Insurance Firms and Lawyers: Neither Takes a Back Seat
Their advertisements crowd daytime and late-night television and are plastered across bus benches and billboards. Some of their telephone numbers are as easy to remember as 911 and their names approach celebrity status.
Love them or hate them, lawyers like the ubiquitous Larry H. Parker make big bucks representing motorists, motorcyclists and pedestrians injured in traffic accidents.
And while insurance companies blame entrepreneurial personal injury lawyers for the high price of auto insurance, the attorneys say they are just trying to help people get what’s coming to them.
Personal injury lawyers and insurance companies are natural enemies, the corporate incarnations of the Hatfields and the McCoys, doing battle in the Legislature, the media and the courtroom. In conversation, each side can cite studies to bolster assertions that the other is to blame for the woeful state of insurance in California.
To the general public, though, neither insurers nor lawyers are held in very high esteem. Opinion polls show them ranking somewhere down with tax collectors, below journalists.
“My role is to keep the insurance companies honest,” said Parker, whose Robin Hood-style television commercials have turned him into something of a celebrity. “I pride myself in representing the underdog, which most people are when they are dealing with insurance companies who have billions of dollars.”
Parker and his colleagues dispute studies like a RAND Corp. report last week that said exaggerated claims and legal bills add $250 per year to the insurance bills of California drivers.
They also take issue with surveys like the one by Western Insurance Information Services that said 22 cents of every dollar policyholders pay in premiums goes toward litigation.
This, despite assertions by the legal profession that the number of lawsuits involving auto accidents has dropped 41% over the past five years and that the number of civil suits overall has dropped 6%.
Insurance companies, meanwhile, argue that litigation is driving rates so high that as many as 70% of the drivers in some Southern California neighborhoods are forced to break the law and forgo coverage.
“Our society has a tendency to call the attorney before they call the insurance company,” said Layna Browdy, spokeswoman for the Auto Club of Southern California. “In a sense, we are doing it to ourselves as policyholders.”
Candysse Miller, spokeswoman for the insurance commissioner’s office, said the connection between litigation and insurance rates is a common-sense equation.
“When you’ve got a lot of litigation, a lot of attorney fees and a lot of medical costs, those costs will be factored into insurance costs and will drive up rates for everybody,” Miller said.
Ina DeLong sees it differently. As executive director of United Policyholders, an insurance consumer organization, DeLong said accident victims who hire attorneys to fight their case generally end up with fairer settlements from their insurance companies than those who do not.
“I’m not a big fan of ambulance chasers in any form and I’m not a big fan of attorneys who advertise that way, but our statistics show that unless a policyholder gets help, they are not going to get what they are entitled to,” DeLong said.
Parker agrees with DeLong--at least partly. He does not like to be called an ambulance chaser. Like all lawyers, he is prohibited from soliciting business at accident scenes or in hospital wards.
Earlier this year, the state muzzled lawyers even further by banning them from making claims about monetary rewards or showing smashed up cars in their ads. So gone is the infamous “Larry Parker got me $2.1 million” ad--replaced by an angry-looking Parker telling viewers that “fighting for you is my job.”
But they don’t always fight for accident victims. When Fullerton lawyer William Czech went looking for a colleague to represent his sister--disabled and brain damaged in a 1986 accident--not one of the dozen attorneys he contacted was interested in her case.
A day after she picked out a wedding dress, Jane Czech was broadsided in the intersection of DeSoto Avenue and Parthenia Street in Chatsworth. She was thrown from her car, was in a coma for two weeks and suffered a skull fracture and massive internal injuries.
William Czech maintained that the cause of the accident was a faulty city of Los Angeles traffic signal that did not allow enough time for a yellow light. Even so, Czech said, the attorneys he contacted told him there was no money to be had in the case.
“Nobody wanted to do it,” Czech said of his fellow lawyers. “They all wanted easy money.”
So he fought it himself.
Within five years--after steeping himself in a whole new body of law--Czech had settled his sister’s case for $1 million, half from the city and half from the driver of the car that hit her. And the city adjusted the timing of the yellow light.
Czech’s first traffic accident case was also his last. Afterward, he went back to estate planning--a job that gives him precious little contact with fellow members of the bar.
“I’m not really thrilled with attorneys,” Czech said.
