WE DESTROY INSURANCE COMPANY EXPERTS

Much of today’s litigation and claims become a “battle of experts” between truth and deception. We have found in our years of experience in cross-examining defense experts that many of them are driven not by the truth but by their dedication to the insurance company’s defense of the claim. In one case, a much-used defense neurologist testified that our client was not injured in the accident. What our cross-examination demonstrated was that this expert was “bought and paid for”. He admitted that in all of his many prior physical examinations of claimants for the insurance companies he had never found that the injured person was really injured. When we dug deeper we found that his explanation was “because the cases he received had been ‘screened” before he was retained to look at the case and that the insurance company “only sent him persons who were not injured”. The expert was devastated before the jury when he admitted that these cases were “screened” by the defense attorney! The jury actually laughed at him when he made this damaging admission. The jury awarded the client a large verdict.

In a recent case the insurance company claimed that the accident involved such a minor rear-end impact that there was no scientific basis for a possible injury to our client. It produced a “west coast biomechanical engineer” who had a national reputation for destroying plaintiff’s cases in minor impact motor vehicle accidents. A biomechanical engineer is trained in the science of “body mechanics” which is a study of the strength of human bones, tissue, body parts, and organs. They analyze the damage done to the human anatomy by outside forces generated during a motor vehicle accident. They study the statistics generated by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) tests on dummies and human volunteers over the years. Some of these experts have taken this science and claim to be able to apply these statistics to highway accidents so they can testify that a claimant was not injured because the G-loads developed by the impact were insufficient to cause injury. They compute the Delta-V, which is the pulse of the actual impact, and use this to extrapolate data to prove their point. We did an extensive investigation of this “hot-shot” expert’s background and at the trial showed the jury that, in his own state trial courts, he had been barred from testifying by some of the judges because of the junk science that he was “peddling to the jury”. Our jury rejected his testimony and awarded our client a substantial verdict.