Dating back to our Bone Screw days we have
mostly pleasant memories of using surveillance to catch plaintiffs
making phony claims. For a variety of reasons, a large
percentage of the Bone Screw plaintiffs were
workers' compensation claimants. A bigger collection of
malingerers, Munchausens, and phony fibromyalgias we've never
encountered, before or since. This motley crew, particularly
in those cases litigated outside the MDL, or after remand, was
particularly amenable to surveillance as a means of exposing their
overblown, or often just plain invented, injury claims.
One guy who supposedly couldn't lift more than ten pounds
after his back injury, we got on tape picking up the back end of
his motorcycle to put it on a jack. Another guy who claimed
he could hardly walk, we caught riding a bicycle more than a mile
on a Jersey Shore boardwalk. And so on and so forth.
Sometimes their counsel were in cahoots, but most of the time their
counsel (at least counsel
