EP 25: What is the Investigator’s Role in Catastrophic Injury Claims?

Welcome to the catastrophic comeback podcast with American Injury Lawyer Clark speaks, helping you find hope, purpose and joy after a catastrophic injury.

Hi, and welcome to another edition of catastrophic comeback. I'm very happy today to have my guest, Scott Rodriguez. Scott is a senior investigator at Speex law firm, and has been with us for a long time as extensive law enforcement and investigative experience. Welcome, Scott, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Scott, the first thing I want to talk to you about is, is in terms of your investigations, you know, we're this is a podcast designed for people who have suffered catastrophic injuries. So let's focus on catastrophic, catastrophic injuries and those aspects of your investigations. First of all, what kinds of things do you investigate? How do you contribute? How do you get involved in these kinds of cases, specifically

to say for example, personal injury claims or cases, typically looking from motor vehicle aspects such as crashes, pedestrians, bicycle is it looking for where we can find that auto coverage? So there spent a lot of time searching through databases, finding vehicles, finding owners, it's a little more complex than you know, if I find a person has a vehicle, and here's auto covered insurance coverage, I have to go beyond that. Because what I've noticed it's common now I see people may have, for example, three vehicles in may have three different insurance policies on there. So I can't just check one box and say, Okay, I got their auto insurance coverage, I've got to hit all those vehicles, then there's looking for residents, resident relatives, policies, for for vehicles and an asset, so do a lot of asset searching, be that in person or through databases? Well, so

so I thought I'd be honest, we I thought you were gonna lead with tire impressions and videos and police statements and all that. So you've got gone straight into coverage. Let's look at that for a minute. Why is that so important? What? What do you mean coverage? Why is that important? How does that apply?

Sure, it's really important on coverages, because in North Carolina, we have a minimum requirement for auto insurance coverage coverage. And oftentimes people only have that minimum required coverage, or unfortunately, some people's injuries exceed that and well beyond exceed that. So the case managers will ask me to search for other covers, so we can make sure we can help this client financially as a part of their recovery from an injury. So

let's let's give them a practical impression of how that works. If if, and I can there's a case that comes to my mind right now where a person is. On the side of the road, changing a tire, somebody hits him, while they're doing that was negligent was at fault, had the minimum coverage $30,000.60 3060, which means 30 per person, 60 per occurrence. So if it's an individual person, the most insurance company would have to pay us 30,000. If it's a group of people, or more than one person, though, they mostly would have to pay a 60,000. So if you cannot find additional coverage, what happens with the balance of that claim that if there's if there's a million dollar loss, and there's $30,000 coverage, what happens to that other $970,000 damage? Well,

after that, we have to start looking at the individual and looking at the individual in their assets they may have. So if we if I exhaust my resources looking for auto policy coverage, maybe I find another resident relative, and we still can't meet the persons injured the financial costs of their injury, I started looking for assets, real estate, small business ownership. So I spent a lot of time on the Secretary of State database, seen if an individual has any small business on their own that might have assets. So I spent a lot of time looking for assets, some of that time gets into the evidence, part of that of actually going out and camping out in front of a house for a while or camping out front of a business. Because what I found is with assets, a lot of that stuff isn't recorded anywhere. It's not documented with Secretary of State or insurance, nothing like that. I need to go out there and put eyes on it. Well,

let's talk about some of those individual pieces in just a minute. But if you can't find assets, and you can't find coverage, then then anything beyond the initial policy, they're just they're just out of luck, right?

It's, for lack of better words, it almost could come to that.

And it does come as the reality it does come to that which is why it's so critical that you do this work and that you and that you do this as you do the things that you do to investigate to do everything that you possibly can to find any additional coverage that there may be. You've talked about a couple of times current sources of have up, you know, have additional coverage. You talked about resident relative. I think you alluded to uninsured motorists, underinsured motorist, business policies, business people that own small businesses, maybe they have business policies, liability policies, or maybe they have umbrella policies or those kinds of things. And so the really the focus, the question I have, is, I just want to make it clear that, if so, what you're saying in which my experiences, if we can't find if they're, if we can't find an additional policy, or if we can't find more coverage, or even assets owned by the individual, people are just out of luck,

they're gonna, they're gonna run out, there's gonna be run out of sources to tap into. So

that makes it really important that we find these policies or these assets, okay? Now, if if a firm that if a person's catastrophically injured, and their law firm comes back to them and says, Hey, there's no, there's no, pilot, there's no, we couldn't find, you know, all this person had was $30,000 in coverage, or in another state, it might be more or less, or whatever, but a small amount of coverage, excuse me for a catastrophic injury. That what questions What questions would that person ask his or her lawyer, you know, like, you know, to make sure that that that law firm had done the things that they should do to make sure there's absolutely no chance? Or is it the best you can find is all practical certainty. There's no other policy or asset available to cover the cost of this?

You know, good question. And I've never been in that situation to be that client, where my attorney calls me says, Hey, we, we've tapped out, and we've we've can't find any more policies. There's no assets we can attach liens to. I think, if I was in that situation, my first response would be well, what do I do now? We're probably from our attorney, what do I do now? How do I how do I recover from this?

So that's a fair question. So if I'm in that situation, if somebody were to ask me and I have been in that situation, I have been in that situation where a person said, What do I do now? And it's a good question. And the answer is, you're just out of luck. And so I think that's an important thing that we need to realize. And so I will tell you what I did in response to that. I remember telling the person okay, what we need to do in the future is advise our clients and advise people that we come in contact with, to purchase going forward, an uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is not very expensive, and it protects you in exactly that situation, somebody hits you or your family, on the road, and they have, and they only have $30,000 coverage, but you need you have medical bills and lost income that's surpasses that uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage will be there for you to to, to at least provide for the financial benefit that you need to get through this situation. So I think that's critical that people need to know, one of the things that I found is a lot of people don't want to tap into that. They're like, we're not going after my insurance, you know, so and so. And so when we find an uninsured motorist policy policy, what do you tell people that if they have that, you know, why do you got to go after my insurance? It's the other guy's fault.

I think the most clear response is that, well, that's what she paid for that for you. And you invested in that for this type of situation, this exact situation. But let's take advantage of that you you have been paying for this, whether they've had that policy for one premium of a year or 10 years. That's what you paid for. You select your insurance company to do that for you. It's like

having a homeowner's policy, and a storm comes and a tree branch goes to your living room. And you say no, not my insurance company. It's the whole point is the reason you've bought that policy is in case somebody hits you and they didn't have adequate insurance.

Yeah. And I think from my view, as the investigator for law firm, I've felt some of that resistance from clients to the response of Hold on, what are you talking about my insurance, what's going to be the what's going to be the response or the fallout from that, and I have to explain, that's why it's there. It's there for that reason.

And so when that when that happens, and I mean, I think they they're right to ask questions, and they can ask questions to their, to their lawyer about okay, well, what does that mean? What's the consequences? What does that look like? How does that work? I think that's something they can ask. But, but I do think it's important that if some if a person goes, is in this situation, and they're told by their lawyer, their law firm, there's inadequate insurance to cover your losses. I think the questions that they probably should consider asking is, well, what kinds of things have you done to verify that that's all the insurance coverage that there is, and I think a good responsible law firm and a good responsible lawyer will say, these are the things that we've done, and they include the things that you've just described.

Yeah. And if, if my reports were reviewed as an investigator, I leave a very obvious and evident trail of how I researched policies, how our research resident relative as how I researched assets, how I try to put together and confirm people or relatives, I leave a very clear evident trail. So somebody could explain to a colleague, a client, here's what happened. Well, let's

talk about that for a minute. Where do you where is it? What's your what's Tell me about your background, what your history is your employment history and training is and your experiences, that's that's led you to be able to do this work and to do it thoroughly and professionally?

Yeah, so my long term career, I'm a retired law enforcement officer, I was law enforcement in Adair County, North Carolina, spent 28 years doing that. I think the relative part of that is the final 18 years of my career, I wasn't a criminal investigator, well, this is what I this is what I did, I filled in gaps, exploring alternative hypotheses for crimes or something that may have happened. So as not to have any sort of biases of what I think the outcome is going to be. So that has really transitioned nicely over over to this. Being able to research people where people come from where they live, the living situations, I did a lot of that in criminal investigations, particularly in developing suspects, I need to know who if I develop a suspect, let's figure out who the suspect is, let's figure out who they are, what they're about their background. Same thing, the same thing kind of applies to here to doing this well. So

when I think about investigator, I usually think about maybe the state's May, I think about you know, being out on the Magnum PI, you know, being down on the street, talking to people looking at stuff. And I'm sure there's some of that, we'll get to that in just a minute. But what you're, what you're telling me is a big part of this job is actually electronic investigation, and research and that kind of stuff,

data collection, and probably just as important as collecting that data is making that data readable or interpretable. I need when I would do cases, during mock criminal investigations time I did everything from property crime to homicides. And one of the biggest challenges was putting this together. So people understand what it is and where it came from. And I think that is a very important part of what I do with Speex law firm. Yes, I will go find this information in this data. But we need to explain where that came from. So we can make sure we're tapping into the right sources. And not just throwing out there throwing things out there to see what happens.

So early in my career, I used to do a lot of criminal offense in state and federal court, we they have a lot of trials. And and one of the things that I always I appreciated about the law enforcement officers that I worked with is their dedication to investigating but also documenting their their files, and you can tell when somebody is a pro, and then when they document their files in I would I would have to cross examine them on their documentation. And the best ones would always be very thorough in their documentation. And they would always describe the reason for their need to be thorough. And that is because I know somebody may ask me about this two years ago, and two years from now in court. And it needs to be right. And it needs to and I need to be able to defend it. And if I don't document it thoroughly, I will never remember it two years from now,

as exactly right. Yeah, that's something you know, I carry a lot of cases. What speaks law firm right now. And I want to make sure in that exact situation when a case manager or litigation attorney comes to me 1820 months later and says, Where did you get this piece of information from? I've already pre planned for that. It's there already documented where it came from? So there's no question because database has changed over time. And what a database might say today, could be different people change addresses, they change audit policies, some of that stuff isn't permanently recorded. So let's document that now today.

Well, so that brings me to another thing I wanted to touch base with you about. We talk about the urgency and you know, people call some times and they're like, hey, yeah, I'm gonna I'd like to talk to you about this. This terrible thing that happened, I was really seriously injured or whatever. And, and then we say, Okay, well, we'll be happy to talk to you. Some of them are like, well, you know, I can talk to you tomorrow. I can call you back in six months. I can call you back. You know, when it's, you know, and we always tell them, you know, you might want to think about that. You can do that. That's your prerogative. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.

Welcome to the catastrophic comeback podcast with American Injury Lawyer Clark speaks, helping you find hope, purpose and joy after a catastrophic injury.

Hi, and welcome to another edition of catastrophic comeback. I'm very happy today to have my guest, Scott Rodriguez. Scott is a senior investigator at Speex law firm, and has been with us for a long time as extensive law enforcement and investigative experience. Welcome, Scott, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Scott, the first thing I want to talk to you about is, is in terms of your investigations, you know, we're this is a podcast designed for people who have suffered catastrophic injuries. So let's focus on catastrophic, catastrophic injuries and those aspects of your investigations. First of all, what kinds of things do you investigate? How do you contribute? How do you get involved in these kinds of cases, specifically

to say for example, personal injury claims or cases, typically looking from motor vehicle aspects such as crashes, pedestrians, bicycle is it looking for where we can find that auto coverage? So there spent a lot of time searching through databases, finding vehicles, finding owners, it's a little more complex than you know, if I find a person has a vehicle, and here's auto covered insurance coverage, I have to go beyond that. Because what I've noticed it's common now I see people may have, for example, three vehicles in may have three different insurance policies on there. So I can't just check one box and say, Okay, I got their auto insurance coverage, I've got to hit all those vehicles, then there's looking for residents, resident relatives, policies, for for vehicles and an asset, so do a lot of asset searching, be that in person or through databases? Well, so

so I thought I'd be honest, we I thought you were gonna lead with tire impressions and videos and police statements and all that. So you've got gone straight into coverage. Let's look at that for a minute. Why is that so important? What? What do you mean coverage? Why is that important? How does that apply?

Sure, it's really important on coverages, because in North Carolina, we have a minimum requirement for auto insurance coverage coverage. And oftentimes people only have that minimum required coverage, or unfortunately, some people's injuries exceed that and well beyond exceed that. So the case managers will ask me to search for other covers, so we can make sure we can help this client financially as a part of their recovery from an injury. So

let's let's give them a practical impression of how that works. If if, and I can there's a case that comes to my mind right now where a person is. On the side of the road, changing a tire, somebody hits him, while they're doing that was negligent was at fault, had the minimum coverage $30,000.60 3060, which means 30 per person, 60 per occurrence. So if it's an individual person, the most insurance company would have to pay us 30,000. If it's a group of people, or more than one person, though, they mostly would have to pay a 60,000. So if you cannot find additional coverage, what happens with the balance of that claim that if there's if there's a million dollar loss, and there's $30,000 coverage, what happens to that other $970,000 damage? Well,

after that, we have to start looking at the individual and looking at the individual in their assets they may have. So if we if I exhaust my resources looking for auto policy coverage, maybe I find another resident relative, and we still can't meet the persons injured the financial costs of their injury, I started looking for assets, real estate, small business ownership. So I spent a lot of time on the Secretary of State database, seen if an individual has any small business on their own that might have assets. So I spent a lot of time looking for assets, some of that time gets into the evidence, part of that of actually going out and camping out in front of a house for a while or camping out front of a business. Because what I found is with assets, a lot of that stuff isn't recorded anywhere. It's not documented with Secretary of State or insurance, nothing like that. I need to go out there and put eyes on it. Well,

let's talk about some of those individual pieces in just a minute. But if you can't find assets, and you can't find coverage, then then anything beyond the initial policy, they're just they're just out of luck, right?

It's, for lack of better words, it almost could come to that.

And it does come as the reality it does come to that which is why it's so critical that you do this work and that you and that you do this as you do the things that you do to investigate to do everything that you possibly can to find any additional coverage that there may be. You've talked about a couple of times current sources of have up, you know, have additional coverage. You talked about resident relative. I think you alluded to uninsured motorists, underinsured motorist, business policies, business people that own small businesses, maybe they have business policies, liability policies, or maybe they have umbrella policies or those kinds of things. And so the really the focus, the question I have, is, I just want to make it clear that, if so, what you're saying in which my experiences, if we can't find if they're, if we can't find an additional policy, or if we can't find more coverage, or even assets owned by the individual, people are just out of luck,

they're gonna, they're gonna run out, there's gonna be run out of sources to tap into. So

that makes it really important that we find these policies or these assets, okay? Now, if if a firm that if a person's catastrophically injured, and their law firm comes back to them and says, Hey, there's no, there's no, pilot, there's no, we couldn't find, you know, all this person had was $30,000 in coverage, or in another state, it might be more or less, or whatever, but a small amount of coverage, excuse me for a catastrophic injury. That what questions What questions would that person ask his or her lawyer, you know, like, you know, to make sure that that that law firm had done the things that they should do to make sure there's absolutely no chance? Or is it the best you can find is all practical certainty. There's no other policy or asset available to cover the cost of this?

You know, good question. And I've never been in that situation to be that client, where my attorney calls me says, Hey, we, we've tapped out, and we've we've can't find any more policies. There's no assets we can attach liens to. I think, if I was in that situation, my first response would be well, what do I do now? We're probably from our attorney, what do I do now? How do I how do I recover from this?

So that's a fair question. So if I'm in that situation, if somebody were to ask me and I have been in that situation, I have been in that situation where a person said, What do I do now? And it's a good question. And the answer is, you're just out of luck. And so I think that's an important thing that we need to realize. And so I will tell you what I did in response to that. I remember telling the person okay, what we need to do in the future is advise our clients and advise people that we come in contact with, to purchase going forward, an uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage is not very expensive, and it protects you in exactly that situation, somebody hits you or your family, on the road, and they have, and they only have $30,000 coverage, but you need you have medical bills and lost income that's surpasses that uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage will be there for you to to, to at least provide for the financial benefit that you need to get through this situation. So I think that's critical that people need to know, one of the things that I found is a lot of people don't want to tap into that. They're like, we're not going after my insurance, you know, so and so. And so when we find an uninsured motorist policy policy, what do you tell people that if they have that, you know, why do you got to go after my insurance? It's the other guy's fault.

I think the most clear response is that, well, that's what she paid for that for you. And you invested in that for this type of situation, this exact situation. But let's take advantage of that you you have been paying for this, whether they've had that policy for one premium of a year or 10 years. That's what you paid for. You select your insurance company to do that for you. It's like

having a homeowner's policy, and a storm comes and a tree branch goes to your living room. And you say no, not my insurance company. It's the whole point is the reason you've bought that policy is in case somebody hits you and they didn't have adequate insurance.

Yeah. And I think from my view, as the investigator for law firm, I've felt some of that resistance from clients to the response of Hold on, what are you talking about my insurance, what's going to be the what's going to be the response or the fallout from that, and I have to explain, that's why it's there. It's there for that reason.

And so when that when that happens, and I mean, I think they they're right to ask questions, and they can ask questions to their, to their lawyer about okay, well, what does that mean? What's the consequences? What does that look like? How does that work? I think that's something they can ask. But, but I do think it's important that if some if a person goes, is in this situation, and they're told by their lawyer, their law firm, there's inadequate insurance to cover your losses. I think the questions that they probably should consider asking is, well, what kinds of things have you done to verify that that's all the insurance coverage that there is, and I think a good responsible law firm and a good responsible lawyer will say, these are the things that we've done, and they include the things that you've just described.

Yeah. And if, if my reports were reviewed as an investigator, I leave a very obvious and evident trail of how I researched policies, how our research resident relative as how I researched assets, how I try to put together and confirm people or relatives, I leave a very clear evident trail. So somebody could explain to a colleague, a client, here's what happened. Well, let's

talk about that for a minute. Where do you where is it? What's your what's Tell me about your background, what your history is your employment history and training is and your experiences, that's that's led you to be able to do this work and to do it thoroughly and professionally?

Yeah, so my long term career, I'm a retired law enforcement officer, I was law enforcement in Adair County, North Carolina, spent 28 years doing that. I think the relative part of that is the final 18 years of my career, I wasn't a criminal investigator, well, this is what I this is what I did, I filled in gaps, exploring alternative hypotheses for crimes or something that may have happened. So as not to have any sort of biases of what I think the outcome is going to be. So that has really transitioned nicely over over to this. Being able to research people where people come from where they live, the living situations, I did a lot of that in criminal investigations, particularly in developing suspects, I need to know who if I develop a suspect, let's figure out who the suspect is, let's figure out who they are, what they're about their background. Same thing, the same thing kind of applies to here to doing this well. So

when I think about investigator, I usually think about maybe the state's May, I think about you know, being out on the Magnum PI, you know, being down on the street, talking to people looking at stuff. And I'm sure there's some of that, we'll get to that in just a minute. But what you're, what you're telling me is a big part of this job is actually electronic investigation, and research and that kind of stuff,

data collection, and probably just as important as collecting that data is making that data readable or interpretable. I need when I would do cases, during mock criminal investigations time I did everything from property crime to homicides. And one of the biggest challenges was putting this together. So people understand what it is and where it came from. And I think that is a very important part of what I do with Speex law firm. Yes, I will go find this information in this data. But we need to explain where that came from. So we can make sure we're tapping into the right sources. And not just throwing out there throwing things out there to see what happens.

So early in my career, I used to do a lot of criminal offense in state and federal court, we they have a lot of trials. And and one of the things that I always I appreciated about the law enforcement officers that I worked with is their dedication to investigating but also documenting their their files, and you can tell when somebody is a pro, and then when they document their files in I would I would have to cross examine them on their documentation. And the best ones would always be very thorough in their documentation. And they would always describe the reason for their need to be thorough. And that is because I know somebody may ask me about this two years ago, and two years from now in court. And it needs to be right. And it needs to and I need to be able to defend it. And if I don't document it thoroughly, I will never remember it two years from now,

as exactly right. Yeah, that's something you know, I carry a lot of cases. What speaks law firm right now. And I want to make sure in that exact situation when a case manager or litigation attorney comes to me 1820 months later and says, Where did you get this piece of information from? I've already pre planned for that. It's there already documented where it came from? So there's no question because database has changed over time. And what a database might say today, could be different people change addresses, they change audit policies, some of that stuff isn't permanently recorded. So let's document that now today.

Well, so that brings me to another thing I wanted to touch base with you about. We talk about the urgency and you know, people call some times and they're like, hey, yeah, I'm gonna I'd like to talk to you about this. This terrible thing that happened, I was really seriously injured or whatever. And, and then we say, Okay, well, we'll be happy to talk to you. Some of them are like, well, you know, I can talk to you tomorrow. I can call you back in six months. I can call you back. You know, when it's, you know, and we always tell them, you know, you might want to think about that. You can do that. That's your prerogative. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.