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079 Electronic Discovery

079 Electronic Discovery

Lawyers in the House with Montlick

Attorneys in Podcast: Alex Tertichny, Esq.

Montlick Injury Attorney Alex Tertichny delves into the fascinating world of e-Discovery and as technology advances the important role electronic discovery plays in personal injury cases.

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The purpose of this show is to provide general information about the law. Our guests will not provide any individualized legal advice. If you have a personal situation and need legal advice, contact us for your free legal consultation with a Montlick attorney.

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00:04	Welcome to Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Wish you had a lawyer in the family? Now you do. Here’s your host, Veronica Waters. Hey everybody, welcome to The House Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here. So happy to have you back with us for another fabulous episode.
00:28	I’m so glad that we can sort of sit down and chill out, get to know each other a little bit and enjoy a little cup of coffee or whatever you’re sipping on today as we learn the law together. One moment in time. It was a song that Whitney Houston sang and she sang her heart out. It was the anthem for the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. But just like we can go back and look at video of those gold medal winning moments or listen to broadcasts of them.
00:58	There are little gold nuggets along the way that just the right lawyer can find that you may have thought were one moment in time but can be discovered if you’ve got the right attorney on your case. Let’s talk with one of those attorneys. Let’s see if he’s got what it takes to find the gold nuggets. I think he does. His name is Alex Tertitney from Montlick Injury Attorneys. Thanks so much for being back in the house with me, Alex. Thanks, Veronica. I’m glad to be here. It has been so long since we had you in here. I know. A couple of years.
01:28	Oh, wow, a couple years. I remember that the first time I met you, you and your wife were expecting a little kitty. And now you’ve got a little kitty. Yes, not so little anymore, going on a year and a half, two years old. Oh my gosh. Have you you’ve not been avoiding us, though? You had a good time on the show before. No, I had a great time on the show. I’m so glad to have you back. You are a Georgia State and Wake Forest grad. That is correct. Right. And husband, father.
01:57	And I got to ask, though, what is the best thing so far about being a dad? Oh, for sure. Walking in the door and her running up into my arms. That’s definitely Oh, my gosh. Your heart must melt. Picking her up from school, seeing her see me for the first time, running over, arms wide open. What does she call you? Papa. Aww, that’s so sweet. Papa. Papa Tertichny. Papa Tertichny has been practicing law for how long now, Alex? Let’s see, about eight years. And how long have you been at Motley injury attorneys?
02:27	I’ve actually been, I worked at Montlick Injury Attorneys while I was in law school since 2011. So going on 13, actually 13 full years now, yeah. Wow, that’s fantastic. And what led you to the law? Let’s remind folks. So I’ve always been passionate about helping people. And there’s types of law where you help people. There’s types of law where you represent corporations and representing our clients who are individuals. Going that extra mile really making a difference in their lives is very meaningful to me.
02:58	So that’s what I really enjoy. That’s what gets me going every day. That extra effort can really make a difference in my clients’ lives. I have heard that about you. You’re known for being astute. You’re known for your great personality. You’re actually known for going the extra mile and sort of being able to meet the challenge head on to get really good success for your clients. What do you think it is that really has driven you to become that way, to be that lawyer?
03:25	Well, seeing how much of a difference it can make for my clients really motivates me to boil down, dig deep into those cases, read the Court of Appeals cases, figure out what the law says on any particular matter, and use that to the maximum advantage for my clients. You’re not shying away from it if it looks tough. No, I enjoy a challenge. He enjoys the challenge. Thank you so much, Alex Tertichny for being back in the house with us here on Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB.
03:54	We’re talking about little gold nuggets along the way, Alex. But I think the best way that we’re going to really tell people what the show is all about is just to say it’s electronic discovery. Correct. Little gold nuggets that you may have thought were lost out there on the internet. They say the internet is forever. Yes. Or they could be someplace else. Right. So let’s talk about e-discovery, electronic discovery. What is that?
04:19	So to lay the foundation for what discovery is, anytime you file a lawsuit, request a hearing, you’re in litigation, there’s a pretrial exchange of information called discovery. And the idea behind that in our legal system here in Georgia and more broadly in the United States is that the parties exchange information so that going into the trial or the hearing, everybody’s got the same facts. And then those facts are laid on the table. And then whoever the facts and law support wins the case.
04:50	So the discovery part is all of the research that goes into building the case. For a trial, yes. For a trial. So typically that’s written questions or production of documents or a deposition, but there’s kind of these peripheral items that can really make a difference in the case. And that’s what we’re talking about today in eDiscovery. So electronic information that can be really probative and helpful on your case. All right.
05:18	So electronic discovery, I keep thinking, sounds like something that somebody posted on the internet. It can be. So social media is a big aspect of that, but there’s other forms of electronic evidence such as a closed circuit TV or a dash cam or a 911 call. Those information, those pieces of evidence can really be probative. And there’s also things that happen after an accident such as surveillance or a private investigator that our clients that anybody who’s bringing a claim should be aware of.
05:53	Now, is this pretty common knowledge? Yes and no. It’s not uncommon to expect some of these things to come up, especially social media today and age, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, those are in the front of everybody’s mind. But other things that you can go, did you know that when you make a call to 911, that’s recorded and that’s discoverable. You can get that 911 call.
06:20	Or if a police officer comes out to investigate a crash, a lot of times they’re wearing body cams or dash cams. And that is really important information because if you’re going to a trial, that might happen two, three, four years after an accident happens. And so if you’ve got that evidence that shows what the scene of an accident looks like or what you called in on about a 911 call, that is a spur of the moment, stream of consciousness, that is approximately close in time, maybe by even minutes or seconds to when the accident happened.
06:53	That can be very important in explaining to a jury what happened or explaining to a judge some important fact of your case. It’s interesting that when I’m out in the world, I kind of assume that I’m always being recorded. Yes, that’s probably fair. Yeah, there are closed circuit cameras everywhere. There’s the network depending on what city you’re in. There’s a network of cameras that may be tied into a real time crime center.
07:19	We have several of those here in metro Atlanta and Georgia where we are today, where people can just tie in residential cameras, business cameras, police cameras, and there are ways, license plate readers, even. I would guess that that might be part of eDiscovery too. It can be. And this is actually very important. You may always be, there may always be an electronic record of you made contemporaneously, but that is not always saved.
07:43	And so what I mean by that is if there’s a security camera or a footage in a restaurant or a closed circuit TV at a warehouse or at a store, that information may be recorded, but it’s not preserved indefinitely. And so a good lawyer is going to get a letter out to preserve that evidence right away. And frequently, when I say it might be preserved for a week, it might be gone after seven days.
08:07	So if you have an incident, an accident, and you are going to want to preserve that information, it’s imperative that you contact an attorney right away who knows how to get that and who can be responsive and preserve that information. Because once it’s gone, there may be no way to recover. Yeah, that’s a gold nugget that’s completely lost. Yes, correct. Yeah, it’s worthless.
08:32	And one thing that I really like about how our firm operates at Montlick Injury Attorney is when you call our office, you’re on the phone with an attorney typically within seven to 10 minutes. And that’s the attorney who’s going to work on your case. It’s not going to be delegated. You’re not going to wait two or three weeks to figure out who’s working on your case. That attorney can take actions that day. You call us, we’ve got good ways to sign documents to retain us electronically. We can get the ball rolling in as little as minutes or an hour.
09:02	It’s fascinating to me that the things that we don’t know about along the way. So one of the attorneys who was on the show with me one time was talking about how when something happens on the interstate, people think that those DOT cams are recording and they’re not. Correct. They’re real-time cameras. And it’s rare, I think, that you have an instance. If you have it, I think it’s probably a private company. I remember, do you guys remember when the woman got in trouble because she said she was she saw a little kid on the side of the road and she pulled over and it turned out she just vanished for a couple days because supposedly it was some love drama.
09:35	I don’t know what the motive was. But you guys remember that happened in Alabama? No, but what? That was huge headlines. All right. Anyway, so she said she saw a little kid on the side of the interstate and she pulled over and then she vanished and it drove the world into a frenzy because they were like, oh my gosh, this bright young lady has vanished or whatever. She really vanished herself. But there was this huge manhunt for her. One of the hugest things that they found out was there happened to be a private company who had a contract to record video from those cameras along that interstate in Alabama, which we don’t really have in most places.
10:10	So they were able to go find that video from that night and see that her story didn’t make sense. So it didn’t end up as an episode of The X-Files? No, no. She miraculously came back to her house after a couple of days after saying that her kidnappers had let her out in some woods, and she managed to find her way back to her house through these random woods. Yeah, So electronic discovery helped break that case open. That wasn’t a personal injury case. Correct. But it’s a way that video can actually really tell a story.
10:40	You talked about private investigators too. Yeah, so depending on the type of case, this can be fairly common. So I handle a lot of workers’ comp cases. And in Workers’ Comp, a lot of people get severely injured and are receiving disability checks for being out of work. Well, sometime an insurance company may want to verify that that person who’s receiving disability checks for being out of work actually isn’t working. So they can hire somebody to sit on your street, take a video of you, you know maybe before you go to a doctor’s appointment so they know where you’re going, they’ll follow you around.
11:15	And it is not typically a problem unless you’re acting inconsistently. And so the important thing to remember about that is to be consistent and don’t embellish. And I can’t tell you the number of times that an insurer has surveilled my client, and they bring the surveillance and try and make my client look bad, but my client being honest and consistent, it’s boring. It doesn’t mean anything.
11:42	And then there’s also sometimes when, unfortunately, somebody will do something and do get, you know, will get in trouble. The insurers are savvy. They know that if they invest a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars to follow you around, it doesn’t need to always work, but if it works, sometimes they’re going to save money. So the important thing to remember, especially in a worker’s comp claim, is if you’re out of work, your actions need to be consistent with what you’re telling your doctor, with how you’re presenting your case. Yeah, that means you shouldn’t be lying.
12:11	No, of course not. Right. You shouldn’t be embellishing. You shouldn’t also be trying to like maybe make yourself sound better than you are either. Right. Because you’re trying to put on a bright face. And I find that that’s the number of people who end up embellishing or a very small number. But do remember that that one point in time, and this is the same on social media, if you do something at one point in time, it can be taken out of context.
12:36	So it might be the first time you’ve cut your grass in 12 months, and then you can’t get out of bed for two days because you’ve got a back injury and you were just pushing it. But it’s important to be consistent throughout because even one small point in time can end up really causing damage. Is it legal for somebody to just record me any and everywhere? Typically in public, yes.
13:00	You may have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your house, but if you’re walking to the grocery store, you’re picking up the kids from school, you know, out in public, it’s typically legal to record somebody. Yeah, there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy when you’re on a public sidewalk. And that may be different for conversations. You know Georgia is a one-party state where you only need one person’s permission in the conversation to record it. Other states like Florida or New York or California may have different laws.
13:30	I know that Florida is a two-party state, or rather everybody in part of the conversation needs to consent to record it, but in Georgia, only one. Yeah, and I know you guys are taking cases all over the country, so you probably have to familiarize yourself with all of these laws. Coming up next on lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB, about half the population has this potential treasure trove of electronic discovery evidence. We’re going to get right into it. Stay with us.
14:01	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. It’s lawyers in the house with Montlick on WSB. I am Veronica Waters and I’m here with Montlick Injury Attorney, Alex Tertichny. Look at that smile and face. You guys got to get on the YouTube and check him out if you haven’t seen him. He is glowing because he is a sort of kind of new father, first time dad.
14:28	Yes. He’s hashtag girl dad. Yes. Love it. And we’re talking about something that his young daughter doesn’t have to worry about right now. What is out there on the internet in terms of social media? Because we’re talking about electronic discovery today, or what’s been called e-discovery. Alex, you mentioned in our first segment when you’re talking about looking for evidence that can help or hurt a case, how people can use social media, but we didn’t really delve into that.
15:01	So just I’m going to ask straight out, if I’ve got a personal injury case, what am I supposed to be doing with my social media? The best advice is to not overshare. Social media is very easily accessible. You may think your account is private. You may think that what you post or what you say isn’t going to be used against you. But the truth is that social media is very easy to be used against you and taken out of context.
15:32	Social media very rarely has context, and it is very rarely an accurate representation of real life. But if you are posting things, photos, tweets, videos, direct messages even, that information is likely going to be discoverable. Meaning, as we mentioned in the first segment, if you were taking a case to trial or it’s in litigation, the parties have to exchange information. And it is probably much easier than you think for the other side to get access to your social media.
16:05	Wow. So when you say that I don’t need to overshare, does that mean I stop talking about everything on social media? Can I can I put up pictures sometimes? Can I make posts? Can I do reels? And what about the reels that are supposed to disappear anyway? Yeah, I would the best advice is that if you put it on social media, it can and will be used against you. So there’s obviously friction between wanting to stay in touch with your friends, stay connected to your network, and also do what’s best for your case.
16:40	And so I would say that as long as you are consistent and you’re not embellishing and you’re not oversharing, it’s probably fine to continue being active on social media, but do keep in mind that things get blown out of context. OK, well, you said that I can’t assume that everything is private, right? But what if I’m not even using my real name on my social media account? OK, so that’s a very good, very good question. There is some case law on point. I lectured on this at a continuing legal education last year.
17:09	The case law says that in order for somebody to authenticate your social media, they don’t need to, you don’t need to be going by your proper legal name. You could be going by a handle or a nickname. And as long as one person knows that that’s you, you have to be aware that that can be authenticated to be you. Wow. So now the challenge is just digging up that person.
17:35	Coming up next on Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB, as we talk about electronic discovery, some real life stories of how those gold nuggets online and on the phone and on those body cams can help or hurt your personal injury case. I’m Veronica Waters. Don’t go away. You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Join us 8:00 a.m. every Sunday on 95.5 WSB.
18:02	Hey, welcome back to Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here with Montlick Injury Attorney Alex Tertichny, the topic of the day. Electronic Discovery or E-discovery, if you want to sound like you’re really in the know. And that’s talking about the little gold nuggets of evidence that you may not know even exist, whether it’s, you know what? I’m not even going to tell you all the places where they could be for that. You’re going to have to go back and check us out online.
18:29	Make sure you check out the replay on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform. You can always subscribe to Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Check us out on all platforms, social, TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and I don’t even know Snapchat and WhatsApp and I don’t know everything. It’s out there. Alex Tertichny is the one who is going to be guiding you through this process. Thanks so much, Alex, for talking about eDiscovery. I feel like five years ago we wouldn’t have even had the phrase eDiscovery, electronic discovery.
18:58	No, it’s definitely the forefront as it becomes more and more prevalent that our information is being recorded on different venues, different media, that we need to be aware that that’s going to be evidence that can be used for or against us in a case. Is this the kind of thing that every lawyer knows and every lawyer would take the time to dig up? In an ideal world, yes, that would be great. But in practice, I’m sure it varies from firm to firm.
19:29	I do know that we are very up on this. This is something that we are very aware of that we advise our clients on all the time. And I will say this to the cows come home. It’s important to get the right law firm early in the case because some of this evidence might not be available if you wait. And so we can gather this information, but we can’t help you unless you call us. Yeah, and better to call, I guess, before you know if you “have a case,” right? As soon as you can or have somebody call for you? Of course.
19:58	I’d always rather somebody call me prematurely early or call and ask questions than wait too long and it be too late when they call later. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve had those moments when you’re like, oh, if only you had called me back when X, Y, or Z. I mean, it can literally be that, you know, a day or two can make such a big difference. One moment in time. One moment in time, people can make such a big difference. All right. So Alex, I promised all the boys and girls that we were going to talk about some real life stories.
20:28	So let’s get on down to the nitty gritty. And tell me about some of these amazing electronic discovery cases that you have. I know there’s got to be one that pops into your head right away. When I say, Alex, tell me about why this is so important. Yes, great. So there was a case that stands out in my mind, a gentleman, a worker’s comp client of mine, who had injured himself pulling a lever on a truck. And the employer thought that that lever was not broken.
20:55	They had the mechanic come out and say, look, the lever was working fine. You couldn’t have injured your back pulling the lever. A lever on a truck, like on the back, on the loading part of the truck? Let’s think of like a handbrake. A handbrake? Okay. They got stuck on the way up and my client injured his back and they thought the handbrake wasn’t broken. So how could he have injured himself doing this? And so what we did was we went and sent an open records request to the 911 department because he had called 911 right after the accident.
21:25	And we got the recording of him calling the 911 center saying, I hurt my back pulling this lever. I need to go to the hospital. I can’t move. And that was very probative evidence that really moved the needle in our favor on that case. And so had we not gathered that, it may have been a he said, she said, but that extremely probative evidence of a 911 call from a scene of an accident is admissible in court and very much worked in our client’s favor.
21:55	That’s fantastic. A lot of people may not know that 911 calls are actually being recorded before an operator actually picks up the phone. Correct. Recorded and transcribed. Recorded and transcribed. So be aware that if you’re trying to fake it. Like I saw on this on this show about this woman who killed her so-called best friend and then pinned it on the husband. OK. But when and then later she committed another murder trying to cover up this other thing, this other case trying to make the husband look guilty again.
22:27	And she lured this innocent man into it and she he was developmentally disabled. He was physically disabled and she lured this guy in there and she’s on the phone with 911 waiting on them to answer the phone. And then when they pick up, she says, no, no, don’t. I won’t get in your car. Don’t hurt me. And then bam, bam, bam. She shoots him. Well, the police were later like, well, if there was really a struggle in the house, like she was saying, we would have heard something, but it was just like silence until the 911 operator picked up. Yeah, there’s some horror stories. You may have heard about this one recently.
22:58	The lady in Ireland who had a personal injury claim that she was claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages based on neck and back injuries that she claimed were disabling. But unfortunately, there was a Facebook or a social media post showing her at the same time she claimed she couldn’t get out of bed from her neck and back injuries, throwing a Christmas tree in a Christmas tree throwing competition that she so happened to win. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
23:26	Let’s back up a Christmas tree throwing competition. Yes. Believe it or not, I didn’t know that either, but it’s a thing. It’s fun. They’re on Christmas trees. Okay. And she won. She got a medal. With debilitating back pain. Unfortunately, I think there’s some inconsistencies there that the court ruled against her. All right. Could that could she argue? Hey, that was taken out of context, Your Honor. My painkillers were just really working that day. She certainly should.
23:57	So her case went away. And you said that was high six figures. That’s almost a seven figure, $800 some thousand dollars? Yes. I can’t speak to the merits of the case. It’s not in the jurisdiction that I’m licensed in being I’m not licensed to practice law in Ireland, but those were the damages that she was claiming. And unfortunately, a Facebook post, which probably wasn’t even from her own account. It may have been from the Christmas tree throw and competition account.
24:22	Ended up being discovered before getting to trial and was used against her probably pretty catastrophically for her case. Wow. So your also advice to clients would be, don’t get in any Christmas tree throwing competitions while I’m investigating your workers’ comp case. Well, I think probably the best advice is to be consistent, right? As long as you’re consistent, you can probably explain most things. And one thing that’s also important to touch on with social media is once you post it, even if you have a case, please don’t delete or modify your posts.
24:55	Because a post, which might be innocuous, but you delete it because you’re worried about it hurting your case. That can ultimately hurt your case. The fact that you deleted it can hurt your case more than the underlying photo. Because if you have an underlying photo or video, you may be able to explain it. But if it is deleted and you delete it during the dependency of your case, the court can hold that against you. It’s called spoliation of evidence. What do you mean? What do you mean? So we’ve already talked about things being taken out of context.
25:25	So I might be worried that this photo of me smiling at my cousin’s wedding or you know doing the electric slide on the dance floor is going to be used by this insurance company to say, hey, Veronica, we know you didn’t really hurt yourself that badly. Right. So I’m thinking, well, maybe I should take this down. Well, if you have the evidence there, you can explain the evidence. If you delete the evidence and it isn’t there anymore, then it’s hard to present evidence in court that doesn’t exist, and how is the court going to take your word for it?
25:55	That I was only dancing for 16 seconds with my niece on the dance floor, and then you forgot to see that part where I was limping back to the table. If that evidence isn’t there, it can be used. That’s called a presumption that it is harmful for your case. It looks like an evidence of a guilty mind kind of action, right? Kind of, yeah. Yeah. It looks like you’re trying to hide something in other words. So if you’ve got, you know, if you’re active on social media and you have a case or you’re contemplating a case, you should not be deleting content off of it to try and hide it because you’re worried about it.
26:31	Yeah, just be honest. That’s kind of a, it seems like a sort of a narrow path to walk, though, when you are thinking about social media and personal injury. You don’t want to overshare. You don’t want to necessarily say anything. I guess you don’t want to I don’t know. It just seems like a minefield. Well, we’ve talked about a lot of different points of electronic discovery that can be helpful for our clients, but social media is unfortunately mostly harmful. It’s very rare that social media is going to help your case. It is far more common that it could be taken out of context and used against you.
27:02	Now, when you talk about all of this stuff that you guys are looking at, I don’t know if and Montlick has investigators as well, right? Correct. And we can contract with folks. And whether it’s something like accident reconstruction or recovery of electronic information, you know that’s stuff that we’re very well equipped to do. And I will always say that please call us right away because there’s a lot of things that we can help you avoid problems. It is easier to avoid problems than it is to fix them once they’ve already happened.
27:34	Good point. So I’m thinking that if I’m in a personal injury case, particularly if it’s pretty bad, maybe it’s one of your workers’ comp cases, which I know are so complex and you do so much work focused on those. I am maybe in a position where I’m not able to really meet my bills. I really don’t know where my next paycheck might be coming from or when I’m going to get it or what’s going to happen with my mounting medical bills.
28:03	And now you’re talking about adding investigators into the mix and doing all this discovery stuff. I mean, how am I supposed to afford that, Alex? So the great thing about how we work is we work on a contingency fee, which means we don’t send you a bill upfront. We don’t expect payment upfront. Our attorney’s fees are paid based on the amount of the recovery we get for you. Percentage of what we get for you, that’s the contingency fee. So we will work on the case for months, sometimes years before we get paid.
28:33	And during that time, you don’t have to send us a check. We don’t send you an invoice. There’s no retainer. We work almost exclusively on contingency fee, which means you don’t pay us until we get you a monetary recovery. Amazing. And is it true that you can sort of work with hospitals and doctors’ offices to sort of put off those bills sometimes? Yes, depending on the type of case and the circumstances, there are ways that you can receive medical treatment.
29:03	And then that medical bill gets paid out of the settlement as opposed to having to pay a co-payer or out-of-pocket upfront. That has got to be such a relief too for clients when you let them know that. Yes. Well, especially because you know in a lot of these cases, the injuries are very severe and you may have tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and who’s got that money laying around to pay upfront. No kidding, right? So question for you about the I’m so fascinated by the PI angle, the private investigator angle as we talk about the electronic discovery.
29:36	I think a lot of people know that police officers have body cams. But when I’m thinking about PIs out there, not just the folks who are working for the insurance companies and trying to make sure that people’s injuries are actually documented and are what they say they are. But the stuff that you guys do with your investigators, anything jump out at you that you can share? So particularly important is preserving evidence at the scene of an accident.
30:04	A lot of times you may be in a motor vehicle accident, and you need to take the emergency medical services to the hospital. Well, what happens at the scene of that accident, the skid marks, you run into a sign. Recreating that very early in the case is important because it rains a couple times or 10,000 cars drive through the same intersection.
30:29	And that evidence is not going to be available down the road, let alone months or years later at a trial. So you need to get somebody well equipped to do this right away to preserve all of that evidence to prove your case. Have you ever had like a gold nugget come along right at the end when you thought all hope was lost? No, not when all hope is lost. But yes, there’s definitely information that will come out.
31:00	Sometimes a case can hinge on who owns or controls the property. And I’ve dug through thousands of pages of property records and found a check that was issued to the state to show or to the county to show who owns that property. Somebody might say, “That’s not my problem.” You dig through the right documents, you leave no stone unturned, and you can really, really turn a case in your favor. Talk about going the extra mile. Alex Tertichny with Montlick Injury Attorneys.
31:28	We will be right back with what you’ve been waiting for all hour long, the Montlick closing argument. You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. If you want to listen to our radio show live, you can hear it every Sunday, 8:00 a.m. on 95.5 WSB. Welcome on back into the house. This is Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here with Alex Tertichny, Montlick Injury Attorney.
31:58	We’ve been having such a good time. I’ve learned so much talking about electronic discovery and those little bits of treasures out there that can actually really weigh heavily on a case when it comes right down to it. You have been waiting for this all hour long. So sit back and relax, kick your feet up because it’s time for the Montlick closing argument. Alex, take it away. Yes.
32:21	So when we’re talking about electronic discovery, whether it’s video evidence that’s collected at the scene of an accident or a private investigator following around or something that you are posting on social media, the number one most important thing to remember is to be consistent. So be honest, don’t embellish. Other things to keep in mind too is that hiring the right attorney to investigate and collect this evidence is very important, and it’s very important to do so right away, because this evidence may not be there.
32:55	If you wait even a couple days, this video may be recorded over. Electronic information might be deleted, and it can be really difficult to recreate that evidence if you don’t have it, if you don’t hire the right law firm right away to go and collect it for you. So be consistent. Call us right away. I can tell you that I used to wonder if you guys were exaggerating this. This is, I mean, real talk.
33:23	You would talk about how you speak to a lawyer right away, and we do all this extra stuff, and there are law firms where you never even know your lawyer’s name. And I thought it was an exaggeration until I ran into so many people in the world, you know from the people at my hair salon to literal colleagues who have gone with other firms and could tell me they had never spoken to a lawyer. They have multiple case managers who are hard to get in touch with.
33:52	They often switch case managers without them telling them. And they are actually doing their own investigation for their own cases. And what might a major law firm actually have the power, the muscle, the know-how when it comes to digging out this kind of evidence, as opposed to just one little hurt person? I think the way that I like to practice is proactively and go out and get information and work my cases.
34:21	I’m not trying to be an attorney who sits back and lets the case go where it goes. I like to be proactive in my cases. That means getting in right away. My clients who call us for a consultation, they talk to me right away. They have my number, they have my assistant’s name and number. If my staff doesn’t pick up, that call rings to me. Doesn’t ring to a blank voicemail rings directly to me. So I really like working with our clients.
34:50	I like being able to proactively make a big difference in their case. And yeah, I just, you know, I appreciate people who call us right away and we can help them right away. And sometimes you call us and might give you advice and you don’t need an attorney, but I’d rather you call and get that advice right away than wait till it’s too late and that evidence is gone or you’ve waited too long or it’s, you know, you’re behind a rock and a hard place. Yeah, one moment in time.
35:15	You want those gold nuggets and you don’t want to be singing I Have Nothing if you don’t call the right attorney who can help you discover those little gold nuggets that can help or hurt your case along the way. Thank you so much to Alex Tertichny from Montlick Injury Attorneys. I’m Veronica Waters with WSB and I’ll see you next time. Peace out. You’re listening to our podcast, Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Catch us live every Sunday, 8:00 a.m. on 95.5 WSB.

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