Why Do We Litigate Your Personal Injury Case?

Transcription

Litigation is carrying a big hammer. It forces insurance companies to treat you fairly. And when they have to come out of pocket to hire an attorney to defend themselves, they’re more willing to be reasonable about settling with you. What’s the litigation process? We file a complaint. They have a chance to answer. Once that answers, then their discovery starts. Discovery is taking depositions, doing written discovery, collecting evidence. This is the time where we take the deposition of the driver, the at-fault driver, any witnesses so that we can have as much evidence for your case as possible. Experts are hired at this point from both sides. So, we hire experts for medical record reviews. We hire experts to tell us that the doctors did the right thing for you.

Here’s the thing that’s almost every case I’ve ever seen. The insurance company is gonna try to blame you for everything. Number one, they’re gonna try to blame you for the accident. So, then we have to get a reconstruction expert to prove that you were not at fault. They wanna say that your injuries did not come from this accident. So, we have to get a expert to tell us that, you know, “Medically, these injuries were caused by this accident.” We have to get the right doctors to treat you because they’re gonna testify, “Yes, these were necessary,” and, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty, that these injuries came from this accident. The defense is always gonna be the same type of argument that they’ve always made is, you know, “We don’t owe him anything because the accident didn’t cause these injuries. The accident wasn’t that bad. The injuries they had were from something else. The plaintiff is a malinger,” or what they would call a liar, a cheat.

They look at your everything under the sun to blame, which would be, like, any prior honesty crimes that you’ve committed, felonies to discredit you. They look at anybody you know that knows you that you’re not really injured. They look at your Facebook page, your Instagram page, they look at all your social media. They look at… They even hire people to follow you, to do sub rosa surveillance to see if you’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing with your kind of injuries. And, you know, social media is a killer because you put anything on there, and they will twist it to make it look like you’re having a great life, you’re not injured. You’re traveling, you’re going out with your friends, you know, you’re going to the lake. You could be dying in pain but they don’t see that because you popped a bunch of painkillers in order to go do things. So, just leave everything off social media. They hire experts to prove that you are not really injured. And we call these experts “defense horse.” They’re paid by the defense firm to say what they want them to say. And that’s exactly what they do. They’re like, “Oh, you know, they’re not really that hurt. The treatment should have taken only a few weeks to get better. They didn’t really need this back surgery that they had. So, all of these medical records aren’t approved, and these radical surgeries were not necessary.”

So, those are the kinds of things that we fight about in litigation. If you have a major damage case, you can almost be certain it will go through litigation because they will do everything to pick at your case to make it less of a value than what it really is. Therefore, you need a fighting litigator to litigate your case. That’s why you call me to make sure that you’re dealt with fairly by the insurance company. Because if you think that an insurance company is gonna be fair, and they’re your friend, you’re absolutely mistaken. They’re about saving money for their investors and for themselves. So, it’s all about the money for them, where for you, it’s about recovering your life back. Getting you back to where you were before the accident is what’s fair. And they’ll discredit everything they possibly can in every case to save money.

The other thing they will do to show preexisting condition is that all insurance companies have access to a website that keeps track of everything you’ve ever done medically in your life that had insurance attached to it, from workers’ comp to health insurance, to any time you went to a doctor and said anything, and any prior injuries that you’ve ever had. So, they have access to that, we don’t until discovery. And so, it’s critical that our clients tell us the truth about past accidents, past injuries. A lot of times we can navigate around those problems with the right doctors, and the right treatment, and the right information. So, those are critical things.

Litigation is really about the battle of the experts. Who has the best experts and what does the jury believe? So, it’s critical to be treated by the right doctors, and to be followed up with quickly, to have no gaps in treatment, to make sure that you say the right things to your doctor about what hurts and what doesn’t because, oftentimes, they’ll look at what happened the day of the accident, and what complaints did you have? And so, are those injuries related to that first day? So, it’s really critical to hire an attorney early on to make sure that these issues are covered. You want a great litigation attorney, especially if you have a massive case. Ninety-nine percent of the time, catastrophic cases are litigated. So, you better hire a great attorney that understands litigation process and is willing to fight for you. That’s why you call me.