Or the gap in treatment eliminates your lost wage claim for the gap period or beyond. Why? There is a doctor's note that you needed to be off both before and after the gap and no evidence whatsoever that you either didn't lose the time from work or did so for a non-accident related reason.
These are almost nonsensical rulings but they happen everyday. It is not because the judges are biased or ill-intended. It is because the familiar denizens of the district court argue them and insinuate them into every case. It is inevitable that this would gain some traction.
A familiar, seemingly friendly, defense lawyer is yet again in your courtroom and is arguing for the thirtieth time that lost wages should be denied for some reason that cannot be embodied in evidence. You don't want to seem biased against them or their clients and you have heard this argument made innumerable times by the usual suspects and well the claimant did miss two weeks of therapy and doesn't remember why although he "thinks' it was because his two year old twins were sick.
Throw the defense a bone, reduce the wages or eliminate them for the gap period, what's the harm? Well actually quite a lot
.The injured person loses two weeks or more of wages which they can ill afford given the fact that they are having unexpected medical expenses due entirely to the negligence of the at-fault driver. The defense bar is encouraged to find more creative non-evidentiary ways of attacking lost wages and medical expenses. The insurance adjusters see actual benefit from making unreasonable offers that don't contemplate making the injured parties whole.
And of course, the judge begins traveling down the road of disallowing legitimate lost income claims and medical expenses without any countervailing evidence being introduced. Makes it easy to do it routinely and make the familiar denizens of the courtroom happy with you.
This is not to suggest that all judges do this but rather to say that if enough do the whole ecosystem of personal injury claims becomes about denying claims for hyper-technical reasons rather than honoring them. Having tried a variety of these cases recently, I am always amazed when the defense lawyer seems to feel put upon when the judge awards all the medical expenses and lost wages and then offers some modest amount of pain and suffering damages.
That is how it supposed to work. If the medical expenses, lost wages and pain and suffering are supported by actual evidence, they should be awarded and pain is well...bad. The tort system exists to fairly compensate people who are injured so they don't resort to perpetrating violence against those who visit injury on them. People spend enormous amounts of money to avoid or quiet pain and once fair compensation for pain and suffering is reduced or eliminated the palliative effect of the tort compensatory system will erode.
