What Lawyers and Insurance Companies Will Do to Win
Personal injury lawyers like myself here in Orange County and elsewhere play an important role in protecting your rights following an injury. You may be familiar with some of the things we do, but until you’ve experienced that accident injury and have to go up against the resources of an insurance company with their in-house teams of attorneys you might not realize just how we accident lawyers protect you.
A few years ago I wrote a personal injury post about the Foundation of the International Association of Defense Counsel (IADC) and a seminar they hosted specifically on how to limit the damages to be paid to an injured party (you!) at trial. For those who don’t know about the IADC, in their own words they say:
Your Tustin injury lawyer is up against this
The IADC membership is comprised of the world’s leading corporate and insurance lawyers and insurance executives. They are partners in large and small law firms, senior counsel in corporate law departments, and corporate and insurance executives. Members represent the largest corporations around the world, including the majority of companies listed in the FORTUNE 500.
I think you can see they have a vested interest in helping the insurance companies or their legal teams succeed in court. Their success means you, the injury victim may not receive the compensation you deserve when up against insurance company attorneys. That’s one glaring reason to enlist the services of a personal injury attorney to counter the techniques and legal maneuvering of insurance companies should you have to take a case to trial.
In my article I excerpted some of the things insurance companies will do to prevent you from receiving more substantial compensation. These include pre-trial things such as:
How Insurance Companies May Conduct surveillance:
- Holidays are a great for obtaining surveillance that shows activity conflicting with testimony
- Problem: Pre-trial disclosure may be required – most plaintiff attorneys request in discovery
- Bad or worthless surveillance can damage defendant’s credibility
- Have to overcome jury’s natural sense of privacy
- Good surveillance can win a case
- Discover all of plaintiff’s social media
As I mentioned before these things are just part of what was discussed in the IADC seminar which specifically concerned limiting an injury victim’s damages/awards at trial. Think about it; you spend time during a holiday with family following your injury. Unbeknownst to you the insurance company may have hired someone to surveil you—a professional “stalker” in other words. That person will try to videotape you during that holiday family time (or at some other time) trying to show that you are not as injured as you claim.
Another aspect of this is checking all of your social media accounts in an attempt to “prove” that your injuries are not as serious as you claim. They may point to photos or other information on social media that can negate your injury claim.
And when we talk about overcoming a jury’s sense of privacy, we mean just that. Jurors will tend to empathize with the injured person who has been videotaped or whose social media accounts have been “mined” for information. They may feel that such things are an invasion of privacy. However, lawyers for the insurance companies are trained to overcome this sense of privacy in order to win a case or limit damages to a victim.
Help for Orange County Injury Victims
These are merely a few of the things you may go up against when you are taking on an insurance company in court. As I said before, you should not go it alone. Hire a veteran injury attorney like me to present your harms and losses that were the fault of the other person’s negligence. Have you been injured in a car crash? Slip and fall? Dog bite? Have you been harassed at work or suffered sexual molestation? Call me today to discuss your case. Consultations are always free and you pay nothing until or unless we win or settle your case. I’m Kyle Scott, personal injury attorney in Tustin, CA with three decades of experience helping injured persons get the compensation they deserve. 714-544-1460.