“Why it is important to get treatment for your injuries”
I’m going to talk about a case that involved a client of ours, we will call her ‘Diana’ (not her actual name). She slipped and fell at a grocery store that will remain nameless. In essence the allegation was that she had slipped on a piece of fruit while shopping. She came to us, she wasn’t exactly sure how to handle the process, and most people don’t. We helped her, she treated for a number of months, until a point at which the doctors determined that the next step was going to be a certain kind of procedure. She got the procedure. We provided the supermarket, before filing the lawsuit, with all the information. So, we waited until she was in a place where the doctors thought that they weren’t going to be able to make her any better, and she was about as good as she’s going to get, or at least they knew what it was going to take to keep her well moving forward for the rest of her life, despite her injuries.
We send a demand to a supermarket. We couldn’t see eye to eye, and that’s not uncommon at all, because often times when you ask for the amount of money that you think that you deserve (that you probably do deserve) the supermarket, the premises owner, the gas station, whoever, may agree that that number is what your case is worth, but in their mind why would they pay full price without testing the claim a little bit. So, they will push back, they will lowball, they will do all that kind of stuff. Our ultimate recourse is to file a lawsuit. We move the claim into a situation where now we have the power to learn about, “what was the maintenance schedule? Who was supposed to sweep? Who’s the manager? Has this happened before?” Things of that nature. Now we have tools within the context of a lawsuit, and once you have them in that position, by that same token, they can now sit down your doctors and ask your doctors about what they did, and how they did it, and all that stuff. The important thing to keep in mind is that we were able to drive that because the client went and they got all the treatment that they were recommended to have by the doctors. People often times ask, you know, “what should I be doing to improve my case?” and my response is always the same: “don’t worry about it. Your job is to go get treated. Your job is to act like someone who is actually hurt. You’re going to do the things that people who are hurt do. They go to the doctor, they follow the doctor’s orders, and if you’re not hurt anymore, that’s fine too. That’s okay. You just follow your treatment course organically.” At the other end of the whole thing I can always, always sell someone who is actually hurt, and actually going about getting treated, and trying to get better for their injuries in a manner that people would think is reasonable.
In this case the client did everything she was supposed to. Diana went to every course of treatment, she escalated when she was supposed to escalate, she hit all her appointments, there were no no-shows. You know, this is a situation where this person had injuries in her neck and in her back. At the same time, they had some history in their medical record of neck pain. The reason you’re hiring an attorney with skill, with experience, you need someone who’s going to be able to look at your medical records and they’re going to be able to make the case for the fact that simply because you have had a pain in that part of your body before, at some time in your life, does not mean that you are foreclosed from ever claiming an injury to that part of the body, because as we know pain can get worse. Not all pain is the same, not all pain has the same origin, and an experienced and skilled attorney is going to be able to take that medical record, and be able to explain it to a jury in a way where they’re going to understand that just because Diana had neck pain in 2012, when she went to go see her primary care physician, doesn’t mean that in 2022 she’s suffering from debilitating neck pain after a fall. One thing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other, and that’s part of the process.
Armed with a client who, on paper, looks like they did everything that someone would do when they’re hurt, and they want to get better, we held the course. We prepared for trial, we were ready to go, and we still ended up settling in mediation. Our client had about $60-70,000 in medical bills. We were ultimately able to shut down that case at about $160,000, because our client, Diana, did her job. She went and she got treated, she saw the doctors, she behaved like a person who wanted to get better, and we did our job by making sure that we hit all the discovery, we made sure that we had our witnesses ready, we let the other side know, “yes, we are here at mediation. Yes, we want to get it done, but we also have a number that we need.” and we decided that number with Diana, and we decided that number based on her treatment, and based on her injuries, we went in there, and we knew what our number was, and we got more than the minimum that we wanted, but it was only possible because everyone did their job at every step of the process. Our client understood the assignment. She understood that when she went to the doctor, the idea was not to tee up a perfect personal injury case, the idea was to get better, and that’s the beautiful thing about this process, is that when everyone does what everybody’s supposed to do, you get a good result.