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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
Speaker 1
Foreign. 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. There's a really good book called the One Thing by the guy who started Keller Williams. And the whole theme of the book is, you know, focusing one thing to make you successful. And you look at what we do, you can go even deeper than personal injury. A lot. You know, we do a lot of trucking cases. I've learned a ton about gas explosions, and those are so interesting. It also is good for business because the more niche you are, the less competition you have and the more people to refer you cases.
00:46
Speaker 2
There's a case we have right now, it's a mining case. And big shout out to one of our associates today, o'. Gill. He did a great demand explaining, like, all the mechanisms in place for mining the levels of responsibility, and just reading it and then doing the focus group for it, you learn so much. If anything, just the terminology.
01:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
01:07
Speaker 2
And then if you have a case and we have another mining case that we're investigating, and it kind of just meshes so well. And so it really is the practice law, because you're continuously learning. But again, to your point, those niches that, like, set us apart.
01:20
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, that's what I love about doing. So learning about mining law. I've learned a lot about gas explosion brain injuries. Some tips on how to do that is go with your experts to whatever they're doing, expert inspections, or if you have a TBI case and you go where they're doing the visuals and just talk to the expert and ask questions like a. Like a novice. Don't think you're too smart to ask. I always ask the most rudimentary questions, even if I think I know them, because you'll be surprised what you learn. And also you want to understand, how do I explain this to a jury? How do I keep it simple? I think one of the cool things about what we do is trying to take complicated topics and simplify, you know, if we're talking about gas explosions.
01:59
Speaker 1
But if a house blows up. Right. That sounds super complicated. How did it happen? Where did the gas come from? But if you can drill down into. In that case in particular, they didn't test the pressure, and that would have revealed a leak. So the. The rule in that case was, you know, if you're going to install protein into a house, you need to check the pressure. And if you don't, you could have a leak in the house, could blow up. So Taking a super complicated topic. And I wouldn't have learned that if I hadn't been at the scene because I saw the expert pull the pipe out. He's explaining what happened. He actually showed me with his hand how this works. I was like, okay, that's really cool. I understand what's going on here.
02:33
Speaker 2
We just got done with a mediation for a house gas explosion. And it was funny sitting in the mediation, the mediator was, you know, trying to put pressure on us to bring our number down, while alternatively the other people to go up. And he tried to get, like, really in depth. And Neil came back and said, look, at the end of the day, if you rent a house, it is not supposed to explode.
02:54
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. Yep, 100%. Go back to the basics, right? Yeah. And that's also something that you gotta be careful of, is getting too in the weeds, because you have to think about what a jury's going to think or not think. I see attorneys get caught up in the medicine a lot, which is helpful. But if you get too complicated, you know, the jury wants to know what was there like before this terrible thing happened, what was like after. And that's what they're going to use to determine if this caused their injuries. Like, do they believe them or not? So whenever I'm talking about causation the case, you know, and they try to say, well, this wasn't caused by the. The injury or the wreck, you know, you got to go to. What are they really saying?
03:29
Speaker 1
Well, they're trying to discredit the doctor and discredit the client. And so how can you bolster them and dispute that, opposed to getting so caught up in the medicine? What does this film say versus that film versus, like, what's the truth?
03:42
Speaker 2
You know, that makes sense. I want to go back to TTLA that you talked about. And for. For those who practice in Texas might not know about it. It is such an important resource. And a couple weeks back, I went to their CLE in Houston and they said it really well. They asked people, you know, why are you joining? And one person articulated it incredibly well, saying it is the best large law firm you can join. Because every day they send tips, tricks, case kind of recaps, and just methodically how they went about it. When did you join TSLA and why?
04:17
Speaker 1
I mean, that's really good question. I joined a year and a half into my practice, and the TTLA president at the time just showed up my office and took me to lunch and then asked me to join. And it was such a Life changing event one I made so many good friends there and it's like part giant union, part, you know, giant law firm and everybody works together to try to be successful. You think it'd be a bunch of competitors at each other's throat, but it's actually the opposite. Everyone's so giving and kind there and I've made so many good friends and learned so much. The other thing is if you're going to practice this law, you need to join a TLA to make sure that you're supported in the legislature. Because there's no one fighting for our clients rights other than us.
04:57
Speaker 1
I mean and the lobbying they do the goes a long way from preventing what's already some really bad law to getting much worse. And that's been a great organization. There's a ton too. Like aha is another good one. And then each state has one. Then there's ones like the Attorney Trucking association of America which we're part of. But there's a lot out there and I, I learned a lot from that group.
05:19
Speaker 2
Yeah, I don't want to discredit Colorado and Arizona. We've gotten great help from them.
05:24
Speaker 1
Yeah. Ctla, aztla. Yep. And I'm a member of all those. I have to like set up a separate email account. So it's like you get overloaded sometimes with the listser emails.
05:33
Speaker 2
Yeah. One thing that the, you know, I've gotten to learn a lot about is the legislative process.
05:38
Speaker 1
Yeah.
05:39
Speaker 2
And you know you mentioned earlier how insurance companies look at their bottom line because they are multi billion dollar multinational corporations and they have all of this lobbying power and we've seen in other states and even here in Texas with tort reform how that does have a material impact on our clients and what they are deserving at the end of the day.
06:00
Speaker 1
Well, what's really sad in Texas, for example, medical malpractice cases, they passed some draconian tor reform when I first started practice in 2005 and it made caps about $250,000 per case for non economic damages which may or may not sound like a lot of money. But if someone, if a doctor kills a baby, that's all the parents can get. And you cannot hire a lawyer for that amount because you're not going to pay the expert's going to be 100,000, the lawyer's going to 40%. No lawyer's going to take the case because it's a lot of risk. 80,000 may sound like a lot of money but if you're going to handle a case for two years, carry 100,000 in expenses, it's a very bad bet. That's not a good roi and it's what's really interesting about that story.
06:41
Speaker 1
One of the main people that was a big proponent of it, he was head of the largest medical malpractice defense firms in the country, had like ton of lawyers. And everyone said it's, oh, it's only going to get rid of the bad cases. All the good cases still be. All the good cases will still be there. Well, three years later, his firm was down to one person himself because all the good cases went away. And it's sad. We probably get 150 calls a month from deserving medical practice clients that do not have a claim in Texas because of that happening. When we had a rash of terribly built houses in the like 10 years ago.
07:16
Speaker 1
I mean, people were falling through the second story of their house, these brand new homes, because a housing boom here and they were getting sued like crazy because these were terrible homes. Like people were getting hurt, killed. And the legislature, instead of making them fix it, got rid of the ability to sue them. Like you have to go through an arbitrator now and there has to be an umpire and you can't recover attorney's fees. And so I don't know how many people that really hurt, but it always ends up hurting, you know, the regular person. You know, we will figure out a way to survive, but it hurts the individual. You know, you can't really bring a came for workers compensation anymore. Yeah, it's very difficult. They can really screw you over.
07:53
Speaker 1
I'm sure you've seen on some of the cases where they send them to a workers comp doctor and the person will be missing an arm, like getting the thing back to work. They're fine, you know, put a band aid on it, you know. Yeah.
08:02
Speaker 2
And honestly, it then creates such a different process for the rest of the case for when we have to handle it.
08:07
Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, what's been some of the biggest surprises you've seen so far? Oh, your long tenure.
08:14
Speaker 2
Yeah, my long tenure. Like firm specific or just practice.
08:20
Speaker 1
Just practice. Because I always think about what it must be like to start a new job, especially as a lawyer and you kind of have this picture in your head and you get there and you're trying to figure out if the picture matches or not, you know.
08:30
Speaker 2
Yeah.
08:31
Speaker 1
And when I first started practicing, I was surprised by a lot of stuff. One like stuff like subrogation. I was like, this is so boring. And So I, I thought it was like a small part of what you did. I was like, God, this is taking up so much of my time. Or ordering medical records. I was like, this is. That was the first position I hired was like, I never want to order a medical record again. And then like just case specific or judge stuff. Is there anything like that you've been really surprised by?
08:53
Speaker 2
I mean, my frustration with obtaining medical records cannot be articulated in words.
08:59
Speaker 1
Yeah.
08:59
Speaker 2
Because it seems like there have been a number of cases where the negotiations or the legalities, the. Actually the easy part.
09:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
09:06
Speaker 2
And then just getting all of the numbers at the end of the day has been the biggest drag on the case.
09:11
Speaker 1
Yes.
09:12
Speaker 2
In terms of, you know, what I expected. I don't want to sound cliche, but it's been pretty much exactly what I expected.
09:20
Speaker 1
That's awesome.
09:21
Speaker 2
It is. In like most things, it's what you put into it. Like if you do go to the cles, if you know, go out of your way to learn certain things. I was just sitting in a depot earlier with Ben Abbas and he was doing a great job and it was a depot of a. With an interpreter for someone speaking Hindi.
09:41
Speaker 1
Wow.
09:41
Speaker 2
Something I've never seen before.
09:43
Speaker 1
And.
09:43
Speaker 2
But he was fantastic at it. And there are so many different lines of communications in that because there's him, there's obviously the interpreter, the person being deposed, and then the opposing party's attorney who is, you know, saying objection form every other sentence. And then that's getting thrown into the lines of communication. But it just teaches you to be patient. But again, the next time I have depo with a translator or anything like that, I can look back, look at some of my notes and say, this is how Ben handled it.
10:14
Speaker 1
So. So basically you're so smart. Everything was just absolutely not.
10:18
Speaker 2
I just love you to be surrounded by people who are much smarter than me.
10:21
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's for sure.
10:23
Speaker 2
I think it's important. I think there's an old quote, being like, you should if you ever feel like you're the smartest person in the room, leave the room.
10:29
Speaker 1
Yeah. Oh, completely. I completely agree. Leave a lot of rooms. You have to laugh at the jokes.
10:36
Speaker 2
It's fantastic. They can see the live action reactions.
10:41
Speaker 1
Great. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO 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. So you know what's funny? Talking about translators, here's kind of a pro tip. When I started working with translators, I actually speak Spanish pretty well. My wife's fluent and I became semi fluent is because I knew Spanish, I found mistranslation several times on really critical points.
11:26
Speaker 1
And what I realized, I was talking to a friend who's a translator and he said, what happens is the translator starts empathizing with the person they're translating for by nature, and they're trying to kind of help him out. And there was an important point where he said, I don't know, or something like that. It was like an important. Either he said I don't know, or he said no in a way that wasn't exactly no. And the translator changed it. And I was like, objection, translation, you mistranslated that was not what he said. And the guy was like. I was like, read back that what he said. That's not what he said there. So what I've done in each case, especially if it's a big case, I have the audio looked at by another translator to confirm it's what they said.
12:07
Speaker 1
And it can really make or break a case on it.
12:09
Speaker 2
Yeah.
12:10
Speaker 1
The other thing is for those, you have to be very patient. Like they're so long and you really have to be ready. Okay, I'm in this for the long haul in doing that. Yeah.
12:20
Speaker 2
The core reporter didn't know that it was being that there was translator. And then Ben, it was a back to back deposition. And Ben was like, yeah, we're going to be here for the next eight to nine hours. And the court reporter was like, what? She was throwing back. She's like, I was not prepared for this day.
12:34
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, that's. That's really interesting. I'm trying to leave other tips I had from. From translation stuff. You know. One other tip, if you have a client that doesn't speak your native tongue is get in with somebody in the family who does. Because you have to have a way to connect on an emotional level. And language can be a big language barrier. When I have a Spanish speaking client, I always try to speak to them, someone in Spanish. I've even brought my wife into several cases to meet the family, meet the kids, meet the clients. That's something I love about what we do, is the emotional connection you have with clients. I remember the first time I did what's called a psychodrama, where you really try to learn your client's story. And I've worked with consultants that do this or lawyers that do this.
13:18
Speaker 1
And the idea is you can get out everything the client went through before after it's written wrongful death cases. But it's an all day process. And the first time I got in there, my friend who does these, you have to start by saying, okay, what's the greatest experience of your life? And I'm thinking, I'm just going to sit back and watch. And it's like, all right, Jack, you're up. Because people aren't going to share if you don't share. And then it was like, what was the saddest moment in your life? What was in. It was a very emotional day. But I learned so much about my client. And there's very few fields where we get this kind of combination of science and like emotional bonding. And you're kind of fighting for someone and. And if you win, it literally changes their life, their world.
13:56
Speaker 1
And then, you know, the logical piece, that's I, that's why I love what I do. It's just all that combination of fun stuff.
14:02
Speaker 2
But it's so important, especially because we are representing people on some of their worst days of their lives and to better understand who they were before the crash, before the act of negligence from someone else, and to understand how it's been impacted. That's the whole case.
14:18
Speaker 1
Yeah.
14:18
Speaker 2
Because if you can explain that to 12 random people to a point where they understand and they can almost put themselves in those shoes, they're more likely to put themselves in those shoes.
14:28
Speaker 1
Well, and this is another thing that I would think about. This is also a marketing tip and just a practicing law tip. First, on the marketing tip side, whenever you have a case that's done, think about all the things you learned about the client, all the things that they had questions about. What, what was the situation? I mean, we had a case one time where a woman. I've had lots of these where a woman was in a car wreck while pregnant. And it was a really scary case because I couldn't find the fetal heartbeat for like 17 minutes. Baby ended up being okay. She had a bruise across her stomach. She's like eight months pregnant, but very few medical bills. But we got a lot of money on case. We got the total limits of it, which I think was 300,000 on a.
15:10
Speaker 1
Must have been a hundred thousand, 100, 300. These numbers get bigger over time. I think it was $10 million. And so I put out some marketing content on what to do if in a car wreck while pregnant. And I got like 15 cases over two years, just that one article. So you can also use this time when you get to know the clients, like, what are their questions? You know, if my stepmom was killed, what are my rights to recover? That's a question someone asks, you know, if my child's hurt, who's going to pay the medical bills? You know, if you're talking about gas explosion case, you know, pro. What types of gas. The other thing is getting to know the clients. There's no substitute for that. I mean, every time I've spent a full day at a client's house, I've never regretted it.
15:51
Speaker 2
Yeah.
15:52
Speaker 1
Because I feel like I could try that case the next day. And then you're also so much more fired up than you were before. Have you done any of the Day in Life videos we've done before? I don't think you've done one of those yet.
16:02
Speaker 2
No.
16:03
Speaker 1
Have you watched any of them?
16:04
Speaker 2
I watched one for a case when I first started because it was a Team Neil. It was Team Neil 1. I don't know if it was the case that you're talking about with the explosion, but it was a bigger case and it was incredible to watch.
16:19
Speaker 1
Yeah. You should check out the other ones there. We have four or five. And they're such powerful tools to tell the story to the insurance company. But also, even if they didn't give me a dollar more, the value I got out of learning the case because it took three days to do those. We interviewed neighbors who knew the person, we interviewed friends went to where they worked. So my opening was done, at least on the damage side. And I've never regretted doing that. You can do this relatively inexpensive. You can do them very expensive, but you can also do relatively inexpensively. And I've done them for, I mean, seven figure cases and a few six figure cases.
16:53
Speaker 2
I don't want to steal anyone's thunder, but I. From what I've seen, one of our attorneys, Evan in Colorado, he just got a huge settlement, which was incredible. And one of the tools he used was almost like video deposit.
17:10
Speaker 1
Yeah.
17:10
Speaker 2
Video demands of the. The family members of the victim.
17:13
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, that's. That's a great idea.
17:15
Speaker 2
Yeah.
17:16
Speaker 1
Well, and here's. Why do you think that works?
17:18
Speaker 2
I think because when you can explain what they have gone through and how you hear the victim's story through their family's eyes and then imagining them on the jury or from the jury's perspective, how the jury would empathize with their story. It's hard to argue.
17:35
Speaker 1
Yeah, well. And I always go through in my head what the defense is arguing. It's the same in every case. First, we're not at fault. Okay, we're partially at fault. Okay, we're fully at fault. Okay, we're at fault. But your client wasn't hurt. Okay, they were kind of hurt. Okay, they're really hurt. Okay, they're really hurt. But it was caused by something else. Okay, it was really hurt. Caused by something else. But your client's a scumbag and a liar. So in my head I'm checking the boxes on all these. So if you have a client who's got an amazing, beautiful family. I saw this really great presentation one time at one of the cles and it was how to deal with undocumented clients, which I've had a lot of.
18:11
Speaker 1
And the defense wanted to make this person to be some scary person that snuck across the border, you know, and he younger guy, had a couple tattoos and, you know, and he changed it and showed the picture with his two year old daughter him at, you know, first day of school and then had his grandma talking about him like. And put in a totally different perspective than what people's stereotypes are or what they try to be stereotyped. So in that case, showing how great the family is, now the insurance adjuster has to realize these are our witnesses. It's not even about convincing them that your client's right. It's like, what do we think a jury's going to do now that we've seen this? And they're motivated by not getting fired or getting promoted.
18:50
Speaker 1
And you get fired by going to trial and getting way more than you recommended in your letter to whoever your boss is, I don't know, Satan or whoever striked up in the record. They're nice people. I know a lot of justice. They're really great people.
19:03
Speaker 2
No, I think you're completely right. It's all risk reward for them.
19:06
Speaker 1
Yeah.
19:06
Speaker 2
And so if they can, you know, shoot you a low ball, that works with clients. I mean, we've had a couple clients come in who have said, look, we've already been offered 5,000, 3,500 and should we just take it? And like, no, because they're hoping you take it, they can just move on. They call it a huge win for themselves and they probably saved their company $20,000.
19:27
Speaker 1
Oh yeah. Never. If an insurance company ever offers you money early on, go talk to a lawyer at least, because they don't do that. If they're not scared. We had a case one time where our clients before hiring us wanted $25,000 and it was a case involving a bus and their daughter was hurt and they wouldn't pay it. So they hire us and we end up getting over a million dollars on the case. And that's just kind of how short sighted they are about these things. Or it probably works 99% of the time. So it still probably paid off for them in the long run. This has been great. I've learned a lot from you today, Max.
20:00
Speaker 2
Thanks for sharing. I'm just happy to be here.
20:03
Speaker 1
No, I have. This has been good. I appreciate you coming back on the show.
20:07
Speaker 2
Always an honor. I just wait for the emails to come in.
20:09
Speaker 1
I know. I think I emailed you like yesterday. Like yeah, it was good.
20:12
Speaker 2
It's better than day of though, I gotta say, because I feel bad. The last time I was already because.
20:17
Speaker 1
I usually work from home Friday.
20:18
Speaker 2
So when I see the notification, like, oh no, let me see if I can get in.
20:22
Speaker 1
No, I, I. It went in your permanent record. It's okay. Made a note of that one strike, but sounds good, man. Good talking to you and thanks everybody. Till next time. Bye. That wraps up another episode of the Effective Lawyer. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you've got a minute, a quick rating or review goes a long way. Want more tips, insights and stories from the field? Head over to Zyndalaw I.O. To learn more. Thanks for listening. Until next time.