Between the crash and the injury there is a paragraph most lawyers never write. It is three sentences long. It is the difference between a claim and a case.
Here is the paragraph as it usually appears. As a result of the collision, Plaintiff sustained serious bodily injuries. Read it as an adjuster reads it. A collision happened, somewhere; injuries followed, somehow; the word serious is doing all the work and the word serious is an opinion. There is no picture in it. Nothing in the sentence connects the wreck to the body, so the reader supplies the connection himself, and the connection he supplies is the one his training gives him: low-speed, soft tissue, reserve accordingly.
The mechanism paragraph closes that gap, and it does it in three moves that never change. The force. The body. The result.
The first sentence is the force, and it is made of numbers from the record. The pickup was doing fifty-five when it met the back of the stopped sedan; the sedan went from zero to twenty-eight miles an hour in about a tenth of a second. That is a delta-V, stated in words a juror can feel. You get it from the reconstruction and the data recorders, not from adjectives, and you do not say it was violent. Twenty-eight in a tenth of a second is violent. The reader will get there first.
The second sentence is the body, and it is made of anatomy in plain words. Her torso was caught by the belt; her head was not, and it went forward and then back, and the brain inside it went with the skull and then kept going, turning, a beat behind, until the fibers that connect its two halves were stretched past what they can take. That is the treating doctor’s note translated into a sentence a person can picture. One metaphor at most, and only if it is true. No jargon a juror cannot see.
The third sentence is the result, and it names the injury as the consequence of the first two. That is a diffuse axonal injury; the CT in the emergency room could not show it, the MRI nine days later did, and it is why she cannot hold a conversation past the second question. Force, body, result. Each sentence ends on a noun. None of them contains an adverb.
Try it on the wreck under a trailer. The car met the trailer’s rear at thirty-eight miles an hour with the guard bent upward from an earlier hit, so the trailer floor entered the car at the height of the windshield header. His body stopped against the belt; his head did not stop, because the thing it met was the trailer. The injury was to the head, and it was not survivable. Three sentences, and the adjuster who reads them does not reach for the soft-tissue reserve, because there is no room in the sentences for him to.
Rules for the paragraph. Every number comes from something you can produce: the recorder, the reconstruction, the medical record. Every anatomical claim comes from a treating physician or a retained one, and you write it the way they said it, only shorter. You write it once, early, and then it travels: it is the paragraph in the demand letter that the adjuster quotes to his supervisor, the paragraph in the petition that survives a motion, the paragraph the expert is designated to explain, and the paragraph you say out loud in opening, in the same words, so that by the time the doctor testifies the jury has already heard the mechanism twice and is waiting for her to confirm it.
What the paragraph is really doing is refusing to let the reader fill in the blank. Serious injuries invites him to guess, and he guesses low. Twenty-eight miles an hour in a tenth of a second, a brain turning inside a skull, an MRI on day nine, leaves him nothing to guess. He can only decide whether to believe it, and you have given him the records that make that decision easy.
The science behind the two examples is in The Third Collision and Underride; the number that starts every mechanism paragraph is explained in Delta-V. The craft rules it applies are in The Adverb and Show the Second and a Half. General information, not legal advice.
