Need car accident advice/witness(Vienna) - Dealing with a big liar

[PAZARG]

I´m from argentina and i suffer the lost of a friend in a car accident in vienna. This happened on the 4th of may. She crashed with a track when she was traying to cross a road. I don´t know if someone have news of that.

[ACWhite]

Originally Posted by mississippimagnolia

You don't work in personal injury law, do you? It doesn't cost people anything at all to file a lawsuit against a "big company" (most of the time). Most personal injury attorneys work on a contingency fee....they don't get paid unless you do. It's not uncommon for the attorney to get anywhere form 25%-33% of the settlement. Don't get me wrong, attorneys deserve to get paid as do injured clients. But don't fool yourself into believing that it's difficult to "win" a case. Insurance companies are more than willing to pay out to avoid the cost of lengthy litigation.

Think about it this way....A client is seeking damages of $10,000 (a tiny amount in a personal injury case). The insurance company would pay their attorneys way more than that just to defend the case. It's not worth it for them. It's cheaper to pay the money and make the claim go away.

I was not limiting my comments to personal injury law--just as people who make comments about "our litigious society" generally are not limiting their comments either. There are many other areas of law where attorneys do not take cases on a contingency basis (in part because it is so hard to win them and the plaintiff has far fewer resources than companies being sued). For example, talk to employment lawyers. Better yet, talk to a hundred women or so about whether they have ever experienced unfair discrimination at work, and then ask if they filed even a complaint within their firm (let alone a lawsuit). As another example, as a paralegal, you can research the # of Sarbanes-Oxley cases that have been filed, and what % of them were won by the plaintiffs. Then ask yourself whether you think you will ever see another financial scandal. There are many, many such examples.

As for the personal injury area in particular, I stand by my previous logic, which you are not addressing. It would NOT be cheaper for insurance companies to use that strategy if there were huge numbers of people doing it. (No one here is questioning whether there are SOME scam artists or whether companies settle complaints to keep costs down.) Cos. would have to draw the line to send the signal to people with bogus claims that they won't get rewarded for doing it, and if they failed to do so, they would be out of business quickly. The success of the settlement strategy depends on most people being honest, and on some people not trying to make claims. And that's my point - we have a few bad apples scamming people, not a "litigious society."

As a paralegal, you are not seeing a representative cross section of the population. You are seeing people who by definition want to take legal action. You are not seeing the many, many people who decide even when they have good cases not to put themselves through the agony.

[kt543]

So sorry about your loss. If it happened in the town of Vienna, it would probably show up in this one. Was she driving as well? I don't see crashes on May 4th.

http://www.viennava.gov/cgi-bin/vpd_highlights/05-07-2010.pdf (broken link)

Originally Posted by PAZARG

I´m from argentina and i suffer the lost of a friend in a car accident in vienna. This happened on the 4th of may. She crashed with a track when she was traying to cross a road. I don´t know if someone have news of that.

[Denton56]

A similar thing happened to us a week ago. My dh was driving my BMW in Leesburg. His light turned green, just as he began to exhilarate a woman in a van came blasting through the intersection, on a RED LIGHT! He hit her. No injuries, little damage to her car, but major damage to the BMW even though he was going less than 5mph. Get this, she lied and said it wasn't a red light, even though the other three lanes had stopped for the red light! Of course no one stopped as a witness. DH got charged even though he did nothing wrong! The cop said a green light means nothing, he should have waited for the intersection to clear! It was clear when he entered it! She came flying through, running the light! Fortunately we know a good lawyer in Leesburg and he's handling it. But it seems so unfair. We are out a car, and out a lot of money, when we did nothing wrong! I always trusted the cops before this. Not anymore. I now know what can happen to innocent people. My dh has perfect 40 year driving record and now that's destroyed by one lying woman and one idiot Leesburg cop who wouldn't know the truth if it smacked him in the face! Oh well. At least we have the money to pay the lawyer and our insurance company is believing us and refusing to pay to fix lying woman's car.

[kt543]

What? People running red lights shouldn't get away with it if they are causing accidents!

It's too easy for people to just lie and get away with things. NPR this morning just said someone lied about getting a medal of honor and thinks it's freedom of speech.