Client Results: Finding an Adequate Source of Recovery

Hi, my name is Joe Moses, and I’m a founding partner in the law firm of Kass and Moses. We’re a law firm based in Chicago that represents injured people. Myself and my partner, Andrew Kass formed our firm 30 years ago. And we’ve been preventing our clients from being taken advantage of ever since. In a perfect world. As an attorney. If my client is a W2 wage employee and has a doctor’s note for the time he missed work, then getting compensated for lost wages is simple. It’s not always the case. The case I want to talk to you about today is a gentleman who was an engineer and a high level salesperson in Kazakhstan on a pipeline. In short, he was injured while on vacation, back in the United States, he was riding a bicycle and he was hit by a car. The insurance company didn’t accept that he had lost wages and they required us to prove what those lost wages were.

So he got a salary, but he also got year-end bonuses. He got commissions, he got travel stipends. He got a lot of other compensation on a normal basis that we did not easily show in his tax forms. So we couldn’t show what was missing from his income. We could only show what he got from his income in the years, he was recovering from his injuries. So in this case, we ended up comparing his income over four years, we had a large spreadsheet that showed every type of compensation he has and compared it over the four years. One year after the accident, one year during his recovery and two years before. When we lined up all the parts of his income, it showed very clearly that he had lost a substantial amount of his income. We were able to recover this for him in a way that the insurance company did not want to provide at all in the beginning.

The second part of this same gentleman’s accident was the psychological effects. So again, in initial negotiations, they did not want to include his psychological interest. They only wanted to include his medical bills, his pain and suffering, his rehabilitation and everything that he suffered physically. But emotionally, he also suffered a lot from this accident. He finds it very difficult getting over the emotional aspects of the accident. The sounds of the accident were stuck in his head. He finds it very difficult to do everyday task to his full capabilities, and he could not be a passenger in a car without great difficulty and trauma.

So we hired a forensic psychologist. The doctor saw the client two times for the specific purpose of documenting the harm caused by the accident. We got the doctor to write a lengthy narrative report, showing his trauma and showing how his life has been affected by the psychological aspects of this accident. In the end, we were able to get this client full compensation on his lost wages, and we doubled the pain and suffering amount by including the emotional trauma. If you were a family member need to help proving full damages with the insurance company, give us a call today.