Victim Resources

I think the first thing to do is to hire an experienced lawyer. The second thing and you know in the confusion of somebody being hurt, a family member being hurt, or you being hurt, it's absolutely necessary to try and preserve evidence.

Classic case would be, a case where somebody is hurt in a car accident. They're taken to a hospital, their family gathers around them at that hospital, but the car itself is towed away and sometimes crushed.

I've been in numerous cases, been involved in numerous cases where months later we'd be trying to get pictures of that car, a jury wants to see pictures of that car. Insurance companies, they disappear those pictures. If they have them. I have had case after case where a picture of a car has disappeared, well why?

It's one of the most important parts of the evidence. So...

I think that when you undertake what I do for a living, in representing the injured. It's that you really have to have a spirit about you. You have to want to fight.

If you don't have that, you can't do this.

It's not just the trial, it's all the skirmishes before the trial. If you think that a defense attorney, for an insurance company, is just always a nice guy to deal with, it's not true.

These guys get paid an enormous amount of money to win. Everything about you has to go "I'm in it to win it, I'm here to win" and if you don't do have that, you're not going to do very well. Which gets me right back to, if you're representing people, and you will not get into the fight and you're part of this 90% that never goes to court or...

If you ask the attorney, "Will you give me your trial record in writing?" and that attorney says to you, "Don't worry about this, don't worry about this, your case is going to settle."

That's when you should worry about it. You should worry and go wait a minute. You don't know that your case is going to settle. What happens when the insurance company, for the injury that you've had, offers you 10 cents on the dollar, 20 cents on the dollar, but you know, "My case is worth more than that." But you've got an attorney that won't fight.

It's the simplest thing in the whole world. What you do is ask the lawyer to provide to you a record of his trial victories, his trial wins and he should say here, here it is. And so what you have in front of you is a...

I'm going to give you an alarming statistic about attorneys in the state of Colorado that do personal injury.

That statistic is that 90% of the practicing attorneys in the state of Colorado have never tried a personal injury case. 90%. Let me break down the other 10% for you. Out of the remaining 10%, 5% and that would take you to 95%. That other 5% are lawyers that do personal injury work that have tried, one, two, three, four cases. They might have lost half of them. And out of that 5% is an even more alarming statistics. There are attorneys that are perennial losers.

There's an attorney is with a firm that has become a household name in the state of Colorado, that since the year 2000, he's lost 24 out of 28 personal injury cases.

So mixed in with the lawyer that doesn't try cases,...

My name is David Hoover, my office is at 2145 Kipling St., Lakewood, CO and I'm an attorney. I've been an attorney for 30 years and practiced nothing but personal injury for 30 years. I've never had a case that was an hourly case, never had anything except personal injury cases, never did domestic cases, criminal cases, I've specialized and did nothing but personal injury....