Watch Arash Homampour and Danielle Lincors explain how they used graphics and animations to secure a $20 million pre-trial settlement in a case originally valued at $100,000 and with only $1.5 million in policy limits.
Transcript
Arash Homampour:
Getting an insurance company in the initial lawsuit to pay more than the policy limits is virtually impossible. Hello, my name is Arash Homampour. We are a nine lawyer plaintiff attorney law firm in Southern California, and we represent individual plaintiffs in catastrophic injury, wrongful death cases, insurance bad faith and some employment matters.
Danielle Lincors:
Hi, my name is Danielle Lincors. I’ve been working for this firm for about four years now. I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Arash Homampour on these cases, and I’ve been practicing law for about nine years now. We first became involved in this case from a referral from another attorney about halfway through litigation, and this was about a year and a half after the incident.
Arash Homampour:
What’s interesting about this case is it’s a referral from a good friend from law school over 20 years ago. He had this interesting case where it seemed like the defendant had admitted liability for a car accident. It also seemed like the defendant was viewing this as a minor leg injury, but disputed brain injury. The policy limits were 1.5 million, and my friend, the referring attorney, had been talking to me initially about whether he felt, or I felt, that the policy had been open. Had he properly demanded the 1.5 million in coverage, and if the carrier refused to pay, would the carrier then potentially be liable for an excess verdict? Obviously, if it’s a knee injury with a disputed brain injury, the question is, is it even worth that much? So what really became even more interesting is that there was this CRPS injury component, or Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, meaning a serious, debilitating, permanent, horrible injury that can result from getting a minor leg injury or trauma to the lower extremities that can result in CRPS.
Danielle Lincors:
The symptoms of CRPS are so similar to a traumatic brain injury that the symptoms that our client was having were actually real and caused by the pain, which substantially increased the value of the case. Initially, we worked behind the scenes before we associated it, just to make sure that we didn’t come into this case until after the final demand expired.
Arash Homampour:
So what we did together is we worked on him drafting a better letter, in my opinion, one that would definitely give the carrier a clean opportunity to settle the case, to protect the insured, and that would make it abundantly clear to everyone looking at this transaction that the carrier was acting unreasonably in not paying the policy limit. Our firm had never handled a CRPS case before. That’s frequently the case, is that we’ll get involved in a case involving a topic that we haven’t mastered and then through the course of the case, we master the topic. So here, we really had to understand and master: what is CRPS? How is it caused? Then what are the long-term effects of this horrible diagnosis? And so we did just that.
Arash Homampour:
We wanted to capture all of that in graphics so that whoever was the decision maker, we could walk through these concepts in simple, graphical, visual terms so that everyone can understand, follow along, an easy to follow approach. So we came to DK Global to do that. He had a spinal stimulator inserted into his body. One of the ways you deal with the extraordinary, debilitating pain from CRPS is that you put a device in the human body that is designed to stop or trick the body from feeling, sensing, and experiencing pain. So the implementation of a spinal stimulator was an important fact to show to the jury, “This is a real injury, it results in real constant pain, and the only way you can deal with it is to surgically bypass it through this device called a spinal stimulator.”
Arash Homampour:
So DK Global created a fluid animation that illustrates all the relative points related to CRPS. Then the animation was something that we could then save slides from and use statically within a PowerPoint presentation. The ultimate time period that we were in the case was three months, because within the three months, we basically just went for the kill. It had been set up properly where the carrier had been given every opportunity to settle and act reasonably. They didn’t, and then we came in and made sure to tighten everything, get the defense experts to agree with what they had to agree with in terms of the injury, causation and damages. Then we were able to ultimately settle the case for $20 million, even though the policy limits were 1.5 million and even though the initial valuation of the case was at approximately $100,000. That’s what our firm does is day in, day out, we get outlier results. We see things other firms don’t see, and not only do we see them, but we enroll the other side, the insurance company and the jury, into seeing what we see.
Danielle Lincors:
Working with DK Global was definitely a lifesaver on this case. It’s extremely difficult to illustrate to someone else how significant living with CRPS is. DK Global did an excellent job at taking the cause from the minor bump, to the knee surgery, to the CRPS.
Arash Homampour:
We love working with DK Global because many times we’re under a time crunch, but at the same time, we don’t want to sacrifice quality. So I love working with them because they can take a lot of our communications and emails and changes and requests and get the best final product done in a short period of time.
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