“if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else”

I’m a motorcyclist, the kind who believes that bikes are best enjoyed when heeled over in a turn. To get the best line through a turn, you look at it “backwards”, picking the place on the road where you want to come out, then that tells you where you need to go in. Evaluating a case has a lot in common with that approach. What sets the value of any injury case is only this: What will a jury in that venue put on the last page of the jury instructions on the day this case gets tried. In turn, that is determined, not entirely, but to a large extent, by what evidence they will hear and from whom they hear it. So when I talk to a client, getting the facts of the accident and their injuries, I have to think of it in terms of the far end of the process, the exit of the turn, so to speak. What jury instructions will I need, what evidence will I need to prove those elements and where will that proof come from. In interviewing the client, I want to know everything there is to know about that person, how they got to this point and what is this accident going to mean to the rest of their life and I have to put all of that in the context of where this case, this part of their life, is going to end up. I want them to come out of the curve on the right side of the road.