year are seriously injured or killed.  There are so many deer in Michigan that in some areas, such as the Upper Peninsula, young drivers are taught by Michigan State Police instructors what to do when they too will one day find a deer in the road. 

Bankruptcy Issues for when you are injured:
Unfortunately, there are many people in Michigan declaring bankruptcy these days, and serious car accidents can occur whether an economy is good or bad.  

How does a bankruptcy filing affect a person who has been injured in an automobile accident?
The most important advice I can give someone who has been injured in a car accident and who is considering whether to declare personal bankruptcy is to avoid filing bankruptcy if at all possible.  The reason is that your bankruptcy becomes an “asset” of the bankruptcy estate.  The bankruptcy trustee (not you, as the person injured in the automobile accident) will decide how much your legal case is worth and when to settle it.  The problem with the trustee holding control of your legal case is that his interests are not the same as yours. 

On December 4, 2007, the Michigan Supreme Court heard oral argument in Jones v. Olson.  This has many Michigan lawyers predicting an end for all but the most catastrophic car accident injury cases in this state.

Many personal injury lawyers already familiar with this divided Court have questioned why the Michigan Supreme Court would wish to grant leave on this case, except to obviously reverse the lower court decision.  The Court of Appeals had previously found that plaintiff Greg Jones, who was injured and disabled from work after his car accident for roughly six months, but who then made a very good recovery, should be allowed a day in court to pursue a claim for pain and suffering damages under Michigan’s automobile accident threshold law. 

Judges, you’ve got this Kreiner case all wrong. 
We need to take another look at this “threshold creep” in Michigan’s auto accident threshold law, where each “Kreiner casualty” seems worse than the last.  We have to look at some of these decisions, cases like Jones v. Jones or Gagne v. Schulte, that are leading to such shocking and absurd results. Things are simply getting out of hand.

Not just us lawyers who are completely bewildered.   
As of today, I’ve counted 200 or so unpublished Michigan automobile accident injury cases where the defendant insurance company has won, and 30 or so auto accident cases where the Plaintiff has won.