Here's a question I get all the time: "What's all this I hear about fraudulent injuries? You know the so-called injured person is caught on videocam skiing or playing basketball. What's your take on this subject?"
I think that the topic deserves its own blog. In fact, it probably deserves its own website. And the Chamber of Commerce -- and by that I mean a nationwide, concerted effort by large corporations including insurance companies -- has waged what can only be described as a multi-million dollar ad campaign and public relations campaign on the American public in order to convince the American public that the problem with our society today, and the problem with our court system today, is that there are hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs out there filing fraudulent and frivolous lawsuits. This is simply not the case.
Why Would Corporations Perpetuate the Myth of Rampant Fraud?
Once somebody understands why a corporation -- like Ford, or GM, or Ralph's or Vons or any of these other large corporations, including insurance companies, would wage such an ad campaign -- it all becomes clear and it really comes out in the light. They're willing to spend a hundred million dollars over the course of a couple of years waging this multi-faceted PR campaign on the American public because they know that the only recourse for an injured individual is the courtroom. And once a person who has been wrongfully injured by somebody who has refused to be accountable for those injuries sues that person in court, the injured person's destiny is determined by twelve people -- the jurors. And these large corporations know that if they can change the way that the jurors look at an injured person, specifically that they look at them with suspicion, and that that becomes an indoctrinated mental predisposition, the insurance companies and these large corporations have really won the battle.
The difficulty is that nobody wants to admit that they've been brainwashed, and a juror is never going to think that he has been brainwashed or she has been brainwashed by a multi-million dollar ad campaign. Their view will simply be there are too many lawsuits, or they're tired of all these frivolous lawsuits, or I'm tired of all these lawyers trying to make a bunch of money on all these fraudulent cases. As I said before, I turn down 80-90% of all the cases that people want me to represent them on and that's not because those 80-90% of cases are not meritorious. In fact, there have been very few calls that I have even received where I believed the case is not meritorious; it simply is impractical for me, financially, to take a case like that. And that's because -- for the reasons I said before, if I have to spend $15,000-$100,000 in costs out of pocket to prosecute a case from start to finish, I have to know that realistically my client's going to get something in his or her pocket at the end of the day and I'm going to keep my lights on and my bills paid and some money to pay my mortgage every month. Because of those financial considerations, I have to be very picky.
I Will Not Take Any Fraudulent Case
And getting back to the main point, which is about the frivolous lawsuits -- I think, just like anybody, I want to maintain an honest, upright business that's full of integrity. And I believe that I do. There's no case that I've ever taken on -- as I'm sure you can imagine that I would ever knowingly prosecute knowing that it was fraudulent or frivolous in some way. With that being said, the vast majority of cases that I have -- my clients have retained me because, despite the fact that the case has a great deal of merit to it and they are severely injured, the people who injured them wrongfully have failed to be accountable for those injuries.
And I think that it's important to understand that if I was to walk up to you and hit you with a bat in the leg, or reach into your pocket and pull your wallet out and cut off your arm and take it away with me, I would be doing something vastly wrong to you, and harming to you. I would be injuring you. I would be taking away something that you very well could never get back. And if I didn't offer to make that right, a reasonable person would have a problem with that, right?
What happens every single day, then, is somebody drives their car too fast and hits you and they do something wrong, and they very well may not choose to remain accountable to you and make it right. Somebody may be careless and leave something out for you to hurt yourself in a way that is beyond the scope of what a normal person would do, and that person very well may opt not to be accountable and not make it right to you. In a case like that, that's why attorneys become necessary.
There's No Need For Lawsuits If ...
If everybody in this world operated according to Biblical standards, according to the Golden Rule, according to what we all know to be good, fair and right behavior -- there would be no need for these lawsuits. There would be no need for this adversarial claims process. But unfortunately, the world we live in today, as a matter of fact, there are those who will wrongfully injure somebody and either they themselves or their insurance company on their behalf will refuse to remain accountable to them and make things right.
And that applies to large corporations especially, because large corporations are concerned about one thing and one thing only, and that is profit. They don't have a conscience, they don't have an ability to recognize that it's in their own best interests to live by what we -- or other Biblical or accepted social standards. They're only concerned about the bottom line, and they're going to do whatever it takes to preserve that. And for that reason, unfortunately, the court room is an individual's last bastion of justice. And those twelve people who are going to be one's jurors will determine their destiny.
