054 Minimal Property Damage, Serious Injury

VERONICA: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here with you for another fabulous episode. So glad to have you joining me again.

CRAIG: Glad to be here.

VERONICA: He is a repeat guest as you may remember, but if you don’t remember Craig’s smiling face, let me tell you just a little bit about him.

CRAIG: Yes.

VERONICA: And dad dog?

CRAIG: Two dogs. Two golden retrievers.

VERONICA: Yeah, two golden retrievers named after snacks.

CRAIG: That’s correct.

VERONICA: Am I right?

CRAIG: Yep, yep. Jelly beans and mister pickles.

VERONICA: I love it. Tasty couple of pups there. And Craig has such an interesting story of such an interesting path to Montlick, because he didn’t start off in this field.

CRAIG: That’s correct.

VERONICA: Okay, tell me about that. What led you here?

CRAIG: Well, before I… after I graduated my undergrad, I actually went and worked for Progressive Insurance for a couple of years out in Denver. And then personal things brought me back to the Atlanta area, and I worked for Allstate for a few years before going to law school. And then while in law school, I interned with a small personal injury practice, and that kind of led my way to Montlick after that.

CRAIG: Well, I think it was working with the insurance companies and seeing how they mistreated people and how they took advantage of people and situations, wanted me to take my law degree and use that to help individuals as opposed to large corporations.

VERONICA: So it felt like maybe moving into something that was more of a calling for you, so to speak?

CRAIG: Sure. Yeah.

VERONICA: Yeah. Now, a little legal birdie told me, no one ever complains about you, Craig.

CRAIG: That makes me feel good. I mean, it’s just important to return people’s phone calls, answer their questions, and treat them like human beings and individuals, not just another case in your repertoire.

VERONICA: Yeah. And you guys get to really know these clients a lot because you’re working with them for such a long time.

CRAIG: Absolutely.

MARK: Bronx, yes.

VERONICA: Mark Molina from the block.

MARK: The Bronx.

VERONICA: From The Bronx. Okay. And Mercy College graduate, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Marine veteran, married, father, motorcycle rider, airplane mechanic.

MARK: No.

VERONICA: Okay, not a renaissance man, but very close, right?

MARK: Very close.

VERONICA: And I know that you had, you’ve been in law for three decades now. Three decades, am I right?

MARK: 30.

VERONICA: 30 years, and you’ve had quite the pathway before coming into personal injury law. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about those.

VERONICA: Wow. It’s like a trial by fire. Because there’s so much on the line.

MARK: It is. It is. When you lose… I didn’t lose a lot, but when you lose and you got to turn around and see the family, it’s something that stays with you. So I left that and went to work, like Craig, for an insurance company. I learned that side of the law and then went on my own. Worked at IBM, worked for several insurance companies, I worked on my own, so a long torturous road to where I am.

MARK: Now at Montlick, happily. And I’ll end my career here. While you may think I look young, I am not. And hoping to end it well here. As you know, you’ve met all of our lawyers and that’s our hallmark. We want the clients to know that we treat them like we want our family to be treated.

VERONICA: Yeah, I keep hearing that over and over and over.

MARK: I got invited to one of my client’s who – I love her madly – her 60th, 6-0 wedding anniversary.

VERONICA: Wow.

VERONICA: What an incredible milestone. How long have you been married?

MARK: 36 long years.

VERONICA: Long, wonderful years, he meant to say.

MARK: Wonderful. And Craig, how long have you been married?

CRAIG: 7 years.

VERONICA: Okay.

CRAIG: I had to think for a second. I’m sorry. I knew that question was coming.

CRAIG: I was not.

VERONICA: Okay, wow, this is great. I love it. So, so many family ties. Thank you so much for sharing so much of your personal stories with us. I always like for listeners to know to whom they’re speaking because, you know, it’s not just a name in the phonebook you know. There are people behind these lawyers’ titles or whatever. And now we’re talking to two dynamic injury attorneys here on Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. Thank you, Mark and Craig, for being in the house. Thank you.

VERONICA: It doesn’t mean, though, that a healthy 18-year-old football player couldn’t also be injured in a small…

CRAIG: Correct. It doesn’t mean that at all. You know, soft tissue injuries.

VERONICA: It was like you said, to me before the show, the heart is a muscle, right? That’s a lot of soft tissue right there. Nobody wants to damage that.

MARK: I was surprised when I got into this field seeing that, but the concept… I do it backwards, right? I always tell people, can you accept the concept if I show you a car that’s mangled totaled?

VERONICA: Nobody can quite believe it. They can’t quite put those things together.

VERONICA: They haven’t had the dots connected for themselves. Okay, so how do you define like a low property damage, though, from person to person, case to case? What’s that look like?

CRAIG: You know, it really depends because you could be talking about low property damages in visible appearance, as Marcus pointed out. You can talk about low property damage in the cost to repair the vehicle.

VERONICA: And cars are so expensive these days, even a tiny… Like when that lady backed into me a few months ago and to my car, there was a cracked grill, but when they opened up the car, it’s like all this other stuff is so expensive just to replace it. So don’t just give me a check for 200 bucks. Not that the insurance company… her insurance company did do right by us.

CRAIG: Sure, sure. I had a case where a client was sitting in the drive-through of a Burger King and someone backed out from a parking space and hit his vehicle – classic scenario, maybe a dent the size of a grapefruit – and he ended up having neck surgery two weeks later.

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CRAIG: Sure, as I was saying, now my client was sitting in the drive-through in his large pickup truck and a small car backed into him as he was sitting there, left about a grapefruit sized dent in the side panel of his pickup bed.

CRAIG: And he had a period of at least a year where he hadn’t seen a doctor, wasn’t getting any treatment, had fully recovered.

VERONICA: Completely good to go.

VERONICA: Oh my God.

MARK: And even though it was just a little dimple on the back of his Jeep, he needed surgery.

VERONICA: Wow.

MARK: And these cases are difficult. They fight us on these because they see the dimple and they just say, not possible.

VERONICA: Even they have it… at the insurance companies.

VERONICA: Welcome back to Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here with Montlick injury attorneys Mark Molina and Craig LaChanse. We’re talking about big injuries from little property damage. Yes, it can happen and if you don’t quite understand why, then you know what…?

CRAIG: Well, I think the key is to get medical attention as soon as possible and contact us as soon as possible because there are certain things that we want to set in place early on in a claim, that if you allow a couple of weeks to go by that could really hurt your claim.

VERONICA: And you got to listen to yourself too. Listen to your body. You might think it’s going to pass after a day or two. But you need to pay attention because maybe… I don’t even know if it’s possible, but maybe you have a client who looks at his or her own car and says, well, it doesn’t look like… maybe I shouldn’t be feeling like this.

CRAIG: Absolutely.

MARK: Get checked out. No matter how minor get checked out, the professional – the medical professionals are the ones that can tell you and they can see and feel if you have a spasm or something like that on your neck, they put their hands on you and what you may think is not a big deal is a big deal, but you got to get checked out.

VERONICA: Make the time to go to the body shop, too. Make the time to get to file the claim to get it looked at. I couldn’t believe how big the repair bill was for just that lady backing into my car.

VERONICA: So now we know it’s a myth. If you see… if you think no damage, no injury. We know that now to be a myth. Yes? All right, how do you debunk it?

MARK: These are incredibly difficult cases. They are incredibly difficult because as I said before, insurance companies are mobilized on defending these cases.

VERONICA: From the start.

MARK: From the start, that’s the first thing. And then once we get involved, then we start meticulously laying out, to even the lesser experienced claims professionals, this is why it’s not a case where there’s no injury. This is what happened. This is a damage. They took the bumper cover off. And this is what they found in the undercarriage. Oh, she went to the emergency room, got checked out. If you notice in the ER, there is objective findings that the person had spasms in the neck.

VERONICA: All right, let’s talk about some real-life examples, guys.

CRAIG: Well, to give you another example. I had a repeat client, a client that I’d worked with previously, and she actually called me up and was like, Craig, I’m not sure what to do.

VERONICA: And why not the recorded statement?

CRAIG: Never give a record a statement to an insurance company.

VERONICA: How are you feeling, Craig? You’re like, I’m fine. Thank you. Well, you said it on the record. You’re fine. Mark, you see this all the time.

MARK: All the time. And these recorded statements, they come back to haunt us.

VERONICA: Mind like a steel trap right there.

MARK: Exactly. You said XYZ and insurance companies said your client said XYZ and then they hit play. Yeah. So yeah, it happens all the time, and I mean, again, incredibly difficult cases. You have to get treatment early, you have to get to us early so that we can get involved early. That’s the key.

VERONICA: Well, Mark, you said you don’t lose often, so give me an example of one that, you know, that you took to the wire?

VERONICA: And they had just been digging in their heels beforehand. And they’re like, we’re not paying.

MARK: They dug in their heels. They blew up the picture of the dimple. Big poster size and paraded it across the courtroom and my client did a fantastic job and, you know, convinced the jury that that didn’t matter. I matter and this is what happened.

VERONICA: So, you know, side note, so that’s interesting. So in Georgia, you can use videotaped depositions of doctors.

MARK: A lot of money. And they don’t take Mexican pesos. They want U.S. currency, a lot of it.

VERONICA: I hear the peso has made quite the comeback, though.

MARK: Yeah, not enough though. I’ve tried. They want U.S. currency.

VERONICA: That’s incredible. Do you have a lot of these cases… is the low property damage, something that’s more frequent than we might think?

CRAIG: Yeah, it’s a significant part of everyone’s practice. I mean, that’s just the reality of the world we live in. So again, don’t be deterred from calling us, you know, talk to us. We’ll let you know whether or not we think we can help you out. And just start… the only thing we can come back to, Mark will attest this, is just start with us. Don’t call the insurance company first. Call us first.

VERONICA: And then one of the things I have learned about every attorney I’ve ever talked to is that if we can’t take the case, we’ll tell you why. We’ll tell you why, but I want to make clear that I’ve also learned that you guys don’t run from the tough ones.

CRAIG: Sure. I mean, there’s a classic scenario, and this is maybe a little different than what you’re asking, but we talk about low property damage. And how does that impact our ability to recover on behalf of our clients?

VERONICA: Really, how so?

CRAIG: Well, the classic example is DUI. If the other driver is cited for DUI, we can seek punitive damages against that individual in addition to the compensatory damages. Compensatory damages are simply your medical expenses, your lost wages, and your pain and suffering.

VERONICA: You’re being compensated for that stuff?

VERONICA: That- we have talked a little bit about that before, learning a little bit about punitive damages. So obviously, it doesn’t come up in every case. And so people shouldn’t come to you saying, well, my neighbor got hit in a car accident, and they got a check for a $7 billion or whatever it is, right?

MARK: It depends.

VERONICA: Yeah. It depends. But one thing is, again, clear… it’s actually kind of mind-blowing. I feel very fortunate, actually, that I wasn’t hurt in that accident. And I was afraid that I was. And I was trying to listen to my body, but I was trying not to panic. Like, is this headache that I feel? Is this tension in my neck? Is this from the accident? Or is it because I’m still shaken up? You know, is my adrenaline dumping out after it got so revved up?

MARK: But I’m gonna use your case and let’s add a little twist to it. Let’s say she had left the scene. And you weren’t injured.

VERONICA: The conduct of the other person can play a direct result in how my case ends up.

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CRAIG: Nope.

VERONICA: Well known fact, not a little-known fact – well-known fact. But anyway, it’s time for the Montlick closing argument. Gentlemen, take it away.

MARK: We handle all size cases and if you’re a follower of this program, you know that we will treat you like we want our own family members to be treated. We’re client centered.

VERONICA: And lastly, legitimate injuries.

CRAIG: Absolutely. Your injuries are legitimate. We’ll fight for you. We’ll fight against these defenses that the insurance companies put up that we’ve discussed throughout the episode.

VERONICA: Do you think that there is a lesson here for people who just don’t quite get it, who are still going to second guess themselves and say, I can barely see this bump, I can barely see this crack. I’m not calling a lawyer. What do you say to them to make them know it’s okay to pick up that phone?

CRAIG: Well, our consultation is free.

MARK: When they hear… ‘cause I’ll get the tough guys who call me.

VERONICA: And, Mark, you’re a tough guy too, right?

MARK: Long, long ago. No more now.

VERONICA: Now you’re… you’re willing to admit you got a booboo. Let’s get it checked out. Let’s go to the doctor and let’s call the lawyer if need be.

VERONICA: Alright, think about this, everybody. Cars, trucks, the vehicles that we travel in on an almost daily basis are built to help protect us out there. They’re these cages of steel and aluminum.

You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Catch us live every Sunday, 8 a.m. on 95.5 WSB.