On August 18, late morning or very early afternoon, my wife was invovled in a car accident. On August 19 people at a chiropractic clinic and several attorneys specializing in pain-and-suffering type lawsuits put letters addressed to my wife in the mail offering to help her in one way or another. Yesterday, August 20, we received all this correspondance.
My question is, how did all these people find out about the accident so quickly?Who’s reporting what to whom? Is there some state accident database that people are constantly monitoring and reacting to? Or what?
Anyway, I was just curious, and thought perhaps somebody here on the Dope might know the mechanics of all this.
And BTW, while the accident led to four people visiting the local emergency room, nobody seems to have incurred serious bodily harm.
Yup, and in fact, I think some counties even have a special area of the website setup for people looking for cases that just hit the books.
In fact, I just went to my state’s website and ran a search for all the traffic citations given out in the past few days in one county. It took me just a few seconds to click through them and grab the names and address of, for example, the DUI citations. If I was a DUI lawyer, I’d be sending them letters.
Now, IME, traffic citations don’t list accidents, just tickets. But I’m sure the lawyers have other ways of polling that data. Either the lawyer has a way of tapping into the county database or he/she sends a paralegal over to the police station every morning for the new reports and then they can go through them one by one and see which of them involved injuries that they want to send letters out to. I’d imagine more severe injuries get phone calls and the worst injuries or deaths probably get personal visits from [del]Saul[/del] the lawyer with everything ready to go (just sign here).
Police scanners; anyone can access them if you have the equipment.
There’s an online feed for the 911 calls for my county, I’m told (although I’ve never accessed it.) In this county, police reports aren’t released to the press or great unwashed sometimes for days, but a scanner is immediate. I know an elderly woman who has the scanner going 24/7, sort of as background noise. Personal/identifying information is often relayed on the scanner.
They also look through the websites of local media outlets for articles and police logs about arrests and accidents and so forth. Once they get an idea of who got busted for what, or who was involved in an accident that might turn into something, it’s a simple matter to send a grunt to the police department or courthouse to request those reports. Other firms may not be so selective and send letters to everyone.
As DXZero said, soliciting clients this way is pretty scuzzy business. I got rear-ended a couple of years ago, and it’s not the white-shoe firms that do this, if the letters I got are any indication.
I took the MPRE a couple of weeks ago and it had this very question on here asking if it was within ethical bounds for a lawyer to do this. I narrowed it down to two choices, but I picked that it was ethical because the attorney didn’t speak to the person live or through real time contact.
I may be wrong, because I drew a blank. But I remembered jurisdictions where this happens, so if I got that one wrong, there are some Bar Committees that are not doing there job!
It is “ethical” in all or at least most jurisdictions in the U.S. It is sleazy everywhere.
I wish people would stop hiring lawyers who do this. Maybe it would stop it. If you need a lawyer, ask around. Don’t go with the guy with a billboard or who mails you after an accident (or, god forbid, an obituary). It’s embarrassing.