Law Tigers: A Case Study

I've been following an online discussion about non-lawyers being able to purchase law practices in some states.

One of the big abuses (or perceived abuses) is the commoditization of motor vehicle collision cases. This takes two forms:

1. Non-lawyer owned firms spend massively on advertising, have cases managed by non-lawyers, and then settle for less than fair market value. In some ways that's understandable. The first dollars are always the easiest to get. The last dollars are the hardest.

2. Non-lawyer owned firms spend massively on advertising and, instead of handling cases themselves, refer out the leads they generate to "partner" firms.

I'm sure this scares some personal injury lawyers. But it doesn't (or at least hasn't) had a big impact on us since our cases come from referrals.

What activates me is the fact that thousands of people end up short-changed because they don't know how to shop for a personal injury lawyers.

I'm sure it happens to people injured in car wrecks. But where it's most obvious to me is in the motorcycle community.

Law Tigers saturates markets with advertising. It sells franchises to attorneys. But it's not a law firm. And it doesn't help injured riders or their families. It's basically the fast-food model applied to personal injury law.

Lots of motorcycle riders don't understand how it works. They think that because they've seen and heard the name Law Tigers that it must be an industry leader. At the point of the spear.

It's a little bit like thinking the best hamburgers come from McDonalds.

We're handling a case right now that's so incredibly emblematic.

My wife was driving along 520. She got to the offramp for 405. There was a motorcyclist down and another rider with him.

She helped out the riders and (bless her soul) gave them my contact information if they had questions or needed help.

Some time passed. They decided to make a claim. They were from out of state and hadn't attended any Council of Clubs meetings here in Washington. So they reached out to a name that was familiar: Law Tigers.

Law Tigers routed their inquiry to an attorney named "Jimmy" in Arizona.

A Washington State Patrol trooper showed up at the scene and issued an infraction to the driver for making an illegal lane change and hitting the husband. It seemed like a good liability case.

So Jimmy writes to the driver's insurer, GEICO.

GEICO writes back and says that it's not paying a dime and that its insured has video that shows it was the rider's fault (but won't provide the video).

Jimmy decides that fighting the case isn't worth the effort and disengages. (And, in some senses, it's hard to blame him. If he has 1,000 cases and the only ones where he makes money are admitted liability, it makes sense financially to eject the others.)

But our practice doesn't work like Jimmy's. Most of our cases end up in litigation. I don't know whether it's oppositional defiance or a heightened sense of obligation, but we don't fold if an insurance company says it's holding an ace but won't show it to us.

We filed suit and ended up getting the video. The video was a little bit ambiguous but sure didn't exculpate the driver. What was weird about it was that it was taken out of the back of the car. Who has video out the back but not the front?

We pressed for all the video. Low and behold, we were provided video out the front too.

This is what the front and back video showed:

Now we have the driver and his insurance company where we want them.

This montage is worth about 4,000 words explaining how riders get short-changed when they hire people to represent them after being inundated by fast-food like advertising.

Motor vehicle collisions are a big deal. People injured in them should have representatives who see their injuries rather than just looking at cases like commodities, where getting 60 or 70 percent of full value on admitted liability cases is good enough.

That doesn’t work for our business model, and it doesn’t work for our value system.