074 No Stone Unturned

VERONICA: Hello, friends. You heard the man. It is Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. And yes, I am Veronica Waters. Happy to have you back with us once again.

SCOTT: Thank you, Veronica. It’s good to be here again.

VERONIC: I love being in here with you. And it’s so funny because every time I talk, I see you giggling.

SCOTT: It’s a low bar. Easily amused.

VERONICA: So I think, honestly, have we ever done a show with you and somebody else?

SCOTT: No.

VERONICA: The other time was just a solo too.

SCOTT: It was.

VERONICA: Listen, you guys are in for a magic ride.

SCOTT: Nobody likes to be in here with me.

VERONICA: Magic eye, magic ride. Is that what it is?

SCOTT: Maybe. Please don’t put me on with Scott.

VERONICA: Yeah, right. So Scott Patterson, let’s remind people who you are.

SCOTT: Correct.

VERONICA: Nice. And Mercer Law School.

SCOTT: Yes.

VERONICA: Yes.

VERONICA: What led you to law so many years ago? What was the I know Hollywood had something to do with it?

SCOTT: Yeah, weirdly enough, there was a LA Law was a show back in the day when I was quite young and used to watch it. And you know something about it kind of intrigued me.

VERONICA: So curious, how does real life compare to what you saw on LA law? Is it what you thought it would be?

SCOTT: No. I mean, you know most of those shows, you know like 10% of it is what you might see. I mean, the courtroom stuff is you know 10% of less of what you actually end up doing. A lot of cases don’t ever make it to that point. When they do, you know some of it’s accurate.

VERONICA: Yeah, when I look at courtroom things on TV and the movies, I’m like, that would never happen. That never happens. What are they doing?

SCOTT: Yeah, my wife is a former prosecutor. So anytime they do kind of criminal things, she’s like, wow, they really need someone advising on that because that’s like so far off of what

VERONICA: they just actually don’t care. They’re writing a story.

SCOTT: Yeah, no. I mean, that actually was pretty accurate in terms of sort of what was admissible, how you know sort of courtroom things can develop.

VERONICA: Really, really good. Really, really good. So quick question. Personal question about Scott Patterson. Because I know you did criminal defense law for a while. Did you and your wife meet like brawling over a case in court?

VERONICA: That’s great, though, to be able to have that sort of brain trust in the household, you know? That’s really wonderful.

SCOTT: Yeah, it is. It is when it was. And I mean, it’s, you know, we kind of have that at Montlick too. I mean, we have, you know, 40 plus attorneys and, you know, they have vast levels of experience. And it’s, you know, you’ve got an issue.

VERONICA: You’ve got a problem. It needs to be addressed. You’ve got a question about a case. You know, you’ve got a brain trust right there in-house. Yeah, but you’ve got a lot of experience yourself. You know, you’ve got a couple of decades under your belt at this point. Yes. Right?

SCOTT: Well, it’s both. It’s both. Yeah, I’m only supposed to be doing varsity, but I’m jumping in and helping on JV too. So if you guys recognize this, recognize this voice from the soccer pitch. Right, yeah. If you ever in Marietta, you might hear it. It’s funny. My dad lives behind the stadium. And he’ll text me, he’s like, “Are you announcing tonight?” It’s like, when we score a goal, it gets pretty loud and my voice kind of projects.

SCOTT: Yeah, he’s like, “So it’s like, is that you tonight? Is there a game tonight?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I thought I heard something.”

VERONICA: That is very cool. Scott Patterson, thank you so much for being back in the House with the Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB. I’m Veronica Waters here and started off the show talking about those magic eye pictures. You remember those?

SCOTT: Yes. Yeah. I’m old enough to remember them.

VERONICA: Were you good enough to see them?

SCOTT: I got better. But yeah, initially, it took a while. And then I realized you just sort of have to kind of relax your eyes and just kind of let it come to you, I guess.

SCOTT: Yes, very much so. I mean, you know we talked about this. You know Any auto accident case, there could be a products case involved. You think of a car. It’s got thousands of moving parts and different components. And, you know, it may look like just a run-of-the-mill rear end collision where, you know, you’ve got an injury and you kind of move forward.

SCOTT: You know, I mean, if you take just the broad field of auto accident cases, I mean, out of those, how many times would you might have a product defect or you know sometimes it’s a road defect. You know I would say probably less than half of them are there or have some issue.

VERONICA: Ever been surprised by one?

SCOTT: Well, I haven’t really personally been overly surprised by ones that I’ve seen. But again, you’ve kind of I’ve had one, actually a friend of mine dealt with this case, and he and I spoke about it. We were sharing office space at the time where the injury itself looked like kind of not a great injury.

SCOTT: Yeah.

VERONICA: What about if something happens when the patient is getting treated? Maybe it was not a products liability case. Maybe everything with the vehicle was fine and dandy, and everything with the road was smooth and sure.

SCOTT: Yeah, it can. So, you can have what appears to be an auto accident in case your client goes to the hospital, gets treated, but then something’s not right about their recovery. Or they end up having to have a surgery because of the nature of the accident, and they’re not recovering quite right. You may very well have a medical malpractice case involved there. But if you’re not in touch with your client, if you’re not following their treatment, if you’re not corresponding with them, you may very well miss that.

ANNOUNCER: 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.

VERONICA: Welcome back to Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB.

SCOTT: Yes.

VERONICA: Hands because you saved because you saved that arm. Yeah. Absolutely. So, let’s talk about what it means, though, when the injuries don’t line up. What’s that all about?

SCOTT:  It can mean a lot of different things. I mean, some of the examples that I’ve seen is a pretty serious car accident actually on the downtown connector. The passenger in the vehicle, you know, hopefully people aren’t freaked out by hearing it on the radio, but he was almost cut in half while wearing a seatbelt.

VERONICA: It’s supposed to lock and grip you.

SCOTT:  Right. And you’re supposed to kind of be close enough to it that it won’t cause that type of injury.

VERONICA: It went to trial. You’re kidding me.

VERONICA: What? Okay, this is why I’m so sorry. I’m so shocked. How do you defend the fact that your product’s seatbelt just went all loosey goosey?

SCOTT: Yeah, you know they’re going to point fingers at someone else. They’re going to say that’s not the way it was designed. It must have been a maintenance issue or some other issue that wasn’t. Ultimately, the companies that were sued, they’re always going to try to point fingers somewhere else.

VERONICA: This is what it looks like when good lawyers step up and take responsibility, persevere and get justice for a family. Coming up next on Lawyers in the House with Montlick, Scott says fewer than 50% of these cases actually have cases hidden within them, but we are going to go delve more deeply into getting you some of those stories so you can see up close and personal what it looks like.

VERONICA: Hey, hey friends. Welcome back to the House. Lawyers in the House with Montlick on WSB.

SCOTT: It really can. It really can. I mean, you’re going to leave a lot to be desired if you don’t pick up on these things, especially when the injuries are serious.

VERONICA: Exactly. Nobody asks for this.

SCOTT: No.

VERONICA: Nobody wants this. And I know I think I’ve mentioned before on the show that you are this, you’re a member of the multi-million-dollar advocates forum, which means that you have consistently landed multi-million dollar verdicts for your clients over the years.

SCOTT: Yeah, they do. They do. And that’s sort of the other side of it. People see like, you know, a big verdict going up like, oh, wow, that attorney’s, you know, doing well. But, you know, behind, you know, 99.9% of those is a very, very sad story of someone losing a life, a loved one losing, you know, a life that they once had.

VERONICA: Yeah, you gotta be a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes, I guess, sort of looking under every rock and tracking down every piece of evidence, figuring out every clue. SCOTT: You do. You have to be, you have to be involved. You have to be engaged. You know, and again, that’s, you know, the beauty of hiring and calling Montlick is you have an attorney from the get-go.

VERONICA: Let’s get back into the stories, Scott, because this fascinates me. Give us anything that jumps out at you. What’s one special one that what’s a lot of special ones?

SCOTT: Yeah, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of them out there. I think one, honestly, I just came across it recently because I was able to meet the attorney that we worked with on this case. So, you know, the other thing about, you know, Montlick is our relationships with other attorneys and our co-counsel relationships.

VERONICA: Made the area safer. You got recovery for the victims. And I remember that was huge. There was a documentary done on it.

SCOTT: Yes.

VERONICA: And it talked to the recovery was tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. It was out of it was many, many, many, many, many, many, many millions of dollars which came out of that. And so, you do, you solve this thing that again, it really strikes me that it’s something people would just take for granted. Oh, it’s always foggy over here. Well, you know, it shouldn’t be. Here’s why it is. But you don’t think anything. You’re right, because you’re driving through the mountains of Tennessee. You think, hey, this is no big deal. No, sometimes it’s not just a nice foggy mountain fog.

VERONICA:  Yeah, that’s incredible. Incredible job. Tell me about you mentioned when we were in the break something about a family you worked with on sort of a heartbreaking case that had to do with a motorcycle rider.

SCOTT: Yeah, so it’s actually a case that is currently ongoing.

VERONICA: Wow. Well, keep us surprised of how it plays out. This is going to be fascinating. That’s going to be Scott Patterson solo show number three, maybe. Well, you know what? I know these things can take a long time, though. They don’t just happen overnight. So, you might have done several more shows by the time.

SCOTT: Maybe true.

VERONICA: Yeah. Yeah. You know, what about you mentioned earlier something in the show about how things can be wrong with the road.

SCOTT: So I mean, there’s a lot of issues there. I actually had a case quite a few years ago that we were looking into. And again, it looked like just our driver had not been paying attention and basically drove into back of a it was late at night. It was out on 285 and drove into the back of a truck that was actually driving sort of in the median and cleaning the storm drains. And again, it just it looked like driver error.

VERONICA: You drove into the back of the guy.

SCOTT: Yeah. But again, you know things aren’t as they appear. And we started digging into it. And what we started looking at and determining was that it appeared that how they were operating out there that night wasn’t in compliance with DOT regulations. They have to create what’s called a moving taper, and it didn’t appear that they were doing that correctly, which, you know, ultimately the whole reason for that is to give people fair warning and enough time to avoid the collision that happened.

VERONICA: What was it that triggered something in your brain that said, I need to look more closely at this?

SCOTT: A lot of it was just knowing we spoke to the family.

VERONICA: Like your spidey senses were.

VERONICA: Did you know from the first call?

SCOTT: Yeah, the way that one came to me as the partner did. I mean, the partner who was friends with the family. He immediately said, I know that guy. This doesn’t sound right. He did what? You know Single vehicle accident crashing? No, that doesn’t sound right.

VERONICA: Relationships matter. Skill matters. The brain trust matters. Being able to brainstorm matters. What about simple things like asking the right questions?

SCOTT: Yeah, it’s key. And you have to have you know the experience to be able to ask some of those questions. Some of it comes with time, but some of it also comes with just being curious. I mean, that’s kind of, you know, what our job is.

VERONICA: Yeah, it’s amazing. And I’m just going to make a quick confession here.

ANNOUNCER: 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.

VERONICA: Welcome back into the House. Lawyers in the House with Montick on WSB.

SCOTT: Yeah, at some point it wasn’t. And that’s all the things that we’re looking into. But again, it’s taking that and then understanding from it because some people are like, OK, you have the helmet moving on. But, you know, again, it was like, wait a second, you have it. Let me see it. Let me look at it. Let’s look into this further. And that’s what’s led us down to the path that we’re currently on where we think there might have been an issue with the helmet. So again, it’s, you know, when you hire the right attorney, you’re going to get the attorney that asks the right questions.

VERONICA: I think it would feel empowering for me too, as a client, to make sure that I shared everything possible with you and did my part to sort of help you. Because I just keep thinking somebody could have had that helmet and said, “This is too painful for me to hold on to. Let me get rid of it. I don’t ever want to see it again. Take that car away. I don’t want to it’s a reminder of this horrible pain I’m in.” And, you know, maybe those quick decisions are not exactly the way to go.

SCOTT: Correct.

SCOTT: I know. Thank you. It’s been a joy, as always.

VERONICA: Yeah, I love it. And you can catch Scott at a soccer pitch near you while soccer season is underway. Thanks so much for joining us, friends, for another episode of Lawyers in the House with Montlick. Sometimes a case is hidden within a case. And don’t you want an attorney who has the magic eye, who can help guide you to justice and a great settlement to make you whole again.

ANNOUCNER: 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.