Nearly two years ago, in the case Pebley v. Santa Clara Organics, LLC (2018) 22 Cal.App.5t 1266, the sixth division of the Second Appellate District upended, to the chagrin of personal injury defendants, and to the joy of personal injury plaintiffs, what the former had too optimistically believed was settled law on economic damages in personal injury cases. That law had come down from the California Supreme Court in its decision in the seminal case Howell v. Hamilton Meats & Provisions, Inc. (2011) 52 Cal.4th 541, 566. Under Howell, the measure of economic damages was held to be the lesser of 1) the dollar amount actually incurred, rather than billed, for a patient’s treatment, or 2) the reasonable value of that treatment. Howell’s most vigorous offspring perhaps was Corenbaum v. Lampkin (2013) 215 Cal.App.4th 1308. The court in Corenbaum ruled, building on the logic of Howell, that not only are medical bills not the measure of damages in personal injury cases; such bills are, in fact, inadmissible, since they are irrelevant to determining those damages.

Straus Meyers, LLP, did not allow plaintiff to realize this strategy on this occasion. Straus Meyers, LLP successfully moved to strike three times successive amended complaints, each time removing punitive damages language, until the court granted its third and last motion to strike without leave to amend. Concurrently, while aggressively undertaking this and other motion work, Straus Meyers, LLP, continued to vigorously investigate the facts until it located, and then deposed, new witnesses, which until then had been elusive, and whose whereabouts plaintiff had conveniently failed to disclose. The testimony of these witnesses would eventually completely undermine the plaintiff’s attempts to portray the insurance company’s behavior in a bad light, and provided the necessary material for an Insurance Code Section 1871.7 counter-claim against plaintiff for insurance fraud, which, as trial approached, ultimately resulted in plaintiff dropping his earlier six-figure settlement demand to….zero.