Personal injury attorneys find technology is helping them make their case

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Robert Weltchek has been practicing law for more than four decades and has seen a lot of changes in his time.

But he uses one telling word to describe the change that new technology has brought to personal injury attorneys such as himself.

The word: Huge.

“Until maybe 10 years ago I was schlepping foam boards, blowups of medical records – maybe 30 huge boxes – into the courtroom,” said Weltchek, a principal in the Lutherville medical malpractice firm of Weltchek, Callahan & Weltchek.

These days, he said, he simply uses an iPad or a laptop to display much more easily understood – and accurate – images depicting his case.

“It can be very helpful in making sure your version of the facts prevails,” Weltchek said. “This sort of technology helps to secure that the jury sees the true facts of the case.”

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Weltchek, whose firm has won a host of multimillion-dollar decisions and settlements for its clients, is not the only lawyer who has come to value new technologies such as medical imaging as critical tools for personal injury cases.

A 2021 blog posting on mosmedicalrecordreview.com, a medical record review service that aids the medical and legal industries, noted that advanced medical images have become popular, powerful tools in litigation.

“They arouse a prompt, instinctive reaction in the viewers and are much more potent than words when it comes to demonstrating the plaintiff’s condition,” the blog went on, and the use of the tools “can be a major deciding factor in a personal injury lawsuit.”

In summary, the blog noted, accurate, modern medical images can: prove that an injury is serious or debilitating; help the plaintiff obtain the proper compensation; help insurers and defense attorneys establish that an injury is not serious; help demonstrate the seriousness of an injury during a trial; and, are much more effective than reading about them in medical records.

A blog on Purview.net, the website of a health-care company that works to improve access to health care by providing a way to organize, share and access medical records, also sang the praises of the use of medical imaging in personal injury cases – and even criminal trials.

“Often there is no better way to sway a jury than to show them a scanned image of an injury, a botched medical procedure or path of a bullet,” it stated. “Descriptions from expert witnesses are important. But a picture is worth a couple of thousand words – or maybe more.”

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Attorney Jim Gentry, co-founder and CEO of the Washington-based Gentry & Associates, a litigation, technology and consulting firm that specializes in producing high-tech visuals for trials, mediations and arbitrations, has decades of both trial experience and of helping other attorneys use technology in their work.

Over the past 30 years, he said, technology in the courtroom has progressed and is now commonly  used both sides in both civil and criminal cases.

Over the years, he said, it has dramatically changed the landscape of trials.

Verbal eloquence and a strong case in the courtroom are still important of course,” he said, “but they are no longer sufficient on their own.”

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Today, he explained “immediacy, engagement and visual stimulation are also critical in the courtroom. Jurors expect to see your case come to life with movement, sound, documents, pictures, diagrams maps, medical illustrations, animations.”

Technology alone does not win cases, Gentry conceded. But it can make a case more compelling, and more and more lawyers are becoming comfortable with using it in the courtroom.

“In many ways they have adapted out of necessity,” he said. “When one side uses technology and the other side uses flip charts, there is an obvious disparity, which will be noticed by jurors immediately.

The trend of using high-tech presentations in trials is not likely to abate, Gentry said, because it works.

“I can foresee jurors one day donning 3D goggles to visualize the human body or a car accident or other evidence,” he said.