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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
00:10
Speaker 2
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. All right, well, welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jack Zinda. Today we're going to talk about a really amazing case that I and my partner, Neil Solomon, were lucky enough to work on. Our client's name was Kim, and she was just a remarkable woman who was in a really tragic incident. She was newly married and was leaving a restaurant with her husband. They were riding on a motorcycle and heading home and were stopped at a light at the intersection. They had plans to, you know, sit in the backyard, stare at the stars together. And while they're sitting at the light, they are just creamed from behind. Kim has terrible injuries.
01:12
Speaker 2
And unfortunately, her husband was killed. Fast forward 20 months later, she reaches out to us to say, hey, can you help me with my case? And that's when my law partner, Neil Solomon, jumped in and started working on the file.
01:29
Speaker 1
Yeah, she was an absolutely amazing client, you know, awesome to get to do good work for her and for her kids to try to help them out because it obviously was devastating for them and their family.
01:42
Speaker 2
So when did they. They contact us? It was a little bit after the wreck happened. I think it was like a year, maybe a year and a half after the wreck occurred. Occurred, right.
01:49
Speaker 1
Yep. It wasn't until close to 20 months after the wreck, she was dealing with her own injuries from a traumatic brain injury, as well as, you know, ankle surgery, back and hip fractures as well. And so she was dealing with those injuries for quite some time. Also, there was some interesting stuff with his family, his, her husband's family afterwards. And so she kind of gave up on it early on because there were some bad facts as for maybe being partially at fault or her husband was at the time. And so she kind of put it aside. And then after she got kind of herself in order, she just started looking to see if someone could try to help her out. So that's when she reached out to us about 20 months after the incident.
02:32
Speaker 2
And for those who don't know, Texas has a two year statute of limitation. So we're talking four months out. And as a general rule, our firm doesn't like to take cases that are less than six months out if we can avoid it because you run into all sorts of issues on did you name the right party, did you get the right jurisdiction to where it's cutting it really tight. So I remember when this Came in. We were immediately like, okay, the statute's running, so we got to get moving fast. And we identified a couple things. One, you know, it's a wrongful death case, so we had to first figure out, do we have the right parties involved in the case? And then two, our client was seriously injured as well. Could we represent everybody and do a good job with it?
03:13
Speaker 2
And then three, what the source of recovery was, because I think I recall we didn't know it was a pizza delivery service when they first came in.
03:21
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's right. She had heard through the grapevine that it might have been. It was listed as a personal vehicle. And I don't even think the crash report necessarily listed it as a delivery vehicle. And I don't think it was until we actually got the information from kind of the open records request to where we. We confirmed that it was in fact a pizza delivery and it was a pizza franchisee insurance policy that was going to be available.
03:47
Speaker 2
That's another tip, is don't take the crash report at its word. I've had at least 10 wrongful death cases that it turned out there was a seven figure source of recovery that was not disclosed in the crash report.
04:01
Speaker 1
Yeah, it was pretty basic. And they had obviously done a much more substantial investigation the police did once they figured out, obviously in homicide cases. And so you really need to go get the full report, get all the photos, all the supplemental reports and incident reports they have, as well as all the body cam and other footage where they actually interview folks after the fact.
04:25
Speaker 2
And I remember in this one, so the client hired us. She was in just a terrible spot. Even 20 months after the wreck. I remember she had some really bad injuries in trying to deal with her husband dying and all these different things going on. You know, the first thing we had to figure out is, okay, who should we represent in this case? So we like to draw a family tree and we like to identify everybody that is in the line of succession, relatives for the deceased. So in this case, went up, okay, who are the parents? And then went down, who are the kids? And then left and right, who are the siblings of him as well, of anyone he was married to, either now or in the past. I think it's really helpful to build these family trees.
05:10
Speaker 2
And then if you don't know for sure, something put a question mark. Because we've had cases where a relative pops up, you know, maybe a child from another relationship you didn't know about. So you really want to make sure you've eliminated everybody so in this one, I remember we did that. Who did we end up representing in the case?
05:28
Speaker 1
Yeah. So we just represented who is our client as well as her on behalf of her two children. So those are the only ones that there. There were parents that were living, but she was not on good terms with them and didn't want us to be representing them. And obviously we have a responsibility and duty to her and her decisions as to whether or not she wants us to try to work with anybody else.
05:53
Speaker 2
Yeah. And that's another tip to remember is when you're looking at a wrongful death case and you have multiple people that you could represent, sometimes you can get the conflict of interest waved. But you want to think, should I get the conflict of interest waved? And we knew very quickly that it was going to be a big issue if we represented her and her former parent in laws like they did not get along. It was very toxic. And that was going to create a lot of issues. I remember that being one of the first decisions we had to make is not representing them in the case. And, you know, so we figured out who we're gonna represent. Just her and we start working through the investigation.
06:31
Speaker 2
Neil, walk us through what your process was for investigating the liability part of it, because there's some really interesting liability facts that we ran down.
06:39
Speaker 1
Yeah. So the this particular case, there's conflicting testimony from people that were out there at the scene. So this happened at night. I want to say it was 10, 11 o', clock, it's dark. There's. It's an area of town where there's some lights, but it's not extremely. And our clients are at a stop sign. There is one report from someone next to them that says that they heard or saw our two folks on their motorcycle stopped at the light and were. Were standing up on the bike when the light had turned green and that's when they had gotten hit. There was another witness that happened to be out there that there was some conflicting testimony of that they had actually gotten into some sort of argument while they were there and stepped off the bike and the bike had actually fallen over.
07:23
Speaker 1
And so there was potential dispute of was the bike even sitting up, Were the lights on? Would they have been visible to the vehicle coming from behind them? Those were all some of the issues that were there. And then a lot of the photos that were in there from the scene depict it being extremely dark versus other photos will show it being light enough to where you could definitely see in front of you. And then top it off. Once we got the file, the driver of the motorcycle, now he was at a complete stop, but his toxicology report came back that he was intoxicated at the time. So that was another factor of, you know, while that doesn't necessarily play to the, you know, the passengers claim, that would go in effect as well for the kids as well.
08:06
Speaker 1
And so we wanted to make sure that we could prove liability, you know, get all the information we need to be able to prove that up.
08:14
Speaker 2
So just so listeners can envision, you have this car, this motorcycle, stopped at a stoplight, big dispute on what could be seen. And our driver, the motorcycle, our clients, on some question of his sobriety or not, which already you're on a motorcycle, maybe you have some intoxication. Not a great place to start. And we got this case into litigation right away because we're looking at the four month mark for the statute of limitations. And one thing we want to be very careful of is that we got all the proper defendants in the case. And this was a pizza delivery company, a really well known one that has franchises as well as corporate stores across the United States. So we had to make sure we identified the right parties in this instance.
08:58
Speaker 2
And I believe we sued not only the Mothership Corporation, but we also sued the franchisor and the individual driver in the case. Am I leaving anyone out, else out?
09:10
Speaker 1
No, I think that's it. We sued the driver, the franchise, as well as the head corporate as well.
09:17
Speaker 2
And you can run down information and try to track this stuff down. There's some good services, research services you can use to try to find different business entities. But if you're running up on the statute, you want to make sure you get everybody in. And a lot of states have a misnomer statute. You can plead in case you get the name spelled wrong, but be really careful on that front. So we got into litigation and then we started taking depositions. And I know we got some really good information from the driver of the car in this one.
09:50
Speaker 1
Yeah, so the driver was a pretty young girl who had been working for them. And as part of. Not only from her deposition, but also from. Basically there were some recorded police investigation videos where they did a recorded statement with her ahead of time. And so it was somewhat disputed, but basically we got from her to admit that she was in fact on her phone at the time of the crash. It was basically for some extended period of time, basically 15 minutes while she's out delivering this pizza out there, she's on the phone talking to a friend Planning what they're going to be doing the following day for a Saturday when she wasn't going to be working.
10:33
Speaker 2
That really helped to make the case because now we have a distracted driver, we have cell phone issues, we have.
10:39
Speaker 1
Her admitting to it at the scene of the crash. The police are actually out there, they're consoling the driver of the vehicle, seeming to care less about the people that had actually been killed and hurt. I think probably due to some of the bias they had against them and are consoling her about what happened. And then the pizza delivery company actually comes out. Has somebody else come pick up the pizza to go deliver it right from the back of her car from the scene?
11:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, this was that case. Yeah. And that is so disgusting. I remember, I mean, talk about a theme of profits over people. Not only have they just killed somebody, but they don't even send out someone to console their poor worker who is involved in this incident. Their main concern is getting the 12 pizza to the right place so they don't lose any money. I remember when I heard that fact, thinking that is just a great fact for us. That is going to add a lot of value to this case. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today or to set up a time to talk one about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw I.O.
11:46
Speaker 2
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.
12:00
Speaker 1
The other piece was really from her that I think helped push it forward pretty quickly from there was the actual company itself. You know, while they had more than one store, they had multiple in the area. So it wasn't this tiny mom and pop shop, if they're even going to try to claim that as a franchise. But on top of that, they had no rules regarding using their phone while driving. She said she did it all the time. And so really being able to pull in the company and kind of their general practices into the case as well.
12:31
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that's a really great point. So. And what you're always trying to do in these commercial vehicle cases is to make the case about more than just this incident. You want to show either a pattern of behavior that led to this or, you know, some real clear rule violations that they didn't follow and how it could affect other people in the community. In this case, you had a really popular pizza delivery company that is allowing a teenage Driver to drive, distracted on the phone with absolutely no training and has more than enough resources to, you know, figure this stuff out, given they own multiple stores, they'd been around for a long time, and then on top of it, you know, after this, they don't change their policies, they don't change their procedures. They just want to make sure the pizza gets delivered.
13:16
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I think the big thing is they have access to, you know, the big corporate entity that has all the resources in the world worth billions of dollars. You know, they could be doing a better job of trying to, you know, make sure they're implementing these strategies.
13:31
Speaker 2
All right, so, Neil, here were, you just taken some depositions. We talked to about 100 witnesses in the defense. After saying, hey, there's no way you have a good case, reaches out and says, we're interested in potentially resolving it. So why don't you walk our listeners through about how you got from that point to resolving the case and what some of the landmines you had to deal with were?
13:52
Speaker 1
Yeah, so at that point, we obviously prepared a demand kind of laying out everything that had happened so far. Now that we had her testimony, we felt it was pretty strong, especially with how great our client was in the case and just how terrible the facts were for them. So at that point, we sent a demand, and they'd requested a couple different extensions. And that's where I think being, you know, working with defense counsel, I mean, obviously you want to stick to deadlines, but a lot of times a defense attorney can be a friend in trying to help get the authority they need to help resolve the case.
14:30
Speaker 1
And so kind of feeling that out, we figured that it was the best move to do so we could resolve some other outstanding issues regarding potential other claimants and then wrapping up what other bows they needed to in order to be able to get the money to wrap up the case.
14:46
Speaker 2
And also something to know, because this was a wrongful death and a personal injury case, there was some interesting segregation issues we wanted we had to figure out. And one was, how do you allocate the money between her personal injury claim and her claim is wrongful death beneficiary? And were able to come up with some interesting techniques to make sure that she maximized her recovery. So, you know, that's something you want to think about if you're especially in Texas and you have a wrongful death case. Like, how do you allocate where the funds go and can you support that in court?
15:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, because the other piece of that is Especially because there's two kids involved. You know, a big chunk of the money is going to them in Texas. You need to go and get that proven up and approved by a guardian ad litem, as well as, you know, the judge in the case. And so we wanted to make sure that, one, that they were set up, and the two, that it was all going to get approved once the time came.
15:33
Speaker 2
So a couple more interesting points for everyone to think about. So, like, the point that we're trying to get at is what happens when a case comes to you and you're hitting the statute of limitations really quickly. There's a potentially large outcome at stake, but you don't know a lot of facts. And so to recall, recap, some of the things we did in this one. One is we quickly identified who could potentially be the plaintiffs in the case. Two, you have to be willing to invest a lot of time on the front end. I mean, I remember Neil and I, along with a couple of lawyers, met on this case every day for the first two weeks and probably put in, you know, 60 hours worth of lawyer time in the first month, tracking everything down.
16:14
Speaker 2
What I see, a mistake a lot of lawyers make is they get a case like this and they sit on it, and then they just randomly file a lawsuit hoping that they don't blow the statute of limitations. Three is, we did so much digging on this one to find the right witnesses. And when I say rumor, literally our client came to us with no indication that it was a pizza delivery company other than I heard through the grapevine from a friend of a friend that there may have been a pizza delivery company involved. So we talked to all of these different witnesses as soon as we could to figure out what are they even talking about? Because we didn't even know what company to sue, you know, and that was a big component of it. Three is were able to get experts involved.
16:52
Speaker 2
And accident recon was really mission critical in that and figuring out what are the things that are upset a jury about the defendant's behavior. And so we've. We honed in on distracted driving and process and procedure. And I know Neil and I spent a lot of time just brainstorming this case, like, what could it be? What could the facts be on this one to make sure we're able to get the client the best result possible. And I'm trying to think there's any other important tips we want to add from this one. Can you think of Mel?
17:23
Speaker 1
No, I don't think that's it. I think you know, like I said, making sure you actually talk to the witnesses and then I think just being strategic about kind of when you push forward or not because I do think that, you know, some of the witnesses actually were not going to be great for us about whether the bike was laying down or otherwise. And so kind of know when to push, you know, when you can if there may be a bad witness before they actually do get deposed.
17:49
Speaker 2
Awesome, Neil. You know, this was a really rewarding case to work on because we helped a really awesome client. Appreciate your time today. Popping in to talk about it. Until next time, thanks.
18:00
Speaker 1
Yeah, you bet. Until next time.
18:06
Speaker 3
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.
18:19
Speaker 2
Thanks.