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
Trial by Fire: Surviving an 8-Week Trial | David Holt
Feeling burnt out by billable hours? Lawyer David Holt just went toe-to-toe with a brain injury case for EIGHT. WHOLE. WEEKS.
This episode is your battle cry! David spills the secrets behind his $10 million verdict and the mental grit it takes to win in the courtroom.
Here's what you'll learn:
- From Cop to Courtroom: David's unique journey from law enforcement to fighting for brain injury victims. ➡️⚖️
- The 8-Week War: Uncover the mental stamina and strategies needed to dominate a marathon trial.
- Winning with Empathy: How to connect with juries and secure life-changing verdicts for your clients. ⚖️❤️
- Doctor Whisperer: Learn how to build powerful relationships with medical professionals (they're key to winning!). ⚕️⚖️
- Self-Care Secrets: Discover how David prioritizes his health and avoids lawyer burnout during high-pressure cases. ♂️⚖️
This episode is for YOU if:
- You're tired of the grind and want to make a real impact.
- You crave courtroom victories and life-changing results for your clients.
- You're curious about the fascinating world of traumatic brain injury law.
Hit play and let David Holt be your trial by fire survival guide!
Want to connect with David? You can find him online at The Brain Injury Law Center (www.brain-injury-law-center.com) or The Smith Law Center (www.smithlawcenter.com). He's also active on Instagram, using the handle dholty5 (yes, that's his son's lacrosse number!). If you prefer email, reach out to him at dholt@smithlawcenter.com. David loves to connect, so don't hesitate to reach out!
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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.
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My journey started a long time ago as a cop in the Tidewater area in Hampton Virginia. I've actually spent a majority of my career just in this city, interestingly enough.
Speaker 2:You sound like a cop, by the way. What's that you have a cop's voice, by the way.
Speaker 1:It would be kind of cool. And then I met my wife and that changed my perspective, because if anybody who's listening has been recruited by the FBI or Secret Service or DEA or whatever it is, you have zero control of where they put you. The last thing I wanted to do was pull her out and go to, like I don't know, depaul, I don't know, to Minnesota or the middle of South Dakota or something like that, where she wouldn't be able to find her joy in what she was doing because she was really happy and with a law degree I could find it really kind of find my niche.
Speaker 2:What's up, my friends, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers trying to break free from the traditional law firm grind. Have you ever tried a long jury trial, anything longer than two or three days, and I really start to get burnt out. Well, today's episode is an interview with my friend, david Holt, who is fresh off of an eight-week-long traumatic brain injury trial. Now picture this endless courtroom hours, 5,000 pages of medical records and trying a case half a country away from your family. David has been there and done that. David is a seasoned trial lawyer from Hampton, virginia, who specializes in these TBI cases, and in this episode we're diving into the story of his eight-week-long trial in Oklahoma. That's right. He packed up all of his stuff, flew across the country and tried a case for eight weeks straight. The reward a $10 million verdict and a very thankful client. Here at, we are to uncover the secrets of David's success from building ironclad cases to maintaining sanity during the toughest of trials. This episode is packed with actionable advice, real world stories and a healthy dose of inspiration. Let's dive in. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2:Today's guest is David Holt. David is a partner at the Brain Injury Law Center down in Hampton Virginia. David is a partner at the Brain Injury Law Center down in Hampton Virginia and I wanted to invite David on because he's had this extraordinary journey this year where he was in the middle of the country in Oklahoma trying a brain injury case for eight weeks, and I've never tried a case that went longer than two. So I want to ask questions because for lawyers you don't have this experience and so I'm always interested, david, in the human side of the story. That goes into like the stamina, the mental preparation and, of course, the lawyering with, like I don't know, a dozen lawyers and 59 witnesses and all this other stuff. So we will get to that.
Speaker 1:David, welcome to the show. Thanks, Brian, I really appreciate you inviting me on and I look forward to our chat today. Exc to the show. Thanks, brian, I really appreciate you inviting me on and I look forward to our chat today, exciting for me.
Speaker 2:Before we get to the nitty-gritty of the case in Oklahoma, why don't you give people your background and how you wound up as one of the premier traumatic brain injury lawyers in Virginia?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well thanks. My journey started a long time ago as a cop in the Tidewater area in Hampton Virginia. I've actually spent a majority of my career just in this city, interestingly enough.
Speaker 2:You sound like a cop, by the way.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:You have a cop's voice, by the way.
Speaker 1:People say that You'd be surprised. I don't even realize it. But people are like I can tell you're a cop just by the way you walk into the courtroom it. But people were like I can tell you're a cop just by the way you walk into the courtroom. I guess you know it did shape a lot of the way that I think and how I act and you know my expectations of people. I saw a lot of things as a cop that many people will never see in their lives and so I've seen the good, bad and the ugly from all vantage points as being a police officer.
Speaker 1:But when I graduated from undergrad up in Fredericksburg at Mary Washington, my best friend at the time became a cop and he was like come on down here. And my initial goal was to potentially work in the federal law enforcement. And when I got down here or back down here because I'm from the area, I'm from Newport News I finally decided at one point in time I wanted a graduate degree and ended up going to law school and I still had the thought of, hey, let's go to the FBI Secret Service, something like that, that would be kind of cool. And then I met my wife and that changed my perspective, because if anybody who's listening has been recruited by the FBI or Secret Service or DEA or whatever it is, you have zero control of where they put you.
Speaker 1:And my wife was a coach at the time at Old Dominion University. She coached women's lacrosse. She was an assistant coach and she loved it, and the last thing I wanted to do was I got married my 2L year and the last thing I wanted to do was pull her out and go to like I don't know DePaul, I don't know, to Minnesota or, you know, the middle of South Dakota or something like that where she wouldn't be able to find her joy in what she was doing because she was really happy and with a law degree I could find it really kind of find my niche.
Speaker 1:So I graduated from law school. I worked in the General Assembly for a little bit for a state senator, ken Stolle, and then I ended up becoming a prosecutor for about eight years and I really enjoyed that and that's where I looked my chops in terms of trial work.
Speaker 1:I remember very vividly, literally the first day I was in a little closet of an office the prosecutor's office and my supervisor walked in with about 15 files and said hey look, you got to look at these and be ready on Wednesday. And it was like Monday and I had to walk into court. And so I just I really became very, very comfortable in the court of law. Of course I'd been there a lot as a police officer. I knew the judges, I knew the prosecutors, I knew the players in the system. I was very comfortable with just walking in there and knowing where my role was as a trial lawyer.
Speaker 1:Later in my career, about eight years later, I tried a racketeering case. I had to kind of start it from the beginning and I developed it. It was a gang and multi-murder case where I had to actually draw up my own jury instructions, and it was one of the first racketeering RICO cases that went to jury verdict in Virginia. And after that I was just like you know what? I've got kids. I want to send them to college, I want them to have the benefit of what I had through my parents, and this opportunity opened itself up. I knew.
Speaker 1:Howard and Stephen are brothers, the Smith brothers. I've known Howard for many years because I went to school with his kids. I've known Howard for many years because I went to school with his kids. He approached me one day and was like, hey, we need a trial lawyer. And frankly, I didn't think much about it. I was in the middle of sort of focusing on this racketeering case and once I got a verdict out of it, I approached them and were talking with some people in my area the people I trusted, some judges and so forth and they were like, yeah, man, this is a great place to go. So I've been involved in this firm, I guess, for about 13 years now. At the time Stephen was trying a lot of TBI cases and so I just rode his coattails, man.
Speaker 2:I just learned everything I could about medicine.
Speaker 1:I was reading everything I could about. I mean, the easy part was walking into court, the hard part was learning how to develop a civil case, because I'd never really done it before.
Speaker 2:So I get asked a lot, david, about you know what skills do I need to develop in my first couple of years out of law school? And I always tell people like if I could go back and do it again, I would have gotten more trial experience. And my recommendation, if you want to come and do plaintiff's work is typically like go and defend auto accident cases where there's zero risk involved. The insurance company is always going to pay, whatever the policy limit is, and your clients might be irritated, but there's actually no personal risk to the client trying cases as a prosecutor. How did you find the transferable skill set or the evidence rules or the knowledge base to be for moving from criminal work?
Speaker 1:to civil work. So the rules of evidence are the same right. And in fact I spent a lot of time helping judges understand what, like some of the hearsay rules were. So that was easy for me, because the hard part was opening 8.01. And that's for many lawyers, that's the Bible for all civil procedure, right? So I had to go back to my civil procedure days from law school and from studying for the bar and remember some of the things that were incorporated into 8.01. And so that was probably the most difficult part.
Speaker 1:I will say and you just mentioned something that I think is important to ferret out as a plaintiff's lawyer versus a prosecutor, I lost plenty of cases. I mean, I lost my first jury trial. I remember all the losses far more than I remember the wins. I remember all the losses far more than I remember the wins. But every time I lost a case I'd get back to the office and prepare for the next one. It's a little different when you're in the plaintiff's world because you have a client that you're answering to and trying to let them understand why you lost or why it was a difficult result.
Speaker 1:But the skills for me being comfortable in speaking in front of a jury, being comfortable arguing my position in front of a judge.
Speaker 1:I had a lot of background in that and so it was easy for me to walk into any courtroom and stand in front of a jury, and even in Oklahoma for two months.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, I'm in a foreign land, so to speak, and I'm from Virginia and I'm not wearing cowboy boots or a cowboy hat when I'm walking into court like everybody else is, but I'm still engaging with the jury, and so for me as a prosecutor or at least gaining that experience as a prosecutor was essential in my ability to be able to walk into court very early in my plaintiff's career and be very comfortable with my position. I tried a case many years ago. There were some cases against a company called Lincoln Military Housing and these cases involved mold and you may still see some things about mold in military housing. We were one of the first litigators involved in these cases and I had a case in front of a federal judge for three weeks and I had no problem getting up in front of that jury or in front of that judge arguing our side, because I had the confidence in my ability to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:And, I think, just having.
Speaker 1:I mean I started in general district court arguing marijuana cases and DUIs and grand larceny or simple larceny cases. Negotiating and working with defense attorneys was really important to me as well, and your ability to be able to understand their side and know when to put your foot down. So my experience as a prosecutor was invaluable, has been invaluable for me, and I still have the badges hanging up in my office. I mean, I'm very proud of that time that I spent doing that.
Speaker 2:So then you come over and you're doing plaintiff's work, and my gripe about plaintiff's work, at least in the auto personal injury world, is that it seems like just about everybody thinks that they can do it right.
Speaker 2:If you're an hourly fee lawyer and then a sizeable auto accident case walks into your office, I find many lawyers will try to keep that case and develop it, and I think then you've developed or you've walked into this niche also in the traumatic brain injury space, which is the space where many, many auto accident lawyers who are not brain injury specialists will do the exact same thing right. We'll hold on to a quote, simple concussion case because they think that they know how to work it. And there's all these CLEs and all these places where you can go and get a one-on-one or a two-on-one education. But you guys are the best of the best in that area. And so what did you do other than ride Stephen Smith's coattails to develop your knowledge base and be comfortable handling brain injury cases and cross-examining neuroradiologists and people who are, you know, have 25 years of education that the rest of us don't?
Speaker 1:education that the rest of us don't. So we I mean, I like to say just we know some things that a lot of people just don't know when they're looking at medical records and I learned this a lot from Stephen in finding the little nuances in what you're reading. I go through all the medical records before depositions or before trial and I spent a lot of time in thinking, we spent a lot of time in thought about how it is that I'm going to present the case. But I will say that I've established relationships with doctors as well, and so having those conversations with these doctors and really trying to understand what they're saying and how they're saying it, and trying to understand what they're saying and how they're saying it, and really just getting your feet wet and getting in there and listening to doctors speak about traumatic brain injury especially we specialize in mild traumatic brain injury.
Speaker 1:So this is the type of injury that if somebody walked in your door you would be like they're fine. But when you start asking questions, they're repeating themselves or they're doing different things that you kind of realize that, uh, something isn't, isn't quite right. You listen to these doctors and how they describe, uh, the injury, how they describe the emotional and the behavioral changes. For us, um, that's kind of how we you know steven kind of developed the, the almost the wrongful death way of proving a traumatic brain injury case. It's that that person is not there anymore, that person died, that you used to know, and now a new person has come along, and so you have to really dig into the medicine. And I will say I was in. I'm looking for the book I think it's in a box somewhere, but I have the Bible on brain injury and I have tabs everywhere. I have highlights everywhere. Every case has something a little different. I have one case that was involving vestibular ocular reflex.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you something I didn't know anything about VOR before I started looking into that and before my medicine, my brain injury medicine doctor started talking about it and it has to deal with your ability to be able to like when you drive.
Speaker 2:you're seeing all these things go by you right.
Speaker 1:But your brain is seeing them, your brain is computing it, it's digesting it, but you don't have to really necessarily react to it. People who have vestibular ocular issues can see these things going by and it starts giving them headaches and they start their eyes start to glaze over and they start getting confusion. I'm opening books, I'm reading, I read a lot of medicine. I read a lot of journal articles. I've joined traumatic brain injury listservs where there's some really really smart people out there and going to these seminars. So so we know when a case comes in, we're screening it for brain injury right away.
Speaker 1:Some people will say, oh, it's got a concussion, and the common understanding and for most people it does, it resolves. But if you work it up correctly and you ask the right questions, we've developed checklists, we've developed pamphlets that we send out to our clients, that sort of thing. So we really kind of know more about it than most people do and if we can get a case early in our office it's going to bode much better. The case out in Oklahoma we caught about a year, year and a half into it, so I had a lot of catch up to do, especially because it kind of started out as a worker's comp claim.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this, and then we'll get into the Oklahoma case how do you view the role of the plaintiff's lawyer in a brain injury case when it's in pre-litigation, in terms of, you know, you can have the same symptom presentation to two different doctors and you can get one that does everything that you described and puts everything into the record that you might need, and you can have one who maybe is more dismissive of quote just a concussion and it'll go away. And so how do you, in your practice and in approaching cases like that, how do you see your role as like no, this is a bad doctor, you should go to this guy instead, or like, or when you should be making referrals out to the vor specialist, for instance?
Speaker 1:yeah, so part of that is just having had these established relationships with a lot of doctors around, not only here in virginia but kind of across the country. Um, reading the records is important in training our staff to understand what they're looking for. So they're bringing it to us as a lawyer and then we'll have those discussions with the client or, if I can get on the phone with a primary care physician and kind of help them. You know, hey, look, there's a little bit more here than maybe if you would consider looking at somebody who is a neuro-ophthalmologist who is able to make that connection of the eyes and the ears and the brain talking to each other. If we can get them to Look, I think it's really important to understand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're lawyers and yeah, our goal is compensation for our clients for their losses. I mean, that's obviously what we want to do, but at the same time we really care about our clients and whether we get a dollar out of the case, we really do want to see these clients get better and so if there's a place that we can find that we have just referral networks across the state, where Northern Virginia is a little more challenging up there in Virginia, explaining that a lot of times, when you're talking to the client, it's the first time that they're saying, gosh, somebody hears me and understands me, and it's coming from their lawyer, and so then you just you kind of listen and understand what it is that they're going through and say, listen, I think you ought to get to a couple of these doctors. Here's some suggestions or recommendations that I have in order for somebody who can ferret out some of the very nuanced things that you're dealing with. We have therapists that we use closely as well. Some of our therapists are TBI survivors themselves, and so they help with compensatory strategies, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So if we can get these clients to these certain types of doctors, then they're going to make the proper referrals because we've worked with them in the past and it's not like we're working with them directly and we're moving the chess pieces, it's. We know that they're going to do the right thing and to us that's important. Once they can get to these particular doctors, we know they're going to be doing the right tests. We know that they're going to be doing the right records, Because there are plenty of doctors out there who are going to tell you that you know, a concussion is going to resolve in three to six months, and that's just the bottom line. That's how I feel about concussions. We know that through the literature and through a lot of other litigation that we have, that that's just not the case. There are some people who are called the miserable minority, who don't recover.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Well, let's pivot. Let's talk about this case. You know, I think I buried the lead I didn't, I think announces a $10 million verdict that you got for your time in Oklahoma. So amazing result. But first of all, walk us through. What was this case about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Georgia Pacific has a paper plant in Muskogee, oklahoma, which is about an hour and a half, about an hour east of Tulsa, oklahoma, and about two hours sort of northeast of Oklahoma City, right on the Arkansas River which feeds into the mighty Mississippi, and they convert paper, these huge paper rolls, into toilet paper that you would buy at Kirkland and they service this particular plant. It's enormous. Service is about seven or eight states in the Midwest Texas, oklahoma, kansas, all those in Missouri and my client was a factory worker in that Georgia Pacific plant for 21 years and I would say there are a lot of people who are associated with this plant. Out there in Muskogee they use forklifts and they're called clamp trucks. They go around picking up these huge paper rolls that are about 12 feet high, they weigh about 6,000 pounds, and they move them throughout the factory, place them into these machines and the machine converts it to toilet paper, into paper towels and some other Kirkland products that you would buy at Costco.
Speaker 1:One of the trucks caught fire and if you're familiar with a lift truck or with a forklift, most of them operate by propane and the reason they do that is because they're inside and it's a clean fuel and when you're inside you can't use diesel. Inside of these factories they use propane and the fire reached the propane tank and kabloui and kablooey. It exploded. About four or five minutes once they realized they had a problem with the fire and the engine it exploded. It's called a blevee. It's a boiling liquid explosion, vapor explosion or something like that.
Speaker 2:That was the first time I'd heard of that term at all when I walked into this case.
Speaker 1:So, our client was about 100 feet away from this explosion. It blew the if you're familiar with those steel doors that come up, they're really fire doors and they had lowered one of these doors real fast and this explosion was so powerful that it blew that steel door all the way across the room.
Speaker 2:Did they lower the door to encapsulate the fire. Is that the idea? What's that? Did they lower the door to encapsulate the fire? Is that the idea? What's that? Did they lower the door to encapsulate the fire? Yeah?
Speaker 1:So that's like part of their training is that when? This happens. They know like they're.
Speaker 2:My guess is, and I didn't ask this question.
Speaker 1:It's probably a really good question to ask, but the purpose of doing that is to ensure that it doesn't get into the rest of the plant, because, I don't know, there are probably about 10 buildings and these buildings are three or four football fields long and wide. I mean, they're enormous. So yeah, the fire doors that was part of their training. Once they realized that they couldn't contain the fire, there were two or three of them that were trying to put it out and the propane kept spitting into the fire, so every time they'd use an extinguisher to blow it out, it came back, and so they realized we've got to get out of here. So the first thing we do is roll the steel doors down and we have a video of the door blowing off, and it was the first thing that was played in opening statements. And I'm the way that we had to set this courtroom up, because there's so many lawyers. We were like right on top of the jury, we were right there, and their whole, all of them went a big breath. They were like, wow, they couldn't believe what they watched, and so it was an enormous explosion.
Speaker 1:My client was knocked over by the power of the explosion and fell down. She injured her hip and she hit her head, and so there was a lawyer in Muskogee who got the case realized that. So Georgia Pacific sued the manufacturer of the forklift for a products liability, poor design. A bad design because the claim was that the fire should never be in a position where it can reach the propane tank. We also sued the maintenance company who, because there's so many of these forklifts, they third-party out the maintenance for these things and the maintenance company did some things within this engine that our claim was that caused the spark of the fire. They rerouted some wires in there that they shouldn't have.
Speaker 1:And so he realized this lawyer realized that this is going to be a third-party claim against some outside companies and found a guy in Tulsa, oklahoma. His name is Tony Lazor. Tony and Steven go way back. They've had cases. Steven used to travel the country doing these cases and so he's had some very nice results with Tony. Tony picks the phone up and calls us and says, hey, I want you to work on the damages side of this case, cause that's what we're good at, and um and and so I spent I don't know three years, two or three years really, kind of working up the damages in this case and we found there was a doctor out in oklahoma that helped us with it and um, so that's how we got the case, and so so just was all of this consolidated.
Speaker 2:I heard you say pacific sued the forklift, but then also you had an individual plaintiff. So so all of this gets consolidated for trial and on the first morning of trial, like how many plaintiffs and how many defendants have lawyers sitting in the courtroom?
Speaker 1:A lot of damn lawyers. There were three plaintiffs' tables. One of them was Georgia Pacific and they were suing for about $77 million because part of their factory burned down and they had to replace the equipment. They lost downtime, all that sort of stuff. Then there were two personal injury plaintiffs One was my client and another one was one of the guys who was trying to put the fire out. He was within like 60 feet of this explosion and he got blown across the room. But everybody reacts differently to a brain injury. His brain injury wasn't wasn't to the point where he couldn't work anymore, but he had to work differently. Okay, and we have a lot of these cases where somebody is still working, but they just have to. Either they have a benevolent employer or they're they're in a different position than they used to be. My client was completely disabled. We had medical doctors who said that she can't work anymore.
Speaker 2:Well, and then, yeah, then, as her lawyer, you have the added complexity. But there's this guy who's right next to the blast, who is quote not as hurt, right, yeah, as she who's outside the blast door wall, and yeah, that's so, so so now, yeah, talk, walk me through that. How did you position that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's walk me through that. How did you position that? Yeah, so you picked up on something that concerned me for a long time. A couple of things really concerned me. That concerned me.
Speaker 1:The video that you know I don't have it with me to show you right now. I could, if you wanted to, but there's a video of the door that I was telling you that blew off, where there was a guy that was rolling the damn thing down, and once it got all the way down to the very bottom, boom, the door flew off. Well, you see this guy scurrying away, right, so he's walking away, and every time I looked at that I'm just going what's the jury going to think? Right, my client is in a different part of the factory. He gets blown over. This guy's in the same room when it happened and didn't get blown over. How do I explain that? Is that a problem? Do I need to focus group it, right? I mean, I'm just like I don't. So the other problem that I had was my client fell down or was knocked down or was blown over or whatever, but the person that she was standing next to did not get blown over, okay, so did she trip, did she fall, did not get blown over, okay, so did she trip? Did she fall? What she testified to was that she felt just something lifting her up and pulling her backwards and then she doesn't remember. And then she remembers, kind of getting up. So I have a couple people who were there near her. They were trying to scurry their way out there, realizing this is not good, and the blast goes off and a couple people are still standing. A couple people fell over.
Speaker 1:So you kind of picked up on my concerns as a brain injury lawyer, is it? Is the jury going to pick up on this? Are they going to care? Are they going to? Are they going to hold me to the mechanism of the injury Right? Are they going to hold me to the mechanism of the injury Right?
Speaker 1:So I immediately went into my brain injury medicine book to look for blast injuries, because there's a lot of medicine out there about military members coming back from war with head injuries, with blast injuries, and not necessarily getting hit with something, but just with the blast itself, and there's some really good literature out there explaining how a person can get concussed and we all know that brains react differently. So we actually did focus group this issue and I was very concerned about it and the focus group just set it aside. They were like people get injured for different reasons and different ways. That's not a big deal to me, it doesn't really matter that much to me how it is that. We just know that it was a powerful blast, so yeah, so that. But the guy like within 60 feet of and got blown across the room had different injuries, and so my goal was to. We had a brain injury medicine board certified brain injury medicine doctor testifying in this case and she was fantastic and one of my goals with her was to explain why that is right.
Speaker 1:I mean, look, you can walk on a football field and play football and you can get hit 100 times in the head and have no residual issue. And to a tagliatella gets hit twice and has this acerbic effect and you realize that this guy's in trouble. Everybody's brain reacts differently. It's probably why what I do is fun but also really hard.
Speaker 2:All right. So you have the three plaintiffs, you have a whole bunch of defendants sitting there in the courtroom. This thing took eight weeks and your focus was only on the damages. And so walk me through like in a case like that, when you have multiple plaintiffs who have multiple different plaintiffs' lawyers, how do you divide up the work? And then how do you come, over the period of a couple of years, to trust each other to do a good job on the various parts of the work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the trust is incredible because it's absolutely I mean, look if I didn't feel comfortable walking in that courtroom with what Georgia Pacific lawyers are going to be able to do to prove their case. We lose Because, as you know, in the plaintiff's side of things, a products liability case is extraordinarily expensive and it's side of things, a product's liability case is extraordinarily expensive and it's also very, very expert, dependent right, and my focus had been on the damages side of the case. I didn't really. My other, tony, my co-counsel, had paid a lot of attention, or more attention, to the liability side of it, sort of what the experts are saying, who's pointing the fingers at who and the interesting dynamic in this case. It sort of what the experts are saying, who's pointing the fingers at who and the interesting dynamic in this case, just sort of as a that ran throughout this entire case was the manufacturer is called Heister Yale and the maintenance company is called Concentric.
Speaker 1:They were eventually pointing the finger at each other, which is fun to watch, but it also was could get confusing for the jury, Like who do we find? And so we had to kind of sort all that out. And the lawyers for Georgia Pacific one of them had some pretty extensive experience in explosions and so I could tell very quickly they were very, very thorough at what they did, what they did, and, to give you an example, they literally shipped a whole team of probably four or five lawyers and two or three paralegals and a bunch of support staff to live in Muskogee for two months. And here I am as a plaintiff's lawyer.
Speaker 1:You're walking in there going hi, I'm over here in the corner. Eventually you guys are going to pay attention to me, okay, but here I am, and every day it was my goal to get the jury to just remember I was there, so you know I come in there and just joke with them or, you know, just somehow make a comment to the judge.
Speaker 1:I just hey, we're over here. Okay, we're not the show yet, but look, it was important for us to make sure that we got the human side of it, and so our opening statement was I want you to remember that there may have been $77 million worth of damage to a building, but it got rebuilt and they're making money now. Guess what. We are humans and the reason we have all these safety measures and the reason that we hold corporations accountable for being safe is if something like this doesn't happen, and because we're really talking about a human being. So we I spent a lot of time, quite frankly, the first week or two, kind of like understanding what our liability case was, because I spent so much time with our damages case.
Speaker 1:You know, the first witness that Georgia Pacific put on was an expert that they had and I'm like, who is this dude? What is he going to say? Wow? But you know, I started taking notes, man Boy, did I take extensive notes and I kind of thought, going into the trial, quite frankly, that I might come home. You know, maybe I'll just bust out of here on a Friday and come back on Monday. You know, maybe I'll just bust out of here on a Friday and come back on Monday.
Speaker 1:And I quickly realized that it was really, really helpful for me to listen to every single witness that testified. Because when I closed and I was a caged tiger, Brian, I mean it was hard, because I've never been in a trial where I'm not the center of attention and that's just who I am, because I'm a plaintiff's lawyer and I have to prove my case, just like I did as a prosecutor. So I had to sit back and wait and so I'm just like I'm stalking the sidelines, just ready to go. But I had to have the trust that the case, the liability case, was built. And I'll tell you, about halfway through the first week I was like dude.
Speaker 2:I'm going to be here forever, forever. How long was the trial supposed to go for?
Speaker 1:About a month maybe.
Speaker 2:Twice, as long as it was supposed to yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know, one day the courthouse got shut down because we didn't have power. You know, we took off on Memorial Day weekend. The jury had, you know, one of the jurors had a softball tournament she was coaching. She had to go to right in the middle of graduation season, so like the jury had to take a day off for graduation season.
Speaker 1:So but I realized very quickly after the cross-examination of that first witness, there are three defendants who are cross-examining each witness and let me tell you it took forever and one of the things I walked out of there with is keep it simple, stupid man. I mean, my God, you can piss a jury off really fast with asking 15 or 20 questions. That should have taken you two. And so I'm the caged tiger waiting to talk and I finally get to talk, and it was the Tuesday after Memorial Day and I'll tell you that story here in a second. But trust is important and I got to know these lawyers through depositions, because I did sit through depositions and I took a couple of depositions of their experts damages experts that they put on. Actually they never even put them on a trial, but I got to know them. They're really good lawyers and so I was very proud of stepping in the courtroom with these guys. They were fighters, it was amazing. It was a lot of fun, it was.
Speaker 2:So you finally got to talk Tuesday after Memorial Day. How much of the time of this eight-week trial was you putting on your client's damages case? Like three days, three days, yeah, three days, and then weeks.
Speaker 1:So it was kind of weird. Scheduling in a case like this was really complex, because I kept communicating with my witnesses and before the case, before we started trial, we really decided, hey, we're going to really keep this simple. For a lot of reasons, one of which is because we knew that the liability side of it was going to take a while and I didn't want to bore the jury with a bunch of witnesses that were to come in. I wanted to be surgical about how it was. So I just I pinned down about four or five damages witnesses that I really wanted her physical therapist, her primary care physician. Oh and, by the way, our very first, and the reason I'm telling you this is because I had to put one witness on kind of early in my case out of order, because she was going to Canada to visit her family.
Speaker 1:She was a nun, she was a doctor and she was a nun, and so she had a medical degree and she worked for a Catholic health care system called St Francis out in Tulsa and she was fantastic. So it was the first flavor that the jury got of what's coming right. I mean, of course, you give your opening statement. Three weeks into it, you're finally putting on a medical doctor to testify about our client and she was really great. And I mean, how do you cross-examine a nun? You know you can't start getting into the bias issues and that sort of thing. I mean she literally so funny story. I'm prepping her a day or so before she takes the stand and I'm speaking with her at her hospital there's, of course, they have counsel there and finally, at the end of all of it she was really great. I said, look, what you're wearing is fine. She was really great.
Speaker 2:I said look what you're wearing is fine. She had the. You know what? You would expect a nun to be wearing, the. I don't know what you'd call it and I'm afraid that I'm going to offend somebody. What is it called I?
Speaker 1:think it's called a habit, okay. So yeah, she was wearing that in the black robe right and the chain and with a cross on it, and I said, look, what you're wearing is fine, I don't wear anything else, okay. So she comes in there without one, you know, and across hanging out around her neck and she, and she gives medical opinions about my client's traumatic brain injury and she, she summarizes a lot of records for so that was my first witness that I put on.
Speaker 1:Then I go to memorial day weekend, right, and if you recall memorial day weekend, the storms that were going on out here on the East Coast, you may not remember, but I do because I flew out of Tulsa to meet my family in Philadelphia. My kids are lacrosse players and I told you my wife is a lacrosse coach. We went to the Final Four, the college Final Four, in Philly, and I kind of saw this coming man. Saturday and Sunday I'm like I don't know about Monday, and so this thing got so backed up I thought I was going to put my case on the week before. So now I've got to put my case on starting Tuesday after Memorial Day. I'm in Philadelphia. We're watching literally the final game and I'm getting dings on my phone going. You're going to have trouble.
Speaker 1:And I'm looking at my, trying to figure out where the plane was supposed to be to take me to Tulsa, and it wasn't there and it kept getting pushed back. I was in the airport like buying new tickets for another airline and I went south instead of going north because I was trying to stay away from all the storms. Anyway, my point is, I was trying to stay away from all the storms. Anyway, my point is I didn't get back until about 1 o'clock in the morning. I had to get up at 5.30 or 6 the next morning and be ready to put my case on. So I had to be back in Tulsa because I was the guy that was next. You know I'm putting on my show. So we finally put our case on all of Tuesday. I put on my brain injury medicine doctor, who was also our life care planner on Wednesday morning, and the defense attorney after I did my direct examination of her, one of the defense attorneys who represented Heister walked up to me.
Speaker 1:He goes that's the best direct examination of a doctor I've ever seen.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't because of me.
Speaker 1:It was because she was so well prepared and she was just a really good, good person and a good doctor.
Speaker 2:And so at one point the judge was.
Speaker 1:there's some argument about her testimony and maybe taking her or doing her direct examination like the next day, and the judge is like we got to get her back to the hospital. She treats 14 or 15 TBI patients a day. I mean, that's what she does for a living. So the doctor even was like she's important in our health care system. So we took about three days to put our case on. We wanted to be very surgical. We wanted to get in, get out and sit down.
Speaker 2:Was this case really about damages?
Speaker 1:For us it was.
Speaker 2:Yes for you. Yeah, In all cases they're always defended, almost always defended, both on liability and on damages. But if you were defending the case, was it really about like, no, we did everything right, or was it really about no? I don't think David's client is actually as injured as he says she is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I thought that's where it was going to go and we polarized, we tried we intentionally tried to polarize the case because if you read the expert report, so my client was tested out there in Oklahoma the neuropsychological testing and I couldn't believe what I was reading. The guy literally said that my client was was attempting to try to pull the wool over the eyes of everybody and that it was a naive attempt to manipulate the testing process. So, going into our opening statement, I was like we're polarizing this man, I'm throwing this right back in their face. Because she is such a good person she's worked there for 21 years.
Speaker 1:Because she is such a good person, she's worked there for 21 years, you think she just wants to throw away that career and hopes that she gets money out of a jury that she'll never like know. She don't know anybody on the jury. So it just didn't, it just was a. You know I had three books out there that I paid very close attention to Trial by Human, nick Riley, david Ball on Damages and then Rick Friedman's book on polarizing the case. And so we polarized it, man, and so we really thought that they were going to try to say, hey, she's just not as injured as you think she is. And they kind of tried to and honestly, brian, when they tried to do that with my nun, it really backfired.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I don't know that I'll ever go into a courtroom with that kind of credibility. On my first witness it was bananas. And then they tried to cross-examine my brain injury doctor. Her name is Perry Craven, out of Oklahoma. She's just, she's unbelievable, and they just couldn't. They just made no headway, none. And so we get into their case and again I'm a caged tiger. I'm hoping they put this neuropsychologist on the stand. I'm begging for them to do it and they never put him on the stand.
Speaker 1:I took his deposition about four or five hours. We argued about raw data and anybody who's listening understands the raw data from a neuropsychologist and whether I had allowed to have access to it and all this sort of stuff. But they never put them on the stand. So I thought they were going to really heavily argue that my client wasn't injured. Instead they put all their chips in the middle of the table in liability. Yeah, and so, especially the manufacturer, the product manufacturer. They just didn't. They couldn't find holes in any of my doctors or any of my lay witnesses. You know my fact witnesses. I put her sister on, I put up.
Speaker 1:I don't want to get witnesses like this before, but her good friend was a pastor. He was a former deputy sheriff and he was like the commissioner of accounts or something like that out there in Muskogee, like everybody not only knew this guy, but he knew everybody. He was on like the emergency response team and they get a call to go out to the fire out there and they actually have to stay out of the grounds and kind of watch what was happening until they were needed. But this is one of my witnesses. You know, you just can't make this stuff up. So we actually polarized the case as best that we could to throw it back on them and the entire time we were thinking they were going to try to really try to push back on the damages and it ended up they were throwing all their chips in the middle of the table on liability.
Speaker 2:I think $10 million in the middle of the country is probably some kind of a record. I mean, I can't imagine Muskogee Oklahoma as a hotbed of nuclear verdicts.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, interesting Cherokee County, which is next to Muskogee County, had a huge verdict. It was a bad faith verdict right before this. It was like a $97 million verdict. I mean, it was like a $97 million, I mean it was bananas. I'm truly convinced, brian, that this whole conservative versus liberal thought process has completely changed since COVID. And I think if you have a good case and a good plaintiff and somebody that you want people to fight for Republicans or Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, or conservatives they're going to fight for Republicans or Trumpers or whatever you want to call them, or conservatives, they're going to fight for you.
Speaker 1:And look, let me tell you this the jury foreman was somebody I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, in a million years would have thought he was a foreman. He was probably 25 or 30 years old. He was a factory worker. He worked in a factory or near I think. He was in a warehouse or a factory or something like that. The hat he wore said dirty hands, clean money. He wore a hat that was literally a dirty hat and he walked into court with a hat on that said dirty hands, clean money and I posted it on Instagram. I said, should we keep him? And I got kind of like 50-50 on it and he was the juror and we were tight At the beginning of this.
Speaker 1:I could talk about this trial forever, but at the beginning of the case, before we actually went to Muskogee, the judge was literally trying to find a place to hold his trial. But he finally decided that we're going to hold it in the biggest courtroom they had there in muskogee and but we were pretty tightly packed in there and the witness chair and the first juror, who was this guy who ended up being our foreperson that I'm telling you, man, they could spell the coffee on each other's breath and he actually, you know, was having fun with the witnesses around there. He was handing him things, he was picking up papers that were falling down and he was just one of those good guys that I'm convinced that if you have the right case and you have the right reason to fight that conservative liberals or whatever it is they're going to fight for you. Now I will say this I asked for $33 million.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you what you asked for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I talked to him afterwards and he was like, yeah, that kind of came out of nowhere. So there were some lessons that I need to learn out of this case. One of them is to get out ahead of that. We went back and forth on a strategy about how much to ask for, because I will say, in a conservative jurisdiction, in Muskogee, it's not poor, but there isn't a whole lot of money there. I mean, most of the people are fairly blue collar, they're working at the factories, some of them are driving to Tulsa. I mean they're just good salt of the earth people, right. And I thought at the beginning of the case, if we threw a number out there they would shut us out, right. But then I had to, kind of in my closing argument I had to make sure that I justified a big number. Yeah, of course it made it a lot easier, brian, when the people in front of me were asking for seventy seven million dollars.
Speaker 2:We only want half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 1:I'm like I'm just I, just I'm in the corner over here just saying hey, remember us Right. And oh, by the way, this is a human injury, you know, and my client can't be fixed. We can't rebuild her. So there are a lot of schools of thought that you know whether or not you should come out with that big number. But I will say this I felt very confident in that number and I felt very good about asking for it and the way that I justified it was a million dollars a year for her past injuries and then a million dollars a year for her life expectancy was the next 21 years. And another funny story In closing I'm a guy from Virginia.
Speaker 1:I know football fairly well in Oklahoma. I pay attention to the SEC now, which is where Oklahoma is playing football. But I wanted to associate the jury with how many years 21 years is and if you think back 21 years ago and we didn't even have the iPhone and there was a lot of talk in opening statements and some other in voir dire, as they say it out there, about trucks, about mechanics and trucks, and so I showed a picture of 21 years ago what an F-150 looked like. But then I said, and maybe it was endearing, I don't know. But I said Bill Stoops was only four years into coaching Oklahoma and my co-counsel almost stood up. He goes it's Bill Stoops, bob Stoops, you idiot. And there were a number of huge Oklahoma fans out there. In fact the University of Oklahoma won the softball championship in the middle of this trial and it was a big deal out there.
Speaker 1:So the jury kind of laughed about it and I got a snicker from one of the jurors that I kind of had been. You know you can't talk to them, but you can tell that you're engaging with them. And she looked back at him and he goes thank you for correcting him on that. And I said, look, I have to deal with UVA and the ACC out here, so we're behind. But that number was a big number and I was concerned about that number. But I tried to justify it by saying there's 21 years. It's worth every penny that you give to her. So I was disappointed in some respects with the $10 million, but I'm very pleased for the client. I mean it's worth it Awesome. She's worth every penny of it, awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, listen, I'm going to pivot and be respectful of your time. But speaking of time, I mean tell me about let's talk the human aspect and time management and I know that you're a CrossFit fitness guy, yeah, but trying to manage that and nutrition and sleep across an eight-week trial outside of your hometown?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like can you walk us through, maybe like what an average day looked like for you while you were in trial?
Speaker 1:I was very intentional about this, brian. I got out there on a Sunday. I flew in about 2 o'clock on Sunday at a Vrbo that I rented for a month and I ended up having to be in three of these because I couldn't figure out what the trial was going to end. But literally I intentionally you know, look, you can go out there and stay in a hotel and eat bad food and I knew that that was going to be a really bad idea for me, and so the first thing I went to do is I went grocery shopping. I went to Whole Foods and I bought just a lot of good, healthy stuff that I knew that I could bring with me to trial and then I could come home and cook, because if I went out all the time I'd be eating a lot of very heavy carb food and a lot of fats and I just I knew that was not going to allow me to be able to be at my best every day.
Speaker 1:So that Monday I went to trial, we started picking a jury. I literally drove straight from Muskogee to a CrossFit gym and joined a CrossFit gym that night, and I joined it for the month and I'd actually been there before because I'd been out there for some depositions and a mediation and a few other things. So I just looked right at the guy and said I don't know how long I'm going to be here, but I'm coming. And so he gave me the access code it's a 24-hour code to the gym and so you know my days.
Speaker 1:I'm up at 6. I was up at 6. I'm very intentional about trying to get light in my eyes in the morning. Andrew Huberman is big on this and I really thought it helped me kind of get prepared for the day. And then I mean, I brought my lunch almost every day as well. I know that's kind of weird, but I would throw some protein in there, some fruit, because we're ordering food in the middle of the day from delis and that sort of thing, and I was very intentional about being very careful about what I'm ingesting because I'm doing a lot of sitting.
Speaker 1:when you go to these trials, you're not walking around a lot. Then my drive was about 45 or 50 minutes away. Concededly, I listened to a ton of podcasts, man. I listened to the Great Trials podcast. I was listening to yours all the time. And I listened to the Great Trials podcast. I was listening to yours all the time.
Speaker 1:Funny story Nick Raleigh, who you know, I've read his books and he just started a new podcast, and one of his podcasts that he started I think it was like his second one was about how to deal with rejection. I was like I'm not listening to that man. I don't want to have any bad vibes, so I literally would skip past that and listen to a lot of other things other than that. But it gave me a lot of time to think, brian, and I'll be honest with you, that was a real benefit to me. I know people would say why are you driving 45 minutes? First of all, it was a straight shot. It was like everything's flat in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1:So when I'd drive back, I would really digest the day and I would go straight to the CrossFit gym. I would change Sometimes they'd already finished their workout and so I would either do my own workout or would do one that they programmed for the day, and then I would get there probably at 6 or 6.30. We'd finish between 4 and 5, depending on the day, and then I'd go back and cook. So, depending on the day, I then uh, and then I go back and cook, uh, and, and then so, depending on the day, whether I spent a lot of time in the first couple of weeks really, really pouring through medical records and getting my examinate Cause I didn't know when I was going to put these witnesses on man, it was bananas.
Speaker 2:I guess that is. That is the benefit of parsing up the trial, is that you don't have to go back and present for the next day or get ready for the next day's cross-examination, for it sounds like 90 percent of the trial or so it was totally different for me because I've been through a lot of cases where literally the next day I have to be prepared to put on the next witness.
Speaker 1:So so probably my routine would have changed pretty significantly if that was the case. So that's what was different about this one is that I did have some time in the evenings to process what I'd just seen. But also I mean I took copious notes on one note and I mean I was moving things, you know, I just took pictures, all kinds of stuff, and then I was actually developing my closing the entire time and I actually was slated to do the rebuttal closing. I can tell that on the Sunday before our closing we changed that up and I actually was slated to do the rebuttal closing. I can tell that on the Sunday before our closing we changed that up and I actually did the initial closing. So my day, you know, it was pretty much the same of listening to the testimony, taking notes. We did some cross-examination here and there, like, for instance, one of the experts got up and said that the power of the explosion near where my client was was 10 times more than what was seen on the video, and so that was my second slide. I showed the video and my second slide was remember when the guy said it was 10 times more powerful. So had I not been there or had not been paying attention all my game I may have missed that, but you know.
Speaker 1:But I'm up at 6. I intentionally forced myself to go to bed, turn off the phones, turn off the TV, put my laptop away sorry about 10 or 10.30 because I needed seven to eight hours of good, solid rest and of course I'm in a foreign place in a foreign bed. I actually went to Walmart, bought my own sheets, I bought a new pillow, I bought things that made me feel more comfortable, and I'm a creature of habit and if I can stay in a routine I'm far better focused, and so that was my. I knew that going into this, that I was going to have to stay in that routine, otherwise it would get sideways for me. And I've been in trials where I've been up to 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning. And let me tell you the next day sucks.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the next two days are not good after that they're really and it's just it's not.
Speaker 1:So you know, I knew going into this trial I'd already started preparing my closing before I even got to Tulsa and so, If you can kind of take the backwards, look at it and prepare yourself for what's to come, my next trial will be totally different, I'm sure, but this one was just different in so many aspects, and that was one of them. So many aspects.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, the world doesn't stop just because you're in Oklahoma for half a week, Right, Because you've got other cases back at your office and then you're responsible for some of the management stuff that goes on back at your office. So when were you finding time and how were you keeping up with your other clients and your staff who were back here in Virginia?
Speaker 1:At night and weekends Periodically. You know, when we had breaks I literally was on Zoom calls every now and then during lunch in another courtroom trying to resolve issues. You know my partner, stuart, and my other partners, howard and Stephen, and I have another associate, samantha. They did a really nice job and I basically just said you're empowered to take care of these things. You know we have some reporting that we'd like to do.
Speaker 1:Of course we have fireproof coaching every week that Stuart was sitting through, so I had to kind of get him up to speed on how to extract some numbers from our system before I left. And you know, on the weekends I would set aside some time to try to focus on a few other things that were going on, as best I could the nights, or even that drive. I'd get on the phone and I'd be on the phone on the drive, you know, home or the drive to the courthouse just to take care of a few things. My goal is to get to the point where I can disappear for two months and I don't have to do any of this work.
Speaker 1:It's not easy. It's not easy, but that's the goal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Awesome and the exercise to me was absolutely critical. I'd beat myself up a little bit just because I need to. I mean, you can sit for only so long. My body needs to move. I get the endorphin. I just the, the blood flow, the, the, uh. It just really helps my thought process and clear my head. Uh, you know, I I constantly say to people you know like why you said, look, it's the one hour that I have to myself, it's the one hour Like I associate.
Speaker 1:Samantha texted me the other day. I said nope, I'm at the gym me time, leave me alone. I'll get back to you later, in an hour I'll address it. But the great thing I love about CrossFit I'm a former college athlete. As you can see behind me, that was my old jersey at Mary Washington College. I played soccer. I'm a competitive guy. I need something like that to challenge me. Right, I get challenged every day mentally and it can wear on you. And if you're not clearing your head with something that is physically challenging, at least for me, I go a little bananas. And so I knew the first thing I had to do was find a gym out there to get exercise.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right, so I got one more question and then we'll tell people where they can find you. If you were going back to the beginning of this case in Oklahoma, what is one thing you would have done differently?
Speaker 1:I probably would have gone out to my client a little earlier and spent some more time with her. It's hard because I was so far away. You know one thing, nick Rowley, and the Trial by Humans perspective is, you know, get in the home of your client and have dinner with them, break bread with them. We ended up doing that, but it wasn't until the beginning of trial that we did that, and I think if I had to do it differently, when I walked into her house I realized that she was a prisoner of her own home and it really sucks. One of the things that she was really struggling with was photophobia. She lights, she's very light sensitive and it would trigger migraines and it would shut her down. She had a young grandson who was two or three years old, and part of my closing argument was a little weird. I'm not sure it worked, but my brain thought it worked. What I was.
Speaker 1:My final closing of my closing argument was to describe a story about his name was Jackson, jackson and his grandmother, and I told a story about what Jackson and his grandmother would have been doing had this not happened and I told you know? So I'm 13 years old, I'm playing golf, my grandmother's out here teaching me how to play. She loved to play golf. She teached me how to putt. My grandmother gave me these great tips on patience and she would take me to the movies. She teached me how to putt. My grandmother gave me these great tips on patience and she would take me to the movies and I would, you know, go to lunch with my grandmother. One thing I remembered blah, blah, blah. So I tried to tell the story of the perspective of the grandson. Had this not happened to her? And then I looked at the jury and said but that's not what happened. That story is about what should have happened.
Speaker 1:So when I went into my client's house I realized I mean, she had a hot plate, a cooktop in her bedroom, her shades were closed, she had like almost a full size refrigerator. That was her I don't want to say a happy place, because people have happy that was where she was comfortable, like it's where she wasn't hurting. And I didn't realize that to the extent that I did, until I actually went there and spent some more time with her and with her family and with her grandson. I really wanted to meet the grandson and because I really had this in my head about this relationship with the grandson.
Speaker 1:I don't know about you, brian, but I have very fond memories of my grandparents. I used to go cut my grandmother's grass and you know she used to make egg salad sandwiches for me, and so I just remember those relationships, and that's what I wanted to play up a little bit in my closing argument was this relationship with her grandson. And I think if, if I'd gone out there a little earlier, I could have like I could have established a better idea of how I wanted to do that before I went into closing.
Speaker 2:I think I mean there's always something right, there's always something that you would have gone back and done. Yeah, a little bit differently or not, a question you wouldn't have asked, or the one question that you remember as soon as you sit down? Every time it happens every time, I mean.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you how many times I sat down and was like man, I can't believe I forgot that. I've got it written right here and you get you know as a trial lawyer. You just get into a zone, man, and it happens. It's who we are as trial practitioners. I really think it's just every day we're trying to get better. I mean, I'm listening to podcasts of really great trial lawyers and I tell you, after getting a $10 million verdict, you look back on it and it's like so what's next? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I had Ryan. Mckeon on a very early version of this podcast and I asked him that after his $100 million verdict he said well, what do you do? Now he said what do you mean? We're just going back and we're going to do more cases, right, we'll see.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know exactly. We'll see what happens, but at least every trial I have I learned something from, and I can go back to the very first day that I lost a trial as a prosecutor in front of a jury, you know. So I remember those. I'll never forget them. But I was proud to represent this client. I had a great time doing it and I love what I do, man, it's just, it makes life a lot of fun. So now, now the goal is to get to the point where I can have three or four of these a year. Um, I'm not running around trying to manage fires in my office and and really be surgical, uh, about how it is that I try these cases.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that's. I think that's a really important point, because everybody's perfect law practice is a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know there's a lot of people that want to be the CEO and get out of the doing of the work and never be in a courtroom again. And yours is different, and but the point is to just figure out what is the most important thing for you, and if that's, let's get this business to a place where it's managing itself, and I can just go do three or four of these a year. That's awesome and I'm really happy for you. So, David, where can people find more about you and about Brain Injury Law Center?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. We have two websites. One is thebraininjurylawcentercom and the other one is thesmithlawcentercom. Of course I'm on Instagram. I'm trying to do a lot better job of following the Bob Simon, jen Gore. You know, get yourself out there to be just the who you are. The more people trust you and see who you've for who you are you know, the more the more that you'll be able to to be able to be counsel for other people.
Speaker 1:It's at D Holti five. D H O L T Y five. The five is my number when I was in high school. It's not that number, that's actually my son's number. Right now in college he plays lacrosse, which is pretty crazy. But it's dholti5 on Instagram. And, of course, my email address is dholt at smithlawcentercom, but text me anytime 757-620-7029. I don't have all the answers, brother, but I love to collaborate. I love to meet people. I love to listen to how people do things better and grow. I'm 52 years old now. God, I just turned 52. I feel like I have a lifetime of trial work ahead of me, which I'm really excited about.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. All right, so we'll link to all that in the show description If you have a brain injury case anywhere in the country and you are feeling out of your depth.
Speaker 1:David is your guy. Thanks my man Absolutely. Brian is a pleasure buddy.
