The Case of Contractor’s Court

“I object!” I said with such a high degree of certitude that I pointed to the ceiling.

“We only asked you to confirm your full name, Mr. Insura,” the judge said, eyeing me cautiously.

“That’s why I objected, judge. I don’t want anyone to know that my middle name is Starchild.”

And so my day on the witness stand began. I was asked to be an expert witness in an insurance fraud case involving a man and a case of expensive cigars. I accepted because I wanted to see insurance justice treated like a T-bone steak and get well done. However, this put me someplace I loathed to be: in the vicinity of lawyers.

The cigar man’s lawyer, a power-suited woman who would have been very attractive if she wasn’t a lawyer, walked up to me. I visibly shook, pushing myself back into the corner of the witness box as if a spider approached.

With snake eyes and a forked tongue, she said, “You don’t like lawyers, do you Mr. Insura?”

“I don’t.” I had been sworn in, so I had to tell the whole truth. “You guys charge more than a college freshman with her first credit card.”

“Ah,” she said with a wink, buttering me up like morning toast. “We’re not that bad, are we? Deep down we’re good people.”

“Six feet deep down,” I countered.

“I see, Mr. Insura. You’re one of those people who likes telling lawyer jokes. I’d tell an insurance agent joke, but I don’t like to kick a man when he’s already so low.”

“Judge,” I said, standing up and pushing my sleeves back. “You’re about to have a hostile witness on your hands.”

“Calm down, Mr. Insura,” the judge said, his gavel poised to strike. “And that’s enough from you, counsel. Actually, before we get started, I need some insurance advice myself.”

“Spill it, Judge.”

“My neighbor is a landscape contractor who occasionally takes his employees to his home to work around the yard. Once, when they finished, he asked a couple of his guys to help him move a heavy chest filled with Civil War-era cannonballs. While lifting this chest, one employee became seriously hurt. The workers compensation carrier denied coverage, indicating the injured man was outside the scope of his duties as an employee for a landscape contractor. Should this claim be covered?”

“Well judge,” I said. “We’ll need to scope this out a bit more before we reach a final verdict.”

Will Ace find the carrier guilty of a bad denial?

Check your solution against Ace’s.