I know a guy who does some collections work for doctors who haven’t gotten paid by workers comp insurers and it’s been a decent deal for him.
the guys i worked for were doing like refinery explosions and shit like that. got a lot of cases from lloyds of london market makers. not car wrecks etc. https://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?n=03 L 9812&s=IL&d=32241 Outcome: Plaintiff's verdict for for $456 million reduced by 15% to $387 million.
What prompted this: I was just asked to be local counsel on a subrogation claim. I told them I could help, but that I'd have to charge by the hour and they said that was fine.
Just had a lawyer cancel a mediation that was set for tomorrow because the carrier hasn't made a decision on how much authority yet. Why do you wait until the day before a mediation to cancel? How do you have a mediation set for over a month and still not have a decision on authority? x 10000
I'm defending a subrogation claim filed by ALFA right now. ALFA's lawyer has to be on a contingency. Getting her to do anything is a huge ordeal. I'm the only one making any money off this case. It's ridiculous.
as a law student we had to bill our hours to get paid. i think they billed us out as paralegals. no one would look at the files for the subro cases. the actual lawyers would bill time to those so their bosses could account what they were working on but it wasn't really looked at. there were six 'law clerks' and the amount of hours that we all billed to the contingency fee subro cases that no one looked at was absolutely absurd.
Just got out of shower and was trying to wind down. Cell phone blows up . Answering service has a live MVA PC on the line. It was a property damage only claim where she was at fault, rear ended someone, has no insurance , and wants to know what to do. Was on the phone in my pajamas with this lady for 20 minutes walking her through her options . What a wonderful life.
Federal court ruled today on my motion to perpetuate testimony of the treating doc by deposition instead of making him come live to trial. Ruled against me. Said just because he's a busy doc doesn't mean he's unavailable. Sucks. I'm trying to get something on his letter head saying he surgery /appointments etc and I'll file again. Failing all that I guess I'm subpoena'ing him to trial.
I'm sure all of you in law school had at least one extremely awful classmate that you looked at and said he is the type of person that gives lawyers a bad name. The sleazy type of guys. Well that guy from my law school class just got charged with 32 felonies, was not shocked to see his face when I saw the news report https://www.abc12.com/2021/04/06/three-attorneys-accused-of-racketeering-in-genesee-county/ Sounds like they'd file lawsuits, claim they served the opponent and falsify documents to such, and then collect default judgments.
If you live within 10 miles of an oil refinery you’re 50 times more likely to get cancer according to a University of Texas study published last December. My Dad worked at the Exxon Mobil refinery in Baton Rouge until production was shut down following a fire in February 2020. Exxon acknowledged four known carcinogens were released into the atmosphere, of “unknown quantities”, as a result of the fire. My Dad died on Sunday February the 21st 2021. He told me he was having health issues after the Super Bowl and died 14 days later, almost exactly a year after the refinery fire. He had “innumerable” tumors throughout his liver, colon, lungs, etc...Cancer ate him up so fast and was so aggressive that I can’t see a scenario where it wasn’t accelerated by his exposure to that refinery fire. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_r...cle_2a030ce4-4e89-11ea-a720-6fcae35453c7.html
Being a consumer attorney...this does not surprise me. An attorney in Houston would file all his junk collection cases in Harris County when the Defendants lived all over the country. I and other consumer attorneys reported him to the state bar and I ended up having to be deposed as a part of the state’s lawsuit against him. No criminal charges though, unfortunately.
Based out of San Diego but hey have offices everywhere. A few years back my old firm almost merged with them. I know a guy who just left their Ft. Lauderdale office because he didn’t want to deal with big firm politics anymore.
Why don't you go to the plaintiff's side? I'm sure you could find somebody willing to pay you a salary to do motion practice and briefwriting remotely.
It's one avenue I'm exploring, probably more than others. Just won't be ready to make a jump until towards the end of this year. But yes, I've talked to a few PI guys about doing the work they hate -- demand letters, respond to MSJs, etc. Was pretty receptive. An ex-partner at my firm called me, he just turned down a job at Lewis, asked if I'd be interested. I told him to pass along my information, don't imagine it going very far.
I mean, like 90% of my job is reporting to adjuster's on b/s soft-tissue cases or evaluating a case that will never go to trial. Same shit, different setting.
I’ve often thought about just becoming a trial mercenary. Just have people getting ready for a big trial call me in, do about a month of hard work, then take a few weeks off until the next one lol
Well get good like Ernest Cannon or Jamail and when you're 75 years old the phone will start ringing!
Went an abysmal 0/5 on MVA google ads today. I guess that cost us about $300. A bunch of garbage calls -property damage only -food poisoning -failed a drug test and thinks someone leaked his results -thought we were a rental car company -traffic tickets
This is a dumb question because all of this is foreign to me, but how do they know if google ad generated the call?
For us, the number they call is only used for google AdWords and when you get the call you get a recording before the person comes on that says it’s from google.
Every different type of lead /ad service we use has a different tracking number. Within google ads, every different type of google ad campaign has a different tracking number. We have an interface that has a list of all calls that came in every day from different marketing campaigns, what kind of lead it came from i.e. google ad etc, it records the call, and it has a transcript of the call. Within google ads , it says "workers comp google ad" or "MVA google ad" next to the call in the interface. I listen to the calls every day. Hugely helpful for fine tuning client intake. Also listen to the calls to determine the quality of leads. You'd be shocked what your staff is telling people or mistakes that are made. But they are all correctable if you have decent people.
The lawyer probably recommended authority and the adjuster just kept not responding or sent it up for approval and the supervisor was not responding at all then last minute said we need to set a meeting to discuss it.
Or just pulled a dumbass, baseless number out of thin air the day before mediation and the lawyer just wants to save everyone’s time. Been there.
I've had to cancel many a mediation because of MSAs. "Adjuster, did you send that MSA for CMS approval? No. Was I supposed to? Yes. See the attached 10 emails I sent about it."
This is my life right now. It’s quite nice. though in the past 48 hours, I’ve had one client die with no other remaining family, another go to federal prison for 3 years for fraud, and another perjure himself during deposition when I told him numerous times that the insurance company knew about his prior claims and if he lied about it, it would be really bad for his case. He lied anyway. also still haven’t finalized those other cases yet. Ugh
I've never understood some plaintiffs doing that. I've had plenty of cases where the other lawyer knows that we know about all the pre-existing complaints and I'm asking the same questions 10 different ways at deposition so it's impossible for anyone to find it isn't fraud and at no point does the deponent catch on. They just keep on lying.
I’ve had a defendant do that. Pretty successful small business owner with a $1mm policy and real assets basically playing the hotdog suit character. The plaintiffs were liars, too, so if he’d just admitted liability, the case value would’ve been a fraction of what he made it.
I always tell my clients up front that I'm what's protecting them so if they're going to lie to me I can't do anything to help them. If they're honest, even if bad news, I can minimize the damage so might as well be truthful because the real story is eventually going to come out. Some of them choose to go on with the lie and I just try to settle it asap.
In this case they are paying TTD benefits and the guy is being held out of work so it really behooves them to settle the case , get a present value discount on future damages, and stop paying TTD.
Yeah that seems like someone just dropped the ball on obtaining authority. When that happens I normally try to move forward with the mediation and negotiate a tentative settlement depending on E/C approval. They normally will give it to me when I can give them a bottom line negotiated number.
Reached an agreement yesterday to settle a MS Comp case for $190k. That will be my biggest contingency fee comp settlement thus far in a MS State Comp case. At 25% that is $47,500 in fees. My previous biggest state comp settlement was $165k. You don't have the massively injured /perm total cases come along that often. Also requires a bunch of future surgery/medical to get the bigger numbers.
Ive settled a few million dollar plus ones but that’s like quadriplegic cases or someone with “RSD” that is getting $50,000 a year in medical care.