Leave it to the lawyers to build a better mousetrap with an iPhone. In the United Kingdom, solicitors Bott & Co found a new question to which the answer is: "There's an app for that." The Car Accident Assistant is the firm's latest contribution to humanity and is available for download from Apple's (AAPL) iTunes environment. If you're in a car accident, you can use the application to connect to the law firm's 24-hour accident help system.

As the ol' infomercial guys love to say, "But, wait! There's more!"

The Car Accident Assistant can be used to help the afflicted collect information about the accident, including vehicles and location. And, you can even take pictures of the accident and gather info from witnesses. It's like having a lawyer in your phone!

You knew it would happen. When a company as controversial as Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) has one of its employees killed in a Black Friday melee, it's only a matter of time before the company starts getting the blame.

Long Island police and a lawyer hired by the deceased worker's family have concluded that the company should have had better crowd control.

"Hundreds of stores around the country have these kinds of sales, but a tragedy only happens if you don't prepare," attorney Jordan Hecht told (subscription required) The Wall Street Journal. "You need to have people line up in a queue in an orderly fashion, with people giving them updates."

Wal-Mart defended itself by saying that it had set up barricades, hired third-party security guards and had extra staff on hand.

And what of the police's contention that the security was inadequate? It turns out that the police were called to the store before the victim was trampled to death because of the large crowds, but they quickly left before the doors opened. (Read more about that in this Newsday story.) So the police seemed to think everything was fine at the time but are now blaming inadequate security after the fact. I'm not sure that makes sense.

The real blame here falls on the people who trampled someone to death. The victim's family should sue Wal-Mart for whatever they can get, but it's pretty tacky for the police to be blaming Wal-Mart for a tragedy that happened after they left.