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TAKING CARE Q In your opinion, what makes a good personal injury lawyer?
Q How do you decide whether someone has a case or not?
A The best personal injury lawyers get to know the client like a family member or a close friend. Unless the lawyer knows the client well, it will be impossible for that lawyer to adequately explain to a jury or a judge how the injury impacted the client. After getting to know the client, the best personal injury lawyers educate their client about how cases are reviewed and evaluated by insurance companies and the courts. It is critical that clients recognize that the insurance companies evaluate a stack of papers that include medical records and bills, lost wage forms, photographs, and police reports. In every case, this stack of papers does not perfectly reflect what the client endured. If the client knows from the start how cases are evaluated, the client can take steps to minimize the disparity between what they are going through and what is contained in a demand package. These initial steps lay the foundation for a lawyer to be effective at trial.
A We bring the potential client in for a detailed interview and determine whether additional investigative work is needed. We can usually assess liability for car accidents during the initial client interview. In cases where a person falls, we often need to independently inspect the location of the fall. In a recent case, an inspection of the location revealed that a building was designed with small oneinch diameter drains that allowed water, including melting snow, to drain across a handicapped parking space. During the winter months, this led to thin sheets of clear ice across a handicapped parking space. These drains were so small that they were not visible in photographs taken by the client. Medical malpractice cases often involve the death of a loved one or injuries to an elderly person in a nursing home where the lawyer needs to review medical records before being able to assess whether a case exists.
Q You call yours a “diverse personal injury practice”—what exactly does that entail? A The personal injury practice at RGPH covers everything from medical malpractice, premises liability, car accident, and defective products cases. There are rules that govern almost any activity or item that is potentially dangerous. Our lawyers review cases with the assumption that potential clients honestly believe that they were injured because someone failed to follow a safety rule. The clients often do not know what was done incorrectly, but that something must have been done wrong. The lawyers at RGPH become detectives and learn the applicable rules to the situation.
PHOTO BY JOHN SPAULDIN
George P. Patterson on excellence in the practice of personal injury law and the challenges and rewards of working to improve clients’ lives one case at a time.
George P. Patterson
Q Do you more often settle out of court, or go to trial? Is one preferable?
Q What challenges and rewards come along with practicing personal injury law?
A The goal at RGPH is to give the clients the best possible choice between a settlement and a trial. We often are able to to procure favorable settlement offers because of the work we perform with clients early in the case to make certain that the difficulties they endure after an injury are documented. Cases where the injuries suffered by the clients are poorly documented often require a trial to procure a fair result. Our experience is that clients prefer the option of considering a fair settlement offer over being forced to trial. Nevertheless, there are low property damage car accident cases and cases involving certain insurance companies where the expectation is that a lawsuit will need to be filed.
A Personal injury litigation is an adversarial process. Insurance companies and defense attorneys have duties that are typically against the interests of those injured in accidents. Almost every injury case is challenging because it involves a fight. The greatest reward is taking a difficult case that you believe in and obtaining a recovery that dramatically improves your client’s life. Q How do you navigate the sometimes sensitive issues for personal injury clients? A I often embrace the sensitive issues in a case because these sensitive issues tend to help a jury to relate to the client and sympathize with the difficulties
that the client had to endure. For example, I had a client that struggled with her weight all of her life. During the two years before an accident, she lost well over a hundred pounds through vigorous exercise. By the time the case was heard, she had regained all of the weight due to an ankle injury that prevented her from exercising. When the case was heard, two photographs were placed side by side. The first was a photograph of her two years before the accident and the other was a photograph of her a week before the accident. People naturally do not want to hear excuses about one’s weight, but any person that saw those photographs knew my client had worked extremely hard to lose this weight. They also knew my client would have continued to exercise had she been able to do so.
REINSTEIN, GLACKIN, PATTERSON & HERRIOTT, LLC 17251 Melford Boulevard Suite 101 | Bowie, MD 20715
www.rgphlaw.com Reinstein, Glackin, Patterson & Herriott was ranked Tier 1 in Washington, D.C., by U.S. News – Best Lawyers® “Best Law Firms” for family law in 2015.
phone
301.383.1525
11 North Washington Street Suite 530 | Rockville, MD 20850
www.PGInjuryLawyers.com