We get a lot of questions about how we evaluate cases. People whom we tell we cannot accept their case often want to know why. In this episode, we attempt to clarify how we evaluate cases.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Just recently, we got a call from a man whose wife died in a very tragic incident in the hospital. He wanted us to take his case and help him out. He had called many lawyers before, he had gone on for years trying to find a lawyer that would help him. There weren't any that would help him. He called the state of Texas and filed a grievance or complaint against the doctors and hospitals involved. That investigation cleared the hospital and doctors.

He then appealed that decision, and he lost. He was a very passionate man who had lost his wife, he was angry, he was upset, he was grieving. By the time he called us, the time to do anything, in terms of filing a lawsuit, had passed because the statute of limitations puts a limitation on how long you have to file a lawsuit. He didn't understand why we couldn't help him, and I don't know if it was because he was just so upset or if he just didn't understand it.

It made me think I want to do a little bit of talking about how we evaluate a case when it comes into our office, because sometimes we can't help people with their cases, and that can be for a variety of reasons. Generally, when we get a call on a new case, we get all the facts and all the information that we can get. One thing I always like to ask the person on the other line, who's trying to hire us, is, "Who's at fault? Who do you think is at fault for this incident, for your injuries, for your loss of a loved one?"

That's the first step I have to figure out. Did somebody do something wrong? Did somebody else's acts or inaction cause the incident that either left somebody injured or led to the wrongful death of somebody? I have to tell people when they call us sometimes that the law cannot right all wrongs. The law sets out when a person has legal redress to take them to court to seek compensation or justice through the form of compensation for the wrong that was committed.

We have to ask, "Who did something wrong? Was it an entity? Was it a corporation? Was it a person that their actions cause some harm?" The next thing we have to know is, what is the harm? Did you have an injury? Did somebody pass away? Are you just angry that somebody wronged you, but there was no injury? We have to analyze whether the wrong caused the injury. In the law, we have to prove that the wrong that we're talking about, the bad act, led to somebody's injury.

It's not enough that there was a wrong and then there was an injury. We have to show that they're connected. The law calls it "causation," we have to show that the wrong was the proximate cause of the injury. It's not enough for conjecture, and it's not enough that you know it really deep in your gut. You see this a lot in instances in which people are exposed to chemicals, or a landfill, or drugs. Everybody's seen the commercial on TV where it asks, "Have you taken this drug and suffered these injuries?"

By the time those things are on TV, there's been a long history of studying and research and studies that typically leads to some understanding that these drugs cause these injuries. It's not enough that somebody believes that the drug they took caused this bad side effect. There has to be science, there has to be some proof of causation, proof enough that a judge will say, "That's valid causation." One of the other things we have to consider is, does the law allow for this kind of...