#nofilter and Personal Injury Cases

It’s easy to fall into the trap. There are so many things that condition us to try to make life look perfect.

I’m a visual person. I like to make these little vignettes showing what life was like for our clients before they got hurt. By force of habit I crop out ashtrays, beer cans and unmade beds.

But that isn’t what real life looks like. That kind of curation comes with a certain component of deception.,

I think our collective tastes are changing. What we want is reality. Not a carefully curated scene with no more depth than a Hollywood set.

One way to provide that “reality” (and ultimately add value to cases) is to own the “bad” things about our cases. To pan back so that the ashtrays, beer cans and unmade beds are on full display. Along with our clients before they were carrying the weight of injury caused by someone else’s negligence.

And it’s not just visual. It’s not just composition of the photos we include in demand letters and show during opening statement and closing argument.

It also applies to the facts of the case.

One thing defense attorneys like to do is show the jury treatment timelines. So in a recent case I wanted to get out ahead of the treatment timeline. Not only was I going to show the days on which our client treated, but also her symptom scores. I thought this was going to be important because there were two wrecks and I thought that symptom score would help to show that she was getting better after the first then got worse again after the second.

But here’s basically what the timeline showed:

Symptoms were all over the map both before and after the second collision. The data didn’t provide any useful information. So I pivoted and focused on something else.

But the defense didn’t pivot. It talked about this very issue. (And probably should have made a chart like the one above.)

As this was happening I realized that I should have been the first one to bring up the issue and explain why symptom reporting didn’t tell the whole story.

If I would have included the somewhat unattractive fact (the medical-data equivalent of an ashtray or overflowing garbage can in the foreground) it would have had less sting when the defense brought it up.

Live and learn. And then, if you’re like me, learn the same lesson over and over again.

#nofilter

#problem

#fire

#ashtray

#beer can

#reality

#no-filter