WitnessesYes, this was like a real life trial with witnesses, cross-examination, objections and even a few “he’s badgering the witness, your honor!”s It was awesome! Basically, the prosecution (bad guys) had 3 witnesses; the two plaintiffs (the people in the car) and the doctor who treated them. The Defense (the good guys) had 3 witnesses as well; myself, an expert witness, and the police officer who took the police report at the police station the day after the accident. Here’s a brief summary of what went down:
Prosecution’s first witness: The Doctor (duh duh duh!!!)So, the doctor who conducted the 64 office visits over the course of 2 months, racking up $8,000 in charges for the two plaintiffs was…HOT! I’m not kidding, she was a sexy little Asian chiropractor who is clearly in over her head. The lawyers for the bad guys each had a chance to question her (her name was Dr. Patrice Lee-Seyon). Essentially, in their questioning they were trying to show that the two plaintiffs were injured, went to this chiropractor for treatment, received a reasonable amount of appropriate treatment, and were referred elsewhere when that treatment reached a plateau. Upon cross-examination, my lawyer asked questions that revealed that this doctor works for a clinic that is actually operated by a company in Louisiana and which owns clinics like this all over the country. This doctor was hired right out of chiropractic school (in fact, when the accident happened she had only been working 6 months) and was the ONLY licensed chiropractor in her office. Since she started practicing, she has referred at least 4 patients to the very same lawyers that were representing the plaintiffs in my case. Throughout the initial questioning by the bad guys and my attorney’s cross-examination, it was abundantly clear that this doctor really didn’t know what she was talking about. All the things she would say sounded so vague, they were things I could come up with if I had to. Like:
Q: Doctor, did you examine the neck of Ms. Plaintiff 1? And, if so, what did you find?
A: Yes, I found that she had spasms and decreased range of motion in her neck.
Q: How did you test for that?
A: I felt her neck and could feel the spasming in the muscle and did range of motion tests and found that her motion was limited on all planes.
I mean seriously, I could come up with that stuff.
Also, I didn’t mention this, but the doctor had to end her testimony early on the first day of the trial and she couldn’t come back until noon the next day because she had to tend to her 100 patients a week (the prosecution acted like the fact that she sees so many patients is a good thing, sounds more like she’s running a pretty slick operation). So, we actually had to slip other testimony in between hers, an unusual circumstance that my attorney took in stride.
The PlaintiffsThese women were so useless in their testimony that they don’t even deserve separate descriptions. Essentially, they got up on the stand and, under examination by their respective lawyers, described how much pain they were in following the accident, how they had headaches, backaches, neckaches and were unable to participate in their normal (and OF COURSE, philanthropic or otherwise honorable) activities.
On cross examination, though, my attorney ripped them apart. He basically constantly hammered home how they never mentioned that they were injured during or after the accident. He also had taken deposition testimony from both of them, which is basically when you get to ask questions with a court report present prior to the trial to try to see if there’s any info that you should look into before the trial. My attorney’s strategy was basically to ask all the hard questions during the deposition when they weren’t as “prepared” and then to ask them the same questions in court and, when they inevitably didn’t like their previous answer, remind them of that answer by quoting their deposition. For example, one of the defendants said during her deposition that she hadn’t had headaches before the accident. My attorney went and found that she actually had had headaches and had even gone to the emergency room for them prior to the accident. So he was able to point that answer out and also show evidence that she had been less-than-truthful in her deposition, thereby discrediting her.
That happened about 10 times during each of their testimonies, so by the end, the jury was really doubting their credibility, which is a good thing J
My testimonyMy testimony in this case was really not that important, believe it or not. Basically, my lawyer questioned me for about 15 minutes about my background and the accident. His main goal was to show that I am an upstanding person who is telling the truth in this case and rightfully shouldn’t have to pay for these women’s medical expenses.
He also wanted to get out a key piece of information about the case and that is the fact that this accident was so minor that I didn’t even know it had happened until my friend who was in the car with me told me that we had hit someone.
On cross-examination, the other attorney basically tried to show that I must be lying about not feeling the accident based on the damage to my vehicle. He pulled out the photos of our car, which had a dent above the wheel well, and tried to get to the point that I had to have felt it. What he didn’t mention – but I’m sure the jury picked up on – was that the other car actually had NO damage, which is obviously very damaging to their claim that they were injured. Not to mention, the dent in our car happened at about the weakest point on a car, right on the hollow wheel well. Good try, bad guy. His last question for me, which my lawyer later revealed was a setup for another line of questioning, was to ask me if anyone else was in the car with me (yes) and if that person or the other car’s passenger were listed on the police report we filed (no). Nice.
Officer Connie LePla’s testimony (coincidence that her initials are CL, too, I think not!)Officer Connie LePla, was the officer who took our police report the day after the accident. At that time, her job was to sit at the desk in the Toledo Police Station and handle walk-ins. One of those walk-ins was us reporting our accident. My attorney called her because he wanted to establish that it is part of her job when completing accident reports to ask about injuries and that there’s even a place to indicate “possible injury” but in our case, no injuries or possible injuries were reported. Zing! We did just that and on cross-examination, all the other attorney’s basically did was try to say that perhaps she hadn’t even talked to either plaintiff because she had no independent recollection of us coming in that day (it had been 3 years, and she does this every day, I wouldn’t remember either). But she volunteered that if they were injured, they should have said so. And that was that.
Dr. DuVall, our expert witnessPerhaps no one was more disputed, discredited, or discussed than our expert witness in this trial. From his opening statement, the Plaintiff’s attorney did NOTHING but focus on ways that he could discredit our expert witness. Dr. DuVall was a chiropractor from the Akron, OH area who has been practicing for 30 years. He also does independent reviews of other chiropractors’ work to determine if their treatment was appropriate. He reviews medical records, and renders an opinion, usually as a paid witness for cases like mine. So, the attorney for the bad guys spend a lot of his time focusing on the fact that apparently Dr. DuVall had a low GPA in chiropractic school and he has in the past been very critical of his profession (well, of those like the doctor who treated the Plaintiffs!), how he has been rendering opinions since he was just a year and a half out of school, and how much money he makes doing these reviews. Some of this stuff was compelling, but what I found especially interesting was that the attorney for the plaintiffs spend very little time talking about the actual case that Dr. DuVall was reviewing (his client’s), probably because he knew that, in fact, his review had been accurate.
Another factor in this is that on cross-examination, I was not impressed with our expert witness’s answers to the questions he was asked. When asked how much he makes doing reviews, he got all squirmy and pretended not to know. My feeling is that if you are being paid to research and subsequently testify regarding cases like this, you have to be prepared to sit on the stand and answer tough questions about what you do without feeling bad or getting evasive. I wasn’t impressed with his ability to answer the questions. I think if he was just honest and said “I make $200,000 a year testifying, but that only means that I have very little incentive to lie in any one case, since it only makes up a small amount of my income” it would be very convincing. Instead he tried to shy away from answering, losing trust with the jury. All in all, I think his testimony was a wash, but the jury did get the message that he thought the treatment for the Plaintiffs was not appropriate (and therefore, I shouldn’t have to pay for it).
October 2008
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