Two Milwaukee-based law firms, Hupy & Abraham and the McNally Law Offices, have been gathering up vehicle-crash police reports in the famously litigation-friendly Illinois counties east of St. Louis, and then soliciting persons named in the reports to file injury claims. “Some local police departments, including Belleville, Edwardsville, O’Fallon and the Madison County Sheriff’s Department,” have resisted the demands, based on worries about citizen privacy and identity theft, or have sought to charge for per-report access, which would discourage mass scooping up of names. The McNally firm, however, “sends a copy of a letter from Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office, which states the police have to allow viewing of the reports, at no charge.” (Brian Bruegemann, “Ambulance chasing? Lawyers zero in on metro-east clients”, Belleville News-Democrat, Sept. 28). Ron Miller at Maryland Injury Lawyer says the practice contributes toward giving the plaintiff’s bar a bad name, and corresponds with attorney Michael Hupy whose firm figures in the story. We covered the phenomenon earlier here and here.
Related posts
In chasing clients; lawyering vs. privacy; Madison County; police; Wisconsin
Anecdote: got rear-ended in 2002 and had a credit-card looking business card solicitation from P.I. attorney on my doorstep the very next day. It was a little slimy but I must confess, enterprisingly efficient.
Cops and rescue workers should just hand out lawyer’s cards at accident scenes.*
*Im positive that this has happened before.
forive me if im mistaken (im not going to get into the ethics of this) but arent these reports public record?
forgive i mean
“Ron Miller at Maryland Injury Lawyer says the practice contributes toward giving the plaintiff’s bar a bad name,”
What, is Mr. Miller concerned that lawyers are going to go deeper into negative numbers?
Sure Tyree. That’s it.
Matt the question is not whether you can access the records. The question is whether you can use the information to solicit clients. As Tyree would say, doing so puts us further in the hole. [Fill in your own joke here.]