Settling Motor Vehicle Cases

To maximize claim value, you need to expand your knowledge of auto cases. Dr. Arthur Croft co-authored the very first medical treatise on whiplash injuries - Whiplash Injuries: The Cervical Acceleration/Deceleration Syndrome. Over the decades since that time, he has published hundreds of articles on traumatic injuries, causation, epidemiology, accident reconstruction, and the junk science often used by insurers and insurance defense experts. He brings it all together on this comprehensive video set. This is our most important product for handling all types of motor vehicle claims.

Handling motor vehicle cases involves a variety of topics including medicine, injury causation, epidemiology, crash reconstruction, biomechanics and many issues surrounding insurance claims practices. In Dr. Arthur Croft’s first book, he addresses a number of these topics, dispels myths of crashes involving minor vehicle damage, and provides lawyers with the research citations to create an effective rebuttal when negotiating with an adjustor who doesn’t understand the science or medicine of traumatic injuries. High points to this book include an annotated list of risk factors for injury in auto accidents, an annotated list of risk factors for permanent injury, and a list of scientific literature that dispels the myth that all spinal injury claims resolve within 4-12 weeks. This content provides a wealth of information for initial reserve setting letters, demand letters, and for responsive letters when negotiating with adjustors.

Whether it happens during PIP/MedPay coverage, or whether it happens in litigation, a defense medical examination is almost always strongly biased against your client. The question is, does your client do something to support a negative finding against them? Hopefully not, because that creates the most problematic obstacle to overcome and can dramatically impact settlement value.

This DVD is for your clients, not for you. Lawyers play it for each client before their defense exam, to ensure that they understand the basics of what will happen, that the defense doctor is not on their side, and what tricks they should watch out for at the DME office. This minimizes the time you need to spend repeating the same advice to each client, and allows you to focus only on the points that are most important to the client’s specific case.

If you settle cases instead of litigating, your focus is more likely on the business aspects of the practice of law. This book addresses the business of running your firm, including how to hire and retain associates. Whether you are a fan or a competitor, it is hard to argue with the success of author John Morgan. In the past 30 years, he has built the largest plaintiff personal injury law firm that has ever existed in the United States and the firm has as many 400 lawyers, thousands of support staff and as many as 100,000 clients. The first of his two books is on the economics of running a profitable law firm from the early stages. Morgan & Morgan have increased the amount of litigation they do since he authored this book (and more than doubled in size), but it gives you a good insight in terms of how to survive and thrive while running a settlement law firm. If you like this book, his second book, You Can’t Teach Vision, will help you build an even better law firm by mixing settlements and trial work.

Yes, this is a medical text. But if you settle cases, you should know this book intimately. Why?  Because at most auto insurers, an AMA impairment rating is the second largest driver of settlement value, only behind the injury diagnoses themselves. So, for any injury your client experiences, you should know whether it qualifies as a permanent impairment, and if so, the right doctor you can refer to for an AMA permanent impairment rating. Don’t bother with the 6th Edition, it’s controversial, its validity is disputed, the majority of doctors don’t use it, and as a result, it shouldn’t be admissible. For this reason, insurers and their bodily injury software programs continue to use the widely accepted 5th Edition. And, no, it isn’t just for workers compensation cases - something adjustors and defense lawyers will often misrepresent. See the upcoming Demand Letters DVD for more about how and why you should be getting permanent impairment ratings on those clients that have a legitimate impairment claim when you plan to settle the case.

While Aaron DeShaw’s Colossus demand letter products help lawyers to obtain maximum settlement values within the insurance software systems, it has always been clear that these insurance programs undervalue cases. After all, the primary purpose of the bodily injury software programs is to help insurers underpay claims. The reality is that you have to go to trial to get full value for a client’s claim and establish yourself as a lawyer that will either try cases, or refer to capable trial counsel. Only once you establish your trial reputation will your settlement offers will go up. But, how do you do that?

In Running with the Bulls: How to Win Top Dollar Settlements, Nick Rowley and Courtney Rowley walk you through proven methods for negotiating just settlements for your clients. Along the way, it covers a range of topics, including how to evaluate non-economic damages / general damages, a step-by-step guide for constructing and sending effective demand letters, how to write a demand letter that will open the defendant’s insurance policy, and many other valuable insights and powerful negotiation tactics that will help you better represent your clients. This book contains nearly 75 pages of demand letters used by Nick and Courtney in some of the cases where they have obtained over $1 billion in verdicts and settlements. Given their back to back trial schedule, it is amazing that they took the time to help other lawyers improve their settlement values with this insightful book.