Main Page

The purpose of this site is to help people to deal with trauma, especially with road traffic injury and dealing with insurance company (in my case QBE - empire of evil). My goal is to share my experience and knowledge I gained going through this terrible ordeal, so that other people can avoid needless suffering I am going through.

Hi, my name is Dr Alfonsas Stonis. I created my own site many years ago. The goal was to share some useful information, mostly from IT sector. During the last several years it was attacked many times and ended up being down most of the time. One day I will restore it. So, now this site has two domain names stonis.info and roadtrafficinjury.net. My main focus is recovery from road traffic injury and all information on this site is about it.

I am migrating to MediaWiki again. For now my focus is about the current task: exaggerated legal fees

This site is my about terrible road traffic injury I suffered on 2015-03-30 and my attempts to restore my life. There are many things I learned and I wish I found that information online when I got injured. So, I am posting the most useful information here. I hope it will help someone. The end goal is to have step by step guide how to navigate this difficult part of your life after road traffic event (or any other traumatic event).

Information on this site

Still in HTML format

Road Traffic Injury - full story of my troubles for the last 9 years can be found here.
- Exaggerated legal fees
- Analysis of itemized Law Partners bill

Motivation

I got injured on 2015-03-30. This then I struggled with injuries. It has been very difficult and painful way. For more than 8 years I suffer in complete misery, and it could have been very different. I needed support that I was not able to find while I tried to find it very hard. There are many things I wish I knew then. I do not think my story is unique. I think the lessons I have learned can help many people. I still need help. I so want to tell in my desperate attempts to find help "if you help me you will help not only me, but also all the people who will benefit from my experiences". I lost 8 years of my life, that were meant to be the best years. It is a crushing fact. However, I am trying to reframe/remake it so, that it would be very expensive learning experience, that I can use helping other people.

There were 3 important questions I had to answer before starting this project (creating a guide how to recover from road traffic injury):

How much benefit it can bring to other people?
Is there something I can do about it?
Am I able to do it?

How much benefit it can bring to other people?

My case. I was very highly skilled software developer. I have PhD in computer science. All got cut short. For 8 years I live in misery did not earn a single cent. While I would be easily earning $200k per year. I have about $300k expenses related to insurance claim with QBE. This took enormous toll on my health. I got miserable compensation: $100k for loss of income for the last 8 years. Even in very pessimistic calculation expenses were $200k to high and compensation (including other components) $300k to low. So, total difference of $500k. However, I would not go through this suffering even for $100M. That is my life, and there will be no other.

According to NSW Transport there has been 9582 serious injuries (hospitalizations) on NSW roads over the last 12 months. I assume vast majority of them go through insurance claim process at least for medical bills. Maybe some of them have different insurance company, maybe only QBE is so nasty. However, I think it is more likely that others cause problems too. I have very bad impression about personal injury lawyers. Unfortunately, all lawyers I have been involved were bad. Because I had problems with QBE and lawyers, I contacted many firms and found only one who seemed to be trustworthy and few potentially good, but I did not communicate with them long enough. I have to find it, but I also seen statistic on some brochure that about 60% of people who had road traffic injury develop mental health problems adding to their problems dealing with insurance. The problem is that it seems that over time personal injury claims become closed area where even at the level of NSW personal injury lawyers, insurance lawyers and government official know each other. They develop (business) relationships and start making deals, that in time become corruption. So, even hoping that about half of injured people do well it still leaves about 5000 people who go through terrible process. My only hope that not everyone runs into such scamming lawyers as I did.

This is only for road traffic injuries. Personal Injuries include other injuries like covered by worker compensation and I believe these were much higher than road traffic injuries.

Is there something I can do about it?

The most important thing I was looking for was a realizable information what to do. I was looking for someone's story, who went thought the same problems. And I could not find it. Imagine if I found it and it saved me big part of 8 years of suffering and $300k in legal fees and loss of income for 8 years. I do not know how much I would have saved, but I believe a lot. So, the information that I am writing here would have helped me a lot. The limited feedback I had from other people running through similar problems is the same - that would have helped them a lot.

I have further ideas how I can help, but first of all I need to help myself I need a good story how I was able to overcome all these obstacles. I believe this can be of enormous help, but I need to choose what to focus first and that is helping myself.

Am I able to do it?

Before taking on this task I have to be sure will I be able to do. I have worked on many large project scales at all stages of their implementation. I was working on one when I got injured. That I was planning to grow to product that would scale to worldwide product. However, things have changed when I was injured. I am tired all the time and hardly manage few productive hours per week. I am tired all the time and I make many mistakes. I am not able to hold any job. So, why I should be able to do this. Simply because I have no choice. In very simplified explanation: one way to deal with PTSD is to face the situation in safe environment, till it is no longer life crushing. So, I need to face it and win to get feeling of safety back. Unfortunately up till not it was mostly only crushing defeat. However, I hope that things will change. I noticed that when I have support I can get more productive. So, I need someone to help me on the way and I have a good chance to have a good result. BTW unfortunately it does not work when I try to do other unrelated tasks.

There is also problem of me making logical mistakes that I was not able to prevent or detect on time. The only thing that helps to some degree is constant monitoring (someone double checking everything I do), but this not a solution. I hope that in time it will get better or find some way to work around with some support.

Contacts

Please write to road.traffic.injury@gmail.com

I am especially interested in learning about two things:

other people experience. I believe there is a lot to learn about and the official information that you are able to find might not be enough.
about the good lawyers (specializing in personal injury law or dealing with exaggerated legal fees). I found exceptionally difficult to find lawyers who are trustworthy.