In this episode of Women in Motion, Lee Kantor talks with Silvia Aninye from Weber Legal Nursing Consulting. They discuss the company’s role in providing legal nurse consulting to various attorneys, advocating for clients during defense medical exams, and offering case management and training. Silvia, who has written a book on the subject, shares her journey from a certified nursing assistant to starting her own business in 2014. She emphasizes the need for legal nurse consultants to be detail-oriented, assertive, and unafraid to confront aggressive doctors.
Silvia Aninye RN, AS, CDP, CDSGF, CADDCT, CLNC
Silvia’s skill-set and industry expertise are comprehensive and up-to-date. She makes it her top priority to see that all jobs are done well and efficiently.
Her career has also seen its share of achievements; while working as a Legal Nurse Consultant at Weber Legal Nurse Consulting Inc., she’s helped a lot of attorneys find testifying experts for different specialties to help support their individual cases.
Silvia has learned and accomplished a great deal in her 8 years of Legal Nursing Consultant. One of her proudest moments to date occurred while she was an RN at LAC-USC. In this capacity, she was responsible for making sure that the language on Vaccination protocol was legally correct and comprehensive.
On one occasion, Sylvia helped educate the patients on the legal language on vaccination protocol, which led to a positive outcome because the patient was allergic to eggs and as such could not take the flu vaccine.
Sylvia is motivated, task-oriented, and efficient, and her knowledge of the Personal Injury and Worker’s Compensation industry is comprehensive and current. While working as Medical Case Manager at Crawford and Company she was responsible for field case management duties.
She’s been able to use her expertise to help the company remain within the guidelines of most laws and protocols and helped prevent legal issues with clients during her time there, The company has saved a lot of money in costs being able to have a Registered Nurse who is also qualified to work as a Legal Nurse Consultant.
Sylvia is an executive Advisory Cloud Network advisor.
Connect with Silvia on LinkedIn and follow Weber Legal Nurse Consulting on Facebook and X.
Music Provided by M PATH MUSIC
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Silvia Aninye with Weber Legal Nurse Consulting. Welcome.
Silvia Aninye: Thank you.
Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Weber Legal Nursing, how are you serving folks?
Silvia Aninye: We’re serving folks on a variety of fronts. The first and foremost service that we provide, I am a legal nurse consulting company that has a lot of female nurses that work for me. And what we do is we actually work with personal injury attorney, med malpractice attorneys, and tort attorneys. We attend defense medical exams to advocate for the clients to make sure that during the exam the doctor does not ask questions that he’s not supposed to ask. And, you know, to protect the clients from making the defense medical exam another deposition. We usually audio record this exam and we provide reports to the attorneys and we also provide audio links.
Silvia Aninye: On the other hand, we also provide case management in workers’ compensation. And we also provide training for nurses on how to do defense medical exams. And, also, we provide continuing education as well. And I also have written a book recently, in February, Defense Medical Exams Made Easy: A Painless Guide For LNCs, for people to learn how to do defense medical exams, mainly nurses. And that is kind of a available on Amazon. And that’s kind of in a nutshell of what we do. If you want more information, our website is www.weberlegalnurse.com.
Lee Kantor: Now, is being a legal nurse consultant, is that something a nurse can do while working as their job as a nurse? Or is it something that after they leave nursing, then they get into this side of the business?
Silvia Aninye: No. They can do this while they’re working because, generally, most of the subcontractors I have work part-time. First of all, the subcontractors are not fulltime employees. They are 1099 employees. We give them cases on a case-by-case basis, so kind of like it’s more or less unless you actually have your own attorneys, do your own marketing and have your own attorneys. It’s just, you know, like a supplemental income for them that they can do in between what they do at the hospitals during the week. And a lot of nurses I have do that. And currently, we have 60 nurses nationwide.
Lee Kantor: Now, what are the qualities of a good legal nurse consultant?
Silvia Aninye: A good legal nurse consultant has to be detail oriented, has to be meticulous, has to be assertive. Because when you work with the doctors, the doctors are kind of aggressive in these exams and try to get information from the clients that they’re not supposed to get. Because usually when the lawsuits are filed, they are provided with all the medical records and everything they need. But most of the time they try to get everything from the client itself, which is not appropriate. And that’s what we’re there for, to stop that, to stop the attorney from – not the attorney, sorry, the doctor from asking questions that he’s not supposed to ask.
Silvia Aninye: So, in other words, to be a good legal nurse consultant that does defense medical exams, you have to be one that does not shy away from confrontation, passive-aggressive confrontation. If you’re one of those people that is easily intimidated by whatever goes on, you probably wouldn’t be a good legal nurse consultant or a defense medical exam observer. So, the first and foremost is the fact that you are the type of person that’s not easily intimidated.
Lee Kantor: Now, is that part of the training that Weber provides, is preparing a nurse to have, you know, those kind of conversations and confrontations?
Silvia Aninye: Yes. We train the nurses to do this during the training. And our training compromises of, you know, brochures, training manuals, books, testing. And we also offer mentoring as part of the training to where I mentor them while they’re on their journey until they get comfortable during their exams. And we also offer a physical exam component where the nurses actually get to shadow me. They go to an exam with me, and I do the exam, and they get to observe and shadow me and see everything that happens.
Silvia Aninye: And when the exam finishes, we have a little 15, 20 minute meeting where they get to ask any questions that they need to ask in terms of what they saw, how to proceed. And they also have access to me during the exams. When they’re in their exams, I am connected to them via SMS messaging. So, if they have questions, even if they’re actually in the exam with the doctor, if they get stuck on something, they can easily text me. And usually I respond because the SMS I gave them is a cell phone where I can reply very fast.
Lee Kantor: So, what’s your back story and your journey into this line of work? It seems this isn’t the traditional path for most nurses.
Silvia Aninye: Yes. My line of work when I originally started was, I would call it, one of perseverance, determination. I started as a certified nursing assistant. I did that for 19 years and then I went to nursing school. And when I went to nursing school, I worked at LAC USC Medical Center for nine years, six years as a nursing assistant and then three years as an RN.
Silvia Aninye: And after that, I did not feel comfortable in the hospital setting, and I decided to branch out and create my own company. Because, initially, before I even became an RN, I always was interested in the legal field and was looking for ways where I could combine my nursing skills with the legal field and be able to serve the community that way. And hence, because of this, working at it and doing a lot of marketing, being a subcontractor myself also for two years to raise funds to do my marketing, Weber Legal Nurse Consulting came into being. And we have been here since 2014 and have some of the biggest law firms. So far as clients, we have Brian Ryder, the Wilshire Law Firm, Jacob Emrani is one of our clients, and a host of others. They have been with us over the years.
Lee Kantor: Now, do you remember that first time you were in a room with a doctor that was kind of scrutinizing or saying stuff to you that required you to be confrontational?
Silvia Aninye: Yes, sir. I have. I’ll just give one main example, because in my book, there are tons of examples. But I’ll give one main example. I had a confrontation with a doctor. This was a neurologist. I will not mention any names or offices.
Lee Kantor: Right. Don’t mention any names.
Silvia Aninye: Yes. I’ll just, you know, share the story of what happened. This was an older neurologist, and it was at the beginning of my career, like within the first two years. And this doctor, I came there with the client and we started the exam. First of all, the exam was not supposed to take more than two hours. This doctor decided to lengthen the exam even though he knew by law he wasn’t allowed to do so.
Silvia Aninye: Now, during the exam, he asked a lot of questions about the personal history of the client, employment history, workers’ compensation history, prior injuries, prior surgeries. And I had to interject and let him know that he wasn’t allowed to ask those questions and that we were deferring those questions to the medical records and deposition of the client. And at this point, the doctor got extremely upset, called me names that I won’t repeat on the podcast, and told me I was obstructing his exam.
Silvia Aninye: And towards the end of the exam, he actually threw a chart at me. And when he threw the chart at me, I had to indicate that this was more or less assault by him taking that action. And when we eventually finished the exam, I had to call the attorney that hired me and inform him of what was going on. And the attorney – because we’re allowed in California to audio record the exam – asked if I would advance the audio recording to him, and I did that evening.
Silvia Aninye: And the next morning, he called me and he told me that he was going to file a motion to have that doctor disqualified from doing these type of exams and actually disqualify that particular defense medical exam. But I was able to stand my ground and handle myself professionally, even though the doctor did not.
Lee Kantor: And that’s the advantage of working with a firm like yours, right? Because if the patient is in there, the patient doesn’t know what they don’t know, and they could easily be manipulated or bullied by an aggressive doctor.
Silvia Aninye: Exactly. And that was what my role was there. And when I came out with my client, the client was so grateful, “Oh, my God. I’m so glad you were here with me. I could never have handled this doctor on my own.” And I explained to them, don’t worry about it. This is what your attorney is paying me for, to make sure that these type of incidents don’t happen. And I was able to save the defense medical exam. But because of the doctor’s actions in terms of physically throwing charts at the nurses, the DME got disqualified and he got removed from the list of IME doctors by his medical board.
Lee Kantor: This must be such rewarding work for you.
Silvia Aninye: It is because when I was working at LAC USC Medical Center, I was working as a nurse, but I extremely enjoyed the role of an advocate. I had also advocated for a lot of patients in the hospital as well on an ethics committee and other committees that we had there. I was always one of those people that the hospital sent when patients had issues with the hospital. So, more or less kind of like an arbitrator or a mediator type of job where you were helping settle conflicts or settle situations.
Silvia Aninye: So, before I started this job, I was pretty much very much conversant with conflict in general, because I’m also trained as an arbitrator and a mediator in the State of California – no. I’m trained as an arbitrator on the federal level for Athena, and on the mediation, I’m certified in the State of California as a mediator.
Lee Kantor: Now, can your clients come from all over the country or are they primarily in California?
Silvia Aninye: They come from all over the country, but a lot of our clients, because there are a lot of cases in California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, New York, these are the states where there are a lot of lawsuits, they primarily come from most of these states. But every now and then we do get cases from other states on the East Coast, hence we have 60 nurses nationwide. But half of those nurses are mainly in California and New York and Nevada, because we get a lot of cases from those states.
Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for your company to become part of the WBEC-West community?
Silvia Aninye: I decided to join the WBEC-West community because I’m a woman-owned business, I’m 100 percent women-owned business, and I felt like if I joined WBEC, I might have opportunities to be able to network more and meet more people that I can work with and I can network with, or get clients from, or provide other services for other companies that other women owners might need. So, mainly, I did it because I wanted to do a lot more networking.
Lee Kantor: Now, what do you need more of? How can we help you? Do you need more nurses around the country? Do you need more attorneys? What do you need?
Silvia Aninye: We need mainly more nurses and, of course, more attorneys, yes.
Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more, where should they go? What’s the website?
Silvia Aninye: The website is www.weberlegalnurse.com.
Lee Kantor: And that’s weber, W-E-B-E-R, legalnurse.com?
Silvia Aninye: Yes, sir.
Lee Kantor: Well, Silvia, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.
Silvia Aninye: Thank you very much, sir.
Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Women In Motion.
