As a personal injury lawyer it’s my business to worry about girls with ponytails.

I took a break from blogging, but I think I’m back. Then again who knows, but here is why I took a break from blogging.

I’ve been blogging for four or five years. Frankly I can’t recall because how long I’ve been writing is meaningless as to whether what I write is worth reading. I write how I feel and think about law and what I do for a living as a personal injury lawyer. Blogging on the LexBlog site is more therapeutic than anything else. So what happened that made me stop writing?

First and foremost you have to know I’m a personal injury attorney. Most people dislike us and what we do; they think we are greedy. I probably am because I hate being poor and my mother raised me to be a capitalist. But I won’t make any apology for what I do or how I do it because what I do is too important to stop. 

Not many people understand why I am a necessary gear in the wheels of a free and orderly society. But I am and those who say bullshit will malign me right up until they need me. Everyone thinks tort reform is needed, but it wasn’t, at least not in Iowa. People will cry for tort reform right up to the point when they need a good personal injury lawyer and then they want to sit in my office trying to convince me that none of the tort reforms matter in their case because in their view their claim is not frivolous.

Frivolous? What’s frivolous? Who defines a frivolous claim? You, me or they?

Yeah well get a clue because there are no frivolous claims in our court system; at least not here in Iowa. And don’t mention to me the McDonald’s verdict because frankly very few people know what that case was about. If you want to see frivolous, then take a look at what’s plead as a defense. There are liars and cheats but not frivolous lawsuits; and there are liars and cheats on both sides of some lawsuits. It’s my opinion there are more liars on the insurance side than the injured side, but that’s just my opinion. If you understood anything about the business of practicing law you’d understand that contingent fee cases can’t be frivolous because lawyers have bills to pay and valueless claims are worthless producing no fee.

Zippo, nadda, nothing, zilch.

This entire frivolous crap shoot took away my clients’ right to seek redress in the Courts. The entire frivolous political rhetoric got me pissed off and the more I heard from conservatives about it the more pissed off I became.

Tort reform has nothing to do with frivolous claims. It has to do with profits. Taking money from the injured and leaving it in the hands of insurance execs who then write themselves huge million dollar bonuses for having successfully cheated the injured. After the tort reform bandwagon got cranked up the harder it became for us to do for people what they needed done. I’m in the business to help people and the harder it got to help people the more pissed off it made me.

Folks, I’m a Republican and there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. They are all gaming us to keep the discretionary spending control passing back and forth to simply take advantage of us, the taxpayers. They leave Congress wealthy because of trading stock options selected by knowing where the money will go long before they vote. Get a clue; it’s not about tort reform it’s about the golden rule. And injured people don’t own gold so they don’t make the rules to benefit the injured. I grew tired of this issue and how it affects those who need my help. I grew tired of marketing people telling me to be a good guy when what I’d really like to do is throttle those in power who distort the tort system for their own profit taking.

I’ve been writing blogs about car, motorcycle and truck accidents nonstop for a long-long time. I write nearly 1,000 blogs per year on average and every blog post is about someone who is either killed, seriously injured or can’t put food on the table. I’ve listened to the marketing guys tell us personal injury lawyers we need to appear like good guys; building image so when people need us they think of us as good guys. Horseshit. That’s like telling your oncologist to stop talking to his patients about cancer and instead to learn how to tell a good joke. We deal in blood, guts, death, brain damage, severed limbs, lies, liars, greed, tears, how to put food on the table, how to bury someone that hasn’t a burial insurance policy, how to get the life insurance out of the girlfriend’s hands and into the infant children’s stomachs or any of the other million problems people create by making poor decisions and then coming to me and asking me to walk on water. Negligence, fault and frankly just being an asshole is what I deal with on a daily basis. I don’t deal in nice things; I earn a living by spending my money to rebuild lives that are down in life’s muck. When life sucks people come knocking on my door.

“If you want to meet a nice lawyer, then go meet a plastic surgeon who holds a JD degree. Trial lawyers aren’t always nice pleasant people.”

This worry about my clients never takes a vacation in my life. I go to bed thinking about widows and orphans along with injured workers and wake up in the middle of the night with a solution or not. I battle liars and cheats who can think of a million ways to cheat the injured. This has been going on more years than I care to count, but let’s do it. Let’s count the days of my life wallowing in the muck of life. I’m 57 on November 8^th. That means I’ve been alive for 20,805 days. I started this journey to the center of the universal fringe in June 1981; but it actually started at the legal clinic for the poor in Jasper County in 1980. That’s 31 years x 365 days/year which equals 11,315 days and nights. This means 54% of my life has been spent worrying about other people’s problems. You want nice, like I said, go visit a plastic surgeon that makes a million a year smiling at people and has the ability to make them something they aren’t.  

As plaintiff attorneys the issues we wrestle with are difficult.  Drunks kill our clients or leave them to fend for themselves in life. My job is to put on the legal party by interviewing witnesses, collecting the medical records, bills, wage loss, estate values, car damage and all other economic losses. I put the party on; the defense simply has to show up and put arsenic in the punch bowl. I work with imperfect people who do not understand the effort it takes to make the seemingly impossible become reality. I put the party on while the defense shows up with a rifle trying to pick off just one issue. If they are successful my client’s life continues to be crap and my money goes down the drain. It’s not easy.

“It’s what we do as personal injury lawyers. We don’t have to be nice, what we have to do is be effective at problem solving.”

Judges don’t care what my problems are. As they are fond of saying this is not about fairness, it’s about law, sometimes referred to as justice. Yeah right. That’s not why I went to law school. I went to law school to help people not to move words. Money improves lives and puts food on the table not words or wearing a black robe.

So what was the straw that broke the camel’s back and forced me to walk away from blogging for awhile? It all started with reading and writing about car accidents. Then one morning around 7:30 a.m. on a country road in southeastern Iowa I hit the wall. I’m driving down Highway 16 heading towards Quincy, Illinois when I see a Suburban in front of me. It drifts off the road, spits up dust and rock, then comes back onto the hard surface and overcorrects across the center line. This goes on for miles and along the way I drive beeping the horn with a white knuckled grip on the steering wheel just trying to get the driver to pull over so I can talk with her. From behind the Suburban I can see a young high school aged girl with a ponytail that swishes back and forth as she turns her head from side to side. As the Suburban drives past semi-trucks, a tractor pulling a disc, cars and pickup trucks I’m anticipating a head-on collision. For miles I’m practicing a 9-1-1 call and mentally establishing a protocol for triaging the passengers. Who will I go to first? How many will be alive? I can still hear voices crying, moaning, pleading and asking me to help me; I anticipate having to make judgments while holding a cell phone and ordering the ambulance. I can see faces of young pretty girls who I end up making decisions that can either keep them alive or not. On the drive as we progress east on Highway 16 I’m looking in my truck’s cab for what can be used to stop bleeding. I think of my shirt and shuck off the embarrassment of how out of shape I am. I wonder how many will be in the other car or trucks that are not so lucky to get by. It bothered me then and it still bothers me today. Frankly I was sick and tired of personal injury. The incident made it all too viseral for me. I just couldn't write anymore.

Video Dash Cam from Iowa State Patrol

And so after this was resolved and everyone is safe, I was left still with sleep interrupted nights and an inability to write a blog about personal injury accidents. No longer do I want to analyze truck accidents. I start to wonder how the girls in the Suburban are doing. I wonder about their golf season and graduation. Prom and whether they are safe. Maybe it’s my nature and maybe it’s PTSD; I have no idea. I even think about the coach and how lucky she was that I was there that day. Instead of spending the rest of her life in prison she’ll get a short stint in the county jail and her life to rebuild and to enjoy sunrises and sunsets. Instead of misery from sitting alone in a prison cell with her thoughts of having killed young promising girls; she gets to move on with her life. Will she ever thank me? Do I deserve to be thanked? Why am I still pondering these things?

I have no idea why God made me the way I am, but rational thought and reason have no meaning at 2:00 a.m. when you’re staring at the ceiling trying to fall back asleep. So today I’m back to blogging and talking about personal injury law, accidental injury and I’m back to meeting with widows and orphans. To get back I had to ask myself do I really want to do this damn personal injury work; and if so why. The answer is pretty straightforward; it’s no different than the reason why I started in this business of being a lawyer. It’s that damn ponytail. That ponytail on that young lady is what makes her perfect for me and what I like to do. I was given the opportunity to be there and to stop the driver, to maybe save her life and the lives of those she sat with wondering if they would make it out alive. That's what PI work is really about. It's why I like PI work. Frankly it’s my nature and my job to worry about that ponytail. It’s what I’ve done for 31 years and it’s why I’m back to blogging and working the personal injury circuit in the Iowa Courts. It’s what we do as personal injury lawyers. We don’t have to be nice, what we have to do is be effective at problem solving.

I hope the girl with the ponytail is doing well and that all the Suburban girls are safe on prom night. Like I said, it’s my business to worry. Onward I march.  

To read more about this issue see these links:

Iowa golf coach arrested for driving team to meet while drunk, By Jonathan Wall

May 11, 2011 - Fairfield girls golf coach arrested while driving team to meet; charged with OWI, child endangerment

SCOTT JACKSONCourier sports writer

MAY 18, 2011 - Iowa High School Golf Coach Arrested For Driving Team To Meet While Drunk

Posted: 2:13 PM May 11, 2011 - Coach Arrested For DUI Driving Golf Team To Meet

Teacher charged with DUI and child endangerment