Puppet Experts
Both sides in a lawsuit hire experts. The difference is that Plaintiff lawyers are usually risking their own money. Lose the case and the client is unlikely to cover the experts’ fees. ICBC and other insurance companies don’t have that problem. So, if an expert gets a reputation for not being believed by judges or juries – we Plaintiff lawyers usually stop hiring them.
Obviously “reasonable people can reasonably disagree”. If my expert says “A”, and the defence expert says “Not A”, I don’t complain. What I complain about is when experts use junk science, do not follow standard diagnostic rules, or who start with the assumption that the Plaintiff is lying. I don’t like puppets who pretend to be real doctors.
Medical diagnosis is not a complicated process: (1) take a history; (2) ask what the patient feels – symptoms of illness; (3) examine the patient – external signs of illness; (4) assess – think about what the illness might be; and (5) prescribe treatment. Follow up later to see if the treatment worked. Hippocrates did it. Your GP does it. Every treating doctor does it.
But defence doctors don’t. They ignore symptoms. Imagine telling your doctor that you have a headache, or feel dizzy, or have a numb left arm and a crushing weight on your chest. Imagine your doctor saying: “That’s just what you say. It’s not meaningful. It’s probably a lie”. Yet, that’s the position of most defence doctors. That’s not medicine. That’s not “reasonably disagreeing”. That’s being a defence puppet. ICBC pulls the strings and the puppet dances.
The classic junk science from a puppet doctor is the use of statistics to argue that this Plaintiff wasn’t hurt. It goes like this: most people who are in collisions like this, don’t get hurt, therefore this Plaintiff could not have been hurt. Or: most people who are hurt like this get better in three months; this Plaintiff says he didn’t, therefore he must be lying.
Let’s try this: on average, every human has not quite one testicle and not quite one breast (because some have none). Look down. How many do you see? LIAR!!!
When an expert is believed by the judge – that’s not news. We expect experts to tell the truth about the medicine, about what the Plaintiff said and did during the defence exam, and what the expert’s honest opinion is. An honest opinion is one the expert reaches with exactly the same process, regardless who pays him.
So when judge rejects the expert’s opinion – or finds the expert was less than perfectly honest, that should be news. When the same expert have been found unworthy of belief by judge after judge, in case after case, that should be news. People should notice. ICBC should stop hiring these people. But they don’t.
And: It’s not okay to say: “Well fourteen judges believed him and only ten found him unworthy of belief, so, he’s 58% believable”. Or” “He’s only be found to be dishonest a couple of times, so he must be mostly honest”.
No. Being caught cheating means you are a cheater. If you were about to hire an accountant and he had “only” been caught committing fraud “once or twice” – would you hire him? So, ask yourself: Why does ICBC hire these cheaters, over and over?
Because they like pulling the strings.