- Typically the insurance lawyer is trying to buy more time to get medical records of a prior injury you had (and maybe you told no one about);
- To buy more time to get an insurance doctor to finish up with a fabricated or exaggerated report about your medical condition;
- To buy more time to find witnesses who will perjure him/herself against your truthful testimony;
- To buy more time to starve you into agreeing to a low-ball settlement of your claim.
Can you call this type of conduct practicing law ethical? Certainly not. Yet this is what I find these defense lawyers will do to please their insurance company clients. And by and large, the meaner, nastier and under-handed they get, the more their insurance company clients want to use them again in other cases.
There may be 1 in 100 injured workers who exaggerate or possibly manufacture a claim. It may even be more like 1 in 150. But if you listen to the insurance lawyers tell it, there are 1 in 5 of the injured workers who exaggerate or fake a claim. This is the only way they can sleep at night and why many of young lawyers leave their big defense firms and try to make a go of it representing the worker (after denying the workers' benefits for the many years these lawyers were on the other side).
William Shakespeare said it well: “this above all-to thine own self be true.” If this were practiced more, there would be a lot less litigation in the workers' compensation system.