I’ve answered many of the questions I have been asked over the years about personal injury lawsuits….right on this website.
To find an answer to your question, you can scroll through the Q & A’s below, or use the search function just to the right. Just type your question, press search, and every answer I have on the site that is related will appear.
Or you can always send me an e-mail using my contact form or call me at 513-621-4775.
First, there are no tricks. There is just enthusiasm, and respect. And the basic rules of human behavior.
Judges like people who like and respect them; who respect their time; who do what they say they will; who are pleasant; who like to avoid unnecessary fights; who are accessible.
Most judges don’t like presiding at trials. They’re not afraid of trials, but every time there’s a disagreement, there’s a chance they’ll do something wrong. And trials keep them from getting other things done.
In fact, most judges really don’t like disputes between lawyers. I do everything I can to get the other lawyer to agree with me before I ask the judge to step in and resolve it.
Judges generally do not like continuing a case to a later trial date. They are concerned that the lawyers are “beating around the bush”, avoiding the issues, causing the case to drag on longer at the expense of the justice system and at least one of the people in the lawsuit. So if I am going to need more time for something, I try to tell the court about it as far in advance as possible.
Judges hate it when a lawyer won’t answer a question directly. I try to answer the judge’s questions as directly as I can; if I can’t be definite, I try to tell the judge why I can’t be definite.
And I try to steer the conversation to issues that work against the other side. To put the other lawyer in a position where he has to choose between giving a definite answer that will hurt him, on the one hand, and not answering the question at all.
I can summarize all this in just a few short rules for lawyers:
• Show up when you’re supposed to.
• Do what you say you will, when you say you will.
• Know your case – the facts and the law.
• Know what your client wants, and talk to your client about whether this is reasonable.
• Try to get to the point in everything you do.
• Be nice. Especially when it kills you.
• Give the judge what he wants.
I have had judges call me and ask me to handle cases for family members, or other friends. I have had the same judge who accused me (undeservedly) of malpractice and threaten me (also undeservedly) with contempt in one trial treat me later with the utmost respect and understanding.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. I get more done by getting along with my own clients, with the other lawyers, and with judges. If you’ve been injured in an accident, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Personal Injury Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
Yes.
Getting treated as soon as you can will make you feel better, will get your settlement earlier, and could easily get you more money than if you delay.
No doctor has ever told me this directly, but I am convinced that going to the doctor and getting the treatment you need will make it more likely that a temporary injury won’t turn into a permanent one. It’s common sense.
I see a lot of people who delay treatment – maybe they have more important things to do, like jobs or taking care of the kids.
But delaying too long can create a treatment “gap”. Jurors – and equally important, insurance adjusters – often say “If he’s hurt that bad, why didn’t he get the treatment sooner, instead of waiting?”
Another thing: It’s almost always a mistake to settle your case before your treatment for accident injuries is complete. So the longer you treat, the more time it takes to settle the case.
So if you have a series of treatments, each separated from the one before by a period the other side will question, you run the risk of being unable to settle your case before the statute of limitations (In Ohio, you have to file suit or settle your case within 2 years from the date of the accident, or you can’t recover your money.).
Which means you have to sue. Which means the insurance company gets a lawyer. And the insurance lawyer wants to learn everything about the case, so he can do a great job for his client and – sometimes – bill a lot of money to the insurance company.
Which means anywhere from another year to a year and a half after filing the suit before your case settles.
Most of my clients have things to do they consider more important than going to the doctor if they think they can “get by” without seeking medical treatment.
But getting treated early is the best way to get the lawsuit out of your life, to get the most money, and feel better too!
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. Every lawsuit has its own timetable – but all my clients want their lawsuit to be over. And so do I. If you’ve been injured in an accident, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Injury Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
All my cases are BIG – but that includes some lawsuits that settle for as little as $3,000.00.
As you’ve probably figured out, attorneys like to look over each other’s websites. (That may be why a lot of them look like each other. Hopefully, you think mine is a little different.)
But when I look at my friends’ websites, one thing I keep seeing is “I don’t take small cases.” And I look at the statement a few different ways.
First, any attorney who says that his client has a “small” case will probably wind up with a disappointed client. If you came to me with something big enough that you would sit down and discuss it with me, and then give several strangers the right to review your medical records, it’s a big deal to you. And it better be a big deal to your lawyer.
Second, most people need a lawyer before they realize just how hurt they are.
A lot of cases that start out looking not that “large” turn out to be big deals.
The two sore wrists from grabbing the steering wheel that wind up needing surgery, and settle for policy limits of $100,000. The lawsuit that starts with a sore knee turns into a personal disaster that requires 5 surgeries, and settles for $500,000.00.
A nice lady that the insurance adjuster offered $2,000.00 winds up having operations on her shoulder and back, and settling her case for $93,000.00.
I could go on forever.
Third, if I agree to work for you – even if you’re all better after a thousand dollars in medical bills and three weeks of physical therapy – it means I think your case is pretty interesting, that I think I can help you, and that I also think we can both make some money.
And finally, I’ve made a lot of money for people on both “big” cases and what the other lawyers are calling “small” cases. So they’re all BIG to me.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. All my cases are BIG. If you’ve been injured in an accident, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Injury Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
Attorneys object to a lot of questions for a lot of reasons.
In a typical deposition in a personal injury lawsuit, the attorneys don’t ask many improper questions.
Abuse can happen, but the purpose of the victim’s deposition is to let the other side find out important things – how the accident happened, what the victim’s injuries are, and whether there is anything else to blame either the accident or the injuries on.
Most things that the other lawyer wants to know can fit into one of these categories.
My approach? Vigorous objections usually tell the other lawyer that you have something to hide. I don’t make them unless I think the other lawyer is trying to take advantage of my client, or unless I think he’s asking about my client’s private life.
As long as I think my client can handle it, I would rather let the other side see how confident I am in my client’s ability to answer trick questions on his own. But if I have doubts at all, I OBJECT.
A story: about 15 years ago, I had a client who was suing a shopping center for failing to pay fees to his advertising agency. The lawyer for the shopping center took his deposition. The lawyer asked my client – a cocky guy – when he started in the advertising business.
My client – mainly just to establish territory, and back off the lawyer – objected on his own. “What does that have to do with anything? It’s irrelevant!!!”
The lawyer was cowed. He tried to argue with my client, but he couldn’t explain why his question was relevant, and never got an answer.
I didn’t say a word. My client loved it.
Things can be different in a trial. But most judges will allow lawyers to ask all kinds of questions.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. I protect my clients. If you’ve been injured in an accident, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Personal Injury Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
A mediation is a negotiating session, with both lawyers, the victim, and often the insurance adjuster, present to exchange offers and demands. The negotiations are supervised by a “mediator”, who acts as a middle man, to carry offers and demands from one side to the other.
Mediators like to have the insurance adjuster present. But it’s not always necessary.
Having the adjuster present can be very helpful when it’s apparent that the other side has the case grossly undervalued.
Why? Because mediators have credibility; if a mediator tells the adjuster that the case is worth $60,000, instead of the $10,000 which the adjuster had set aside to settle the case, the adjuster is more likely to believe the mediator than the attorney for the other side. A lot of cases settle because the adjuster has the opportunity to hear a “second voice” – the mediator’s – tell him what the case is worth.
On the other hand, a lot of defense lawyers have the full authority of their client to negotiate within a reasonable range. And if there aren’t any “problem issues” in the case – for instance, legitimate disputes about liability or whether a surgery was necessitated by the accident or by a pre-existing illness – chances are that a good attorney has discussed the case with his client, and has a clear grasp both of what a jury will do and of his own client’s view of the case.
And let’s face it, an adjuster isn’t going to fly in from the company’s office in Connecticut on a $12,000 lawsuit.
Sometimes, you know from the other side’s opening offer whether they have a reasonable view of a case. A couple years ago, I started negotiations in a Clermont County lawsuit by asking for $1.3 million. (I didn’t want to have a trial if the other side was willing to make a decent offer, for reasons particular to the case.)
The insurance company responded with an offer of $300,000.00, and said they’d mediate if the adjuster would not have to fly in for the mediation session. At this point, I realized (1) That even without the adjuster present at the mediation, we would get enough money to make my client happy and (2) If we didn’t mediate the case right away, there was a chance the insurance lawyers would find out some very important weaknesses in my case, and wind up offering less.
We had the mediation in Batavia with the adjuster attending by phone, and settled the case for $500,000.00.
On the other hand, I’ve seen some cases where the mediator had to spend a lot of time butting heads in a closed room with the adjuster before the insurance company would change its valuation.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. If I have my druthers, I want the insurance adjuster to attend the mediation in person. If you’ve been injured in an accident, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Personal Injury Lawyer about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
All kinds of things. Here are some of them:
-The make and model of the truck – which can tell you how wide it is. Useful knowledge if you’re trying to reconstruct an accident that happened on a very narrow road.
-If the truck had an event on data recorder, or “black box”, you can learn information about the truck’s speed, steering and braking history immediately before the accident.
-The driver’s discipline and violations history – helpful if you’re trying to establish that the company was negligent in hiring, retaining or failing to discipline him.
-The training materials for the company’s drivers – which by themselves can establish a standard of care.
-The manifest for the truck for the particular trip.
-Whether the driver was given any particular route instructions – which could, in turn, reflect on the questions of whether he was following the instructions, how the instructions were formulated, and whether the driver was in the scope of employment.
-The damage incurred to the truck because of the accident.
-The mileage and maintenance history of the truck – very useful if equipment failure was a cause of the collision.
-How much time the driver had spent behind the wheel in the 72 hours before the accident – which can tell you how much time he had not slept during that period.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. The stakes are usually higher in a truck accident case, and a good lawyer has to know what to do if the trucking company decides to fight liability vigorously. If you’ve been hurt by a truck, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Truck Accident Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
It depends on the type of expert you need.
There are two types of witnesses – expert and lay. A lay witness testifies about facts that he personally saw – “I saw the light and it was red”, “the truck ran the stop sign”, “the blue car was over the line when the collision occurred”. A lay witness can’t give an opinion.
An expert witness might be able to testify to some facts, but only an expert witness can give an opinion.
Who was the perfect expert witness? Remember the scene in “My Cousin Vinnie” where Joe Pesci calls his girlfriend, Marisa Tomei to testify that the crime couldn’t have occurred the way the prosecution said it did? Where Marisa shuts down the trial, because she knows more about cars, tires, and limited slip differentials than anyone in the courtroom?
Marisa Tomei was the perfect expert witness – she hadn’t seen the crime or the scene, but she knew cars so well that she could tell the court why the other side’s witnesses had to be lying.
If I’m looking for an expert who can tell the jury how the accident happened – for instance, to say that the truck driver is lying when he says that he was only going 55, or that a truck did not have enough time to clear the intersection when he left the stop sign – I hire an accident reconstructionist.
Accident reconstructionists are usually not like Marisa Tomei. They are typically either engineers or retired law enforcement officials with specialized training in accident reconstruction.
They are able to look at the physical evidence – or reconstruct it based on witnesses’ testimony – and develop a precise timetable of what happened when.
If the lawsuit requires someone to say what the standard of care would be for a truck driver (or a trucking company) in a particular situation, I would try to find someone with expertise in trucks – maybe a manager for a trucking company, or a retired enforcement official. Trucking experts know specifically what truckers – and trucking companies – are and are not allowed to do.
There are other types of experts I might use in a trucking case, depending on the situation.
Where do I find them? I get some from having seen them testify in other cases. Or I might call another attorney – maybe one in town, maybe in another city. Some experts advertise on the web; some in lawyer magazines.
I hired one of the best experts I’ve ever used in an automatic door case. I googled “automatic door expert”, clicked on a WCPO video of the expert, and then googled his name. He had a Ph.D from MIT, cost about $6,500.00, and made the case. (The amount of the settlement made the cost insignificant.)
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. If you’re going to trial in a trucking case and there is any dispute about who caused the accident, you need an expert. If you’ve been hurt by a truck, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Truck Accident Lawyer about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
It depends on how bad you’re hurt.
My first job as a lawyer was working for an insurance defense lawyer downtown. An old, crusty guy.
He asked me to work on a case where a woman, camping next to her booth at a fairgrounds in Kentucky, had been injured when she stepped into a hole next to her tent. My boss told me to call the adjuster assigned to the case to learn some of the facts. The adjuster – who knew my boss – said “Tell your boss that I can fill that hole pretty easily. Let me know.”
Needless to say, I never discussed this with my boss, and – as far as I know – the hole was never filled. And I had no further communications with the adjuster. The case settled.
I would not destroy evidence. But I learned that there are people who will.
OK, back to trucks.
If the victim’s injuries aren’t severe, I write a letter to the trucking company requesting that they keep, and not destroy, a laundry list of items that could be relevant to the case. These would include mileage logs, the “black box”, training materials, driver tests, driver personnel records, etc.
That way, if we can’t settle the case without filing suit and some of the items turn up “missing” later, I can try to introduce the letter into evidence. I think most judges would let the jury see the letter.
Another option is to file suit right away. The good thing about that is that it gets the case in the hands of a lawyer, and – despite what you may think – most lawyers are very sensitive to the consequences of destroying evidence. No lawyer wants to lose his license.
But getting the case in the hands of a lawyer might not be a good thing. Lawyers slow things down a lot, and tend to be a lot more cautious about settling cases than insurance adjusters do.
If the injuries are substantial – I can’t think of a guideline – several other things might be in order. It can be a good idea to:
• Get an accident reconstructionist to the scene right away;
• Hire a detective or investigator to interview witnesses
• Get photographs of the accident scene and the road coming up to it.
• Getting a trucking expert to review the case for possible violations of government regulations. He may think of something we need that had not occurred to me.
This costs money. So the severity of the injury matters a lot – it doesn’t make sense to spend $20,000 investigating a $25,000.00 case.
And there are two main reasons to do an investigation – punitive damages, and liability disputes. So if it’s clear that the truck driver just made a mistake, and if the liability is being conceded – you can tell if the trucking company’s insurance is paying for the other vehicle’s property damage – the investigation might not be necessary.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. You can’t keep the other side from destroying evidence; but once you’ve asked them to preserve it, that makes it a lot harder for them to make it disappear. If you’ve been hurt by a truck, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Truck Accident Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
Usually, the same lawyer works for both the trucking company and the truck driver. But not necessarily.
It depends on the dispute. If the defense is fighting only about whether money is owed to the victim, or how much, the same lawyer can make the same argument on behalf of both the trucking company and the driver. So only one lawyer is necessary.
But suppose that the trucking company – or its insurer – wants to say “The driver was acting beyond the scope of his authority, so the trucking company should not be liable for what he did.” This could include a situation where the driver decides to drop his kid off at school; or where the driver is given a route by the trucking company, and decides he wants to take a different route.
In each of those situations, the trucking company could try to argue that it should not have to pay for damages caused by the driver.
If the trucking company made that argument, its interest would be different from the driver’s; the driver would want the company to be responsible for his accident, but the company would not want to be responsible.
The same lawyer could not argue, on the one hand (for the driver), that the driver was authorized in his route selection, and (also, but for the company), that the driver was not allowed to use that route. Because the two arguments contradict each other, the trucking company and the truck driver would each need their own lawyer.
But there’s a practical side. If the trucking company thinks it’s going to lose on the issue of whether it’s responsible for the victim’s damages, it will probably offend the jury if it argues otherwise. So it might decide not to assert that defense. And in that instance, it would not need a separate lawyer.
There is another situation where there would be two lawyers.
Often, the truck driver has his own insurance, in addition to the insurance carried by the trucking company. The driver’s insurance would hire a lawyer for the driver; but not for the trucking company. The trucking company’s insurance would hire a lawyer for the trucking company.
I have been a lawyer over 30 years. The fewer lawyers on the other side the better; it’s harder for them to beat up on the victim if there is only one lawyer. If you’ve been hurt by a truck, talk with an experienced Cincinnati Truck Accident Attorney about the case. Call me, William Strubbe, at 513-621-4775.
Because all situations are different, and because there may be other facts pertaining to your case that I don’t know about, you should not rely on this answer for legal advice. I am not your attorney, and no lawyer client relationship has been formed.
