00:00 Speaker 1 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Hey everybody, Jack Zinda here today I want to talk to you about what are the most common areas of damages that are overlooked in cases. I just wanted to give a quick rundown of some things that I see of common mistakes of either new attorneys that have joined our firm or attorneys at other firms. And some of this can mean the difference between getting 100,000 and a half a million dollar result. So I'm not going to go into detail on each different areas. I'm going to do different podcasts on each topic. But I wanted to give an overview of the things that I see people miss. 00:52 Speaker 1 So you guys can gals can make a list of these and make sure you don't miss them in your cases. So here we go. Let's start from the beginning. All right. One of the most common ways I see that people overlook damages is not getting the images. So if your client had x rays or MRIs, you need to get copies of those. I have settled cases for a million dollars just based on the X ray alone. Now obviously I had to supply a little more information than that, but if you have a client that was had several broken bones, the X rays can be really powerful. If they had hardware installed from a surgery, the X rays will show those. It's a really great piece of evidence. 01:32 Speaker 1 And so you want to make sure you always request for copies of the X rays and you always look at them in your cases. The same with your MRIs. Another area that I see people overlook a lot is exploring traumatic brain injuries. If your client suffered a concussion, loss of consciousness, headaches, nausea, some sort of head injury, you need to make sure you're fully exploring what are the types of treatments they can get in a traumatic brain injury or they should be getting for traumatic brain injury. Things like a diffuse tensor imaging, V and G testing, an MRI scan, getting to a neuropsychologist, and other things. It's important that you are ensuring that your client is aware of these treatment types and has access to them. 02:16 Speaker 1 A lot of times the traumatic brain injuries are life lasting, last for a lifetime, and you have to make sure you're explaining that damage to the jury and to your opposing party and you're fully exploring that. I've seen attorneys leave a lot of money on the table because they don't fully explore the traumatic brain injury aspect. And we have a checklist for that. If anyone's interested to get a copy of it for how to look for traumatic brain injury issues in your case. The next is looking to explore loss of earning capacity. Now, there's a lot of areas that people miss. One of the first areas is if the person owns their own business, assuming that you cannot get loss of earning capacity. 02:58 Speaker 1 I've had cases where people own bookkeeping businesses and we're able to get letters from clients where they didn't work for them those weeks. I've had it with housekeepers, truck drivers, pizza restaurant owners, all sorts of other businesses where I was able to establish that there was a loss of earnings due to them not being able to run the business or that they had to hire someone else to come run the business. Now, if they're employed, you want to make sure you're exploring future loss of earning capacity. If they had a traumatic injury and they're not going to be able to work till 65, can only work till 60 or 58, that shaved off time on their life earning capacity. 03:35 Speaker 1 And you want to make sure you include that damage model into your damages and there's experts that can help you reveal that and explain what the damages are. Typically what you're going to want to do is get some information from the doctor saying here's the limitations I anticipate. When they get older, then you would need someone to explain what the earnings difference would be if they did work to their full earning capacity or did not. Many times. If you have a blue collar if your client has a blue collar job and they're in their 50s, it's very difficult for them to get retrained in a new field. And so it can add several hundred thousand dollars in loss of burning capacity. 04:18 Speaker 2 This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zinda Law Group has paid out millions of millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us@re referralsindalaw.com we'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zynda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case. 04:56 Speaker 1 The next one I see people miss a lot on is exploring the post traumatic stress of your client PTSD and using experts to fully explore that. If you had a mom witness the injury of their child if you had a child witness the injury of Their mom. You want to make sure you're fully exploring the mental anguishes damages through a PTSD specialist. This is typically going to be different than just a therapist. And you have to be careful because a therapist could open the door to all sorts of issues. You don't want to be brought up in your case, such as if the person had any other prior mental health issues or if they had some drinking issues. So be careful in the type of expert you pick there. But it can add a lot of value to the case by exploring that. 05:44 Speaker 1 Now, I also want to make it clear you don't want to make up damages. And so as you're evaluating which experts to work with or which providers that your clients are going to make sure you're vetting those providers, that they're honest brokers and they're not going to treat someone who's not really hurt. And usually you can ask around and get an idea of someone's reputation on that. And luckily there's very few providers that I've run into in my whole career that act that way. Another area to look into is scar revision surgery. So if you have a dog bite or a car wreck where there is a scar and it's in a visible place, getting an estimate for how much that surgery is going to cost and explaining why that's necessary. Another area that's typically overlooked is getting future care information from treating doctors. 06:34 Speaker 1 Almost anyone that has a herniated disc or some sort of spinal injury is going to need treatment at some point down the road, especially if they're later in life. Doctors will typically explain what the treatment's going to be and so you can include that in your damage model. Now you want to make sure that you talk to the doctor and find out what the treatment's going to entail before you have them put something into a narrative or some other documentation that they'll be cross examined on. You also want to make sure that you're exploring life care planners. These are people that can help estimate what your client's future care is going to need from the information from the doctor. They're very different in price and very different in abilities and qualifications. 07:19 Speaker 1 So be really careful when you're examining which life care planner to go with. But I've seen those add substantial value to cases because it's explain what's the future going to look like for my client, which can help with non economics as well as economic damages. So just to give a quick summary of the areas that we talked about that I think are the most common overlooked areas to run up the score on damages. Number one getting copies of your imaging Number two exploring traumatic brain injuries Number three exploring loss of earning capacity for business owners Number four looking at scar revision therapy Number five looking at PTSD specialists and number six looking at future narratives from the providers. Hope everyone's found this helpful. 08:04 Speaker 1 If you have more questions on how to explain to the jury or how to improve your damages on your cases, please feel free to reach out to me at any time. I'd love to help new attorneys. Also love to help experienced attorneys that are just starting to practice personal injury law. You know, either myself or another member of the lawyers of my team would be happy to help. Until next time, it's great talking to you. Thanks a lot. Bye. 08:31 Speaker 2 Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the podcast. 08:43 Speaker 1 Thanks.