PI Firm Seeks Tweets About Icy Walkways; Promises to Donate Sandbags to Slick Properties
A Milwaukee personal injury law firm is on the hunt for slick spots on the city’s sidewalks.
The Warshafsky Law Firm is soliciting tips from city residents through Twitter, Facebook to identify slippery spots around the city and then posting them on a dedicated blog, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel blog Proof and Hearsay reported.
Warshafsky partner Frank Crivello told Proof and Hearsay that salt’s deicing power lessens as temperatures dip below 20 degrees or so. If people used more sand, there would be fewer slip-and-falls, Crivello told the blog.
To help encourage participation, all ice-spotters—be they concerned residents or businesses who could use the bag of sand for own maintenance—will be entered into a drawing to win a $1,000 Funjet Vacation gift certificate, according to a Web page explaining the Spread the Sand program.
A commenter on Proof and Hearsay had a theory:
“If someone slips & falls on a property previously notified of a slip-hazard, Warshafsky has built-in evidence to try the case for the plaintiff and win a nice settlement … all disguised as a public service campaign,” the commenter wrote. “How nice.”
But Crivello told the ABA Journal that that isn’t the plan.
“We are not interested in having businesses be identified on our website and then use that information against those businesses later on,” Crivello said. After seeing injury cases come through the firm’s doors for decades, “it’s hard not to be affected by it from a human standpoint.”
Crivello also mentioned an effort the firm made this fall to give free rides to Halloween revelers who made a pledge on Facebook not to drink and drive, which Milwaukee Fox affiliate WITI noted a the time. Crivello said that 600 people took the firm up on the free-ride offer.
