It’s late and you’re tired. After a long day, you just want to be home in time for dinner. But as you enter an intersection, a truck barrels through a stop sign, smashing into your passenger side. Within seconds, every plan is changed, every project delayed, and every concern you had before this moment is overshadowed by an uncertain future. Filling hours in the hospital, a wrecked car, waiting for insurance to approve repairs, you’re stuck, and you’re mad, and you’re starting to think that you’ll never recover, in more ways than one.

In his new book, Not A Good Neighbor, injury lawyer Brian LaBovick, shows you how to navigate the paperwork and pitfalls of an automobile accident case. He shares stories from nearly three decades of practice to help you maximize benefits in this often-complicated process. You’ll learn the ins and outs of auto accident insurance and ways to increase your settlement, with the strategies you need to attain the money you deserve. In today’s world, insurance alone cannot protect you. Learn how to protect yourself and fight for fairness, so you’ll never be a victim again.

Drew Appelbaum: Hey, listeners, my name is Drew Applebaum. And I’m excited to be here today with Brian LaBovick, author of Not A Good Neighbor: A Lawyer’s Guide to Beating Big Insurance by Settling Your Own Auto Accident Case. Brian, thank you for joining. Welcome to the Author Hour podcast.

Brian LaBovick: Thanks. Super happy to be here.

Drew Appelbaum: Let’s kick this off. Can you give us a rundown of your professional background?

Brian LaBovick: Well, I am a lawyer by trade. So, you start off, you go to law school, and when you graduate, you gotta look for a job. Now, I went to law school and all I thought about at that time was being a prosecutor. I wanted to be a trial lawyer, I was relatively conservative as people went, and I thought being a prosecutor was going to be my career path. I graduated from law school. I was very lucky to be selected for the United States Department of Justice Honors Graduate Program and that’s how I started my career. I learned how to try cases there.

When I came out of that and decided to go into civil practice, I originally had a job with a small firm, and I was their main trial lawyer. So, they had another attorney there who was a prolific business generator. And they needed somebody who could try cases. I got to cut my teeth trying civil cases for them and very shortly thereafter, I went out on my own. I’ve run my own firm since that time, which was 1993. So, it’s been quite a while and I’ve been a civil trial lawyer since that time.

Drew Appelbaum: Now, why was now the time to share these stories in the book? Was there an “aha” moment? Did you see something inspiring? Or was it something as simple as you had some more time on your hands because of COVID?

Brian LaBovick: No. It was two things that converged. I decided to do this pre-COVID. COVID was just a little bit of a lucky break that the world shut down and I could actually concentrate and get the book done. But two things happened.

First, I get a lot of calls from a lot of people who have been involved in automobile accidents and they want to handle the case themselves, because either their injury is minor, or they’re really not very injured at all, and they don’t feel like hiring a lawyer is something they want to do. But they’re so lost in the process. So, that’s one thing that’s happened my whole career.

The other thing that dovetailed into that is that I had a guy in Tampa call me for this exact thing and I did walk him through the process. I went through the process with him, and I gave him an extraordinary amount of time. He and I clicked for whatever reason, we got along, and we still are friends to this date. He went through the process and did it on his own and he had a very successful outcome.

When we were done, he said, “You have got to write a book about this, because you’re a great teacher, you love telling stories, you used those stories to teach me how to get my case done, and if you could do that in a book, you could help out a lot of people without having to spend all this time on the phone, coaching them through it.”

I really don’t have the capacity to do that for a bunch of people. So, I said, “You know, I’ve got to do that.” I wanted to do it, and I started the process and then COVID hit, and I crushed it this year in getting it done. So, that’s what we did.

People Learn through Stories

Drew Appelbaum: So, you have this case where you basically walked somebody through this in Tampa and you decided, “Hey, it’s time to write the book.” You probably had the idea of the book rattling around in your head, but a lot of times what happens with authors is during the writing process, just by digging deeper into the subject, there are some major breakthroughs and learnings. Did you have any of these along your writing journey?

Brian LaBovick: Did I have a breakthrough in learning? I did to some degree. What I learned is that, similar to what this gentleman in Tampa taught me, people don’t learn well through being instructed in steps.

So, for example, when I started the book, I thought, let me do this how-to book and we’ll teach people how to use these forms, and how to use the system so that they can do this. That was the original concept of the book, kind of a how to handle your own automobile accident case for dummies, which may even be out there. I don’t think so. But possibly, I guess. That was the original thought process.

What I learned was what he taught me, which is that people learn by hearing stories, people learn by hearing examples, and that I had to bring to light the experiences that I’ve gone through, through hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of automobile accident cases, and bring those facts to people so that they could actually incorporate them, understand them, and use them in a successful way to end their own automobile related problems.

Drew Appelbaum: Now, who exactly is this book for? Is this something everybody should know and they should give it to you in Driver’s Ed? Or is this for people who have recently been in an accident?

Brian LaBovick: That would be the best, right? An ounce of prevention is worth, whatever, of solution. Most people who are going to want to read this book have just been involved in an automobile accident. You don’t believe that you’ve got a problem until you’ve got the problem.

Most people are driving around, and they say, “I have full coverage. If I’m in an accident, everything’s going to be okay.” And then they get into an accident and they don’t even know what to do first. They don’t know if they are allowed to photograph somebody’s license? Are they allowed to photograph their car? Can they record them at the scene? Should they be taking photos at the scene? Should they call the police? There are a billion questions that run through your head, and you’re panicked, and you’re not sure if you’re hurt, and your heart’s racing and your mind’s racing, and you make lots and lots of wrong decisions.

So, it’s better to read the book beforehand. But what will happen is that most people will say, “You know what, I’m going to pick that book up and I’m going to read it now.” And they’re going to go backward and have to fill in the gaps of what happened from the time of the accident, to wherever they are when they pick up the book. Better to read it beforehand, clearly, but it will help you to pick up those pieces if you read it three weeks after, or if you start skimming it two days after.

Drew Appelbaum: Let’s dive into the book. I have to ask this question. And I don’t know, because you are a lawyer if you want to answer this, but you’ve been pretty honest and the book is very honest. Do you need a lawyer after an accident?

Brian LaBovick: That is a very hard question to answer on the front end because it assumes that you can make a generalization for the accident that happened. Do you need a lawyer? Probably not.

Most people involved in accidents do not rise to the level that they would need a lawyer to take over their case. You really need a lawyer when there is significant human damage that occurs, when you’re terribly injured, or when you’ve got a real problem that happens because of the accident. The problem with that analysis, the hard part about that analysis is that you don’t know whether you’re really hurt or not. Many times, right after an accident, you don’t even know if you’re hurt and that’s borne out over and over again.

There was a model, I’m trying to remember her name. She’s in the book. She was involved in a terrible accident. She ended up having a liver laceration, and she ended up almost dying. She walked away from the scene thinking she was okay. So, you need to really pay attention to your body after an accident. Many people are like, “Oh, I feel okay”, because they’ve got all this adrenaline rushing through them. And the next day, their neck hurts, and they don’t know where to go and they don’t know what to do.

Depending on the circumstance will determine whether or not you need a lawyer. The general rule for me is that regardless of whether you need a lawyer or you don’t need a lawyer, you need a doctor first. You don’t need to worry about the legal side of the case, you need to worry about your human damaged side of the case. You need to worry about making sure you’re healthy, and that you’re going to be okay. That’s the first most important thing.

So, if you’re involved in an automobile accident, get medical care fast. If you’re really hurting right from the scene, go in the ambulance. They’re going to call an ambulance in any significant accident case and if you’re feeling bad, go and get checked out at the hospital, because you don’t know how bad it is. If you think, “I’m not going to go in an ambulance.” If that’s not going to happen, then if you start to hurt, an hour later, go to the hospital emergency room and tell them what happened. Go to an urgent care and tell them what happened. I mean, let people know that you’re hurting and get that medical care. That’s very important.

The Actual Costs

Drew Appelbaum: I want to dig more into that in a moment. But one of the eye-opening facts in the book was actually the costs involved if you do choose to go the lawyer route. Can you talk about those costs?

Brian LaBovick: It depends on the lawyer you choose, whether or not you have to worry about the costs. So, the cost in hiring a lawyer is twofold. The first cost is attorney’s fees. I don’t actually know any injury lawyers who don’t work this way–we all work on a contingency fee. In other words, we don’t get paid unless we get money for you. That makes it extremely easy to afford the fees involved in hiring a lawyer. It makes it very low risk to hire a lawyer.

The other flip side of that is that there are actual costs involved in prosecuting a case. And those costs are as simple as the cost of medical bills, the cost of getting the accident report from the police, there’s mail costs, and file costs and fax costs, and copy charges. So, there’s a whole host of very minor costs that lawyers charge because they’re paying that to run the case. Just having a case, in an office, you open up a file, you have a hard file. In my office, those hard files that we used to have because now we’re paperless, but we used to have hard files and the files themselves, these big two-ring binder things were like $8 just for that. So, that goes in as a cost.

If you’re with an injury firm of any significant size, the costs are usually something that the lawyer bears, and that they will live with betting in your case that they can get those costs reimbursed. I’ve been practicing for 30 years, and I don’t think that I’ve ever held any client accountable for costs on cases that have gone nowhere. Whether they went nowhere, because they were liable, or they went nowhere, because something happened in the case where it didn’t work out well, which is really not very often at all, but it does happen, maybe once every five years.

So, there are costs that way that the client has to worry about, and you want a law firm that has a reputation for not holding a client’s fee to the file for even the $300, $400, or $500 that having the case in the office will end up costing the lawyer.

Now, if you hire a lawyer, at least in my state, you have the right to fire a lawyer whenever you want, because we have a right to work state, which means you’re the boss, he’s the employee, or she’s the employee, and you can fire your lawyer whenever you want. So, if you end up firing your lawyer, almost all law firms will put a cost lien on your file, which means that if you ever do settle the case, the insurance company is going to say, “Well, your lawyer has a cost lien, and we’re going to pay him back that out of the settlement.” So, that does exist out there. But it’s usually the most minor part of the case and not really something that you should worry about in the capacity of hiring a law firm to handle an injury case.

If you’re going to hire a law firm to handle an injury case, it should be for a relatively significant sum of money and the costs of prosecuting it should not be the reason that you worry about moving forward.

Drew Appelbaum: Starting right after an accident, you kind of touched on it before, what should you do to protect yourself? Is exchanging insurance cards and potentially taking pictures enough? What would you say is on your post-accident checklist, if you’re in the right mind frame of thinking of it?

Brian LaBovick: If you’re really attentive, you’re going to want to take pictures of both vehicles, you’re going to want to take pictures of the intersection, and I say take pictures because it’s great to have that but we all carry smartphones now. So, it used to be carry a camera in your car and then start taking pictures. We don’t have to do that anymore. Almost everyone I know carries a smartphone that has the capacity to take pictures.

So, just start snapping off digital photos. It’s free for you. Snap off a video of what’s happening. Look at every intersection, every corner of that intersection, so that you can see if there are any cameras from related businesses. There are security cameras on almost every commercial building now. Many of them capture the accidents that happen at intersections or on roads in front of them. We’ve been very lucky, after accidents, when we are investigating cases, running out with our investigator, and grabbing the video that happens at the scene.

In fact, earlier today, I had a call from a woman that we are investigating her husband’s unfortunate death case riding a bicycle, and there’s a business and we know that they have the video and we need that video because that video proves that our client was not at fault in the accident. We believe we’re going to get it, but we’re in the middle of finding that for them and that’s going to be a definitive moment in the case. So, you want to be able to look for those things and have those things available as soon as possible.

The other thing you want to do is get as much information from the other drivers involved in the accident, whether it’s one or two. Make sure you get name, address, copy of their license, copy of their insurance card. And if there’s any significant damage to the vehicles at all, any damage, really, you want the police to come and write up a report.

The other thing that you want to do is you want to get people to admit accountability while they’re feeling bad about it. So, you get out of a car, and the person who caused the accident, their reaction is, “Let me apologize for what happened. I’m so sorry I was blah, blah, blah, whatever, looking at my phone, fixing my radio, getting a drink of water. I thought you were going to go, and I didn’t realize you were going to stop at the yellow light.” Whatever the reason is that the accident happened, get that admission, right up front. You can be nice about it and say, “Oh, it’s okay. We’re going to be okay, I’m okay, you’re okay. That’s the most important thing.” But when the police come, make sure you relate that. Say it right in front of him, you have to be very assertive. “He admitted that the reason that he hit me was because he was looking at his phone, so I want that noted that it’s not my fault. He agreed that it’s his fault, he was looking at his phone.” Get that admission right into the police report, that’s going to help you out tremendously.

Drew Appelbaum: Now, it could be so particular as you could even have issues if you don’t choose the right body shop. Are there differences in quotes you can get and is there a body shop you should be looking for if you have to take your car in to be repaired?

Brian LaBovick: So, body shops are very interesting. Quality of body shop is obviously on a body shop by body shop basis. So, in your area, I would find people that have reputable body shops that do good work, that have a reputation for doing good work. That’s number one. There’s a lot of them out there and there’s a lot of good people who do bodywork and they do a great job of it.

The insurance companies go out to the major body shops, whether they be dealership body shops, or dealership related body shops, or independent body shops that have grown big enough that they make deals with the insurance companies. So, GEICO, or Allstate, or State Farm, or Progressive, will have a deal with a body shop, and if you go to that body shop, the adjuster will go there, and the body shop owner or somebody there will be able to adjust that claim very quickly. And that’s great because then you don’t have to worry about paying them, you know that they’re certified by that insurance company you’re using, and the payment and getting it done is great.

But there’s a little trick that you have to recognize that happens within the fixing of the automobile upfront. That is that many body shops could have, and I don’t want to say they do, but they could, so be aware of this, have a, I want to say even unwritten deal that they will do a very cursory estimate of the cost of repair of a vehicle. So, they’ll look at a vehicle and they’ll say, and you’ll see this on the repair estimates, it’ll say, “Estimated repair $787. I haven’t taken the bumper off to see if there are any deformation damages underneath it. And as long as there aren’t, then that should be the cost of the repairs.”

What they’re hoping, what the insurance company is hoping, is that the owner of that car says, “I’ll take that check and release you from having to do any more bodywork. I want the money instead of the repaired car, and I’ll get it fixed later. I’ll hammer out the bumper or I’ll paint the bumper later, whatever it is.” They count on the fact that many people will take the money over the repair.

The problem with that is that almost invariably the cost of that repair is significantly more than what that original estimate is. Because once you start taking pieces off the car and looking under them, anytime there’s any other damage under there, it drives the cost of that repair up significantly.

So, my suggestion is, if you’ve got a car that demands repair, get your car repaired, make them do the full repair, check it, make sure it works well, drive it before you say it’s released, make sure it’s completely done. Be very aggressive about making sure that your car is completely repaired before you release the insurance company from doing anything further on it. And that’s the dirty little secret about body shop work.

Not a Good Neighbor

Drew Appelbaum: I think a lot of people think that they can just call one of the big insurance companies they pay their monthly, yearly payments, and they assume they’re going to be taken care of in the event of an accident. Is this actually the case? And does your insurance company actually care for you, as the commercials would insinuate?

Brian LaBovick: Insurance companies, at least to date, are still run by human beings, and so you’re going to have a human being adjuster who is going to look at your claim. And they’re going to make decisions about your claim based on the situation and based on who they are as a human being.

I will tell you that there are payment systems in place for those adjusters, bonuses, and whatever else, promotions they get, for keeping their claims under a certain limit. And so, they are rewarded for behavior that limits the money that goes out the door. That’s the way it has to be. Insurance companies make their money by accepting premium payments, and never paying out on claims. If they could do that, if they could accept lots of premiums, and never pay a claim, that would make them very happy. So, whether they’re your insurance company, and they need to pay on your claim, or whether they’re the other guy’s insurance company, and they need to pay on your claim, you’re taking money away from an insurance company, and they’re going to find ways of making that difficult at all times.

Whether or not they’re on your side in any way, is without a doubt, just simply not true. They’re only on your side to the amount they must be on your side pursuant to the contract, to the letter of that contract, and if you in any way think they’re going to go beyond that contract, that almost never happens. Have I seen it happen occasionally? I have. Almost always, it’s because of some other reason, not the human element. I have never seen an insurance company say the human element is going to force us to pay this claim because we feel terrible. That’s not what happens.

They’ll pay the claim because they’re afraid of bad faith or they’ll pay the claim because they contractually must, or they’ll pay the claim because there’s some lawyer that’s going to strong-arm them and cause them to pay both an attorney’s fee and the claim or is going to make some type of claim to the state for bad faith or bad faith insurance practices or something like that. But they don’t pay it because they feel bad for you, ever.

So, that knowledge is very important when you’re dealing with an insurance company. You can’t really–I want to say trust your adjuster on your side or their adjuster on their side. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to give you a personal experience.

I was driving my son’s car and without going into the here and there about the case, I was driven up onto a curb and I hurt the car. No injuries, no accident with another car, just a problem where I drove up onto the curb and we blew out a tire, I hurt a rim. I didn’t know how badly I had hurt anything else, and I took the car into the body shop. The body shop looked at the car, did an estimate, I said, “Go ahead and fix the car.” The car repairs were actually pretty expensive. They were like $1,200 to $1,300 and they went ahead to fix the car.

When I went to go and pick up the car, now, I haven’t had a claim against my estate. I was literally hit by a car a year ago when I was jogging and I twisted my ankle and I said, “You know what, it didn’t hurt me bad.” I never made a claim. I put my insurance company on notice. We have something called PIP. I mean, I got no money out of being hit as a pedestrian, because I wasn’t hurt, thankfully. So, I was just happy that I was good and we moved on.

So, this is who I am as a person. My insurance company knows that because I didn’t take advantage of an accident case that I could have taken advantage of. I’m an honest guy by nature, and I get into this property damage thing and I pick up my car and I say, “Okay, great.”

When I go to pick it up, there’s more damage to the car that we noticed. In other words, what happened is we opened the hood and I noticed that one of the motor mounts was broken. There was a black thing that was missing. And I asked, “What’s that?” And he looked at it, and he goes, “Oh my God, this motor mount cracked.” So clearly a motor mount had cracked. And I said, “Well, I’m late for a hearing. I’m going to take my car and I’ll bring it back when I get a chance.” And he said, “Great.” I said, “Take a picture of it. Make sure the insurance company knows, let’s document it here.” He said, “Okay.” I drove away, went to the hearing. I got caught up.

A week went by. I took it back to him, like 10 days later. He calls me up and he said, “The insurance company’s denying the claim.” “Why is the insurance company denying the claim?” “They’re saying you must have been in a secondary accident. They want you to pay a secondary deductible.” I said, “But we have proof. I mean, you have it.” He said, “No. They don’t believe me. They want to send it to a Special Investigations Unit, SIU, to investigate your claim on your car, because there’s this other $1,000 worth of damage.” And I said, “That’s crazy. Come on. This is crazy.” Well, let me tell you, they put the hooks to me, and I ended up having to deal with that in a kind of a hard way, just to give you an idea of how much they’ll fight to do that.

Now, from their perspective, they’re thinking, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense. He’s trying to take advantage. This is wrong. He did something else to the car.” Who knows what they did? But I had an adjuster there who basically told me that I was trying to defraud them for the $500 deductible that I have on the car, which is ridiculous, but it was their position and I had to fight that.

Drew Appelbaum: Yeah, that’s wild, that that’s your own company and provider putting you on the hot seat like that, and not trusting you.

Brian LaBovick: On a person who, historically, they can see that I put them on notice a year beforehand, that I was involved in a pedestrian car incident and I didn’t even use my PIP, no fault insurance to pay for a doctor bill, because I walked off my twisted ankle. I could have gone to the doctor, filed a PIP claim, had them do that, made a claim for my uninsured benefits. I probably could have made $10,000 on that claim if I was a dishonest person. But that’s not who I was. And they understand the nature of how these things work. They can see, “Okay, this guy is, he’s an honest client of ours. He’s had our policy for 15 years. He’s made two claims.” Am I now going to defraud them on a $500 deductible? And that’s what they told me I was doing. It’s just terrible.

Underestimating the Damage

Drew Appelbaum: You’ve seen so many of these cases, what is the absolute number one mistake that you find that people make?

Brian LaBovick: The biggest mistake that I think people make is underestimating the value of the damage that they’ve suffered. I think that they don’t recognize that their cases do have more value than they think, and that’s probably the thing that hurts them the most because when you don’t recognize the value of what you have in front of you, you don’t treat it as such. Then it ends up not being valuable because you haven’t worked it up the way you’re supposed to. That really is all related to medical treatment and analysis of injury, and doing the things that are necessary to document those injuries.

So, you need to document how this accident has affected your life with human stories and human analysis, because that’s really what allows you to let the insurance company know that a jury will eventually give you money on the case.

My job as the injury lawyer is to look at your life, and to recognize that if your life has been hurt in any way, I’m going to be able to tell that story to a jury, and they’re going to recognize the value of that, and the value of that is really something significant. I usually am able to drive that point home by talking to the jury in jury selection about paying for the full damages in a case. I’ll ask if there’s anybody here who would object if this were a lawsuit about the defendant who ran over my client’s diamond and crushed it, and the diamond was worth $10 million. If that was what we could prove that it was, it was a $10 million diamond, and we clearly could show that he was guilty of running over–it’s really liable for running over, but people think in terms of guilt and innocence–liable for that incident, would you object to the lawsuit for $10 million? Or is that like, “No, I really can’t imagine giving $10 million in a lawsuit, I’m not going to give you $10 million for the diamond.” And everybody says, “Well, whatever the thing is if you can show me that’s the value of it, of course, $10 million, is what it is. Whether it’s 10 million, $100 million, $2 million, $2, it doesn’t matter. The thing is what it is, right? As long as we can prove that, then it is what it is.

I said, “Okay, so I want everybody to tell me, what’s the most important thing in your life?” And people answer one of two things–you know what they answer? Health, children, right? My health is my most important asset. My children are my life–those are the two answers that I hear a lot. And so, then I ask, “All right, so is there anybody who feels that the $10 million diamond is worth more than their health? How about for a child? Can I give you $10 million for your child?” Some people laugh and they say, “Yes.” But depending on the child, right?

The point is that human damage is an expensive item because we should be valuing it more than the physical value of stuff, whether that stuff is our gold Rolex, or whether that stuff is our Maserati car, or whatever physical object you deem most important in your life, I guarantee you, your health is more valuable.

Drew Appelbaum: That’s a really compelling argument, by the way, I’m sold. I want to go towards the end of the book, and you have some resources back there in the appendix, can you talk about what resources are there?

Brian LaBovick: Sure. So, in the book itself, and we’re going to put all of that stuff on a website also, so eventually we’ll have it up on a website. There are a number of documents, most of them are letters, that you will need to transact business with the insurance company, letters to make sure that the property damage is taken care of, letters to make sure that you get your accident report from the local police agency, letters to make sure that any health insurance policies are providing you with the information on whether they have a lien against your settlement or not, the understanding of what that lien is about, and how to negotiate that lien with the insurance carriers.

There’s a number of things that go into an accident case that are procedural, and you need access to a communication device to get the information, and then to negotiate that information. Some of it is about letting doctors know you don’t have health insurance or maybe don’t take your health insurance, but that you need to be seen and treated so that they have a lien on your case later on. So, when you get a settlement, you can pay them out of the proceeds. Sometimes it’s that you need to get the accident report because the police officer at the scene just does what’s called an exchange of information and he says he’s going to file a report later.

So, it’s those forms that we want to provide to people so that they don’t have to hunt and think and try to make it up on their own. They’re not hard forms if you know what you’re doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s great to just have that formatted, and be able to take them, use them, and move your case through with them.

Drew Appelbaum: It seems like the thing you would want or you would even want to just keep, maybe not in the car, if you’re going to be in an accident, but you’d want to keep it around. It’s such a great go-to guide and very easy to understand. I think it’s brilliant that you put that back there.

Brian, I know we just touched the surface here, but I just want to say writing a book, which is going to help a lot of folks in the unfortunate event of an accident, is no small feat. So, congratulations on publishing your book.

Brian LaBovick: Thank you very much. It’s been a labor of love, honestly. It’s been a lot of fun and I had a great time doing it.

Drew Appelbaum: Now, I do have one question left and it’s the hot seat question. If readers can take away only one thing from the book, what would you want it to be?

Brian LaBovick: I think the thing that readers should take away from the book is that by knowing your rights, and knowing how the system works, you’ll be able to make a wise decision on whether or not you need to involve a lawyer in the case. Because if you read the book, and you come to the conclusion that your case is valuable enough to involve a lawyer, then you really have used the book for its highest best use, which is splitting the wheat from the chaff, right? Being able to say, “Okay, my case right now is a case that I can handle on my own, I can maximize the value to me, I’m not going to involve a lawyer because the lawyer’s time is not going to be well spent on this case, and I can get this done and save pretty much a third of whatever your settlement is up to a certain amount.”

You need to recognize that if your damages are at a point, or if you’re in the type of case, which is noted in the book, where you need a lawyer, you want to be able to know that sooner than later and get into that relationship. Because the attorney, if they are a quality injury attorney, if you get somebody who really loves the craft of it, and cares about you as a person, will start to develop that case early on in the process, will be collecting those bits of information, and doing the investigation necessary so that they do maximize justice for you, and that’s the key to this, is justice maximization.

So, it’s our mission statement, to maximize justice by aggressively fighting for client’s rights. Within that mission, I can maximize justice for you by teaching you how to do a small case on your own, and I can maximize justice for you by teaching you when you need me at the earliest point possible. That’s my goal. That’s the thing I want people to take away.

Drew Appelbaum: This has been a pleasure and I’m really excited for people to check out the book. Everyone, the book is called Not A Good Neighbor and you can find it on Amazon. Brian, besides checking out the book, where can people connect with you?

Brian LaBovick: So, I do have an author website that’s being put up, which is brianlabovick.com. And of course, I am the managing shareholder of my firm and CEO of that firm, which is the LaBovick Law Group. So, pretty easy. Last name.com, labovick.com, www.labovick.com. And you can get me there.

We have informational quest forms, and you can just ask questions there. I really enjoy the process of teaching people how this should work. If I can make time for you, I will. I do need to warn readers that, at this point, it’s extremely hard to find the time to donate to people that want their questions answered. So, I try to return calls, I try to return emails, but if it’s a friendly, “I need advice” question, it is very difficult given the amount of time that I spend working.

Drew Appelbaum: And everything you need is in the book.

Brian LaBovick: Yeah, exactly. Please, get yourself to read it because you won’t ask the questions.

Drew Appelbaum: Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show today, and best of luck with your new book.

Brian LaBovick: It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate that you did this. So, have a great day and I wish everybody the best. Stay healthy, stay safe, and peace out.