Why Honesty Is the Best Policy in Personal Injury Claims
I'm Griff Tonkin. I'm with the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices in Redding, California. We're a personal injury firm handling cases throughout California.
I was asked recently to tell some war stories, and I thought of three particular cases that I've handled over the course of my career. Really, they stand for a simple proposition — one that you would probably share with your children or a loved one — and that is a simple note: honesty is in fact the best policy.
These three examples all come from an earlier time in my career where I was on the defense side of personal injury cases. That is, I defended people who were alleged to have injured others. In these three cases, honesty was not deployed by the other lawyer and their client, and that ended up being a very bad decision for them.
That's why when you meet with us here at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices, we're going to give it to you straight. We're not going to tell you what you want to hear. We're going to tell you what you need to hear, and what you need to hear is sometimes the difficulties of your particular case.
That doesn't mean you don't have a case. It just means like if you're facing a team and they've got a great defense, you prepare appropriately for that defense. Or if they've got a star forward on the basketball team or a star wide receiver on the football team, you prepare to be able to deal with those issues. It's no different in the handling of your personal injury claim.
So when you meet with us, we're going to give you the straight story, and we expect to hear straight from you. We don't care what the truth is. We just want to know what it is. Here's three examples of cases where that just didn't happen.
The Dog Bite Case
In a case early in my career, a dog was alleged to have been tethered in the back of a truck. Someone approached the back of the truck and asked to pet the dog — at least, that's how the story went.
As she reached into the back of the truck, the dog growled at her. Allegedly, the owner said, "I've never seen my dog growl at anybody. Don't pet my dog."
She ignored the owner and said something to the effect of "dogs love us" and reached into the back of the truck anyways, where she was bitten on the face. A key detail in this story was that the dog was tethered. Well, right before trial, we determined that the dog wasn't tethered, and the truth hadn't been told for over two years of litigation.
This fact entirely changed the dynamic of the case, and it was a terrible result for the person who decided not to tell the truth. The better policy would have been to tell the truth and deal with the problem early on. That's one example.
The Minor Car Accident That Didn't Add Up
I have another example, again from the "honesty is the best policy" file. In this case, when I was on the defense side of things, there was a minor car accident with very little damage to the vehicle.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't be hurt, but it does indicate that you're probably not suffering from severe injuries. Well, in this case, the mother and daughter who were in the vehicle that sustained the minor damage were making a personal injury claim, but they were making severe injury claims — an inability for a lifetime for mom ever to be able to return to work, an allegation that she couldn't do things as mundane as grocery shop and would have to use a walker for the rest of her life.
The daughter was alleging that she hadn't been able to go to school, hadn't been able to participate in PE or any other physical activities. Well, the truth was this: on a day when we knew where these folks were going to be, we just had an investigator out in public. You don't have a right to privacy when you're in public space.
And the video showed the following: the mom picking up newspapers, kicking them across driveways, throwing them to her trash can, taking trash cans back, and importantly, grocery shopping. While grocery shopping, she was picking up and throwing 40- to 50-pound bags of dog food without any indication of injury whatsoever. Similarly, she loaded heavy two-and-a-half-gallon jugs of water and that dog food in her car without problem.
The daughter who was missing school on the day that we had this court proceeding was seen skateboarding all day. And to her credit, she was quite a skillful skateboarder and could do a number of really impressive tricks — but she shouldn't have been able to do those tricks if she was as injured as she said.
As the mother and daughter approached the office where the proceeding was going to occur, they switched seats. The daughter, you see, had told us she hadn't been able to get her driver's license because she was in too much pain to even turn the wheel of a car. Well, the daughter had been driving all day.
So they switched seats and mom drove the rest of the way to the office. When they got to the office, the daughter stood up, put on a sling, and tucked her arm into the sling. Mom got out of the car, walked to the back, and could be seen yanking on something in the trunk that was stuck.
As she pulled, the car shook — she was pulling so hard. Eventually a walker popped free. She opened the walker and then proceeded to develop a severe limp and needed the walker to walk. She hadn't used the walker at any other point during this day.
This was so egregious that the daughter, when using the bathroom and the other facilities around the office where the proceedings were occurring, removed the sling and had her arm out so she could access her smartphone. This was just a totally dishonest claim.
That's never been one of the clients here at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices. I want to make that clear. But it is shocking conduct revealing that honesty is in fact the best policy.
The Motorcycle Accident and the Real Story
Now, one of the most interesting and egregious claims — well, we didn't have it as a personal injury attorney representing the injured party, but on the defense side — was a case where a lady and her boyfriend were riding on a motorcycle. The boyfriend was piloting the motorcycle and she was on the back seat. It was a minor bump from the rear, but she claimed severe injuries to her knee.
Now, we knew she'd gotten a bump on her chin. We could see that her chin had been pushed forward into her boyfriend's helmet, but there was no injury to the knee. In fact, ambulance personnel reported at the scene that she was walking around fine.
However, several weeks after the accident, she went to medical treatment and she did in fact have a severe injury to her knee. But there'd been a gap from the initial treatment right after the accident until several weeks later. We couldn't figure out how she'd injured her knee, but we were pretty confident it wasn't during the motorcycle incident.
Well, hell hath no fury like the brokenhearted boyfriend. You see, this couple broke up. We found the boyfriend and we asked him what happened. It turns out, she'd suffered a significant fall at their home from a significant height and suffered a terrible knee injury in that fall.
But they made the plan together to tell physicians and medical providers that the knee injury was from the motorcycle accident that had happened a few weeks before. The boyfriend came clean, and her case was completely destroyed.
Our Commitment to Honest Representation
Here at the Arthofer and Tonkin Law Offices — and I know this may sound strange coming from an attorney — our core values are honesty, integrity, and ethics. We will never sacrifice our ethics for a claim. We represent people that are ethical and honest.
We're prepared to deal with the difficulties of your claim no matter what they are, but you're going to get a straight answer from us and you'll get excellent representation.
Call us today at 530-722-9002 on your personal injury matter.
