One of the most common causes of medical malpractice in Texas is surgical error. This includes when the wrong body part is surgically affected, when a surgical instrument is left in the body or when a surgical error complication that is not a known risk occurs. When this happens, people can be killed or forever injured.

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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All right, I'm here again with Brian Steward discussing medical malpractice cases. Brian's a medical malpractice and personal injury lawyer in San Antonio, with just a broad array of experience in all kinds of medical malpractice and personal injury issues. We've talked previously about misdiagnosis, failure to diagnosis and a couple of other common causes of medical malpractice, and now we're going to talk about surgery.

Brian, you and I recently were talking about a case involving a surgeon that during a neuromonitoring of the surgery, there was something missed, and that led to a very serious injury to one of your clients. Let's just walk through, let's start with just generally surgical errors and how that can happen in a case, and how as a lawyer you go about evaluating those claims.

Brian Steward: Sure. Surgical mishaps, problems or errors in surgery are cases where you look at what the presentation is, you look at what the problem is, and then you try to evaluate what the response was. What did the surgeon do in response to the symptoms that the patient was providing them with?

Some of these cases are fairly simple, and they're the cases we all read about years and years ago, where surgery is done on the wrong leg or they fixed the wrong knee, they fixed the wrong ankle, they replaced the wrong hip. Those are easy cases. Obviously, they made a mistake, and the nurses and the people in the operating suite made a mistake.

What we're seeing more and more is surgeries in elective surgeries' situations where the person, the patient doesn't get the outcome that they expected. Now, outcome expectations are very different than a surgical mishap or a surgical mistake.

An outcome problem is where your patient, your potential client believes, "Okay, this is what I was told, that this is what I expected. I was told I was going to get a knee replacement surgery and I was going to be able to walk and play golf and return to my life like I was 35 years ago".

Those are expectation cases, and those are hard cases because of this thing called informed consent. Before any of us have had any meaningful surgeries, we have filled out a form. We don't remember the form, but we filled out a form, and that form, which was created by the Texas Legislature, with the help of the Texas Medical Association, basically sets out the risk for that procedure, which means you thought that these guarantees were made by the surgeon, when in essence and truthfully, you weren't guaranteed anything.

What you were told is, "Here are the potential risks, here are the potential hazards, and hopefully you will get a good outcome". That surgeon's good outcome, the medical profession's good outcome is different than your belief in what a good outcome is. Trust me.

When you're looking at these surgical cases, both from the patient standpoint and from the lawyer standpoint, you are looking at mistakes which are glaring mistakes,...

One of the most common causes of medical negligence and a leading reason for medical malpractice lawsuits is the misadministration of drugs in a hospital setting. Whether it is giving the wrong drug or too much of the right drug, these acts of negligence can kill or forever injure patients.

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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Justin: I'm here with Brian Steward on this new edition of Hill Law Firm Cases, discussing medical malpractice. Brian's not a specific medical malpractice lawyer, but he's had a long history of handling medical malpractice cases from the plaintiffs and the defense side. He's somebody I would go to with questions regarding medical malpractice because in my career, for the most part, medical malpractice cases had been very limited by the laws in the state of Texas on what is viable and what kind of cases can actually be brought anymore.

On the last episode, Brian and I discussed one of the first cases that got him involved in medical malpractice lawsuits and it involved the misadministration or misprescription of a prescription drug. What was it, Brian?

Brian Steward: The drug was actually a chemotherapy drug called dynemicin and it's a drug that's used through an IV to pediatric patients who suffer from cancer, specific types of cancer. The case, which was 1992, involved the over administration of that drug, which means that this child who is already suffering from cancer gets-- I think it was five times the accepted dose of this medication.

Any of you who've dealt with cancer or loved ones who've dealt with cancer, know that there's a balance in prescribing chemotherapy and radiation. The balance is you want to stop the cancer while also allowing the host, the person, to survive. With dynemicin, if you overprescribed it to that extent, it essentially shut the host down and ultimately took the life of this child. It's one of those things where we think about misprescriptions, and you hear about it all the time.

You hear about the person who goes to the pharmacist and they're supposed to get one drug and they take this drug for two days, then they realize it's not the correct drug and they go back. That's the tip of the iceberg on these cases. I think if you look at the literature and you look at the history, in hospitals currently, the misadministration of medications is probably the most prevalent malpractice that's committed because of the system and the way drugs are prescribed and ultimately used.

Justin: Brian, where's the failure in that? Is that the doctor prescribed the wrong amount, the tech administering or the hospital pharmacist? Where's the chink in the chain?

Brian: It's a systemic failure and part of it is language. I handled a case out in West Texas about six years ago, doctors use and nomenclature for the prescription of drugs and it says Q1, which is once a day, Q2 which is twice a day, Q4 which can be four times a day. Now, that's fine if the doctor and the nurse are on the same page, if the nurse is not on the same page as that doctor, and you see a Q4 that can be four times a day, that can be four times an hour, that can be four times a week. It's a mess.

The big hospitals' systems, all have pharmacy...

When a doctor or medical professional fails to diagnose or misdiagnoses a treatable condition, it can lead to long term injuries or death. This is one of the most common causes of medical error in Texas. We discuss this with Brian Steward.

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. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

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Justin Hill: Welcome to another episode of Hill law firm cases. I'm here with Brian Stewart again, as we've been talking about medical malpractice. Brian is was one of San Antonio's best, most knowledgeable medical malpractice attorneys. He's done plaintiffs and defense work and we've been talking about the most common reasons and bases for medical malpractice lawsuits specifically in Texas in San Antonio since we have our own unique set of laws I guess is the best way to put it.

Brian, let's talk about misdiagnosis. I've had calls before and only almost all the calls I have gotten have been related to the failure to diagnose or the misdiagnosis, not failure to diagnose. The misdiagnosis of some medical condition that the misdiagnosis led to worse complications or death in the future. Talk to me about that, how those are evaluated and what you've seen in your practice.

Brian Stewart: The thing about failure to diagnose and misdiagnosis cases is that you're always looking retrospectively, meaning you're looking backwards, which means once it's finally diagnosed, it's easy to figure out what it was.

Unfortunately, we don't get the luxury of preparing those cases in that way. We have to look at what the physician or the healthcare provider knew at the time that patient presented. That makes those cases difficult, not impossible, but difficult because at many times, we will know vastly more than that healthcare provider knew at the time of presentation, which means that the decisions that we're trying to make when we're looking and evaluating these cases are much different than the decisions that the healthcare provider was making.

There's an exception, and the exception is fractures. The exception is health. When healthcare providers take X-rays, take CTS, taking MRIs, and they interpret a film and then two days, three days, a week later, they call back and say, "Yes, we actually do see a fracture", those are slightly different cases on the liability part because it's fairly easy to determine, "Okay, someone missed something". The problem is the damages aspect of those cases because the delay in the diagnosis typically doesn't change anything in those fractures.

Where you get a lot of calls, and these are heartbreaking calls are in cancer cases, cancer failure to diagnose or delay in diagnosis, because you have people who, they rely upon their health care providers, they follow the instructions, they get the testing, whether it's mastectomies or various other exams, and they believe that they're doing fine until they find out ultimately that they're not, so then you try to work backwards to figure out what was missed.

When you do that you determine or you understand that someone may have misinterpreted a test or not ordered the test that would have been diagnostic, meaning they didn't order the test that would have given them the answer that they're looking for, and now you have a patient or a patient's family, unfortunately, who's asking you to try to determine, "Hey, what happened here?", and should they have done

Due to some changes in the law, medical malpractice cases in Texas are less common and harder to prove than ever before. The quality of care has not improved, but injured people have fewer options. Medical error continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the United States but in Texas, and San Antonio, the ability to hold wrongdoers accountable is significantly limited.

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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Justin Hill: On this episode of Hill Law Firm cases, I have good friend, good lawyer, good former defense lawyer Brian Stuart here with me. I wanted to talk to him a little bit about medical malpractice cases, because we get calls on medical malpractice cases and oftentimes I have to tell people one, you don't have a case, and really the only answer to ever having a case is to vote and get involved politically. Brian, talk to me a little bit about your background in medical malpractice from- on the defense side to the plaintiff's side.

Brian: It actually started before that. Believe it or not, when I was an undergrad, I was premed. For two summers I worked at University Hospital as an RT. It was fascinating. It was great stuff. I really believed and my parents certainly believed that I was going to be a doctor, until I took organic in the summer between my sophomore and junior year and realized maybe there was something else out there.

Despite that, I always was interested in the medicine. When we started, when I graduated from law school, I worked at a firm in a plaintiff's firm that did some med mal. One of the best cases we worked on was a case against the [unintelligible 00:01:39] involving daunomycin, which is a drug that's used for chemotherapy. It was used on a child and they overdosed the child and the child died. The partner and I worked it up. We did a lot of work on both the medical side and also the product side, because there was a system in place.

There was a pharmacy system in place that should have prevented this but for some reason, the pharmacist overrode that and allowed the medication to be prescribed. After that case and after working with some really fantastic lawyers on both sides, I was hooked. When I switched sides and started doing defense work, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to do med mal, because I wanted to learn it. I wanted to interact with the doctors and the nurses.

I thought it was something where my science and my medicine background would be an asset, and it was. I did that and I worked for Columbia HCA and their system, defended cases from El Paso to Laredo to Brownsville, and saw some of the craziest things come in the door as far as cases, mistreatment. Again, met some fantastic lawyers on the plaintiff's side who were prosecuting those cases.

Some lawyers who because of their experience and their intelligence were able to figure out that what the medical charts said wasn't exactly what took place. I knew just from my experience that a lot of cases would go away, because when people saw the chart and the way it was written they thought, "There's no way I have a case." In fact, if they ever got to the point where they could talk to the nurses and the doctors they would realize that a lot more went on than appeared in that chart.

When the opportunity arose and I was able to switch sides and do...

Hunter Craft has handled some of the biggest cases against car makers, trucking companies and major corporations in the United States. He blazed his own path and had hard times along the way. Now, he is running a great practice and doing great work for people in need. He joined the podcast to talk about being an attorney and give advice to young attorneys. He is my friend and the closest thing to a mentor I ever had.

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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Justin: All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. I just made Hunter Craft listen to our ominous intro music, which the podcast that I started for the law firm has really kind of changed since I've started it and it's become more of just kind of a-- I really think if you just listened to the podcast, you would learn everything you need to know about my law firm, who's here, who we work with, and the types of cases we handle. Honestly, I think that's been a pretty big success. Hunter, thank you for being here.

Hunter Craft: Justin, thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to visiting with you.

Justin: Yes, a little color commentary. Hunter is who I tell people has been the closest thing I've had to having a mentor. As a lawyer, he was a Attorney at Watts when I started, he then became a capital partner with his name on the wall at some point, which was well deserved. I worked in his office. I worked on cases with him, and then over time, we started our own law firms, and still occasionally, we work together. I rely upon Hunter heavily to provide me guidance, sometimes tell me when I'm being an idiot, and really just be a great friend. I'm glad you're here and I want to talk to you about the things that I think are interesting about you.

Like I told you before the show, the context is, a lot of people nerd out about being lawyers. I tell people you're the best lawyer they've never heard of because you're not into the pomp and the stuff on Facebook and all that, you do it quietly and you do a great job. I'm getting the opportunity to ask you questions that I'm sure a bunch of lawyers wish they could.

Hunter: Well, I appreciate it. I tell you, I've told a million people that the greatest compliment I've ever gotten is the one you gave me, and that is that you refer to me as the greatest lawyer that people have never heard of. It's a source of pride with me. I've always been taught, and since growing up under my father, that it doesn't take pomp and circumstance, you don't need billboards, you don't need TV ads, you don't need to brag about everything that happens is good, if you do a good job for your clients and you're fighting every lawyer out there, to whom that will eventually be relevant, will know about it.

Justin: I think to everyone that comes across your path, they know who you are. It's funny in my world, there are so many lawyers I run across and talk to, and there's some that have never heard of you, and then the ones that have worked with you or against you have nothing but great things to say. Let's just get started. You and I are both Baylor Law graduates. You were there a little bit before me. You left Baylor and got the job at one of the firms that everybody leaving Baylor wishes they could get. Fulbright & Jaworski, man, that was one of the top echelon firms. What drew you to Fulbright? Then honestly, you weren't there that long, so what drew you to leave?

Hunter: The obvious answers on Fulbright, it was one of the jobs that everybody...

Bexar County courts require mediation in almost all cases prior to trial. Mediation is an effort to settle a case through the use of a third party neutral whom tries to help find a resolution. Brian Steward is one of San Antonio's finest mediators and he answers questions.

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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Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. We're here talking with Brian Steward. Brian Steward is a San Antonio personal injury lawyer. He's been doing it a little bit longer than I have. He's got a few more gray hairs than I have. He also has recently started mediating. I wanted to get him on, talk a little bit about what is mediation. This is really a podcast for clients and people that are trying to learn about the process.

I want to start first is, what did you think about mediation and what was your way of explaining it to your clients prior to going through mediation training and becoming a professional mediator?

Brian Steward: Sure. Mediation is an interesting process. It began in Bexar County in 1992 when Judge Charlie Gonzalez says, "We're going to start employing mediation." I had absolutely no idea what it meant and I've come to love it. Mediation to me as a lawyer and to my clients means, we have an opportunity to sit down with a third party, an impartial third party, listen to the evidence, listen to our case and try to resolve it. The mediator is not going to fix your case. He's not going to decide your case. The mediator is going to listen to your case and make some suggestions.

The mediator is also going to go into the other room where the defendants are, listen to them, and also make suggestions to them. By that, I mean, the mediator has more information than even your lawyer does during that mediation process. If you trust the process and you trust that mediator, sometimes you'll be able to get cases resolved. This is an opportunity.

Mediation is an opportunity for plaintiffs, normal people to get the benefit of the mediator's knowledge on this case in the context of these county cases going on in this county in trials that are being tried currently on issues that will face you in juries that will decide your case.

Justin Hill: I'll just be candid. I have a problem with mediation, in that, I feel too often than not the other side is showing up trying to buy a case for cheap or settle a case for cheap as opposed to evaluating risk and actually trying to resolve the case. I always tell my clients, "Look, our goal of mediation--" My question for you is going to be, what has your goal of mediation been for your own clients?

Because what I tell my clients, "My goal in mediation is, let's figure out how much they have brought today to settle your claim and let's get them to offer the maximum amount that they have to settle your claim. Then you can make an informed decision on whether or not that is sufficient."

That's always been my goal. That's always been my plan. I've never seen mediation as the sole goal of settling the case because I don't want to lean on my client or tell them, "Hey, you need to settle the case." I want to know how much did they bring to settle your case so the client can then make a decision.

Has that been what you've told your clients in the past or how have you, as a practicing lawyer, gone about explaining the goal to your clients?

Brian: There are two things that you bring up that are important. The first issue and the first focus is, I want to make sure, as...

Bill Marler got his first food poisoning case when he was less than four years out of law school. Against the odds, he almost single handedly changed the food industry in the United States. He has represented thousands affected by food poisoning and recovered hundreds of millions. Most importantly, he is a really humble and nice guy.

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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Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. Bill Marler just had to listen to my overly-dramatic intro music, but we're learning as we go. We were just talking. I said it's crazy. You don't have a podcast and you said you don't have time and COVID allowed me this free time to do something I'd been wanting to do for a while. Bill Marler is, I don't even think it's arguable, the foremost food injury lawyer in America which has created you to be one of the foremost food safety experts probably around the world.

What I want to talk to you about, food cases, how you got into it. You sent me a little bit of background information. I'm in San Antonio. Migrant farmworker is something that's in the past history of so many people in this city and lawyers I know and friends of mine. Talk to me about how you had some time working as a migrant farmworker.

Bill Marler: [laughs] Yes. When I was 16, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. My parents were both teachers, really good people. I had decided that I didn't want to hang around the house and hang around the little town I was living in for the summer. I wanted to go seek adventure. A friend of a friend of a friend said, "Oh, man, you could work in the apple orchards and pear orchards of Eastern Washington and make a fortune."

I was like, "Gosh, that sounds like a great idea." I told my mom and dad. I said, "I'm going to do this." They're like, "No, no, you're not. You're going to get a job here." I was like, "No, no, no, I think I'm going to do it." "No, no, no, you're not going to do it." One Saturday, when they're-- to the grocery store, I packed a duffel bag and hiked down to the road. You could hitchhike back then. By eight hours later, I wound up in a little town on the Columbia River that's known for raising cherries, apples.

I worked that whole summer from Eastern Washington to Eastern Oregon to the eastern side of British Columbia, which is called essentially the Okanagan Valley. It's where all Washington fruits and vegetables were raised. Now, with global warming, it's the hot spot for wine. Now, Oregon pinots and Washington cabs are right up there because we warmed up the planet enough that up here in the Pacific Northwest can grow good wine.

It was a really interesting experience. I think the thing that I took away from it was just how hard those people work. Back then, this is 1970s. Back then, it was White, Black, Hispanic, but a lot of poor Whites. It was a different demographic than really what you see now. Although in slaughter facilities across the Midwest, a lot of the people in the slaughter facilities are Eastern European. I learned a lot about immigrants.

Justin: When you were doing it, was that not the Hispanic migratory farmworkers? Would they not get up that high?

Bill: It was very few. There were a handful. Nowadays, that is what it is. Right now, Washington and the COVID thing, Washington as a state has done pretty well, considering we were the first state that blew up, but we're doing really well in Western Washington. In Eastern...

Another San Antonio personal injury lawyer joins us to talk about a case that was joint ventured between his law firm and Hill Law Firm. The case involved the partial amputation of a finger at a day care. A young child lost part of her finger due to a danger on the premises.

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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Justin Hill: Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm here with one of my great friends, San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer, Sean Luchnick. He practices law on the north side of San Antonio. He's a young lawyer, but I wouldn't say he's inexperienced or not knowledgeable. He knows what he's doing. To his credit, he is not somebody who's too bold or too brazen to think he's got a lot to learn. He's here with me today. We're talking about some cases we've worked together.

At this point, we've probably worked 10 to 15 cases together, and if you really take it out from when you interned with me, we've probably worked 30 cases together. It's great to have him on to chat some cases. We talked previously about a case, probably the first case that he had a lot of hand in working with me, and we're going to talk about another case involving a daycare injury, and I've talked about it before on this podcast. Let me just ask, it's always great to get a fresh perspective from a young lawyer.

I remember the first time somebody asked me to represent them about their child being injured. I felt this very profound sense of weight and headiness to that. That's a real serious thing. To this day, anytime somebody asks me to represent their child, I still feel a very bizarre responsibility. I feel it in all my cases, but when somebody's putting their child's injury in my hands, it's just a different thing. Did you feel anything different when you were reached out to by that family that we represented together regarding that daycare case? Was there some sort of emotional response that you had that was abnormal or new or different?

Sean Luchnick: Well, first off, I want to say thank you, Justin, because you said I was a great friend of yours. You're a great friend of mine. I appreciate you didn't just say as a good friend or a colleague. That made me feel good inside.

Justin: I mean it.

Sean Luchnick: Onto your question, sometimes it's hard. You always want to try to put yourself in somebody else's perspective. I don't have children. The closest thing I have to a child is a dog.

Justin: You have 10 dogs.

Sean Luchnick: I have about four, but if you count my parents' dogs, you could say I have 10 dogs that I'm family members with. My firstborn, Bear, I care for him greatly. I couldn't imagine how it would feel if there was an injury to Bear and it was because somebody else maybe wasn't doing their job the way they should do. They weren't abiding by their standard of care.

Justin: We don't want to marginalize children with dogs. There's a whole different perspective when you have children, which at some point, you will have children. There's a headiness to somebody calling you and telling you they've got a child who's been injured in a grievous way. We had a child who had part of her finger chopped off. That's...

Workers are often taken advantage of in the State of Texas. We represented a worker in San Antonio whom was hired to do a job and given very little information regarding the dangers associated with it. The contractor knew the structure was rotten and put him on the roof anyway. His fall when the roof collapsed broke both of his legs and limited his ability to ever work again.

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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One of the more common questions we get from new clients or people that are meeting with us, especially in South Texas in San Antonio is whether or not somebody has a claim or a right to file a lawsuit or a claim if they're undocumented. In Texas, they have a claim. If somebody is injured through no fault of their own, the negligent party or the wrongdoer doesn't get to say, "Well, since you're undocumented, you don't have a right to recourse." Luckily, in Texas, that's not the law.

One case I worked on, involved a construction worker, a man in his middle age who was working with a company that did a lot of odd jobs purported to be a roofing company, but when you dig into it, maybe they weren't. They had been hired by a house flipping group to replace the roof on a house that was being flipped. If you know about house flippers, some of them cut corners, and some of them do work as cheap as possible. That's what we were dealing with in this case. They hired a group that didn't know what they were doing.

My client had been called by a friend, a friend who knew his cousin and asked if he could come help on a roofing job. My client was not a skilled worker or a skilled roofer, he was a laborer and he was told to start tearing off shingles. It was probably his third time ever on a roof. While he was tearing off shingles, a portion of the roof collapsed. While the house flipper had a copy of the inspection report showing rotted wood and rot under the roof, they had not shared that information. My client fell off the roof when it collapsed, and he suffered what has to be the worst lower leg injury I've ever seen in my career. A lower leg injury that the treating trauma surgeon said had an outcome over life that was less positive than people with diabetes, AIDS, cancer. It's a lower leg injury that forever will alter his mobility, his ability to work, and his quality of life.

As expected, the house flipping company tried to blame everybody but themselves. At first, they said there was no inspection. Then there was an inspection and they said that it was made available. Then they said it wasn't made available, but they would have made it available if anyone had asked. They also tried to say they didn't do anything to control the manner and method of the work of the roofing company even though all the roofers said that the house flipping owner got on the roof, told them what to do, when to do it, and what order to do it. Specifically for us, he told them what portion to tear off of the roof that collapsed. The part of the roof that collapsed wasn't part of the original structure, but with some add-on patio that somebody had added on, and they'd never done it correctly. That was in the inspection report as well.

After we were able to pull back all these layers of frivolous defenses, we were able to get a full measure of justice for our client who was injured on the job through no fault of his own.

We hear the craziest defenses to our injury lawsuits. One recurring defense is that a vehicle is stolen and therefore there is no insurance coverage. Almost universally, there is no police report showing that the vehicle was stolen but it is an attempt to avoid liability. We fight these defenses.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in 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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Justin Hill: A few fiestas ago, a young couple were driving through an intersection when they were hit broadside by a lady that ran a red light, was speeding and was high on methamphetamines. The crash was so severe that the husband didn't survive the crash. We represented the wife and their children.

In cases like this, there's lots of investigation that has to be performed to make sure that anybody who caused or contributed to the cause of the crash is held responsible. Through our investigation, we were able to find out whose car this driver was driving, where she had been, what she had been doing, where she got her drugs from. We needed all that information to make sure that we had fully and completely investigated the possible cases and any possible liability against any third parties.

We're going to talk about frivolous defenses on this podcast. This is one of those cases where I ran into the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle. Insurance companies can deny coverage if they can show that a vehicle was stolen or is being used without permission. Certain insurance companies are almost infamous for doing this. They'll say that vehicles are stolen anytime. They don't like the facts of the case or anytime they think they can muddy the water.

In this case, they tried to say the vehicle was stolen. What our investigation found was that this was the ex-wife of the owner of the vehicle. What we were able to find out that she had been at his house with him and that she had made a mention of using the vehicle. Now, he said he told her she couldn't and she took the keys. Now, we were able to search to see if any criminal charges had been brought or any police report had been filed.

What it looked like to us based on the documents we found was after the crash happened and they found out about the crash, then they decided they were going to file a police report. Whether they were instructed to by their insurance company or not, we don't know. What we do know is they denied our clients any level of justice for a long time, trying to ride out this frivolous defense. In the end, they were able to delay a settlement in this case using this made up theory.

We were able to figure out that this defense was frivolous. It was being manufactured as a way to deny coverage. As we continue to push the case, something happened on their end. Most likely they were looking at a trial date, and they finally agreed to settle the case for the full policy limits.

This is a great example of the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle that insurance companies like to use. Almost never is there a police report to corroborate the idea that a vehicle was stolen. However, that doesn't stop insurance companies from using this frivolous defense to try to deny justice or delay justice.

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