How everyday details reveal the truth of an injury

Since I am a lawyer and I carefully guard my clients’ personal information, I have to make some things up, change details and blend experiences when I want to tell you about the moments in my career that changed things, moved me.  I don’t want to bother anyone by asking them to give me permission to talk about things they would rather forget.  So, I will take poetic license–call it creative writing–but it’s based on some truths: what I do, what our firm is willing to do, and how we want to help our clients. Those truths matter.

Quite a few years ago, I attended a small, local seminar for lawyers where we talked about really seeing our clients—not just reading charts, but understanding the small, daily ways an injury reshapes a life. I worked with a videographer that weekend, and something clicked. I’ve always been empathetic—sometimes too much so—but as a younger lawyer I didn’t fully understand how to turn empathy into evidence. That seminar helped me find better ways to tell a client’s story with clarity and respect.

Soon after, a case landed on my desk that felt like a test of those lessons. The records said soft-tissue injuries, possible concussion. After months of working with the client, hearing despair and frustration, I realized the medical records and the phone conversations weren’t telling us everything. The lived reality—missed shifts, headaches that arrived like weather systems, a child who whispered because normal voices had become too loud, the worried family—wasn’t on the page. So I talked to my client, asked for permission, then called the kind videographer and said, “Could you go with me to where the story actually happens?  I’m thinking I need to spend some time in my client’s world.”

We drove out into the country to a small home with a gravel drive. Our client showed us the porch step she now measured with her foot before trusting her balance, the kitchen light she kept off at certain hours because it started the spiral, the notebook where she tracked what used to be automatic: medications, appointments, the order of simple tasks. Her partner explained how grocery day became a two-part mission because the bustle and refrigerated-aisle glare were too much to handle at once.  He teared up.  We didn’t interrogate; we listened. We let the camera linger on the pace of a morning, the way she stood to rest her back between stirring and chopping, the way her face hardened and softened as the headache crested. Some of her friends came by to tell me about who she was and what she had really lost in that car crash.

I could have spoken with her friends on the phone and I could have just written down everything she told me.  But when she let me come into her world, for which I am eternally grateful, I came away with the blend of my client’s old life and her new life-after the injury-seared into my brain.  I was moved and I had really felt her story.

Another day we headed into the city on another case—busses booming along the road, a crosswalk that flashed too fast, a car parked in the driveway that couldn’t be driven anymore. We talked, quietly, understanding our client’s struggle with short errands that used to be nothing at all. My investigator and I walked around the yard, saw the empty garden rows, the overgrown grass, the bushes that needed trimming.  Sitting in the too quiet house, we spoke with my client’s partner.  We kept the camera off and the questions gentle.  Outside we took many pictures of the car and pictures of the yard and they shared pictures of some of their harvest, from their little yard in the city, the year before the crash. What mattered wasn’t making drama—it was making honest context.

None of this was about invading a private life. In each case, it was about showing what the records couldn’t: that recovery isn’t a straight line; that symptoms didn’t respect business hours; that the “same person” on paper now lived by a different set of rules to get through a day. We didn’t need experts to narrate every frame—though we later used specialists to explain why these limits made sense. The everyday footage did the first, most important job: it made the invisible visible.

I had recently been learning—and relearning—that good lawyering is sometimes slow and humble. You sit at the kitchen table. You stand on the sidewalk where the near-miss happened. You ride in the car and notice that the railroad crossing is the hardest part. You visit the client outside her place of employment at the end of shift, when the pain speaks loudest. You go where you need to go—country or city, day or night—to understand a client’s world on their terms.

In this composite, our photographs and videos never saw a jury. They didn’t need to. Our footage spoke to the people who needed convincing—the adjuster who thought a concussion was “just a bump,” the defense lawyer who believed a return to work meant a return to normal. The footage, paired with careful medical documentation and voices from the client’s circle, told a truthful story that moved the case toward resolution.  I will never forget seeing my clients’ loved ones cry as they told me about all that my client has lost and how much they still love them.

Those cases resolved favorably, as many of our cases do, the most serious one with a large settlement.  Ultimately, our work allowed our clients to have some dignity, something extra to find some joy and enough to make changes that would ease the burdens of daily life.

I carry these experiences forward. The technique—whether it’s a day-in-the-life video, a carefully kept symptom journal, or simply showing up at the places that trigger pain—springs from a single belief: clients aren’t case numbers. They’re people whose lives deserve careful attention, compassion, and a zealous effort to translate lived experience into proof.

We don’t film every client.  We do what feels comfortable and what makes sense-to us and to our clients. Sometimes a few photos, a timeline, and the right specialist are enough. But when it matters, we’ll drive the back roads and the city grid. We’ll wait for the late-afternoon glare that turns a kitchen into a migraine. We’ll stand in the store aisle that used to be easy. We’ll do what it takes to understand—and to help decision-makers understand—the truth behind the medical records.

That’s the work that motivates me: not just to win cases, but to see people clearly so we can fight for what they need to rebuild.

This narrative is a composite based on multiple cases. Identifying details have been changed to protect privacy. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.