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    Plaintiff 101: The Black Book of Inside Information Your Lawyer Will Want You to Know
    Plaintiff 101: The Black Book of Inside Information Your Lawyer Will Want You to Know
    Plaintiff 101: The Black Book of Inside Information Your Lawyer Will Want You to Know
    Ebook158 pages1 hour

    Plaintiff 101: The Black Book of Inside Information Your Lawyer Will Want You to Know

    By Michael J. Harvey and Karen R. Mertes

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    About this ebook

    As my life hung in the balance after a tragic car accident caused by a drunk driver, I promised to spend the rest of my life helping others if I were to survive. Despite sustaining a traumatic brain injury, I am the founder and president of Fulfill Your Destiny, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to helping people whose careers have been altered by injury or other unforeseen circumstances. This book is to help other personal injury survivors contemplating litigation, or already involved in litigation. You should be able to navigate these troubled waters ever so slightly easier because of our experience and advice. We’re hopeful that plaintiffs' attorneys will see the benefit of providing this book as a teaching tool to their clients so as a team you can win your case!
    Written by Karen R. Mertes and Michael J. Harvey.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichter Publishing LLC
    Release dateOct 7, 2015
    ISBN9781311393029
    Plaintiff 101: The Black Book of Inside Information Your Lawyer Will Want You to Know

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      Book preview

      Plaintiff 101 - Michael J. Harvey

      Note from Karen Mertes

      As my life hung in the balance after a tragic car accident caused by a drunk driver, I promised to spend the rest of my life helping others if I were to survive. Despite sustaining a traumatic brain injury, I am the founder and president of Fulfill Your Destiny, Inc., a 501(c) (3) non-profit dedicated to helping people whose careers have been altered by injury or other unforeseen circumstances.

      Inspiring stories of people who have been helped can be found at www.fulfillyourdestiny.org under the Who We’ve Helped tab.

      My proceeds from the sale of this book are directly donated to Fulfill Your Destiny. Thank you for purchasing it. We hope you find the information contained within these pages very insightful. Please know that your donation for this book is used to help others through Fulfill Your Destiny.

      With Gratitude and Warmest Wishes,

      Karen

      Introduction

      Trial and error may be a fundamental method of problem solving, but there is little room for it during the litigation process.

      Before my injury, the term ‘personal injury lawsuit’ meant little to me. If someone was injured due to the negligence of another, he or she filed a lawsuit. The phrase was so commonplace I doubt it even evoked any emotion, even among its practitioners, personal injury lawyers. However, after my injury, I came to realize full well how very personal, a personal injury lawsuit actually is. How personal you may ask? I suffered an injury that took me out of the workforce I had been in for 20 years. A career in which I prepared by earning an undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees with advanced training. It left me with questions about who I was and what I was able to do. During the litigation process, I was threatened by opposing counsel that if I did not accept their offer, and he prevailed at trial, he would not hesitate to seek to recover his client’s damages which would likely be so great under the prevailing tort law in Florida that the likely consequences would be to lose my house and/or file bankruptcy. Is this personal enough for you? This is the foundation and motivation for me to write this book.

      If this book serves its purpose, we’re hopeful other personal injury survivors contemplating litigation, or already involved in litigation, should be able to navigate these troubled waters ever so slightly easier because of our experience and advice. We’re hopeful that plaintiffs’ attorneys will see the benefit of providing this book as a teaching tool to their clients.

      My purpose for writing this book was, in fact, threefold. First, it served as a form of catharsis, helping me work through all the anger and frustration I had experienced as a result of my injury and then, years of litigation. I had spent a lifetime creating a reputation of integrity, honesty and character. To watch defense attorneys and experts attack every aspect of these qualities, for the sole reason to eliminate or reduce the damages I had suffered at the hands of a drunk driver, left a scar on my psyche that remains with me even today. Please do not consider my motives to be sour grapes though. In the end, the insurance company paid me virtually everything I had demanded from the very beginning, but not without first challenging my perceptions as well as my integrity, honesty and character. The process took four years and two months and, in the end, left its mark. I’m hopeful, through the writing of this book, to leave some of the pain caused by the litigation process behind me.

      My second purpose for writing this book was to help other personal injury victims who may be considering hiring an attorney and filing a lawsuit to understand the process and possibly assuage some of their fears and anxieties. In addition, I’m hopeful this book will prevent readers who have not yet retained counsel from making critical errors which could have substantial negative impact on their cases. For these injured victims already in the litigation process, it may seem quite foreign to you, almost like another language. I’m hopeful this book will assist lawyer-client communications and understanding which may otherwise be lost in translation.

      My third purpose for writing this book is to assist personal injury lawyers’ educational support and communication with their clients. Time is a lawyer’s most important resource, yet often, the least abundant. Timely, effective communication between lawyer and client is critical to successful litigation. I’m confident this book will assist clients in understanding the nature of their responsibilities associated with most aspects of the litigation process, saving the attorney hours, if not days, explaining these basic elements. Time, the attorney can now spend on other aspects of the case requiring his or her attention, leading to the successful resolution of the case.

      In order to provide you with the greatest insight into the civil litigation process, I have coauthored this book with Michael Harvey, M.S., J.D., my husband and retired attorney. We’ve written this book together where he offers his views from the lawyer’s perspective while I offer my insights and impressions as a plaintiff. This book is unique having been co-written by an experienced attorney and a lay person plaintiff, offering the individual perspectives of each.

      While we respect both male and female lawyer’s we usually refer to ‘the lawyer’ in our book as ‘he’ since the primary lawyer in my litigation was male. We also usually refer to the plaintiff as ‘she’. As a point of clarification for our purposes in this book, the words, ‘lawyer’, ‘attorney’ and ‘counsel’ are interchangeable.

      To assist you in your communications with your attorney, we’ve added a Notes and Questions for My Attorney section following each chapter.We would urge you to write down any questions, thoughts or observations that may immediately come to mind during the reading of this book, which you may wish to follow-up with your lawyer.

      After reading this book, should you have any questions about its contents, we invite you to contact us. If we receive areas of inquiry not addressed herein, we may include them in a subsequent edition of the book.

      ONE

      The Big Lie

      One of your first thoughts in deciding whether to purchase this book and then take the time to read it is to come to terms with the propaganda fed to us by anti-plaintiff lobbyists and their allies. Specifically, such detractors and to a lesser extent, the popular media, have promulgated the myth that all an injured victim has to do is to sue a defendant and take a case to trial. A jury will then always return a verdict in the plaintiff’s favor and award him or her buckets of money. Spill some coffee in your lap at a drive-through, sue the restaurant and collect thousands of dollars at trial. Right? Wrong!!! Nothing could be further from the truth.

      Why do anti-plaintiff lobbyists want you to believe this? There are at least two reasons. First, such lobbyists are always promoting some form of tort reform, which is a term used at the legislative level, to enact laws designed to deny or limit plaintiffs’ access to the courtroom and/or limit the amount a plaintiff can recover. Second, if enough people believe this lie, then jury pools can be poisoned, leading to a defense bias and verdicts in favor of defendants or, at least, substantially reduced plaintiffs’ verdicts.

      As an illustration, with a civil jury of six, what do you think happens if four or five are willing to award the plaintiff fair damages and one or two jurors resist? The end result will either be a hung jury, or, for more likely, dramatically reduced damages, as the majority compromise with the minority in order to reach a unanimous verdict

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