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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Jack Zinda
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer. Today I have with me LG head of Business development. Hey, LG Hey, Jack.
00:31
LG Pustmueller
How's it going?
00:31
Jack Zinda
It is going awesome. We just wrapped up ACL here in Austin and there's been like 100,000 Californians that just left the city and we found some peace and quiet.
00:40
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, some of the crowds at ACL were the biggest that I've ever seen.
00:43
Jack Zinda
Yeah, that's a cool show. It's always fun. Every year. It's kind of a love hate relationship with people that live in the city because it's fun when you're going, but then deal with the traffic the week before and of it are kind of nuts.
00:52
LG Pustmueller
Oh yeah, I live pretty close to the park, so I'm dealing with that traffic on my commute home.
00:57
Jack Zinda
Well, today we're going to talk about how to handle PTSD cases. So post traumatic stress disorder and how knowledge about that can actually add value to your cases and really help your clients tell their story and make sure they get full justice for what happened.
01:11
LG Pustmueller
To start off, let's just go ahead and define what PTSD is and tell us about what a typical PTSD case might look like.
01:18
Jack Zinda
That's a great place to start because first, if you don't know what you're looking for, you can't identify. You know, as all lawyers know that practice personal injury law, mental anguish is a damage that you can collect. A lot of times, depending what state you are, it may just be kind of wrapped in how you think of it with pain and suffering. In Texas, you actually have to have specific evidence of mental anguish to get it admitted by the judge and get a recovery on behalf of your client. So we've spent a lot of time trying to identify how do you pull out that damage. And one way to do it is know how to identify PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder, which is the mental impact that someone has as a result of something that occurred.
01:58
Jack Zinda
And it gets them into some sort of mental feedback loop where they're suffering the same type of anxiety or stress that they that occurred at the time it happened. It can even be something where the anxiety and stress from it is way is much worse than at the time it occurred because they're reliving it in their head over and over again and it's creating a fight or flight sensation. And I think we've all been there. I remember one time I got stuck in an elevator actually, like, the dad graduated from law school. I was in elevator with my mother in law, my brother in law, my future wife and girlfriend. And it was in the middle of the summer in Texas. And I'm wearing my full, you know, graduation stuff.
02:40
Jack Zinda
And we go to the parking garage and I never take the elevator in the park. Garage said, okay, I'll go in with you guys. We take it. It's glass. It gets stuck halfway between the first and the second floor. We're talking like 15ft. It was like, we all could have taken the series very easily. And you know, in movies you just think you can escape with these things with like, you know, just get off the top and jump out. Well, you really can't. You're kind of trapped. Right? And I've never been claustrophobic before, but it's really hot moment. It's a moment. Yes. And we call the people at the fine Baylor Law School, which is a great law school, maybe not the best elders. I think they're better now. And no one answers. No one answers. Finally, someone answers.
03:21
Jack Zinda
Twenty minutes later, oh, my gosh. And I start breathing hard. Like, what is this feeling? And it was a panic attack, and I never had one before. And they got us out like an hour later, which was just brutal.
03:33
LG Pustmueller
Wow.
03:34
Jack Zinda
And the next time I took a flight, I was in a middle seat on a Southwest flight. And I've been flying since I was 2. And I always, like, never paid much money for Southwest. I was always like C30 or whatever. And I was between two really large people. And kind of the same thing happened again. And it was reliving that event that occurred. And I was able to work through it, doing, you know, affirmations and breathing exercises and stuff. Learned some really cool techniques. But it was really revealing because it helped me understand what my clients go through on a much lesser scale when they deal with the things they deal with.
04:07
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, definitely. So you just kind of mentioned that it's important to identify it, but how does one go about identifying that in a case?
04:17
Jack Zinda
Well, so, you know, the first thing to know is when do these situations come up? And so you're looking for scenarios where something very traumatic happened. Obviously, almost any of the incidences we deal with will have some sort of trauma related to it. But some cases have more likelihood of having these issues than another. The ones I look at are, did something really crazy happen that was out of the blue that people could believe either themselves or a loved one might die or that they witnessed something just horrific that is seared into their memory. And humans are very empathetic beings. So we're able to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else if we witness something. So an example would be if you have a case where someone burns to death.
04:59
Jack Zinda
I had a case where a house exploded and there was five family members. Two had pretty bad burns, a third was okay, and a fourth had a broken bone and a fifth burned to death. And the family could hear the person as they were burning. And obviously you can imagine that's a very traumatic event that occurs in that situation. So that case obviously had good example of where to see that. And when you identify it, you want to look for symptoms that it's happening. And usually your clients are not the best people to tell you. You want to talk to friends or family members that are talking about situations where maybe they seem anxious, maybe they're nervous, maybe they start crying, maybe they break out in sweats, maybe they shut down.
05:49
Jack Zinda
Some people when they have ptsd, just stop talking and just don't do anything. The next place you're going to look is in their medical records and you're going to look for examples where they're talking about the difficult things they've gone through. And maybe they've seen a therapist that is helping them deal with this situation. Maybe they've gone to someone who helps focuses in trauma and the trauma specialist a lot of times can help you understand what they're going through and what the ramifications are. Some other examples where I've seen it, where you might not necessarily look for it are car wrecks. I had a case one time where my client was trapped upside down on I35 for about 30 minutes.
06:27
Jack Zinda
Very few physical medical injuries, but the whole time they were thinking about what's going to my kids, what's going to happen to my spouse, was going to have to get hit by an 18 wheeler. So that was a great case to point that out and tell that story because in those cases the adjusters or the defense is going to say they don't have any medical bills, how hurt could they be? Or their medical bills aren't very much. So you have to figure out how to tell that story outside of that. Another example was I had a case where this really great guy slipped in a stairwell that wasn't well lit, that had a leaky sprinkler system and it was his apartment complex and was the only way to get down. There's no elevators. And he was in his 70s, and he shredded his shoulder.
07:11
Jack Zinda
And it was the third time he'd heard it. And the doctor said, we just can't do surgery on it. That, you know, you can't have surgery again with this. This type of injury because it's shredded too many times. So he was just stuck with the shoulder, would never work the same way again. And because of his age and he was having a lot of anxiety about being stuck, not being able to be active. He played, you know, like to play sports still. And so telling that story of how that event was, creating anxiety, trauma, those sort of issues was a really powerful part of the case. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today to set up a time to talk one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw I.O.
07:54
Jack Zinda
And we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular.
08:08
LG Pustmueller
What other challenges have you encountered as you're working a case that has ptsd? Because obviously you have to treat it really delicately the beginning, and a client might not want to talk about it. Like you said, sometimes they just shut down as you kind of build that relationship and warm up, you know, that topic. What are the other challenges that you might face as you're working the case?
08:27
Jack Zinda
You know, some of the other challenges that I've seen is. Is one is you have to know that it doesn't apply to every client, and you can't try to make this something you go for every single case. Sometimes it's not present, and jurors see through people that don't have ptsd, and you're trying to make the case that they do. So that's the first thing we'll see. Sometimes people try to do is try to fit too many places where it really doesn't apply. And I think at trial, it's all about credibility. And if you present something that is not really credible, it's going to come through. So I think that's one area. The second is you've got to take your time. You've got to spend time with the clients, and. And it can be tough because we're all busy.
09:04
Jack Zinda
We all have so much to do. That's also another practice pointer. You know, we limit the number of cases we take for this very reason is I think it's better to make more money off less cases than have to take more cases and make less money off each case. Because you're not getting as much value for the client in those situations. And identify PTSD takes time because you have to talk to the family, you have to talk to the spouse. And not just like a phone call. You have to go through what their before and after of their life was like. The next is, sometimes people just aren't empathetic enough. I had a case one time where my client had been injured, was attacked, and, you know, it was a.
09:46
Jack Zinda
It was animal attack, and they were having all these weird symptoms after the incident occurred, and it didn't necessarily line up with the level of damages they had, but it was a. It was a pretty aggressive attack. And she went to a counselor, therapist, and she had been attacked as a child in a really traumatic way that this was resurfacing and something I would have never thought about that could happen. And that's actually a very common thing, relating one traumatic event to another and pulling that feeling back up. So they're reliving it over and over again. And that was really powerful because before then, you know, our client was breaking down their deposition, and it didn't carry a lot of credibility. I believed her and her husband believed her, but it just didn't line up necessarily with the facts we had.
10:31
Jack Zinda
And then when were to tie those two things together. Wow. That's now a powerful story about how this injury really caused a lot more harm than initially revealed. And that was a cool case. We got that case settled a couple of days before trial because they were offering us very little until we really made it clear this is a compelling story to tell.
10:48
LG Pustmueller
Have you seen or guess? Are the rules different in Texas versus other states when it comes to PTSD and other mental anguish within a case?
10:56
Jack Zinda
Yeah, that's a great question and a couple of things to know that are dependent on which state you are. One, what's admissible? You have to be very careful, because when you get into this area, you're admitting all of the mental health history of your client in most states. So if they have a history of drug addiction, alcoholism, abuse, or being abused or other things, that usually stays out. But usually, if this is a topic you're bringing up, it may come in because now it's relevant towards their mental state. The other is, do you need an expert witness or not? Texas, I tend to think I always want an expert if I'm going to present PTSD because it's a medical diagnosis. Some states you can get by without having an expert witness and get in through just the medical record.
11:37
Jack Zinda
So really be careful on your rules. And way I like to approach that is I'll write down my, you know, my element of harm. If I'm new to a state or maybe I'm a new lawyer, I'll go find case law that talks about that element of harm and how they proved it up. And I'll try to find the case where it got tossed out in the case where it got left in. And I know it's somewhere in that range of the case get left in. So I kind of know the facts that I'm dealing with there. But be careful. You don't want to get to trial, have this be your argument. Then it gets thrown out because you can't present that type of evidence or you didn't present enough evidence to hold your judgment.
12:10
LG Pustmueller
So when it is handled correctly and you do have the evidence, how does this increase the value of a case?
12:16
Jack Zinda
Well, the number one way is now you're telling your client's full story. Our job as trialers is to tell a jury what has gone on with our client and why that has impacted their lives and what has been taken from them. And by identifying this as something that has happened, it's taken part of their life away. And you can explain why it's a big deal. You know, I always ask, why does this matter? Why is it a big deal? And if you can't answer that question, the jury's not going to understand what's been taken from your client. So by understanding, hey, this issue, this injury, this incident led to this ptsd, which is a medical term that leads to this harm, which affects our client in this way on a daily basis.
12:57
Jack Zinda
And it is very difficult to get through and try to relate it back to other things that people understand that may happen in their lives or their family members.
13:05
LG Pustmueller
You've mentioned a lot of really interesting stories and cases that you've had to deal with. If there's anyone out there that's dealing with a case with PTSD right now, is there anything else that you would want to share with them and tell them that's important to know?
13:17
Jack Zinda
Yeah, I think, you know, one. Make sure you put together some method of, like, how you look at these things. Like, I like to do things once and then not have to repeat the same process every year. So create your own checklist, you know, based on what your state requires to prove it up. Create a checklist for what questions you want to ask the client to identify these types of situations. Think ahead for when it pops up, how you're going to handle it. Think about, you know, what experts might I need, where do I want to look in the medical records? And then fourth, understand how you prove it up at trial, the evidentiary process, and do that before the case comes in, because if you wait till the case comes in, you might have enough time and you might be scrambling.
13:54
Jack Zinda
So I would do that ahead of time. And if you have any questions, we have checklists and processes on these. Call me up or shoot me an email. I'm happy to share that with anybody.
14:01
LG Pustmueller
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jack. I appreciate your time today.
14:04
Jack Zinda
No, thank you. It's great. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.