Who is at fault when a driver doesn’t clear snow off their car in MD? We’ll look at laws and guidelines in the state of Maryland regarding how vehicle owners should handle snow and ice on their vehicles. If a driver doesn’t exercise reasonable caution and their carelessness injures another person, they may be held liable for damages.

If you own a business, you’d better own a shovel. When it snows, ices, or freezes outside, walking surfaces can become treacherous to customers entering a business property on foot. Business owners have a legal duty to keep their premises safe for visitors. If a customer slips and falls on uncleared ice on a business property, there can be serious legal consequences to the property owner who didn’t properly maintain the premises.

Depending on where in Maryland the business is located, there will be varying laws that dictate when the business needs to clear ice and snow. In some places, a commercial property owner has as little as three hours to remove snow from the property after a snowfall.

Most of us have done it. You pull up to a red light, your foot goes on the brake—and your hand reaches for the cell phone beside you. But next time you start to text or check your messages at a stop light, you may want to think twice about the laws for using a mobile device at a traffic light. Is texting at a red light really illegal? And what happens if you use your phone at a red light in Maryland?

After you’ve been in a car accident, you might turn to social media to update your friends and family about what happened so that you can alert everyone in one place. This makes sense—you just want to get the message out there so that you don’t have to update everyone individually and let them know you’re okay. But actually, this could end up hurting you in the long run.

Conversations about car accidents usually revolve around distracted driving or drunk driving, but what about drowsy driving? Fatigue and exhaustion behind the wheel can be just as dangerous as distractions and intoxication. Considering that when you’re sleepy and trying to do any other task it can be more difficult to concentrate, the same thing happens when you’re behind the wheel, and it’s incredibly more dangerous.

We’ve known the rules since childhood—red means stop and green means go. Yellow means the light is about to turn red. But what does a flashing yellow light mean? According to the Maryland Department of Transportation, a flashing yellow traffic light at an intersection means you should slow down and proceed with caution. Drivers facing a flashing yellow light are permitted by law to proceed through the intersection without stopping. But defensive driving is good practice, especially in situations like these when other drivers can’t always be trusted to adhere to traffic safety rules.

Our state of Maryland saw several major legislative changes over the past year—police reform laws were passed, medications could legally be sold in vending machines, the Maryland Governor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs was created, COVID-19 emergency orders were terminated, and the state song was repealed.

A number of new laws in the state of Maryland are scheduled to go into effect in 2022 or will be in effect by the end of 2021. Below is a list of a few of the laws that may be relevant to many of the clients we serve in Baltimore and the surrounding Maryland areas. As always, we invite you to reach out to our law firm at Belsky, Weinberg, & Horowitz, LLC with any questions pertaining to the information in this article.

Workers’ compensation is a complex area of the law. As workers’ compensation attorneys in Maryland, we at Belsky, Weinberg & Horowitz, LLC know that cases can easily become very complicated. It’s not uncommon for workers to miss out on some of the benefits they are entitled to under the law—simply because they were not aware of the benefits or the process of claiming them. In other situations, an employer may make the process even more difficult for an injured employee. One of the jobs of a workers’ compensation lawyer is to protect the employee if this happens.

Truck accident litigation is often very complex. When a collision between a commercial truck like a big rig or 18-wheeler and one or more smaller passenger vehicles occurs, the injuries suffered by victims tend to be major, as is the damage suffered by the vehicles themselves. Multiple passenger vehicles are also often involved in these types of crashes, which can mean that more than one claim may be involved.

Car accidents happen every hour of every day in the United States. Many of them are fatal. According to the National Safety Council, over 40,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents in 2020. In Maryland alone, we see more than our share of car accidents—both fatal and non-fatal.