There has been a recent cultural revolution in America on the issue of sexual assault and harassment. Women for years suffered from assaults and harassment by men who had dominion over their lives. What has caught the press attention recently has been the famous men who have used their position to sexually assault and harass women, but there are countless victims that have borne this treatment from supervisors in the workplace who were not famous and they needed to keep their jobs to pay their rent and put food on the table. Before the recent rash of sexual assaults become prominent, I was privileged to represent a group of women who withstood abhorrent conduct from their supervisor in a Fortune 500 company. This resulted in an extensive jury trial during which the defense tried to bring up every event in the lives of these women that might show they were “damaged goods” or they “asked for this”—- two typical but obnoxious defenses that have been raised for decades.

As the trial pressed on, I found that I actually gained strength from my clients, who came to court each day determined to withstand the onslaught of accusations. They fought through tears on the stand and the more they were attacked the more it back-fired in front of the jury. At one point during the trial, the judge called defense counsel to the bench as said, (I am paraphrasing): “my God, even a prostitute has certain rights and you are treating these women as if they were prostitutes. You are very close to the line and I would caution you that a jury is watching what you are trying to do.” Defense counsel ignored the warning and pressed ahead. When I delivered my closing argument I told the jury something like this: “You have had an opportunity to watch what happens to women in a courtroom who have the courage to stand up for their rights. You can reward the defense for the way they have conducted this trial but I ask you not to let them get away with it. Send them a message that in our county we don’t tolerate this conduct in a work environment and we don’t tolerate this kind of defense in a courtroom.”

The jury found in our favor and gave us a generous verdict. I say “us” because by the time the trial was over, I felt that we were one unit under attack daily. Indeed, in the defense counsel’s closing argument they attacked me and the psychiatrists who testified on behalf of the women for putting on what they considered was a fraudulent case. I have conducted many jury trials in my life but I can’t think of any verdict that was more satisfying, because the defense attacks were so widespread and relentless. I was so proud of the way my clients endured these daily attacks. Hopefully more trials will not be needed in the future and cases will resolve in fair settlements, but most important of all, hopefully the offensive behavior—now under a magnifying glass—will cease.

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Pictured are Caragh Fay, Thomas Fay, James Murphy & Ron Karp. All the lawyers (except Murphy, who practices in Chicago) live in Maryland. Karp and Fay have been members of the Maryland bar for over 45 years.

Md. lawyers help collect $24 million for 1998 bombing victims

By: Anamika Roy Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer June 19, 2017

On Aug. 7, 1998, members of terrorist group al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killing a dozen Americans and wounding thousands of people.

Earlier this month, three Maryland attorneys helped victims from that attack collect $24 million for their injuries in a legal battle that has been ongoing for 15 years.

Four years after the attack, which also involved simultaneous bombings in Tanzania, Ronald A. Karp, managing partner of Rockville-based Karp, Wigodsky, Norwind, Kudel & Gold, P.A., sought compensation for eight American victims and their families by suing Iran and the Republic of Sudan — countries whose governments were accused of supporting the attacks.

“It’s been a long hard slog to do it, but this first recovery for these victims was huge,” Karp said.

Thomas Fay and his daughter Caragh Fay, of Fay Law Group P.A. with offices in Washington and Maryland, and James Murphy from Adler Murphy & McQuillen LLP in Chicago were part of the team that helped the victims collect $24 million in compensation this month.

When Karp started working on the case, he did not expect it to take 15 years.

“I didn’t know it would take so long to go through all of this,” Karp said.

Suing foreign governments for compensation is difficult because the plaintiff has to prove the government enabled the attacks in some way. Karp and Thomas Fay, who have been members of the Maryland bar for over 45 years, started working on the case in 2002. In 2014, Judge John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia gave a $487 million judgment against Iran and Sudan.

However, getting that money to the victims and their families has been an uphill battle, further complicated by multiple lawyers representing Sudan withdrawing from the case, Karp said. The $24 million collected this month was the first of any settlement money the victims received since the 2014 judgement.

Through a program called the Fund for Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism, the Justice Department helps American victims of terrorist attacks collect judgments by seizing assets from countries whose governments are accused of enabling those attacks. Every year, the government attaches more assets and victims can apply to collect on their judgment.

One avenue Karp and his colleagues are pursuing is to sue a bank they believe al-Qaeda terrorists used to funnel money. However, it takes time to piece together assets and get that money to the victims. It’s highly unlikely the victims will ever get the entire $487 million.

“I can’t imagine being able to get the full amount of the judgment,” Karp said.

That said, the amount the team collected through the Justice Department will go a long way to help State Department employees, many of whom are living on federal workers’ compensation and are under financial constraints.

One of the team’s clients is a woman who lost her eyesight in the attack and will use her share of the collected money to move to a gated community, Karp said.

“She still won’t be able to get her sight back, but at least it’s compensation for this horrible crime that these terrorists committed,” he said. “The $24 million that we’re able to collect has really been able to change the lives of these victims.”

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A grown man is sitting across from my desk crying. He is well accomplished and can’t understand why he has lost focus in his life since hitting his head inside his car in an auto accident.  He can’t remember phone numbers he has known for years.  It takes him 5 times as long to do the tasks he did at work.  He thinks he has early dementia and can’t understand why, at the end of the day when he comes home, he starts weeping.  I know this man well from handling cases like his for decades, and even though I am not a doctor I know he has symptoms of a concussion.  Neurologists will use many terms to explain his dysfunction all of which vary with the severity: closed head injury, traumatic brain injury (TBI), post-concussive syndrome, diffuse axonal injury (DAI) and other names as well.  For the more catastrophic injuries the patient has had an intracerebral hemorrhage (bleeding) and swelling of the brain.  For the sake of simplicity, I will collectively refer to all this under the category of a brain injury caused by trauma.  Sometimes the trauma can cause a shearing of the neurons in the brain: too small to be seen with the naked eyes or CT scans and MRI’s but nevertheless causing serious dysfunction of the brain pathways.

The tests done at the hospital are frequently negative, unless he has a major injury such as a subdural hematoma or subarachnoid hemorrhage—-bleeding that can require emergency surgery.  Much of the time he has had all negative tests but he knows something is not right in his head.  He had headaches, is dizzy, memory loss he can’t quite grasp and he just seems slower than usual.  He is accompanied by his wife who tells me that since this accident, he has not been the same person. I explain that one reason is crying at home (as neurologists have explained to me) is that he is so frustrated by having to labor so hard to do the same tasks he did before, that his emotions overflow at the end of the day.   His private life is not only different but his work life may never be the same.  If he has a job that requires lots of focus and detail work, such as transposing figures or solving problems on a computer, his doctors will first give him six months to get better.  Most brain injuries resolve within that time, but if the symptoms persist, he will be followed for a year or two and usually after two years his doctors will tell him that his symptoms will be permanent.  Many companies will not wait that long to keep someone who can’t function—most of the time the victim is simply out of work.

The man sitting across from me is conflicted.  He doesn’t want anyone to know he has brain damage that can affect his ability to do his work.  He knows he will need to get more tests but he fears the results may eventually have to be disclosed to people who rely on him.

My job as his lawyer is to get him fair compensation for all that has been taken from him, including the ability to do his job well.

I also tell him that the insurance company against whom we will be making a claim will simply say he is exaggerating.  Unlike an x-ray showing a fracture to your hand, which is undeniable, someone can have a brain injury and will have entirely normal CT scans and MRI’s.  His emergency room record is one of the most important documents that can help prove his damages:  if it shows he lost consciousness, or complained of symptoms associated with a brain injury, that helps with proof in a court, but it is not definitive.  When you go to the ER complaining of a blow to the head the doctors perform a Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) exam and rate you from 1 to 15.   If you score high on that, (15 being the best), the insurance company will use it to say you were just fine, even though you can have a perfect score on the Glasgow Coma scale and still have a brain injury. Even if I have represented a patient who had a low score on the GCS, (8 or less) the insurance company will simply say it was a temporary condition.  Doctors use the GCS as a standard neurological tool to help them triage emergency room care but my experience is that insurance companies, in defending brain injury cases, come up with an argument for the GCS that will always try to minimize the injury.  (If it is high they embrace it, if it is low they assert is was just transient and argue that the patient will certainly get better).

The film CONCUSSION with Will Smith (and the documentary that was the basis for it: League of Denial) raised the level of understanding as to how people can suffer from a blow to the head and have the injury only show up in the most nuanced ways.  In the movie, which showed concussion injuries to football players, they could not even diagnose it until there was an autopsy which showed CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), which is an everyday term that means if you get hit in the head, your brain gets traumatized (just as it did in the example I gave above in an auto accident) and it causes “Encephalopathy”, which is a disease, damage and malfunction to your brain.  I am hopeful that since this film came out and so much attention was focused on football players who had concussions, people sitting on juries will better understand the problem of showing brain damage in a courtroom, when you do not have evidence of a massive bleed or someone sitting in a wheel chair who is unable to function.

There are sophisticated tests (other than CT scans and MRI’s) that can demonstrate a brain injury and most of them are expensive and will not be paid for by insurance carriers. So the challenge we have as lawyers is to find a way to show the truth about our client’s brain injury.   The defense, in my long experience, will always find a paid expert to say that the client is exaggerating, much in the same way they found experts to opine that smoking did not cause cancer, that seat belts would not save lives and that there is no connection to brain injuries in football players who go helmet to helmet with other players on a regular basis.  I am hopeful that with all the publicity brain injuries have received, the stigma of exaggeration will disappear and victims will be able to receive their fair and just compensation.  Our law firm has had and continues to have numerous brain injury cases and we will continue to fight for the rights of these victims.

*Ronald Karp is managing partner of the law firm of Karp, Wigodsky, Norwind & Gold, P.A. He has been practicing law for 44 years and is regularly selected by his peers for Best Lawyers in America, which lists the top 1% of lawyers in the United States and to the Top 100 lawyer lists published by the Washington Post in the Super Lawyers section of their Sunday magazine.  This list is selected by the voting of other lawyers and a blue ribbon panel of experts.  There are over 100,000 lawyers in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area.

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By Ronald A. Karp

I have been riding a bike since I was a child and have been representing folks injured on a bike for decades.   When I ask clients what they miss the most about being injured in a bike accident the answer is always the same:  getting back on the bike again and enjoying the special wonders that only regular riders experience.

Before we get into compensation for being injured on a bike, let me first describe what is so special about balancing life on two wheels: riding a bike.

What is there about biking that re-creates the wonder one first felt as a child?   That very first time I was able to balance without the use of training wheels and the sensation that I was actually going faster than my legs could normally take me, is a sense of wonderment that has never left the child in me.

There was this sensation that the wheels are turning in a greater ratio than they deserved to.  My prior experience was on a tricycle and as I peddled the big front wheel turned in the exact same ratio as my little legs pumping the wheel could muster.  It was one to one.  Like walking.  Like climbing steps.  But on the two wheeler, I was pumping pedals attached to a chain and the front wheel was suddenly going faster than the old one to one ratio I had known most of my life (up to the age of 4 or 5).

That feeling, that you are moving faster on the ground than walking or running and the sensation of seeing the ground disappear as it moves under you is one of the great wonders of childhood.  It is right up there with your first bite of ice cream, of putting your foot into the ocean and the first time you hear a melody that unaccountably lifts your spirits.

This feeling lasts into adulthood. How can this two wheel joy have lasted for so many decades?   I suspect it is for the same reason that hearing and seeing the ocean is still a great sense of wonder and relaxation:  It represents a sense of freedom.  A child is limited by how fast he can walk or run.  He is limited by the walls in his house or apartment.  Then one day he realizes he can move faster than he ever thought and while he certainly does not understand the physics, he knows something magical is happening when he appears to be defying the everyday laws of time and motion that has framed his life.

A child looks at the ocean and it seems to go on forever.  If he is from the city, as I was, he has never seen this far in his life without looking at the sky. He sees waves taller than he is, cresting with fine spray and crashing with exploding white foam.  He has never seen such power and wonder. And the air is so fresh and clean that it is nothing like he has ever experienced.

Is it any wonder that all kids fall in love with the beach?

Is it any wonder that they fall in love with a bike?

My love affair with a bike has lasted a lifetime.

Biking can be transcendental.  It can be invigorating and relaxing. It is a great green hobby.  It uses no fuel (other than what is provided by your body), it pollutes nothing. It is peaceful and quiet.  It takes better care of your feet, knees and legs than walking or running.

One recent crisp afternoon, when the fresh cut grass smelled great I was riding along a bike path in Rock Creek Park, one of the great and best kept secrets about our nation’s capital. Mothers were sitting next to the path on grass, eating apples with their children, and life had glided to such a slow and quiet pace, that the ride itself became spiritual.

Biking allows you to “go into the gap” —-that feeling of just floating along with total focus on the ride.  When it happens, there are so many gifts to behold: the beauty of nature, the gift of balance and just being alive to take it all in with all our senses functioning at levels we too frequently take for granted.  Biking slows down the pace of life and gives us a chance to see things we would miss in a car.  It gives us opportunities to recognize and appreciate the miraculous and magic moments that occur all around us.

Then suddenly all of this is taken away in split seconds.   One minute you are enjoying the gift of balance and then next minute you are in an ambulance heading for the ER.  Wondering if you will ever work again, fearful of the surgery that awaits you and also thinking that maybe your biking days—-one of the great joys in your life—are over.

It has been my experience that some cars just don’t respect the space of people on bikes.  The pass too closely, they assume bikes will yield the right of way to them, they look upon bikes as a nuisance that interrupts their day.   The same driver that would have respect for a pedestrian has little when that same person is riding a bike.

My job as a lawyer representing a biking victim is to find ways to compensate our clients for ALL that has been taken away from them.   Not just medical bills and loss of income, but for loss of enjoyment and for a life without pain.    A famous trial lawyer once said that true compensation involves focusing on what has been taken away and what our clients have been left with.

I approach each case with its unique facts and the way it has impacted my client’s life—-especially what has been taken away by a negligent driver.  And I know what a special and simple joy life is like on bicycle.

*Ronald Karp is managing partner of the law firm of Karp, Wigodsky, Norwind & Gold, P.A. He has been practicing law for 44 years and is regularly selected by his peers for Best Lawyers in America, which lists the top 1% of lawyers in the United States and to the Top 100 lawyer lists published by the Washington Post in the Super Lawyers section of their Sunday magazine. This list is selected by the voting of other lawyers and a blue ribbon panel of experts. There are over 100,000 lawyers in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia metropolitan area.

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