South Carolina Trial Law Blog

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A quick comment about rates insurance companies pay and how much uninsured people pay. I recently helped a friend out with a few doctor’s bills. I don’t do this for a living, but did it to help a friend. The bulk of it was two Emergency Room visits about two months apart. She had insurance on the second visit, but was uninsured for the first visit.

She had charges of $2,617. Insurance paid $370 and there was a contractual adjustment of $2,047.00. That left her a balance of $200 to pay.

She had charges of $4,719.76. The hospital agreed to reduce it to $3,020.65.

Of course, if she got the same deal that the insurance company got and paid both her portion and the insurance portion, it would come out to owing the hospital only $1,027.96 .

We were able to work a significant reduction for her. But it’s crazy that this goes on.

I have a case that came in not too long ago. Single car wreck. 11:30 p.m., the car’s right tire goes off the edge of the road and the driver over corrects, swerving back and forth trying to get control of the car. The car eventually hits a concrete culvert and flips 3–4 times, finally coming to a rest upside down in a cornfield.

My client is the passenger. He was buckled in and looking for the driver. He came to and was able to drag himself out of the car. Frantically looking for the driver, he finally found him 30–40 feet away from the car in a twisted mass. Dead.

The driver was a friend of his. Someone quite a bit younger, that he had been living with for three months, working with and mentoring in his trade. Dead.

My guy had the initial ER bills, four weeks off work and minimal follow up to that point, because he couldn’t afford the doctor’s bills. I called the insurance company. They had the state minimum policy limits of $25,000 with an additional $25,000 for UIM.

I figured that this was more than enough to get to the $50,000 and called them to check on their feelings. “Oh no…..that’s not nearly enough.” Not enough to get to the $50,000? “No……Not enough to get to the $25,000.”

But this is a very serious fatality case. It was his roommate, friend and co-worker. “Your guy didn’t die. We consider this a soft tissue case and nothing more”.

Wow. It’s breathtaking.

The insurance company is of course Allstate.

The minimum auto policy limits of $25,000 went into effect on January 1, 2007. But on existing policies, the new limits take effect on their renewal date, which is every six months from the date of the original policy.

That means that depending on the renewal date, you can’t be 100% of having $25,000 minimum limits until July 1, 2007. The statutes and cites are after the jump. Continue Reading Posted inQuestions SC Lawyers Want Answered, SC Specific |Comments (0) |Permalink

I have been experiencing a distubring lack of response to my settlement demands in workers compensation cases. More often than not I believe it’s because the insurance company hasn’t given the attorney authority to settle the case and they are reluctant to call back with nothing. I’ve put together a standard form letter with suggested responses for the defense attorney and have received a positive response and more information about my cases. The form letter is below the fold. Continue Reading Posted inPractice Management |Comments (0) |Permalink

I sent a demand package to an insurance company on a car wreck case with about $26,000 in bills for medical treatment and two herniated disks. The adjuster wanted us to get information on prior medical treatment because of the severity of the claim, they felt there had to be some pre-existing condition. We complied because that was information that we would need to gather if there was a lawsuit anyways. When that didn’t turn up anything, the denied any payment.

The reason? Not enough damage to the car and they didn’t believe that my client could have herniated two disks from that amount of collision.

When I talked to my client his response “Well Dave, there wasn’t too much damage to my car. I was driving a Nissan Titan. The guy who hit me, his car was totalled. It was a crumpled mess that had to be towed away from the scene”.

Of course, the car that was totalled belonged to the adjuster’s insured, so she was well aware of that, but any reason to deny a case.

In a recent conversation:

Question: Does anyone have any information on expert _______?

Answer: You are in trouble.  ______ is formidable.  I have used the expert myself on several occasions.  The expert is well qualified, very articulate, makes a very good witness, quick on his/her feet, and is married to a judge. Good luck.

Ouch. Just goes to show that both sides can have good witnesses.

I went to their seminare in Atlanta 2 weeks ago. Great, great stuff. Unfortunately, the book was still at the printers and won’t be out for another week or so.

They conducted a lot of focus groups and studies based on Clotaire Rapaille’s work. Here is Rapaille’s home page. The basic concept is that we have the modern functioning brain that helps us with decision making and functioning in our current environment. Underneath that is our lizard brain. The reptilian brain.

The reptilian brain works on basic survival mode. Does anything threaten our survival or make us safe? Very basic instincts. Like the fight or flight syndrome. When a sudden danger appears, the body is pumped full of adrenaline and either stands ground to fight, or gets out of the situation.

By studying Rapaille’s work and applying it to the legal field, they’ve used the same arguments as before, but frame them slightly differently in an attempt to appeal to the basic lizard brain inside us all. It sounds very powerful. It takes the biggest tort reformers that were against us the most and turns them into our strongest allies. Wow. I’d love to see it in action. I have a trial next week and will apply some of the principles and we’ll see how it goes.

They are still working out the best way to present the information. I think the best solution is a one day seminar presenting all of the information followed by a 2 day seminar a few weeks later showing how to apply the theory to all aspects of your trial. It’s very good stuff and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you do plaintiff’s work, you really need to check this out. The Book is here. The Seminar is here. The next seminar is in June in Dallas. While putting the link in, I just found out the Dallas seminar is full. You owe it to your clients and yourself to check out the next one.

I’ve stayed out of the fray on this for as long as possible, but with the release of the memos from the Office of Legal Counsel, I juat have to include my opinion.

As my readers know, I’m a plaintiff’s attorney and the tagline of this blog is ‘Using Technology to Be a Better Trial Lawyer’. My focus is being a better trial lawyer, whether it’s through regular trial classes, using technology or even running a better office. That splits the readership because it’s a somewhat scattershot topic area, but that’s what interests me. I think it also interests plaintiff’s attorneys with their own practice.

So I have held myself back from talking about interrogation and torture so as to not further spray the field, but it’s time to offer my opinion on this.

But why should you listen to me?

I was an interrogator in the United States Army from 1982–1989, just short seven years. I signed up for 3 years the first tour and 4 years the second tour. The Army taught me Arabic on the first tour and Hungarian on the second tour.

I taught interrogation at Fort Huachuca, Arizona from 1986–1989. While at the interrogation school, I taught basic tactical interrogation for the United States Army. There were also ocassional classes for the Officer’s Basic Intelligence Course and the Foreign Allied Officer’s Course, where we taught officers from other countries.

In addition to those classes, I was on the team that did course development for the USMC reserve interrogation course and also was on a review board for the interrogation MOS (job specialty) training.

So that’s why you should put some stock in my opinions. I went to law school in 1989 and am now a lawyer. Having the interrogation and a legal background is a good reason to listen to me. 

Here are the reasons to take my opinion with a grain of salt:  

I got asthma rather severely and received a medical retirement a year or so before Desert Storm in 1989, so while I taught interrogation for 3 years, I did not do any live interrogations.

All of my experience was with tactical interrogations and not strategic debriefing of high level detainees.

I worked on a tactical level. While I did teach interrogation for three years and know the doctrine cold, it was on a tactical level. I did not set policy at the national level in D.C.

TrialWorks has added a extra-net or web-based component to their program. They’ve always had the remote access, but this allows you to give anyone a username and a password and access to a portion of your database.

You can give a new client access to their case information. If they have multiple cases, they can look up information on any of their cases. A co-counsel can have a filter that will allows them access to information on any of their referred cases.

What information do they have access to? Anything you want. You can set up a template as to what information to allow them, but also alter it for a specific client. For example, you can have them see the incident report, medical records, pleadings and discovery requests, but not correspondence.