Personal injury lawsuits range in size. But big or small the recovery is valuable to the injured party. A new and ingenious measure being used by the insurance defense complex is to avoid the costs of litigation or the risk of loss in the courts while essentially winning every case. Apparently, some of the more gung ho members of the complex have been staying up past their eight o’clock bedtimes devising a new plan. This is about as non-corporate as they can get.

Here’s what they’ve come up with. Instead of always following the knee jerk reaction of refusing to admit wrongdoing and litigating they have concluded that on select cases they can appear to settle the case on the issue of liability and then proceed to cut the damages so badly that they in essence always win the case, guilty or not.

The damages suffered by the victim-plaintiff are the costs of medical care and the like. These are known to lawyers as “specials.” Specials are attacked on the basis that they represent costs for services that weren’t needed or that were needed but were over charged for. To this end, they retain a medical expert witness to say that many of the medical services rendered were not needed. When you think about it this is pretty easy for them to get done. They know that medical practice isn’t set in concrete and that different doctors may have a different approach to medical care. They thus find doctors who will say what they want them to say when they pay those doctors as well as they do. Do you think this is hard? It isn’t.

They also have access to medical coding software which can also be rigged or “worked” to some extent. They then hire a coding person to challenge the actual costs of all of the specials that were necessary thereby knocking them down in value. Pretty soon the recoverable amount of damages are so low that they essentially won the suit.

MedWitness, Ltd. has expert witnesses to testify in support of the need for medical services and coders with software to challenge the defense coders so that the injured party can get the true value of the harm done. In short, just because you settled or even won doesn’t mean you can’t get your money anymore.