On the Nature of Lawyers...

Jerry the Geek questions another Geek (with a .45) about the injuries allegedly sustained by Patricia Konie when she was recently jackbooted, noting that the woman on the video is able to lift her dog into a vehicle, and questioning whether she could have been injured as badly as claimed in the lawsuit.

I don't have any more information than what's in the lawsuit, but I do understand a little bit about the nature of lawsuits. First, the text quoted in my own post on the story is from the complaint in the lawsuit; that's important, because it means the account therein was written by Konie's lawyer, and it was written to establish two things: the legal basis for Konie's claim for damages, and the extent of those damages.

Generally, courts do not issue awards randomly. They are usually based some combination of actual damages (eg, costs incurred in healing the injury, medical care, repairing or replacing property, etc), punitive damages (awarded without a showing of cost, to discourage violations), and legal fees (because the injured party should not have to pay their lawyer if the other party is clearly in the wrong -- the lawyer's fees are another cost to repair the original injury, except that they are not always awarded).

So when you file your initial complaint, you are looking to establish from the beginning the extent of the damages your client suffered, if not necessarily a precise accounting at that stage. You're going to have a hard time convincing the court to order damages for injuries that magically appear later on in the case, so you include everything you think you might claim eventually. Most likely that's all that's going on here. If the complaint says the injuries "may" require surgery, what he's really saying is that they haven't required surgery yet, but that they might.

Since the complaint was filed towards the end of November, and the press release is datelined mid-December, I'd say that the injuries did in fact require surgery between the time the complaint was filed and the press released issued. Since the press release is considerably more detailed about those injuries than the complaint, I'd say there are good odds that the medical care obtained in the meantime helped to diagnose the injuries that had been inflicted.

I don't know anything about dislocated shoulders, never having had one, but hypothetically, if I was being "evacuated" and one of my shoulders was dislocated, I would be lifting animals with the other arm. Just something to bear in mind.

Posted on 2005-12-21 19:11:30.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

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