How Much Is Your Personal Injury Case Worth?

So what I'm hearing you say is that with each of these custom cases, there's going to be a different outcome, so there's not really a set way to determine the exact number that a client might get. That's correct. So going forward, when we're looking at these personal injury cases, what might the severity of the injuries kind of do to the amount that a client might get in the end?

Well, the severity of the injury is a big factor. It's a big element. It is kind of the foundation. If you think of a custom home was a square footage, does somebody have a sprain 1500 square foot or do they need surgery on their spine in two spaces because they have herniated disc? That's going to be a larger footprint. So that is kind of the foundation upon which you build the case. If you think of it, someone comes in, they've been injured and they have a spine injury. The first thing we want to do is find out what the diagnosis is and what the imaging shows, and then we go backwards. We go backwards in time to find, look at medical records, to see if there was any prior complaints, any prior problems, because if there isn't, then that injury, the causation of that injury is a lot clearer to juries.

(09:26)
If there is prior problems, then we want prior imaging to see how if and how it's been exacerbated or worsened by this incident. I would think of the injury as the foundation of the case that we're building. We're looking back as far as causation to prove causation that this injury was caused by the accident or caused by the incident. We're comparing priors. We're then leaving injured party and his or her doctors to do their thing. We don't get involved. We want the doctor and the client to take care of the health problems and the injuries and just give us reports as far as what's the diagnosis, what's the prognosis, what's the future look like?

So now that we kind of have these medical records from our client, what do you do going forward now that you have that foundation of the case of how severe the injury really was?

Well, the value of your claim is determined by three major components. When I was in law school a long time ago when we rode horses and buggies to law school, I was taught that the value of a claim is you have to look at it like a three legged stool. You have the liability leg, you have the damaged leg, and you have the collectability leg. And like any three legged stool, if you don't have solid three legs and you sit on it, if one of 'em weak, you fall, it breaks and you fall. So someone comes in with a significant injury. If that injury was caused by the instant, you have the damaged leg and you're trying to determine how is that injury if and how is that injury going to affect somebody for the rest of their lives? That is a big factor in value.

(11:14)
The liability leg is how strong do the facts make it that it was someone else's fault and someone violated conduct. That's recognized in the state of South Carolina as being a wrong that you can collect for the state has to have elements that you have to prove in order to even get to the damages and towards car accidents, you have to show that the person had a duty, they breached the duty, the breach caused damages, duty breach, causation and damages. In a premise case, you have to show that the premise owner knew or should have known there was a defective condition on the premises. So every different types of case have different elements you have to prove. So you look at the liability leg, it may be a strong liability. You may be riding down the road, someone crosses the yellow line, they're drunk, they come across and hit your family. It's

Pretty clear. Yeah,

Clear liability. That leg is solid. And then the third leg is collectability. Collectability is often a sad leg to have to talk to people about because you can have a good liability case where that's solid. You can have bad injuries or damages, but the insurance coverage is very low. Somebody's riding on the road with 25,000 in liability coverage. Our client doesn't have underinsured motorist coverage to protect themselves. Okay. The at-fault party has no assets. So you have bad liability, bad damages in $25,000 to collect. And those are hard conversations because kind of sad, the real value of that claim may be millions of dollars, but if you can't collect it,

What do you do? Yeah,

You don't do it. We can go to trial and get a piece of paper by judgment against the person that's good for 10 years, but if someone's been damaged bad, that's a sad situation.

Okay. So let's say we do have a case where the liability is clear. Someone was really injured, they went to the doctor, they did everything. What kind of role do medical expenses then play in determining the real value of their claim?

Yeah, like I said, the injury is the foundation, medical bills, they're an element. Sometimes they're a valuable element and sometimes they're not a valuable element. Let me explain that. Somebody's got three, $400,000 of medical bills, and that's a valuable part of the damages to come up to the real value.

(13:55)
But sometimes somebody has devastating injuries and very low medical bills. If you think about somebody who may lose both legs in an incident or someone who has a traumatic brain injury, they're past medical bills. They pale in relationship to the actual damages in this case, the life change in this case. So sometimes medical bills are a big element in coming up with the real value, and sometimes we don't even present 'em to the jury because you risk the chance of the jury anchoring down on a low medical bill when the medical bill is nowhere near the most important parts about the case.

So let's say medical bills aside, let's say I couldn't work due to this injury. What kind of compensation can I recover in an instance like that?

Well, in South Carolina, you can get the medical bills both past and future medical bills. You can get future medical bills. If you have a doctor to opine that based upon a reasonable degree of medical certainty, it is more likely than not that you would need these future medical procedures. The law also allows that an injured person can collect past lost wages and future lost wages. The future has to be proven. We use vocational experts who will often assess our client's abilities, their past work history, and then look at the medical restrictions given by doctors to determine whether or not that person is employable in the future.

Absolutely. And so maybe while this client is missing work and they're kind of trying to account for these lost wages, there's also an emotional and mental part that comes into play, right? So how do you assess those damages and determine what kind of compensation they might deserve for that?

Yeah. One of the elements allowed in South Carolina law is mental anguish, emotional damages. That element is tougher. That element, you really need to have that subcontractor we talked about as far as presenting that element, you need a credible person to be able to come up. It's often done with lay witnesses. Sometimes it's done with professionals if the emotional damages are bad enough. But often those are your good friends, your coworkers, your family members who've seen a change and see what you're struggling with. Most people don't like to go out and announce they're having emotional stress and mental anguish about something. So it takes people close to the individual and because that's something that could be true or not true, the credibility of those people that your witnesses who can explain that to a jury, their credibility is very important.

Right, absolutely. So what I'm kind of hearing you say is that it depends on each case, like you were saying, it goes back to that kind of custom house analogy where in one particular case you might have a lot of witnesses that are super credible, but sometimes it's just kind hard to prove.

That's right. Yeah. If you think about the mental anguish part about cases, I can tell you that as a society, we recognize mental health and mental anguish a lot more than we did 20 years ago. Right? 20 years ago it was a very small part of any kind of personal injury, really case. But I think just the public is much more aware of mental health problems today than they were 20 years ago.

Absolutely. So turning back to a different kind of case, let's say in terms of property damage, what is the process for valuing that in a personal claim?

Property damage is a frustrating thing in South Carolina. We can handle a huge personal injury claim with less hassle than property damage claim.

Really,

It is frustrating and the frustration comes from the law. What it allows for and what it doesn't provide for in a car wreck case, if your car is not damaged, it's not totaled, you can repair it for less than 75% of the value. It's not totaled. South Carolina says you're entitled to the reasonable amount of money to have it repaired the reasonable amount of money to store it while it's being repaired. Loss of use to substitute that car while it's being repaired for something for you to drive, and then depreciation of the car because of the wreck. Because we all know that Carfax, and I'll tell you if your car's been wrecked, absolutely. So you're entitled to those. If the car is totaled, you're entitled to the actual cash value of the car. That really stings for people who have a dependable car. They've taken real good care of it, they got some age on it, it's paid off, they don't have any payments. Then by no fault of their own, somebody comes across by stance and totals their car. When you look at the book value or you talk to a car dealer, it's only worth blank dollars, and now they only have blank dollars to go out and try to find a dependable car, and that's tough.

So would that value that they're may be given like that blank dollars? Are you saying that that's typically way less than what they paid for it originally?

Oh, it's always way less. And if they've got it paid off and they've been driving it for five years and taking care of it, that value has dropped. And when you drive off the lot, it drops, but it drops every year and every mile you put on it. So the people who have dependable cars that have paid off, it is not a good thing for them. What the law provides, and oftentimes if the at-fault driver in a situation either not talking to their insurance company or telling a different story to their insurance company, the insurance company may not be willing to repair your car and that may be contested. In that case, you better have some collision and comprehensive insurance on your own policy so that you can take care of it and let your carrier go back against their carrier to get repaid. We've had some clients who only have liability coverage. They don't have anything on their own car, and in that situation they're without a car until we can litigate it or prove to them they should pay for the property damage.

So obviously one of the factors you're saying here is whether your car gets totaled or there's some lesser damages or things like that. Are there any other pertinent factors that people need to consider if they happen to get in a wreck or they experience property damage?

No. You have a duty to mitigate your damages. Okay. What that means is you have a legal duty to reduce your damages as much as possible. One of the rubbing points with property damage is the car would get towed to a storage place. The at-fault driver's insurance usually pays for that, but now the at-fault insurance company is delaying making decision whether they don't pay for it, it sits there and it's getting storage charges, a daily storage fee after a short period of time. If there's a place our client can put their car, we try to remove it from that. If our client can't, doesn't have a location to put it, and they can't do a whole lot to mitigate that damage of storing a vehicle, but the storage charges to getting people in a car, that's a frustrating part of property damage.

And is there typically an allotted set of time that an insurance company would have to respond to make sure that these storage fees are taken care of?

No. Worst case scenario, an insurance company can say, we're denying liability, so we're not paying your property damage. And so to receive those damages, you'd have to file a lawsuit that takes a while. It takes about 13, 14 months to come up on a roster. South Carolina does have a process where you can file a property damage claim is a non-binding arbitration. They put three attorneys in a particular county to listen to it, and they come up with what they think the value and what the decision should be. We've done that a few times. That's not the best situation.

And why is

That? It's just it's not binding. So the insurance company can still keep fighting it. It has got some cases settled when there's just a dispute about some of the storage stuff and about the depreciation, whether you have a disagreement about depreciation.

Okay. So kind of going back to maybe our car wreck scenario. Let's say I was driving my car, I get injured, but maybe I'm partially at fault. So what does comparative negligence kind of do to my personal injury claim?

Well, you can't work for the Derrick Law Firm if you're stirring up litigation. Carl, be careful.

Oh, no,

No. We have comparative negligence in South Carolina. It's not true comparative, but what the law says is that if your fault becomes greater than the other party, you collect nothing.

Really. Wow. I bet that can be devastating to some cases.

Yes. Now, when I got out of law school, it was contributory negligence, which said that if you were 1% at fault, you can't collect nothing.

Oh my

Goodness. That still exists in North Carolina, which is a terrible law. Wow. Yeah, I mean they would argue 1% fault because you got up and got on a highway. Right? But comparative, if your total damages in your case is a hundred thousand dollars and a jury finds you 50% at fault and the other party 50% at fault, you can collect $50,000 of that a hundred.

Okay.

So that's still here. If your a hundred is reduced by 50%, if you're 25% at fault, it's reduced by 25%. But if you're 51% at fault, you get nothing.

No way. So that 1% can really take you over the edge there.

Yes, it can. Wow. And that's when we're investigating these cases. And really the most important thing about getting real value of your claim and determine the real value is a fast thorough investigation. I tell our attorneys, I want to know everything. I want to know the good, the bad, the ugly. I want to know everything because every little fact counts. And we may be in a situation where we're fighting for that 1%, and so I want to know everything we jump on. We have private investigators on standby. They've got six or seven of them. Now I want to investigate within 24 hours, I want pictures of the skid marks. I want pictures of all the cars. I want talk to every witness. I want to pull the data from the at-fault party's vehicle to see how fast they were going. Everybody's got computers in their cars. Now we can get a lot of good data. I want people on the scene looking at surveillance of homes or businesses close to the incident, the importance of getting all of those facts so that you can prove a hundred percent on the part of defendant or get every piece of evidence that you can put on your side of the scales to weigh it down.

That can be that 1% like you were talking

About. It's amazing how you can evidence disappears 20 years ago if you get in a wreck, 10 people stop, make sure the person is okay and leave their names and numbers. Hey, if you need, I saw it, call me. Really, those days are over. Yeah. There can be a wreck out on 5 0 1 in front of Tanger outlet and there's no s. Yeah. So it's harder to get witnesses nowadays because people just kind of move on with their lives. So we're looking for surveillance. I tell family members when something happens, I really wish some family members step up and say, Hey, let me call somebody and get this investigated while you're mourning or while you're taking care of these injuries. Because time erases evidence. And if we can get on a case early where I can pour surveillance, the problem is these surveillance videos, they overwrite themselves.

(26:24)
So it may be seven days, it may be three days, it may be 30 days, but the evidence disappears. Really, the witnesses disappear. Who was working at the store next to the scene who went out there and talked to everybody? People forget. They forget. They changed jobs, they leave the state. The difference, and I'm going to tell you 20 years ago when I was in practice by myself, I was the only attorney, small firm I could not afford to do what we do now. In the cases that make huge differences, we now investigate immediately to get those facts. And I like the woman who called me. I mean, she doesn't call me. And this surveillance gets, they get gone,

Right? They disappear.

It just gets to be a much harder case, and it's the timing of getting someone to investigate the case is probably the most important thing that the plaintiff or the plaintiff's family can do.

That's good to know. So what steps can I take to maybe maximize the value of my personal injury claim? I know that we talked about timeliness being key and that being really, really important. What are some other things that really contribute to getting that claim number faster?

I would, and we ask our clients to cooperate with your lawyer. There's things that people do to destroy or weaken their case. Number one is to lie about anything. If you don't tell the truth,

They

Can't help you out. Somebody's going to find out and you wreck your case. So to be honest is number one. Number two is to do what your doctors tell you to do. In the last four years with our focus groups, I've watched around 400 juries talk, and every time someone has not done what their doctors tell them to do, they get punished.

Really?

Absolutely. People believe, jurors believe, and I think reasonably, if you're saying you're hurting and your doctor says, well, let's do this, and you say, nah, not do that.

It says something,

You've just killed your case, right? We don't tell our clients what to do. They can do whatever they want to, but we tell everyone, and I would tell anyone who talked to me off the street, if you don't do what your doctors advise you to do to get better, you greatly damage your case and greatly reduce the value of your case. Really need to be honest, need to do what the medical providers tell you to do. Other than that, just live your life. I mean, the things that have happened up until the incident and at the incident, there's nothing you can do about that. Be honest with you, lawyers. So we can go investigate it and get everything pulled and know the things that add value and the things we need to work on after the incident. The plaintiff is actually part of building their case because everything they do after that is evidence.

Really. Okay.

So you think about, and we've had cases where at-fault driver hits one of our clients and immediately he starts FaceTiming and saying how bad he was and somebody pulled out in front of him and blah, blah, blah, blah. On FaceTime and on social media, we made some hay with that. So you have a person who's injured in a wreck, they jump on social media. Everything you say on social media is discoverable. You can't erase evidence. So when you jump on social media and share everything with the world,

It's going to come back to you. You

Get the good and the bad. And most time it's the bad. We advise people to just get off of social media, not for their entire life, but you just don't need to discuss anything out about the incident or anything. Just is creating opportunities for the other side to attack you.

Right. And would you say that juries kind of pick up on the type of character of a plaintiff or defendant if they are posting stuff on social media that may be rash or things along those lines?

Absolutely. I mean, there's no doubt about that. One of the first things we do investigating people is social media. Somebody gets in the at-fault driver gets in a wreck, we're going to look at their criminal record. We don't look at their social media and just get all kinds of stuff. We get videos of somebody bragging about riding down the road while they're high. Oh

Lord.

That's pretty good evidence. Yeah. So it's amazing to me, and maybe I'm just an old man, but it's amazing to me what people put on social media.

Absolutely.

But nowadays, they share some things.

Everything. Everything.

They should not share. But if you're injured in a wreck, understand that everything you're doing, if you're injured in any kind of incident, understand that everything you do after that until the case has concluded is evidence discoverable. And that's what insurance companies look for. That's what defense lawyers look for. They're looking for just something to hang their hat on. So people need to know that.

So would you say overall, when you're building this custom case, what's most important is calling as soon as possible or getting somebody else maybe in your inner circle to call B, making sure that you're being honest with your lawyer, and then C, watching what you're doing on social media and being careful about what you're disclosing.

I think so. I think investigations faster. We've got to get the facts. When I was growing up, there was a TV show called Dragnet. You ever seen Dragnet? I have

Not.

And there was a line at the first of every show that said Just the facts, ma'am. The facts are what determines the value of your claim. The facts. So if you get a fast investigation where we jump on it and we can get all these facts fast, we've done the most we can do with the facts, the facts after the incident as developed by the plaintiff and the plaintiff's conduct, those are what determines value of the case. Like I said, we do a lot of focus groups. It used to be for the first 30 years that I practice law, somebody would come up and say, what's the value of my claim? If they come into my office and say, what kind of value do I have in my claim? I have no idea. I've heard this much of the evidence. I've heard from one side, have no idea. You need all

The details and all the facts.

All the facts. After we get all the facts, what we do now, we've been doing the last four or five years, we'll get all the facts and then we'll do a focus group jury research project where we bring in 12 people. We don't tell 'em which side we represent and we present the facts that are good for the plaintiff, the facts that are good for the defendant, and let them deliberate and tell us what's valuable and what's not valuable and what they think the value of the case is and what additional facts they would want if they were on a real jury. We take what they tell us and go get those additional facts. And so we're able to show our clients what these 12 people say the real value is. And before we did that, we're just guessing as a lawyer, we're just guessing.

(33:47)
You never know. You don't know what lawyers know. If you don't use real people, what lawyers know is what insurance companies will voluntarily pay. And that's not our definition of real value. Insurance companies have a duty to their shareholders. They're trying to make them money. I have no duty to their shareholders. I have a duty to my client to find out what the real value is. So to say this insurance company will only pay blank dollars, has no relationship to what the real value of the claim is. They're paying out a risk. They're weighing their risk rewards, and the better you can build the facts and then you get an appraisal from a focus group, and we often show the appraisal to the insurance company, to the defense lawyer and say, Hey, that's what these 12 people, you need to get your money up. Here's what the real value is. There's a lot of cases people think it's funny because I'm an attorney and I think there's a bunch of unnecessary litigation, but the reason there's unnecessary litigation is there's no way to determine the real value of a claim until it gets to a jury. And often that jury's three or four years down the road from when the incident happened, and

You still never know what they might

Say no. So you build the facts and people are disagreeing with what 12 people in a particular county would do with those facts as far as value. So what we've done with our jury research is we've taken this thing that happens three years from now and we'll actually focus group the case before we file a lawsuit. If we can get the majority of the facts, focus group it, see what they think the value is, so we can tell our clients so they can make a decision whether or not they want to file a lawsuit or show it to the other side. If they come up into an acceptable range for our client, the client can make a decision, well, based on what these 12 people say, I want to take that or no, I want to drive forward and go into litigation.

So kind of wrapping up with jury research focus groups, where would you say you can kind of place these focus groups in terms of our house analogy from before or our custom case, would you say it caps off this jury experience or this case experience or?

Well, the focus group, they're the appraisers. We have a podcast called the Appraisers where we share case studies with other attorneys around the state of South Carolina, but they are the appraisers. When a custom home builder build a home, he can put a price on it. But if somebody's on buy, they don't go to the bank. They didn't get an appraisal done, a professional appraisal to come in and determine the value of that house in that location. That's what the focus group is. The focus group is not me appraising it because I love my client. It's not what my client thinks the case is worth. It's not what the insurance company thinks the case is worth, and it's not what the defense lawyer thinks the case is worth. These are 12 people who don't have a dog in the fight, 12 people who are unrelated to anyone in the case to come in and say, in our community, based on these facts, issues and damages, here goes what we think about the case. Before, we did focus groups at every step of the way insurance company makes an offer, said this is all we want to pay you. Dark way you think about the offer, well, I don't like the offer. Well, what's the value? Well, I think the value may be more. Let me go look at what John Doe got in a case two years ago against Jill Doe, the other attorney on different people with different facts and different elements presented in different formats.

It's not as helpful.

It's apples and oranges. There's a trial consultant that says if you give a case to four groups of six people, you'll get 95 or 98% of the conversations that go on in the real jury room. We often do a pre-lit focus group, and then we do another focus group after we get the evidence in before mediation. Then we do an all day focus group for a trial. So when we're going in, we've had six groups of six tell us what they think about evidence and what they want to know. So we feel like we're incredibly prepared when we go in. One of the benefits we have found and everything we do is based upon no one wants to file a lawsuit. These focus groups have allowed us to get jury's opinions before lawsuits file to share the values given from those focus group panels with the other side to try to expedite the resolution of the case.

Right.

Been successful in a lot of cases. I believe it's the best thing we've done to get real value for our clients to know what the real value is and get it in an expedited manner.

So what I'm hearing you say is that jury research focus groups are kind of a way to have the trial experience without having to go through a ton of unnecessary litigation. So I know that you said that clients really benefit from this process. What is the benefit to the attorney? Who has this case, who's focus grouping this case?

Well, it's huge. When I got out of law school way back then, we tried cases all the time. We we're always on a trial roster. We're always up at the office on the weekend getting ready for trial. We just tried cases. We didn't have arbitration, mediation, all that stuff. We tried cases and we constantly got the feedback from the community as far as what they believed about issues, facts, and damages. I wouldn't need focus groups if we were trying that many cases, but cases don't try anymore. We win cases now in discovery, but you must be prepared to try the case if the insurance company makes you try the case. So our attorneys are able to stand up over and over and over and present cases to jurors in the focus group arena, get immediate feedback, watch themselves on video, make changes to presentations.

Well, it seems to me like these focus groups can really help everybody from the attorney to the plaintiff. But my question is how do these focus groups aid jurors? What do you guys offer to jurors who want to participate in a focus group?

People love it. I mean, I think we've had about 6,000 people sign up.

Really? That's

A lot. I think 2,500, 3000 have served. Wow. Over that 95, 90 6% of 'em sign up. They want to serve. Again, people like having a voice in the community standard. And I mean, they come in, they serve, they get some good suppers, nice piece of cake, and they get to have a say so and make a difference in a case. I mean, what they do very often affects everybody who's involved.

Absolutely. And

They like it. There's some people who come who've never been picked for a jury and they, I've always wanted to be on a jury and people like the law, they watch the criminal cases on TV and get into us. So they like to come in and

Have their legal experience. Yeah. Have their legal experience. And

It's good to get a wide variety of opinions and what people want. It helps our attorneys get ready for trial if they have to go to trial. Right.

Good

Practice. They are as prepared as they can be.

Yeah, absolutely. So I know that you put such an emphasis on getting all of the facts of a case. So how do you really do that? Is that just part of the in-house investigation or are there other parts that kind of come into play?

It depends on the type of case it is. To get the real value you need to get the facts. You need to get, of course, good, bad, ugly.

Yeah.

Well, the first 30 years of my practice, or at least the last 20 of those 30 years, when we talked to the insurance company, they would say, well, we think your case has problems because of A, B, C, and D. We don't offer you this. And the older I got, the more I'd say, listen, I don't want to hear the problems. In my case, I'm old enough to understand them. Of course, just tell me what you don't pay me. And I've now changed that and I've told our attorneys, now you listen to 'em and you say, tell me every reason you don't think this case is worth what we think it's worth. Tell me every argument you have, every piece of evidence you have. And we get them to tell us that so that we can then use it in the focus group and make their arguments with their evidence to these focus group members to see what they have to say about their arguments

Or perhaps make your case stronger, I'm assuming.

Absolutely. There's nothing, there is nothing better than sending a focus group result to an insurance company who, when those members of the focus group jurors have killed the arguments they've made to us on the telephone. So we can do that and car wrecks, that kind of case. We get it from the insurance industry a lot of times. And then if it goes in litigation, we'll get it from the defense lawyers too. And then when they start taking depositions, you start picking up on what their argument's going to be.

Yeah, maybe lots of different places

Of the cases. There's some cases, if we can get most of those facts from the insurance, we can focus this stuff before we ever have to file a lawsuit and speed up the resolution. A lot of times there's other cases you can't do that. Let's say it's a premise liability case where someone falls inside of a business, they have surveillance. Let's say it's a bar. They have surveillance, something happens. There's instant report, there's witness statements. We say, Hey, how about give us that? And they say, Nope, sorry. They have no legal duty to give it to you if there's no lawsuit going on.

Oh, so you have to file the lawsuit at that point.

So then you go to your client and say, listen, the facts that they have, the facts they know have a chance to change the value of this case drastically, but we've got to file a lawsuit. And like I said, nobody wants to file a lawsuit and no one wants to be sued, but they won't give us the facts to evaluate. That's the only way you do it. You can't properly evaluate a case when there's facts you don't know. It's like that in trucking cases. Do they properly hire the right trucker? Do they violate their own policy? Did they train them? Right?

There's a whole commercial aspect to it.

The whole commercial, the regulations, they will not give you that without litigation. You have to go file a lawsuit. Same thing with Dr Shop cases. We do cases against drunk drivers and the bars that they get out in the road and kill people or hurt people. What we want to do in that, we want the facts. We get on that, we get the dash cam out of the police cars, the vest cams, the body cams on the police officers. If we can,

Are they supposed to give that to you or how does that work?

The dash cams we get, a lot of times they won't give us the body cams until there's litigation.

So same thing kind of as some of those other businesses.

We want surveillance. We want to do everything we can get from the time of the wreck to prove intoxication level of the driver, but also find out if they're coming from a bar that overserved them. A lot of times the dash cam you can pick up sometime they talk about where they come from if the officer questions them. But those cases usually require us to file quickly because it may surprise you that surveillance disappears. Oh,

Really? Pretty

Quickly in that incident. We want surveillance. We want the credit card receipts when somebody goes into a bar and drinks to see what they've purchased. We want to know who's working that night, won't just know all the facts and they won't voluntarily give it to you. So your only option to file suit and go in and do discovery. When I say file suit, what I'm talking about, when you file suit, you now have the ability to subpoena things.

You

Now have the ability to make them sit across the table from you and you ask questions. You have the ability to make them produce credit card receipts to you, make them produce the surveillance to you.

So while they're maybe withholding such receipts or footage or things along those lines, is there a particular reason or are they just kind of hoping that you won't file a suit? In that case? Maybe

I'm trying to put it real nicely. They're playing defense and we're playing offense.

Right.

Also, a lot of, I know of some circumstances where insurance companies have kind of given directives to this is what to do when this happens.

Don't say, yes, perhaps

Preserve this, get it to us. Give us these things. Don't say anything to anybody. Don't give anything. So there's, there's been some situations where I've seen insurance companies kind of directed people on what not to do and what to do. And if you understand it from their standpoint, their standpoint is they don't want to give facts. They're going to increase the value to the plaintiff. So they sit on it until legally they have to give it to

You. Okay. Right. So unless you subpoena those things in your lawsuit, chances are you might not get those. That's

Right. Understand, it's almost like plain chicken. You offer a person blank dollars. Oftentimes our injured parties will get offers immediately after the raid. We'll pay you blank dollars, sign our lease, you'll be finished. Very few facts known at that time. They go hire a lawyer and they offer something again. And if you base it, if I'm basing on what somebody else did on another case, and I don't have all the facts, I feel like I'm not doing my client a good job. I think we've got to find out what the real value is.

And that has to do with all those details and facts that might not come up unless

All the details, the longer they drag out, more leverage they put on plaintiffs, I call it the leverage of time they've always had for the first 30 years, the insurance industry has had on our clients the leverage of time. How can we drag it out, hold onto the money. We've got that money invested somewhere. We're making money on that money. The leverage of time. People get tired on a case over just want

To get it over with. They're going through

Some hard times. They can't last but so long. They've always had the leverage of uncertainty. You don't know what a jury's going to say about that. A jury could really, you don't know. You don't know how 12 people don't respond to this.

But that's what focus groups seem to alleviate. Sometimes

The focus group has flipped those two leverages because now the focus group, we can speed up the process and we can take away the leverage of uncertainty. So we have flipped that and we're still working on flipping it better. I mean, every focus group we do, every focus group that we analyze, we've got more data.

Absolutely.

So we use that data. We use what we find as leverage against insurance company. Insurance companies in South Carolina have a duty to acting in good faith liability coverages, which means if you're a bar, you have insurance, the insurance company will pay damages up to a certain amount, but they also have a legal duty to protect your assets. So if I can show them that the real value of this case is more valuable than all their coverage, it puts 'em in a situation where now they don't protect their client's assets. They need to go ahead and pay us our money

In order to act in that good faith. That's

Right. Yeah. So we got more ammunition to give them to act in good faith. In the past, they've always said, Hey, we act in good faith. We just disagree what 12 people are going to do with these facts. Now we show 'em what 12 people or 24 people or 36 people are going to do with the

Facts. You kind of have the evidence in that way. Yep. I've heard the phrase bad faith a few times. Could you kind of define what that is in terms of an insurance company?

South Carolina has recognized an implied duty on the part of insurance companies. They recognize that insurance companies have leverage on people who buy insurance. Auto insurance is mandatory. You got to go buy it. You better have health insurance, you better have disability insurance. You better have this insurance and this insurance. And they understand the imbalance of power between an insurance industry and one individual

Person.

So what they say is, these people pay premiums and then there's a claim insurance company. You got to act reasonable. You can't act unreasonable. You got to have a reasonable basis for denying a claim. You got to have a reasonable basis for delaying the payment of a claim you have, have a reasonable basis for how you value the claim. So we have used in our effort to find out what the real value, the topic for the day, the real value of your claim is to do this work, get all the facts, get it appraised, and then use what we have found to be the real value to leverage the insurance companies to act in good faith. If you put it in the best possible light for the insurance company, they're doing their jobs, they're trying to save money for their investors. So we're just showing them this is what the real value is

With all the facts, all the details and all the evidence.

If you want us to present anything else, let us know and we'll present it to the next focus group. So if we show 'em that we're allowing them to see what these 12 people think about it and hopefully for doing the right thing, they'll go ahead and do it. If they continue not to do the right thing

Or to act in bad faith,

There could be a claim for bad faith. And what happens is, let's say the insurance company, we show 'em this focus group, we show 'em this focus group, we give 'em all the evidence. They don't believe it. They say,

No,

We're not going to pay you. Right. We go to a jury, the jury gives us $3 million, and the Atfa Barr has only 1 million in coverage, but now he's got a judgment against the bar for $2 million that they could have prevented by paying the policy limits.

Wow. Okay.

So that bar owner changes could then sue them for bad faithful, not protecting him.

Oh, okay. They have a duty to protect their client as well. If it's that's,

Or that bar's going to sign his cases, his case to us to pursue against his insurance in return, we won't come after his assets.

Really? Oh my gosh. That's interesting.

So they have that. Insurance companies are always looking at the responsibility to pay the claim, but the responsibility to act in good faith based on reasonable information,

But then they also have their clients, which causes a whole other situation. That's right. Gotcha. Awesome. So during this podcast, we discussed finding the true value of your claim, and you mentioned three major components, collectability damages, and liability. Could you just give me a quick synopsis about what those mean?

Yep. Liability is proven that someone else caused it by their negligence or violation of some statute or some duty. How strong that case is and disproven that the plaintiff contributed to it. Damages are investigations as to all the damages that were caused by the violation of the duty. Yes. I can answer that question. Liability is who is at fault, who caused it, how much fault you can put on the defendant versus the plaintiff. Damages are looking at all the damages that are recognized under South Carolina law and then investigating and looking at every damage that was sustained by the plaintiff in this particular case. And then collectability is how can you pay the damages? It's got to come from insurance or assets. Okay. Most cases, I've done it for 35 years. I've had assets involved five or 10 times. Most of it is limited by the insurance coverage, the insurance coverage that the other party has purchased, and the insurance coverage that you have purchased yourself to protect yourself against other people's negligence or recklessness.

So the truth about the real value of your claim, would you mind kind of summarizing the five or six points we talked about here today?

Yep. The real value of your claim is based upon what a jury would give you if the case was presented with all the facts that added value for your claim in a presentation model that the jury likes, which includes everything they want to hear. It is not one or two elements. It's not multiple of your medical bills and your lost wages. That's like the custom home analogy. Again, it is about building a case, using every fact that exists in this world to add value to that case. And then looking at the blemishes in the case to see if they can be painted over or they can be minimized. And then to get the elements of your case and the facts of your case given to a jury by the most credible people available to teach the jury the facts and to share the facts with the jury as your subcontractors. And then you get it appraised by the focus group and just like an appraisal on a house, you get an appraisal of your case by a focus group to determine in this particular county, this is what this case is worth. And then you leverage that to try to do away with the insurance company's leverage of time and uncertainty to flip the leverage on them by using their duty of good faith to get the client paid the real value faster.

Absolutely. That was really awesome information. Thank you so for letting me be a part of this podcast. I really learned a lot throughout our conversation and I'm sure our viewers did as well, and I look forward to the next one. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us on The Legal Truth Podcast. If you have questions that you would like answered on a future episode, please send them to the legal [email protected]. If you would like to speak to us directly, call us at two four eight seven four eight six. If you find the podcast valuable, please leave us a five star review and share the legal truth with your neighbor, friend, or family member who is seeking reliable information about a South Carolina personal injury or workers' compensation claim. Dirk j Derrick of the Derrick Law firm Injury Lawyers is responsible for the production of this podcast located at 9 0 1 North Main Street, Conway, South Carolina. Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers has included the information on this podcast as a service to the general public. Use of this podcast in any related materials. Does not in any manner constitute an attorney-client relationship between Derrick Law firm, injury lawyers, and the user.

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