Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
How to Learn from MISTAKES: The Young Lawyer's Blueprint for Success
Ever wondered how a shift in mindset can skyrocket your career? Brian shares his method of reflective learning, meticulously documenting every trial's nuances—from jurisdiction to personal reflections—and explains how this practice is a game-changer for professionals in any field. Whether you're in real estate, law, or even podcasting, discover how adopting Brian's strategy can refine your skills and boost your performance.
But that's not all. Learn how Brian effectively leverages past case results to guide his clients in making informed decisions, whether it's investing in experts, opting for a trial, or settling. He emphasizes the importance of building a niche and creating non-privileged case summaries to present objective evidence. Reflecting on his journey, Brian suggests new lawyers start in insurance defense to gain rapid trial experience. This episode is packed with actionable insights that can elevate your career, regardless of your profession. Don't miss out on Brian's practical advice that could be the key to your next big career leap!
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
I've said a number of times, in a number of different ways, that what we're talking about on this show really is about mindset and it's really not about how to become or to be a better lawyer. In fact, this show never talks about how to take a better deposition, how to give a better closing argument or how to select a better jury, but I always follow that up with. But this advice is not an excuse to be a crappy lawyer, and so in today's episode I'm going to walk through the framework that I use, not tactically but strategy-wise, to get a little bit better every single time I try a case, and the life hack is that if you're not a lawyer or if you're not a trial lawyer, there's something in this episode that you can take and steal and use in your own career. That'll put you a little bit further on your next deal, your next sale, your next client, whatever it is. If you don't know who I am, my name is Brian Glass. I'm a personal injury trial lawyer in Fairfax, virginia, and over the course of my career I've tried almost a hundred cases, and after every single case that I've tried, I've written for myself a summary that I've kept in a book about the things that I learned from that trial and what I can get better at for the next trial, and so, in today's show, I'm going to walk you through what that summary looks like and the ways in which you can use it to improve your own career. And, like I said, the life hack here is that this really has nothing to do with trial work.
Speaker 0:You can take this principle and apply it to whatever it is that you do. If you're a real estate agent, every single real estate deal. If you're a transactional lawyer, every single transactional deal. If you're a podcast host, you can apply it to. What can you do better in a podcast? How can you grow your social influence? What things did you get? What things did you get wrong? So there's something here for everybody. The important thing to understand, the important thing to understand in life, is how you learn. What is the meta skill of how you learn? Some people read, some people learn by listening Me. I often have to piss on the electric fence in order to learn something, and throughout the course of my career, I've peed on the fence at trial a number of times. The thing is, I've never peed on the same fence in the same way twice, because once I've done that, I'm very good at learning and triangulating to how do I navigate around that problem or that issue just a little bit better. So I've kept this book, this binder of my trial results, every case that I've tried over the last 15 years, and it's up to about 100 results. Now I want to walk through what that looks like.
Speaker 0:I've tried all kinds of injury cases. I've tried only injury cases by the way, I'm not a criminal defense lawyer. I don't do family law, only injury cases, only really auto accident cases and one medical malpractice case in which I was a local council second chair, and I've tried cases of all shape and size. I've tried cases from $3,000 in chiropractic bills that an insurance company didn't want to pay and had offered $0 on all the way up to a $4.3 million catastrophic injury drunk driving case, which was the largest in 2022. So I've been all over the spectrum.
Speaker 0:In Virginia we have two tiers of court. We have a lower tier which, when I started, had a jurisdictional limit of only $15,000. With COVID and some of the court backlogs, it's now up to 50. Now you can try a pretty decent sized injury case in front of a judge in 75 minutes. That's crazy to me, but you can do that. And then we have jury trials, right? Jury trials in any kind of a case, any size of a case you can take in front of a jury.
Speaker 0:Personally my career now I love being in front of juries, I love talking to juries. I think that I thrive in explaining difficult concepts in a simplistic way, and so talking to lay people on a jury about law and about medicine really is something that I really enjoy. I dislike now talking directly to a judge. Why? Because I often think the judge is smarter than me, and so I find that I have a harder time with honing in on how simple can I make this without the judge looking at me like I'm an idiot and without kind of assuming too much from judges, because what you have to understand about these bench trials is a judge might hear I don't know, four cases in a day, and there are wildly different judicial temperaments, which is why, if you're in that arena, it's good to be in that arena all day, all week, and it's really good to keep the kind of a log that I'm going to tell you about today. So here's what I track after every single case that I try I come going to tell you about today. So here's what I track.
Speaker 0:After every single case that I try, I come back to my office and I write out a summary of the case what jurisdiction was it in? Who was the judge, who was the defense lawyer, what was the result? And then we go a little bit deeper what was the offer, what was the demand and what did I before we walk into the courtroom? What did I think the case was worth? Sometimes I try to keep track of who the adjuster is, but the reality is adjusters change so many times in the life of a case and a change so many times those guys or girls will change roles. After you've tried whatever case and that is as a trackable metric is really not terribly important. Here's what is important. I spend some time in every case thinking about what went right, what went wrong, what was unexpected, what did I not know was going to happen when I walked into a courtroom.
Speaker 0:So typically, when we're trying these cases, you can usually write the script, especially for the smaller cases where the dispute is there's not a lot of damage to the back of the car and so the person couldn't have been that hurt or they waited a little bit of time before they went to a doctor, and so they weren't actually hurt, or they had a prior injury, and so usually you can predict 90, 95% of what's going to come out of both the defense lawyer's mouth and out of your client's mouth. Where it gets a little hinky is when something comes out of your client's mouth that you weren't expecting, and so what can you come away with as preparation for the next time? And the skill here is really in figuring out whether it was a lack of preparation or whether that's like a truly one-off result. Either you didn't explain something to the client, or maybe the client didn't hear and understand the way that you explained it. Or, like under the bright lights of a courtroom, the client just freaked and that thing, that bad fact or whatever it is, came out of their mouth. So the skill is figuring out is it something that I did wrong that I can fix in the future, or is that a freak accident? And if I try to explain now to every client in the future what happened in this one case, in the freak accident case, am I going to lose the forest for the trees when I'm preparing my clients for trial. So what went right? What went wrong? What happened that was unexpected. And then the highlight of this is always what did you learn? And if you come back from trial and there's not something that you learned, you need to spend more time thinking about that case, because there's always a lesson here, and I'll give you just again.
Speaker 0:This is not a tactical show about how to be a better lawyer, but I'll give you two really good examples of things that I picked up from other people's tactics at trials. One of them is from a defense lawyer. So we're in a deposition and he's labeling these exhibits and he's jumping all around exhibit seven, exhibit 15, exhibit four and it makes no sense because we didn't start at exhibit one. And then we get to trial and I recognize that what he'd done is he'd built well before trial his entire exhibit binder and he labeled everything so that when we got to trial and he's referring back to a witness's testimony at deposition, he's not saying okay, this is trial, exhibit seven, which was deposition. Exhibit four, a right. We've itemized all these things and we've pre-labeled all these things so that we're using the same numerical coding the whole way through.
Speaker 0:I thought that was brilliant and I think most lawyers don't do that, because most lawyers don't actually expect cases to go to trial, like we get the trial and then we're scrambling in Virginia 10 days before trial to put together a witness and exhibit list and we're, for the first time, numbering all these things, like having the forethought now to create the witness and exhibit list as you're going through the case. You may decide six months into a case that something needs to be in an exhibit you may add it in there. You may decide that something doesn't need to be be an exhibit you may add it in there. You may decide that something doesn't need to be an exhibit and so while you've used exhibit three in a deposition somewhere, now that's just going to be a blank item on your witness and exhibit list. So that foresight is something that I picked up from a really skilled defense lawyer that I now use in my practice.
Speaker 0:The other thing that I've gotten better at and I'm not great at it yet is thinking on my feet and cross-examination, and so in the beginning of my career I was typing out the entire cross on one or two or three or four pieces of paper, whatever it was, and having this mental checklist, yes, but also physically checking things off as I asked them, turns out that it's very hard in the heat of the moment, with a judge looking at you and a jury looking at you and a witness answering questions, to process the answer that you've just received, cross your question off the list and figure out what question you should be asking next, all while taking notes on what was the answer and how can I use that answer against them in closing argument. And so I started a couple of years ago theming my questions on note cards and then, on the back of those note cards, clipping any exhibits that I might need to impeach the witness on that segment. That might look like attaching medical records to the back of a series of questions about a knee surgery. And then I've got questions about reasonableness of medical bills on another subsection that has maybe some of the same exhibits attached to it. But that allows you to spread this thing out on council table, go back, pick up one topic at a time, ask your questions on that topic and then, when that topic's done, you put it back in a binder, put it in a folder, put it away and it's out of your mind. It's just a way to declutter your mind, because as you stand up and you're asking questions on cross-examination, like the thoughts will go wild.
Speaker 0:Lawyers say there's really three types of questions in cross examination. There's, like, the cross that you intended to ask. There's the cross that you actually asked, and then there's the questions that you thought of as soon as you sat down and shut up. And one way to improve that is to sort things by topic and keep them spread out on your desk and pick up one topic at a time with all of the material that you need to rebut or impeach a witness on that topic if you have to.
Speaker 0:So the next thing we're putting on our summary of the case is what do you need to learn? What came up at trial that you were totally stumped about and you still don't know the answer to? Might be a piece of medicine, might be a piece of evidence. What do you need to learn for the next trial? And then, lastly, I go back to what would you do differently? Not on the next trial, not what are you going to do differently in the next trial?
Speaker 0:If you woke up on Groundhog's Day and you were trying this case again today, what would you do differently? Sometimes the answer is going to be nothing right. Sometimes everything goes your way. You wouldn't have asked any questions any differently, but that's usually not the case. There's usually a couple of things you would do differently, and it's been really helpful for me to put pen to paper, and I like to do this at least first by physically putting pen to paper, not on a computer. Our minds just think differently when we're handwriting something about the neural synapse connection from your hand to the pen to your brain. You just think differently, and so the first draft of this for me is always on loose leaf paper. But what would you do differently if you were trying this case again? And then how do you think that would impact the result?
Speaker 0:So the benefit of keeping this binder is really twofold. Number one it makes you process for yourself in a deliberate way after the case what went right and what went wrong and what you screwed up, because there's always something, almost always something. But most of us, after a bad result, want to put our heads in the sand and just get on to the next one. And it's really important to get on to the next one. If you fall off the horse you've got to get back on, get your ass kicked to trial. You have to get back into a courtroom as soon as you can, I think.
Speaker 0:But most of us don't spend deliberate time and effort on what I could have improved. We blame the judge, we blame the defense lawyer, we blame the client, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what we could have done better. So I'll give you an example. Early in my career I tried a case with a woman who, in retrospect, I hadn't prepared thoroughly enough. And the judge said to me after the trial oh, got to be prepared. And I thought and I'm still doing the voice right, fucking asshole, don't tell me I got to be prepared. I was prepared. The client fucked it up, but in retrospect, no, I own all of that. We're the ones who should be going over the top to prepare our clients for any eventuality and balancing that with if everything is important, nothing is important. So how do I prepare them for every eventuality? That's a hard job, but most of us don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about what we could have done better. Secondly, it gives you a reference point, for if I have a case with a judge who I haven't tried a case in front of in three years I can go back and maybe I recorded some of their own biases or the way that they like to conduct Wadir or something like that. Maybe I've got some notes on that judge back in my binder and not just rolling around in my head hoping that I remember it three years down the line.
Speaker 0:The last way to use this and one of my favorite ways to use this is that once you built in your niche, you can now show these things to clients. None of this is privileged about another client's case. So that's a tip Don't put any attorney client privilege information into these summaries so that you can use it like this Now if I've got a case that's on the lower end, that kind of looks like 15 or so other cases that I've tried, I just whip out those 15 or so results and I show them to the client and I say, listen, I tried this case 15 times. They had medical bills and injuries similar to yours and this is the result. So it's not just me telling you that 90% of the time the result is going to be in this range. Here's the evidence. Here's why the offer is good or why the offer is bad, based on objective evidence of the other 15 cases that look a lot like yours that I've tried in the past.
Speaker 0:Okay, now with that information client, what do you want to do? How do you want to make decisions about investing money in experts trying cases or settling the case? Okay, hopefully that's been helpful to you. We don't do a lot of tactical stuff on here. We do a lot of mindset, but I think less than the tactics of how do we try any particular case, like the learning of learning. How do you process information personally, because it's different than the way that I do and it's different than the way that your clients do and how do we get better and faster at making decisions with the information that we have, understanding the information that we don't have and making the best choices within that framework.
Speaker 0:I hope this is a helpful exercise to you. Like I said, I've tried about 100 cases in my career. If I could go back and do it again, knowing what I know now, I definitely would have spent the first two or three years of my life as an insurance defense lawyer and I would have, in the first three years, probably tried 200 cases. I'd have an even greater book of lessons and ways to get better. If this has been helpful to you, do me a favor Hit subscribe and share this with one other lawyer that you know. The only way that shows like mine grow because I don't do any advertising and I'm not great at social media is by these one-to-one shares. If you have a younger lawyer in your office or you've tried a case with a younger lawyer and you want
