063 Accident Reconstruction Experts & How We Use Them

VERONICA: Welcome to The House, Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters. Come on in, have a seat, make yourself comfortable. We’re hoping to bring you another fantastic episode this week.

JASON: Good to see you again, Veronica.

VERONICA: You don’t have to sing like I’m doing.

JASON: I can’t sing as well as you.

JASON: Trick question because you could say I’ve been with Montlick since I was two years old. Well, that’s true. That’s true too.

VERONICA: But you also started at Montlick before you even became an attorney. Yeah. So, in 2006, 2007, I started working there as a legal assistant while I was in college.

JASON: 100% because it’s always about representing individuals against corporations and insurance companies.

VERONICA: How much did you think about going into other fields of law, though? I dabbled in maybe my second year of law school. I was interested in a little bit of entertainment law. I interned at Sony Music up in New York for the summer.

VERONICA: Oh, that’s exciting. Living in New York was exciting.

JASON: I wasn’t enjoying the entertainment stuff as much because it was really contractual and I really enjoyed being more, you know, adversarial.

VERONICA: And those numbers and black and white figures just weren’t doing it for you. Not just to like, oh my God, do I have to look at yet another printout? Please take me away from here.

JASON: Exactly.

JASON: Yep, that’s all I’ve ever done since I graduated.

VERONICA: Love it. Thank you. Welcome back to the House. And today our extra special guest on Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB is somebody that Jason knows pretty well from his work through Montlick, but she doesn’t work at Montlick. Her name is Amber Bishop, and she is an accident reconstructionist,

AMBER: also an attorney, but not practicing.

VERONCIA: And an attorney.

AMBER: Yes.

VERONICA: All right. So that is what our show is about today. Thank you so much for being in the house. Amber and Jason.

AMBER: Thank you for having us.

JASON: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, I think it was how many years ago, four or five years ago now. Amber and her partner, Shelly Weed, came and did a seminar at our office.

VERONICA: Yeah.

JASON: And it’s pretty amazing what they can do too. I mean, we’ve been in situations before where you have literally no idea what happened. The officer has no idea what happened. Conflicting statements and they’re able to piece it together. I don’t know what magic they do, but they’re able to do it.

AMBER: It is exactly what it sounds like. Accident reconstruction is the science of investigating collisions. I use physics, math, technology to determine the facts and circumstances that existed when a crash happened. We are looking at really three different types of evidence. You’re looking at the vehicle. You’re looking at where the crash happened, the scene.

VERONICA: Wow. Can you do something that’s years after?

AMBER: We can. We can.

VERONICA: That’s incredible. And I told you she’s starting from the end and she’s rewinding time to find out what happened. How did you get into this field to begin with?

JASON: She’s told me she uses Tonka trucks all the time.

AMBER: I do; I do. I’ve got some toy cars in my closet that I pull out when Jason and I are doing Zooms. But my dad and I grew up working on cars.

VERONICA: Do I have to be a physics major in order to be an accident reconstructionist?

AMBER: So, I see typically two paths. We’ve typically got people with hard science and math backgrounds, engineers. The other path that people typically take is their law enforcement. And then they get specialized training in crash reconstruction. They end up taking a lot of math and science courses so that they understand the physics of a crash. So those are the two typical. You’re a wicked smart lady. I’m sure you could get a math or science degree or become an officer if you wanted to.

VERONICA: It’s interesting, too, that you mentioned that so many people from law enforcement backgrounds actually become accident reconstructionists themselves because the police also do reconstructions, right? Are they hiring you or someone like you when they’re doing it, or do they have their own in-house folks?

AMBER: So, most police jurisdictions have a specialized unit, a traffic unit that is doing the crash reconstruction. GSP, the Georgia State Police will offer their services to local, smaller jurisdictions that don’t have those people on staff.

VERONICA:  OK. Now, Jason, I’ve heard Montlick talk about different investigators that you guys have on staff. But this is this is different from.

JASON: Oh, absolutely. OK, yes, because if I if I have an investigator on staff, he’s going out to meet with maybe a witness or take photos of something, I’m hiring someone like Amber to actually be a potential expert witness in the case. Right.

JASON: No. And you don’t necessarily you don’t need an accident reconstructionist in every case. I think that it has to be appropriate for the type of case. Generally speaking, it needs to be a serious injury case. And it also needs to be a case where either you’re dealing with an insurance company that’s disputing liability or the defendant’s disputing liability or in more frequency you’ll use Amber in a trucking case too because there’s a lot of types of data that you can get from a truck like from the black box and Amber can talk a lot more about that.

VERONICA: Yes, she said you can pull event recording data, right from the vehicle, but you can also learn about the driver’s behavior, which is fascinating. And potentially you might catch the body in a fib.

JASON: Yeah. That’s happened once or twice.

AMBER: Yeah, once or twice.

VERONICA: How so?

AMBER: So, passenger vehicles, we typically get about five seconds of pre-crash data. So that means that we have direct insight into what a driver is doing five seconds before a crash. We get speed information, whether the drivers on the brakes. Depending on the manufacturer and the make and model, we can get steering input. So, I can see, you know was the driver steering right or left and to what degree?

VERONICA: And you’ve actually had a case where you found somebody who said, I was going 45.

AMBER: I swear, I swear. OK, well, your electronic data tells on you. Yes, 90. Yeah. VERONCIA: And they were going 90 in a 45.

AMBER: Yes, and somebody turned left in front of them because they thought they had enough time.

VERONICA: Wow, the secrets of the little black box.

ANNOUCER: You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Join us 8:00 a.m. every Sunday if you want to listen live on 95.5 WSB. Welcome back to the house. Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB.

JASON: Yeah, to give an example.

VERONICA: A play-by-play of accident reconstruction. Amber Bishop and Montlick Injury Attorney Jason Saltzman here on Lawyers in the House with Montlick. I’m Veronica Waters. We will be right back.

ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Join us 8:00 a.m. every Sunday on 95.5 WSB.

JASON: Yes.

VERONICA: Six figure difference.

JASON: Absolutely. Because the Escalade that hit the client only had minimum limits, $25,000.

VERONICA: Incredible. Now, Amber and Jason have mentioned a couple of times the famous black box. And I remember the first time I heard about this, it was probably reporting on some plane crash or hearing about some plane crash, maybe when I was little and everybody was looking for the black boxes, which little fact on airplanes, orange is the new black. They’re not actually black. They’re orange so that the folks, the investigators can spot them out in potential wreckage, right?

AMBER: No, they typically tend to be silver. Sometimes actually they’re black.

VERONICA: Now, I know my car is old enough that it actually doesn’t have it doesn’t have a black box. An event data recorder, I think, is the technical term for it in a vehicle, right? In planes, they were called cockpit voice recorders, or do you do accident reconstruction with planes and stuff?

AMBER: No planes, no boats. We’ll do big trucks, passenger vehicles. We’ve not had a unicycle, but I would try to do that. Bicycles, motorcycles, pedestrians.

AMBER: There are some Kawasaki motorcycles, yes, some Harleys, yes. Not as many as we would hope for. But 90% of the passenger vehicles sold today do have event data recorders in them. A lot of tractor trailers, it depends on the engine, but they have engine control modules that have crash-related data that we’re interested in in obtaining.

VERONICA: Oh, my gosh. So, it can get overwritten on a big truck.

AMBER: Absolutely. Yes. Oh, it’s huge.

JASON: Yeah, that’s like a major problem. Because what happens is it’s our job as attorneys to get that evidence preserved.

VERONICA: You’ve got to get a lawyer involved early, but you also have to have an accident reconstructionist involved.

JASON: But there’s nothing to reconstruct if there’s no evidence.

VERONICA: Well, Amber said sometimes she gets calls within hours. So would it be somebody like you calling and saying, hey, I know I’m going to need you for this. I’m going to need you.

JASON: Yeah, it’s happened. There’s been cases where we’ve called them 10 minutes after I got the case.

VERONCIA: Because you just knew. Yeah. You just knew.

JASON: But there are sometimes when you call Amber and she’s not available. Yes. Sometimes Amber is unfortunately on the other side of the case. But I like that.

VERONICA: And then you get the answers. You get the truth no matter what it is. And then you maybe you don’t have to write the big check either to pay Amber for her services because she got them for free since the other side hired her.

VERONICA: OK, so you would hire another expert. The data might be the same, but the interpretation of the data might be different.

VERONICA: Ooh. Do you do criminal cases too? Montlick does personal injury, which is civil, but

AMBER: We do about I would say 60 or 65% of our case is defense. Our case is our defense, but that’s insurance defense and criminal defense. And then we do about 30%, 35% personal injury with Montlick and similar firms.

AMBER: So, Jason gives me a call. I focus on three things. It’s the scene, it’s the vehicle, and then it is human factors related behavior.

VERONICA: Yeah, you were there to be an objective eye to analyze the science and the data.

AMBER: 100%.

VERONICA: You’re not talking to somebody who says, well, this is what happened. Give me my side of the story. There’s no side of the story.

AMBER: No, I want the math and science. You want the math and the science.

VERONICA: And who’s going to dispute that? It is what it is. Right.

JASON: And that’s what, you know, like what Amber was saying. I mean, it does come with the territory that if you’re going to hire accident reconstructionist in cases, there are going to be times that you’re going to get a call from your expert saying I got nothing, Jason, like you’re going to have that. And hopefully, you know, you’re, you know, I feel that most of the time that doesn’t happen, but it does happen.

VERONICA: Yeah.

JASON: Yeah,

VERONICA: I mean, because I’m sure it ain’t cheap.

JAONS: No, it’s not cheap.

VERONICA: I’d love to hear some examples of some more cases because I find this the most fascinating thing. And I love that you can do like these cartoons or whatever to show the jury. That’s so cool.

AMBER: Cartoons. I love that. Is it not?

AMBER: So, we had a case where there was an impact just between an SUV and like a small Prius. And then after the impact, you expect the vehicles based on Newton’s laws of motion. You expect the vehicles to go in a certain direction and come to a stop within a certain amount of feat. Well, one of the vehicles after impact actually did a 180 accelerated and then did various steering maneuvers before he ran into a gas pump.

VERONICA: Incredible.

JASON: Yes, for sure. I mean, it’s also sometimes just shocking what we’re able to learn, you know, like I’m always so interested in some of the things we, you know, I mean, it could be something very simple like paint transfer. They can figure out based on the height of the vehicles how that those impacts happened, or it can be something more complex like, you know, engine data or, you know, we’ve some vehicles have dash cams, thankfully.

VERONICA: And then I need one of those.

AMBER: Yeah. You come see us. We’ll put one in for you.

VERONICA: OK. I think that’s amazing. You know, I wish that I had had you, Amber, in my Rolodex, when this guy sideswiped me at the corner of Peachtree and West Peachtree. There was paint transfer on my car from his big old tall SUV.

AMBER: See? And we would go out and we’d measure your car. We’d measure his truck. We would like line up the damage and show where contact was made.

VERONICA; Yeah, I wouldn’t know how to find that. All to get out of the truck. That was a hit and run because he kept going and I kept going. I think I was. I was like in shock.

VERONICA: You are back in the house. Lawyers in the house with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here hosting Montlick Injury Attorney Jason Saltzman, an accident reconstructionist and attorney Amber Bishop. And it is time for what you have been aching for all hour long.

JASON: Well, I think the big thing about this show today is that we are as attorneys, we’re in pursuit of the truth in these types of cases. So, it’s just so important in order to find out everything that happened, you just you have to make sure that you hire an attorney early if you’re in a really serious injury case with disputed liability or trucking case or there could be other circumstances as well.

AMBER: So unfortunately, most of the officers that respond to a scene don’t have crash reconstruction training. You know, they respond. They get information from the drivers. They put it in the report. But sometimes it’s incorrect. Sometimes it’s incomplete. And they’re not imaging the black boxes. They’re not going out.

VERONICA: So what? The police report is not.

JASON: No, it’s not admissible evidence. The officer can look at it while he’s testifying about what he said what he what the witnesses told him and what he saw. But, you know, the officer didn’t see the actual accident.

VERONICA: Right. The ticket doesn’t mean that there’s no civil liability.

JASON: So long as you don’t plead guilty to the ticket.

VERONICA: That’s so fascinating. Listen, we could do another hour on this. I’m learning so many wrinkles. Thank you so much to Amber Bishop and Jason Saltzman talking to us about accident reconstruction today. Life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. However, if you are hurt through no fault of your own, you might need somebody to rewind time and figure out what happened from the beginning of that. So, remember this next time. We will see you on WSB.