FAQ Friday with Gregory Herrman & Hector Luna | Corpus Christi Personal Injury Lawyers

I okay alright well hello everybody welcome again to frequently asked questions Friday today we have a guest Hector Luna Hector is one of my legal assistants here at the office your Nana nurseries Ella Baker I'm Hector Luna I've been with Gregg for 23 years he's going on 23 years before that I used to work for an insurance company as an insurance adjuster so I know all the all the nasties those guys do and tell us a little bit about yourself like where were you from originally originally from McAllen Texas then I went to a and I which doesn't exist anymore now it's Texas A&M Kingsville and then I came into the first larger city that I could find outside of Kingsborough corpus so I got here in an overheated car and started looking for a job right first job I got was with an insurance company they sent me off to claim school got me a camera and a company vehicle which I sure could use at that time and taught me all about car wrecks and you know you spent time working in workers comp and auto accidents for an insurance company all right yeah I know you got a couple kids what are you what are you kids my daughter's name is Ashton she's 22 she graduated from UT recently and got her green job in New York City she's working for publishing house they do all the publishing for Barnes & Noble and my son is 16 and thanks who's 20 loans he said yeah he thinks he's too cool for school and just wants to play electric guitar not do his homework Morgan we're all familiar with that all right well so today's topics that you want to talk about the first one was insurance propaganda it just got any propaganda I think we're all familiar with like you know Trump propaganda and Putin propaganda and you let that stuff tell us what insurance company propaganda it's pretty it's pretty pretty similar to that one of my biggest pet peeves is hearing insurance adjustors you know they and the insurance companies in general they put out this propaganda that you know they're the good guys somehow they're the good guys and then wear the white hat and lawyers particularly plaintiff lawyers or car wreck lawyers are evil and we wear the black hats and that's just completely not true I think our clients and potential clients should realize that these are multi-billion dollar corporations they're not public service nonprofit organizations they want to portray themselves like the red cross or something they're not they're multibillion-dollar corporations they take in billions and billions of premiums and they're their entire strategy they're their whole business strategies to not pay up or to pay as little as possible and in many cases to deny as many claims as possible I mean these guys will not settle for less than a hundred percent profit margins they they frequently lose their butts in the market and natural disasters earthquakes hurricanes whatever and they immediately raise everybody's premiums and they and they try to blame it on plaintiff lawyers like that I would like scapegoats like it's got to be these car racks and these frivolous lawsuits on these little car wrecks of these plaintiff lawyers you know file on us and that's why we're gonna have to raise all your rates when we know that that's completely false I remember particularly walking into an insurance company into the office early on Monday mornings and the first thing we had to do was we had to set our our margins are we let me see what they called it back then we had to you know we had to kind of sit down at our computer and give a company an estimate of how much or I should say how little it would take to settle each of the claims assigned to us that was it's called setting their reserves so that way the company could set those reserve's aside so that we could actually settle cases with them and they could you know use the rest of the money to invest in all their schemes and other stock market deals or whatever so they they wanted us to give them an estimate of how much you would take potentially to settle these cases and like I tell you we were made aware that they needed the money they need to keep tabs on it so that they could invest the other money stuff like that and most a very good job of it the best yeah and so if they would just pay the claims and paid people fairly they never hire lawyers in the first place they wouldn't even put us out of it yeah one thing that they do that helps us is an insurance company is never ever gonna hand you money in your hand after a wreck so that you can go take care of yourself or the family with a doctor they're never going to hand you money so that you can go get a check out of the doctor to prove that you're injured so that you can go after them so what they do that helps us is the insurance coming tells these guys you know if you're injured if you're hurt go see your own doctor save your receipts and we'll get back to you that's a strategy they use they know that the average person doesn't have any money in their pocket those folks don't have group health coverage and they sure they'll have a bunch of doctor money in that pocket so you know typically these guys will go and to spend a hundred dollars at the pharmacy and a hundred dollars at the minor emergency center and they that's it they're broke after that insurance companies wait two three months and they go knocking on their door and these guys get out there little receipts and the insurance company says you know what since it's our fault we're going to go ahead and reimburse you and since we're nice guys and you know we're going to go ahead and give you an extra hundred bucks how does that sound sign right there and that's how they want to handle it they don't want us involved because we can help these guys maybe find doctors that can help them without charging them upfront you know we try to help them seek medical attention and the insurance company does not like that at all they want these guys to go broke trying to spend their last 200 dollars to prove their injured or and we give it to therapy and stuff yeah because lots of these whiplash it permanently damages the tissue the muscle tissue and the ligaments and tendons and if you don't get you don't get the therapy it's never gonna heal back the same and you're gonna have problems the rest of your life because the carriers don't care about that this might save money yeah but what people really need is they need to get to a therapist or a doctor that's gonna actually give them healing yeah therapy to put them back in the shake they were as much as you can before the accident but that's not in their interests after surgery sometimes they say well you know they didn't complain to the police they were hurt at the scene when a police officer asks you if you're hurt at the scene of an accident he's not he's not a doctor he just wants to know are you bleeding is anything broken do you need an ambulance it doesn't mean that you didn't get in here that you don't have whiplash sure that your neck and your back it's not gonna hurt the next day a cop just wants to know do you need an ambulance or not may be broken but the insurance Gotti's jump on that right away they tell the police officer why why would you tell the police officer oh your injuries they're not doctors that's another thing insurance companies do we try to case a Scott and I try to case Richard I think of the guy's name ed but this was probably three or four years ago and the company rep was a chiropractor and so the lawyer had been up there saying well your guy Richard our guy was in a canoe team leader and he got hit by a bull moose around oh wow how does it work side down and Richard you know immediately afterwards said he you know he thought he was okay because you can have a bunch of trundling stuff going and so the lawyer on the case kept pounding that that you know hey Richard never said he was injured immediately you know Richard I mean that was fine and so the company rep I got him on the stand and he was a chiropractor and he brought that up too and I said no I said no you know sir as a chiropractor that that's not unusual at all many people immediately after an accident say they're not injured right and he says yes sir that's right so so this is a company rep under oath I was trying to get away with it but then when you pointed out to him he even he estimate on you know under oath yeah that's true I know that just for me in a car up right now people get it injured all the time and they think they're fighting because adrenaline stuff don't feel it till the next day or sometimes three days master yeah so another thing is this frivolous lawsuit that insurance companies constantly are putting out their lawyers don't try frivolous lawsuit why would they frivolous means it has no merit why would a lawyer take a case with no merit to court it would cost him a bunch of money renew them all yeah you'd lose them all so I think what insurance companies are trying to say is that they want to decide what's realism what's not because you know but it's a conflict of interest because if it's not Tribble is they have to pick up but they don't want a jury of your peers deciding what's frivolous or what isn't they rather say no you can't have a jury of your peers decide we want to decide what's what's privileged and what is it which is just the worst that's that's not American and that's not how it should work everybody deserves a lawyer and the lawyer will tell you if it's frivolous or not not not the insurance companies that don't want pay you yeah someone who represents your best interest that's my good is a poacher business exactly okay and then I think the last topic you wanted to cover was myths about lawyers is that well all your jokes but now those were the myths right there you just just stuff that they're putting out there all the time well you don't need a lawyer you can handle it yourself they would love that I noticed right away the insurer people come in here saying insurance companies just treating us like crap pushing us around and I have to tell them well once you hire us and we're going to turn the tables on and we're gonna treat them like crap and start pushing them around I've even had some very conservative people they're really really shy about going to lawyers they think they'll find out tell me how I I just don't believe in lawyers I've never sued anybody in my life and I don't feel like so first of all I tell them well you're not suing anybody you're hiring us so that we can lawyers can negotiate a settlement for you and we can file a claim for you you know you're not suing anybody until they force you to sue but anyway this lady was an upper-middle-class lady from the island blue haired older lady I remember she had a thick southern accent she says Hector she goes I have never been treated like I have by that adjuster ever she goes let me tell you she goes I don't believe the lawyer she goes and I definitely don't need the money she goes but I want you guys to go after that little fart and take him for every nickel you can for him talking down to me like that here's an insurance company treating a conservative that normally would side with them ugly and they end up over here can you imagine how they treat for people and uneducated people so that they can keep doing that and people will keep pouring in to see us okay and just in case you know we don't recommend it we recommend you hire a lawyer but if somebody does want to try to handle their own case we do have a book that I wrote on our website you spent our front page I don't think it's there anymore some of the phone is under the fold okay so if you you go to Herman Herman calm and the screen pops up you'll have to scroll down it won't be the first thing you say you have to scroll down but we do have a free book you can go on there and order it and we can either mail it to you or you can get it it's an e-book too you can just download didn't meet listen they want to get a copy of it so anyway we'll Hector thank you very much for joining us today let me just move on to a couple of announcements our scholarship ends tomorrow so I guess they have till midnight tomorrow right mm-hmm okay so just remember the first first-place winner gets $2,500 second place gets $1,500 third place is $1,000 and we write the check directly to you not to your school so you know you use it for for beer money if you want anyway go to our website enter you still got time you got till tomorrow midnight hopefully somebody from around here wins it be greatest my from South Texas one so if you know if you're here you need the money or you know any students that need money go on there and enter and write your essay the topic is what changes can be made to decrease distractions with technology and motor vehicles so go on there and submit your yes yes your essay and we will have a winner probably give us about a week or so to finish reading reading all the essays but hopefully by the middle of December we'll have a winner also another announcement community involvement we have teamed up with the open arms agency it's a foster agency for foster kids and it's to help them enjoy the holidays and Herman and Herman is gonna buy toys for these children but we're also asking everyone else to come and help out too and donate new unwrapped toys here at our office 1201 third Street and everybody who donates a toy will be entered into a drawing to win a Yeti cooler full of awesome surprises and we'll just keep those awesome surprises a secret until until after y'all donated the last day to donate is December 6 so that's not much time that's a guess what next week from a week from today so that's a week from today so and lastly I just want to throw in if you're not registered to vote don't wait till the next election or close to the next election go ahead and register now there's too many there's too many sneaky things that our county clerk's up to and the legislature is up to whether they would always shun kick people off the voter rolls and stuff and but just go ahead and register to vote we'll put a link back up again where you can go to register you literally do it online you can sign up for it they send need the piece of paper you you signed and send it in I mean it's really really simple but anyway you know we got another big election in two years as last one was a very very important election and you know that there were mixed results but we did we did fairly well but we'd like to do a whole lot better in 2020 so don't don't wait till 2020 to go register to vote let's go ahead and register register right now if you can millenials actually picked they finally got out their butts and and decided to registered votes and they decided to not only register to vote but they actually vote not near in the numbers we helped for but here in Oasis County you know they were up about 10 to 15 percent somewhere in that range we would certainly like to see that go up to you know 20 30 40 50 percent so if you know anybody else who's kind of just apathetic you know talk them in the least register no vote and maybe between now and 2020 they'll get inspired by something that somebody stupid does or says so anyway that's pretty much it until next Friday so Hector thanks again for coming on we certainly appreciate it and we'll have another victim for you next next Friday