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In this episode, Zinda Law Group CEO and founder, Jack Zinda, gives you quick tips on how to handle the difficult, but often rewarding wrongful death lawsuit.
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
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. Today I'm going to talk about some core essentials to handling wrongful death cases. Now most personal injury lawyers get very excited when they get one of these cases because they can be worth a lot of money to your practice. They can be very rewarding because you're helping someone through a very difficult time. But it's important if you're going to handle a wrongful death case that you remember a few key tips, and I'm going to hit those real quickly, and obviously, I could talk about wrongful death for a day, a week, a month. There's books written on the topic, but I want to give you some of the key takeaways that I see firms miss all the time.
First thing you want to do is identify who can actually bring the claim. If you've got the stepbrother, you may not actually have a client, and you don't want to do a bunch of work before identifying who can actually bring the claim. That's typically going to be the spouse, the parents, the children, or the estate. And if you're certain states like New Mexico, you may have to bring it through a probate court-type process. So number one, figure out who can bring the claim, and that's going to be determined by your state.
Number two, ensure that you are not going to have a conflict, and in my book, there's two types of conflicts. There's what the Bar says you can and cannot do. Those are ethical conflicts that you cannot get around for the most part. Then there are common sense ethical issues, okay, conflicts. If I have a couple whose son got killed and they're divorced and they hate each other and they've gone through 18 custody battles, maybe I should not represent both people because they're not going to get along, and it's going to create problems later on, even if I can get a waivable conflict.
So you need to use common sense and not get greedy and work with clients that you can't work with. If you do have a conflict but you think that they're actually aligned on what the outcome's going to be, try to get them to another lawyer that understands how these cases work that you know can work well with. But you cannot take a referral interest or a JV because you actually have a conflict there, okay? That's important. You don't want to get a Bar complaint and lose your law license because you got greedy and took two clients that you couldn't take the case.
Speaker 2:
This podcast is presented by Zinda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zinda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zinda Law Group, please email us at referrals@zindalaw.com. We'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zinda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case.
Jack Zinda:
Next, this is something that people skip all of the time. Get the supporting documents that verify who can bring a claim, okay? Just because someone says they're the spouse or the mom or the kid, doesn't mean that that's actually the case, and I've seen horror stories where lawyers file lawsuits on behalf of the wrong people and it turns out they weren't actually who they said they were. That is embarrassing. You want to get the birth certificate of everybody involved, so the kids, the parents, the spouse, the deceased. The death certificate, even if it's a parent and they passed away, get the death certificate to verify they're no longer around because you have to prove it to the insurance company or the defense. Marital certificates, divorce decrees if they're divorced, custody agreements because if you're representing a child, who has the legal right to bring the claim? And then there's a document that you use in some states called an Affidavit of Heirship that verifies who is what.
Next important piece, get to know your client's story. You need to know who they were and how they impacted the people that you're representing. That takes a lot of time. See what they said at the funeral. Get copies of the funeral presentation if they had them. That's a great starting point. Go to their house, look through their photo albums, talk to their neighbors, talk to their kids, talk to their parents. But you got to get out of your office, and you got to get to know your client's story. These cases are not usually about economic damages. They're about the loss of someone. And if they had a bad relationship with the person who you're representing, you want to figure out, well, how do I tell that story and that there was a chance that the relationship could be redeemed? So you got to know the client to be able to do that.
Next really important tip, identify the source of recovery. These cases can be expensive, very time intensive, and you need to make sure there's actually a source of recovery to recover from. Well you see cases all the time where it's a wrongful death case, there's only a $30,000 policy, or there's no insurance at all, and you don't want to do a bunch of work if there is no source of recovery because you're not helping the client in that instance. So make sure you identify a source of recovery.
So just to summarize, step one, identify who can bring the claim. Step two, make sure you're not conflicted out. Step three, get all supporting documentation. Step four, know the client's story. Step five, identify the source of recovery. If you at least do those five steps, you're going to be somewhat okay and be able to pursue these cases.
If you have any questions about wrongful death cases or any other type of case, please reach out. We're here to help. Thanks, bye.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to 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.