Jeffrey "Jeff" Gerardi

I’d say 99.9 percent of my practice is personal injury. I do some premises liability and the odd case here or there. But for the most part, it’s all auto accidents.

We have people who’ve had an accident, and 90 percent of the time, they get an attorney because they had trouble getting hold of the insurance company. If the adjuster had just acted promptly and returned calls and paid the medical bills, the client would have been done with the case.

In five minutes of talking to a client, you can figure out what the issues are going to be. Somebody comes in and says they’ve been hurt in an accident but that nobody was found at fault because both parties said the other party had a red light. Okay, now we know that our first issue is going to be a liability. Or it may be a case where the insurer says the injury didn’t happen from the accident, so you know this is going to be a causation case. You wind up being a mini expert on issues because of the cases you handle. Years ago, I had someone who fell on a piece of carpet in a doctor’s office. For about six months I talked to carpet experts. I read about carpets. I talked to the two most renowned experts on carpets in the Southeast. I was an expert on that subject as the case moved forward.

I had a client who was a veterinary surgeon who got in a wreck and broke her finger. It healed well and she was fine but, basically, she was out of a career. To her, that was her whole livelihood. She wasn’t planning on getting an attorney until they yanked her around about the car so much. We wound up getting her case resolved for a six-figure settlement. If I had gotten that same kind of injury that case would have been worth $50,000. She used that money to put herself back through school, and now she’s a vet tech.