Speaker 1: Welcome back to Personal Injury Today, where we discuss the hot topics to help attorneys better understand their clients' cases and come to a fair settlement. In today's video, we're going to talk about ways that you can understand the intricacies of your client's complex personal injury case. We're here today with Dr. Brad Poppe. He's the founder of Injury Reporting Consultants, where he helps attorneys just like you resolve their clients' cases through evidence-based medical reporting and analysis. Welcome Dr. Brad.

Speaker 2: Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: All right, so let's dive into this topic. We want to understand, first off, are all personal injury cases as straightforward as they may seem initially?

Speaker 2: No, they're absolutely not. They're always a multi-system problem, and nothing is ever clear cut. It may seem to be, it may seem like a slam dunk to an attorney, but really it's not. It's an onion, and you have to peel away that onion and expose everything that's associated with the case in order to understand it. I think that one of the big hurdles that I see when dealing with these types of cases is that attorneys within their law firm, they only know what they know. They try to understand the case and do the research, which is good, but there's just times when they're not doctors. They don't fully understand what doctors are writing, or why they wrote this, or what does this mean, or what implications does this have on that, et cetera, from a medical or rehabilitative type standpoint. When they don't reach out for help, it does their client a disservice. As with anything in life, if you don't know, ask questions. We were taught that in grade school. Raise your hand, ask questions. I don't know. A lot of people ask questions because they gain answers, and they gain knowledge, and then the attorney can apply that knowledge to different cases, but how do they gain knowledge? Through experts. People that do this on a day-to-day basis. I put my brain around thousands of cases. I've been a practicing doctor for 20 years in personal injury. I know how these patients present. I know what goes into their care. I know their prognosis. I've seen thousands of personal injury patients. Reach out to people like me. I can help. Do it within an acceptable time frame. Again, my best advice to attorneys, if they have a case that's, hey, it came across our desk and it's kind of a funky case, great, call. Don't wait until the last minute when you're behind the eight ball, and you don't really a lot of time to really work the case properly and understand it, and then expect these experts to come in and save the day. There's just not enough time, so get it out there. Expand your reach, and learn quickly to become more effective.

Speaker 1: That's great. If you're watching today, we want you to like this video if you found this valuable, and share it with other attorneys. Share it with your clients, and also subscribe to this channel, and then hit the bell notification so that you can be updated every time we have a new episode. It sounds like a couple things here. In order to understand, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the three or a couple different ways that you can understand the intricacies of your client's personal injury case. The first one is you'll never understand unless you're asking questions, and then you talked about making sure that you call on experts to help you understand even further, and not waiting until the last minute to ask those questions or call on those experts. Exactly. Do you have a story or an example, a case where either they didn't ask the questions, they waited too late, or on the flip side, that they were really great, maybe the attorney was amazing at asking a lot of questions of their client, of you as an expert, and did so in a timely manner?

Speaker 2: I would like to share a success story. It just worked out beautifully. It was an attorney that called about their case, and they said, we kind of know what we're doing or what we think we might need to help show the value and show the impairments and disabilities and help build a damage report, but we don't really know. I'm like, thank you. And so, it was probably an hour conversation. I'm like, well, based on what happened and kind of how they're presenting, have you thought about this? Well, how about this? Well, what about this report? Maybe it's a functional capacity evaluation to really show true impairments and disabilities. Do we then want to show lack of competitiveness in the workplace and show a monetary loss, earnings capacity loss? Maybe so. Are there future needs for this client? Have they reached maximal medical improvement, and this is as good as they're going to get? Or are the treating practitioners opining on, hey, they're going to need more cognitive therapy. They're going to need physical therapy, maybe orthopedic surgery, whatever. What does that picture look like? And being able to really kind of wrap that attorney's brain around, wow, this isn't a slam, but this is a multi-system problem or case. We're playing chess, not checkers here. And so, I think it was enlightening to the attorney to really like, wow, I didn't understand this. Like I say, it's an onion. I didn't realize there were so many layers of the onion. It seemed kind of like a straightforward case, but in all reality, it really wasn't. So we were able to provide some different reports to help build a balanced damages report package for the attorney. And it did really well. It actually got some of the mediation, because the insurance company understood. They understand. And when you have that communication where everyone understands, problems get solved. So that's my best advice.

Speaker 1: And in this case, in this story that you told, what was that timeframe? When did the attorney reach out to you?

Speaker 2: Early on. Perfect. Like the case came across her desk a couple of weeks ago, or prior to them calling me. And I'm like, perfect. That way there's no time constraints and, oh, shoulda, coulda, woulda, oops. And then everyone's scrambling to produce a quality report, and it's just very, very tough to do that.

Speaker 1: So if you're watching today, you can reach out to Dr. Brad Poppy easily. We have all of the information right below this video for you so that you can do the same thing and just sort of brainstorm on your specific case and see if you can provide any value at all. Also, again, share, like, and subscribe. And then if you have questions, if you have topics for our upcoming episodes, place those in the comments, in the comment places below, and we'll get back to you and come up with some episodes just for you. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.