The 3rd Annual Washington Med-Legal Conference:
Bridging Two Worlds to Protect Auto-Injury Patients
Brian Chan, DC Coast Injury & Medicine, Leadership Level Corporate Partner
For many chiropractors working in personal injury, the pattern is painfully familiar.
A patient walks away from a collision feeling “fine.” The ER labels their injuries as mild. Imaging is read as “unremarkable” or “no acute findings.” They’re told to rest, take painkillers, and follow up “if things get worse.”
Days or weeks later, things do get worse.
Headaches start. Neck and back pain settles in. Mental fog and emotional strain creep into daily life. By the time the patient seeks real follow-up care, the early documentation that could have shaped both their recovery and their legal case is incomplete, vague, or missing entirely.
Emergency departments and primary care settings often miss subtle but significant injuries. Attorneys receive fragmented records. Case managers try to reconstruct timelines from scattered notes. Somewhere in that maze, real people fall through the cracks.
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The Washington Med-Legal Conference (WMLC) was born to change that.
Born “In the Middle”
The Washington Med-Legal Conference didn’t start as a marketing idea or a generic seminar. It grew out of necessity.
Coast Injury Medicine, a medical practice that focuses exclusively on car-accident care, sits in a unique position “between” two worlds:
• On one side: healthcare providers—chiropractors, medical doctors, physical therapists, ARNPs, and others.
• On the other: legal professionals—trial attorneys, paralegals, and case managers.
From that vantage point, the team at Coast Injury Medicine kept seeing the same pattern: by the time a case reached the end of the process, the patient’s story was already working against them.
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