November 4th, 2013

Blawg Review 325.7 (RIP: Ed.)

The late, anonymous Editor of Blawg Review, kinda, sorta photographed by me in 2009.

If you didn’t know Ed., please bear with me. He made me a better blogger, and a better lawyer. He died of esophageal cancer last week, as announced by his son on Twitter.

Newcomers might not remember Blawg Review, the weekly round-up of law blog posts that he started in 2005 that rotated around and around from blog to blog. The Blawg Review website that he managed and edited held down the anchor with all of the links. The roster of those who hosted Blawg Review looks like a Who’s Who of the legal blogosphere. I was honored that he asked me to host three out of the 324 prior editions before it came to an end last year.

As I noted back in 2009 — a lifetime ago in pixellated years:

Without Ed., there would be no Blawg Review. And if someone else were doing the organizing, you just know it wouldn’t be nearly as good.

Ed. wished to remain anonymous, even as he traveled the country and met with scads of bloggers. To my knowledge, not a single one of us knew his real name. As Scott Greenfield noted, he was always just Ed., the editor of Blawg Review. I had the pleasure of meeting him several times as he passed through New York.

Ed. didn’t want to be known by name. He didn’t want it to be about him. It was about the Blawg Review project. He was the living, breathing embodiment of how to conduct yourself online under cover of anonymity — the exact same way you would if you were face to face.

According to his son:

There was nothing my father enjoyed more than debating the philosophies, merits, and impacts of laws around the world – sharing opinions and celebrating the discourse you helped create here at Blawg Review.

So why did he make me a better blogger and lawyer? It all goes back to The Mummers Veil that he wrote on January 1, 2007. This wasn’t just any old round-up of posts that constituted a Blawg Review that he wrote, but rather, a delightful flight of fancy as he imagined himself traveling the world visiting law bloggers. This was the literary device he used:

Ed. as he appeared to the world in his Twitter profile.

In this Blawg Review #89, your dutiful editor appears as the lone mummer, visiting the sites of legal webloggers far and near in the blogosphere between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day 2007.

Now literary devices and lawyering don’t usually go hand in hand — lawyers are boring and write dryly and stuff their pages with case citations and numbers that correspond to book volumes. Some lawyers seem hell bent on putting judges and law clerks to sleep.

But look what was possible in the blawgosphere! There was Ed., not just enjoying the writing that he found at the end, but enjoying the journey to find it. The possibilities of communication were without limit — even for us boring lawyers — and by organizing this weekly round-up of legal writing that he orchestrated, I could explore not just what others were saying, but how they were saying it.

And with that I engaged in my own flights of fancy when he asked me to host Blawg Review, wrestling with how to enjoy the journey through the blawgosphere while at the same time presenting its stories. It inspired me to run the 2007 NYC Marathon with law bloggers in tow, fantasizing that they were running the streets of New York with me while discussing what was going on in their sector of the legal woods. It was marathon length and it was great fun, and the journey was inspired by Ed.’s mummer traveling about.

The same was true when I went trick or treating in 2008 with the Bogeyman in tow. This time we tricked and treated at the homes of law bloggers, each telling us their particular stories. Again, it was Ed. and his turn as a mummer whispering to me at the keyboard while I typed.

The third and final flight of fancy that I engaged in had Arlo Guthrie and numerous law bloggers visit me for turkey and a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat. Ed. was with me all the way.

I received a few accolades for those pieces, but in truth, it was Ed.’s traveling mummer that was the inspiration.

So how did he make me a better blogger and lawyer? By reminding me that it’s all about telling stories and journeys from place to place. Every article we write or client we have has a story in the background. It is not the facts and figures that capture the imagination and compel people to listen — though they are critical to proving a point — it’s the stories.

You can tell them from the start, tell them from the end, or tell it from the middle, just figure out a way to tell it. That is true whether you are blogging or lawyering. As Mark Twain once wrote:

“Narrative is a difficult art; narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands, its course changed by every bowlder it comes across and by every grass-clad gravelly spur that projects into its path; its surface broken, but its course not stayed by rocks and gravel on the bottom in the shoal places; a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes, and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe three-quarters of a mile around, and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path it traversed an hour before; but always going, and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.”

Photo via Robert Ambrogi

How many others did Ed. influence? Hard to say, but as you read the obituaries online from last week and today — starting with an intro at the Blawg Review site by Colin Samuels — you can see that the answer is many.

But not just any many, for those that he influenced may have, in turn influenced others. Because they are bloggers and they have readers. And it works like a giant chain — just as the bees influence the flowers, and the flowers influence the lovers and the lovers have babies and pretty soon we’re all talking in high squeaky voices and saying, coochie, coochie, coo. Because of the bees.

I think Ed. would have liked that; it was like a little story.

My condolences to his family. I don’t know how much they knew or appreciated how he influenced others, but from where I sit at my keyboard here in New York, it was plenty. He left a legacy despite being anonymous. That’s one hell of an achievement.

Some of you are regular readers and started today at this blog, and you may wonder about the title, Blawg Review 325.7. That .7 exists because this is part of a big web ring, and you are currently in the middle.

Some of you arrived here from Popehat (Blawg Review 325.6), a blog based in San Diego. In honor of Ed., please fly back to the west coast and visit with George Wallace in Pasadena, CA, (Blawg Review 325.8) for his thoughts on Ed.s’ passing.

And then, dear reader, please complete the circle visiting other bloggers, as Ed. did with his mummer.

And we can all wonder if our own obituaries will be half as fine.

October 31st, 2013

Can You Secretly Record the Medical-Legal Exam?

Over the summer I did a series of pieces on Dr. Michael Katz, who got busted by a judge for lying under oath about the length of the medical-legal exam that he did on the defendant’s behalf. He was claiming it was 10-20 minutes or so, yet a secretly recorded video had him at just one minute and 56 seconds. The judge wasn’t pleased.

A mistrial was declared and the good doctor was referred to the District Attorney for possible perjury prosecution, to the Administrative Judge for possible civil contempt and to the Department of Health – Bureau of Professional Medical Conduct to evaluate his fitness to practice medicine.

I covered a lot of angles in that series, even doing original research on the length of exams by other “frequent flyer” experts that insurance companies rely upon, and finding an average length of under five minutes for those I looked at.

But one piece was missing from my series: Is it permissible for plaintiffs’ representatives that accompany them to these exams to surreptitiously videotape the doctor doing the exam, and if this is done, does that video need to be exchanged? The reason it was missing is that there really isn’t much in the way of law in this area.

To be sure, Justice Duane Hart‘s initial reaction in the Katz case was that this was improper conduct by the plaintiff, and initially sanctioned him. That sanction was withdrawn, but in the process he had also declared a mistrial on a case that had been going for a month. The problem that Justice Hart had to wrestle with is that there is no statute governing this and little case law.

This week on that subject, in the New York Law Journal, comes an article by Ben Rubinowitz and Evan Torgan (Turning the Table: Cross-Examining IME Doctor Using Video of Exam, $ub). They are, by all measures, well respected attorneys here in New York, and these guys frequently lecture on various aspects of personal injury practice.

In the absence of either statute or case law to analyze whether it’s acceptable to video, they turn to ethics opinions. But:

[T] he ethical opinions regarding secret video-recording specifically fail to provide clear guideposts for attorneys. For example, the American Bar Association, in opinion 01-422, found that, in general, undisclosed taping by an attorney or his agent was not in and of itself prohibited. In accordance with that opinion, The New York City Bar modified its previously held position that undisclosed videotaping was unethical, holding that such conduct was permissible, but only where the lawyer “has a reasonable basis for believing that disclosure of the taping would significantly impair pursuit of a generally accepted societal good.”

What constitutes “a reasonable basis for believing that disclosure of the taping would significantly impair pursuit of a generally accepted societal good”? Good question, glad you asked. And no, I don’t have the answer because such answer does not (yet) exist. Do I think it is a generally accepted societal good to catch a doctor doing a 2-minute exam that he claims was a 15-minute exam? Yep, I sure do. The scoundrels should be purged from our midst if we would like our system of justice to have more integrity.

It’s unclear to me why recording such exams should be a problem. Defendants, after all, are free to do secret surveillance of plaintiffs. Why shouldn’t a plaintiff be able to do likewise to the defense medical examiner, especially when we have excellent reasons to believe there is widespread corruption going on? The doctor isn’t even a party to the action.

Back to Rubinowitz and Torgan:

As it relates to personal injury actions, defense attorneys have become well versed in the use of videos to discredit a plaintiff’s claim of injury. While the law regarding the surreptitious taping of a plaintiff in a personal injury action has developed over many decades the issue of the propriety of the taping in the first instance and its disclosure seems to have been answered: There is no prohibition against such taping and there are now definitive time periods in which disclosure of the video must be revealed.

When it comes to the videotaping of the IME, however, the law is not so clear. In New York not only is there no statute directly on point but there is a paucity of case law supporting or prohibiting such conduct. The question that will likely be addressed in the near future is whether the plaintiffs attorney or his agent should be permitted to videotape the independent medical examination, and if so, when disclosure should be made. Many see no difference between the defendant’s right to surreptitiously videotape the plaintiff and the plaintiff’s right to surreptitiously videotape the IME. Both the plaintiff and the defendant are seeking to use the video for a similar purpose: to discredit the credibility of an individual through the use of extrinsic proof.

The sooner this gets resolved by the appellate divisions, the better, perhaps with a bit of help from the various ethics committees. But from were I sit, there is simply no sound reason to object to the practice. Every other formal part of litigation where evidence may be presented to a jury is recorded somehow, without exception. That a doctor would be able to claim something happened at a medical-legal exam — which is very much a formal procedure — when the plaintiff says no such thing happened, is very easily remedied.

Why would anyone be upset about making the process more honest? Why should there even be ambiguity over how long the exam took or whether certain tests were done? As I noted over the summer when discussing next steps for this problem, technology is now completely unobtrusive. And with Google Glass coming along, the filming couldn’t be easier.

October 29th, 2013

Death by Red Bull, An $85M Lawsuit, And The Money Shot

The story comes over the transom like so many others do — with a big fat headline screaming about a lawsuit with a multi-million dollar claim. This one claims that the energy drink Red Bull caused death. And the gist of the claim seems to be — based on this newspaper article as well as the Complaint that I obtained from plaintiff’s counsel — a failure to warn that Red Bull is actually more dangerous than what Red Bull lets on.

The result is that 33-year-old Cory Terry — who was a regular consumer of the product — is dead after downing one of the drinks during a basketball game.

The Complaint itself cites a litany of medical problems allegedly caused by Red Bull that spans many years and many countries, and cites to a number of studies of over-caffinated drinks that have appeared in the medical literature. It then goes on to state causes of action based on strict liability for a failure to design the product properly, a failure to warn of the dangers, breach of warranty and fraud.

For the purposes of my posting, let’s assume that it’s accurate that Red Bull failed to properly warn about the drink’s contents and committed fraud. If true, it could be an interesting lawsuit. Whether it caused this particular death is another issue.

I’ll assume it’s all true because I have an altogether different bone to pick with Ilya Novofastovsky — he being the lawyer that brought this suit.

And that bone is with the claim for $85M for this unmarried construction worker who left behind a 13-year-old son. Now it’s not $85M in compensatory damages as the NY Daily News story would have you believe. It is $5M each for seven different causes of action plus $50M in punitive damages.

But here’s the problem: In New York, you aren’t allowed to put an ad damnum clause in a lawsuit. That’s the fancy pants Latin phrase for the monetary demand. New York outlawed this practice — a practice I’ve always despised — for medical malpractice cases in the 80s and for all personal injury cases in 2003. Ten. Years. Ago.

At that time Walter Olson, the founder and editor of Overlawyered, celebrated the demise of the ad damnum clause, as did his oft-times foils the lawyers themselves. As Olson noted back then:

New York thus becomes the latest state to adopt a measure that is relatively rare among litigation reforms in eliciting widespread support from among both defense interests (example: American Medical Association model legislation, PDF) and the plaintiffs’ bar…The state bar association urged Pataki to sign the bill, saying it “will reduce pretrial publicity about how much money is sought from particular defendants, and deals with the common misunderstanding by the general public that the amount sued for is the amount actually obtained by plaintiffs.”

And yet, some lawyers still put that clause in. Why? There are only two possible reasons, as I explained last year when a lawyer sued for $30M over a dog bite: Either the lawyer is ignorant of the law or the lawyer is deliberately violating it in the hunt for headlines. It’s your call as to which is worse, ignorance or a potential ethics issue.

And so Ilya Novofastovsky becomes the latest lawyer to embarrass the rest of us, as we face down potential jurors who appear in the courthouse. It’s headlines like this that poison the well of potential jurors. He may not have caused embarrasement deliberately, but that’s the effect.

Every time I pick a jury I am forced to deal with unusual claims that appear in press headlines, distracting me from the job I was hired to do. The biases are there, planted firmly in their brains by lawyers that make monster claims that bury the reason they actually took on the suit. The fact that these claims are outliers is of no significance, because these are the ones that jurors see in the paper. These are the cases, and the lawyers, that help to poison public opinion.

And lest you think I am overstating the case, you are free to read the acerbic comments that accompanied that Daily News article. This is a sampling, and think for a moment how the comments would be different if the story headline dealt not with money, but with the product being mislabeled and focusing on the fraud, which is the actual crux of the complaint:

Wow. This has “looking for an easy buck” written all over it.

Ka-ching!

He chose to drink it. Now shut the hell up about suing the company for 85 million. You just want some easy money.

The family is simply looking for some cash.

Welcome to America. There are no consequences for filing frevious law suit. $85million? That’s what he would have made in his lifetime of robbing and stealing perhaps.

Opportunists looking for a quick payout.

And so the headlines — those things that affect jurors — aren’t about fraud and product problems. They are about the money; the money is always in the headline.

A quick story on the subject: A bunch of years ago a TV reporter was doing a story on New York’s broken sidewalks and wanted to interview me regarding one of my cases, that being an elderly woman who’d tripped and busted her arm. It was a plain vanilla case, so to speak, but a good example of what happens when you don’t fix busted sidewalks. They are dangerous, and that’s what the story should be about (and what the reporter told me it would be about).

With the camera rolling, the reporter then asked how much we were suing for. This was the money shot, so to speak. Being prepared for that inevitable question I responded in three to four very unquotable sentences about how difficult it was to predict the future, and the potential surgeries, but that I didn’t think the case would exceed x.

That’s great, she said, now can you give me the answer again, but shorter, with just the money? And with the camera rolling again I slowly gave her the same three to four unquotable sentences.

I wasn’t giving her the money shot. While money may be what we are forced to sue for, since I can’t get my client’s health back, this was a story about safety.

Lesson: Don’t give the press the money shot. If you do, the story is no longer about safety, injury prevention and personal responsibility for those that are negligent (or worse). Now it’s all about the money.

Eventually, a lawyer will need to turn to the money when in front of a jury. But then it can be presented on its own terms, unfiltered by the distortions of the press.

Update (11/1/13): Max Kennerly discusses the substance of the case.

October 23rd, 2013

A Lesson In Ambulance Chasing…

Want to know how ambulance chasing works? From the Appellate Division (Second Department) comes this story of attorney Henry Lung, censured today.

The name of the runner or investigator is Virginia Mello. She finds the potential client in a very big automobile case in 2005. Mello is not an attorney.

Lung makes this offer to Mello: That if she gives him the case, he will then flip the case to a reputable firm in exchange for a referral fee to him of, I assume, 1/3 of the legal fee. And Lung, in exchange, will then give Mello 10% of his share. In cash.

The conspiracy is entered into and the case is then referred to Sullivan Papain Block McGrath & Cannavo, a well-regarded law firm that presumably knows nothing about the shenanigans that took place. They take the case in 2005 and settle in 2008 for $4.1M, a whopping big sum. Lung is given a $450K referral fee for the legal work that he did.

Lung then proceeds to make his cash payments to Mello…as per the decision today:

Subsequent to receiving his share of the attorney’s fee, [Lung] made cash payments to Ms. Mello in the sums of $11,500 in 2008, $8,500 in 2008, $8,650 in 2009, and $3,000 in 2009, as compensation for referring [the plaintiff] to him.

Thus, Lung gets censured by the Appellate Division on two separate issues:

Compensating a nonlawyer for recommending a client, and rewarded that nonlawyer for having made such a recommendation, resulting in employment; and
Sharing a legal fee with a nonlawyer

And Lung seems to have some other problems as well, given that he has previously been sanction for misconduct:

[T]he respondent has a prior disciplinary history consisting of a Letter of Admonition, personally delivered, for negligently converting client funds, commingling personal funds with client funds, and communicating with a party known to be represented by counsel (March 2005); a Letter of Caution for failing to enter into a written retainer agreement with a matrimonial client and failing to provide the client with a Statement of Client’s Rights and Responsibilities (February 2006); a Letter of Caution for improperly seeking to limit his individual liability to a client for malpractice (February 2006); a Letter of Admonition for, inter alia, neglecting a client’s legal matter, improperly notarizing documents, and submitting a falsely notarized document to a court of law (February 2010); and a Letter of Admonition for improperly issuing a subpoena duces tecum in a criminal action (September 2011).

What can we conclude from this? First, that he has a damn good defense lawyer. I’m stunned that Lung wasn’t disbarred, or at least suspended from practice. And I don’t see anything in the opinion about the need to disgorge the remaining part of the referral fee that he received.

Second, I often write about people outsourcing their marketing to others, such as those that sell “leads” on cases. And the question is, how were those leads procured? This is an example of how a dirty activity got laundered.

Third, let this be a warning to those that think allowing nonlawyers to buy an interest in a lawfirm is a good idea.

Fourth: The legal proceedings may not be over for Lung or for Mello. I don’t do criminal defense work, but I see an awful lot of cash flowing to her. Do you think Mello declared that money on her tax returns? How did Lung deal with that tax issue?

I’ll let the criminal defense folks weigh in on that one. But in the meantime, I think that part of his Avvo profile that says “No professional misconduct found” will be changing shortly.

October 21st, 2013

Dear Judge Smith — You gotta be kidding me.

Hon. Robert S. Smith

Judge Robert S. Smith sits on New York’s highest court, our Court of Appeals. Last week he wrote a dissenting opinion in a case dealing with auto collisions and insurance fraud, Ramkumar v. Grand Style Transportation. This is my open letter to the judge in response to that dissent:

————————-

Honorable Sir:

Let me start by stating that I write this letter with great trepidation. If you take offense at either the content or the tone, you have enormous power as 1/7 of our top court to repay my clients, or other injury victims, in ways that can be quite unfriendly.

But your dissenting opinion last week in Ramkumar v. Grand Style Transportation made me angry and forces me to pound on this keyboard, given your assumptions that the no-fault system is riddled with fraud by claimants. My concern is that if you feel this way, then other jurists might also, and claimants do not appear before our courts with the scales of justice in equilibrium.

For those that missed the case — this is, after all, an open letter and I hope to educate by doing it this way — this was a simple matter of a plaintiff testifying that he stopped getting treatment after sustaining injuries in an auto collision, because he “was cut off” by the insurance. Those of us on the plaintiffs’ side of the “v” refer to this as standard operating procedure. Insurance companies are in the business of generating profits and satisfying shareholders, and cutting off claimants — oft times with sham exams that last just two to three minutes– bolsters those profits. This is not news to those of us that represent such people.

At issue in Ramkumar was the simple matter of determining what level of proof was needed by the plaintiff to oppose a motion to dismiss his case that was based on defendant’s assertion that the plaintiff lacked a “serious injury” in the ridiculously vague way the Legislature has defined it. The majority said his statement that he wasn’t getting treatment because he was cut off was enough to raise a triable issue of fact. But you dissented.

In arguing for more proof, you went on to allege that there is rampant fraud in the No-Fault arena. But — and this is what raised my anger — 100% of your comments address this from the plaintiffs side of being responsible for fraud. And where is the data coming from for these reports? Insurance companies with a vested interest?

Let me suggest to you, Judge Smith, that there is indeed rampant fraud. Systemic fraud. Nauseating fraud that affects many thousands of cases per year. To prove this, I submit this bill of particulars–

A New York Times exposé on sham medical exams by the insurance industry regarding Workers’ Compensation exams, where one doctor that did those exams said:

“If you did a truly pure report you’d be out on your ears and the insurers wouldn’t pay for it. You have to give them what they want, or you’re in Florida. That’s the game, baby”;
Dr. Robert Israel, an orthopedist doing 1,500 defense medical exams per year, is hit with three year sanction for his conduct in doing defense medical exams;
Dr. Michael Katz, an orthopedist who once testified to doing 750-1,000 defense medical exams per year, busted for lying on the stand about the length of his exam, testifying it was likely 10-20 minutes. A secret recording documented it at merely one minute 56 seconds;
An analysis of exams by orthopedists Edward Toriello (1,500 – 2,000 per year), Lisa Nason and neurologist Jean-Robert Desrouleaux (1,000 – 1,500 per year) all show disturbingly short exams done for insurance companies, averaging less than five minutes per exam, and many times lasting only two to three minutes.
Dr. Joseph Tuvia, another frequent flier for the insurance industry (radiology, reviewing 1,000 films a year for litigation), magically has at least five different signatures on his reports that are allegedly signed under oath.
Dr. Harvey Goldberg is instructed by the insurance company that hired him to do an exam of the plaintiff to leave out of his report things that would be beneficial to the plaintiff. His original report, it seems, had a favorable causality finding for the plaintiff and he was asked to remove it from his report;
An orthopedist that I cross-examined last month, who testified that in describing range of motion losses, he used a different standard of “normal” in another case. Why? Because this “conforms to what this carrier says is normal.”

Now you will notice, your honor, that if you click those links, you will see that all of those stories and investigations, except for the Times piece, were done by me. Think about that for a moment: I’m a solo practitioner, with a full time practice, that blogs a few hours a week. If I can find that much evidence of tainted and quickie defense medical exams, how much do you think a real investigation would find? Does the phrase “scratching the surface” seem like a fair one?

We are talking about the potential for an unprecedented level of insurance fraud being perpetrated by the insurance industry.

And after claims are fraudulently denied in No-Fault, what is done with the data? It’s used in a self-fullfilling report to claim insurance fraud? I’m sure you remember the old saying about analysis: garbage in, garbage out.

I don’t blame you, of course, for having skepticism about claims. This what the insurance industry peddles to the world. What troubles me greatly, however, is that your skepticism appears to be one-sided and therefore imbalances the judicial scales before the evidence is even weighed.

You made this comment in your dissent:

If plaintiffs and their witnesses are willing to say under oath whatever they have to say to get past summary judgment, they will succeed in doing so….”

And what of the insurance company doctors — those comically referred to as “independent” as they earn six figure sums (or more) from such exams? Why should a judiciary dismiss cases based on such reports instead of, as Justice Scalia once famously wrote, testing their credibility “in the crucible of cross-examination“?

You seem to trust these insurance doctors very much, as you wrote:

If there is indeed a reasonable explanation for plaintiff’s cessation of physical therapy, he should have had no trouble in offering much better proof of it. He could have submitted an affidavit in opposition to summary judgment, identifying his no-fault carrier, attaching a copy of the written communication, or describing the oral one, in which the carrier cut him off, and saying what, if any, reason the carrier gave.

That any judge would accept an insurance doctor’s opinion on the real reason so many injured people are cut off from benefits reveals to me a judge that is, I’m sorry to say, deeply out of touch with what is actually going on. I see an industry orchestrating what are, little doubt, many thousands of sham exams every year. Those of us in the trenches of practice see a world appearing vastly different to what you’ve described in your view from Eagle Street.

This is not a new issue to you. Back in 2009, in Bazakos v.Lewis, you wrote the majority decision on a case dealing with these so-called “independent” medical exams, (deciding that if one sues a doctor for injuries incurred during the exam, it was subject to the 2 1/2 year medical malpractice statute of limitations).

Your boss, Chief Judge Lippman, made this observation about what is ” known euphemistically as an ‘independent’ medical examination”:

These exams, far from being independent in any ordinary sense of the word, are paid for and frequently controlled in their scope and conduct by legal adversaries of the examinee.

Just to be clear, there are countless cases of No-Fault carriers cutting off benefits claiming no injury, or that treatment wouldn’t benefit the victim, only to have these individuals go in for surgery on knees, shoulders, neck, backs and other body parts. Identical problems are rife in these medical-legal exams of all kinds.

Your faith in the so-called IME seems deeply misplaced given the substantial evidence of insurance company fraud and exploitation, which seems clearly in need of investigation by the Attorney General or Department of Financial Services.

My questions for you judge are these: How would you feel if a 3-minute orthopedic exam would be the basis upon which courts and juries would weigh your claim if you’d been injured? And if you feed your family with physical labor instead of with the pen, and those injuries therefore had a more dramatic effect, how would you feel about that 3-minute exam? And given the substantial evidence of problems, how does a judge simply accept as true the proclamations of an insurance industry that profits from it?

Respectfully yours,

Eric Turkewitz