Transcript
Pam: Today we’re going to be discussing Myths and Mistakes, which is the title of a book you’ve written, Barry. I know you’ve done a lot of legal writing for both lawyers and consumers. Tell us a little bit about that.
Barry: The writing that I’ve done for the legal community, there’s been articles, there have been seminar papers and so forth that I’ve published, but the idea behind that is that it’s a way of giving back to the legal community, it helps kind of elevate the standards of practice, helps other lawyers, or in some of the things that I have to teach, and hopefully it serves the public at large by improving the overall quality of practice and legal community as a whole.
On the consumer side I’ve done a lot of writing for the public at large, with free reports and books that are available on my websites.
I believe that one of the best ways to avoid getting taken advantage of by insurance companies is to have good information available to you. So these books and reports are really designed to educate consumers about what their rights are and how the whole legal process works.
Pam: One of the books you’ve written and is available for free on fightingforwhatsright.com is Myths and Mistakes. It’s kind of an intriguing title and was a very interesting read. How did you come up with it?
Barry: Well, the basic premise behind the book is that there are things about the civil justice system that people believe are true, that seem like they should be true, and they act on them even though they really aren’t true at all. So that is the myths part of this.
Pam: So those are the myths. Why is the word, “Mistakes” in the book title?
Barry: There are a couple of reasons for this. One way is that people act in a way that’s ultimately self-destructive towards their case. It ends up costing them thousands of dollars in money in terms of the settlement of their case, and costs them a lot of delay in terms of the ultimate resolution of their case.
The other reason is that people don’t really have an accurate perception as to what a tough environment they’re dealing with when it comes to insurance companies. And if their case eventually goes to trial, the jurors there are going to be sitting in the jury box deciding the merits of their case.
And between the two of those things, the things that people believe should be true that aren’t, and the things that people tend to believe about insurance companies and jurors that really aren’t accurate at all, this tends to lead people towards making mistakes which really can cost them a lot of money and a lot of delay in resolving their case.
Pam: Thanks for sharing that information. The full book Myths and Mistakes is available at fightingforwhatsright.com.
