I grew up in Bergen County, New Jersey. I went to high school there. Then I went off to law school at Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan. While there, I was able to get into the E.F. Hutton training program. Eventually, I went to work for Merrill Lynch. When I first started practicing, I worked for a law firm here in Mashpee, and I worked there for about 12 years, and we did a lot of insurance defense, meaning the other side of personal injury. We did do some personal injury, and after being there for over a decade, I wanted to concentrate on plaintiff’s work, as opposed to insurance defense,. Left that firm literally down the street from here and started this firm in 2004. One of the guys that I worked with, I actually carried his bag around. I learned from him. I think he’s one of the best lawyers in Massachusetts. We hit on a case in Barnstable for a record 8.2. Yeah, it’s still the record today. And I got to square off against him over a fee dispute in the federal court. He still refers cases to me.
I’m willing to take your case, to work on your case, to get to know it, to get to know you. I also have the resources to hire the right experts. I actually go to trial. A lot of lawyers don’t. They’re afraid. They don’t want to go near the courthouse. I can remember when I was working at my former firm, we had a lawyer, a local guy, a Yahoo. Didn’t know up from down, in from out. The firm and the insurer had the case valued at over a half a million bucks. And this guy took the first hundred grand. That’s the kind of lawyer you don’t want to hire.
In Massachusetts, you’re able to pursue a claim if you incur $2,000 in, quote, reasonable and necessary medical expenses. So that’s a pretty low threshold. A diagnostic test, an MRI or a CAT scan will get you there. But I think if you believe you have a case, you should just reach out to a lawyer and ask him for a no-cost consultation to discuss the process and how to proceed from there. Very simple.
The most important thing for a client is to find a lawyer whose personality agrees with the lawyer’s personality. Because you’re going to have to spend a lot of time with the lawyer. Sitting down, answering interrogatories, preparing for depositions, going to expert meetings. You need to work with someone who you get along with, who you believe in. You want to be able to come into a lawyer’s office, talk with his assistant, get information and give information and be comfortable with doing it, sitting in a conference room and talking, saying, hey, where are we on my case? What’s going on? What’s the next step? What can I do? What are you doing? Ask all those questions.
It depends. I guess the first thing is, do you have photographs of what caused your injury? Is there a code violation? There’s some slip and falls. I guess if you had a picture of the banana peel on the linoleum in the stop and shop or a grocery store before someone slipped? Sure. Believe it or not, all the grocery stores have video surveillance and the banana peel isn’t the most common injury. It’s the leaking cooler and you can see the water kind of meander out from the bottom of the cooler into the walkway. I’ve actually seen those videos and have had clients slip in the water and get hurt to the point where they needed surgery.
I think the hardest part is sometimes in the middle of a case, you’re just grinding it out with the insurer. You’re answering written discovery or propounding written discovery. You have lots of meetings with clients to do that. You’re preparing them for depositions. You’re taking depositions. This is all going on in a six to nine month period. And it’s work. And I don’t mind it. I like the grinding it out part because that allows me to get to know my case and to know my opponent. And you need to have a clear vision on that in order to go to a jury trial and be successful.
I hear from the client. I sit down and meet with them, whether it’s here in the office or elsewhere. I want to interview them to find out what happened. If need be, I’ll have my investigator go out and talk to potential witnesses so I know the lay of the land. We accumulate their medical records, send out notice letters, and, you know, we’re off to the races.
To attempt to put a value on a case or evaluate a claim for bodily injury, the first consideration is what are the nature and extent of your client’s injuries? What are their medical expenses? Will they have future medical expenses? Have they sustained lost income or wages. Will they incur future loss of earnings capacity and whether or not they’ve suffered any permanency of injury? We attempt to assign a value to some of those. For instance, I can objectively know what the amount of medical expenses are, the amount of lost wages are. Those are objective. We also then seek to try to value some subjective issues such as permanency of injury and physical pain and mental suffering and trying to arrive at the value for a claim.
Get the treatment that you need. Don’t worry about the case. Get the treatment that you need and hire a competent lawyer. Make a deal with the lawyer, allow him to worry about your case, and allow you to worry about your recovery. That’s what I would do if I was injured.
The first thing I think you evaluate when a drunk driver is at fault is, where were they drinking? Were they drinking at home? Were they drinking at an establishment? And if they were drinking at a bar, we call them dram shop cases. You want to investigate to determine whether the bar served a visibly intoxicated patron. Because if they did, they potentially are liable for the injuries caused to what our Supreme Court calls the weary road traveler.
Let’s start with what’s one of the first things you do. So, we commence a civil action. When you file an action in Massachusetts, the court, generally the Barnstable Superior Court, is where I am. They issue something called the tracking order. And that sets forth the stages of when you need to complete discovery, when you need to file Rule 56 or summary judgment motions, when you’re going to have a pretrial and a trial. So you file a suit and you proceed according to this presumptive tracking order. You get a trial in Massachusetts. Although the tracking order says two years, it’s generally a little longer than that, two and a half years. So, I know in two and a half, I have that amount of time to put my case together.
That they’re able to get a hold of us and that we return their phone call and are available to meet with them. I say that more so about Jessica than they do, because she greets everybody that walks into the office and is here more than I am because oftentimes I’m in court.
That somehow or another the motorcycle operator is at fault. I call it the 80-20 rule. An operator either over 80 years old or under 20 years old who simply doesn’t see the motorcyclist and crashes into them without even knowing it. In fact, I saw an accident one time. I was over in Mahoney’s waiting for the guy to bring out some plants. And I saw an accident and I could tell that the elderly woman, 80 years anyway, never even saw the motorcycle and creamed him.
Our roadways are very tight here on the Cape. And I’ll give you an example of a case I’m working on. I represent a bicyclist who was riding on Route 28. The individual who caused the accident was an elderly person who had just come from their ophthalmologist office and had their right eye dilated and on the way home with the bright sun although this case has yet to go to trial. I believe that that elderly individual simply did not see the bicyclist knocked her and knocked her into the woods and didn’t realize anything had happened until she saw somebody bounce off her windshield.
Not to speak to them, that they are under no obligation to speak to an at-fault insurance company. You have to speak to your own insurer for the purposes of processing something called PIP or personal injury benefits. But you are not obligated to speak to an at-fault insurer.
I know how the insurers are going to evaluate a case. I know what they look for. I know the experts they’re going to hire. I know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Keeps me on an even par with either the claims adjuster or opposing counsel.
Right off the bat, if you don’t have a lawyer, they’re going to call you up, act like your friend, and tell you how much they really care about you and extend an offer that, frankly, you should not accept. That’s the number one tactic. The other tactic they use is they continue to stand off, lowball, and until you understand that some of our consumer protection statutes have teeth, commonly referred to as 93A or 176D, then you can call their bluff. Most consumers don’t know that. All the lawyers do, however.
The first mistake is to talk to them. You’re not required to. You’re required to talk to your own insurer to address something called personal injury protection benefits, but you are not obligated at all to talk to the at-fault insurer and you should not talk to them because they may ask you how you’re feeling today and you may say, oh, I’m okay today, not realizing that you had some underlying injury that’s going to rear its head in 30 to 60 days down the road.
We have a lot of auto tort claims, a lot of bicycle-related claims, passenger claims. We have a fair amount of dog knockdown claims. What’s more unique to Barnstable than anything else is the rather conservative and frugal nature of our jury makeup, which presents a challenge for lawyers who are trying cases to be able to appeal to a jury in order to get the right verdict for your client. And in order to do that, you have to convince them by awarding your client money today at this jury trial, you’re actually protecting them and their families.
The population swells during the summer, and there are more bad drivers who are unfamiliar with, for instance, rotaries, and who, although they are on vacation, they’re in an awful hurry, and we just have a lot more, a lot more going on. A lot more motorcycle accidents, rear-enders. We have a fair amount of alcohol-related accidents in the summer. There is certainly a swell not only in population but claims.
The rotaries are a problem here on the Cape. There are also certain intersections that are bad. One, for instance, on 151, there’s a half a dozen of those. Some are being corrected, some aren’t. I think it’s just the overwhelming amount of traffic on the roadway that’s really the problem and not so much the construction of the roadways.
A dog bite case is usually an aggressive dog, unfriendly, goes after somebody. A knockdown case is somewhat the opposite, where a friendly, large dog, exuberant, sees somebody; they want to play with them. They run up sometimes from behind them without the person even knowing, jump on them, knock them down, break bones. But in the process of that, they’re licking the person’s face, trying to be friendly, not realizing they just seriously injured that person. And I did have that case, and I took it to the Barnstable Superior Court. We settled before trial.
Call rescue to make sure, if they can, to get the ambulance or the fire department out there and get them to an ER as soon as possible to treat their injuries. They should also try to identify the dog or the owner of the dog if possible. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. We have cases where people are knocked down, and the dog takes off, and we just never find out who owned the dog. And you need to find the owner to be able to bring an action on behalf of the client.
If you have a case that needs a suit to be filed and that has to proceed to a courtroom, you need a lawyer that you can sit down and meet with. And that lawyer you just picked up on the app, is that lawyer going to be your lawyer for two and a half years? Not likely.
