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Parts
Mike,
Great post!! Good things to remember before the problem.
You guessed it. I will remind you to put a “,” after “Group Writing”. No comma makes all the words one long tag.
Okay, I think I fixed it.
Thanks.
My little brother had followed your advice about keeping a record for bad employees. If he fires them they don’t come back.
I liked the way you handled these serious subjects. A few wise choices will cover a world of hurt. There are bad actors who look for weaknesses and know the law. We have to outsmart them.
Oye… And a reminder that civil law is no better than criminal law!
Worse in many ways. Often enormously more expensive–especially discovery.
Any thoughts on how the US addiction to litigation can be broken? You can run a substantial business for decades in other parts of the world and never face a civil suit (except from an employee, and that will be in a specialised tribunal). If the regulatory state is a multi-trillion dollar drag on economic performance, what must the de facto lawyer tax be costing?
Mike I need you to become my attorney to sue the property management company of the apt complex I live in. It will also involve suing the government, and a couple of the management team personally. If you are successful, both our families may retire to a lovely island someday. Deal?
I have advised colleagues and proteges to always, if your jurisdiction allows it, record conversations when you are alone in a room with someone (i.e. when there are no witnesses). Anyone. Friend or foe.
The smartphone revolution makes this very easy. No longer must one carry a microrecorder, since every smartphone has a “voice notes” app. File the recordings away on an encrypted thumbdrive not connected to the Internet. One can never, ever know when corroborating evidence of a manager’s exact instructions or a subordinate’s acknowledgement of a message received will be useful.
It would be better to never be alone in a room with anybody, but that’s simply not feasible.
First, I want to know which editor picked that picture. As a personal injury attorney I find it objectionable – so objectionable I might be moved to action, but I’m a little busy right now counting stacks of money.
But seriously, let me address this paragraph:
Mike,
I’ve enjoyed your series and agree with a great deal of it. You are obviously one heck of a business transactional and litigation attorney.
But please take my word for it on this – your description of personal injury work is 180 degrees from how we operate. My firm is 18 lawyers who are a boutique – we do nothing but personal injury, from construction accidents, to products liability, to medical malpractice, to premises cases, to worker’s compensation and, yes, automobile negligence cases. You won’t find one of us in divorce court one day, criminal court the next, etc. We concentrate on serving the injured.
“Minimum effort to obtain the maximum return.” That’s just not how it works. Minimum effort will get you malpractice and ethics complaints. The reason I average 55-60 hours per week at work is I put in the time on every case. You can’t look at a smaller valued case as being unimportant. It’s not to the client. The only way to maximize the value of any case is spend money and time on the preparation. Insurance companies will give bigger settlements to the prepared guys, not the unprepared. The really big ones will average out the hours you spend on the really small ones, but NEVER short change the smaller ones in an effort to save money. You’ll lose money. Plus that makes for a better system – if the larger value cases didn’t help pay me for work done on the smaller ones, there would be a whole group of people – those with smaller cases- that could never get a lawyer.
“For example, a car wreck guy will take in dozens of low value whiplash cases, but to truly profit he must settle those cases quickly.” Settle quickly??? What the hell is that? This isn’t a contract case, my friend. The facts on a personal injury case aren’t clear when the client comes in the door. There is no such thing as settling quickly.
The reason for that is orthopedic injuries have a tendency to deteriorate into a worse condition with the passing of time. If you believe your client has “whiplash” as you put it (that’s not an injury, but a mechanism of injury – you probably mean just a sprain) and you “settle quickly” for short money in a month, what are you going to do when a year later, your client shows up and says, “I got worse, got a series of injections, ended up with a fusion surgery and lost my job?” You’re going to call your malpractice carrier, that’s what you are going to do, because you messed up that poor soul’s life for short money.
On my injury cases I tell the client up front I won’t even file suit for 8-10 months to let the injuries season and investigate the liability end to make sure we have a good reason to give someone the “bad day” you are talking about, and to make sure we identify the responsible people.
I know it’s easy to go to the stereotype on injury lawyers as “ambulance chasers” (which is illegal itself) and as doing unimportant work. Well, trust me, there’s a lot more “vocation” than job to this.
When a little girl is brain damaged and bedridden due to a drunken driver who got loaded on a dozen drinks because his bartender didn’t have the sense to cut him off and let him drive away, the issue is how will her family pay for the constant care she will need for years to come. When I can solve that problem for them – I can’t think of a more important business case than that.
Sorry if that ended a little preachy, but I do this for a living and take seriously helping people who are injured.
Tommy:
I am so glad you posted this rejoinder. I was hoping somebody would because I was “Trmp-eting” to the base a bit. I know many plaintiff’s lawyers and you’re obviously one of them–deeply concerned about their clients’ welfare. I haven’t done PI work in many years, and did mostly defense. I dealt with many pliatiffs’ attorneys who did do a bulk business, hiring a substantial staff of paralegals to process low value cases for purposes of quick settlement. I’m not so much criticizing them, as explaining their business model. I remember one guy who had a standard letter of about 15 pages filled with threats of millions in damages, but who quickly settle for a few thousand. He did a land house business. In my experience there are a lot of such lawyers. As you know, insurance companies very often seek early settlements, and these lawyers take advantage of that willingness.
A good, conscientious plaintiffs’ lawyer is worth his price in gold. There are plaintiffs who’ve suffered horrific in juries and who need high damages to get on with their lives. I applaude those lawyers.
I should also have pointed out that many, many defense lawyers also profit hugely from the present system. Discovery has been a boon for defense firms. I would even speculate that discovery has built many large litigation firms. I haven’t practiced in six years so don’t know what reforms have been made, but I know the Federal Courts were in the process of streamlining the system. I hope this have continued to improve.
Thanks again. If you are so inclined, I would invite you to write an OP on the subject. I think it could spark an interesting and fruitful debate. My final post on this subject is due tomorrow. Among the topics will be tort reform. I’d really appreciate your input.
BTW: I didn’t find the picture, although I did find it amusing. Microaggression I guess. I might have gone with this(-:
I hear you Mike about the personal injury “mills” as they were. But here in the Garden State the lawsuit threshold has driven most of them out of business. You can’t take on hundreds of cases anymore – the litigation is too expensive for small payoffs. And the insurance companies will offer nothing on lawsuit threshold cases until the eve of trial, and about 92% of drivers are subject to the threshold.
Those types of mills were still around when I started but they are gone now.
Of course it has resulted in a “Walmart-ization” of the law practice around here. You can’t do personal injury some of the time and you can’t be a small practice either – the outlay on these cases is just too expensive. So it really does take a firm with some numbers and a wallet to front the expenses to do this kind of business.
Your right about the “Walmartization.” I hate it. But law is a business, and volume is everything. Large firms can handle the big claims, but a lot of lawyers, especially new lawyers, open firms because they cannot find work anywhere else. As you know, these lawyers are often ill prepared for major PI cases, and often mess things up.
I sent you a PM on the subject, if you’re interested.
I’m glad you told me you PM’d me. I never look at that thing and I miss some. Ricochet needs some sort of tickler when you get a PM.
Mike,
Reading posts I-III just confirms for me every single lawyer joke out there is not only funny, but just a good start.
I am starting to think we should go back to the old Anglo-Saxon blood money system. So much money for an arm, twice that for a leg, an eye is worth an arm unless it is the only eye remaining…
Hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a single business lawsuit would bankrupt nearly any small business even if they won. Just might as well declare bankruptcy immediately and blow all your assets on a really kick-ass vacation before the lawyers get it all.
What plaintiffs don’t understand is the harm they do to our economic system.
I’ve worked both sides. I did the first 8 years of my career on the defense side, then I switched to Plaintiff’s work and have done that for 16 years.
I can attest that there are far more “frivolous defenses” that tax the system than frivolous lawsuits.
They just aren’t as widely published.
Thanks for 3 great posts!