Hill Law Firm Cases

Holiday Safe Driving Tips for San Antonio Drivers

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0600

The holidays are here. More people are on the road and that means more accidents. We cover some of the safe holiday driving tips to try to help our San Antonio neighbors avoid crashes and make sure everyone stays safe on the Texas roadways.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast where we not only talk about what's going on at our firm, we also talk about ways to not need a law firm like mine, safety tips, how to live a safer life, how to drive safer, how to be safer on the roads and in your home and in the work. Today, we're talking about holiday driving. It's right around the corner and actually, Thanksgiving holiday is already behind us. If you drove then and you're fine now, good for you.

We're glad you were able to drive safely. As the Christmas holidays approach, we hope you also drive safely. The CDC, we all know a lot about CDC now that we have lived through this pandemic, but they also do injury prevention and control and they've released some tips for holiday safe driving. They also started by pointing out that it looks like 2020, we'll see a 7% increase in deaths, roadway fatalities which is surprising to everybody because actually, there were less miles and time driven by people in 2020.

In 2019, they said there was about 36,000 people killed in crashes. I expect it to be closer to 39 in 2020. Even less people on the road has not led to less traffic fatalities. Be careful out there. San Antonio has a lot of roads, a lot of people on the roads, and the holidays just make for even more traffic. Some safety tips they recommend for everybody to follow.

Number one is, the real obvious one, is do not drive when you are impaired. In 2019, alcohol-impaired driving was part of- or contributed to over 10,000 crashes in the United States. That's not just alcohol, drugs, marijuana. If you're on medication in which you shouldn't drive, don't drive, call a taxi, call an Uber, have a friend drive. Number one tip that we've been hearing our whole lives. Remember it and plan ahead.

Also, distractions. That's the new thing that's leading to a lot of crashes that we see here at our law firm, a lot of people in San Antonio. If you're just driving around or sitting on the phone, one of the things the CDC points out that- if you are receiving a text message and reading it, driving at 55, that you are likely keeping your eyes off the road for almost the distance of a football field.

Five seconds not looking at the road is almost the length of a football field at 55 miles an hour. Just remember, put your phone down, pull over if you need to use your phone. Also, check the weather. Us in San Antonio saw one of the worst traffic backups mass casualty events. It's probably the worst that I've ever seen or heard of was the Fort Worth pile-up last year with the ice on the road.

I have hit ice in Fort Worth before. It is a very scary thing to hit that unexpectedly. Check the road safety tips, check the weather on the road. Make sure before you head out, you got a plan. Make sure you know what to do. If you do hit bad weather, get a hotel, stay the night, try to avoid it. Some child passenger safety tips they recommend. Make sure your kids are in the age-appropriate seatings whether it's a car seat or a booster seat, make sure the seat belts fit them properly.

There's a lot of analysis that goes into properly restraining a child in a vehicle. Make sure you're up on that and make sure you've got the right booster or car seat. Make sure you take off their puffy, bulky coats and things like that before you strap them in because that can limit the effectiveness of a car seat or a booster seat or seatbelt. Remember, children under 12 should be in the backseat of the vehicle.

You yourself can make a good example by letting them know that every time they get in the vehicle that they need to put on their seatbelt and they need to be safe as they drive. If you have teens that are driving now, make sure you share all of this with them. Make sure they understand the dangers of texting and driving. Make sure they understand the dangers of impaired driving.

Make sure that they're aware of the laws. Every state has different laws. Make sure your kids understand what the current laws are. I think I looked recently, the laws for teenage drivers in Texas is much different than it was whenever I was a young guy learning to drive. Now, there's limitations on who can be in the car with you, hours of driving, and things like that that did not exist when I was getting my driver's license, at least to the extent.

I was aware then and I'm aware now, I don't think any of those things existed. Then from the everybody driving standpoint, this is maybe a good time just to remember, make sure that you yourself have all of your licensing current, and make sure you've had your eyes checked, and make sure that you understand the dangers of where you will be driving. If you're going up north for the holidays and you are not used to driving in snow and ice, remember that and don't think that you're going to figure it out on your first try.

We hope everybody has a happy holiday. We hope everybody's very safe on the road. Remember to plan ahead. Remember to put down your phone and not drive if you're impaired. If everybody does this, this can be one of the safest holidays in recent memory. We hope it is. Everybody have a happy holiday and we'll talk to you next time.

December 2021 Hill Law Firm Update

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0600

Your San Antonio Personal Injury Law Firm, Hill Law Firm, has been very busy the second half of 2021. From new cases, to settlements, to community involvement, we have a lot to share. This short update covers mostly the injury lawsuits that have settled recently. Sexual assault, on the job, car wrecks, and other cases have been part of our recent settlements.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: Welcome back to Hill Law Firm Cases. We haven't had an episode in a while. I wanted to update everybody on what's going on over at our law firm. First, happy holidays, happy Thanksgiving, and a Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah, and whatever you celebrate, we hope you have a good holiday. We wanted to update everybody on what we've been up to. The firm has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of months. We've been very busy from a work side, from a staffing side, from all types of things going on.

It's a very busy time of the year as it relates to lawsuits. It's also very busy as it relates to our involvement in the community and our work with nonprofits. We recently attended Restore Education, big fundraiser, a spelling bee in which me and Gabriel from the Hill Law Firm were able to take home first place. It was a lot of fun, but we've also been involved in zoo activities and San Antonio Bar Association activities, and other fundraisers.

It's important for us to be involved in our community, but not just from some of the vanity type charities and where people want to put their names on, but real small charities that need the help and need donors and need people who can put in hours to help. We're really involved in those as well. I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we've been going through in the last couple of months in terms of our cases. What kind of cases we've been working on, how those cases have been turning out for us, and I think it's good to just start and walk through some of the settlements we've had over the last 45 days.

Some of them have been real victories for our clients and for our law firm and for the justice system as a whole. To start, we recently settled a case against a major insurance company that really had in bad faith and in a really bad way treated our client poorly. She was rear-ended in a car crash in San Antonio. No fault of her own. The other driver said she was messing with her cup of coffee. When she rear-ended our client, our client ended up requiring a shoulder surgery.

Now she had had a shoulder procedure just months before this. We had imaging and doctor's notes and everything showing that she was fully healed before this crash, but the insurance company, as they tend to do, lodged frivolous defense that was trying to allege that even though we had records and notes and doctors saying she was fully healed and fine with complete range of motion and no pain prior to the crash, they tried to say that the previous issue is what required her to have surgery after this crash.

They hired a doctor who charged about $17,000 to agree with them. I don't think he was in any way impartial. In his deposition, he said that he had given 20 to 40 depots over the last three years, but whenever he was pushed and we got documents on it, he had actually been deposed over 120 times over the past couple of years. This was a real victory because after the deposition of this expert, we increased our demand from our demand at mediation, and that's pretty abnormal when the insurance company will agree to accept an increased demand. We settled it for more than we were willing to settle at mediation, more than they ever wanted to pay, but it was a real victory for our client.

Another case we just settled actually last week was on-the-job injury where a employee of a local restaurant, a food establishment here in San Antonio, Texas was injured whenever he slipped down a set of stairs that he was required to use as part of his job. Texas has some strange on-the-job injury laws, but one of those is that if a condition of the premises causes an injury of an employee, they can hold the employer liable if the employer doesn't carry Texas workers' compensation insurance.

Now in our situation, they tried to allege that the client, our plaintiff, knew about the slipperiness of the stairs, but the Texas Supreme Court has said, even if they are aware of the danger, if it is part of their job, that they're required to use that part of the premises, then you as an employer have to make sure it's safe. Our client suffered pretty serious injuries as a result of this fall. We actually did a site inspection ourselves, and it was almost comical how slippery it was.

Our law firm handles a lot of on-the-job injuries and workplace safety cases, and we were really happy with the result we got for our client in this case. We did really good work and we were able to find that there had been previous allegations and previous lawsuits and not just from employees, but from business entities suing the target defendant in our case regarding the safety of their restaurant. We did good work. Client had a really good result and was real happy about it.

Another case we were able to settle about a month ago was a case involving an injury at a car race track. Now as a very strange set of facts, a lot of really difficult negligence issues, the case by the time it got to our law firm was already a couple of years old and the pandemic didn't help, and it was a long haul for these clients, but at the end of the day, we think they got treated fairly. We like to take on the tough injury negligence cases that a lot of firms won't. We were glad that we were able to put the case together in a way that the defendants and the insurance companies felt like they needed to settle it instead of letting a jury decide.

I'm particularly proud of some cases we settled about 60 days ago. We were hired by a young man who was solicited on the internet when he was underage by a much older predator, I'll say, because I think that's a fair way to put it. Who found him on a website, convinced this underage child to meet with him, assaulted him, and I think there's some reality to this out-of-town guy thinking he could come to San Antonio, find a victim, nobody would ever come after him and the victim would keep his mouth shut, and the victim did for a long time until he found us and he asked us if we could help.

Really, I thought we were taking a flyer because those cases are really tough. It's really hard to not only prove that case whenever it's just two people's words against the other, but also recovery. It's very rare that somebody who does actions like that who's an assault or a criminal actor is going to have any assets to pay a judgment. They'll never have insurance for it, and unfortunately, if the person does have assets and wealth and income that could pay a judgment, they are usually going to find a way to protect their assets from any type of judgment.

The case went on for about 18 months. There were lots of legal issues. There were some interesting expert issues that we dealt with in that case. At the end of the day, the defendant paid out of pocket a substantial amount of money to settle the claims for our client, and in that case, also had a companion case that we hadn't even filed, but at mediation, they asked if they could work on settling that one as well. Both cases got settled. Clients are very happy. It's a much better result than I was expecting for the clients, just because of the difficulties of suing an individual in a case like that.

It's really been a productive last couple of months at the law firm. In terms of what we're working on today, we have a whole bunch of stuff that's come in that's unique. We're handling a lot of on-the-job injuries. We've got on-the-job injury involving a propane fire. We've got some other cases involving carbon monoxide poisoning, which is a very unique set of facts that we're still working through and working up, but like we often say, we handle cases that a lot of firms won't.

We filed two cases against the Catholic Church over the last 90 days. Both of them on behalf of victims of sexual abuse. Both of them are just tragic and terrible sets of facts, and we really think, and we hope that we'll be able to get an outcome for our clients that not only compensates them, which is all we can do under the civil justice system for the most part, but also we hope it brings some amount of healing to them for what they're going through, some amount of closure. In those cases, I was told by a lawyer early on in my career that if you're going to handle those types of cases, you can't just look at them in terms of money.

You need to ask the clients what they need out of this case and what would be closure for them and what would be considered a victory for them, because the analysis on the part of a plaintiff in those types of cases is very different than it is in many others. We do our best to really listen to our clients. We try to tell them what we think is possible, and then we try to work towards what they want and what they need as a result of the legal actions they're taking, because it's a scary road for them to go down, and so we want to make sure we're taking all those interests into consideration whenever we work the case.

We've got a pretty busy early year ahead next year. We were able to settle some cases at the end of the year that we'll wrap up at the start of next year. We've got a full docket of stuff coming in and, and we continue to have a pretty good mixed bag of on-the-job injuries, sexual assault cases that we've always had a real passion about handling, commercial motor vehicle crashes, general negligence, some product liability cases.

We're excited about next year. We've got some new employees that have started. We've got a new young lawyer who has started with us. We're going to do some meet the employee stuff later on so we can expose people to Gabriel, our new lawyer, and we'll be better about doing these as time goes. We hope everybody has a great holiday season, and we'll talk to you next time.

HEB Chicken Listeria Outbreak

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 05:00:00 -0600

Recently, H.E.B. grocery stores have announced a massive recall of millions of pounds of chicken products due to the risk of listeria contamination. Listeria is a deadly pathogen that can cause illness and is of particular risk to pregnant women. If you have purchased these possibly listeria contaminated HEB chicken products, return them immediately. If you ate one and feel ill, seek medical attention now.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

There are not many law firms in San Antonio that handle as many food poisoning cases as we do and we have. Probably the most recent largest food poisoning lawsuit in San Antonio revolved around a outbreak at Pasha in San Antonio. That involved hundreds of people who were injured and became sick as a result of eating contaminated food. That case recently resolved. Recently in the news was a story that HEB was recalling some 8.5 million pounds of ready-to-eat Tyson Food chicken products that included some of their Meal Simple products.

If you live in San Antonio or you shop at HEB, you know what these Meal Simples are. They're ready-to-eat meals, you buy them and heat them up. Also, included in the recall, were some Tyson grilled chicken breasts, fajita chicken, grilled and ready pulled chicken, a bunch of Tyson products, a bunch of Meal Simples to include Meal Simple buffalo chicken, pepper trio chicken, barbecue chicken, curry chicken.

Then even some of their SoFlo products, which is pizza, their buffalo chicken pizza, and their crustless Buffalo chicken pizza had been recalled.

They've all been recalled as it relates to a potential outbreak of Tyson chicken with a pathogen known as Listeria. You may know of Listeria from the Blue Bell recall a few years back that almost shut down Blue Bell. Listeria is a really nasty illness. Listeria can and does kill hundreds of people in America a year.

It's something that can be through proper food handling techniques eliminated or very, very limited from contaminating food. One of the bad things about Listeria is that it can be a very, very deadly, and very dangerous sickness specifically for pregnant women. Pregnant women are 10 times more likely than other people to get a Listeria infection.

On top of that, it can cause all kinds of complications with the pregnancy and really anybody who would be at risk from other illnesses, older people, people with weakened immune systems, but in particular, pregnant women have a real risk with listeria. Some of the facts include that pregnant Hispanic women are 24 times more likely than the general population to get a Listeria infection. This is straight from the CDC website.

According to the CDC is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness or food poisoning in America and that approximately 260 people die per year. What we know right now is that HEB has taken on upon themselves to withdraw some and recall some 8 million pounds of chicken. If you have any of these products, you need to throw them away or go back to HEB and get a refund. If you think you have eaten some of them and you feel sick, please go to the doctor.

Food poisoning is something people talk about like it's a tummy illness, but in reality, food poisoning is very dangerous and can kill people and does kill people. If you think you have been part of the Listeria HEB food poisoning outbreak and you'd like to seek counsel, please reach out to us. if you have not been injured by this, but have some of the products, call HEB, get a refund, and let them properly dispose of any products you have.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We'll try to keep you all up to date on what's happening in Texas and what's happening in San Antonio and what's happening at the Hill Law Firm.

[music]

[00:04:28] [END OF AUDIO]

Child Safety In Vehicles Part 1

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:00:00 -0600

Vehicles can be very dangerous places for children. A lot of the dangers are unknown or less publicized. In this series, we are trying to cover and discuss some of the most common dangers in vehicles for San Antonio and Texas residents.

Transcript:

Justin Hill, San Antonio Injury Lawer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin: Welcome to another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases where we talk about what's going on at the Hill Law Firm, but we also talk about ways to keep yourself and your family safer on the roadways, on the job, in everyday life. One of the things we want to talk about today is keeping our kids safe in the vehicles. If you get on the internet, there's all kinds of information about properly installing and fitting car seats and children's helmets or bicycles, all types of information about how to increase the safety of your child in a range of environments and in a range of situations.

One of the things we want to talk about today is some of the more uncommon, I'll say, but very serious dangers associated with vehicles that we typically hear in the one-off story, the tragic story that you hear in the news and think, "That couldn't happen to me," but are real dangers and really happen to normal people doing their best every day.

In San Antonio, one of the things that people know about our city is it's very hot. You come around the San Antonio River Walk during the summer holiday when you get a lot of families down here going to SeaWorld, and I still look around and think, "Jeez, how is this a holiday for some people?" Because I'm very hot-natured, and I sweat, so I do not enjoy being out those really hot two or three months during the summer.

One of the things to consider in those hotlines or really all the time of the year, especially in South Texas, where it never gets too cold, is the risk of heatstroke. People talk about this oftentimes, and you hear about this in the media where people leave a dog or leave a child, unfortunately, in a vehicle, even for a short amount of time, and it can lead to heatstroke.

It's one of the leading causes of non-crash-related causes of death for children, and it can happen when kids are left in a hot car alone, and it doesn't take long to leave them in there for the vehicle to get so hot that their core body temperature gets too hot, and it can just overwhelm their little bodies. For example, the inside temperature of your car can rise almost 20 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 minutes.

If it's 100 degrees outside, you're talking, it's 120, 130, within 10, 15 minutes. Once a child's body temperature gets above 104, it's a very bad deal, and once it gets above 107, it can be fatal. These are really serious concerns. There's lots of things that we need to think about. We're going to talk about a few of those things, but one of them is just habit. As it relates to your vehicle, get in the habit of checking all of your seats before you lock the door and walk away. Make sure that you keep your vehicle locked if you have young children.

3 out of 10 heatstroke deaths in vehicles involve children just crawling into a vehicle and accidentally closing themselves into it. It's not being left. Almost 30% are preventable just by locking your car and keeping your keys away from your children. Third, pay attention to other vehicles you see. If you see a child or a dog, in my opinion, in a vehicle in a hot day or, really, any day, make sure to call the authorities if it looks like, or you even suspect a slight risk that the child could be in danger.

Never leave your kid in the car. Even if you just have to run in for a second, don't do it. People do not fully appreciate the risks of vehicle getting hot and what it can do to a child's body, even in cooler days. An outside temperature in the mid-60s can still lead to a vehicle getting over 110 if it's sitting outside, and that was a shock to me when I learned that fact.

Third and final on some additional tips is, this doesn't just happen in the South and the Sun Belt. This can happen in any community, in any state, anywhere in the United States. Texas is hot all over oftentimes of the year. Pretty much, everywhere in Texas is going to have 60 degree days throughout a year. We just talked a 60-degree day can lead to 110 in a car, so be careful with your kids in vehicles. Keep it locked. Do not let kids play in vehicles.

Remember the risks associated with heatstroke. It's a real thing, so be careful. Texas is hot, be safe with your vehicles, and be safe with your kids. Next thing we want to talk about, and I've actually worked on one of these cases. One of the more tragic cases I've worked on, that we ended up in litigation against a major car manufacturer, was backover litigation.

In our case, a father was reversing early in the morning, and his kid was behind his vehicle, and he didn't see him. His mirrors did not catch his kid, and unfortunately, his kid was killed. The lawsuit centered around the fact that basically, every vehicle on the market at that time had either backover sensors or reverse sensors or rear cameras to shield and protect against this kind of risk.

Many car manufacturers wait until the last minute either to save money or to avoid having to match the competition, or they just don't think there's value in it. They'll avoid adding safety measures that can save lives. In that case, we were able to come to a good resolution, in my opinion, but there is no resolution for a family who's lost a child in that way.

Backovers are a real cause of death of kids all over America all the time, not only for stationary, children sitting behind or playing behind a vehicle but also darting children who dart behind a vehicle while it's reversing. Some prevention tips provided by NHTSA are, one, teach your kids that you do not play around, under, near vehicles.

Like we talked about heatstroke, vehicles are off-limits. As a kid, I used to play in an old truck that we had that was broke down. I didn't realize how many dangers there are associated with that. I will never allow my child to play in or around a vehicle for the reasons we're talking about today. Before you leave, always walk around your vehicle, and take a look.

I've become accustomed to doing that because I have chickens, and one time I ran over a chicken. It was sleeping under my vehicle, I guess, because of the shade, and even though I did not reverse quickly, it didn't get out of the way, so now it's part of my everyday practice whenever I reverse. Teach your children that any moving vehicle is something to get away from. Don't stand there. Don't stand near. Move away from it.

Make sure that when you're reversing that you're paying attention to all sides, your side view mirrors, your rearview mirror, your camera, if you have one. Not only because of something that could be behind but because something that could end up behind you from either a child or a dog, somebody running in behind you. Lastly, if you can and your means allow for it, make sure that you really attempt to protect a vehicle with all the safety features that you need to protect yourself, protect children.

There are many safety devices, some beep, some detect cross-traffic, some are cameras, but there's a lot of great safety devices out there, so make sure you get what you can get. The third thing we want to talk about today, another risk, which I've seen litigation surrounding this, are power windows. There was a time which a power window was activated to close by pushing down on it, and they didn't have safety cutoffs.

There were instances in which children stood up on the side armrest, stepped on the window switch, and that downforce on the switch caused it to close, and there were children that were suffocated. Many children are injured in power windows, not just from being suffocated but from their hands and their fingers and their wrists being caught in it. A few prevention tips provided by NHTSA are, first of all, like we've talked about, vehicles aren't toys.

Teach your children that vehicles aren't toys. They're not supposed to be played with. When your child is in the vehicle, they need to be properly restrained in the age-appropriate car seat or booster seat or whatever the law dictates for your state and whatever safety dictates for your child. Look and make sure that there is nothing in a window when you're opening and closing them. If you have a child in a booster seat in the back, make sure that they're not sticking their hand in the window as you're opening or closing it.

Also, make sure you don't leave vehicles on, even though the engine might be off, but in that on position to where windows will open and close while your kid is in the car alone. Again, don't leave your kid in the car alone. Some of the other things you might want to know about power windows are your vehicle may have child safety settings for power windows, like window locks and things like that. [clears throat] Also, newer model vehicles have pull-to-close switches, so instead of pushing down to close the window, you have to pull it up.

This was such a simple fix in a lot of what was happening to children. It surprised it took so long for the industry to make such a simple fix to save lives and save kids. Finally, if you're looking at new cars, pay attention. There are some vehicles that the automatic windows have a reverse if something is stuck in the window, so if it detects something, it automatically will close itself.

This is going to do it for this episode. We're just trying to touch on some of the less common risks in vehicles that people don't talk about. We're going to do two of these. The next one, we're going to talk about the risks of seatbelt entanglement, truck entrapment, and vehicle rollaway or tracking some of the information provided by NHTSA. We're going to talk to you about that, and we'll see you next time.

[music]

[00:11:44] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Car Crashes and Seatbelt Use

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 05:00:00 -0600

On this episode, we discuss the use of seatbelts in Texas. The statistics, the law, and the campaign to increase usage are discussed. In San Antonio, it is important that everyone follows the Click it or Ticket campaign when possible. We cover some interesting details about seatbelt usage.

Transcript

Justin Hill, Injury Lawyer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast where we typically talk about what's going on at our law firm here in San Antonio, Texas. We talk about our cases, we talk about results, we talk about personnel and just good things that are happening as well. One thing we really try to focus on as well is safety. We're a law firm that represents people injured through no fault of their own, in most cases. We're in a practice area where if people, companies, government agencies enforced and implemented safety procedures, we'd be out of business.

That's the long-term goal of our industry, to regulate safety such that it becomes economically responsible and the right thing morally for businesses and people to do. For example, automotive safety has increased significantly over the last 20 or 30 years in large part due to lawsuits. Everybody's familiar with Ford, Firestone and some of those lawsuits, but everything from airbags to rollover safety to the strength of your roof to the way tires are manufactured now, all of those things have been affected for the better through lawsuits and litigation forcing industry to be held responsible when they either take shortcuts or just ignore safety altogether.

Too often and many of those industries, the marketing department had more say than the safety people. Did a feature sell was more important than did it save lives. If you've been driving around Texas, you know that our state also works to improve road safety in the state of Texas. Just here in San Antonio, driving around, you see a lot of billboards talking about the number of fatalities on the roadway and injuries on the roadway.

Click It or Ticket campaign, it's one of the things we're going to talk about today. In preparing for this, a statistic that really stood out to me as shocking is that November 7th of 2000, more than 20 years ago, was the first or was the last day in Texas in which there was not a roadway fatality as a result of an automobile accident or some sort of accident on the roads. As a result of that, Texas has taken up the Click It or Ticket campaign and not as a direct result but due to the fact that our roads have a long way to go to be safer, one of the things that state of Texas has done is create and implement this Click It or Ticket campaign.

It is passed and pushed by the Texas Department of Transportation and according to NHTSA, which is the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They said that the Click It or Ticket initiative in Texas is estimated to have saved over 6,000 lives, prevented over 100,000 injuries and saved Texas almost $25 billion since the campaign began just 18, 19 years ago. It's been a highly successful campaign. As the run-up to the new year, the state of Texas renewed their push and published a lot of data to talk about why wearing your seatbelt remains a very important piece of contributing to roadway safety.

It reduces the risk of dying in a crash by 45% for people in the front seat and it reduces the risk of dying in a pickup truck crash by 60%. Mostly as a result of rollover vehicles being much more prevalent in pickup truck accidents. Through some data and analysis, the state of Texas said that more than 90% of Texans have gotten into the habit of using their seatbelt every time they get in the vehicle but that leaves 10% of Texans who are not and also they realize through this data that in the nighttime or the evening hours, there is a much higher likelihood of people not wearing their seatbelt. Whether that's from fatigue or tiredness or people having some sort of intoxicant remains to be seen, but it's an interesting piece of data.

In 2019, there were 925 traffic fatalities involving an unbuckled driver or passenger. This is a drop from previous years but still a pretty shocking number. Aside from the data, the state of Texas likely and oftentimes due to the industry power of our insurance industry, we talk about it often Texas, almost always sides with insurance over injured people. Through legal maneuvering and arguments, they have changed Texas law by going to a insurance company and corporation friendly Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court in Texas has decided that use of seatbelt is admissible in a car wreck crash. Now, the language for the most part requires the defendant to prove that the seatbelt would make a difference. If somebody was hit by a drunk driver going 100 miles an hour and there was no way somebody would have survived belted or not, they shouldn't be able to tell the jury, "Yes, the driver was drunk, but that lady was unbelted."

Insurance companies would take those ticky-tack underhanded approaches to try to paint an innocent victim in a bad light. We still have some cover there that courts won't allow that kind of tactic, but if they hire a biomechanic to say that somebody would not have been injured or would have been injured less with a seatbelt on, they now get to do that in court. There's a lot of reasons to wear your seatbelt. One, it's a smart thing to do, not only for you but for your family and for everybody on the roadway.

As we go into 2021, we hope you'll all remember to put on your seatbelt, remember Texas's Click It or Ticket campaign and also remember that it actually does work and it saves lives. We'll see you next time.

[music]

[00:07:09] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Dog Attack Case at HLF

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:00:00 -0600

Join us to hear about some of the dog bite and dog attack cases we are currently handling at Hill Law Firm. Both involve our San Antonio neighbors being attacked and injured by dogs that were not properly restrained or handled.

Transcript:

Dog Bite Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill, and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing what we have going on at our firm, safety information, general information about our cases, and really just whatever I think will be helpful for our listeners, helpful for our industry, and helpful for you and your family just from a safety perspective. If you keep up with our law firm, either on social media or through this podcast, you know that I love dogs. We have Winston, he's been my dog for 12 years, we even have a Meet-the-Team episode on this podcast with Winston. It was done as a joke, but also he's part of the team. He's in the office quite a bit.

He's my best friend and it's great that I have an office where I can bring him in. When we bring him in, we're careful with him. He's a nice dog, we know he's a nice dog, but when he's outside, he's on leash. I make sure that I monitor him around people. If I'd ever seen him show any sign of aggression, I would not let him be around people, he would just be sitting in my office with the door closed with me and probably leashed or something. Luckily, he is not one of those dogs, he's a good dog, goes around and gets belly rubs.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have dogs that aren't like him. My personal views aside on why people keep dangerous or aggressive dogs is neither here nor there, but people do have them. For many reasons, there are duties under the law by which they have to keep them leashed, safe, away from people. Texas actually has causes of action by which you can file a lawsuit against somebody who doesn't maintain their dog in the correct way. For example, Texas has a cause of action, which is a way to sue somebody, there's a cause of action for negligent handling of animals.

If you can prove the defendant was the owner or the possessor of an animal, and we've seen that before, we've had people that say, "Well, I didn't own it, I was just babysitting the dog." Well, Texas doesn't care. If you're a owner or possessor of an animal, you owe a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent that animal from injuring others. If you can prove they breached that duty of reasonable care, you can hold them responsible for any injuries that they caused. You see this often, for example, where somebody has a dog that, has either been aggressive or bit somebody before, they have house guests over and the dog bites somebody.

They weren't reasonable on allowing a dog that had a history to be around people and injure them. Or you have instances in which a dog has a history of getting out of the yard and attacking people. Well, the fact that it got out the 10th time is enough for us to hold them responsible, not because they knew it was going to attack but because they knew it could get out of the yard and then all bets are off if it was going to attack. There's also causes of action under the law for what's called negligent per se. If you can show that the dog owner violated a law or city ordinance or municipal code related to a dog, you may be able to hold them responsible under those provisions.

For example, in Texas, in San Antonio, there's a leash law that if you have a dog it needs to be on a leash, and we've sued many people for violations of that. We're currently representing multiple people who've been injured by dogs in our lawsuit and I want to talk about two of them. One of the cases was a little novel and new for me. In that case, we have an elderly gentleman who's walking his dog down the road. A neighbor's dog gets out of the yard runs up and jumps on him. Now, the man probably weighs about 120 pounds and the dog probably weighs about 120 pounds.

When the dog ran and jumped on him and knocked him over, it broke his spine. It broke his back, a compression fracture in his spine. Now, the dog was running at him to attack his dog and our guy, our client stood in the way. When we started digging into that case, the owner of the dog told the insurance company that he considered it a guard dog. When we drove by the home where this dog was they had three beware of dog signs on their front gate. One wasn't enough for this dog, it was that dangerous of a dog. They knew they had a dangerous dog. They knew they had a guard dog, and they let the dog out.

This wasn't the first time they had let the dog out. They said that they had forgotten to close the gate, but when we drove by, the gate was open as well. They had a dangerous dog and they just didn't care to keep it leashed up. Their negligence in acting reasonable lead to a man having a fracture of his spine. That's one of the cases we're working on right now. Another one involves some of the most egregious facts I've seen as it relates to a dog attack. In that case, we represent a young lady who was pregnant, she was at a friend's house.

The backyard according to the friend was partitioned so that the scary big dogs that the friend owned were on one side of the yard behind the fence, and she let her dog out to use the restroom. Our client's dog was a chihuahua weighing one or two pounds. Whenever her dog went out to use the restroom, she found out in a very unfortunate way that the fence that was meant to contain the Cane Corso, which is about 100 pound dog really wasn't a fence and the dog just walked right through it attacked her dog.

She went out to get her dog, and the large dog bit her on the head. She had staples and stitches and all kinds of injuries even though-- and this is all occurring while she's pregnant. The risks were through the roof of what could have happened, but she was luckily able to escape with just the bites to her head. When we got into that case, we asked the city of San Antonio through Public Information Act request to provide any and all information they have about that home, the dogs that are at that home.

I had never in my career seen such a long documented history of dogs being reported for being aggressive, for attacking people, chasing people, breaking through fences. Just within a month or two of our lady being attacked, those dogs had broke through a fence and killed another dog. The homeowner, and the friend who owned and possess these dogs, as we discussed earlier, for 11 years had been reported repeatedly to the city of San Antonio for their dogs being dangerous, for their dogs attacking people, chasing people, getting out of the yard, not following the leash laws.

It was the most egregious set of facts I have yet to see in a dog bite case such as this. That case, I feel is a pretty strong case. It's going to be hard for the owners of those dogs to say that they acted reasonably to protect people from being attacked by their dogs when they had been reported and spoken to by the City of San Antonio so many times and knew that these dogs had actually killed another dog. These are exactly the reasons that the laws exist allowing those people to be held responsible for what happened.

Luckily, in both of our cases, our clients we believe will be able to make a relatively successful recovery medically. Even though our client's spine was fractured, he did not suffer from paralysis, which is such a scary issue for him. It is just going to be very hard recovery for him. Our law firm handles dog bite and dog attack cases, sometimes they're maligned by the media, but when you really get into these cases, people are attacked and injured horribly, gruesomely. I've seen too many cases where little children have been bitten on the face and instances in which dog owners all they had to do was just take some reasonable precautions to keep their dog safe, and they failed to do it.

If you've been injured, you've been attacked, you've been harmed by somebody's dog. We're happy to talk to you. Sometimes we can't take those cases, but sometimes we can take those cases and if we can, we'll do a good job for you. Stay tuned for our next episodes of Hill Law Firm Cases where we will be talking about some of the other cases we're handling right now. We'll see you next time.

[music]

[00:09:41] [END OF AUDIO]

Q&A with Damond Garza, San Antonio Trial Lawyer and SATLA President

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 05:00:00 -0600

Damond Garza has been a defense and a plaintiffs attorney in San Antonio for almost 20 years. He has tried over 40 cases to juries and leads San Antonio's trial lawyer association. He is a good friend and offices next to us at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. All right.

[music]

Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. Today, I've got Damond Garza with me. Damond is a lawyer in San Antonio, a friend, and he's also a lawyer that we work with on some cases. He is the current president of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association and his reign ends tomorrow, right?

Damond Garza: I think officially on the 21st, actually.

Justin: He's also a stickler for technicalities as you will learn. I asked Damond to come on and talk about practicing law. Really, the point of these has been younger lawyers. That's been the thought process and that's been the response from people. When I tell you who will respond about you being on here, then you'll understand. You'll be like, "Oh, okay. I understand your audience now." You're not the first SATLA president I've had on there.

Damond: That makes me a little-

Justin: Second.

Damond: -less special feeling, but that's okay.

Justin: First [unintelligible 00:01:22], I mean. I think that's what they say in that one show. Javier was on. I think he's the only one that would have been SATLA president. Bill Marler was on. There's been books written about him. Mikal Watts was on. He's been indicted and has a book and movie coming.

Damond: No books or movies based on me yet, unfortunately-

Justin: Indictments?

Damond: -or fortunately. No indictments that I'm currently aware of.

Justin: I think you would know. What is SATLA?

Damond: SATLA a local trial lawyers association that is comprised of a little bit over 400 members these days. Primarily lawyers here in the Bexar County area, but we have a good contingency out of South Texas and we have members really spread as far as Alaska, even because it's a group of lawyers who represent folks, who represent people against companies, organizations, insurance companies who tend to have a lot more power and influence in the courts. We represent those folks against those powerful folks whenever they suffered a loss, injury, death, economic loss, something like that.

We put our minds together to share information, to help each of us better represent our clients. The folks who usually defend injury cases have large organizations, they share information to help strengthen their defenses. We try to pool our resources to better combat against those forces who would otherwise deny the availability of the courts to regular people who have suffered a loss.

Justin: San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association is not limited to San Antonio lawyers. I think there used to even be in Alaska person.

Damond: We still have a very active member from the State of Alaska, we've got people from the East Coast, the Midwest, the Southeast, and everywhere far-flung in between.

Justin: A very robust idea and document sharing through our Listserv, but the rules are just lawyer and do not regularly represent insurance companies. Is that basically the breakdown?

Damond: More or less. Yes, you have to be a lawyer who represents people for the most part, but the biggest thing is you cannot represent insurance companies or any corporation or governmental entity regularly.

Justin: To get in, they apply, they have to have multiple people that vouch for them, pay their dues, which are really not bad.

Damond: Our dues are actually significantly lower than a lot of other trial lawyer organizations that do what we do. That's intentional. We don't want to be exclusive only for lawyers who make money over a certain amount or who can afford a certain entry point from a cost perspective. We want it to be open to virtually all lawyers who do what we do because we believe that a high tide raises all boats. Our whole thing is get the information out to folks who represent folks like we do and it will be better for everybody in our industry because when those people are represented well and the right results are coming out of the courthouse, that helps all of our clients.

Justin: Our San Antonio Trial Lawyer Association Listserv was the model for Texas Trial Lawyers Association Listserv. We were ahead of the curve long before you and our lawyers probably.

Damond: Yes, absolutely. That Listserv is such a great resource and one of the main reasons why a lot of folks who don't live or practice in Bexar County, or at least in Texas, still maintain their membership with us is because our members are really good about sharing that stuff and it's super helpful, especially for young lawyers or folks who are striking out on their own, hanging a shingle as it were because it becomes like a virtual law firm where lawyers who have more skins on the wall, a lot more years in the practice under their belt are willing to share their ideas, their thoughts, their forms, their documents, transcripts of folks that you might be having to cross-examine.

They'll even volunteer to do some feedback on your cases. It's all stuff that people volunteer without any expectation of return other than the hope that when you, one day, have material that could benefit another member, that you will also be willing to pay it forward and share your stuff.

Justin: You become San Antonio Trial Lawyer President, you've been in for a while, you've been on the board, you've held some positions, what is your lawyer history?

Damond: When I graduated law school, I initially started doing I guess what you would call insurance defense work. I went to work for a defense firm based here in San Antonio that I had clerked for in law school. After about a year there or about a year or so after I got my license should I say, I decided to leave there and go work for another San Antonio-based defense firm who specialized more on products liability defense.

We represented some of the largest companies in the world who manufacture automobiles, watercraft, things like that, farm equipment, what have you. I was there doing mostly products liability defense work for about five years with a little bit of insurance defense work sprinkled in that. Then sometime around the six-year mark of being licensed or so, I decided to come over to the side of the good and the right and represent individuals doing plaintiff's work. That was about 10 or so years ago.

Justin: You went to work for a plaintiff's shop in the Southside of San Antonio. You also are a disciple of Gerry Spence's Trial Lawyers College which has a cult following. What is that? What is the science and thought process behind trial lawyers college?

Damond: Sure. Gerry Spence, for those of you who are not indoctrinated into his mystique as it were, is largely regarded by many folks as the best or the greatest trial lawyer that America has ever known. He has a long track record, both in civil cases like I do now, and also in criminal cases as well, trying cases all across the country, some of which were very, very widely covered by the media especially back in the day. He is a lawyer for the people. That was his thing is he wanted to help folks fight against those who had more power namely the government and large corporations and defend our individual rights.

When he really started to gather a lot of notoriety for his talent and his skills, he bonded together with other notable trial lawyers, many of whom were from Texas but around the country, and said, "Look, these insurance companies and these defense entities, these groups that were put together by large companies to try and help themselves, insulate themselves from liability for their wrongdoing are holding these seminars and they're teaching these defense lawyers all these tactics and methods to basically prevent our clients from getting what their just due is and we need to create a college or a school for lawyers for the people."

We want to train lawyers in the best ways to approach their cases and ultimately to try their cases, to give regular people a more even footing in the courthouse. We need to do it in a way that doesn't make those lawyers beholden to anybody."

When they were trying to put together this idea of the college, there were some companies who came forward and said, "Hey, we'll be your corporate sponsor. We will fund this college that you're trying to put together," but Gerry and the others who helped him put it together, knew that whenever there's money being given, there's oftentimes strings attached. They didn't want to be beholden to anybody. They created this organization that is run entirely on donations from individuals. It's all raised and run almost entirely by volunteers.

There are, I believe, at the time that I was last aware only three or four full-time employees of the college. Then, everybody else who works for, including the board and all the instructors, are lawyers who just volunteer their time. They were trying to teach lawyers to be better lawyers, but their concept was that to be a better lawyer, you first had to be a better person, the best version of yourself. Gerry and a few of the other guys that he helped found the college were teamed up with a world-renowned psychologist whose last name was Moreno. He, I believe, was based out of New York.

They knew that he was using a tactic or a strategy or a type of, I guess you'd call it, therapy in which folks who were using it for therapeutic purposes would get together and they would use this psychodrama technique to delve into what's going on with folks on a deeper level, to understand their motivations, to understand why they do some of the things they do. They decided to adopt that methodology for use in delving into a legal case and determining the individuals involves true motivations, their true feelings exactly, maybe what really went down on a given incident, and then you could mine that for information to use in your case.

Prior to being able to use those techniques or those strategies in a legal case, you first learned the skills or the techniques by using them on yourselves. That's where Gerry and all of the other faculty talk about becoming a better version of yourself. If you use these techniques to delve into your personal life and the issues that you're struggling with, because we're all human, we're all fallible, we all have shortcomings, we all have baggage from our life experiences.

If we stop ignoring those things but actually take a really hard look at them, we can hopefully become happier, better people. We can work on our things that maybe need to be worked on personally and when we get to a better place, personally, we can then be a better lawyer for our clients. Those tools and those techniques are fungible across both personal lines and professional lines when it comes to working with clients on a case.

Justin: They do small seminars, but you actually went and did the holy shit package three weeks in Montana. It used to be once a year, but now they do twice a year, I think?

Damond: Yes. It's actually based in Wyoming. It used to be--

Justin: Is there much of a difference, Wyoming, and Montana?

Damond: [laughs] Stickler for detail?

Justin: Yes, exactly.

Damond: It's about a three and a half week course now. I think it originally was a full four weeks, but they've shortened it down to about three and a half. I did one of the small regional events first which is the ones they do in local areas spread out around the country several times a year which is just a long weekend. It's like a three-and-a-half-day deal. That wet my beak for the possibilities of what the program can offer. Then, I signed up for the full college up in Wyoming. It's out in the middle of nowhere. It's down in a river valley in the middle of some mountains, in the middle of Wyoming, and the campus was set up on Gerry's actually family ranch.

He purchased what used to be the double diamond cattle ranch because at the time I think in the early 1900s may have been the largest cattle operation in the country for a period of time. He bought this ranch years and years prior. What he did was he carved out a small piece that he donated to the college under a lease that said as long as they maintained a trial lawyers college there as a nonprofit, they would continue to have the opportunity to use the property. I believe he carved off a couple of little pieces for his children. I'm not sure if he retained any for himself.

Then, he donated the overwhelming majority of it back to the Shoshone native tribe that used to live on those lands generations ago. This campus was in the middle of this river valley down below these mountains. There was virtually no cell signal. They didn't offer us internet and the ideas for the three and a half weeks that you were there, you're disconnected from your job and your family so that you can focus on working on yourself as a person and as a lawyer and you're not constantly distracted by all the bells and whistles coming off of your phone or your iPad or your laptop and everything else. It's a super-intensive three and a half weeks.

Justin: All the stories I heard about it I thought it was gobbledygook. It was touchy-feely in some of the stories. Everybody likes it. Some people like it more. Somebody, in particular, had a discussion with me and it was like wild stories of things people admit to in sessions, but I had you come and help me prepare a client. It was really eye-opening and watching her go through what you made her go through made her really reconsider and think about what her loss was. It was really eye-opening to me. I did apply. I was rejected. It's the story of my life, constant rejection, but it was really interesting to watch. You have tried 30, 40 cases?

Damond: Yes. I think it's about 40 at this point.

Justin: I tell people in San Antonio, I really don't know anyone that's tried more ca- probably, it's a deal but in our contemporary age group. You and Toscano really are the only two guys I know that have tried a bunch of cases, and Desi who tried a bunch of cases with. Any of them stand out? Any specific trials you think, "Man, that was so eye-opening and/or changed who I am as a lawyer"?

Damond: Yes, there's a lot of those moments sprinkled in there. I can think of a few.

Justin: Let's go with a few.

Damond: One of mine had to deal with a case where my client was on an unrelated matter, something that transpired many months after the crash in which he was injured and for which we were representing him, he was incarcerated in a federal penitentiary up in New Mexico. He was there on some pretty nasty charges for, if true, some pretty despicable behavior. He was there. We had to go up to New Mexico to take his deposition and we videoed it, but then we ended up needing to call him live to trial. There was no way to transport him from New Mexico to Texas. He had to testify telephonically during his case from the penitentiary in New Mexico.

Justin: That hurts your case.

Damond: Yes, it does. There's all kinds of reasons why, not to get into too many of those details, but yes, it does hurt your case. The defense, in that case, was just salivating at the idea of a defendant being locked up in federal prison in the hopes that a jury would ignore the law and ignore the facts of the crash for which the case was being tried and rather would punish him again for being a criminal. We're all raised to believe that there's right and there's wrong. As a kid, I was raised to look up to police officers and to respect them, and to look down on criminals. We played cops and robbers as a kid. That's just the thing.

I believe that the defense lawyers and probably more specifically, the insurance company that hired them that they working for, when they found out this guy was incarcerated, they thought, "Well, great. No jury's going to award money to a criminal even though the law says you focus just on the facts of the incident, not on the entirety of somebody's life." We knew we were going to be fighting against prejudice against criminals. Whether it was intentional by a juror or not, we all come into the courtroom with our own internal biases.

That's one of the things that we worked out at the trial lawyers college is recognizing that we all have internal biases and then drawing them to the forefront so that we can call them what they are and not allow them to be driving our decisions in a case. For this particular case, we fully expected that the jury would hear a lot about it, that the defense lawyers would take every opportunity they could to remind the jury that this guy was a criminal and to highlight that. Well, the defense really wanted the jury to know why he was in prison, which the rules of evidence only allow in certain circumstances.

There are certain procedures you have to go through in order to be able to introduce that evidence.

Justin: One being moral turpitude, which is still the only time you'll ever use that word is in our industry with that one thing.

Damond: Right. Had he committed a crime of moral turpitude, which is basically theft or fraud, something involving deceit.

Justin: Forgery.

Damond: Right, then that the rules say, "Hey, that's fair game for a jury to know," because if this guy has been convicted of the crime, essentially of lying or deceit, then the jury deserves to know that because maybe they want to use that when they're weighing the credibility. If it's testimony in a case where he's testifying under oath, tough to tell the truth. Well, he didn't commit crimes of moral turpitude or any of the other crimes that would normally be admissible.

Justin: Not a felony.

Damond: But it was a felony. Which is sort of a catchall, and the defense has to go through certain steps to be able to prove that it's admissible, which they had not done by the time of trial. We properly moved to keep that out, basically because his criminal case was still under appeal and it hadn't been finalized, and it's only admissible when it's been finalized or exhausted the appeals. They didn't have proof that it had been finalized. They couldn't prove or disprove whether it was on appeal. The judge said, "Well, you haven't met your burden, so you don't...

Texas Trucking Accident Stats and Causes

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Texas trucking crashes and commercial motor vehicle accidents are a product of a booming transportation and oil and gas industry. We discuss some of the lies and dishonesties about these crashes being used to push tort reform.

Transcript:

[music]

Two professors at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway completed research recently using hair and urine samples for drug testing, and they were also studying whether hair drug testing has any racial bias to it. One of the things they found was that if we move to hair drug testing instead of urine, more than 300,000 truckers would be removed from the roadway. They would be unable to pass their drug test because they will have used illicit drugs in whatever time allowed to show up on a hair drug test.

The authors were asked to do this by a trucking industry association because the trucking industry associations were considering hair drug testing. This really shocking finding came out of their research that basically said that urinalysis is insufficient to really pick up illicit drug use after some amount of time. If we really want to crack down on people who think it's okay to drive 80,000-pound vehicles and also use drugs that we should use hair analysis.

Now, the obvious import for the industry is we can't lose 300,000 drivers overnight. What would we do? Where would we find those 300,000 people to make up for those jobs? That would likely mean they'd have to raise wages and make their jobs more appealing. The researchers went on to talk about how all those people should be pulled off the road, and they don't care what the industry has to do to fix that problem. That it's really just so reckless for trucking companies to have this information. To know that if they did a hair test that they would find some of their truckers were using drugs or alcohol, and they still don't do it.

This is a study that came out this year, just six months ago. This is really important right now because what's happening in Texas is a coalition of trucking companies and trucking industry trade groups, and highly most likely also insurance companies are pushing for reforms of our legal industry so that they're held less accountable when they cause crashes. Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the trucking association here in Texas have teamed up, and they say that lawsuits and people injured on the road are putting them out of business. Texas doesn't even have close to the highest trucking insurance premiums, but the trucking industry is saying we can't afford these premiums so we have to get legislative changes to our legal system.

It's worth noting that they're not discussing changing the way insurance is handled in Texas. They're not discussing changes to their own industry that allows for a lot of trucking crashes in Texas that involve texting and driving, alcohol-related driving, and lots of really egregious gross negligence. It is criminal, but almost homicidal behavior. If you were behind an 80,000-pound vehicle and you're texting and driving or drunk, you know that you've got a really high likelihood of hurting somebody or killing somebody. But the industry isn't trying to address that. What they want to do is say, "Hey, legislators. Please shield us from lawsuits because we're not self-regulating," which is leading to a lot of bad lawsuits and a lot of injured and killed Texans too that people forget to talk about, so they want the legislator to fix it.

Just for some background information, Texas has had an explosion in the oil and gas industry which has led to an explosion in the support industry for that, supporting oil and gas, and a lot of that is trucking. We've had a lot more trucking lawsuits filed, but we've also had a lot more truckers on the road, which means more truck crashes, which means more injured people, and therefore more lawsuits. You have the industry talking about truck crashes and the lawsuits associated with those going up, but they're not talking about that.

It's just normal what you would expect when you have an explosion in the trucking industry, you're going to have an explosion in trucking crashes. When insurance companies are deciding whether to settle those cases, well, they don't ever really do the right thing, so that leads to lawsuits against the trucking companies. Trucking companies should be asking for some reforms with the insurance industry but instead, they just want to stick it to Texans who've been injured.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration puts out a lot of data. Really, they're an incredible resource. If you want to know anything about highway safety, vehicle crashes, 18-wheeler crashes and the like, they put together a lot of information. Their most recent data on crash facts was from 2018, and I wanted to cover some of it. Their annual edition of Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts just covers all the statistics related to what compiled in 2018. They pull that information from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System by NHTSA. They pull information from the General Estimates System, also maintained by NHTSA, Crash Reporting Sampling System or CRSS, which is also NHTSA, and the Motor Carrier Management Information System or MCMIS crash file, which is maintained by the FMCSA.

They pull a lot of this information. They specifically track information relating to types of crashes, types of vehicles involved, what happened to people, and what happened to drivers in crashes. Some of the trends that they noted was that in 2018, 5,096 large trucks and buses were involved in fatal crashes, which is only a 1% increase from 2017, but it's a 48% increase from 2009. If you live in Texas you know in 2008-2009, that's when all the shale booms started. In the last 11 years, we've had a huge explosion in the oil and gas industry and all over America due to fracking and some of the other regulations that changed. In that same time, you saw an almost 50% increase in fatality crashes involving large trucks and buses.

There was a 34% decrease in the number of fatal crashes involving large trucks, 18 wheelers, and buses from '05 to '09, and then a 45% increase from '09 to '18. What we saw was a trending downward and then an explosion upward which just matches the oil and gas boom. From today 2009 to 2015, injury crashes increased 62%. What do we know about some of those crashes? Of approximately 499,000 reported crashes involving large trucks, 1% were fatal crashes, and 107,000 or 21% involved somebody getting injured. That makes sense. You have an 80,000-pound vehicle, it doesn't have to go fast to hurt somebody.

Approximately 57% of all fatal crashes involving 18 wheelers occurred in a rural area, 26% occurred on an interstate setting, and 13% fell into both of those categories, on an interstate in a rural area. There were 13.5 fatal, large truck crashes per million people in 2018, which is a 27% increase from 2010. What we're seeing is the number of fatality and injury-related crashes has steadily been going up somewhere between 3% and 5% a year, and that's going to lead to an increase in claims on insurance policies. In 2018, there were 1.12 fatalities in federal crashes involving large trucks. The majority 82% were people that were not in the large truck. Big truck hits passenger vehicle, passenger vehicle takes the brunt, and those people get hurt.

Then some other things I thought were interesting. From 2015 to 2018, the number of large trucks weighing between 10,000 and 14,000 pounds in crashes increased 330%. We're not talking the fully-loaded 18 wheeler, we're talking about some of the smaller commercial motor vehicles, and you see that across the spectrum. You take away some of the 18-wheeler 80,000-pound vehicles and some of the smaller commercial vehicles, the rate of crashes increased significantly over the last five years. Then from the people. Of the 4,786 drivers of large trucks involved in fatal crashes, 7% were 25 years or younger, and 6% were 66 years or older. Speeding of any kind was the most frequent driver-related factor in the crash.

I also wanted to look into some of the causes of some of the crash, and luckily the FMCSA has produced a really detailed study called the LTCCS, the Large Truck Crash Causation Study. It hasn't been updated in about 10 years but it's still full of a lot of great information. Basically, what they said was they took factors that are most likely to increase the cause of a crash or increase the risk of a crash, and they included them as causation factors for this data collection focus only.

What they did was they analyzed 963 crashes over a 33-month span. What would happen is in 17 States they had people on the ground who would go out and investigate crashes as soon as a crash occurred. They would send their own researcher and a state truck inspector out to the site of a crash. They would do their own investigation, they'd go through logbooks and witness statements. They'd look at the scene, they would track weather conditions. They would collect over 1,000 different elements on the truck, the driver, the other vehicles involved, the roadway conditions and everything, to try to compile some information about large truck crashes in the United States. During that 33-month study, there were approximately 120,000 fatal and injury-causing crashes involving large trucks nationwide.

Then what they did was they tried to determine what the critical event was in a crash, and that was basically whatever put that crash into a course that made the collision unavoidable. For example, running out of a travel lane either into a wall or into a lane or off the road, that was one of the things they would consider a critical event. Or rear-ending another vehicle; that would be a critical event. Once it was started it was unavoidable, the truck couldn't stop in time. Then vehicle loss of control by either going too fast or a vehicle breaking or cargo shifting was another critical event.

Then what they did was they looked at the critical event and they tried to come up with a critical reason. Sometimes that involved the vehicle, so the brakes went out. Sometimes environment, maybe there's ice on the road, but the vast majority of them they decided had to do with the drivers themselves. Then they categorized those crashes by driver critical reasons, and they broke them down into four categories. Driver non-performance, meaning the driver either fell asleep or had a heart attack or passed out or was somehow physically impaired for some reason.

Driver recognition was another one. This was that they became inattentive for some reason. It could be texting and driving, some sort of distraction in the vehicle, or they just didn't observe a situation fast enough or adequately enough to come to a stop. There was driver decision-making. In those cases they categorized as driver decision-making, they said the driver drove too fast for the conditions or followed too closely or didn't recognize the weather or something like that. Then the last one was driver performance. In this, they said basically the driver either overcompensated or they panicked or they just exercised poor judgment in the situation.

Of the hundreds of associated factors related to these crashes, the top 10 factors they decided were causative of large trucks crashing and their drivers making bad decisions were brake problems, traffic flow interruptions, or either congestion or previous crash, stop and go traffic. Prescription drug use was very high, traveling too fast, unfamiliarity with a roadway, roadway problems. Required to stop before crash, so a traffic control device or crosswalk. Over-the-counter drug use, inadequate surveillance, and fatigue.

Let's think for a second. Of the 10 factors quoted for large trucks and their drivers being causative of a crash that injured or killed somebody, 2 of the top 10 factors were drug use. That's crazy to think about. Yes, it's pretty off-putting. Then some of the other associated factors that they really walked through in their report was how prevalent some of these issues were. We talk about over-the-counter drug use. That was noted in 17% of the 963 crashes that they evaluated. Illegal drugs were in 2%. Alcohol was in 1%. External distraction was in 8%.

A lot of really avoidable issues are causing and leading to the crashes on our highways that kill thousands of people every year, that injure hundreds of thousands of people every year, taking away people's livelihoods, taking away their loved ones, changing their lives. Instead of talking about how to make our roadways safer, we're talking about how to protect the insurance industry, and I think that's a real disservice to all of us. They really know a lot of good trucking companies as well. The good companies are harmed by the bad companies, and the bad companies are the reason that insurance rates are being driven up. If a bad company gets bankrupted by a lawsuit, that is the way that we have regulated that bad company.

If they're putting drivers on the road who are on their phone or on drugs or don't have a license, of which I've handled all three of those types of cases. I've handled cases where a driver was unlicensed and his company kept paying his tickets because he said he was going to get licensed eventually. Those types of companies should not exist. Their good drivers will have no problem finding a job. Their bad drivers and unlicensed drivers shouldn't be on the road anyway. If they're a company that doesn't focus on safety, even though they allow 80,000-pound vehicles on the road going 70 miles an hour, they shouldn't be in that industry. They should let the good companies pick up that market share, hire their good drivers, and follow good safety protocols.

We're going to continue to talk about this as our law firm has represented many injured people injured by 18 wheelers through no fault of their own. We think it's really important that the right to trial by jury be preserved. If there are some changes and tweaks to be made, I think everybody is always open to those discussions, but we should not be shielding 18-wheeler companies and bad companies and bad drivers from the harm that they caused to our fellow Texans. Stay tuned. We'll talk about it more, and we'll see you next time on the next episode of Hill Law Firm podcast.

[00:17:18] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Injury Attorney Q&A Pt. 2

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 05:00:00 -0600

We get a lot of questions from potential and current personal injury clients. We address those questions today!

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. This is going to be our second edition of a lawyer Q&A that we have put together. I've asked my staff and I myself have done the same as we get common questions from people that call the office or from our current clients that we get. I've already done Part 1 of this series. It looks like we've got about another 40 or 50 questions that we have compiled, and I'm going to just go through some of the most common questions we get. If I didn't hit the question that you have, try and listen to Part 1 of this series and we might've covered it there.

In Part 1, we talked about honors and awards we've received, how we get paid, what a fee arrangement is? Who's responsible for out-of-pocket? How much time do we spend on a case? What is a case worth? How are we paid? What happens if you lose? Then questions about our firm, what percentage of our case load is personal injury? Do we get cases referred by their lawyers? Do we handle complex cases in cases against Fortune 500? The questions that you have, feel free to listen to our lawyer Q&A Part 1, that's up on our website, jhlawfirm.com.

Today, I'm going to start with a common question that I personally have gotten. One of those questions we hear a lot is, "Have you handled personal injury cases like mine before," and/or questions such as, "Have you ever tried a personal injury case like mine?" One thing I always have to tell everybody when they call and ask you a question like that is that every case is unique. Every case is unique from the fact that what our plaintiff has gone by case and also the liability against the defendant and the ability to recover against the defendant is going to be different.

For example, we have handled lots of car accident and vehicular accident cases, but I've never seen two that are exactly the same. Have had the same plaintiff, have had the same liability, and have had the same insurance company and lawyers. Every case is different. My first boss always said a lawsuit is a lawsuit is a lawsuit and as long as you can learn and understand the substantive law, then you get evidence to support your substantive law, you go try it to a jury under the same rules of evidence that don't really change depending on what type of case it is. We can never tell somebody, we have handled a case exactly the same as theirs.

Ethically, we are bound to only take cases that we feel we are competent to handle. It's the reason I turned down a mortgage, a dispute case that came in last year. When a bank asked me to go try a case on their behalf regarding a mortgage fraud claim, it's not something I have done before. Honestly, I didn't feel too motivated to get into a trial representing a large bank. We have tried lots of different types of personal injury cases, dram shop cases and negligence cases, car wreck cases, on-the-job injury cases.

We have the ability, the resources, the knowledge and the know-how to work up, prepare and try a personal injury case, a product liability case, dram shop case, 18-wheeler case, on-the-job injury case. Even though the case may have some differing details, we feel like we are competent, ready and able to handle those cases. The next one we're going to hit up is, "Do cases like mine usually settle out of court or go to trial?"

I tell all clients that the vast majority of cases settled before trial and there's multiple reasons for that, but the biggest reason is at the end of the day, the defendant has to ask themselves, do they prefer to let a jury decide, which means it's out of their hand and the plaintiff also has to ask, do they want a jury to decide, which means it's out of their hands? Sometimes, the defendants make it easy.

We have a case, [unintelligible 00:04:26], they do not think they have any liability. I've told them they don't understand the law in this case and I think that is why they have misevaluated the case but regardless, we can't force them to be good lawyers, pay attention, learn, and understand. All we can do is prepare our case for trial. With that being said, rarely do cases get zero offers and get forced to trial. Usually, they get offered some amount of money and the client has to decide, did they think that that is fair to them or would they prefer to let a jury decide their case, even though there's a risk that they get more or less or exactly the same.

We get asked a lot of times by current clients and new clients, "Do you see any problems with my case? How does my case look?" Early on, it's impossible for us to know what's going to flush out in the end on a case. We just recently settled a case, it was a three-car pile-up, 18-wheeler crash. The first car that was hit settled their case before filing a lawsuit for what I think was very little money.

We filed a lawsuit, we started discovery and in discovery, there was a video of the trucker on his phone when the crash occurred. That makes the value of the case increase substantially. When my client had come in originally and asked me, "How does my case look?", I would've told him, "I've handled similar cases. Here's what I think the defendant is going to do. Here's what I think they're going to do as a defense and here's what I think they're going to generally offer you at the end of the day."

When that video came out showing the trucker looking down for seven seconds before he hit the first car which then hit our car, that video probably doubled the value of the case. It's very easy for us to tell people at the start, "Hey, we think you have a good case," but that case could get better or it could get worse depending on how the facts turn out in discovery.

Next question we get sometimes is, "If I'm not satisfied with a settlement offer, are you prepared to take the case to trial?" We just discussed that, yes, we handle cases all the way through trial unlike some lawyers that try to settle them and then if they look like they're going to go to trial or be in litigation, they refer them out. We prepare our cases for trial and we think because they're prepared for trial, we get a better offer for our clients. This brings up a side thing that we hear a lot.

We will have clients that just tell us, "Hey, go tell them to give us more money." I always have to tell clients that, "We can't force them to give you more money. We can't force them to increase their settlement offer. All we can do is present our case in the best light we have prepared for trial and tell them what it's going to take to get the case settled. If they say no, we can't force them to do that." We can then go ask a jury to give us more than what that was going to be and if a jury awards us that amount or more, the defendant can then either pay it or they can appeal it.

We're not in the game of forcing insurance companies what to pay. We're in the profession of preparing our client's case for trial, to the extent that they know that we're not going to fold at the last minute-and-a-half to present an offer that they think will get the case settled. One of the things that sets us apart is we're a small law firm and I often get asked, "Will you be the attorney handling my case?" I think a lot of people now have heard horror stories from some of the big advertising law firms, I guess it'd be the best way to put it, where they have gotten assigned four, five, six, seven different lawyers during the life of their case. They never know who to call.

They don't know what's going on with their case or who the point of contact is. At our law firm, I am involved in every single case. We bounce back and forth between one and two lawyers, being me or me and someone else. In all cases, I will always talk to clients if they call and set up an appointment and go over their case with them. My role in the case is to prepare their case for trial and if I have another lawyer helping me, that's what that means. They'll help me in that process, but when people hire our law firm, they get me as their attorney.

We get asked those specific questions about, "Do I get to talk to a lawyer? How do I get updates? What is the role in the case?" I think I just kind of addressed all of that, but the biggest thing for us is clients always get all the information they need and they have a million different avenues by which to seek it. They can email us, they can text us, they can reach out to us by phone, Zoom, or come in-person.

We always make sure to keep our clients informed, it's something that we really focus on here. Another question we get is, are we too busy to take on their case? I think this stems from the idea I talked about earlier where people have heard horror stories about lawyers taking on a case and then it'd be shifted around to multiple different associates and/or partners and case managers or litigation managers or whatever they want to call them. At our law firm, we have to be really careful about what we take on.

I actually got an email in the middle of the night last night from somebody saying that they had the best case and only to call them if I was certain, I would take it. There was no information about the case or what it was or anything about anything other than they have the best case and if I called them, that meant I was taking their case. I politely responded and said that we are very limited in what we take because we do not want to become a law firm that doesn't know our clients, that doesn't know our cases, and that doesn't do a good job because we've taken off more than we can chew.

We have a small caseload. If we choose to take on a case, that's because we believe we have the capacity at the time to handle it. We do sometimes tell people, "Hey, we can't take your case right now. We're really swamped," and then we'll give them recommendations on people to call. We get asked sometimes to provide references. This is less these days than I think it probably would have been 10 years ago with the Internet. Our best source of references are the reviews that we have gotten from clients.

When you have clients two years, two months, two weeks after their case resolves, remembering how good of a job you did for them and hopping on the Internet so that they can let other people know how happy they were with your services, I think that's the best reference anyone could get or give. I always tell people, "Feel free to look into those." I think in a lot of the platforms, you can actually reach out to the people and ask them questions.

"Has my license ever been suspended or revoked? Had disciplinary issues at our law firm,"-- And that's because we do our best. I can't say we've never made a mistake here or there, but it hasn't been for a lack of trying, it's the practice of law because there is no perfect way to do it. You do your best, you stay compliant with the rules and the ethics standards, and you just do your best for your client and usually, that works out in your favor. I think as long as we're always trying our best for our clients, trying to answer them zealously that we're going to stay on the right side of any complaints.

The last question we're going to handle today is, "Am I a member of any professional organizations? We're a member of the San Antonio Bar Association, the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association, the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, and the Texas Bar. We're on and off members of AIG which is a products group. We're members of AAJ, American Association for Justice. We think it's really important to stay involved with our professorate associations, not only for the edgy element that we get good CLE and information from our peers, but also from the advocacy element that those organizations work to protect consumers rights.

A lot of places have really well-funded government, consumer protection agencies and things like that. In America, we don't focus on government regulation like other countries, other industrialized nations. One way we do this as by self-governing and one way we self-govern is by the right to trial by jury. If we think products hurt somebody or persons hurt somebody, we're allowed to go to a jury and ask for redress.

Now, as you see and hear, every couple of years or every year, tort reform, the insurance industry and the corporate interest do not like that. They try to change the laws to keep everyday people from having the right to trial by jury or they want to supplant what a jury does and say, "Yes, maybe you were hurt," or, "Maybe somebody in your family was killed, but the most you should ever get is this amount of money."

They just want to pull out of thin air what they think is the right amount of damages or the right legal remedy for somebody and take that away from a jury and take it away from me and use right to go ask a jury for what's right and wrong. We are involved with a lot of trade associations, a lot of personal injury related trade associations in San Antonio legal associations for many reasons, but probably the most important is that we believe that it helps protect the right to trial by jury and it helps to protect consumers' access to the courthouse. Join us next time. We'll be covering more questions on Part 3 but until then, we'll see you next time.

[music]

San Antonio Christmas Safety

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 05:00:00 -0600

All injury attorneys in San Antonio and the rest of Texas see an uptick in cases during certain Holidays. Christmas is no different. There are more people on the road, more parties involving alcohol, and more fire hazards present.

Transcript:

San Antonio Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

We are now in December, which means everybody is full on Christmas mode. We've put away the pumpkin spice lattes, we've shelved the cornucopia and turkey and dressing until next year.

Now, we're onto peppermints and hot chocolate and Christmas trees and all the wonderful things associated with Christmas. Another thing about Christmas, though, it is associated with lots of its own specific dangers. We want to talk a little bit about this. The great people at the National Safety Council, which is one of America's leading non-profits regarding safety information and safety advocacy, has put together some holiday safety information. I wanted to share that with our listeners.

It's truly broken down into two things, or three things. We're going to be on the road a lot. We're going to be decorating. Lots of things involve fire this time of year, so let's talk about that. The holidays are a dangerous time to be on the road. I think, in 2017, they said there was almost 300 deaths on Christmas Day on the roadways. Alcohol was a factor in a third of those.

What we know is that people go out and they celebrate on Christmas Day, Christmas Eve. People travel for Christmas, a lot of people are on the roadways. A few things, it's cold outside, prepare your car for winter travel. Depending on where you are in Texas, that probably don't mean much, other than to watch the news, watch the weather, make sure you're not driving into an eye storm, especially if you're going up to North Texas, like where I am from.

Here, in beautiful San Antonio, I think it's probably unlikely that there will be much ice on the road or snow on the road or the need for change or anything like that. Depending on where you are and where you're traveling, make sure you prepare for the weather, whatever that may mean, and prepare for a breakdown in cold weather as well, just in case that were to happen.

If you're going for a long drive, make sure you get a good night sleep. You don't want to be fatigued or drowsy while you're driving. Also, don't drink and drive. A lot of people like to celebrate the holidays with a drink or two or too many. Just make sure that you don't get behind the wheel after that. Plan your travel ahead. Traffic during the holidays picks up. Plan your travel so that you know where the traffic is, maybe how to avoid it, and then you have plenty of time to get to where you need to be.

You may have people in the car with you. Avoid distractions. Make sure that you're not on the phone or watching a TV or not paying attention. Make sure everybody in your car is buckled up. This might be one of the only times a year that everybody is in the car together. Make sure that you follow all safety protocols with your kids and/or family in the car.

Be a defensive driver because, remember, some of those other people on the road will have partied too much and may be a drowsy driver. Pay attention to those on the road. Next thing we want to talk about is decorating safely. In our house, we say, "You got to be careful with poinsettias because they can kill dogs." Poinsettias and things like that can also poison children, so be careful with the plants that you use.

Be careful with the tree that you use. If you've got a artificial tree, make sure it's fire-resistant. If you have a real tree, make sure it's fully watered and there's no source of flame around it, because those trees go up like a match. When I was a young kid, my dad took ours out into the field and set it on fire just to see how bad it really was. It just went up like a match. Imagine that happening in your home.

Also, make sure that you do all the proper things you're supposed to do with a live tree. Make sure you water it, make sure it's cut sufficiently. Make sure that it's in the right place and there's not a tip over hazard and all those types of things. Be careful with the ornaments you put on the tree. We've all seen Home Alone, where the guy steps on the ornaments. That's real life.

A friend of mine on Facebook posted yesterday that he had to go to the hospital because he stepped on a Christmas light. Same difference is a Christmas ornament that they can cut and go into your foot. Be careful with what you put on the tree, especially if you have children, for choking hazards or break hazards and things like that.

Be careful while you're hanging lights. Every year, people fall off ladders and some of the nastiest injuries I see are related to falls from ladders. Be careful if you're up on a ladder, putting up lights. I personally don't do it. If I do decide to do that, I will hire a contractor who has all the proper equipment and is more familiar with and uses ladders more often than I do.

A lot of people, it's the first time, and the only time they'll get on the ladder all year, is to hang Christmas lights. That is not somebody that has a lot of experience at the time, getting on ladders if they're doing it once a year. Make sure that you don't have shorts in any of your lights. Make sure you're not overloading your electrical system. Just be careful for all of the wonderful things we love about Christmas and make sure that you are decorating your house safely.

The last thing I want to talk about is fire safety. We've all seen the fire department videos of turkey fryers setting houses on fire. This time a year, if you're using turkey fryers or deep fryers, be careful. If you're running a fire, make sure your chimney is cleaned out, because people don't, maybe, fully appreciate it. The chimneys can catch on fire if they're not cleaned. My understanding, based on discussions with some people, is once that sat creosote cake in your fireplace catches fire, it burns at an extremely high temperature.

Again, be careful with your outdoor fireplaces, indoor fireplaces, trees that are flammable, plants that are flammable, all your wonderful candles this time a year and the lights that you use. It's a wonderful time to celebrate. It's also a time to be very careful about all of the things that are new. We don't have trees year round, so tree safety isn't a big part of our day-to-day thinking. Be careful, enjoy the holidays. Be safe for yourself, but also be safe for the others on the road and others in your home. Merry Christmas from all of us at Hill Law Firm.

[00:06:50] [END OF AUDIO]

Traffic Injuries and Fatalities Increase with Texas Oil Boom

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 05:00:00 -0600

The Texas Department of Transportation recently released data showing an increase in traffic fatalities and crashes in the oil rich areas of Texas. South of San Antonio and out in West Texas are areas with large oil and gas stores. That has lead to more traffic and more crashes.

Transcript:

Oilfield Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

I think it's fair to say that no matter where you live in the state of Texas, you know that Texas is associated with oil and gas production. I came from a town called Burkeburnett, Texas. It was known as boom town and there was actually a movie with Clark Gable named Boom Town about Texas' oil production. Everybody's heard about Spindletop.

The movie Giant spends a long time discussing our Texas moved from cattle ranch and farms to oil and gas. The movie There Will Be Blood. The TV show, Dallas, Texas' oil and gas is as any other state in the union and probably the most of all States. With that being said, Texas is in a new peak of oil and gas production. In 2017 Texas oil production exceeded the peak of oil production that Texas on 1972 and then they beat that production in '18 and '19.

Without a doubt, Texas is going through a huge renaissance or revitalization of oil and gas production in the state of Texas. A lot of that has to do with the technology advances and fracking or hydraulic fracturing and finding new energy plays in the Barnett shale, the Eagle Ford shale, the Granite Wash, the Hainesville and Bowser shell and the Permian basin and the Wolf camp and you could go on and on about all these new areas where oil and gas companies have found essentially oceans of oil under the ground.

What that means is there's a lot of oil production, meaning there's a lot of people working in the oil and gas industry and there's a lot of people working in the sectors that support the oil and gas industry. In San Antonio, for example, there's a lot of people that work in industries that support either the Permian basin or the Barnett shale and that can range from delivering water to taking wastewater, to loading mining and delivering sand to building pad sites and to actually be in a roughneck out in the oil patch, either as a driller or in a frack crew or any of the other areas that are supporting the oil and gas production in the state.

That also trickles down to just regular jobs like gas station workers, grocery store workers, the HEB in Karnes City or outside of Kennedy was seeking people to work and were paying high wages because they could not get workers because workers were going to the oil and gas industry. This also means that a lot of people are on the roads in communities that aren't used to that. The traffic in the Midland Odessa area and the Permian basin area in the Barnett shale, is in numbers unseen before.

A lot of that traffic is 18-wheeler traffic and commercial motor vehicle traffic. What we found is that traffic crashes in these energy producing areas have increased just substantially. For example, in 2019 TxDOT said there was over 205,000 crashes in counties defined as the Texas energy sector and that's defined by the Texas Railroad Commission and it includes large portions of West Texas, South Texas and some metropolitan areas or edges of metropolitan areas like Dallas and Fort Worth and even El Paso.

The number of crashes represents an approximately 3% increase from the year before and these crashes led to almost 1700 fatalities. Now we personally have worked on a lot of these cases and a lot of them involve unqualified drivers or drivers over hours. A lot of them involved distracted drivers driving 18-wheelers, 80,000-pound vehicles and somebody's playing on their phone.

Another contributing factor to some of this is the lax hours regulations when it comes to people on the oil and gas industry and also the road conditions. If you get down to some of these oil and gas producing areas, the roads are so eaten up due to the weight of the vehicles that it makes driving on them more dangerous. The state of Texas is taking on a campaign of ending the streak and be safe and drive smart and they're really trying to target the oil and gas industry.

In San Antonio, we don't get as much of the oil and gas traffic or 18-wheeler traffic as some of the other areas but these other areas went from having no traffic in town ever to, for example, I was out in Pecos, Texas and there was one stoplight that we had to sit through four rounds of the light cycle because there were so many vehicles backed up. You're dealing with towns that never saw traffic before now seeing incredible amounts of traffic, having roads that have been eaten up by the weight of the vehicles and lots of commercial motor vehicles on the road.

What we have also seen is that the demand for drivers has been so extreme that a lot of people are hiring drivers they would not have hired any year that wasn't a boom and a year where they could be a little more selective or be a little more picky. We handle a lot of 18-wheeler crash cases, we represent people injured by 18 wheelers, by distracted drivers and we always make sure that we turn over every stone. It's one thing I always tell my clients. I can't tell you that you'll be happy with what I find, but I can tell you I'll get you the answers to what happened.

Usually what we find is that what we're told at the start is a lot more whitewashed than it turns out to be. For example, we had a case recently, a three-car pile-up where an 18-wheeler rear ended everybody. He told our clients, he told his job and he told the cop at the scene that he looked down because there was an animal in the road and when he looked up, he hit everybody. It turns out there was a video of the crash in his cab and he had been looking down at his phone for eight seconds when he hit all these cars going 70 miles an hour.

Our firm understands the need for discovery in these cases so we had already filed it and we were getting to discovery when we found out the car that was hit first had already settled their case for pennies on the dollar. And that lawyer advised his client about settlement without having any understanding what caused this crash. That's a fear I have that I will, at some point, if I don't follow my cases, not be able to fully educate my client about their options.

It's one reason I always tell clients when they come in that we're going to file your lawsuit because I need to file the lawsuit to get answers to what happened and why it happened. If you are the one of the people that have been injured, or if you've lost a loved one in a truck crash or 18-wheeler crash and it revolved around the oil and gas industry or they've been injured or you've been injured in the oil and gas industry, give Hill Law Firm a call, we'll get answers for you. We'll make sure you're taken care of and we'll always be here to answer all the questions that you need along the way.

[00:07:48] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Personal Injury Attorney Q&A Part 1

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Have you ever had questions about hiring a personal injury attorney or about how the practice works? In this series of Q&A, we are going to tackle some of the most common questions we get at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

San Antonio Personal Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. One thing I wanted to do was cover some frequently asked questions we get. We get a lot of discerning clients that come and meet with us, or one of those reasons is because a lot of clients that end up calling us are clients that have done a lot of research into client satisfaction and reviews and looked into a bunch of different law firms. Nobody's going to hire our law firm because we got a slogan or a jingle. We don't carry hammers or other types of tools. We don't have a phone number that's really easy to remember. What we are is a good law firm and does good work for people.

We get a lot of questions from people when they call about hiring us, and a lot of those questions I've tried to keep track of and write down. I'm going to just walk through some of them. This is going to be a multi-part series where I just hit up a bunch of questions that people ask. One of the questions we get is, how do you get paid? Our law firm is a contingency fee law firm. That means that you don't pay us hourly, you don't pay us a flat rate.

A lot of lawyers get paid by the hour. A lot of lawyers get paid by the flat rate. For example, if you get a DWI, you're going to have a criminal defense lawyer say I'll handle your case for $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000. It's a flat rate, no matter what happens. Our law firm gets hired on a contingency fee, which means we get a percentage of recovery if there is a recovery. If there is no recovery, we don't get any money. We don't get any fees. We don't even get our expenses back if there's no recovery. If there is recovery, we get our fees as a percentage of the recovery, and we get our expenses back.

One thing that makes us a little different, I think, is that our client always makes the decision on when to settle a case. We can tell them we disagree with them. We could tell them we think it's too high or too low, but they tell us what to do. At the end of the day, they get to make the final decision on how to settle their case. We have been asked, have we received honors or awards? I think this is a funny question because if you look, there are so many lawyers that get all sorts of awards.

If you're a lawyer, you get a letter probably once a week or every other week saying you've been named top this or top that, now give us $500 for your certificate. A lot of these awards are made up. There was a famous example where a lawyer bought an award for his pet chicken because he wanted to point out how worthless most of these awards were. Some of the awards are peer vote based.

I, Justin, has been named Texas super lawyer rising star for almost 10 years. Now, that's peer-based in which other lawyers vote on you, and it's done through Thomson Reuters. We've also been nominated for other things and gotten some of these other awards, but I think that's probably the best one in terms of how you gauge things because it's voted on by their attorneys.

We get asked if we offer free and confidential case reviews. The answer to that is always yes, with the caveat that we can't give people free legal advice. I can talk to them about their facts. I can talk to them about their potential case. I can tell them if it's a case we would take or not take or who I would call if I was them. What we can't do is give them legal advice when they're not our clients. With that being said, also, whatever they share with us is confidential, and it can't be shared with anybody else. We offer, and we give lots of free and confidential case reviews.

We get asked a lot of times what a case is worth. We might get a call from somebody the day after they were in a crash or hurt on the job and their first question is, what do you think I can expect in terms of settlement? There are so many things that go into what a case is worth. That it's really impossible to give any idea what a case is worth until a lot of work has been done on the case.

A lot of factors have to be determined, including what are the client's damages. What are their past medical or future medical needs? Will they work again? Have they lost wages? How much insurance does the other party have? Are there any egregious facts like drinking and driving, or texting and driving, and things like that on the other side? Case worth at the end of the day is what a jury says the case is worth, but in terms of what a client can expect, that's not even a question that can be answered or even a discussion that can be heard until a lot of work has been done on the case and the case is getting ready for trial.

We get asked what happens if we don't win the case or if the person doesn't get any recovery? Like I stated earlier if there's no recovery, we don't get our fees and we don't get our expenses. If the case goes to trial and you lose, that's true. Also, there's the caveat of a court could Ord court costs against the losing party. I've never had a defendant actually seek those out.

I've never seen anybody actually seek it out, but it's something I have to tell clients when they're going to trial that if we lose this case, the defendant could come after them for court costs. Now court costs are not all of their expenses. It's very limited filing fees and deposition transcripts, and a very limited number of things are considered court costs, but they could be responsible for those.

What percentage of Hill Law Firm caseload is personal injury cases? We get asked that a lot because we handle a lot of types of cases, and to be fair, we handle sexual assault cases on the job injury cases, car wrecks, 18 wheelers. We consider all those to be personal injury cases. 99% of our docket is some form of personal injury case or some form of case revolving around an injury.

How often do other lawyers refer cases to Hill Law Firm? We get a lot of cases referred to us by their lawyers, but over the last 10 years, really five years, that number has gotten less because we have spent less time trying to solicit cases from other lawyers. We still have the same lawyers that have sent us cases for years. We review those cases.

We look at those cases the same as we always would, but we get a lot more direct calls straight into our law firm now than we used to, and we have to spend time on our direct cases, the same as we would a referred case. That limits our ability to go out and tell other lawyers that we're accepting referrals. We do get referrals, or we've always received referrals. We just receive less these days than we used to. That's a product of us not trying to get them, not that other lawyers don't trust us with their work.

How long have you been practicing law? I was licensed to practice law in April of 2007. Lawyers talk funny in terms of how long they've been a lawyer. They talk what year they're in their practice. I think I'm in my 14th year of practice. Have you ever been disciplined by the Texas state bar? Luckily I have not been disciplined. I have not been grieved. I have not had to go through that process. I actually serve on the grievance committee for District 10 here in San Antonio, where I get to help resolve grievances between clients and lawyers.

One thing I've learned is some of the best lawyers end up in grievance because of a minor mistake. I've also learned that some lawyers deserve to be in that process because of a history of making bad decisions and not looking after their clients. The most encouraging thing I've learned, though, is we take our grievance process seriously. I think that aggrieved people are taken care of by the state bar of Texas. I think lawyers are punished where they need to be, helped where they need to be. I'm a big believer in the process the state bar has to self-govern.

Have you handled complex cases involving commercial defendants? The answer to that is yes. We handle at any given time probably 30 or 40 cases involving corporate or commercial defendants; whether that's on the job injuries or 18-wheeler crashes. We've prosecuted product liability cases against some of the biggest product makers in the world. It's a very common part of our practice to pursue claims against businesses, and corporations, and commercial entities.

The last question we're going to cover for today, and we'll do more of these in the future is we were asked, can I see a list of your case results? For the most part, almost every case that settles the defendants require confidentiality. We rarely fight this because the clients are concerned more with getting their settlement and getting it fast than they are about the ability to put it on social media. We don't stand in the way of their desire to have confidentiality. It would be good marketing probably for us, but at the end of the day our clients get to make that determination, and my marketing need or my desire to put it on a social media post is not going to outweigh my client's wishes and we always follow them.

We're going to keep this up, and we're going to do more lawyer Q&A over the next few months. If you have any questions, reach out and let us know.

[00:09:58] [END OF AUDIO]

Personal Injury Cases in San Antonio During COVID

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has created situations that make settling and trying personal injury cases in San Antonio and the rest of Texas much more difficult. Courts are shutdown. Doctors offices are running with low staff. And, getting evidence needed can be slowed. We discuss expectations for our clients in this episode.

Transcript:

San Antonio Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, this podcast has been an attempt to make sure our listeners, make sure our clients, our former clients, our potential future clients not only know what we're doing on a day-to-day basis in terms of the type of work we work on, but also who works with us, what's going on in the legal industry and what to expect if you ever need our services. One of the more common questions that we're getting these days revolves around the COVID crisis, the court shutdowns, what to expect, and how it's going to impact their personal injury lawsuit.

In San Antonio, the court systems have been shut down for months at this point, very few things have been moving forward. The courts have been looking for people willing to try their case by Zoom, but not many people want to try a personal injury case by Zoom for a variety of reasons. We get these calls from our current clients asking what to expect and what's the delay and what's going on. We have to walk through this uncharted territory that we're in right now as it relates to the COVID crisis.

From our law firm standpoint, I just wanted to discuss a few things. With the COVID crisis early on here in San Antonio people weren't going to work, people weren't driving on the highways and the streets. That meant there were less car crashes. There were less on the job injuries. There were less people needing our services. What that meant practically was our phones weren't ringing as much on intake and new cases but it was still ringing, but it allowed us to start focusing solely on moving the cases that we had at that time in light of the fact that there were a lot of hurdles to moving cases with the COVID crisis looming.

One thing I have to tell all of my clients now and our future clients is that the question of how long will it take to resolve my case is up in the air at this point. There's a lot of reasons for that. The one that most people know about is that the courts are not trying cases right now. We're able to get hearings, we're able to do some things, but from a plaintiff's standpoint, in a personal injury case, the deadline or the backstop time in terms of a cases lifespan, is the trial date.

If you don't have a trial date, the other side feels no pressure because there's nothing looming for them to worry about. They don't have to worry about allowing 12 people here in San Antonio decide the merits and value of the case. They can delay and just sit tight because there's no risk for them, but practically there's other considerations as well that we have to talk to our clients about.

For one, depos are more difficult. We're able to do zoom depositions, they're happening all over America, the state of Texas is no different, but they're much harder to handle for certain types of depositions. A fact witness, that's not that bad, but when it comes to very document-intensive depositions of experts or doctors or corporate representatives, it's more difficult to the extent that some of them we have to really weigh whether or not we want to wait to handle that deposition in-person because it will be a more effective deposition.

Some of the other things that people don't think about is medical records right now. Not only are doctors harder to get to see patients because of the crisis. There's a lot of teleconference, telemedicine, but even once they have seen patients, it's harder to get medical records right now. A lot of doctor's offices are running on a skeleton crew. They have less people in the office and getting medical records for a lawsuit is low on their priority list it seems like. That's a practical thing that slows down the case as well. Another thing we've run into is evidence and experts.

A lot of cases require experts to help work the case. These are hired people with expertise in a certain area that help you get answers to your case. Sometimes we hire them just to give us advice. Sometimes we hire them and ask them to share their opinions with a jury as a retained expert. A lot of experts aren't willing to travel right now, so a lot of them are not able to do the work we need, and oftentimes that work is necessary for a case to proceed to trial. Trial dates due to Zoom being put off into the future creates the biggest problem for us moving the majority of our cases but there's a trickle-down effect to the shutdown that has permeated almost every area of the personal injury practice.

Finally, insurance companies are never known to really try to do the right thing or they hide behind what is going on with this crisis, so they can hold onto their money longer because there is no trial in the future for them. What we're seeing from some insurance companies but not all is we're going to offer you probably 80%, 90% of what we would have offered you if you could get to trial, but we're going to offer you that because you're going to have to tell your client that they might be a year or two years out from getting their case resolved due to the court shut down.

Some insurance companies are playing on that about what they're doing to people and leave it to the insurance company to not waste an opportunity to take advantage of people. The overriding message I wanted to share with people is if you've been injured or you still have a claim, you still have a case and we're still taking those cases, we just have to tell people to expect that the timing or the normal. I would say that most of our cases are moving at about the same pace that they would have moved prior to the COVID crisis, but some are moving slower and some are stuck in the mud because we can't get to trial.

My message to anybody who's been injured is don't be frustrated by the idea that your case may take longer. Don't limit your time to seek options and seek out legal counsel. Just understand that the process is going to be a little bit different and you're going to hear lawyers tell you that they can't give you straight answers on some of the process because nobody really knows what to expect in terms of trial dates and nobody can force people like experts and doctors to work faster under these conditions. If you have any questions about what's going on at our firm or questions about your potential personal injury case, feel free to give us a call.

[00:07:17] [END OF AUDIO]

Texas School Bus Safety Laws

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 05:00:00 -0600

What are the laws in Texas about interacting with school buses? That is the question we discuss on this episode of San Antonio's go-to personal injury law firm podcast. Join us to learn more.

Transcript:

Personal Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm cases where we're going to be talking about school bus safety in the state of Texas and in San Antonio. One of the things about our law firm is we are a safety advocacy law firm as well as a personal injury plaintiffs law firm. It's very important for us that what we do makes our community safer, and specifically, what we do make San Antonio safer city for everybody to live in. I always joke with people that I wish we got put out of business by everybody following the laws, by products being made safer, and by people doing what they're supposed to do.

I hope we don't get put out of business by political changes in which our legislators and insurance companies try to protect and shield insurance companies and corporations from any liability when they do wrong. One of the things I like to talk about is, in a case, usually there's some standard by which people have violated that led to somebody being injured. For example, if somebody is on their phone or drunk, and they cause a crash, they violated that law and that safety standard about drinking and driving, or texting and driving and caused a crash. In that example, San Antonio is one of the worst cities in the state of Texas in the United States for drinking and driving. These are issues that if people would follow the law, and do correctly, I wouldn't get those types of cases, and that would be great for everybody in our city, our state, and it will make our community safer.

One of the things I want to talk about today is school bus safety. We all have been stuck behind a school bus before, we've probably all hated that experience, especially if you're stuck behind a school bus that stopping over, and over, and over, and you can't get around it. I remember growing up, I lived out in a rural area, and we'd be stuck behind buses for a long time on our way home.

That was part of it and I actually rear-ended the school bus as a kid, so I'm glad that people follow the laws when they do because I was one of those kids that could have been injured. [clears throat] The State of Texas has laws on how we are supposed to interact with and treat school buses when they're on the road. Some of the laws involve all drivers must stop for flashing red lights on a school bus regardless which direction you're traveling.

We've all seen a school bus start to slow, and the yellow lights on the back of it start flashing, and then they turn red. The law on that is that they're essentially the same as a stop sign, that no matter which side of the road you're on, whether behind it or fixing to pass it, you're required by Texas law to stop. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, kids exiting and entering a bus might dart across the road or step out when a vehicle is trying to pass.

If you're old enough to drive, you've probably got better judgment, hopefully, then, a six-year-old who's running across the street and just wants to get home, or just wants to get on the bus. If you see the red lights, come to a complete stop. Another thing about school bus safety is that you're allowed to continue your trip once the bus has moved, and the flashing lights have stopped flashing, or if the school bus driver lets you pass. You can end up passing the bus if you need to, you just can't do it with its lights flashing.

The fines in Texas for this type of bad behavior can lead to $1,000 fines in the state of Texas. Some of the things we should consider with school buses is, obey the posted speed limit. That if you're in a school zone, the fines could double. Keep an eye out for children standing around on the side of the road waiting for their bus. Maybe there's not a bus there, but you've got children standing on the side of the road, and who knows? They could be playing, and fall into the road or get too close, so pay attention to them.

Also, if you see kids, or it's the time of day where you'll see kids getting ready to get on the bus, remember that they might run and run across the street trying to catch their bus, so be careful and pay attention. One of the things I remember about our time around the bus was we got rear-ended one time when we were on the bus. I remember it, you couldn't even barely feel it when you were on the bus. A practical consideration for drivers out there is you do not want to run into a bus.

They're built like tanks and they're built that way to protect our kids, and make sure that they get to school safely. Be careful with buses. No matter how big of a hurry you are in, it's not worth endangering the lives or livelihood of children getting on that bus. It's probably not worth a thousand dollar or $2,000 fine, that you could be hit with if you violate those laws. If you've been injured or your child has been injured by somebody failing to obey the laws of Texas or the laws of San Antonio regarding school bus safety, give us a call.

We have handled many cases involving children injured in school zones, or school crosswalks. It's an egregious example of people not paying attention and not following the law when we all know you're supposed to be careful in school zones or around school buses. If you have questions, call the Hill Law Firm.

[music]

[00:05:57] [END OF AUDIO]

Preparing for Depositions

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin: In the Hill Law Firm podcast, we try to not only discuss the cases that we handle but elements of cases that we handle, the way we handle cases, people we work with on cases. The podcast is designed to give information generally about the types of cases we handle from start to finish, from intake to end, the questions that arise along that process, as well some substantive cases that we handle as well. We've talked recently about the discovery process, depositions, what they are, what they're intended for, and why they are a part of the process.

One of the most common things that we as attorneys have to do in personal injury cases are prepare our clients for their depositions. When a plaintiff files a lawsuit, they're usually alleging that somebody else was at fault for causing their injuries and that they suffered injuries and as a result of those injuries they suffered damages. Those damages can include pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, physical impairment, all in the past and in the future. It can also include wages lost in the past and future or wage-earning capacity for people that can't work anymore. It almost always includes medical bills in the past and the future.

When we prepare our clients for their depositions, there are some things that are pretty standard among all cases. I want to walk through a few things I tell my clients in preparing for their depositions. We have a few rules that we go through, some general information about presentation and how to prepare. Now, this is not intended to be information anybody should use in their own personal case. They should always consult with their own attorneys.

I think it's important to generally hear how we go through our process. If you're one of our clients and you have a call coming up with me, or you have a deposition upcoming with our law firm, here's some of the stuff you're going to hear and here's some of the things that everybody should do, in my opinion, when it comes to a deposition. I always tell my clients there's a few rules as it relates to a deposition. First and most important, the number one rule is, to be honest. We're not here to make up a case, we have a case.

Honesty is the most important thing in a deposition for a few reasons. One, because it's important that we tell the truth of our case so that we can all understand what a jury is going to hear about our case. Two, because I'm not going to represent somebody who's not being honest. Three, honesty is something the jury can pick up on. Be honest even when it's uncomfortable because a jury wants to know that you're being honest, and a jury wants to know that you're being fair because at the end of the day, we're going to ask them to be fair. You need to be fair as well.

Another thing about honesty is that the law allows only certain things and only certain pieces of evidence to go in front of the jury. For example, certain criminal convictions if they're so old or certain types, aren't allowed to be told to a jury. The law says only certain types and only certain types of crimes in a certain time period can be told to the jury. Those limitations sometimes go out the window if they witness lies about them. It's important they're honest so that they don't create an evidentiary problem for themselves.

Another rule is answer the question. The purpose of a deposition is a question and answer session with the other side under oath. I tell my clients, listen to the question, understand the question, and answer the question. There's multiple reasons for that, but for the most part, one is you want to make sure you understand the question before you answer it so that it's not used against you, or changed, or misrepresented to the jury. In a deposition, you're allowed to tell the attorney asking questions to rephrase their question or to state it in another way if you don't understand it. Answering the question is the main purpose of the deposition, and not anticipating questions is another reason we tell our clients to answer the question.

The defense lawyer has their job to do. Our job is to not do their job for them. Plaintiffs have to sit for their deposition. They get to be asked certain questions. Me, as their lawyer has the ability to object to some of those question. In certain instances, like attorney-client privilege, we can instruct them not to answer, but it's not our job to make sure they ask all the right questions. We tell our clients, "Answer the question. Answer the question honestly. Understand the question first, then answer it honestly."

One of the biggest stressors for people giving their deposition is they feel like it's a quiz or a test. I always tell my clients, "It's not a quiz. It's not a test. It's what you know as you sit there when they're deposing you. It's fine to say you do not know something. It's fine to tell them that you're not sure, but you think. What they want to know is that you're being honest. What a jury wants to know is that you're being honest. A jury doesn't expect somebody to have all the answers all the time."

I also tell people, "Don't guess." If for example, you're asked the speed of a crash, and I've had this happen before in a case. I've had a client say that they thought they were going 30 miles an hour when the crash occurred when all the other witnesses thought they were going 10 miles an hour. People get nervous in a deposition and sometimes just blurt things out, so it's important not to guess. It's not a test. It's fine to say you don't know something. Don't guess, be honest, answer the question, understand the question. Those are the general rules.

I get asked how to dress. I tell my clients, "Dress like you're going to church, or dress like you're going to some sort of semiformal event. You're going to be on camera for the most part, so don't come in a tee shirt or a rock band shirt, shave, comb your hair, look presentable. If you're in trial, you're going to be presentable and a jury is going to look at you every day to see if you care enough to get out of bed, get dressed, and present yourself properly to a jury in a formal setting of a courtroom." In a deposition, you don't have to be as formal as a courtroom, but I tell people, "Understand that you're being evaluated in appearance, in emotion and honesty and all those things while this deposition occurs."

That brings me to another point. Control your emotions in your depo. You might get flustered. The defense lawyer might say something that gets under your skin, but there is no winning in losing your temper or being rude. In preparation for a deposition, I always tell my clients they don't need to go review all their medical records. They don't need to review everything they've ever seen or know about the case. I tell them, "Spend a little bit of time thinking about the case. Spend some time remembering what you went through, how you felt. Think about your symptoms, how they were then, how they've improved or not."

I don't want my clients to spend exhaustive amount of time going over all the details of the case, but I think it's important they sit down and they try to remember what they felt in those moments, how they experienced those moments, who they talk to, who helped them during this period. When people feel better, they don't really remember what it felt like to be in pain, so I want them to think about it. Did they modify their lifestyle? Did they change the way they did things? In certain cases, we'll spend a lot of times with our clients having them try to put their selves back in those positions that they were in when the injury occurred in the days and weeks and months that followed. In some cases, we do not. It's a case by case.

Finally, I always tell my clients just to relax. The deposition is not going to be the end of the world. It's nothing they need to lose sleep over. It's something they need to prepare for, understand what they're getting into, know that I'm going to be sitting there with them, and know that it's all going to be okay. These are our general rules. Every single case is different. Every case has different facts. Every deposition preparation in our office is catered to the specific case, whatever issues, injuries, liability facts, how long it has been since the incident and the deposition, what other depositions have occurred. There's lots of things that go into it, but I wanted to do a short rundown on what we do to prepare our clients for their depositions in general.

Motorcycle Safety and Sharing the Road

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 05:00:00 -0600

At Hill Law Firm, we handle many motorcycle crashes every year. Unfortunately, they often involve very serious injuries due to the disparity between automobiles and motorcycles. If you are driving around San Antonio, share the road with those on smaller vehicles.

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

At Hill Law firm, we handle all types of personal injury, car wreck, motorcycle, pedestrian accidents, bicycle accidents. Another thing we handle fairly regularly are crashes involving motorcyclists. Crashes involving motorcyclists are unique for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is that they typically involve very serious injuries due to the fact, they usually have a big difference between the vehicles either impacting one another or you have the result of somebody falling off or being thrown off a motorcycle at a high rate of speed.

One case I handled many years ago and took to a jury verdict involved a fireman who was on his motorcycle. When he was turning into a gas station, the person behind him wasn't paying attention and struck him. They hit this man at a pretty high rate of speed, estimated to be somewhere between 40 and 50 miles an hour. Our client the firefighter was just grievously injured. He ended up losing a portion of his leg in the crash and was never going to be able to be a firefighter again. That particular crash involved another driver who had been drinking before.

It highlights the dangers involved in motorcycle vehicle crashes. It's likely that if our client had been in a passenger vehicle at the time, that he might not have suffered such serious injuries. We're currently working on a case in San Antonio, Texas involving a motorcyclist who was pulling into a gas station. The gas station had hired a company to do power washing and pressure washing of the parking lot. At the entrance, they had put two cones far apart from each other, not blocking the entrance. In those cones, they put metal posts and they strung a wire.

Now that wire covered the entire entrance of the gas station, but the wire was not very visible, it was almost impossible to see. Our client, as they drove into that wire, fell off their motorcycle as did their passenger, and they were both seriously injured. A car would likely have driven through that wire. A car would have sustained damage but it's a very different experience than if you're on a motorcycle and you're knocked off of that motorcycle.

In Texas, July is considered, Share the Road, Look Twice for Motorcycles Campaign month. The Texas Department of Transportation puts out this annual campaign every July of 2020. In particular, it's done to enforce the, End The Streak Campaign in the state of Texas. Currently, Texas has not had a single day without a roadway fatality since November 7th of 2000.

Due to that, the Texas Department of Transportation has tried to create a campaign through social media and other news related awareness pieces to try to lower and reduce and potentially, hopefully, eliminate roadway fatalities for at least one day. The Share the Road, Look Twice Campaign regarding motorcycle safety is one of those.

In the press release, the state points out that on average one motorcyclist dies every day on Texas roads. The cities with the most motorcyclist fatalities include Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Odessa. The six month period from May through October is the deadliest six month period for motorcyclists in the state of Texas and accounts for over 60% of all motorcycle fatality crashes.

In the press release put out by the Texas Department of Transportation, they cover a few things that we should all do to make sure that we are helping make sure the road stay safer for everybody including motorcyclists. Texas Department of Transportation asked everybody to take the following steps. One, to take extra precaution when you're making left-hand turns. The state points out that sometimes it's hard to gauge the speed of motorcyclists as opposed to vehicles, and so when you see a motorcyclist coming, wait a little bit, don't try to pull out in front of them.

The next is, pay special attention at intersections, especially if you're at a stop and the other cross traffic doesn't have a stop. Since motorcyclists are smaller vehicles, sometimes they're not as apparent. Take a better look, use extra caution when entering an intersection or going through an intersection. Give driving your full attention. Make sure you're aware of who's around you, who's coming up behind you, who's in front of you, and be aware that some of those people sharing the road with you are on smaller vehicles such as motorcycles.

Look twice when changing lanes, especially in your blind spot, a motorcyclist might not be as easy to see. Give motorcyclists room when you're passing them. Even though they don't take up the whole lane, they should be given access to, and freedom within the whole lane as though they would be if they were in a regular passenger vehicle.

The last two are, stay back, don't tailgate a motorcyclist, and just generally slow down. The slower you're going, the easier it is to make maneuvers if needed. Motorcyclists have the same right on the roadways as you and I do. Some people just choose to drive a motorcycle for other reasons, whether it's the wind in their hair, or the incredible fuel mileage economy that those things get, they're entitled to the same safe roadways that you and I are.

Help the state of Texas and the industry campaign. Help make motorcyclists safer on our roadways. If we all work together, we can help end the streak. That's going to do it for this episode of Hill Law firm cases. We're going to continue to try to put out some of the information from the Texas Department of Transportation so that we can all work together to have safer roadways for everybody in Texas.

[music]

[00:07:16] [END OF AUDIO]

Why Do We File Our Cases Faster than Most

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 05:00:00 -0600

We tell our San Antonio personal injury clients that we are not the type of San Antonio injury law firm that will wait a long time, send a lot of letters, and hope the other side insured company pays us without doing much work. We file our Texas personal injury and car accident cases. We think our clients are treated better when their cases are filed, set for trial and prepared for trial.

Transcript:

Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin: With every new case that we get in the door, I have to sit down with a client and have to discuss with them expectations for the process, what to consider going forward, and try to set their expectations about a process that really is unfamiliar with most people. It's unfamiliar because most people aren't used to having to go through a long, drawn-out process to find resolution to a problem. They usually should be able to be resolved without court intervention. Insurance companies have realized that the longer they delay a case, the more time they can have holding on to money in their reserves. There is a financial incentive for insurance companies to hold on to their money and delay the payment of claims, even claims that they know they should pay out. One of the first things I tell clients when they come to meet with me and discuss hiring me is that unlike a lot of law firms and a lot of lawyers, I'm going to file the case. I'm not going to do what a lot of people do. There's a different strategy among lawyers. Some lawyers take the position that they want their client to finish treating, do everything they need to do, figure out all of their damages, then send a letter, and try to resolve the claim. Then, if that doesn't work 6, 9, 12 months down the road, then they'll file a lawsuit. I was trained at a young age to file a lawsuit immediately because insurance companies have proven, time and time again, over a long period of time, that they're not planning on doing the right thing. If they do the right thing, they're not going to do it early on.

I explain to my clients there's a few reasons that we need to file their lawsuit, and also explain to my clients that if they want one of those law firms that is going to go through a letter-writing campaign of trying to get their case resolved, without putting it in the court system, then I might not be the lawyer for them. One of the first things I tell them is that insurance companies rarely, if ever, will disclose the amount of insurance available in a case. Whether it's a $30,000 policy in a car crash, or a $10 million, $20 million policy available in some other type of claim, including an 18-wheeler case in which someone lost their life, it's very rare day that an insurance company will tell you what sort of insurance policies you're dealing with, the layers of the insurance, or the insurance carriers. Some states require that the insurance carriers tell you how much insurance there is, what the limits are, and who the carrier is. Texas does not require that unless a lawsuit's filed. If a lawsuit is filed, the defendants have to disclose the amount, the limit, the carriers, and all that information allows you to properly and adequately advise your client. It also allows you to potentially put the defendant in a Stower situation, which puts a lot of pressure on the insurance company to evaluate your claim because in those situations, there could be risk if they do not pay a claim when it would have been reasonable to do so.

Another reason that we file cases early on is we're the plaintiffs. We have the burden of proof. We need to be on the offense. We have to prove our claim, we have to push the case to trial, and trial is the only risk that most defendants and insurance companies feel. If you allow trial to be pushed out by a year, it just delays your client's resolution. We think it's best and we believe our results have proven out that it's best to be on the offense early on. The third thing that I advise my clients on when I'm discussing why we're going to file their lawsuit is that getting to trial takes time. In many counties, it can take as long as 24 months. In Bexar County, usually 12 to 16 months, you can get a trial date. Now, your first trial date oftentimes may be continued if the defendant's defense lawyers go to the judge and ask for a continuance because they have some things they need to do.

What I've seen is that for people that wait to file their cases, they're dealing with that same process no matter what. If they file it a year after the incident, they're looking at another year to get to trial. We file our cases immediately and we're looking at a trial date within 12 to 16 months. Now, if our client is still treating and we still don't know the extent of their injuries or damages at the time of trial, we can ask for a continuance, but that continuance won't put us another year out. What I found that these three reasons that we file cases are things that end up benefiting our clients much better than if we sat on their case and waited, and then sent a bunch of letters. Recently this year, we resolved a case, a wrongful death, 18-wheeler case for a family. One of the proudest parts of that case for me and my office were that we were in pretrial, 13 months following the incident. We weren't just filing their case or just starting discovery or any of those things, we were ready and prepared and at the courthouse about one year following the crash. That's something that not a lot of law firms can say. That's something that when I tell law firms, they can't believe that we were able to get the case ready and get it to trial that fast. Pushing the case like that, being on the offensive, and never letting the defendants stop digging their heels and mount a proper defense allowed us to resolve that case in a very favorable way. It's a strategy that I think is beneficial for our clients. It's one thing that sets our law firm apart. It's something I tell every client when they come in, that we're going to file their case and we're going to push it to trial. That's why we think they'll get a better resolution.

[music]

[00:06:53] [END OF AUDIO]

Evaluating Personal Injury Cases

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 05:00:00 -0600

We get a lot of questions about how we evaluate cases. People whom we tell we cannot accept their case often want to know why. In this episode, we attempt to clarify how we evaluate cases.

Transcript:

[music]

Just recently, we got a call from a man whose wife died in a very tragic incident in the hospital. He wanted us to take his case and help him out. He had called many lawyers before, he had gone on for years trying to find a lawyer that would help him. There weren't any that would help him. He called the state of Texas and filed a grievance or complaint against the doctors and hospitals involved. That investigation cleared the hospital and doctors.

He then appealed that decision, and he lost. He was a very passionate man who had lost his wife, he was angry, he was upset, he was grieving. By the time he called us, the time to do anything, in terms of filing a lawsuit, had passed because the statute of limitations puts a limitation on how long you have to file a lawsuit. He didn't understand why we couldn't help him, and I don't know if it was because he was just so upset or if he just didn't understand it.

It made me think I want to do a little bit of talking about how we evaluate a case when it comes into our office, because sometimes we can't help people with their cases, and that can be for a variety of reasons. Generally, when we get a call on a new case, we get all the facts and all the information that we can get. One thing I always like to ask the person on the other line, who's trying to hire us, is, "Who's at fault? Who do you think is at fault for this incident, for your injuries, for your loss of a loved one?"

That's the first step I have to figure out. Did somebody do something wrong? Did somebody else's acts or inaction cause the incident that either left somebody injured or led to the wrongful death of somebody? I have to tell people when they call us sometimes that the law cannot right all wrongs. The law sets out when a person has legal redress to take them to court to seek compensation or justice through the form of compensation for the wrong that was committed.

We have to ask, "Who did something wrong? Was it an entity? Was it a corporation? Was it a person that their actions cause some harm?" The next thing we have to know is, what is the harm? Did you have an injury? Did somebody pass away? Are you just angry that somebody wronged you, but there was no injury? We have to analyze whether the wrong caused the injury. In the law, we have to prove that the wrong that we're talking about, the bad act, led to somebody's injury.

It's not enough that there was a wrong and then there was an injury. We have to show that they're connected. The law calls it "causation," we have to show that the wrong was the proximate cause of the injury. It's not enough for conjecture, and it's not enough that you know it really deep in your gut. You see this a lot in instances in which people are exposed to chemicals, or a landfill, or drugs. Everybody's seen the commercial on TV where it asks, "Have you taken this drug and suffered these injuries?"

By the time those things are on TV, there's been a long history of studying and research and studies that typically leads to some understanding that these drugs cause these injuries. It's not enough that somebody believes that the drug they took caused this bad side effect. There has to be science, there has to be some proof of causation, proof enough that a judge will say, "That's valid causation." One of the other things we have to consider is, does the law allow for this kind of lawsuit?

Sometimes we have a wrong, and we have an injury that was caused by the wrong, but the law doesn't allow for any cause of action for a lawsuit. I was talking to a guy on the phone today who had a son very seriously injured in a boating accident. He wanted to sue the manufacturer of the boat. Now, there was something on the boat that injured his kid, but whether that was a defect in the product or not, would be a really tough call. Every boat on every leg has this same thing with it, and his son just, unfortunately, got injured by it.

We also see this in situations like hit and runs. If you can't find the person, the bad actor, it's very hard to have a case against them. It's not enough to just say somebody did something wrong, we have to know who they are. In the medical malpractice arena, we also have to have this discussion with clients on whether or not the law allows for recovery. The medical malpractice laws have been changed in Texas so much that they limit recovery to the extent that they have made many cases, so expensive that the costs of working the case would be more than the likely recovery in the case.

Then, there are other incidences in Texas law where the state of Texas has just said certain defendants are immune. For example, suing the state of Texas and suing a local government is very limited to when you can do that. In many instances, you can't do that at all. If you have all of that there, then you have to look at damages. I've had calls where people want to sue because they felt grossed out by what they ate. I have had calls where people have wanted to sue because they had a cut on their hand that they never required stitches and was just a very superficial cut.

The costs of filing a lawsuit and working a lawsuit are not cheap. The cost of filing lawsuits, couple hundred dollars, services $100. Taking depositions can be $500 to $1,000 per deposition, and those things all rack up. At the end of the day, the potential outcome of the case has to justify spending all of those costs. That's the next thing we look at. What are your injuries? What are your damages? Those can range all over the board. Sometimes we don't even know what they mean and we have to consult medical experts on what they mean.

That's the next thing we have to evaluate, what are the damages? Other things we just consider when we're looking at a case is, what's the venue. If somebody calls me about a car wreck in Maine, I'm probably not going to be able to help them. One, I'm not licensed there, and two, it wouldn't make sense for me to work a case in Maine. There are other places in Texas where it takes years to get to trial, or due to Texas' size, it's very hard to get to the Panhandle from San Antonio.

Those cases all have to be weighed on what type of case they are, whether it justifies the costs and time of travel. Otherwise, you can refer these potential clients to somebody in their neck of the woods. Another thing we always consider is the age of the case, as I stated earlier. After so much time, the law does not allow the filing of a case. There is a statute of limitations on basically every case in the state of Texas, and every possible case in the state of Texas, and then if the case is not filed within that window, the window closes. It's very hard in Texas to reopen that window.

I like to know how old is the case. If the statute of limitations ends next week, it's a very dangerous case for us to get involved in, and oftentimes, I won't want to. The other thing is generally the ability of the law firm. We get calls on cases sometimes that we just don't handle. I get called on divorce cases and people that have been arrested for crimes. Those are cases in which they need a lawyer, but that's not the type of work we handle.

We always have to evaluate whether or not it's the type of case we handle. At the end of the day, everybody that calls our law firm can rest assured that an attorney is evaluating their case to decide if it is something we can do. When we tell people we can't represent them, we try to do our best to tell them when their statute of limitations will run based on what we understand at the time, and we try to give them some sort of recommendation or referral for a lawyer that we think could help them, or a service that we think could help them. Whenever a potential client calls our firm, they can rest assured that they have been given a fair look and a fair shake and that an attorney has evaluated their case.

[music]

[background noise]

Drunk Driving Cases that Changed Policies

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We have represented some very courageous clients. Two cases we had, one in San Antonio, led to not only a monetary settlement but also the changing of company policy. Personal injury cases can make our communities safer for everyone.

Transcript:

[music]

Some of the most rewarding cases we get to work on here at Hill Law Firm, are cases that involve not only a settlement for the client that makes them happy and makes them feel like justice was served, and a full measure of justice was served, but also there are cases in which we were able to affect policy changes, sometimes through the law, sometimes through products and sometimes just internal company policies.

I want to talk about two of the latter. In two cases we've handled, we've been able to change the policies of a company in the way they do business. The first involved a company that allowed one of their employees to take people out drinking on a company credit card. After he had been out drinking on a tab picked up by his employer, to entertain clients of his employer, he got in his company vehicle and as he was driving down the road, he crossed the center line and crashed into our client.

That case was worked up over many months and led to a substantial monetary settlement that made the client very happy. She was very satisfied with what they had done in an attempt to make it right, but that wasn't enough for her. She wanted to make sure that this wouldn't happen again. We told the defendant that we would accept her monetary settlement, as long as it also came of policy changes. Among those was a training program for anybody that had a company vehicle. This included a four-hour training program for anybody with a company vehicle to know how they could and could not use it. Also, the company instituted policies with regard to how the company credit card could be used, and it could no longer be used to pick up alcohol tabs for their clients.

Finally, the company instituted a no-questions-asked policy for its employees, that if they're intoxicated and need a ride, the company would pay for a taxi or a rideshare company to pick them up. At the end of the day, my client by standing her ground, not only made the company safer, she made the public at large safer.

The second example of this is also related to a drunk driving case. In that case, we pursued a bar and the bar had policies that encouraged servers to upsell their patrons. For example, if a patron said they wanted to buy 12-ounce beer, they were encouraged to tell them that for just a small amount more monetarily, they could get a double the size beer. In that case after the settlement, we were able to talk to them about those policies and get them changed. Also, we instituted the policy as part of the settlement.

The defendant agreed that after anybody had two drinks, that the computer system, the point-of-sale system they use, would generate a ticket where the manager would have to go do a quick check on anybody. Just a, hello, lay eyes on them and see if they seem to have their faculties. Plaintiff's lawyers too often get a bad reputation, mostly due to media and insurance companies. They want to sensationalize and turn plaintiff's lawyers and victims into villains, but the reality is, these cases that are prosecuted by plaintiff's lawyer like the ones here in San Antonio, Texas, make the road safer, they make companies safer and they make it safer for the general public at large.

T-Bone Crash with VIA Bus in San Antonio

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 00:15:00 -0600

Recently, we settled a case for a young lady that was a passenger in a vehicle that ran a red light. In the intersection, her vehicle was t-boned by a VIA bus. This case had a lot of tricky issues due to the number of claims sure to be filed. We settled this case early for maximum limits.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Recently we were able to settle for what was a surprisingly good amount for a client. It was a case involving a car crash in which a car was T-boned by a VIA bus. This case had some difficulties. One of them was our client was very close family friends with the driver of her vehicle. However, that driver was at fault. Another complication was there was about 25 people on the VIA bus, Texas law provides that the insurance company can pay out whatever claims they want. They don't owe a duty to multiple plaintiffs to be fair to everybody. They can payout their money, wash their hands of it, and be done.

We knew this and we knew that provided some sort of need for speed. We had to hurry up and make sure that our client's rights were protected. Our client at the end of the day would be competing with 25 other claims, assuming those 25 other people were injured. Our client suffered serious injuries. She was a young lady, barely out of high school, suffered a very serious cut to her face, some broken teeth and some other internal injuries. Luckily for her, she had health insurance and she was able to get all the medical care she needed. She seems to be on a road to full recovery. We were able to resolve her case without filing a lawsuit, which is pretty rare anymore in these times.

The defendants understood that she had serious injuries. She had a scar on her face that would not heal anytime soon and the juries normally feel a certain level of sympathy for women who have injuries such as hers. On top of that, we expected the insurance company to toss all the money in a pot and tell everybody to fight over it. What was working in our favor was like most cases, we were the most aggressive. We pushed hard, we stayed on it. We got the insurance company everything they needed early on, and we told them we were going to be filing the case by a date certain if they didn't resolve our claim. I was surprised, and anymore in our industry it's pretty rare to be surprised, and I was surprised that they made a full policy offer for our client without having to file a lawsuit. It was much higher offer than I thought they would make, especially that early on.

On top of that, we were able to get a full offer of the under-insured benefits from our client's insurance. Our client was able to put this to bed without having to follow a lawsuit, be deposed, go to trial. It was a great result for her and is going to provide money to pay for her college.

Bus Crash Wrongful Death South Texas

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 03:15:00 -0600

About 10 years ago, a terrible bus rollover happened in South Texas that killed two and injured many other Texans. Justin Hill worked on that case for years fighting off every defense raised by the major bus company. In the end, we held them accountable.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. In 2008, a commercial bus rolled over in South Texas. It was all over national news. It shut down the interstate for hours.

I was hired by the families of the two people killed in that crash and about five other people that were injured. That case is one of those cases that took on a life of its own. The defendants decided that they were going to spend as much money as they could fighting the claims and they were going to make no attempt to reasonably or fairly settled them. The case drug on. One of the young men on the bus who was killed had young children and a young wife.

He worked for the company, but at the time he was traveling on a personal ticket. He had gone to visit family. He had taken out a free ticket and the reason for travel was personal. In spite of this, his employer, the bus company, tried to force him to take workers' comp benefits. Now, they do this to try to limit his recovery because the workers' comp system limits the amount of damages if somebody is killed on the job.

We thought it was pretty clear he was not on the job at the time, he was dead heading back to work. He worked in a ticket area and he wasn't a driver, but they took the position he was on the job so they could try to limit his recovery. The other woman killed left four adult children and a husband. The bus companies tried to blame the manufacturer of the bus, the manufacturer of the bus that they continued to buy buses from.

They tried to say that there was some defect in the bus, even though it was 17 years old and had what we calculated to be well more than 4 million miles on it. The driver in this crash had lost control after a driveshaft had broken. Now, drive shaft breaking isn't the most common problem, but it happens regularly and that doesn't cause buses to roll over left and right. Now the bus company argued that that is what caused it to rollover.

They hired more than 20 experts and spent what had to be 2 or $3 million defending this case. They wanted make everybody that sued them and their attorneys spend as much money as possible and waste as much time as possible. We never gave up. We stuck to the case, and most of the cases were settled a month out from trial. However, the poor young man who was stuck in the worker's comp system, his case went up and down in the appeals court for almost 10 years, until finally his case resolved and his wife was finally able to get money to help care for herself and her children.

I've said before, we handle a lot of bus cases and this was the bus case that sort of defined my early career. I learned a lot about buses, about the companies, about the manufacturer of buses. I learned a lot about the economics of the companies and how they have such buying power that the manufacturers of buses will change the entire way they build buses to make specialized versions for their big customers. We continue to represent victims in bus crash cases, and we continue to hold bus companies accountable when they do wrong.

Most Common Car Crash Lawsuit Defenses

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

When we file an injury lawsuit in San Antonio or anywhere in Texas, we know that the defendants and insurance companies will create some defense whether it is true or not. When it comes to car crashes, we know the playbook and we know the defenses they will use.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: We've represented a lot of San Antonians in car crash cases. Without failure, I have to warn and prepare my clients that no matter what the facts of the case are, the other side is going to come up with some defense. In car crash cases in San Antonio, there have been enough trials and enough cases that we know the playbook from the defense side. Recently, I went to a CLE and I heard one of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Brethren, discuss how he calls the defense's the PIG defenses, P-I-G.

In 99% of car crash cases, the defense is going to say one of these defenses. First they're going to say, "The person injured in the vehicle had a preexisting condition." This could be from the person really honestly, it had an injury to the same location they injured in this crash, to the fact that they went to a chiropractor 20 years prior, and the chiropractor mentioned that they were going to do a full body adjustment. They'll try to contort that to say that the client had some preexisting condition.

Currently, I'm working on a case in which the client after getting rear ended by woman not paying attention, had shoulder surgery. Now, the defense is saying since she had had shoulder surgery a while before this crash, that it's the previous injury or the previous surgery that caused her injury in this crash. They ignore the fact that the previous surgery had nothing to do with a traumatic injury. It had nothing to do with the portion of her shoulder that was injured in this crash. It had nothing to do with anything related to this crash. It was just in the same general vicinity of her injury in this crash. They'll go to all lengths to say that some previous medical condition is what caused the injuries from the car crash.

The 'I' is impact. Another thing they like to do is say, "Well, there's no way that somebody could have been injured in this impact. Look at the pictures." Now, they have to admit that all the studies show that there is no amount of impact by which an injury cannot occur. People can be injured at any speeds depending on how they're positioned, the dynamics of the crash, the size of the vehicles and their condition. Some people are more susceptible to injury than others. Older people are more susceptible than teenagers. That's the second most popular defense we see.

The third, the 'G', is gaps in treatment. In normal everyday life, we all try to walk off injuries and try to see if they'll resolve on their own. However, insurance companies ignore the fact that people do not want to go to the doctor unless they absolutely have to. They'll try to turn that into a defense and they'll say, "Well, you had a gap in your treatment." It doesn't matter if the gap is one week or four weeks or four days. They're going to say that at some point, there's so much distance between two doctor visits, that either you weren't hurt or you hurt yourself some other way. It's odd having to discuss with clients, how these PIG defenses will be used to try to defend the case.

Then at any other point in life, you would want to see if time heals your injuries, but the insurance companies will use that against you. They'll use it against you if you put time between your doctor visits, and then if you don't, they'll use it against you that you went to too many doctor's visits.

One thing can be clear is the insurance companies are never going to attempt to do the right thing. They're going to try to find any way to deny delay and defend your claim. By knowing what the PIG defenses are from the other side, we're able to prepare our cases and prepare our clients in the right ways.

[music]

Hot Tub Dropped on House Visitor

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 05:00:00 -0600

We represented a young San Antonio man, with another law firm in San Antonio, whom was injured when he was at a friend's and a hot tub fell on him. He injured his knee and shoulder and had surgery. The hot tub delivery company were held responsible.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: Truly, one of my favorite things about being a lawyer is the ability to work with other good lawyers, learn from other lawyers, whether that's an old gray hair, it's a new lawyer. Our world, in the legal profession, people talk about the practice of law. I think that's an important point because we're all trying our best to learn and we should learn every day. We call it "The practice" because there's no perfection. You cannot be the world's best mason without trying a lot, you can't be the world's best plumber without trying a lot.

All of these trades and professions you learn all the time and one of those professions where people should learn all the time is the legal profession. I have the opportunity on occasion to work with young lawyers, older lawyers. Right now, I've got Sean Luchnick with me here, who's a younger lawyer compared to myself, not young in terms of knowing what he's doing but he got the opportunity to intern/work with me when he had just gotten licensed. We got to work a case together. I have him on here today. I want to talk about that case. [unintelligible 00:01:36] thank you for being here.

Sean Luchnick: Justin, thank you for having me.

Justin: One thing about [unintelligible 00:01:41] is I always have to teach him, so you got to talk close to the mic. We're going to talk about a case. We don't use names. We don't use numbers. Neither of us wants to get in trouble with a bar. It's important I think for our listeners to understand the personal injury law, personal injury lawsuits are not confined to what you see on television, they're not confined to what you see in the news and they're not confined to what the insurance companies and defense lawyers want you to think about us.

[unintelligible 00:02:09] and I had the great honor of working a few cases together. One of the cases we work together involved one of his friends who he's known a long time, who was at a home, when a large piece of equipment, a hot tub was being delivered. The delivery people basically enlisted him to help out with the delivery. Is that fair to say?

Sean Luchnick: That's exactly right.

Justin: Okay. He's just a guy hanging out at the house, people show up to deliver a hot tub. As I work to the case with your help, the allegation was they were very ill-equipped to deliver a giant hot tub. What would you say about that?

Sean Luchnick: Yes, so pretty much it's happening. My friend, he is at a other friend's house. The house they're at, it's my friend's house, and my friend is at my other friend's house. A hot tub is being delivered to my friend who owns the house. The company gets there. When they get there, it's two people who work for the company delivering the hot tub. They're starting to put this hot tub onto a dolly and they're pointing around the side of the house, let's say so here's the house. The hot tubs on the dolly coming around the side.

Justin: Sorry about this way. It's heading north and it's about to take a 90-degree turn to the east, fair?

Sean Luchnick: To the east. Yes. Which would be where the patio is where it's going to ultimately get installed.

Justin: Okay, they're delivering a hot tub to a patio in the backyard but they come to the front yard, they unload the thing, they're heading north, they're going to take a 90-degree turn to the east. What happened?

Sean Luchnick: What happens is, before we get to that because it's pretty relevant to the case, my friend, I going to try not to say his name, I hope I don't slip up. My friend kind of says, "Is that thing strapped down? Is it properly equipped?" If you could imagine a hot tub, you'd think you'd lay it flat, like think of a sandwich, like on a plate. You wouldn't lay it up this way. It's like this on the dolly and he says, "You're not going to strap that down? It doesn't seem that safe."

My friend, just to give a little backstory, he's a contractor as well. He knows these things. He's a handyman, he can look at something and understand that's probably not the right way to do it. Not that came to the facts of the case, his knowledge level, but anyways. They tell him, "No, the weight of it gets the job done. There's nothing to worry about. It's not going to fall, don't worry." Then they're having a little trouble getting on the grass going around the side before this right turn we're talking about to the east. They enlist my friend and ask him and my other friend who owns the property say, "Hey, can you kind of help us out?"

Justin: [unintelligible 00:04:45] stand there where it slants in case something happens, is my recollection.

Sean Luchnick: Yes. The friend who ultimately gets injured, he's where they make this turn to the east. Let's say here's the Hot tub again, visual diagram.

Justin: If there's a 90-degree turn on the roadway, he'd be where the signs are telling you, "It's going right?"

Sean Luchnick: Yes, he said, and there's a slope that goes downhill right there. He's standing there. They're saying there's nothing to worry about, just stay in there and look, make sure nothing's going on. Nothing's going to happen. They then enlist the other friend of mine who's the owner of the property, he's actually there to guide the dolly which is hilarious. They're going to have him guide the dolly. Well, then the other worker's in the back of the dolly and then the other ones on the opposite side of where my friend is who's watching it on the downward slope. Ultimately, what happens as they're going around before they get to the deck, the hot tub falls down on my buddy-

Justin: While it's attempting to make the right-hand turn, it tips onto you buddy, my client, our client.

Sean Luchnick: Our client, he tries to save his life. He goes like this and actually is able to brace the hot tub.

Justin: This is all audio so when you say goes like this, he looked like a praise and worship. He was pressing up as hard as he could while bracing his legs.

Sean Luchnick: I mean, imagine you're on a downward slope and a hot tub that raised about 4500 pounds is about to fall on you. What do you do? He is, instead of getting squash, he's a very strong guy.

Sean Luchnick: Bracing himself.

Sean Luchnick: Yes, bracing himself. He played D1 college football, was tied in bigger gentlemen. Thank God for him that he was because I don't know what would have happened if he was a smaller individual.

Justin: It still fell on him. He suffered a traumatic injury to a shoulder and a knee, if I recall.

Sean Luchnick: Yes, well, what happened is he was actually able to brace it and then he tore his meniscus and his shoulder in doing so and then ultimately, he ended up collapsing. By the time they were able to lift it off of him, the other three people there. That's the facts of the case.

Justin: Then you and I worked this case together. I got involved late in the game. You and I worked the case together. We did a bunch of great research. We found out that there's actually equipment-made for hot tub deliveries in the industry that would have kept this from happening, that's literally built for this, but they didn't employ that equipment, right?

Sean Luchnick: No, absolutely those equipment-

Justin: They were using some homemade stuff.

Sean Luchnick: They didn't use anything, they didn't use any straps that they should have had.

Justin: They had a dolly and wheels but it was sort of a mix mash of stuff.

Sean Luchnick: No safety precautions, didn't use any equipment for that. Obviously, their company policies not to enlist the homeowner to help them transport the dolly.

Justin: We worked that out in litigation. We got their policies, we got the procedures. I was actually able to depose the corporate representative who turned out to be the owner of the company. We realized, I think in those depositions that maybe they weren't the most sophisticated company, in spite of having seven offices in San Antonio. I mean, it's a bizarre thing that you can have seven offices in San Antonio, you can have a seemingly well built sophisticated Corporation and really have no idea how to safely operate your business.

Sean Luchnick: Yes. Sometimes that's a reoccurring theme, I think in any market. Sometimes you think the barriers to entry in the marketplace are pretty hard. It's hard to start your own business but then we do this thing. We have various things or companies do things negligently or they do things that are maybe not up to a standard. You would think they would operate, you realize there's a lot of businesses out there that really don't do things the right way.

Justin: That's right.

Sean Luchnick: That's an eye-opening, something that I've maybe knew before the practice of law, but definitely learned in my first year.

Justin: It's also for all of the people. I will say I have plenty of friends and family who think what we do is less than noble, ignoble, if you will. A lot of other countries have decided, we're going to allow the government to dictate the way things are done. They're going to require that things are done in a safe manner, that products are made safely, they're manufactured safely, they're designed safely.

In America, we've decided, "Hey, the Seventh Amendment is going to roll all and we're going to say, "Hey, everybody" Juries will decide what is safe and what is not, juries will decide what damages are available for people injured by negligence or dangerous products. That's what we work in. I think people forget is we work within the constitutional framework of the right to trial by jury decides what is safe and what is not. In the case that we're talking about here, the hot tub that fell on the guy. The other side has to look at and say, "Would a jury think that was safe?"

We were able to get the case resolved, which I think was a very fair result and a very good result for our client, your friend. It was able to be resolved because they had to consider this plain, if he's exercising his Seventh Amendment constitutional right to trial by jury. Will the jury think we were being safe? We're going to be back. I'm going to have another conversation with [unintelligible 00:09:53] about some more cases we've worked together but that's going to do it for this episode.

[music]

Jackknifed 18-Wheeler Crashes

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We have handled two 18 wheeler crash cases that involved jack knifed 18 wheelers blocking all lanes of travel. One of these cases was in San Antonio. Both of these cases involved fatality crashes. Tractor trailer drivers are expected to be safe and not create dangers. When they do, deadly accidents occur.

Transcript:

Speaker 1: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

18-wheelers are the largest vehicles on the road. They're largest in terms of length, they're largest in terms of weight. They drive at highway speeds with the rest of us on the road. Due to their size, if they're to hit a passenger vehicle, it's a much different crash than two passenger vehicles hitting each other. 18-wheelers can weigh as much as 20 or 30 times the weight of a passenger vehicle.

Hill Law Firm has handled a lot of 18-wheeler crash cases, and a lot of them have had very, very tragic consequences. We've handled two cases in which the 18-wheeler driver, the defendant driver, somehow or another came to block all lanes of travel, with his trailer running perpendicular to the roadway. In both of these cases, the 18-wheeler driver was somehow reversing and jackknifed his vehicle across all lines of travel. In both of these cases, it was at night and in both of these cases, our clients were doing what they were supposed to do; minding the laws, driving the speed limit, paying attention when they came upon a trailer in the night, blocking all lines of travel.

One of these cases we handled involved four men going to work. It was a car full of people at about six in the morning in the fog when an 18-wheeler driver had blocked all lanes of travel by getting jackknifed across the roadway. When they hit that trailer, they underrode it, and it cut off the top of the passenger vehicle. Two men were killed in that crash and two men were very seriously injured.

The other case involved a man who was going to work who was also in an 18-wheeler. It was a dark part of San Antonio and there was a curve. As he came around that curve, the 18-wheeler trailer that had been jackknifed was parked shoulder to shoulder across all lines of travel. Our client must have seen him because he attempted to move to the far right and break, but he wasn't able to break and move in time. He crashed into that trailer, and he did not survive the crash.

Both of these cases bring to light the importance that 18-wheeler companies hire safe drivers. San Antonio, statistically, has a big problem with 18-wheeler crashes in this county. The rules and laws say the 18-wheeler drivers and 18-wheeler companies can use the roadways. However, they're held to a little higher standard than normal drivers. Their drivers have to have more schooling, have to have different licensing, have to have different requirements and employers have to jump through certain hoops before they hire these truckers. The law states that if you're going to drive a bigger, heavier, longer vehicle on the roadways, that you have to do a few things that other drivers don't have to.

Those additional hoops and those additional safety measures are there to make sure that the normal motoring public is not put in harm's way by negligent and unsafe trucking companies and truckers. Unfortunately, in those two cases, the trucking companies and the truckers hadn't followed the rules and that's what led to these terribly tragic accidents.

We're going to talk more about some of the other ways 18-wheeler drivers and 18-wheeler companies occasionally create dangerous situations on the roadways that lead to San Antonio crashes.

[music]

1604 Wrong Way Drunk Driver Multi-Car Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

There are many wrong way crashes in San Antonio, Texas. The State has even studied the problem due to the number of those types of crashes in San Antonio. Recently, we represented a young lady hit head on by a drunk driver and then she was hit by a second vehicle seconds later.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

San Antonio has had a problem with wrong way drivers for many years. Different organizations and DOT and other government agencies have researched this to try to figure out why San Antonio has a higher incidence of wrong way crashes than other cities. This is especially true in the 1604 corridor on the North side of the city. If you live in San Antonio and you read the news, you see these every so often. They are not uncommon to see crashes involving wrong way drivers on 1604. It's not limited to 1604 in San Antonio, but some of the other roads just do not have the same level of problem.

Our law firm has handled many wrong way crashes in San Antonio. About five years ago, we were hired to represent a young lady who was driving home on 1604 after being at work. It was pretty late at night, and as she was driving, she was hit head on by a drunk driver. Many of the wrong way crashes on 1604 happen in the middle of the night, and many of them involve intoxicated drivers. For our client, that's was what happened. She was hit head on by a drunk driver, and while she was unconscious and her vehicle was disabled in the roadway, she was hit by another vehicle as well. She spent 10 days in the ICU. Somehow or another, she was able to make a pretty good recovery. She had soft tissue injuries that were going to be with her for life, she had broken bones. She had scars on her face.

In that case, the drunk driver's insurance and the drunk driver settled as soon as they could. They knew they couldn't defend the case. The driver who hit her the second time at first attempted to say that they had no liability, even though the roadway was lit in this portion, and even though there was, by all statements, about three minutes between the first crash and the second. After a few months, his insurance also settled their portion of the case.

However, our clients uninsured under insured motorist coverage, took about nine months to settle their case. Due to changes in the law, there's very little risk if insurance companies deny their insurance claim for UM or UIM coverage. In the end, we were able to settle this case for the limits of three different policies for this young lady injured by a wrong way drunk driver off 1604. Unfortunately, unless many things change and they figure out why this problem occurs up there, wrong way crashes in San Antonio are going to continue to be a problem, and I expect we'll continue to represent victims of these wrong way crashes.

[00:03:42] [END OF AUDIO]

Should I See a Doctor After a San Antonio Car Crash?

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

If you are injured in a car accident, you should immediately seek medical attention. This is a question we hear a lot from people that were recently in a crash. The only way to know how injured you are is to let a trained medical professional evaluate your injuries.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

In our ongoing series here on Hill Law Firm cases we've been discussing some of the common questions we get from people following car crashes. As previously stated, sometimes we get calls while people are still at the scene of a car crash and sometimes they call us weeks, months or maybe even a year following.

We mostly had been talking about the calls we get from people we know at the scene of a crash. Usually, these are former clients or friends of clients or family members or friends that we've known and they'll call us because they want to make sure they don't do something wrong that allows their insurance or the other side's insurance to deny their claim.

One of the questions we get often is, should I go see a doctor. Across the board, I tell clients when they come in at any stage of the litigation or their case claim process that I'm not a doctor. I can't give them medical advice and if they think they're hurt, they need to go see somebody. What the insurance companies like to do is they like to say that if you didn't go see a doctor in X number of days following the crash, that you must not have been hurt. I don't play those games. I don't let the insurance adjuster tell my clients whether they're hurt or not.

I let the doctors decide whether somebody is injured. A few examples I always think of is one of the more common examples is we'll get calls from people following a crash and they'll say, well, I'm stiff or I feel weird, but I'm not in a lot of pain. In the next day or 24 or 48 hours later, they call and they say that they're in terrible pain. At the scene of the crash, people seem to have adrenaline or something going on in their system that lets them know they're hurt, but they're not feeling the pain just yet.

At any point along that process, I tell them, "If you start to hurt, you need to go see somebody." Another thing that we see a lot is people who bang their heads in crashes or with their heads so fast, they end up with a concussion, and those symptoms present overtime sometimes. We'll have clients that'll say after a crash that they have a really bad headache and then they start realizing they have problems sleeping. They realize that they're nauseated. Maybe they're dizzy and maybe they're having memory issues, but some of those symptoms come on overtime.

What we tell everybody, our clients, our friends, our family is that if you think you're injured, you should go see a doctor or a medical professional but the only one that can determine whether or not you're injured or in pain is you. Listen to your body, listen to yourself, and if you think you've been injured following a crash or an accident or an incident, go see a doctor. Go seek professional medical help.

[music]

[00:03:37] [END OF AUDIO]

Minor Child Injured in Bank Building

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Commercial buildings are supposed to keep the property safe so that invitees into the property do not get injured or killed from a dangerous condition. In this case we represented a young girl that fell through the stairway railings that were 10 inches wider than the code allows. She suffered a major traumatic brain injury as a result of this property owners negligence.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Speaker: About four years ago, we had the pleasure of representing the mother and grandmother of a young elementary school-aged child who was injured at a bank. On that day, the grandmother was going to visit with her wills trust and estate attorney. Now that attorney shared office in a bank building. The bank was one of these multinational Fortune 500 banks. They had a bank building, but they didn't really care to update it or make it safe. While this little girl and her grandmother were walking up the stairs, the little girl tripped. What normally would just be a little trip and fall on the stairs turned into a very tragic situation.

When this little girl fell, she fell to her left, to the left where the stairwell railings should have stopped her. However, the stairwell railings were too wide. They were outside of code. They were not narrow enough to stop a child from falling between. As this little girl fell between them. Her grandmother reached and grabbed and she was able to grab her shoe which came off of her granddaughter's foot. The grandmother was doing everything right and paying attention and the young girl was a little girl who tripped on stairs.

The reason she fell through this stairwell 25 feet under her head was because the bank had failed to ensure that their stairwell railings were up to code and that they were safe, and that even though they invited the general public to be in that building, to be paying customers, and to go visit their tenants, they didn't care to make sure that their bank was a safe building for children, adults, and their tenants.

This little girl fell 25 feet under her head. She crushed her skull, she had a bad brain injury. The case proceeded, and the bank made any number of defenses that they thought they could use to defend and avoid liability in this case. First, they tried to argue that the bank railings were up to code based on 1974 codes when the building was built. After we were able to prove that to be untrue because they made major renovations on the building and therefore, had to bring it up to code. They moved on to the next argument, and that was, yes the kid was hurt and maybe the bank railings weren't up to code, but this little girl made a full recovery and therefore, she was fine.

There was multiple experts involved who had done neuropsychological testing of this young lady imaging of her brain and other diagnostic tests. In the end, the defense lawyers put up an expert who purported to be an expert in brain injuries. In that deposition, he had to admit that there were indications on some of the testing that this young lady was going to develop a seizure condition as a result of this brain injury.

In mediation, we were able to settle this case for an amount of money that will take care of this young lady's medical needs for the rest of her life. We were also able to hold the bank accountable for failing to do what they should have done. If a business is going to invite people onto their grounds and into their building to transact business, they have a duty to make sure that building is safe, and they have a duty to make sure that they keep it in a safe manner and a safe condition.

[00:04:43] [END OF AUDIO]

Wrongful Death Case Trooper Deposition

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0600

The lessons learned early in my practice guide the way I work personal injury cases today. My first deposition was of an investigating officer in a quadruple death wrongful death product liability case. I learned a lot in that case and practice law differently because of that deposition.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

As attorneys, we always look back on cases and we reminisce and we look back and think about what we learned and didn't learn. Early on in my career, I was lucky to be hired by one of the best law firms in the state of Texas in the United States. Probably the Premier Product Liability Law Firm in the United States at that time. I'd been at the firm about two weeks when one of the partners told me that he wanted me to take a deposition, sort of baptism by fire.

As I start preparing for the deposition, I realized this is a really big deposition. Some law firms give young associates busy work and the firm I was at, let me do real work. I was going to be deposing the investigating DPS trooper, regarding a car crash that involved tire delamination. Now, what that is, is that when a tire is defectively manufactured, the tread can come off of a tire at highway speeds, which can cause drivers to lose control.

In this case, these drivers were going North on 281 when their front left tire delaminated, suffered a traumatic tread separation and cross the center line hitting the other car head-on. Everybody in both vehicles died in this crash. I was deposing the DPS trooper regarding the cause of the crash, what he found, what he saw, who he talked to. It was a very in-depth deposition. I remember I prepared for days. On the way to that deposition, the lawyer I was working with on the case asked me what my plan was, and I told him. To this day, I'm not sure if he was doing it to mess with me or test me or just a disagreement, but he told me on the way there 30 minutes before, that he wouldn't do any of the things I was doing. Rightfully, I was terrified, I was confused. I went and took the deposition, I think I sweated the whole time but learning on a case with so much riding on it, such a heavy weighty case, forced me to prepare in a way that I wasn't used to.

This is the very start of my career but I felt the importance of what I was doing at that point and that importance led to my preparation. I still follow that philosophy today as I prepare for depositions, or I prepare for trial. I look back on that deposition and I think, "No, I would do it exactly the same way I had planned to do it." We all have to learn the way we do things in our own style. I take depositions of troopers and wrongful death cases the way I prepared to that day and the way I still think is the right way to do it. One thing that I've learned through my career is nothing can beat preparation.

Trip and Fall at San Antonio Hardware Store

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We represented a lady that was at her hardware store to pick up some supplies. While walking out of the store, she tripped on a bold that was left in the concrete after a recent renovation. Her fall led to her braking a part of her should that required her to have surgery. This San Antonio case settled quickly after filing.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

We handle all types of personal injury cases here at Hill Law Firm. One of the types of cases people hear about often are slip and falls or trip and falls. They're spoken of negatively as though somebody injured, when a property is unsafe, is somehow at fault. Sometimes they are at fault, but sometimes they're not. The law in Texas has become so difficult that it's very hard to prove one of those cases, and never get in front of a jury on any case like that. We don't do a ton of premises liability cases at Hill Law Firm, but we do some of them.

One of the cases we handled was for a woman who was injured at a hardware store. The hardware store recently had a renovation. They had moved the front of the store out, they had put an even an overhang area in front of the store, they had changed a lot of the areas where people come and go to expand the size of their store. My client was at the store picking up something, when she was walking out towards her car. What she didn't see was that when they renovated the store, they had left a bolt sticking about one inch out of the concrete. This bolt was right in the middle of the walkway, and the store had just opened up after the renovations.

The color of the bolt was almost identical to the color of the floor. My client was walking, looking at her receipt, when she kicked the bolt and fell. My client was about 65 years old and not as agile as she used to be, and she fell on her shoulder and broke her shoulder. The incident was on video, and the hardware store shaved down the bolt the next day. They admitted that they had accidentally left that bolt there. They admitted that they had created a dangerous condition for our client, that they had a duty to remove any dangerous conditions, and they had not.

Due to the trip and fall of my client in the San Antonio hardware store, she had significant medical bills. She had a surgery. I thought she was going to require a second surgery, but her first surgery and rehabilitation did the job. Luckily for her, the defendant, in this case, realized that this was a trip and fall that they were responsible for. They did the right thing, and they resolved her claim early.

[00:03:28] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Wrongful Death Dram Shop Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 15:00:00 -0600

Sometimes when a drunk driver kills someone, not only can they be held responsible civilly and criminally, but the bar that over served the drunk can be held civilly liable as well. In this case, two people were killed and two were injured. Four families forever changed by a bar and person making bad choices.

Transcript

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

At Hill Law Firm, we handle personal injury cases, and we also handle wrongful death cases. Some people don't understand the tie in and how they're related to each other, but generally, the law is very similar, cases approved almost the same way.

A couple of years ago, I was reached out to by four different families, one of the most tragic cases I've ever worked on. Four young adults, fresh out of high school, were in town catching up. A couple of them worked at a local restaurant, and were getting off, and one of their buddies picked them up. They were going over to one of their houses to catch up after they had all been gone, some to college, some to the military. They were stopped at a light, when all of a sudden they were rear-ended by a drunk driver.

The two passengers in the back were killed. The two passengers in the front were seriously injured. Both of them suffered brain injuries, and both of them suffered bad soft tissue injuries. The woman who hit them didn't even know where she was. She thought she was still on the highway. She thought she had her kids in the car. She told the police officer she hadn't even been in a crash. She was so intoxicated, she didn't even understand what was going on.

All of the families hired me to represent them. They all agreed to waive any conflicts they may have, and they wanted to make sure they were all together in this because it was a tough thing for all of them to do, and all of their kids had grown up together as great friends. We found out the lady that hit them had been drinking at a bar celebrating her 25th birthday. Her coworkers had taken her out and got her drunk. Then they sent her on her way. Even though she was clearly intoxicated, as the video from the bar showed, she kept getting served. Then her friends, her so-called friends, let her get in the car and drive. She lived in the Northeast side of San Antonio, but she was in the Southwest side when this crash occurred. She thought she was almost home, she told the cop. She had no recognition of where she was, what had happened, or how to even get to her house.

The families in this case hired me, my law firm, to handle the case for them. Once we were able to get our hands on the video from the bar, and the TABC certifications from the bar, it was pretty clear that the bar was not following the rules. The video showed that this person was intoxicated, and the TAB certification showed that they had servers serving alcohol who were not certified. The bar tendered its policy limits pretty quickly thereafter. I stay in touch with some of these former clients. I stay in touch with two of the young men who were injured, one in the military. We also helped him apply for military benefits that he did not know existed.

Even though we represent clients for one case, we help them where we can because we got into this for the right reasons. Dram shop cases are difficult, and very few lawyers handle them anymore because they think they're too difficult to prove. We're one of the few law firms in Texas that have tried Dram shop cases to verdict. We continue to represent victims of drunk drivers against drunks, and it gets the bars that get them drunk.

Sexual Assault Case that Changed the Law

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Some of the hardest cases we have worked on include sexual assault lawsuits arising out of the sexual assault of minors here in San Antonio. These cases are difficult legally and emotionally. One such case we took led to a change in Texas law that we are very proud of because it helps all Texans.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] A lot of people we meet with, we have to explain that the law is not made to right every wrong, but the law is written the way it is written due to legislators and courts who have interpreted it a certain way and decided that certain things would be actionable in the civil system. Sometimes the laws need to change because they, by operation, are unfair.

One of the early cases I worked on, which I've talked about in this podcast, involved the sexual assault of a minor. I got involved in that case because at some point along the way, a sexually-oriented business establishment, a strip club, had sued her. When she was being trafficked, she was taken to a strip club at one point. After she was rescued, the strip club sued her and the attorney for the strip club got on the news and said that she looked like Miss America and looked like she wanted to be there even though she was 14 years old. The strip club sued this 14-year-old girl for, according to them, jeopardizing their TABC license.

Somehow or another, this young lady was referred to me because nobody knew how to help her. Two years out of law school, I can't say I really knew how to help her at that time, but I was going to help her. I represented her as a defense attorney first, the one time in my career I was a defense attorney, and then the strip club decided that was a really bad idea on their part and they wanted out of it, but it was too late at that part. We pursued them for allowing this to happen in their bar for not using diligence, and what we felt was something they knew was happening and they just turned a blind eye to it. They filed a motion to dismiss our case in the court.

The law at the time was that if somebody suffered mental injuries without physical injuries, that they don't have a claim in Texas except for a few limited circumstances. This was not one of them. The trial judge told us that that was the law and he didn't feel it was just, but he had to grant their motion, so the case went up on appeal. On appeal, the appellate court said that they thought the law was unjust as well, and they wanted the Supreme Court to give guidance, but for now they were going to change the law and say that if a minor was in a sexually-oriented business, and the law protects minors from entering those businesses, that the court was going to recognize that she would have suffered a mental injury.

This was new law in Texas. The Supreme Court chose not to decide this, so for now, in one appellate division in the state of Texas, we were able to change the law and make new law. This is new law that protects minors. It protects children. It protects them against predators. In this sexual assault case, I was able to represent my client in a way that, not only at the end of the day, stood up for her rights, but due to her courage, we were able to change the law in the state of Texas, at least in one appellate division, so that children are more protected now than they were before. [music]

Hotel Premises Defect Brain Injury Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Josh Fogelman of Austin and Justin Hill teamed up to represent a nice lady injured when a ceiling tile fell and hit her on the head. The ceiling tile had become soaked with water due to an improper AC repair. This leak was known and never fixed. When the tile hit her in the head, she suffered serious psychological and neurological injuries.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: Occasionally, on this podcast, we get to have our friends, our colleagues, our co-counsel/co-workers on to join us and discuss cases and issues and other things we've worked together. I have Josh Fogelman here with me today who's an injury lawyer in Austin, a really good friend of mine and classmate from Baylor Law School. Him and I had the occasion over time to work on a few things together, but today, we're going to talk about a case we worked on out of Austin. We're not going to say the name, Josh. We're not going to say any amounts. It was a really fascinating case with a really fascinating client that had a really fantastic result. Tell me what you remember about the factual scenario.

Josh: This was definitely an interesting one. We represented a woman who was visiting Austin from out of state with her husband. They were staying at a hotel in Downtown Austin. Our client was sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting to speak with the concierge desk and a ceiling tile collapsed and fell and struck her while she was sitting there in the lobby. It was an interesting injury case because this particular client had a pretty extensive history of some physical and psychological injuries.

She'd actually been a civil rights activist who was very involved in the civil rights movement. Because of her involvement in the civil rights movement, she had actually been subjected to a number of physical attacks that had left her with permanent injuries, as well as some pretty serious post-traumatic stress syndrome. When she was hit by this pretty heavy falling object, she was not expecting to strike her. It triggered both her physical and psychological injuries in a permanent manner.

Justin Hill: One of the things that was interesting about that case was the incident was on video, correct?

Josh: It was. There was some security camera footage of the incident. It was pretty alarming.

Justin Hill: Yes, which takes away some of the defenses that we've seen. We talk about that on this podcast a lot. These frivolous defenses, made-up defenses, you see them in all the cases. I always have to tell clients, "No matter what your facts are, if it's on video, they're still going to have a defense to your case." In our case, it seemed like the defense ran the gamut from, "Okay, that happened, but blame all these other people," to then, "Okay, maybe it was our fault. Now, let's blame her pre-existing injuries and her pre-existing psychological issues." What did you find to be the toughest element of that case?

Josh: I thought the toughest element of that case was proving the extent of her harm. One of the things that we struggle with with personal injury lawyers is so many of the cases that we see, you can actually look at photographs of the physical injuries. It's very clear what has happened to a person. Oftentimes, they will walk into the courtroom with a permanent reminder of what those physical injuries were, whether it's the loss of the limb or some permanent scarring, something of that nature.

But when you're dealing with primarily psychological injuries, it can be a little bit more challenging to really present that in a way that you feel comfortable and confident a jury will identify with and understand. This was one of those cases.

Justin Hill: I always tell people, "If you can't see it on an x-ray, then it's a tougher damage to explain to a jury and make them understand the extent of the injury." You got me involved in that case to help you work on some of the issues. I thought it was a really interesting case. I thought we had a hard time-- I thought we were going to have a hard time proving that what she was hit by was going to be sufficient to say that it caused any brain injury. Her doctor said it did. She had great treating doctors that had known her prior and after.

After I read their documents, I thought maybe we don't have that problem. Another thing I'd like to talk about is this was not your normal case. This was not a slip and fall, it wasn't a car wreck, it wasn't what people think about personal injury cases. This was a woman who got hit by a water-soaked ceiling tile while she was at a Downtown Austin hotel. It's just a strange factual scenario. Recently, we had a mediator from San Antonio on here to talk about mediation. This case we worked together got settled in a mediation. What do you think about mediation? Did you think you got a good result for your client? Would you work with that mediator again?

Josh: Yes. I thought mediation in that case was interesting. If you remember, we actually flew a Texas mediator to Maryland and met and actually conducted the mediation out of state. In fact, most of the parties came from Texas to go and accommodate our clients' inability to travel. This particular mediator is someone that I had worked with also in another catastrophic case that we had. He was an outstanding mediator. This mediation was pretty interesting because oftentimes in mediation there's a lot of back and forth, nickel-and-diming each other until you finally get into the meaningful money territory.

This mediation wasn't like that. It was large, long [unintelligible 00:05:59], and it became pretty clear early on just based on the communications we had that we had a good chance at getting it done. I thought this particular mediator did an outstanding job. One of the most difficult things that we deal with the mediations too, Justin, is managing client expectations. Particularly, when you're dealing with a client who's either been brain injured or they're dealing with some debilitating psychological issues. Establishing and managing their expectations can be really challenging.

Oftentimes, you have issues in your case that are outside your control. Perception issues, causation issues, things like that that clients can sometimes maybe minimalize because this has been such a major life-changing incident. You have to work with them to help them understand what the risks are. In this particular case, I thought both you and I and the mediator did a great job of managing a very complicated client.

Justin Hill: Yes, because a lot of times I think you get clients who especially when they've had pre-existing or previous injuries, they almost start to see this lawsuit or this one chance of recovery is their chance to recover for their entire history of being wronged or having injuries or having exacerbation of injury. I think in that case there was part of it. We were dealing with, "We can only prove this portion of what you're dealing with."

[unintelligible 00:07:28] mediator did a good job, but this is the only mediation I've ever had where I've flown a Texas mediator out of state. I forget about that, but we had a San Antonio defense lawyer, a San Antonio plaintiff's lawyer, an Austin plaintiff's lawyer, a Dallas mediator. Did I get everybody?

Josh: I think that's right. We had our insurance adjusters, had also flown in from Houston, is that right?

Justin Hill: New York.

Josh: I think we had some people from all over the place, for sure.

Justin Hill: Yes. It was interesting. Then we ate crab cakes.

Josh: We did, yes. We had a successful mediation and all went out and had a great time together afterwards. It was a successful day.

Justin Hill: Okay. I'm going to have Josh back on again. We're going to talk about some other issues and have him shine some light on the practice of personal injury law, what he thinks about San Antonio, what he thinks about practicing in Central Texas. We'll have him on again.

[music]

[00:08:27] [END OF AUDIO]

Law in 10: Texas Gun Safety Laws

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 11 Aug 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Texas has a number of laws passed and created to protect people from the dangers associated with guns. Many of the laws are created to protect children and vulnerable populations from the dangers of guns. In our Law in 10 series, Steven Lopez and Justin Hill discuss some of these laws.

Transcript:

Steven Lopez: Hi, I'm Steven Lopez here with Justin Hill, we are both attorneys here at the Hill Law Firm. We're going to talk today about a case that we're dealing with here at the firm, and talk about one of the laws that applies to that case, and it has to do with guns safety. We recently started working on a case, Justin, that involves gun safety. It's an unfortunate incident where a person left a loaded firearm in a place where an eight-year-old could readily access it. They ended up gaining access to that gun and losing their life. Today I thought we'd take some time and talk about gun safety and law under the Texas penal code that has to deal with not only a negligent use of a firearm, but what can happen when negligently using that firearm leads to the wrongful death of a child.

Justin Hill: Yes, I think that's a good point for us to move into some of the things that we get calls about at the law firm. Because we'll get calls where people just want advice on the law, which we can't really give advice on the law if we don't represent somebody. We can touch on some of the big parts of the law that we see in our day to day practice, and that's what you're doing here today. In light of this case you just filed up in Bell County. I think it's a perfect time to talk about,firearm safety, and the laws you're going to talk about. Because you yourself, you're kind of a gun guy and a gun owner.

Steven: I don't know if I'd call myself a gun guy. I do own a couple of firearms, I do hold a concealed handgun license. I'm not the person that carries a gun around every single day. I do have a license to do that, I do believe in the second amendment. I also believe that with owning a gun, and especially if you have a concealed handgun license that, that is an awesome responsibility. It comes with just a lot of responsibility in how you use and operate those firearms.

Justin: Yes, I never got my CHL. It's interesting to me to go to the class, but I've always thought it's either going to get stolen. Somebody else is going to get their hands on it. I have some guns, but I didn't mean you were crazy about guns, but you have guns. You're a supporter of the second amendment. You have your CHL. You've been to the class where they teach you a lot about these laws.

Even in light of that, the case where we're suing the man who had a CHL, and still just ignored some of these very important laws. What's the big criminal law we're going to be talking about in that case as we move forward on that Bell County case? So Our listeners can understand, and specifically our gun-owning listeners can understand that there's a lot of responsibilities about owning a gun outside of just what you're taught in the class.

Steven: The law we're going to be talking about today is Texas penal code section 46.13. That's a law that deals with where you can leave your gun when children are around. Just the plain text of the law says, "A person commits an offense if a child gains access to a readily dischargeable firearm, and the person with criminal negligence fails to secure the firearm or left the firearm in a place to which the person knew, or should have known the child would gain access."

Now that's a lot of legal words we're going to go ahead and break that down for our listeners, and for people who own guns and have them around the house. First of all, Texas penal code 46.13 is a violation of that code is a class C misdemeanor, but if someone gets hurt, if the child hurts themselves seriously or causes death either to themselves or anybody else that becomes a class A misdemeanor.

Justin: Which is still crazy to me that it's not a felony if you leave a gun and a child ends up harming themselves or somebody else. That's what Texas has decided and they have said, "Look, it's going to be the lowest misdemeanor just by doing it, and we'll make it the worst misdemeanor if you end up-- it leads to somebody getting seriously injured or killed."

Steven: Yes, I was pretty shocked when we got into this case and started getting into this law that it was only a misdemeanor, myself. A violation of that law if you're caught breaking that law, that also opens you up to civil liability, which is what we're dealing with here and in our case. This law applies to children. It's a criminal offense if a child gains access.

Under this law, a child is anybody under 17 years of age, under 17 years of age. If a 17-year-old gains access to a gun that you leave laying around the house, this law doesn't necessarily apply. It doesn't apply at all. We break this law if a child gains access to what is called a readily dischargeable firearm. Under the law, that means quite simply, a loaded weapon. Doesn't matter if the gun is chambered or not. If there's ammo in that gun, that's considered a readily dischargeable firearm under the law. That's what that means under that law.

Justin: Under 17, a gun that's loaded and the person has to be essentially negligent the way we about it, in terms of this, to allow it around for a child. Which means they didn't act like a reasonably prudent gun owner would in those circumstances. Fair?

Steven: Fair. It's a crime if it's readily accessible, or you fail to secure the firearm. There's various ways, of course, gun owners out there know that there's many ways and many precautions you can take for securing a firearm. You just simply don't load the weapon. There's trigger locks, you put the weapon in a safe. You really have to be criminally negligent in order to be breaking this law. It's egregious in my mind to leave a loaded weapon in a place where you know, or should have known that a child can gain access to it.

Justin: We're talking about a criminal statute, we don't do criminal law. Sometimes criminal laws can help us establish what a reasonably prudent person would do. What we're dealing with is a gun safety or negligent use of a firearm lawsuit, but we're using the criminal statute. In our case, the guy was actually arrested under this criminal statute, but it helps us build our wrongful death lawsuit against him by using the statute to show what he should've done in a reasonable way.

Steven: The statute helps us establish what the state of Texas considers reasonable. The state of Texas, as much as it is pro second amendment, and a lot of their laws and many, many Texans have firearms and our proud firearms users. The state of Texas says that you have to use these weapons in an responsible way and to secure them in a responsible way. You can't just leave them around the house where somebody can cause harm to themselves or others.

Justin: There are some carve-outs to this statute, like if somebody had broken into your house you're not responsible. If they harm themselves while defending the home, there's some issues there too. Generally, what the Texas law is telling us is that you can be criminally prosecuted if you leave a gun that's fireable within access or where a child can get to it, and that you weren't acting reasonably.

I was thinking about this, my dad would put his guns at the very top of his closet. Whether they're loaded or not, that's probably reasonable whenever I was a little kid and would have to go way out of my way to try to dig this out of the top of a closet. In our case, we're dealing with a guy who left it on a coffee table readily accessible to a very young child. He rightfully has been arrested so that the criminal system can work that out.

Steven: Yes, that's what happened in that case. I don't know it's splitting hairs with you. I don't know that every case is fact-intensive, indifferent. That would be something that we would argue about it in the civil side of the case of whether leaving a gun at the top of a closet is reasonable. I think this law, the Texas penal code has in mind laws that go beyond that, trigger locks, safes, really securing a firearm, especially a loaded firearm in a civil case. I wouldn't bat an eye at arguing the reasonableness of leaving a loaded firearm, even in a closet or anywhere where a child can climb up and get it.

Justin: I wouldn't either, but at least in those cases, somebody would have a basis to say they thought they were being reasonable. Which that's what it comes down to in the criminal case, where are you acting reasonably and to some extent, if you tried, you have that argument. I'm not saying that would be reasonable. I think he put a gun in a safe if there's children around or really anybody around, I think guns need to be behind a lock.

Steven: Absolutely.

Justin: That's going to do it for this episode. We're going to do a Texas law in 10 segments led by Steven. I'm going to be his Ed McMahon on some of these. We consider ourselves a boutique personal injury law firm in San Antonio. We deal with laws that some firms don't, in cases that some firms don't. We want to add a little flavor and give a little education about some of the laws we're dealing with. We'll see you on the next episode.

[00:10:13] [END OF AUDIO]

Unlicensed Cement Truck Driver Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:45:00 -0600

Our client was rear-ended by a cement truck. The driver of that truck didn't have a commercial driver's license and he and his company knew that. Regardless, they let him have the keys to this large vehicle and put him on the road. He injured my client to the extent she had to have neck surgery.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. A podcast discusses real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. or confidentiality reasons names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin: As the oil and gas boom in Texas has taken over the trucking industry, a lot of trucking companies that require their drivers to be licensed and safe have stooped to hiring truck drivers who maybe aren't licensed and maybe don't have a good driving record.

A couple of years ago, we were contacted by a young lady who was rear-ended by a cement truck. It was not that big of a hit, however, she was very seriously injured. Her injury required her to have surgery on her neck. Working on the case we were able to find out a few things: one that truck driver, the 18-wheeler driver, the cement truck driver that is, did not have a current commercial driver's license. Now, that seems pretty unheard of, and it is pretty unheard of.

Once we started digging into it, however, we found out that this man had been ticketed for not having a driver's license multiple times. When he was ticketed, his employer would pay those tickets. In this case, an employer knew they had a driver who did not have a commercial driver's license and was, therefore, illegal to drive. They gave him the keys to a fully loaded, very heavy cement truck, and sent him out on the road.

Unfortunately for my client, she was in front of this trucker when he failed to stop and he rear-ended her vehicle. Now she has fixation in her neck, which means some of the spinal columns have been fused together. She'll never be the same again, due to the negligence of this truck driver and his company, she's been forever injured.

While working at this case the defendants tried to come up with any defense they could, but they could never get over the fact that they gave the keys to a truck, to a trucker who didn't have a license. In the end, we were able to resolve this case. In the end, I think, we were able to change the way this company did business.

Not only did that happen, this trucker was criminally prosecuted because what he was doing was illegal at the time. At Hill law firm we not only like to represent our clients in the civil matters for the monetary damages they have suffered, we also hopefully can use the civil matter to effectuate change in some of these companies that need to change their policies. This is one of those cases where we were able to change the policies of a company. While our client will never be the same and never fully recover from her injuries, she received a settlement that made her very happy, that she thought was fair under the circumstances, and she got to change the policies of a company to make sure it would never happen to somebody else again.

[music]

New Cases at Hill Law Firm: July 2020

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Hill Law Firm handles all types of personal injury cases in San Antonio and all over the State of Texas. In this episode, we discuss some of the cases we signed and filed in the past month or so. They include 3 different cases stemming from allegations of sexual abuse, a worker injured on the job, an 18 wheeler crash, and a case involving the negligent securement of a firearm. Hill Law Firm handles a very diverse docket of cases.

Transcript:

San Antonio Injury Attorney, Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. As I started this podcast, part of the reason to do it was so that I could explain to clients and potential new clients and people in our industry the type of work we do as a law firm. These are not things that we publish or put out there, but it's important, I think, that people understand what type of work we do for multiple reasons. One of which is, I can't say how many times I've had in town, reach out to me and tell me that they didn't know the type of work we did, or that they would have referred me somebody if they'd only known that was the type of case we handle.

I started this podcast with part of the idea of giving a little bit of background in who we are and what we do.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about just a general month. I want to talk about some of the cases that we filed over the last 30, 45 days or so to give you some flavor about the type of work we do. As a lawyer, really, my entire career is representing victims of sexual assault, sexual violence, sexual harassment. It's just always been something I've been very passionate about. It's something many lawyers won't take or handle, so I've gotten a lot of calls by people that have nowhere else to turn. This month is kind of different in that we've had a lot of those cases come in, and we filed three cases involving some sort of sexual assault or sexual harassment. We filed two cases. We brought in two cases involving allegations of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church.

One of those cases has been filed in Houston. One of those cases is here in San Antonio, and it's not currently filed. The one in Houston has been in the newspaper, the Houston Chronicle ran an article about it. We represent the victim who was assaulted when she was still a minor by the youth minister at the church. That youth minister ended up being convicted and is a registered sex offender. He was hired by the church just a very short amount of time before this assault occurred. In our lawsuit, we alleged that they failed to screen who they were hiring, supervise who they were hiring, or train them properly. On top of that, they put this man in close approximation with young children without knowing really anything about him. That case is filed in Harris County.

The one in Bexar County that we've yet to file involves a priest sexual abuse allegation for many years ago, involving a priest who's a well-known pedophile criminal, and the church has admitted as such about this priest. The third case we filed in Bexar County, Texas, involved the owner of a business who was running fake Craigslist ads to get women to come into his office for a fake interview. When they were there for the interview, he would assault, harass, and otherwise try to take advantage of these women who were trying to get a job in these tough economic times. He's now been arrested and indicted in Bexar County, Texas. We have filed a civil lawsuit against him for these actions as well.

Some of the other cases that we filed this month include a traumatic brain injury case filed in Harris County, Texas. We represent a young woman who went to a restaurant, and the restaurant failed to secure a sign that was hanging over the door. When the door opened, a very heavy sign hit her on the head. She suffered a traumatic brain injury. Six months later, she's still suffering the effects of that brain injury as she tries to get better. Another case we filed involved a man who was injured on the job. His employer provided him a faulty piece of equipment. When he was using that equipment, it broke. When that equipment broke, he fell. The fall led to a fractured heel bone, which is a very hard injury to heal, on top of the fact that it's very debilitating because you can't put weight on your foot or leg for a long amount of time.

Another case we filed involved an 18-wheeler crash here in Bexar County, Texas. In that case, an 18-wheeler was missing a turn due to not making a wide enough turn into a driveway, and they just reversed in oncoming traffic and hit our client. The last one I want to talk about is a case we filed in Bell County, Texas. It's one of the most tragic cases I've ever dealt with, one of the saddest set of facts. It involves two grieving parents whose son was killed when a homeowner left loaded dischargeable firearms out within reach of an eight-year-old boy. We filed that case against that homeowner for doing that. Not only is that negligent, it's also criminal.

It's our understanding he's now been arrested for these actions. No matter what the criminal system does and no matter what the civil system does in this case, it's a tragic loss of an eight-year-old boy that could have been prevented. In Texas, we believe in freedom, individual liberties, and the right to bear arms. One of the things that comes with that right to bear arms is a big responsibility to do it safely, to follow the law, and make sure you don't do anything that can lead to harm or injury to anyone else.

That wraps up about the cases that I wanted to cover that we have filed or brought in over the last 30 or 45 days. There are some others as well, but what I want to do, is every so often, check in with our listeners and let them know about the types of cases we're handling, the types of cases we do handle and give some information about what we're doing on a day-to-day basis, the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis, and the people we fight for. Until next time. Thanks for tuning in.

[music]

[00:06:49] [END OF AUDIO]

Meet the Team: Steven Lopez Part 1

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Steven Lopez is going to chronicle his transition into the San Antonio, Texas personal injury law practice at Hill Law Firm. At recording, he has been at the firm about 3 weeks and will join a few times to discuss. Join Steven and feel free to send us questions.

Transcript:

[music]

Welcome to this episode of the Hill Law Firm podcast. Today, my guest is a previous guest. This is the first repeat guest on the Hill Law Firm podcast section. Now he's a member of the law firm. Steven works with us, so this is going to be meet the team and also get caught up on what Steven's doing and what he thinks and what he plans to do here. Thanks, Steven. Welcome.

Steven Lopez: Awesome. Thanks. Happy to be here. Happy to make history.

Justin: [chuckles] Welcome to the Law Firm as well and happy National Tequila Day.

Steven: Awesome. Thanks.

Justin: As a perk here, I have provided Steven a margarita that he's going to have later and I also provided myself to get a little bit about what's going on here. We've got a Q&A with you talking a little bit about where you're from. We put it on our website a blog post with a Q&A, more information on who you are as a background. I don't want to cover that, but I want to talk to you a little bit about your time here. You're in your seventh year as an attorney.

Steven: Seventh year.

Justin: In our world, the seventh year is the most marketable year for a lawyer. Five to eight-year lawyers are the most sought after. I got you at the peak of your career-

Steven: Price.

Justin: [laughs] Let's talk a little bit about first impressions. You got here, what are some of the first impressions you have of working here and your caseload and what you think?

Steven: Sure. Well, I met all the staff, got situated during that first week, and really what was really outstanding to me was the relationship that everybody seems to have here. It's a very small firm and everybody just talks to each other like normal people. You can tell that the staff feel respected and feel that their input's worthy and that people listen to them. There's not really a hierarchy, a boss-employee vibe that I got when I got here. It was very warm from all levels, from the top down. It's a flat aces and just dove in. I got a lot of interesting cases with some really hurt people that I was able to meet and talk to and get involved right from day one. For me, that's the most rewarding part is meeting our clients and getting to work on some interesting cases.

Justin: Our law firm is unique. I tell everybody that we meet and part of what we say on our website is you're going to get a whole bunch of individualized attention. We're very intensely focused on the cases and clients, and that's together, which is going to be exciting and fun.

Steven: Yes, which is great. It's always good to know that you've got someone in your corner, someone that's also familiar with the facts and the legal issues in your case and you're just not on an island out there fighting by yourself because 9 times out of 10, the defense firms and insurance companies have a whole squad of lawyers that are pitted against you. It just feels good to have a strong team and somebody in your corner.

Justin: You got involved and you got caught up on our file system, you got caught up on our document management system, our phones, our computers, all that. You did that on the weekend, on your own time as you were transitioning over here. One of the things that I've asked you to take a lead or role in to get some of the stuff off of my plate, honestly, is intake. You're going to be working with Josh, and I guess anybody who's been involved with my law firm or represented by my law firm knows Josh.

You and him are going to be working on handling and making sure that everybody who calls our law firm with a potential new case gets really good service, gets a really good answer. If it's a case that we can and do handle, you'll be the ones talking to them about that. Talk to me a little bit about what intake has been so far, and are you learning anything, or is it just process you're learning at this point?

Steven: Well, first I had to learn the process. Josh is really good about following up with people, getting all the information that we need, but more often than not people that call our firm want to speak to an attorney and get an attorney's opinion on their case or just to see if we're able to bring them on as a client. That's been eyeopening. Just the variety of cases that we get has been really interesting to me. I enjoy that part. I enjoy talking to people even if the case isn't right for us or it's something that we don't handle. I try to point them in the right direction, whether that's to attorneys that are registered with San Antonio Bar Association or colleagues that we have around town that might be able to handle a case. For me, it's listening to people acknowledging their situation. A lot of times people just want to talk and talk about their situation and give themselves the peace of mind that they have spoken to an attorney.

Justin: We listen and we try to get back to people very quickly, which I've tried to. We say every new case is an emergency here. I want everybody to remember that when somebody new calls, they need somebody at that moment. I'm glad you're going to be helping out with that. You made a good point. You see a big variety of cases on the intake, but we also take a big variety of cases and handle a big variety of cases.

Speaking of it, let's talk about your docket in general terms. You've got the texting and driving 18-wheeler case. You got a hit and run 18-wheeler case. You've got a pretty and nasty dog bite where a lady was just walking down the street with her own dog and the neighbor's dog chased them down the block, and she ends up having a knee surgery. What are some of the other cases you're working on?

Steven: We know that dog bite case was pretty interesting. There's an unfortunate case where a child was killed with a handgun that was left out. That's been a pretty heavy case that we jumped on very quickly recently. That's been taking up a lot of my time, just trying to research that, talk to the family.

Justin: Where a gun owner allowed a loaded gun to be left out around a child and the child somehow discharged it and killed themselves. It's a tragic, terrible situation.

Steven: It is. In that situation, you want to do a good job on the case, but you also want to do a good job developing that relationship with a grieving mother. She's also going through some things in her personal life right now where she just needs a friend and needs an ear. I was happy to be there and happy to at least listen to her while we're getting her case going. We've moved pretty fast on that one. It just makes me proud to be at a firm that moves fast and works a case hard and fast, and we're in it and we're fighting already.

Justin: I think it leads you as an attorney or any professional to do a better job when you feel personally invested in a case, personally involved with a client and you understand their story. It's not a piece of paper. It's not a number on a sheet. You know her. You know her story. You know the terrible consequences and what she's going through. Now you're helping her get through it as not only a lawyer but a counselor. I think we do a better job. I think it's part of what sets us apart and part of why we keep a small docket so that we can do that. You've got a real big variety. Some truck wreck cases. You've got some car wreck cases too. You got a dog attack. Ownership and maintenance of a firearm, essentially, is what that is. Anything else you're working on?

Steven: It's all in that general ballpark in that variety.

Justin: You've handled some intakes on weekends and you've handled some at night. Running a small firm is a lot more time-intensive, I think, than not running a small firm where you have a ton of staff. I really enjoy it. So far, it seems like you really like what we do and you're getting on board with the way we do it, which has made me very happy because you never know. You and I have been friends for a long time, but you never know how that relationship is going to be, whether there's going to be pride or ego or any of that. I really appreciate the fact that you've stepped in and just said, "We've got a job to do. Let's do a good job for these people." I appreciate it. Anything upcoming that you're looking forward to, any big depos, any doctors or defendant depositions that you got coming up or any hearings?

Steven: We've got depo sets on the texting 18-wheeler case coming up in September. Several fact witness depos, there's another-

Justin: Including the texting trucker, which you and I will arm wrestle on who's going to get to take that one.

Steven: That's interesting. There's also an interesting dynamic. There's another firm representing another plaintiff. Just to get involved and to watch the defense bar with those attorneys at the other firm has been interesting and educational for me just to see how that's developing.

Justin: Fly on the wall.

Steven: Yes. It's been great.

Justin: I've butted heads with the co-plaintiff on one of your cases already. There's a little bit of that that's going to go around. As you move forward, I'm hoping to have your docket at about 30 or 40 cases, mine at about 30 or 40 cases and we'll move forward. I want to chronicle this a little bit so that people can see what it's like onboarding into a new firm, becoming an injury lawyer in a firm with such a diverse practice, which we have, which is something that I take a lot of pride in because I get really interested in new things. I think you will too. Let's just keep this up.

Steven: Yes, it's been great for me. Like I said, my docket's a variety of cases. Nothing is routine here, which is great. I also enjoy the research part not only researching the law but researching facts, researching areas of science or engineering that I didn't know anything about before. To me, that's great. Also, keeping the docket small so that we have the time to do that, the time to make every case individual and to not use forums and to not just make it wrote on a day-to-day basis. I'm really enjoying that.

Justin: That's very important. We're going to keep this up. We're going to do another one in a couple of weeks or a month to see how things are going. This will be part one of the series. Maybe Steven's going to start doing a series of his own on this. We'll talk to you soon, and thanks for being here.

Steven: All right. Thank you.

Most Common Causes of Medical Malpractice in Texas: Birth Injuries

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Due to future economic needs for babies injured in the birthing process, they are some of the only medical malpractice claims in Texas that remain viable. The causes of birth injuries due to medical error can stem from failure to screen the mother and baby prior to the birth to failing to monitor the health of the mom and baby during the process. Either way, these cases are hard to prove and require expertise. Expert medical malpractice lawyer Brian Steward joins us to discuss.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

All right. We're back with another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, and we're here talking with Brian Steward regarding medical malpractice lawsuits. Brian is a local lawyer in San Antonio, an injury lawyer, a mediator, and he has had a long history handling medical malpractice from plaintiff's and defendant's side and also pre and post law changes that made it almost impossible in the state of Texas to bring these types of cases.

One of the ways these types of cases have lived on though is in the birth injury context. That's mostly because if somebody is injured at birth, a baby is injured at birth, their medical needs into the future are so significant and so catastrophic really for their families that the claims are still viable and the crazy cost of paying for experts to work these cases up is justifiable in those situations.

Brian, one of the only ones I've ever had experience with, was whenever I was in one of my old law firms. We got a call regarding a terrible birth injury and the baby was going to be injured for life. It was going to have cognitive issues for the rest of its life. The issue was whether or not during birth, there were signs that the oxygen had been deprived to the baby as it was being born.

It turns out, after experts and all this, we didn't have a viable claim. The experts said, "This is a real risk that can happen," and the doctors did everything right in this particular situation, and it could not have been avoided is what we were told. We didn't have a viable claim, but I had spent enough time working up that case and started to realize just how catastrophic--

Before we talk about the law, when families go through a birth, it ends up with a baby that has a terrible injury, what are they looking at lifetime? Do the kids just bounce back or a lot of times they're looking at lifetime future medical needs?

Brian: Most of the children who are delivered and survive that initial 48- to 72-hour period will ultimately be diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which is a catch-all for brain damage as a result of diminished or total lack of oxygen for a period during the time of the birth.

Justin Hill: Let me just interrupt. You mean most of the babies that survive who have had some sort of hypoxic or lack of oxygen injury during delivery?

Brian: Right.

Justin: Okay, sorry.

Brian: When those children and those parents ultimately are trying to evaluate what's taken place, what happens is, unless they're told at that time, which most hospitals won't do, they're trying to look at three, six, nine, 12 months later and that child is failing to make certain landmarks, certain benchmarks, and they're trying to figure out what these developmental delays are due to.

The problem with that is that unless you know what you're looking for and unless you, as the parents, were suspicious of the events over the last few hours or days before delivery, you're going to miss it. There are things that happen and the rules that obstetricians and Labor and Delivery Departments are supposed to follow that are set in stone. They didn't just appear, and they're not because of lawyers, they're because the medicine dictates, for instance, that there has to be a rule that says, "It's 30 minutes from the decision to perform a C-section to the actual incision."

That is one of those things that even when I was a young lawyer 30 years ago was one of the rules, when we would talk to experts, when we would talk to high-risk OB-GYNs and Labor Department, they would say, "This has to be the response because that baby doesn't have the stores, it doesn't have the glycogen stores to respond to these losses."

What that means is the mother is already laboring and is in a troubling labor, which means that they have been in labor for a long period of time, so the things that you have to do immediately. Those cases, at least the cases in the beginning of this litigation series and certainly still today are cases where you have nurses and OB-GYNs who do not respond to the crisis.

The only person that is affected by that crisis is that baby. You may not understand the true effect of that loss. Typically, the loss is oxygen because oxygen is the most important fuel to that baby. You may not understand the effect of that loss for months, if not years. Those cases are still out there. They all hearken back to fetal monitoring to issues in understandings of glucose levels for that baby during the first 5, 10, 24 hours after the delivery and what that means, it's complicated medicine, but it's not a mystery.

There are high-risk OB doctors who've seen this and dealt with this for years and neurologists who've seen this and dealt with this for years. They can track exactly when the insult took place. There's a condition called leukomalacia. Luekomalacia takes a film of the developing brain and because of where certain deficits are found, where certain lesions are found, they can tell you where and how long the loss of oxygen was for that fetus pre-delivery. The medicine is there, it's just that parents need to understand that as they are going through this incredibly hard time, there are events taking place that they need to be aware of.

Justin: For the most part, they're not going to be told as they're walking out of the hospital, "Hey, we probably screwed up, so keep an eye out." A lot of times, people have to figure this out on their own and then work backwards, sometimes not even having a hint anything happened for maybe years.

Brian: No clue, although there are some things that you can be aware of. Glucose levels are very important. If you have a child who's born hypoglycemic, which means below a certain level, that's indicative of stress during that labor period. If you have a child who is not as responsive and you'll hear various standards that are used. They're being debunked, but there are various standards that are used in evaluating a child initially after birth. Sometimes, you'll find that if you're using those standards, you'll have a child that's not as responsive as it should be and your question has to be, "Why not?"

Justin: Lack of oxygen, that's one of the more common causes of birth injuries. Sometimes, that's going to be the result of medical negligence, sometimes it's not. We looked at a case recently here that involved the failure of a doctor to screen for certain viruses. Are there pre-delivery tests that should be performed, whether it's medical condition, viruses, blood levels that also can be a basis for medical negligence if a child is born with injuries that could've been avoided if those tests had been performed and read and responded to?

Brian: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have certain standards that they've set up for the last, at least 25 years, probably much longer than that about the pre-delivery and prenatal testing that should take place. That's not necessarily even if the mother is high-risk, it's just, "Here is the testing that we need to make sure that we are going to end up with a viable fetus and a viable baby."

One of those is strep B testing. Strep B testing in a typical setting is something that is done periodically. It is important because if you have strep B, you as the mother, as the host, can give strep B to your fetus, your baby, and that can have some fairly harsh responses for your baby's delivery. The requirement for most hospitals, at least since the mid to early '90s was that there's strep B testing, but unfortunately, that's a situation where you have strep B testing of patients who are receiving periodic medical care and prenatal care.

The problem is where you have a patient population that doesn't receive that kind of periodic prenatal care.

So, the patient gets to the point where she is 36, 37 weeks, which isn't term, but it's close enough to term to be viable and you have issues that are going on with the delivery or issues that are going on with the mother and you go to delivery, but you have not actually done a strep B test or a test like that. The problem then turns to, if it's a vaginal delivery, then you're going to have exposure of that fetus, that baby, to strep B. You're going to compound whatever error by allowing this child to be born vaginally as opposed to being delivered by C-section and immediately placed in an ICU or an NICU.

There's testing, whether it's strep B testing or amniocentesis for certain patients, if they're deemed high-risk by their OB-GYNs or just by their age, but their tests that should be performed during the prenatal care of these patients, these mothers, because there are things that can be done, there are things that can be identified, and things that can be ultimately changed.

Whereas, 30 years ago, the medicine wouldn't allow you to change those things. Now, you have surgeries that are being performed on babies that are 35, 32, 30 weeks where you're looking at heart procedures, where you're looking at organ procedures. With the advance of science and the advance of medicine, you're having cases where within five days of a delivery, there are pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons performing surgeries on patients to correct things that they never could have dreamed of years and years ago.

Justin: I think the takeaway from this is birth injuries are an incredibly complex and specialized area of the law that you really won't even know if there was a negligence or a medical error until somebody with a lot of experience in a very specialized area of medicine had a chance to look at it. We're going to talk about a few more things with Brian before the series is completed, but that's going to do it for this episode.

[music]

[00:12:53] [END OF AUDIO]

Most Common Causes of Medical Malpractice in Texas: Surgical Error

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 23 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

One of the most common causes of medical malpractice in Texas is surgical error. This includes when the wrong body part is surgically affected, when a surgical instrument is left in the body or when a surgical error complication that is not a known risk occurs. When this happens, people can be killed or forever injured.

Transcript:

[music]

All right, I'm here again with Brian Steward discussing medical malpractice cases. Brian's a medical malpractice and personal injury lawyer in San Antonio, with just a broad array of experience in all kinds of medical malpractice and personal injury issues. We've talked previously about misdiagnosis, failure to diagnosis and a couple of other common causes of medical malpractice, and now we're going to talk about surgery.

Brian, you and I recently were talking about a case involving a surgeon that during a neuromonitoring of the surgery, there was something missed, and that led to a very serious injury to one of your clients. Let's just walk through, let's start with just generally surgical errors and how that can happen in a case, and how as a lawyer you go about evaluating those claims.

Brian Steward: Sure. Surgical mishaps, problems or errors in surgery are cases where you look at what the presentation is, you look at what the problem is, and then you try to evaluate what the response was. What did the surgeon do in response to the symptoms that the patient was providing them with?

Some of these cases are fairly simple, and they're the cases we all read about years and years ago, where surgery is done on the wrong leg or they fixed the wrong knee, they fixed the wrong ankle, they replaced the wrong hip. Those are easy cases. Obviously, they made a mistake, and the nurses and the people in the operating suite made a mistake.

What we're seeing more and more is surgeries in elective surgeries' situations where the person, the patient doesn't get the outcome that they expected. Now, outcome expectations are very different than a surgical mishap or a surgical mistake.

An outcome problem is where your patient, your potential client believes, "Okay, this is what I was told, that this is what I expected. I was told I was going to get a knee replacement surgery and I was going to be able to walk and play golf and return to my life like I was 35 years ago".

Those are expectation cases, and those are hard cases because of this thing called informed consent. Before any of us have had any meaningful surgeries, we have filled out a form. We don't remember the form, but we filled out a form, and that form, which was created by the Texas Legislature, with the help of the Texas Medical Association, basically sets out the risk for that procedure, which means you thought that these guarantees were made by the surgeon, when in essence and truthfully, you weren't guaranteed anything.

What you were told is, "Here are the potential risks, here are the potential hazards, and hopefully you will get a good outcome". That surgeon's good outcome, the medical profession's good outcome is different than your belief in what a good outcome is. Trust me.

When you're looking at these surgical cases, both from the patient standpoint and from the lawyer standpoint, you are looking at mistakes which are glaring mistakes, whether it's wrong location, whether it's something that another surgeon, thousands of miles away or in a teaching facility or a teaching hospital would say, "I never would have done that". Those surgeries, although you wouldn't think that they'd be prevalent, actually are.

Justin: I got to think one of the hardest parts of an expectation case, because I've gotten calls on these too, is just the subjective part of it. It's funny. I've gotten calls from people that say, "I was told I wouldn't have pain anymore. Pain is just necessarily subjective. I actually do some consulting for a friend of mine who does some plastic surgery. He gets a lot of people saying that," Whatever you worked on doesn't look like you said it would look".

How do you ever prove that the expectations could ever be met, weren't met? It's just such a subjective analysis. I want to walk through, you talked about two things. Wrong body parts, those are still solid, provable cases. There's a special law on sponges or foreign items left in the body, right?

Brian: There are. Believe it or not, sponges and finding those sponges and actually finally removing them, one of the last areas where there's a discovery rule in Texas, the discovery rule used to allow the unfortunate patient certain times within which to find out that they finally had this damn thing that's causing this infection. It's really been, for the most part, disproven or taken out of medical malpractice litigation, except in the case of sponges.

I can tell you from my surgeon friends, when surgeons do surgeries, they count the number of sponges, they count the number of gauze pads, and at the end of the surgery, they're supposed to have a timeout, and during that timeout, they're supposed to count the number of these sponges, because there's a radio-opaque dial that they can use. Those are still good cases.

You made a mention of expectations in plastic surgery. There was a period, probably 5 to 10 years ago, where the vast majority of my calls for medical malpractice cases were plastic surgery cases, and they were breast implant cases. They were not necessarily failed, although the patients believed that they were failed, and sometimes the husbands believed that they were failed. The expectation was, "I'm going to look a certain way because I took this picture from a magazine and that's what you're going to recreate," and certain doctors took advantage of it.

Those were not good cases because you're trying to translate a very subjective belief, "I'm going to look a certain way. I'm going to feel a certain way," with the understanding that you're going to go in front of a jury of 12 people, probably half of those people are men, and you're going to talk about something that's fairly intimate and specific to you, how a certain body part or body parts look, and that is hard to translate.

Justin: I've had this specific issue in a non med mal setting, there is some amount of discomfort and luxury that you have to overcome when it comes to certain plastic surgeries. Maybe they've been affected in a car wreck and you're trying to get recovery for those. It's hard to convince a jury that I need recovery for this thing I spent $20,000 on or $15,000. It's just that it's a hurdle to overcome because it's such a luxury that so many people cannot afford. I think that probably translates in the med mal context as well.

Brian: As you try cases more and more, you realize that the jury hears, "Do not let bias to simply play a part in your deliberation". That's the third instruction that a judge gives them in their charge. When you get to the point where you're describing a problem with plastic surgery or how this patient may not be happy with what took place, you really need to keep that in mind because, for instance, or for example, a male is not going to have much sympathy for a woman who spent X thousands of dollars on breast implants and is now dissatisfied with them. Those are, and I hate to use the quote, but those are white people problems, as opposed to our general population's problems, and you don't really translate those kinds of problems into money.

Justin: Let's talk about another thing because I think a lot of people, especially who listen to podcasts, their biggest exposure to medical malpractice surgical errors is Dr. Death out of Dallas. You had this very crazy surgeon who had a god complex. He was a narcissist. He did drugs and alcohol, and he would butcher people.

I guess what I really want to point out is there's this really broad range between clear examples of medical malpractice where you have a guy on coke and booze doing surgeries that he's not qualified to do, or the wrong leg or taking a sponge out on one end, somebody who doesn't like the way their nose job looks on the other end, but then in between, you have good surgeons who make bad mistakes occasionally that end up permanently disfiguring, disabling or killing people. Talk to me about maybe one or two of the cases, and in general terms because all these things are confidential, that you've seen, in just terms of run of the mill surgical error that is not this terribly egregious situation.

Brian: Sure. One of the things that you'll see is more and more they're elective procedures. When I use the term elective, I mean it's not a life and death situation now and surgery needs to take place. A lot of people, especially in this community, suffer from gallbladder issues, which means that a patient goes in for gallbladder surgery and the doctor goes in, use the laparoscopic approach, which means there are three or four different holes and they go in and they try to remove the gallbladder and hopefully this will relieve the symptoms.

Now, sometimes just to be honest and accurate, you can't necessarily see what you're trying to remove. You know generally the geography of the body and the anatomy of the body and you're trying to remove certain things, but that doesn't always work. You have these people who believe that they've had this laparoscopic gallbladder procedure to remove it and four or five, six months later they realize, "Well, it wasn't all removed and I still have these symptoms".

Those are the types of things that they're not prevalent, but there are things that you see and things that you hear about. It's fascinating because when you take the depositions of those surgeons, those surgeons will admit, "I couldn't exactly see what I was operating on. I removed what I thought the problem was and I guess it wasn't a problem".

You would think or I thought when I started taking these cases, when I started looking at gallbladder removal cases, I thought that all of these surgeons are going to say, "I could see exactly what I was removing and there's no way in the world that there was an error".

What I've realized is that these surgeons will admit that they are visualizing the field. That's the term they use. It's a medical term. They're visualizing the field and doing the best they can, but they cannot look at the surgery field and the anatomy and be 100% sure that they have performed the surgery and not damaged any adjacent organs.

I think that's fascinating because sometimes we think that these surgeries are these wonderful, pristine, clean, wonderful things that happen where there is no chance for error. With these general surgeons that I've been deposing in these cases are telling me is, "That's not it at all Brian, there are all these organs, there's all these overlying and underlying issues and I'm trying to deal with. At the end of the day, I'm trying to remove this organ that's in the middle of your chest and do it the best I can".

There are cases out there, there are viable cases out there, but again, you have a defendant general surgeon or a defendant surgeon who has an ego, who has experience, who has done 10,000 of these procedures and they don't believe that they ever could have done something wrong.

Justin: I think that's a really good example and a good one to end this on. That's going to do it for this episode regarding surgical error. We're going to talk two more with Brian regarding medical malpractice. I just added informed consents to the list because I think we use them. They're used against us. We use them in our cases.

As well as, I want to talk to him about birth injuries, which any more in Texas seems to be one of the biggest viable-- I say viable because Texas law is not very good for people that have been injured in medical malpractice settings. It seems to be one of the most viable or still most viable medical malpractice claims. We'll be covering those on the next episode.

[music]

[00:13:37] [END OF AUDIO]

Most Common Causes of Medical Malpractice in Texas: Pharmaceutical Administration Negligence

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

One of the most common causes of medical negligence and a leading reason for medical malpractice lawsuits is the misadministration of drugs in a hospital setting. Whether it is giving the wrong drug or too much of the right drug, these acts of negligence can kill or forever injure patients.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed, however, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin: I'm here with Brian Steward on this new edition of Hill Law Firm Cases, discussing medical malpractice. Brian's not a specific medical malpractice lawyer, but he's had a long history of handling medical malpractice cases from the plaintiffs and the defense side. He's somebody I would go to with questions regarding medical malpractice because in my career, for the most part, medical malpractice cases had been very limited by the laws in the state of Texas on what is viable and what kind of cases can actually be brought anymore.

On the last episode, Brian and I discussed one of the first cases that got him involved in medical malpractice lawsuits and it involved the misadministration or misprescription of a prescription drug. What was it, Brian?

Brian Steward: The drug was actually a chemotherapy drug called dynemicin and it's a drug that's used through an IV to pediatric patients who suffer from cancer, specific types of cancer. The case, which was 1992, involved the over administration of that drug, which means that this child who is already suffering from cancer gets-- I think it was five times the accepted dose of this medication.

Any of you who've dealt with cancer or loved ones who've dealt with cancer, know that there's a balance in prescribing chemotherapy and radiation. The balance is you want to stop the cancer while also allowing the host, the person, to survive. With dynemicin, if you overprescribed it to that extent, it essentially shut the host down and ultimately took the life of this child. It's one of those things where we think about misprescriptions, and you hear about it all the time.

You hear about the person who goes to the pharmacist and they're supposed to get one drug and they take this drug for two days, then they realize it's not the correct drug and they go back. That's the tip of the iceberg on these cases. I think if you look at the literature and you look at the history, in hospitals currently, the misadministration of medications is probably the most prevalent malpractice that's committed because of the system and the way drugs are prescribed and ultimately used.

Justin: Brian, where's the failure in that? Is that the doctor prescribed the wrong amount, the tech administering or the hospital pharmacist? Where's the chink in the chain?

Brian: It's a systemic failure and part of it is language. I handled a case out in West Texas about six years ago, doctors use and nomenclature for the prescription of drugs and it says Q1, which is once a day, Q2 which is twice a day, Q4 which can be four times a day. Now, that's fine if the doctor and the nurse are on the same page, if the nurse is not on the same page as that doctor, and you see a Q4 that can be four times a day, that can be four times an hour, that can be four times a week. It's a mess.

The big hospitals' systems, all have pharmacy software. They have pharmacy hardware in place to take in these pharmacy orders from the doctors and make sure that the actual medication has been ordered is appropriate. The problem is there's the human factor, and the human factor is the pharmacist that types that in, can override the system. Even though there's a system that says, "This is too much", that pharmacist can say, "No, this is exactly what's ordered on this standing order from this doctor and I'm going to prescribe it." That's also cost hundreds of people across the nation, their lives.

Justin: I think it was Corpus Christi maybe 10 years ago. I don't know if you recall, but maybe the pediatrics ward or the newborn ward, I don't know what you call it, but they were administering heparin at something like a thousand or a hundred times. I can't remember if they were missed labeled bottles or what it was, but it was 30 children that were injured

Brian: The heparin issues across the nation, it's a fascinating story. I've been waiting for a movie spotlight to do heparin, because heparin was one of those things where it was so commonly used that the hospitals disregarded the fact that there were different dispensers, meaning there were different packaging for those heparin bottles. When a shipment would come in, they would ordinarily just take whatever it was and utilize the same system, and to administer their heparin with really tragic results in that, they were prescribing and administering doses of heparin which are absolutely inappropriate. If you asked them in their deposition, absolutely believe that they were doing the right thing.

Justin: In my former life at the other plaintiff's firm, I was assigned to work on heparin cases and that arose out of the Corpus Christi incident, but the cases we had revolved around, they contaminated batch of heparin. Heparin had a lot of bad press rightfully so for a real short amount of time. I learned in that, that people can flight multiple issues but we were dealing with- because Heparin's made from actual pigs if I recall correctly, and they were getting contaminated batches out of China which were sickening people and, at the same time, you have these wards that are over administering.

It was a real strange time for whoever makes heparin. It was a bad time for them.

Brian: I think that limited the companies that created heparin for about three or four years, now it's back up and running because it's a huge profit center. In this industry, in the pharmaceutical world, they are looking for profit centers and heparin is an easy one despite the downside.

Justin: I intended to cover a lot of different areas with Brian on this episode, but we just got stuck on and rightfully so the wrong administration of medicines or their wrong prescription of medicines in the hospital setting or the medical malpractice setting. But I'm going to get them on again and we're going to talk about some of the other causes of medical malpractice, he can enlighten us on which ones are still viable and which ones the state of Texas has said, "We can't bring any more".

[music]

Most Common Causes of Medical Malpractice in Texas: Misdiagnosis Negligence

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

When a doctor or medical professional fails to diagnose or misdiagnoses a treatable condition, it can lead to long term injuries or death. This is one of the most common causes of medical error in Texas. We discuss this with Brian Steward.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: Welcome to another episode of Hill law firm cases. I'm here with Brian Stewart again, as we've been talking about medical malpractice. Brian is was one of San Antonio's best, most knowledgeable medical malpractice attorneys. He's done plaintiffs and defense work and we've been talking about the most common reasons and bases for medical malpractice lawsuits specifically in Texas in San Antonio since we have our own unique set of laws I guess is the best way to put it.

Brian, let's talk about misdiagnosis. I've had calls before and only almost all the calls I have gotten have been related to the failure to diagnose or the misdiagnosis, not failure to diagnose. The misdiagnosis of some medical condition that the misdiagnosis led to worse complications or death in the future. Talk to me about that, how those are evaluated and what you've seen in your practice.

Brian Stewart: The thing about failure to diagnose and misdiagnosis cases is that you're always looking retrospectively, meaning you're looking backwards, which means once it's finally diagnosed, it's easy to figure out what it was.

Unfortunately, we don't get the luxury of preparing those cases in that way. We have to look at what the physician or the healthcare provider knew at the time that patient presented. That makes those cases difficult, not impossible, but difficult because at many times, we will know vastly more than that healthcare provider knew at the time of presentation, which means that the decisions that we're trying to make when we're looking and evaluating these cases are much different than the decisions that the healthcare provider was making.

There's an exception, and the exception is fractures. The exception is health. When healthcare providers take X-rays, take CTS, taking MRIs, and they interpret a film and then two days, three days, a week later, they call back and say, "Yes, we actually do see a fracture", those are slightly different cases on the liability part because it's fairly easy to determine, "Okay, someone missed something". The problem is the damages aspect of those cases because the delay in the diagnosis typically doesn't change anything in those fractures.

Where you get a lot of calls, and these are heartbreaking calls are in cancer cases, cancer failure to diagnose or delay in diagnosis, because you have people who, they rely upon their health care providers, they follow the instructions, they get the testing, whether it's mastectomies or various other exams, and they believe that they're doing fine until they find out ultimately that they're not, so then you try to work backwards to figure out what was missed.

When you do that you determine or you understand that someone may have misinterpreted a test or not ordered the test that would have been diagnostic, meaning they didn't order the test that would have given them the answer that they're looking for, and now you have a patient or a patient's family, unfortunately, who's asking you to try to determine, "Hey, what happened here?", and should they have done something sooner and would they have changed the outcome, and changing the outcome is where these cases rise and fall.

Justin: You have to prove that at some point that if it had been properly diagnosed whenever it should have been found, that the outcome would have been different. Specifically with cancers, there are some that the survival rate or the prognosis is so terrible that you almost have to tell these clients when they come in, it really didn't matter if they had found it or not, because there would have been nothing maybe a lengthening of somebody's life, but maybe never saving a life. In cases like that, is that just a tough conversation you have to have or are other cognizable claims in those situations whenever maybe it's just delaying the inevitable.

Brian: It's a tough conversation, but it's also something where you have to do the research and you have to at least enlist the support of an expert to talk to you about survival rates. Texas back in the early '90s looked at loss of survival claims and essentially said if the person had less than a 50% chance of survival, then there's no cause of action for medical malpractice or medical negligence case against that healthcare provider.

Then the focus became what is 50% and who provides that information? Whether it's an epidemiologist, whether it's an oncologist, whether it's any hospitalist or internist, that's where the focus focused.

As you ask the question, the responses, it's a tough conversation, but it's a number of different tough conversations because the first one is with the family. The second one is with the doctors, and the people that we hire to review these cases, do the literature searches and try to give us answers.

Justin: Let me ask you this, are there claims when the difference is, "Okay, you would have had a life expectancy of one year and if it had been caught, maybe it would have gone to two years". Are those claims that lawyers take in Texas or is that just such a tough thing to discuss with a jury and ask for a dollar amount that for the most part, most lawyers don't take those.

Brian: Most lawyers don't take those cases. I've looked at some of them and I've taken some of them. I can tell you why. As I get older, and I value my last few years a lot more and look at cases involving nursing homes and people at that point in their lives, I realized that a lot of that final chapter is as important to the families in that in individual as what we look at when we're looking at kids and kids that sustain injuries.

Justin: We spend our whole lives saving up money so we can enjoy the end of our lives. That's sort of this weird dichotomy in American life, is you work so hard, hoping that you get those last years.

Brian: Right. When you get those last years and something happens, it derails your plans that has value. I had a case two years ago then involved the administration of inappropriate improper diabetes drugs to a patient, and it really took the last probably 5 to 10 years of that person's life away. That case, in explaining it to the hospital, in explaining it to the healthcare providers representatives, was one of the toughest cases I've had because that was an individual who'd worked all of his life, just as you said, to finally get to the point where they could enjoy the life and then this happens.

When I talked to the widow and her children, it was really difficult for them to understand how that they lost this opportunity, and we discussed with the defense lawyer and the actual healthcare provider representatives, the loss of this opportunity, and that's what it turned on and we were able fortunately to get it settled creatively, but it was a tough case.

Justin: Okay, and we've been trying to talk about failure to diagnose a misdiagnosis, sometimes we're going to end up on a tangent a little bit, but just to bring it back around, it sounds like in these cases, you not only have to prove that a reasonably prudent doctor would have or should have caught whatever they didn't catch but you also have to prove that it would have made a difference, right?

Brian: Right. You need to show that the earlier diagnosis of this issue in treatment would have changed the outcome or lessen the extent of this disease process. Sometimes there just isn't that literature out there. There aren't the opinions out there to support the case. Again, those are tough conversations that you have to have.

Justin: All right, Brian, thank you very much. On the next episode, we're going to talk about surgery error, but for today, that's the end of this episode discussing medical malpractice and misdiagnosis and failure to diagnosis.

[music]

[00:09:03] [END OF AUDIO]

Medical Malpractice in Texas with San Antonio Injury Lawyer Brian Steward

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Due to some changes in the law, medical malpractice cases in Texas are less common and harder to prove than ever before. The quality of care has not improved, but injured people have fewer options. Medical error continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the United States but in Texas, and San Antonio, the ability to hold wrongdoers accountable is significantly limited.

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: On this episode of Hill Law Firm cases, I have good friend, good lawyer, good former defense lawyer Brian Stuart here with me. I wanted to talk to him a little bit about medical malpractice cases, because we get calls on medical malpractice cases and oftentimes I have to tell people one, you don't have a case, and really the only answer to ever having a case is to vote and get involved politically. Brian, talk to me a little bit about your background in medical malpractice from- on the defense side to the plaintiff's side.

Brian: It actually started before that. Believe it or not, when I was an undergrad, I was premed. For two summers I worked at University Hospital as an RT. It was fascinating. It was great stuff. I really believed and my parents certainly believed that I was going to be a doctor, until I took organic in the summer between my sophomore and junior year and realized maybe there was something else out there.

Despite that, I always was interested in the medicine. When we started, when I graduated from law school, I worked at a firm in a plaintiff's firm that did some med mal. One of the best cases we worked on was a case against the [unintelligible 00:01:39] involving daunomycin, which is a drug that's used for chemotherapy. It was used on a child and they overdosed the child and the child died. The partner and I worked it up. We did a lot of work on both the medical side and also the product side, because there was a system in place.

There was a pharmacy system in place that should have prevented this but for some reason, the pharmacist overrode that and allowed the medication to be prescribed. After that case and after working with some really fantastic lawyers on both sides, I was hooked. When I switched sides and started doing defense work, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to do med mal, because I wanted to learn it. I wanted to interact with the doctors and the nurses.

I thought it was something where my science and my medicine background would be an asset, and it was. I did that and I worked for Columbia HCA and their system, defended cases from El Paso to Laredo to Brownsville, and saw some of the craziest things come in the door as far as cases, mistreatment. Again, met some fantastic lawyers on the plaintiff's side who were prosecuting those cases.

Some lawyers who because of their experience and their intelligence were able to figure out that what the medical charts said wasn't exactly what took place. I knew just from my experience that a lot of cases would go away, because when people saw the chart and the way it was written they thought, "There's no way I have a case." In fact, if they ever got to the point where they could talk to the nurses and the doctors they would realize that a lot more went on than appeared in that chart.

When the opportunity arose and I was able to switch sides and do plaintiff's work again, one of the things I always wanted to do was keep a med mal docket. I don't do many of them but I always have a few of them that I'm looking at and going through because regardless of the legislation that's passed in 2003 and afterwards, there's still medical malpractice out there.

A lot of what I do is explain to people what the law is and explain to people what the obstacles are, but at the end of the day, I'm still just talking to people about medical malpractice and whether it was committed and whether a bad outcome is equal to malpractice.

Justin Hill: I think you made a really good point as it relates to medical malpractice and that it's its own world of process and procedure and nomenclature and everything that really somebody who hasn't worked in the medical world or in the medical malpractice world, they're probably not going to understand it.

Brian: It's designed to create this artificial barrier to people understanding it. We are so used to using common sense and in a situation where there's a bad outcome, typically a death, you think, "If this 52-year-old person died, it had to be from some sort of medical malpractice." That means that I or any plaintiff's lawyer who is doing medical malpractice, they have to learn the medicine. They also have to learn how to talk to people and counsel people about these bad outcomes with these people who- they've sustained a loss.

I hate to put it this way, but with some of the car accident cases, you're dealing with people with sore backs. With almost all of the medical malpractice cases that are viable, it's someone who has died. Someone who has lost a loved one and they're looking for answers and you as that lawyer are trying to provide them with answers. You're also trying to explain to them that the medical malpractice laws in Texas since 2003 are as difficult as any system can be, and is strictly designed to preclude you, prevent you from filing that case to the extent where within 120 days after you file your case, you have to provide an expert report.

A report from a physician which details the acts of negligent and connects the negligence to the bad outcome, which means that a doctor has to provide you with an affidavit against another doctor where- no one will admit this, there are insurance companies, insurance providers in Texas that specifically state in their policies that if you cooperate with the plaintiff's attorney, you will lose your coverage.

There is no incentive whatsoever for a doctor in Texas to provide testimony or an affidavit against another doctor, which means that we end up going outside of the state of Texas to find experts. Even with that, you're providing an expert report to a judge who may have been appointed by a system wherein- or so I've heard, one of the questions they're asked is, "Are you willing to dismiss medical malpractice cases?" Obviously, they're going to say yes in certain regimes, and here we are. You go to this judge who is a lawyer, who probably never did med mal. The defense files a motion to dismiss your claim because the expert report is not sufficient.

The judge listens to your argument, reads the report and tries to figure out if you have a case or not. If you lose your motion to dismiss, the judge shall, that's the language of the statute, shall award the costs incurred by the defendant against, not you as the lawyer, but the plaintiff, which means the person who's already sustained the loss of a family member gets hit a second time with $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 of fees and expenses that were generated by the defendant healthcare provider in defending the case. That's a difficult conversation to have on the front end, and it's a hell of a difficult conversation to have if it's happened. Oh yes, the insurance companies still pursue that.

Justin Hill: I think that's been really great for me, because I have to explain to clients all the time or potential clients about the hurdles. I always say that hopefully one day the pendulum swings back as much that we protect injured people the same way we protect doctors. We're going to get back with Brian on our next episode, where we're going to talk about the most common types of medical malpractice cases that are still viable in Texas.

[music]

[00:09:02] [END OF AUDIO]

Hunter Craft Q&A

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Hunter Craft has handled some of the biggest cases against car makers, trucking companies and major corporations in the United States. He blazed his own path and had hard times along the way. Now, he is running a great practice and doing great work for people in need. He joined the podcast to talk about being an attorney and give advice to young attorneys. He is my friend and the closest thing to a mentor I ever had.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin: All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. I just made Hunter Craft listen to our ominous intro music, which the podcast that I started for the law firm has really kind of changed since I've started it and it's become more of just kind of a-- I really think if you just listened to the podcast, you would learn everything you need to know about my law firm, who's here, who we work with, and the types of cases we handle. Honestly, I think that's been a pretty big success. Hunter, thank you for being here.

Hunter Craft: Justin, thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to visiting with you.

Justin: Yes, a little color commentary. Hunter is who I tell people has been the closest thing I've had to having a mentor. As a lawyer, he was a Attorney at Watts when I started, he then became a capital partner with his name on the wall at some point, which was well deserved. I worked in his office. I worked on cases with him, and then over time, we started our own law firms, and still occasionally, we work together. I rely upon Hunter heavily to provide me guidance, sometimes tell me when I'm being an idiot, and really just be a great friend. I'm glad you're here and I want to talk to you about the things that I think are interesting about you.

Like I told you before the show, the context is, a lot of people nerd out about being lawyers. I tell people you're the best lawyer they've never heard of because you're not into the pomp and the stuff on Facebook and all that, you do it quietly and you do a great job. I'm getting the opportunity to ask you questions that I'm sure a bunch of lawyers wish they could.

Hunter: Well, I appreciate it. I tell you, I've told a million people that the greatest compliment I've ever gotten is the one you gave me, and that is that you refer to me as the greatest lawyer that people have never heard of. It's a source of pride with me. I've always been taught, and since growing up under my father, that it doesn't take pomp and circumstance, you don't need billboards, you don't need TV ads, you don't need to brag about everything that happens is good, if you do a good job for your clients and you're fighting every lawyer out there, to whom that will eventually be relevant, will know about it.

Justin: I think to everyone that comes across your path, they know who you are. It's funny in my world, there are so many lawyers I run across and talk to, and there's some that have never heard of you, and then the ones that have worked with you or against you have nothing but great things to say. Let's just get started. You and I are both Baylor Law graduates. You were there a little bit before me. You left Baylor and got the job at one of the firms that everybody leaving Baylor wishes they could get. Fulbright & Jaworski, man, that was one of the top echelon firms. What drew you to Fulbright? Then honestly, you weren't there that long, so what drew you to leave?

Hunter: The obvious answers on Fulbright, it was one of the jobs that everybody really wanted. You got to crawl into an elevator and go up 41 flights and get out and hear the Dane and look around and see some of the greatest talent in the country walking the halls. You walked down the hall and you were picking the brains of people like Steve Dillard and OtwayDenny and some of these names that a lot of your listeners will know too.

I don't know how you turn down that opportunity. Every case that you were working on was important. The guidance, the leadership, the brain power, the resources that you had was-- I can't think of a better way that I could have started my career, but ultimately, I wasn't drawn to defending corporate America. In fact, my heartstrings pulled me in the opposite direction. I know that they deserve a defense and they deserve a good defense, but that was not my cup of tea.

Justin: Also, a different thing about the air when you came out, where the big building silk stocking firms, most of them still had some amount of litigation power in them. They've all moved away from that, it seems like, but you were on the back end of the big firms having stud litigators. Fair to say that a lot of those have moved away from that, right?

Hunter: There's no question. I'm not necessarily proud of it because I would scold a young lawyer for approaching it the way I did, but honestly, when the offers went out after clerkship, I made it a very clear point to Fulbright, and I had another neat opportunity, and we can talk about that later if some other people have clerked on it, but ultimately, one of the conditions to go into Fulbright is I said, "You've got to put me on one of these two last tort teams. There was two teams and it's divided into teams and those were the only people doing real world litigation anymore. All the rest of it was paper pushing and these giant commercial lawsuits and that sort of thing.

In terms of actually having an opportunity to get there and fight it out a little bit, there were really only two teams left, and I insisted upon it, and frankly, instead of kicking me in the rear end and sending me on down the road, they were receptive to the idea. I did, I got a lot of great experience [unintelligible 00:05:16] the last waning years of that opportunity in big firm law.

Justin: What were your other job offers? You mentioned it, so what were they?

Hunter: I was really torn between-- You have the usual slew of some big firms that I had interviewed with, but the other clerkship I took was really interesting. Someday when we have another 15 minutes, I'll tell you how I ended up in Fulbright of Houston, but I grew up in Dallas and I had a really unique opportunity to work under somebody that was a defense lawyer then who is now one of the pre-eminent plaintiff's lawyers in the country, Charla Aldous.

Justin: I didn't know that.

Hunter: I did, I clerked with her back when it was Cooper, Aldous & Scully. I walked in day one, and for whatever reason, she happened to be in the office, because she was always out of the office, [unintelligible 00:05:59] cases, and walked by and said, "Let's go grab lunch. I want to meet the new kid." We hit it off and I did the predominance of my work for her and through her. She was real honest with me that she wasn't probably long for that insurance billable defense work, that that portion of her career was winding down at the time, and so it made it a little easier to end up at Fulbright, but that was certainly a unique opportunity.

Justin: She's gone on to have an incredibly successful career-

Hunter: She's amazing.

Justin: -yes, as a plaintiff's lawyer now. You were at Fulbright. You stayed what? Nine months-ish?

Hunter: No, I was there 18. I was there twice, Justin. [laughs]

Justin: So, two. For whatever reason I was in gestation periods to me, two children worth. [laughs] Yes, there's reasons, I think, in those terms at this point in my life, but from there, you went straight into what would have been Watts and Heard at the time. That's about the time-- What year would that have been?

Hunter: It was April of 2001.

Justin: That's probably about the time I started looking in Texas Lawyer and stuff like that, and they were on the full page ads about these monster verdicts and monster settlements. Those guys, they were the new kid on the block, and they were hot as fire could be.

Hunter: All I can remember is, back when people used to get Texas Lawyer in print format, and you could see these full page of Denman and Michael walking up to the courthouse and it would say, "Watts and Heard coming soon to a courthouse near you. Have $35 million in verdicts and 35 whatever, all before the age of 35."

Justin: It was pretty good.

Hunter: It was a flash and I got a hand to those guys, not only did they market it well, but frankly, they backed it up. Two of the better trial lawyers, I think, I've ever had the privilege of watching work.

Justin: Watts came on here and I had a lot of young lawyers reach out that, "How did you get him to come on your show?" You know what I mean? There still is that mentality of there are people that are kind of untouchable. If you're a guy doing TV commercials, you can never meet George Clooney, and I think a lot of young plaintiff's lawyers trying to make it, and that's the top of the heap and he deserved it.

Hunter: In fairness, that's something that I was drawn to always, about what he is, a tremendously successful lawyer, well earned. He has had a lot of notoriety, all of it based upon hard work and success, but really, if there's ever a guy you could sit down and drink a Miller Lite with, as you know, [unintelligible 00:08:31] would be happy to pull up a chair right next to him, wherever he's sitting and visit with somebody, pick their brain, and let you pick his brain, communicate with you. He was definitely influential in my career in terms of that.

Justin: How did you get over to Watts? Leaving Fulbright, I'm sure there were lots of options for someone like you, you'd already had a good academic career, you've got the pedigree of Fulbright & Jaworski, you worked on a tort team there. Otway Denny, I know was one of the guys that, you said, has mentored you at that point in your career, who still is a legend. How did you choose and end up at Watts?

Hunter: Its a really funny, it was all through Denman Heard. I'd never met Michael. There was a lawyer, who I just hold in great regard, that was a little ahead of me at Baylor and then at Fulbright, and then he jumped to Michael. A guy named Roger Braugh. Roger had already left. His family was from the Kingsville area. He had already left to go work for Michael when Michael was just in Corpus. Word had leaked that Denman was joining Michael and that they might need an associate. It leaked through one of Denman's old law partners when he was at Williams Bailey or whatever the iteration was when Denman was.

Just by word of mouth, I ended up meeting Denman for a bucket of beers at a place that's no longer there in downtown Houston. After about two hours, I was sold. I walked in the next morning and had a painful conversation with the guys at Fulbright that I'd made a decision to do something different.

Justin: You went through this in a way I did not. Without getting into details, you left a real salary to go work for Michael, which was basically eat-what-you-kill type of environment. What was your process in doing that, sit down with your wife at the time and say, "Look, we're going to have some lean years," or did you just expect it was going to be super easy?

Hunter: I didn't. I thought it was going to be easier than what it ended up being, and it certainly wasn't easy, and I'm grateful for that. This day, it was a situation where we were pregnant. We had just bought a house and I didn't have a salary. It was a draw. I didn't even know what a draw was. I remember the first question that I asked when we got into a firm meeting as somebody kept using the term referral lawyer, and I raised my hand just like I was in law school and asked what a referral lawyer was.

I was green. It was a hard steep learning curve. I tell the story. It's really funny. I got into a fist fight in my front yard with a Ford Motor credit guy that came to repossess my expedition that I'd bought when I had a Fulbright salary and I physically could not make the payments on it anymore. I had bill collectors calling me, I had everybody calling me, and that's when-- My wife had a job and a salary. She was doing the best she could, but ultimately, her goal and our goal for her was to be a stay-at-home mom. You can imagine the compounding problems that I had created by taking a steady certain job when she's pregnant and ended up to a place we were physically fighting off bill collectors.

Looking back on it, I can say it with a smile. It wasn't funny then explaining to the West View police why I had just taken a swing at the Ford Motor tow truck driver. Looking back on it now, I'm so grateful for those years because it's made me hungry, it's made me smart when we've had the opportunities to have some success, that those days can come again and don't let them catch you off guard.

Justin: I think the dumber thing was taking a swing at a tow truck driver. Those guys are grizzled.

Hunter: It ended quickly, thank goodness.

Justin: They have tire irons.

Hunter: It was more of a crime of passion than of wisdom.

Justin: My experience at Watts I was told I have a salary and then I was coaxed to leave that fore draw that I paid interest on. Now, when I meet with young lawyers that especially want to get on the plaintiff's side, I have a different perspective of how compensation should be structured, because you look at people like you, me to a much less extent, who struggled when you had the opportunity to make a lot more money elsewhere. It's a different mentality. I think once you've had to go through that and you have to humble yourself [unintelligible 00:12:43] "I chose this and I'm broke right now."

Hunter: It's interesting as you look to hire young lawyers, there are just no young lawyers really anymore that are willing to take that eat-what-you-kill right off the bat. I tell everybody, I said, "You're welcome to have a salary and I'll pay you a salary because I don't want anybody have to go through what I went through. At the same time, I can promise you you're going to be a better lawyer. It's going to make you hungrier and it's going to teach you to invest in you." It's real easy to take an automatic deposit to your account every two weeks, it's a whole different idea to completely bet your financial independence and survivability upon you, your ability, and your work ethic.

Justin: I think I learned a lot of that from you. I just started cold calling every lawyer I could find in town because somebody was going to refer me a case and that was going to help me get out of my financial straits.

You went over to Watts, you had a handful of years that were rough. I think you told me about even going to the Hammer's office and picking up some of their referred out stuff that nobody wanted. You got to go on like the third day and pick over trash, but you were hungry, you were doing what you could, take what you could. Then if I recall, you said you had a big break because you had a Ford case. Watts had just got into a war with Ford and yours was the first set for trial in that war. So much of that is luck. Talk to me about how important the Ford wars were for you as a lawyer in your development? How much luck just played a factor in that.

Hunter: I'll always say this, I love Denman Heard to death, but Denman Heard's background was not necessarily in automotive and tire products, and that was Michael's bailiwick. I was in Houston and I got a phone call, and the great ironic tragedy of it is he's a fellow that I used to play baseball against in high school then went to a rival high school. He and his wife were returning home from her birthday party and a family in Temple, Texas when they suffered your classic Firestone wilderness tire tread separation, OEM tires on a Ford vehicle.

Justin: Fast forward, Firestone for people that don't know.

Hunter: Firestone, I apologize. I know some of the viewers look at me-- It reminds you how old you are when a lot of people look at you with a blank face about Ford Firestone, but that was one of the great- [crosstalk]

Justin: You were on the end of it though to be fair.

Hunter: Yes, I was. It was one of the great historical torts, but I had that case and I didn't have a ton of leadership on how to work it up. Roger, like I said, was with Michael then and it was very helpful, but it really forced me to grab myself by the bootstraps and just invest myself. It's hard to explain because it sounds like stories that you tell everybody, "Oh, you know back when I walked to school barefoot, uphill both ways in the snow," but it's true.

I was up at the office until 2:00 AM every day. I was back by 6:00. There were plenty of times where I snuck in and slept on Denman's couch just trying to learn about vehicles and tires and I owed it to that family. Back then, they had formed a statewide MDL. They had federal MDLs, but it was a brand new concept back in the early 2000s. They became the gatekeeper for these Ford Firestone MDLs. They had this draconian list of things that you had to do to be able to get out of the MDL to be able to go to your trial court and try the case.

I was proud to say that, post formation the MDL, that case was the very first case that checked all the boxes and got sent to a trial court. I remember one of the nicer Ford lawyers. He was one of the national guys [unintelligible 00:16:19] 9 or 10 different Ford lawyers from four different firms working on it. He called me and said, "I just want to congratulate you. I can tell you that there have been conference calls that you had been called every name in the book and we have done everything we can to prevent you from being able to go to trial. I hope you go kick their ass."

[laughter]

Justin: Where was the MDL at?

Hunter: The MDL was actually in Montgomery County, our region. The region for our area my case was pending in Orange, Texas. It was the actual MDL [unintelligible 00:16:51] in Montgomery County in Conroe.

Justin: Was that Barahona?

Hunter: Jeffrey Harden.

Justin: That was the first in the Ford wars, right?

Hunter: That was the first for me. Now, Michael had a long history with Donna Bailey. Michael and [unintelligible 00:17:06]. They had definitely unturned the stones and done the discovery in their own rights...

Personal Injury Mediation is Discussed with a San Antonio Mediator

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Bexar County courts require mediation in almost all cases prior to trial. Mediation is an effort to settle a case through the use of a third party neutral whom tries to help find a resolution. Brian Steward is one of San Antonio's finest mediators and he answers questions.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. We're here talking with Brian Steward. Brian Steward is a San Antonio personal injury lawyer. He's been doing it a little bit longer than I have. He's got a few more gray hairs than I have. He also has recently started mediating. I wanted to get him on, talk a little bit about what is mediation. This is really a podcast for clients and people that are trying to learn about the process.

I want to start first is, what did you think about mediation and what was your way of explaining it to your clients prior to going through mediation training and becoming a professional mediator?

Brian Steward: Sure. Mediation is an interesting process. It began in Bexar County in 1992 when Judge Charlie Gonzalez says, "We're going to start employing mediation." I had absolutely no idea what it meant and I've come to love it. Mediation to me as a lawyer and to my clients means, we have an opportunity to sit down with a third party, an impartial third party, listen to the evidence, listen to our case and try to resolve it. The mediator is not going to fix your case. He's not going to decide your case. The mediator is going to listen to your case and make some suggestions.

The mediator is also going to go into the other room where the defendants are, listen to them, and also make suggestions to them. By that, I mean, the mediator has more information than even your lawyer does during that mediation process. If you trust the process and you trust that mediator, sometimes you'll be able to get cases resolved. This is an opportunity.

Mediation is an opportunity for plaintiffs, normal people to get the benefit of the mediator's knowledge on this case in the context of these county cases going on in this county in trials that are being tried currently on issues that will face you in juries that will decide your case.

Justin Hill: I'll just be candid. I have a problem with mediation, in that, I feel too often than not the other side is showing up trying to buy a case for cheap or settle a case for cheap as opposed to evaluating risk and actually trying to resolve the case. I always tell my clients, "Look, our goal of mediation--" My question for you is going to be, what has your goal of mediation been for your own clients?

Because what I tell my clients, "My goal in mediation is, let's figure out how much they have brought today to settle your claim and let's get them to offer the maximum amount that they have to settle your claim. Then you can make an informed decision on whether or not that is sufficient."

That's always been my goal. That's always been my plan. I've never seen mediation as the sole goal of settling the case because I don't want to lean on my client or tell them, "Hey, you need to settle the case." I want to know how much did they bring to settle your case so the client can then make a decision.

Has that been what you've told your clients in the past or how have you, as a practicing lawyer, gone about explaining the goal to your clients?

Brian: There are two things that you bring up that are important. The first issue and the first focus is, I want to make sure, as the lawyer for the injured party, that I get the most possible money on the table during this mediation. Sometimes you'll realize fairly soon that that's not going to happen, but that has to be the ultimate goal.

The second goal, and it's happening more and more, but the second goal is, is there something that I'm missing? Is there additional information out there that might enhance my case? That's one of the things where defendants over the years have used mediation, as you said, as a discovery tool, meaning they want to go in and see if they can push buttons and get someone to make a decision based in part on desperation.

I think what good lawyers do in mediation when they're looking at this second issue is they use it to their advantage. As much as you look at mediation as a chance to get this thing settled, fantastic lawyers that I've worked with use this as an opportunity to really look at the defendant. I think we lose focus and we lose how important that is. We go into mediation and our clients are looking for an evaluation of our damages. Sometimes we don't look at the evaluation of the defenses and the evaluation of the corporate representative or the poor schlub that's going to sit there during this case and defend this case. Sometimes that mediation is the opportunity for you to glean that information. Who's going to sit there? Who's going to make the decisions and who's going to be in the hot seat?

Justin Hill: I want to talk to you a second from now about what your role is as a mediator, but I'll tell you, I've had the worst and the best stories. I've had mediations where I've showed up and the other side has offered less money than it cost for the mediation. You see that more in car wreck situations, I think, than your non car wreck cases. What is your advice, based on your gray hair as a practicing personal injury lawyer, for people like me who still are a little piss and vinegar, a little bit about mediation, in how to approach mediation from a reasonable perspective, as well as an advocacy perspective, knowing that a lot of people like myself have dealt with these situations where you've walked in and some car insurance company offers your client $250 to settle their case when they have $20,000 in medical bills?

Brian: In a former life, I was a defense lawyer and I handled car accident cases for some carriers. I can tell you that I, as a defense lawyer, had certain responsibilities to that carrier. I had to provide that carrier with certain information so that that carrier could set reserves, which means they could try to figure out what the value was based upon what I told them in their own experience and try to set aside enough money to get this case settled.

What does that mean? It means that I had to have enough information from you and your client. Whether it's medical records, whether it's police reports, whether it's other information that's going to help me evaluate this case or at least provide the decision-makers with the information so that they could do that. That was sort of a eureka moment when I turned and started doing plaintiff's work again because part of me always felt like, "Why do I have to do the defense lawyer's job? This person who's sitting across from me, who's sending me all this hate mail, who's asking my client these questions in the deposition, they should know what they're doing. They should know what this case is about and they should be able to evaluate it." They don't. You feel like they should, but they don't.

Justin Hill: I think you're letting defense lawyers off the hook and insurance companies. My situation, there was not a question of whether we had promptly and fully prepared the other side. They just showed up with a $250 offer. To be fair, the jury gave us $400,000 in that case after they offered us $250. There is some amount of obstruction in the mediation game as well. How do you break through that?

Brian: You break through that by preparing your cases to go to trial. When you're presented with a situation that's not going to resolve, you walk. There is nothing worse than being in mediations where people knowingly accept less money than the case is worth because of their own circumstance. As lawyers, we have to remember what our goals are, what our duties are. If you know that this offer is not appropriate, and you know that this defense lawyer, this system is trying to pay less than the case is worth, you have to be able and willing to walk that case to get the value that your client ultimately deserves, whether it's from the second or third mediation or from a jury.

Justin Hill: I take a hard line personally that I don't do multiple mediations. If you're going to drag us around the first time and not be fair, I'm not even going to consider a second. If we're close the first time and everybody is working and everybody is trying and there's maybe a hiccup and hey, we didn't have this information, then maybe I'll consider it. When do you think it's actually fruitful to have multiple mediations? When do you think everybody's wasting their time and money?

Brian: I think the best first mediation is the first mediation where you have some basic and general information about the case and the damages. That's the best possible time for a first mediation. You don't necessarily need each and every potential fact witness deposed, or each healthcare provider trader deposed, but you can get at first mediation out of the way because invariably there's been some pre-suit litigations and pre-suit exchanges. You've got information that the defense lawyer and the adjuster should have. You probably file the lawsuit to get it out of the dead or away from the desk of the adjuster. Now you have another set of eyes.

The second mediation has to take place, if you're going to do one, within probably 45 days of the trial setting. By that I mean, you have the plaintiff who is designated experts, but more importantly, you have the defendant who is designated experts. Mediations where the defendant has not designated experts, it's an interesting process, because you're anticipating, you can do that in a lot of cases, but you're anticipating what the defense lawyers and their experts are going to say.

Justin Hill: Or they'll tell you, "My experts will say--" Which might end up not being true after they designate them.

Brian: The good lawyers also can take the, "My experts will say--", and turn that into, "Oh, that's good, because what's the basis of them saying that?" So many lawyers today, so many defense lawyers today will parrot those words without any true basis for those comments and that evidence. Ultimately, good plaintiffs lawyers can cross a defense expert, a designated expert, and get some concessions where that defense lawyer when they're talking to you, they're never going to provide you with those concessions.

I have gone through third mediations. I've gone through third mediations where,- in Harris County specifically, a judge, as he was sitting on nine different challenges for experts said, “At 9:00 AM tomorrow, I'm going to tell you what my rulings are on these expert challenges.” These were expert challenges for both sides. I'm going to tell you what they are. I strongly suggest that tonight, when you go home, because we were in the fourth day of trial, when you go home, you all have a great dinner and then sit down and talk about this because this is the last best chance you're going to have to settle this case. We settled that case.

Justin Hill: I've never had a judge order a mediation but I hear about it, but one of my mentors in our profession, he has instilled in me, and I buy into it, I believe it, that you're never going to have a real productive mediation in a substantial case until all experts are deposed. In substantial cases I've taken- unless you've got an insurance limit that's clearly in play or whatever. That's the position I've taken, which ruffles a lot of defense feathers, because they want to be able to sit down and try to buy the case cheap, or settle the case cheap, whatever you want to call it, because they think that some of us don't want to go to the expense of hiring experts, go to the expense of doing all this or spend all the time doing all that.

As a mediator, now that you're a trained professional mediator as well as personal injury lawyer, now, what is your goal? When you're an advocate and a plaintiff's lawyer or defense where your goal is to basically alleviate risk for your client, get a good result for your client, find justice for your client and leave with a happy client, but as a mediator, now, what do you see your goal as? What do you want to achieve in a mediation?

Brian: My goal is to get that case resolved, this singular case resolved. Sometimes you'll be in a situation where this case is associated with 20, 30, 100 other cases. It is hard to differentiate between those cases, but you have to because this case is about an individual or a family that sustained a loss. As much as you want to think about that greater case, it doesn't really help on the plaintiff side, if you put too much emphasis on that greater case, that larger case because you lose the importance of this case to this family.

Now, on the other side, when I'm in the other room, and I'm talking with defense lawyers and sophisticated counsel and the sophisticated adjusters, and we're talking about this case, and those other cases, there's value in me talking about those other cases because that other room is making economic decisions. You as the plaintiff's lawyer and you and your room, you're making economic decisions, but it's on a much smaller basis.

The other room, the defense room, is trying to figure out where this fits into a myriad of other cases, and a myriad of other problems that plaintiffs lawyers don't necessarily focus on or have to deal with in their singular case on most cases. Sometimes, you'll have plaintiffs lawyers, like your mentor, who've looked at trends, they look at multiple cases, they make decisions based upon not just this case, but others. For the most part, when we're in that room, we're trying to make decisions based upon this family, this individual and their losses, and it really does at times force you to focus on, what can I do with this family in this case today?

Justin Hill: Generally, before mediation, you've told me, you and I have a mediation coming up. When this airs, we will have had a mediation and you told me, “Give me everything. I want everything. I want to know all the documents, what is your case?” I've had all kinds of experiences. I have mediators who don't want anything, and when they show up, it's as though they are just trying to move a ball between two people till it gets close enough that both people put their hand on it. Then you have mediators that really do prepare.

When people give you a bunch of information prior to mediation, what are you trying to do? I assume you're trying to take a real neutral look at it all and make a outside view on what you think is fair and reasonable, what the traps are, what the warts are, what the good parts are. What is your take on how you evaluate a case prior to walking in and hearing opening statements?

Brian: Before you walk in the case, I will have read each and everything that you provided to me, on both sides. Trust me, I'm well aware of who provides me with information, who doesn't. I'm well aware of why certain people provide me with certain information, why other sides they don't provide me with the information. I've been a plaintiff's lawyer, I've been a defense lawyer. I know what those reports look like upstream. I know what's supposed to be placed in this report. I know that certain reserves are set aside. I know that certain predictions are made. I want to know that.

I'm not trying to embarrass anyone, but I'm not a fool. I've done this, and I know when I'm looking at this information, as much as some of that's advocacy, there's a point where you're simply reporting. I want to see that because I want to be able to help each room. I know that sounds hollow, but I really do want to be able to help each room when I go in and make comments about strengths and weaknesses of a certain case. If you tell me that a plaintiff was fantastic and I don't have the deposition and I can't say why this person was fantastic, then when I'm in that room, I'm not going to be able to be as effective as possible.

On the other hand, if I'm in the other room, and they're saying, "Well, that's not even going to come in." Or, "That's not admissible." Or, "That's not going to be an effect or a factor in this jury", I want to be able to say, "Well, actually, here's how it could potentially come in. Here's how it could affect you, and here's how this changes the value of your case."

I still consider myself a practitioner. I still consider myself litigator. I don't consider myself mediator, that's not going to be my principal business for a long time if it ever is. As such, my knee jerk response is always going to be, how do I evaluate that evidence? How would I respond to it and what does it truly mean?

That means, ultimately, if you give me information that I think is not dispositive or important, or changes my evaluation, at some point, I'm going to tell you that. If you make the mistake of asking me what I think your case is worth, I have friends who are mediators, who are great lawyers, who do not want to respond to that question, I will respond to that question, but I will only respond to that question when I feel like I have all the information.

Justin Hill: Another question I want to ask you from my own personal edification is, my first boss, his role in mediation was three moves. He always stayed for three moves, no matter how offensive or terrible their opening offer was. He always said that that's when you start to see what their direction is. When I came out of law school in college, I'd taken a class called Negotiations, in the Business School at A&M. The basis for the class was about getting DS, that was sort of the deal. I came out and thought, "Oh, we got a bat. Now, we're all going to figure out how to get this thing resolved." I realized, "That is not mediation. That is not how it works. This is not a fair discussion." You'll have adjusters come in, and they've ran your case through a computer program and you've got dollars and cents. We're going to offer you $10,136.07, crazy things like that.

What negotiation tactics, or styles do you think are the most effective and the most persuasive in a mediation?

Brian: The best thing that you can do as a lawyer on either side of pending litigation is provide me with the information that you're making your decisions based upon, some insight into your experience and how you would handle this at trial. Ultimately, any tidbits that you think may move the needle one way or the other and be truthful about it. I am from a different time, I grew up in the afterglow of calm which means that you could try as many cases as you possibly wanted back in 1992 to 1993.

Now, those words are somewhat hollow because, obviously, we've got a different demographic sitting in that jury box, but the experience is still something where people want to pitch to me, "Okay, I've tried cases, I've tried cases, I've tried cases." As I get older, and I get away from that, I realize, it's not necessarily that you've tried cases, it's that you have the experience...

Q&A with America's Foremost Food Safety Attorney, Bill Marler

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 04:00:00 -0600

Bill Marler got his first food poisoning case when he was less than four years out of law school. Against the odds, he almost single handedly changed the food industry in the United States. He has represented thousands affected by food poisoning and recovered hundreds of millions. Most importantly, he is a really humble and nice guy.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. Bill Marler just had to listen to my overly-dramatic intro music, but we're learning as we go. We were just talking. I said it's crazy. You don't have a podcast and you said you don't have time and COVID allowed me this free time to do something I'd been wanting to do for a while. Bill Marler is, I don't even think it's arguable, the foremost food injury lawyer in America which has created you to be one of the foremost food safety experts probably around the world.

What I want to talk to you about, food cases, how you got into it. You sent me a little bit of background information. I'm in San Antonio. Migrant farmworker is something that's in the past history of so many people in this city and lawyers I know and friends of mine. Talk to me about how you had some time working as a migrant farmworker.

Bill Marler: [laughs] Yes. When I was 16, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. My parents were both teachers, really good people. I had decided that I didn't want to hang around the house and hang around the little town I was living in for the summer. I wanted to go seek adventure. A friend of a friend of a friend said, "Oh, man, you could work in the apple orchards and pear orchards of Eastern Washington and make a fortune."

I was like, "Gosh, that sounds like a great idea." I told my mom and dad. I said, "I'm going to do this." They're like, "No, no, you're not. You're going to get a job here." I was like, "No, no, no, I think I'm going to do it." "No, no, no, you're not going to do it." One Saturday, when they're-- to the grocery store, I packed a duffel bag and hiked down to the road. You could hitchhike back then. By eight hours later, I wound up in a little town on the Columbia River that's known for raising cherries, apples.

I worked that whole summer from Eastern Washington to Eastern Oregon to the eastern side of British Columbia, which is called essentially the Okanagan Valley. It's where all Washington fruits and vegetables were raised. Now, with global warming, it's the hot spot for wine. Now, Oregon pinots and Washington cabs are right up there because we warmed up the planet enough that up here in the Pacific Northwest can grow good wine.

It was a really interesting experience. I think the thing that I took away from it was just how hard those people work. Back then, this is 1970s. Back then, it was White, Black, Hispanic, but a lot of poor Whites. It was a different demographic than really what you see now. Although in slaughter facilities across the Midwest, a lot of the people in the slaughter facilities are Eastern European. I learned a lot about immigrants.

Justin: When you were doing it, was that not the Hispanic migratory farmworkers? Would they not get up that high?

Bill: It was very few. There were a handful. Nowadays, that is what it is. Right now, Washington and the COVID thing, Washington as a state has done pretty well, considering we were the first state that blew up, but we're doing really well in Western Washington. In Eastern Washington where food production is, we're starting to see some of the small towns that have food production facilities blow up with COVID problems. Exactly the reasons for that is that people coming to Washington or is it just the working conditions, it's probably a combination of all those things.

Justin: Yes. Bill, a lot of people that listen to this podcast are lawyers, young lawyers, especially, I seem to hear a lot from. How did you get into the law? We're going to talk about food cases and spend that time. At some point, we all decide, I decided due to a family trauma that we had or a family tragedy, that I wanted to be a guy suing big corporations. That interested me in it. I felt passionate about it. How did you get into the law?

Bill: When I went to college, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. When I was at the end of my freshman year at Washington State University, the Cougars in Pullman, Washington, I stayed that summer to work on a farm primarily because I had an expertise in that now. I stayed that summer and got connected with some the guy that was the student body president. We've decided it would a fun thing to do to run some students for the Pullman City Council. This is at 1977, so I just turned 19 years old.

18-year-olds had just gotten the right to vote just a few years earlier. I got serious about it. I canvassed the entire town and I won by 51 votes. For a while, I was the youngest person elected in the United States to any kind of public office and was the first student ever elected to the Pullman City Council. It was a four-year term. I think that really started to gel my interest in becoming a lawyer. I had visions of being a lawyer and being the youngest president. That didn't quite turn out exactly the way I planned, but no harm, no foul, things turned out just fine.

Justin: Other than being elected to city council, kind of the normal path of college straight into law school?

Bill: Yes. Well, I spent a year after law school working as a paralegal, which I'm constantly glad I did that. I worked as a paralegal and then went to law school, worked actually while I was going to school. I was lucky I did not come out with a lot of debt. Went to work for the big law firm in Seattle at the time. It was called Bogle & Gates. It had 300 lawyers. I wound up doing asbestos defense cases right out of the box.

After about a year of doing depositions of mesothelioma victims and their spouses, I decided that I couldn't do that. I went to work for a small plaintiffs firm. I was there for about a year and then it was a husband-and-wife team. Really good cases and high-end PI cases. I learned a ton, but they got divorced and the firm blew up, so I was without a job. I wound up getting a job at a 50-lawyer insurance defense litigation firm. It was a solid job.

I was married. We just had a baby. I was wanting to make sure I had a stable situation. The thing I did there, and this is, I think, for your young warriors listening, is that I never just decided to just take the cases that I got. I tried to always think about doing my own thing, try to build my practice. The fact that I had plenty of experience, I went to some of the lawyers. If we didn't have a conflict, I said, "There's no reason why I can't take that car case."

One time, I've met a cabby. I was going somewhere. The cab guys were trying to create a different union. They asked me to come to their meeting and help them organize. I went to their meeting and help them organize. From that, one of the guy's sister's kid had been murdered by an escaped convict, a pedophile. I sued the state of Washington. That was my first big plaintiff's case. It caused a lot of grief in the law firm because it was very high profile.

Justin: How old were you then as a lawyer?

Bill: About three years out of law school.

Justin: Okay. Nice.

Bill: The great thing about being overconfident, sometimes you don't know how stupid you are. I think primarily from being on the city council, I felt like I was well-qualified when I'm probably not. As that case was perking, the Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak hit the state of Washington and it was January 19th, 1993. I remember that day. I lived on an island. I still live on that same Island across from Seattle and I took the ferry every day. It was a rainy day.

I was reading the morning newspaper sitting on the ferry and it was like, "There's something going on at a Jack in the Box? E. coli? What the hell?" I got to the office that day and no lawsuits had been filed. I get a call from a former client of mine who I had helped in a workers' comp case. It had been a couple of years earlier. She called me and said, "I don't know if you'd be interested, but I have a friend whose kids are in the hospital with this E. coli thing." I hopped in a taxi of one of my buddies from the taxi service and drove down to Tacoma, which is about 30 miles away, and signed these people up.

Justin: Your snapshot at the time, you had done no products work?

Bill: Well, yes, not any product--

Justin: Asbestos defense, but you were their low man on the totem pole.

Bill: I knew about strict liability and I presumed that food was a product, so strict liability applied.

Justin: Had people done any food poisoning cases at that point?

Bill: At the time, we didn't really know how big this thing was. I came back and I drafted a complaint. I probably shouldn't tell you this story because if it comes back, my wife will get mad at me.

Justin: [chuckles] Go on.

Bill: Go on. Go on farther, you bastard.

Justin: [laughs]

Bill: When I was in Pullman, Washington, a woman I dated was-- They have the Edward R. Moreau communications program. It's a well-respected communication. You'll find a Washington State University grad in most newsrooms across America. That's a--

Justin: It's like Missouri?

Bill: Yes, exactly. Yes, for writing.

Justin: Journalism, yes.

Bill: Journalism. Anyway, at the time, I had this girlfriend, pretty serious. Anyway, she dumped me for the guy who wound up being the quarterback for the football team. Years later, here I am, a lawyer with this case and she is the anchor for the local TV station. I called her up and I said, "Hey, it's Bill." "Hi, Bill. How are you doing?" "Great," blah, blah, blah. I said, "I think you owe me one." Anyway, I wound up being on TV that night when I filed the lawsuit and became the face of Jack in the Box of trying to explain to the public what was going on.

Justin: You were a three-year lawyer?

Bill: Yes, three and a half years. October, yes, so three and a half years and--

Justin: Didn't know enough to know what you didn't know.

Bill: Exactly, but I knew more than anybody else.

Justin: You were playing the media. You took a case nobody had done before and "Hey, take a swing."

Bill: Yes. I also had gone to the University of Washington medical school library and walked in and said-- This is before computers. This is crazy. This is before the internet and we didn't have email. I walked in and it was like I don't even know where to look for anything about E. coli. I just walked up to the librarian and said, "Hey, do you guys have anything about E. coli?" I just read all I could. At least I knew how to say it and I knew what the problem was.

Justin: Was this before or after that weird time in the '90s when the book Outbreak or the movie Outbreakcame out and everybody was scared of getting Ebola? Was that before or after that time?

Bill: This was before.

Justin: Okay, because there was that weird time in the '90s when everybody was scared of a pandemic.

Bill: Ebola, yes. Of course, now, we watch those movies and they look very similar to what we're seeing now.

Justin: Yes, that's right.

Bill: I went from having one case to 10 cases to 30 cases.

Justin: All individually filed?

Bill: Yes, and then a really interesting thing happened. There were a lot of good plaintiffs' lawyers in the Northwest, people who are on National Trial College and all that kind of stuff. Here I am, a third-year lawyer from a mid-sized insurance defense firm primarily with all these cases. The plaintiffs' bar was pretty pissed.

Justin: Yes?

Bill: Yes. I went to a meeting with them and they were pretty unhappy. Essentially, I smoothed it over by essentially saying, "Hey, look, I will do all the work. I will prove to you that I know what I'm doing and I can help us all." Really, from that point on, I took control of the case. I offered to do everything.

Justin: Did the other plaintiffs' lawyers have cases? Is that why they were--

Bill: Yes, they all had cases. They had one here, one there. Pretty soon, people were like, "Well, you've got 30 cases here. You take this one."

Justin: Did people think they were viable or were they taking a swing because you were? You see that in towards. You see it where everybody's like, "That's crap, but that guy is going to swing. I might as well ride along."

Bill: Yes. I think at the time, nobody knew quite what was going on.

Justin: What was the theory?

Bill: The theory was at the time that Jack in the Box had not cooked the hamburgers to a sufficient temperature to kill E. coli.

Justin: It was almost a negligence case then at that point, right?

Bill: Yes. As we got to know more, it became essentially as we started-- I started thinking about it as the hamburger was the product and the defect was the E. coli and the defect was not cooking it properly like-

Justin: - a manufacturing defect.

Bill: - manufacturing defect. That became the overarching theory. It became really clear that there were some-- four kids died and there were 50 children who had developed acute kidney failure. There was one girl who I wound up being retained by their family probably six months into the outbreak. She was hospitalized for over six months and they had every day-- You're too young to remember this. Back during the Iran hostage crisis in the '70s, it was every night, there was like, "Day 52 of the hostage crisis." Every night on TV was "Day 52 of Brianne Kiner."

Justin: Is that right?

Bill: Oh yes. It was like just a drumbeat of that, but circling back to the relationships with lawyers is that like projects in college. If you offered to do stuff, then don't be like say, "Hey, I get your fee," or you're just doing it for the right reasons. If you offer to do stuff, it's amazing how many people will let you do it. The thing that came out of after two years of litigation and me transferring law firms in the middle of that, I decided that about a year into it, I went to the partners of the firm I was in.

By then, I had about 100 cases. It was pretty clear that by then, I was figuring out and I'd been hired by this family of this child and a couple of people who've lost children. It was pretty clear that this was going to be a big deal. I had to say, "Hey, look, make me the 23rd partner and I'll just get my 1/23rd share of whatever." They were like, "No, no."

Justin: They said no?

Bill: "You're not in law school." I'm like, "Okay." I actually went to the senior partner of the firm. Wonderful guy. About a year after I left, he passed away. The family asked me to speak at his funeral, which pissed everybody off for the firm. Nonetheless, I went to him and said, "Pinckney." His name was Pinckney Rohrback. "Pinckney, what should I do?" He goes, "Bill," he goes, "You gotta do the right thing for your client and everything else will be okay." That night, I wrote a note to the managing partner and said I'm leaving the firm. I joined another firm, wrote a letter to all my clients saying, "You have a choice. You can stay with the firm. You can come with me. Your complete choice." All but one client came with me.

Justin: Wow, today, that would lead to a ton of fee fight lawsuits where you all go--

Bill: No, no, no, it wasn't cool at all. They were mad. They threatened to sue me. I said, "Hey, let's do mediation," went to mediation. I agreed to give them half of my fee at the end of the case. Whatever the fee was, I gave them half. They were like, "Awesome." I tried to take a big deal. Through to my first mediation, we settled $25 million worth of cases. I walked a check over to them for $2.5 million.

Justin: Did you have any idea what the value was in these cases?

Bill: No, they didn't either.

Justin: I read the book Poisoned. That's the seminal book about--

Bill: That tells the story.

Justin: Yes, about that litigation and they didn't-- Jack in the Box didn't take you seriously at all at first, right?

Bill: The great thing about discovery is it's such a fun tool. I remember the breaking point. I don't know if it's in the book, but the breaking point of that litigation was I realized that there was shareholder litigation that was alongside of us. There's all the shareholders of Jack in the Box who sued Jack in the Box for essentially causing this outbreak and making their stock price go down.

I knew that the litigation was going on and they had a protective order, but I didn't. I called up the lawyer and I said, "Hey, could you come over and look at some of my documents?" He was looking at the documents that I'd called in and he goes, "Well, I can't tell you what other documents I have, but I have other documents that you probably-- they're copies of your documents but with handwriting." I moved to intervene in the shareholders' litigation.

Justin: That's great.

Bill: In fact, I argued that motion. The guy on the other side of it was Bruce Clark, who's now my partner. He represented Jack in the Box. The court ruled in my favor and I was able to get access to all those documents. Once I got that, yet everything became clear that Jack in the Box knew about the cooking temperatures, made a conscious decision to ignore it because it interfered with their two-minute turnaround cook time. That timing was more important than the temperature.

Justin: Wow. [chuckles]

Bill: After that, it was just like the cases just settled.

Justin: How many cases did you end up having in that?

Bill: Just a little over a hundred of mix and sizes. Unfortunately, some

San Antonio Daycare Finger Injury with Co-Counsel

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Another San Antonio personal injury lawyer joins us to talk about a case that was joint ventured between his law firm and Hill Law Firm. The case involved the partial amputation of a finger at a day care. A young child lost part of her finger due to a danger on the premises.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin Hill: Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm here with one of my great friends, San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer, Sean Luchnick. He practices law on the north side of San Antonio. He's a young lawyer, but I wouldn't say he's inexperienced or not knowledgeable. He knows what he's doing. To his credit, he is not somebody who's too bold or too brazen to think he's got a lot to learn. He's here with me today. We're talking about some cases we've worked together.

At this point, we've probably worked 10 to 15 cases together, and if you really take it out from when you interned with me, we've probably worked 30 cases together. It's great to have him on to chat some cases. We talked previously about a case, probably the first case that he had a lot of hand in working with me, and we're going to talk about another case involving a daycare injury, and I've talked about it before on this podcast. Let me just ask, it's always great to get a fresh perspective from a young lawyer.

I remember the first time somebody asked me to represent them about their child being injured. I felt this very profound sense of weight and headiness to that. That's a real serious thing. To this day, anytime somebody asks me to represent their child, I still feel a very bizarre responsibility. I feel it in all my cases, but when somebody's putting their child's injury in my hands, it's just a different thing. Did you feel anything different when you were reached out to by that family that we represented together regarding that daycare case? Was there some sort of emotional response that you had that was abnormal or new or different?

Sean Luchnick: Well, first off, I want to say thank you, Justin, because you said I was a great friend of yours. You're a great friend of mine. I appreciate you didn't just say as a good friend or a colleague. That made me feel good inside.

Justin: I mean it.

Sean Luchnick: Onto your question, sometimes it's hard. You always want to try to put yourself in somebody else's perspective. I don't have children. The closest thing I have to a child is a dog.

Justin: You have 10 dogs.

Sean Luchnick: I have about four, but if you count my parents' dogs, you could say I have 10 dogs that I'm family members with. My firstborn, Bear, I care for him greatly. I couldn't imagine how it would feel if there was an injury to Bear and it was because somebody else maybe wasn't doing their job the way they should do. They weren't abiding by their standard of care.

Justin: We don't want to marginalize children with dogs. There's a whole different perspective when you have children, which at some point, you will have children. There's a headiness to somebody calling you and telling you they've got a child who's been injured in a grievous way. We had a child who had part of her finger chopped off. That's a real serious call. It's got to create some sort of emotional response in you. What was your first reaction to that?

Sean Luchnick: My first reaction was someone who was a friend of a friend. Again, I even had to tread lightly myself because we're attorneys but we're also counselors. When they're asking us stuff about the merits of a case, I don't want to, in any way, downplay what happened to their daughter because it is a horrible injury. Again, the photos were incredibly graphic. Even when I was communicating with the client, I wanted to be as compassionate as I could be and really try to let him know I'm there for them and I have their back and I'm on their side, the whole way through on this thing.

Again, like I said, I was trying to see how I would feel if it was my daughter that it happened to, and it is very hard. You have to navigate the waters, and make sure you're saying the correct thing, and make your client feel like you have their back and their interest, and you got to do all you can, especially, whether you're a young lawyer, old lawyer, when you're dealing with somebody's child, you want them to feel like you would represent the case as if it was your own child. I think that's very important. You're not trying to make the client feel that. It's how you feel as well.

Justin: You better feel it if you're doing what we do.

Sean Luchnick: Yes. If you're going to take that fee, you better treat it as if it's your own family member.

Justin: Yes. This is something I describe to people a lot. I say there's plenty of people on the internet who will take your case, there's very few people, internet or not, who will do right by your family and do right by your case. I got to meet with those clients. They were friends of a friend of yours. We worked that case together. I remember when I spoke to him for the first time, both parents wanted to be involved which was fantastic. It's always good to have clients who are very involved. For a lawyer, it should be intimidating because you know you're going to have your feet held to the fire. At the same point, it's what you should feel. It's what you should want to do.

We worked that case. I remember one of the things they first told me was they were very concerned about their daughter's health and how she was and all those things, which you should be. Another thing they told me was that one of the teachers called them and said, "Hey, we knew we had a problem with this door. This door had a problem. The door would close too fast. It didn't have soft closing functions." All of the things that could have prevented this injury did not exist in this case.

You would have heard that story before I heard that story. What triggers in the mind of a lawyer who hasn't worked those types of cases before? I remember all of my firsts as a young lawyer, like all of these things, the first time I got this call and thought, "That's an interesting issue." That was clearly your first daycare injury issue. When you got that case, there was some point you decided to work with me on the case. What was your thought process?

Obviously, you weren't one of these lawyers that says, "I got a boat to buy." You wanted to make sure you get the best result for your client. What was your thought process on, when I was in your shoes, I wanted to make sure I learned and I wanted to make sure I got the best result for my client. What did you go through whenever your client gave you the details of the facts of the injury of the young daughter?

Sean Luchnick: Well, aside from thinking what legal theories we could recover under and how I could help them, I did have to separate myself from the situation, because a little bit about my background, my father's a personal injury attorney. All my exposure to the industry has pretty much been in car accidents, things of that nature. When I saw this, the fact that I was blessed that I got to work with you, you are a very dynamic practice. You take a wide array of cases. You take any type of injury law you do and then some.

I don't know that you've had a daycare case before, you probably have, but I know this was something right up your alley, and I said, "It's in the best interest of this client of mine, and it's in my best interest from a learning perspective, would be to team with you, and we could do this together. I can learn a lot. It's going to help the client out." Like we talked about before, when you're treating a client like they're a family member and you're trying to do something to better their interests, or you're thinking about them solely in every decision you make, I don't really care about the fact that maybe I could represent this person and I could keep the entirety of the fee.

Justin: Sure. "Never trust a lawyer that’s got a boat payment," is what my first boss said.

Sean Luchnick: Absolutely. Thank God, I don't have any boat payments yet. For me, it really wasn't about what the ultimate recovery in my pocket was. It was just about the ultimate recovery for the client. I knew it was a no brainer to team with you, and like I said, it's going to help me out as well. I think when I first worked for you, the first year, I wasn't even trying to get paid. It was all, for me, whether you were gracious and did take care of me, and certainly, you did that.

Justin: You didn't get paid.

Sean Luchnick: You did bonus me a few times.

Justin: Okay, fair enough.

Sean Luchnick: Let's just say, I wasn't looking for that. I knew that it was way more beneficial for me to learn under you, as opposed to getting money in the short term. So it was a no brainer. We teamed up. We met the client. We went through everything. Of course, I learned a lot on the case. Of course, maybe one day I could handle a case like that on my own, be self-sufficient. Either way, I don't really know. I think even you as a lawyer, I think there's just certain cases where it's always better to have another colleague.

Justin: I think the important thing is know your limitations. Just because you're not sure it's a limitation, if you think somebody can provide a better result for your client, then you owe it to your client to get them the better result. On that case, I think we provided the better result working together as a team, as opposed to you, maybe, handling it alone, and I personally work cases sometimes on a team with another lawyer I bring in because I think it's a better result for my client as well.

We worked that case. It was the daycare injury case. She had a finger partially amputated. She had a fantastic recovery. Early on, we filed a lawsuit. Once we got involved, the other side reached out and they wanted to find a result because nobody wants to defend a case against an injured young lady. It's one of the best cases I've worked over the last few years because I got to work with you. Like I said, you're a great friend, but I might downgrade you. I don't know. Well, we're still figuring it out. We're going to have you back on, we're going to talk about some more things.

Sean Luchnick: I would like to say one last thing though before you end it. Because of that, she did have a very quick recovery, which, thank God, it was a lot better than we thought because it was brutal, they couldn't even sew it up because of infection-

Justin: A bad infection yes.

Sean Luchnick: -it was an open wound. I think the fact that teaming with Justin, we got on the case, we worked it very hard from the beginning of the case. It was one of these cases where it was going to go to trial if in a year we filed suit. There was a lot of pressure upfront on the insurance carrier and the daycare to get this case resolved.

That benefited, because if another attorney would have sat on this case and not put in the time and effort to get it done, for a year out, and you look at this girl's finger, and you can't really see anything wrong with it because it healed, the case value diminishes greatly. I think we really helped the client out, not to give us--

Justin: You have to know how to posture, and protect, and prepare your cases the best for the case, and sometimes that means a lot of early pressure, sometimes that means you got to put some time in between because your clients are still treating, right?

Sean Luchnick: Absolutely. It wasn't a case to where I could say, "I'm sure I could've done the case on my own," but it wasn't in the client's interest for me to learn this area of the law to push forward. I knew you were going to get on it right away, and we could team up, and I can learn a lot. It was in the best interest of the client-

Justin: We did.

Sean Luchnick: -and it was a favorable result, I believe. I was happy about it, and I'm glad I teamed up with you.

Justin: We're going to work some more cases.

Sean Luchnick: We are going to work some more cases.

Justin: That does it for this episode. We're going to have Sean back on. He's a dynamic young lawyer who's going to be part of this industry for a long time, and he'll be part of our story, hopefully, for a long time as well.

[music]

[00:11:43] [END OF AUDIO]

Workplace Injury in San Antonio Causes Broken Leg

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Workers are often taken advantage of in the State of Texas. We represented a worker in San Antonio whom was hired to do a job and given very little information regarding the dangers associated with it. The contractor knew the structure was rotten and put him on the roof anyway. His fall when the roof collapsed broke both of his legs and limited his ability to ever work again.

Transcript:

[music]

One of the more common questions we get from new clients or people that are meeting with us, especially in South Texas in San Antonio is whether or not somebody has a claim or a right to file a lawsuit or a claim if they're undocumented. In Texas, they have a claim. If somebody is injured through no fault of their own, the negligent party or the wrongdoer doesn't get to say, "Well, since you're undocumented, you don't have a right to recourse." Luckily, in Texas, that's not the law.

One case I worked on, involved a construction worker, a man in his middle age who was working with a company that did a lot of odd jobs purported to be a roofing company, but when you dig into it, maybe they weren't. They had been hired by a house flipping group to replace the roof on a house that was being flipped. If you know about house flippers, some of them cut corners, and some of them do work as cheap as possible. That's what we were dealing with in this case. They hired a group that didn't know what they were doing.

My client had been called by a friend, a friend who knew his cousin and asked if he could come help on a roofing job. My client was not a skilled worker or a skilled roofer, he was a laborer and he was told to start tearing off shingles. It was probably his third time ever on a roof. While he was tearing off shingles, a portion of the roof collapsed. While the house flipper had a copy of the inspection report showing rotted wood and rot under the roof, they had not shared that information. My client fell off the roof when it collapsed, and he suffered what has to be the worst lower leg injury I've ever seen in my career. A lower leg injury that the treating trauma surgeon said had an outcome over life that was less positive than people with diabetes, AIDS, cancer. It's a lower leg injury that forever will alter his mobility, his ability to work, and his quality of life.

As expected, the house flipping company tried to blame everybody but themselves. At first, they said there was no inspection. Then there was an inspection and they said that it was made available. Then they said it wasn't made available, but they would have made it available if anyone had asked. They also tried to say they didn't do anything to control the manner and method of the work of the roofing company even though all the roofers said that the house flipping owner got on the roof, told them what to do, when to do it, and what order to do it. Specifically for us, he told them what portion to tear off of the roof that collapsed. The part of the roof that collapsed wasn't part of the original structure, but with some add-on patio that somebody had added on, and they'd never done it correctly. That was in the inspection report as well.

After we were able to pull back all these layers of frivolous defenses, we were able to get a full measure of justice for our client who was injured on the job through no fault of his own.

The Frivolous Defense of the Stolen Vehicle

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We hear the craziest defenses to our injury lawsuits. One recurring defense is that a vehicle is stolen and therefore there is no insurance coverage. Almost universally, there is no police report showing that the vehicle was stolen but it is an attempt to avoid liability. We fight these defenses.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: A few fiestas ago, a young couple were driving through an intersection when they were hit broadside by a lady that ran a red light, was speeding and was high on methamphetamines. The crash was so severe that the husband didn't survive the crash. We represented the wife and their children.

In cases like this, there's lots of investigation that has to be performed to make sure that anybody who caused or contributed to the cause of the crash is held responsible. Through our investigation, we were able to find out whose car this driver was driving, where she had been, what she had been doing, where she got her drugs from. We needed all that information to make sure that we had fully and completely investigated the possible cases and any possible liability against any third parties.

We're going to talk about frivolous defenses on this podcast. This is one of those cases where I ran into the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle. Insurance companies can deny coverage if they can show that a vehicle was stolen or is being used without permission. Certain insurance companies are almost infamous for doing this. They'll say that vehicles are stolen anytime. They don't like the facts of the case or anytime they think they can muddy the water.

In this case, they tried to say the vehicle was stolen. What our investigation found was that this was the ex-wife of the owner of the vehicle. What we were able to find out that she had been at his house with him and that she had made a mention of using the vehicle. Now, he said he told her she couldn't and she took the keys. Now, we were able to search to see if any criminal charges had been brought or any police report had been filed.

What it looked like to us based on the documents we found was after the crash happened and they found out about the crash, then they decided they were going to file a police report. Whether they were instructed to by their insurance company or not, we don't know. What we do know is they denied our clients any level of justice for a long time, trying to ride out this frivolous defense. In the end, they were able to delay a settlement in this case using this made up theory.

We were able to figure out that this defense was frivolous. It was being manufactured as a way to deny coverage. As we continue to push the case, something happened on their end. Most likely they were looking at a trial date, and they finally agreed to settle the case for the full policy limits.

This is a great example of the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle that insurance companies like to use. Almost never is there a police report to corroborate the idea that a vehicle was stolen. However, that doesn't stop insurance companies from using this frivolous defense to try to deny justice or delay justice.

[music]

I-35 Rear-Ender Car Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We represented a young man who was rear-ended at a high rate of speed by a distracted driver on I-35 in San Antonio. The driver was going approximately 60 miles per hour when she hit our client. Luckily, he was able to walk away from the crash with injuries that would not keep him from doing his job or walking.

Transcript:

[music]

The most common cases we handle, just because the volume of these cases is the highest, are car crashes. Car crash cases in San Antonio make up the bulk of most personal injury lawyers work. A lot of people roll their eyes at this or scoff at this, but the reality is that insurance companies have made it necessary to hire a lawyer and oftentimes file a lawsuit just to get a fair settlement on what is an uncomplicated car crash case. While there's lots of discussion over frivolous lawyers and frivolous lawsuits, there's very little discussion over frivolous defenses. Defenses made out of whole cloth, as a way to deny, delay and defend a claim.

Insurance companies only get paid by the money they hold on to or the money they don't pay out. They don't make money by paying out claims. This makes me think of a recent case we just settled, in which I represented a young engineer going to Austin to visit his girlfriend. It wasn't yet rush hour, but it was probably about 3:45. I-35 headed north towards Austin around the Windcrest area. If anybody's been there, they know that traffic slows and speeds up. Sometimes it stops.

My client's following the law, following the rules, traffic stops, he stops. About two seconds later, he's hit by a vehicle going about 60 miles an hour. What that lady was doing, we don't know, but she wasn't paying attention and she's lucky she didn't kill him. Those kind of speeds can kill, or traumatically injure everyday people. Our client got very lucky. While he was injured, he didn't have a life-time debilitating injury that he would never be able to recover from. He has a back injury that will be with him the rest of his life, but he's gonna be able to work and he has a concussion that mostly resolved, but he hasn't lost his ability to do his job as an engineer.

I tell people about cases like this and they cannot believe that it didn't settle, but it didn't. The case got filed, the defendants moved that case to federal court, they required depositions, discovery, they dug into my client's past medical history. They were looking for any way to deny his claim. That's what insurance companies do. In the end, the insurance company did the right thing but they made sure that plaintiff, my client, felt stress, felt pressure, felt like he had done something wrong.

These are the cases we handle day to day. Car crash cases are not easy cases anymore. They were at some point in history out here, but insurance companies make their money by denying these cases. We continue to represent car crash victims because they are some of the most preyed upon of injured people, because insurance companies think they can convince juries that it's made up or frivolous and in doing so, they'll pull out all the stops.

Q&A with San Antonio Employment Lawyer Lawrence Morales II

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Lawrence Morales has worked in the area of employment litigation and law since he got out of law school. He has defended employers but now spends most of his time standing up to workers whom were treated poorly in violation of the laws protecting workers. He came on the podcast to discuss the type of work that he does.

Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm with Lawrence Morales, who's a local employment lawyer who I went to law school with.

Hi, Lawrence.

Lawrence Morales: Hi, Justin.

Justin: We've done a Q&A series of local lawyers, what they do, why they're into what they do. Lawrence and I have worked a handful of cases together. We have a couple of cases going on right now. I asked Lawrence to come on, talk about what he does, who he is. Then we're also going to have a separate episode talking about some stuff we're both going to get into together.

Lawrence, you are mostly an employment lawyer from the plaintiff's side. At least you do other things, but from the plaintiff's side, you do employment work. What is your interest in employment work? Why did you get into that? What's your passion?

Lawrence: I've been doing labor employment now for about 15 years. My passion is really helping people navigate through this complicated scheme. Right or wrong, people identify themselves with what they do for work, and the realities that they spend more time at work than oftentimes they spend with their family. Sometimes there's a disruption in that. Maybe something they caused or maybe something that they didn't cause. When there's that disruption, they need help. Fortunately, I've been able to do that. The other lawyers at my firm, including you, when you help us on certain cases, have been able to help people when there's that type of disruption at work.

Justin: I've heard some of the politicians talk about the dignity of work, and I've always really appreciated that idea that our identity and our reason we get out of bed in the morning, is often tied to our professions. Is there anything in your backstory or your history that made you really have a passion for workers, or did you just get into it as a lawyer and realize this is something that really motivates me?

Lawrence: I think both. Some of my family, growing up, had bouts where they unfortunately didn't have work. As a child, I saw the effect that that had on them. I recently read a study that the number one way to get depressed is to stop working. If you want to stay engaged, if you want to stay happy, if you want to live a longer life, frankly, don't retire because the schedule, the purpose of going to work, interacting with people, those social interactions, is important. We're there to help if there's a problem with that.

Justin: We said that in our own household right now with what's going on with COVID, just being stuck in your home really, it affects your mood. I'm sure for a lot of workers going to a work environment that is not friendly, or welcoming also starts to affect them. You and I have worked cases involving hostile work environment, situations or environments where workers are made to feel bad or made to feel unwelcomed due to things that are outside their control, race, sex, religious identity, other things like that. What are the types of cases you work on in the employment context?

Lawrence: Sure. Anytime there's a dispute between an employee and an employer, we can get involved. On a typical week, we'll get 50 calls from potential clients. The vast majority of those will be tied to terminations, people saying they were terminated for 'unlawful or wrongful reasons'. Sometimes race, sometimes gender, more recently, sexual orientation, gender identity. On top of that, we have wage theft, when people aren't paid properly for the hours that they work. There can also be violations of leave laws, like the Family Medical Leave Act, not giving people enough notice when you terminate them, that type of thing. I would say the bulk of the actual work that we do, are what we call wage an hour, employers not paying their employees properly. Then also some type of discrimination related to any one of the protected classes.

Justin: Wage an hour oftentimes relates to, I think in the classic context, are people that aren't paid overtime because the employers don't count something that's required on their job to be part of their job. For example, I worked on one as a summer associate at a firm where there time putting on equipment didn't count. When you put in a consideration of how much time it took to put it on their equipment, they were working overtime and not being paid for it. What are the more common wage and hour cases or the scenarios that lead to those that you think are still viable cases out there?

Lawrence: The ones that you are referring to are called donning and doffing cases, that it takes you 15 minutes to put on your uniform or something, and that should be compensable time. Frankly, in San Antonio, we don't have a lot of manufacturing, and we don't see a lot of those cases. The bulk of the wage an hour cases that we see are one of two things. One, where employers who want to save employment costs and they misclassify people's independent contractors. Importantly, if you're designated as an independent contractor, most of the employment laws don't apply to you. That means the discrimination laws don't apply to you, you don't have to pay overtime, and there can be this incentive for employers to misclassify people as independent contractors.

The other side of that, the second point of wage and hour cases we see, are where people are basically instructed not to bill all of the hours that they work. We don't have money in our budget to pay you for 50 hours. Therefore we want you to clock out at 5:00, but we need you to stay here until 7:00. As a result, they're working off the clock. Those are the two ones we see most commonly.

Justin: The second one seems like the much more easy case to prove up and figure out what the compensable damages are.

Lawrence: It is, but the problem is, there's always going to be a fight about how many hours people work. If I asked you how many hours you work, you could easily say a hundred hours, but if we actually went through and took a surveillance of it, it might be 70 or 80. There's this natural inclination to overstate.

Justin: I'm glad you still think that I'm still a hard worker in your scenario, and I appreciate that.

Lawrence: Really take 20 to 30 hours for you, but whoever you are, there's this exaggeration of hours naturally. Sometimes actually proving that up. We had a case where, for example, we had, I think, 80 or 90 people, and just trying to figure out logistically, how do we go to trial and prove to a jury, where they're not falling asleep, how many hours, 80 or 90 people worked, and it can be complicated. The case got resolved before we had to actually go to trial. That can be one of the complicated factors.

Justin: Was the judge going to give you the four months of trial time that you needed?

Lawrence: No. There's all kinds of sampling and techniques you can go through to try to get there. Fortunately, the law favors. I don't want to get too legalistic here, but it would be too easy for employers to say, unless you can tell me how many hours you worked on every single day that you worked here, you can't prove your case. That would be too easy. It's their obligation to record the hours that they actually work. The law basically says that we're going to allow people to provide a reasonable and just estimate. Then the employer has the obligation to basically come in and say, no, that's not really right. Fortunately, there is a procedure within the law to help fill that problem.

Justin: You also mentioned on the independent contractor and the misclassification, that seems a much more intense focused analysis of the facts. What are you looking for in determining whether or not somebody is misclassified? If we have a listener who's saying, "I think I'm misclassified. I don't get overtime." What are some of the things they should consider before they call a lawyer?

Lawrence: One question is going to be, how many hours are you working? Are you working more than 40 hours a week? Because if you're not working more than 40 hours a week, frankly, there's probably not going to be a wage an hour wage and overtime case. The second question is, how much control does your employer exercise over you? The more control, the more likely that you're an employee, but the ultimate question is, are you in business for yourself, or are you working for somebody else? Because if you're in business for yourself, then you likely are independent contractors. When somebody hires me to be their lawyer, chances are, they don't tell me how to do my work or when I have to do it, they just tell me to get the job done. Very little control. I'm in business for myself, I'm an independent contractor.

Justin: That's a similar analysis as we run into from a personal injury standpoint, sometimes where we're saying, well, you call him an independent contractor, but you're telling him what to do and the method of means of finishing that job. He's really an employee. It's a similar analysis. From a discrimination standpoint, we're going to spend a little bit more time talking about this on another episode, as it relates to the recent Supreme court ruling on LGBTQ status, and whether they can be discriminated against in a discrimination context of what makes a viable case, what are you looking for, what are the facts that support one of those cases?

Lawrence: I will say these are the toughest cases. Because of the 50 people that call every week, I have to say, unfortunately, the law in Texas is at will employment. That means you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason, as long as it's not an unlawful reason. The law spells out quite clearly, what are unlawful reasons. We need evidence that it is one of those types of reasons, race, age, national origin, now sexual orientation, sexual or gender identity.

One of the things that we're looking at, frankly, is what is your evidence? Tell me, prove to me that the reason why you were treated differently is one of those types of things. Naturally now we see a lot more recordings. People recording conversations, where perhaps pejorative statements are made. That's great evidence to show that there's some type of animus towards a protected class. Frankly, jurors are expecting to see some type of direct evidence. The more of that that we see, the more likely we feel like we can connect the dots between a bad employment decision and a protected class.

Justin: I had this question the other day. Can an employer fire someone for utilizing their FMLA leave?

Lawrence: No, absolutely not. The FMLA allows up to 12 weeks of unprotected leave for certain serious health conditions, and you cannot be retaliated for doing that. Generally, if you are retaliated against, even for asking about FMLA, and whether you qualify under those circumstances, that generally is a protected complaint that could provide a cause of action.

Justin: The last thing I want you to hit is, you and I have worked on some warn act cases, worker adjustment, notification, whatever. The big picture is that it's a mass layoff of multiple employees per location, and they have to either give them 60 days pay or--

Lawrence: 60 days notice.

Justin: Yes. Those cases are really difficult because oftentimes those employers are going bankrupt. What are the general elements of that type of claim, and what do you look for when you get those phone calls?

Lawrence: Yes. It's a very mathematical statute. The first question is, does the employer have more than 100 employees? If they have more than 100 employees, under certain circumstances, if enough people are fired, they have to be provided 60 days notice. I would say looking at those numbers, do you satisfy all the numbers? If the answer is yes, then the question is going to be, is there some employer that can frankly cover the costs related to that? Because if somebody's going into bankruptcy or becoming insolvent, sometimes even if there is a violation, it might be hard to collect.

Justin: With COVID going on, is there any special considerations for employees or employers as it relates to what they should be doing? If you're an employer or employees should know that their employers can't do during this time?

Lawrence: I will say there are so many different laws that have been impacted by COVID. On the one hand, we see increased animosity towards Asian-Americans as a result of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, there could be discrimination cases based on race and national origin there. On top of that, there's all types of leave and disability questions that come up. I will say, if I'm, and I represent employers too and counseling them as well, that is going to be the most thorny issue, in that if you have somebody that has a disability and they request an accommodation related to COVID, for example, they have some disability and they want to work from home because of that disability under the ADA, you have an obligation to provide reasonable accommodations. It's going to trigger a lot of those questions, not to mention that Congress and President Trump signed in a new law, the family first coronavirus response Act that provides paid leave for the first time to certain individuals related to COVID. It does it for small employers, that is employers that have 500 employees or less, which is complicated, and frankly, the department of labor and everybody's still trying to figure it out. We're getting a lot of calls about that too.

Justin: If somebody is one of these communities that's compromised, either you're elderly or you have some immuno-compromised condition, do they have a basis to say that they fall under the ADA for an accommodation to not go into a workplace where multiple people are there?

Lawrence: Maybe. I think age alone probably wouldn't be enough, but if you had some health condition that made you more susceptible to getting COVID, and I think arguably you could easily say, look, I'm entitled to some accommodation. That might be anywhere from PPE being issued to you at the office, to maybe glass or some type of plexi gas being placed around your work area, to working from home reduced hours. It just depends on the circumstances.

Justin: Okay, Lawrence, if people want to learn more about you and your father and your sister and your wife, you'll all work together. I think that's great. You have a family environment like that. How can they learn more about your law firm?

Justin: The moralesfirm.com.

Lawrence: Okay. There's multiple Morales firms, you and I joked about this at some point. moralesfirm.com. Facebook, is it The Morales Firm?

Justin: That's right. The moralesfirm.com, and Facebook.

Lawrence: We're going to do another episode. We're going to talk a lot about the LGBTQ case that came out where they said that this discrimination on that basis is discrimination on the basis of sex. Therefore, those are protected classes of people. Thanks for doing this. We'll have you back on the next one, which we're going to record right after this one.

Justin: Thank you.

[00:14:32] [END OF AUDIO]

Most Common OSHA Violations: Ladder Safety

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 19 Jun 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Ladder safety is a very important issue at worksites and workplaces. When people fall from ladders they can suffer very serious and even fatal injuries. OSHA investigates falls and ladder injuries and will sanction companies that violate OSHA regulations.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Lately, we've been discussing worker safety a lot on Hill Law Firm Cases Podcast. Specifically, we've been talking about the most common violations and most common OSHA citations and what they relate to. We've handled a lot of worker safety cases, and a lot of cases involving on-the-job or work site injuries. One case type that we see consistently involves ladder safety. For whatever reason, either due to height or due to the operation, or for whatever reason, in my career I have seen, represented, and even sometimes told people that they didn't have a case, cases involving and arising out of injuries and falls from ladders.

One particular case I looked at recently involved a man who was doing work at a beach house in preparation for a storm coming in. While he was working, putting up boards on the windows, the ladder fell out from under him. His injuries included two crushed heels, a broken leg, and a broken ankle. That's one thing about ladder cases is every time I've seen a ladder injury, the people that have been injured have always suffered very serious, long-term complicated injuries. I've seen leg injuries. I've seen injuries to arms. We've represented a man who suffered a brain injury. At my previous firm, I worked on a case in which somebody was paralyzed as a result of a ladder fall.

All this to say that ladder safety is of utmost importance, whether it's on-the-job site or in your home. The reason for that is that a fall from height, we know can cause debilitating serious injuries and even fatalities. We've been talking about OSHA violations and OSHA citations, and one of the commonly cited set of regulations that employers are cited for failing to follow revolves around ladder safety. OSHA has a set of standards and regulations and rules that employers and employees are supposed to follow when they're on-the-job site. OSHA's regulations for ladder safety are outlined for whether it be a step ladder to a type of ladder used in orchards. Very specific regulations about all types of ladder usage.

On top of that, for all of our listeners, OSHA puts out an OSHA quick card on portable ladder safety. Why this is important is because a lot of people use ladders at their homes, not only at their job sites, but at their homes, their businesses that they may own, or just in their day-to-day operation they'll use ladders to accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished. Because of that, normal people who are not laborers or not people that work on ladders every day are often put in positions where they could fall and injure themselves severely as a result of using a ladder.

I recommend anybody that's going to be using a ladder to review the OSHA quick card on portable ladder safety, because it outlines and details a lot of things that can be helpful for everybody. It goes through a few things, including read all the labels and markings and follow them to the extent that they're on the ladder, and explain how you should use it. Another thing that people oftentimes forget is, be careful where your ladders going because if there's an electrical line and you have an aluminum ladder, that could lead to an electrocution. You should always inspect your ladder and make sure there's no damage to it.

Whether that damage be a locking mechanism that doesn't work, a bent portion, a broken rung, or any other part of your ladder that doesn't work or is broken, you should not use that ladder. You should always have three points of contact on the ladder when you're climbing it. For example, two feet and one arm, or vice versa, two arms and one foot. You should make sure your ladder is not slippery, that it doesn't have any oil or water on it to where you could slip. Then you need to make sure that your shoes have a lot of grip to them. You don't want to move the ladder while you're on it. Don't try to shift it while you're on it. Don't lean far away from it while you're using it.

Don't exceed the maximum weight limit of the ladder. If there are locks on the ladder, make sure that they're locked. You wanted to make sure that it's placed on a even surface. If there is only one point of contact with the ladder, like a lean-to a ladder, you want to make sure that it is properly placed on the ground where it cannot slide or slip out from under. There's a lot of great useful information on OSHA's website regarding all type of workplace safety. If you're using a ladder in your day-to-day life, at your home, at your job, or if you're working with somebody who's using a ladder, you should share this information with them.

Ladder safety is very important. Ladder safety is very important because falls from ladders at heights can lead to very serious debilitating or even fatal injuries. We'll continue to outline worker safety on Hill Law Firm Cases. In the meantime, make sure to reference the OSHA safety card if you plan to use a ladder in your own day-to-day life.

[music]

[00:06:32] [END OF AUDIO]

LGBTQ Discrimination Law Discussion

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Recently, a monumental Supreme Court decision clarified that employees cannot be fired or discriminated against due to their LGBTQ status. Justin Hill and Lawrence Morales, both of San Antonio, have handled many cases involving employees that have suffered discrimination.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed; however, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. On Monday, June 15th, 2020, the US Supreme Court came out with an opinion Bostock versus Clayton County monumental decision. I'm here with Lawrence Morales, who's one of the best, and in my opinion, the best employment lawyer in town for plaintiffs, or probably a business too, but they're not normally the people I represent. For people that have been wronged on the job and need some answers, Lawrence is the guy to go to. He's the guy I personally go to. I asked him to be on the show today to talk about the Bostock versus Clayton County opinion. Him and I are going to do some cases and represent some people who are going to fall under these new protections. Lawrence, what happened?

Lawrence Morales: On Monday, there was a landmark decision that basically extends protection under one of our discrimination laws to about one and a half million more Texans than previously existed. Let me back up and tell you a little bit about the origins of this law. The law is the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is the law that basically bars discrimination and has barred discrimination against race, national origin, sex, color, for the last 40 years. A big question has been whether people who are transgender, sexual orientation, and gender identity are protected classes under that law.

By way of background, we'll get a lot of calls sometimes and people will say, "I got fired because I'm a homosexual. Can I bring a claim?" Unfortunately, until Monday, the answer to that question was, "It depends on where you live." There were 29 states in the United States that basically did not have any state law protection for gender identity or sexual orientation, and Texas was one of them.

We had to say, "Sorry, go to the EEOC, file a charge of discrimination. This is an issue that's going up to the Supreme Court, and hopefully, it'll be decided in your favor." Thankfully, on Monday, that day finally came, and now it is safe to say that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes under Title VII.

Justin: I love the fact that you pointed out 1.5 million Texans are going to fall under this new law or this new decision, which means 1.5 million Texans have additional protections on the job by a law that was passed by a Texan and LBJ.

Lawrence: That's right. It was signed into law by LBJ. That's exactly right. The good way to describe it was after the 2015 same-sex opinion, you could get married on Monday morning to somebody of your same sex, but then you can get fired that afternoon because you got married to somebody in your same sex. On Monday that changed. Do you want me to tell you the story about how ironically we have a segregationist to thank for the law that came or the decision that came out on Monday?

Justin: Yes.

Lawrence: Okay. The story is about a guy named Howard Smith--

Justin: I don't get a lot of questions, so I appreciated that question.

Lawrence: I'm trying to help. Howard was a United States Congressman from Virginia for about 30 years between the 1930s and the 1960s. Among other things, he was an unapologetic segregationist. He opposed racial integration. At the time, in the early 1960s, there was a lot of movement with black rights. Martin Luther King was making great strides in trying to push for an Equal Rights Amendment. Title VII was this law that was on the table that would have protected race, national origin, and color.

Howard Smith was essentially the Rules Committee Chair for the US House of Representatives at this time. He had basically vowed to delay the passage of this law and to delay the vote on this law because they didn't want to get passed because of the protections concerning race discrimination.

Because the opponents to that view wanted to use some obscure law in the House of Representatives, he was forced to bring it to a vote. Two days before the vote was basically taken, he decided to add sex into the law. Now it would read; race, color, national origin, and sex. Now, keep in mind that at this time, I think that there were 12 women serving in the House of Representatives out of 435. There were only two people serving in the Senate. Although there's a debate about this, a lot of people believe that the reason why Congressman Smith put that into the law was to be a poison pill because he thought that it would be so repulsive because at the time actually, gender equality was more radical and more fanciful than race [crosstalk]

Justin: That was before the push for the ERA Amendment which Phyllis Schlafly murdered.

Lawrence: Right around that time. If that was Congressman Smith's intention, it backfired because it passed the House of Representatives, I think 168 to 133. It passed the Senate, and our Texas president, LBJ signed it into law in July of 1961.

Justin: Some poetic justice.

Lawrence: It is some poetic justice.

Justin: What does it mean practically, or do we even know what it means practically in terms of who in the LGBTQ community is going to be part of the protected group? Does somebody who is transgender, do they fall into that? Do you have to be homosexual to fall under? Which members of this new group actually got protections and which are still up in the air?

Lawrence: Justice Gorsuch basically says that sexual orientation in all forms and gender identity in all forms are going to be protected under the term sex.

Justin: Oh, wow. Okay.

Lawrence: I guess I will say it's a 20-page opinion, and I will say it's worth a read.

Justin: It's pretty short.

Lawrence: Yes. I will say-

Justin: For the Supreme Court.

Lawrence: -there's 40 pages of dissent from Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Alito, you can skip that portion, but the main portion of it basically says that if you take a homosexual person, a man who likes a man, if you have a problem with that, is a problem because if a woman likes a man, you wouldn't have a problem with that. The only difference there is the fact that one person is a man and one person is a woman, and that is based on sex. As a result of that, that violates Title VII. As regard to gender identity, if now you basically identify being with a man and that departs from how the gender that you were-

Justin: Born with.

Lawrence: -classified, born with. If that's offensive to you, it wouldn't be offensive to you if it was consistent with the gender that you were born with. As a result, that is based on sex. As a result, any form of sexual orientation, any form of gender identity is now protected as sex under Title VII.

Justin: What does this mean practically for people, say they were fired two years ago, and their employer said, "You're gay. I'm firing you because you're gay. Good luck suing me." Do they have any recourse?

Lawrence: Unfortunately, the answer is, in the two-year example, probably not. I'm actually going to read if you don't mind, there's a very nice way that Justice Gorsuch says this. He says, "We can't deny today's holding that employers are prohibited from firing employees on the basis of homosexuality, or transgender status is an elephant. This elephant has never been hidden in a mouse hole. It has been standing before us all along." What he's basically saying is that the term sex in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is broad enough now and had been broad enough since the beginning to include transgender and sexual orientation. The problem is that under the EEOC laws, you have 300 days from the date of discrimination in Texas to bring a charge of discrimination. If you have been discriminated against based on your sexual orientation or your gender identity within the last 300 days, call a lawyer, file a charge of discrimination, because that 300 days is an unforgiving deadline.

Justin: What if somebody did that, whatever, 2, 5, 10 years ago, they went through the EEOC process, the EEOC said, "Hey, we don't cover your gender status or the fact that you're a homosexual." Do they have any recourse or do the fact that the EEOC got it wrong so long ago close their options?

Lawrence: That's a good question. Unfortunately, I don't know. I will say we had been recommending for a long time for people to file a charge of the discrimination, even though it was uncertain whether they were protected under the law. All of those people that have charges in the queue, those people are fine, whether people from years ago who didn't bring a claim, because it wasn't recognized at that time, whether they have some cause of action. I just don't know the answer. I hope they do, but my gut tells me that they may not. Justin: Clarity from the courts is probably coming at some point.

Lawrence: Yes. There's going to be a lot of questions. There's a lot of issues that are raised from opponents of this particular ruling about the effects of it, what effect it's going to have on bathrooms, whether employers are required to provide gender neutral bathrooms or locker rooms or that kind of thing. Justice Gorsuch says, okay, those are issues that we're going to have to decide as they come up. Right now, unequivocally, it's a violation to fire somebody merely because they're gay or transgender.

Justin: For any listeners who are out there and they say, "Look, a 100 days ago, I had an adverse employment decision that was made against me. I'm pretty sure it was because I identified different. Then my boss thinks is appropriate." What are their avenues? What should they expect in terms of process?

Lawrence: In order for you to bring a lawsuit based on gender discrimination or sex discrimination, you first have to file a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They can call a lawyer, somebody like me or you, to help file that type of charge, or frankly, they could just go to the EEOC's website and file a charge.

There are ways to expedite the charging process and sometimes lawyers can help with that. I would say, if you think you're close to that deadline, call somebody fast because once that 300 days passes, then you basically lose that protection. I will say, not to be technical, if there's anybody listening outside of Texas, there is a possibility that you can only get 180 days. It just depends on whether your state law has a different type of law protecting sex discrimination.

Justin: That's a good point. This is not legal advice for anybody who's listening. This is generally the law as we know it. In Texas, they call us, they call you, and they say, I need to file a charge of discrimination. Why do they need a lawyer? What is the process? Why can't they go in front of a judge and jury? What should they expect?

Lawrence: We file a charge of discrimination. The EEOC basically has six months to investigate whether there is in fact discrimination. Frankly, the EEOC is inundated with all types of claims and it's hard for them to process those investigations within six months. Very frequently after the six months, we'll actually request what we call a right to sue letter. That's the document that we need to actually file a lawsuit in court.

If the EEOC does complete their investigation and conclude that there is discrimination, oftentimes they'll work with the lawyers to try to help resolve the case so that it can be completed that administrative stage. I will say 99% of the cases, we get that right to sue letter, and we have to file a lawsuit within 90 days.

Justin: Somebody who gets their right to sue letter, you're their lawyer. They've got the best team on the planet to handle this case. They know they were fired for reasons that they're not allowed to be fired for. What can they expect in terms of damages? What is available to them?

Lawrence: You're going to have lost wage damages. Basically, if you were terminated, what would you have earned had you not been terminated, that is going to be mitigated or essentially reduced by any amount of money that you earned or should have earned after the termination. You're also entitled to emotional distress, mental anguish damages, punitive damages, that can be kept depending on the size of your employer, but it could be up to $300,000 depending on the size of your employer for mental anguish. In addition, you get attorney's fees if you're successful in the case.

Justin: All right. Have you had any of these cases come in just yet since the opinion came out?

Lawrence: Not since the opinion came out, but we expect with 1.5 million more protected folks that hopefully we get some of those calls.

Justin: Is there anything else about this opinion or this basically not new area of the law, but broadened area of the law that you think our listeners should know?

Lawrence: I think that other than that, the opinion is inspiring in a sense. It really Justice Gorsuch went I think out of his way to explain how fundamental and basic this ruling is. If you're somebody in the LGBT community, read it. It will make you feel good because it very persuasively summarizes the legal arguments as to why you're entitled to protection.

Justin: From a judge, for people that don't pay attention to this, whoever is listening to this; from a judge who everyone that is an ally or advocate of the LGBTQ community thought was going to be bad for them. He's the one that wrote this opinion, and I'm not going to sit here and say, he's a big ally of anybody that needs help from the court system, but in this instance, that's a big reason that this opinion so important is that he wrote it.

Lawrence: He's Trump's first appointee to the Supreme Court, which was a touchy subject because we know that Merrick Garland was nominated by President Obama, never got a hearing in front of the United States Senate. I'll say that he does it based on his interpretation of the words in the statute, but it is a matter of fact, a summary of how simple this is, and that you were being treated differently simply because of sex and it needs to stop.

Justin: All right. For our listeners, Lawrence and I, we plan on working these cases together. Anybody who's been discriminated against or fired due to gender identity or sexual orientation can call my law firm at 210-960-3939, or jahlawfirm.com, or they can reach out to Lawrence's firm. What's the contact info?

Lawrence: 210-225-0811, or www.themoralesfirm.com.

Justin: We might not have the answer you want, but we'll be able to walk you through your options. It's very rare that there is a new civil rights forefront in America anymore. This seems to be a new avenue where people that have been treated poorly for things that are outside of their control are finally getting rights that have not been available to them for a long time.

Lawrence: Let me say one thing, is that in addition to losing your job because of sexual orientation or gender identity, if you've been subjected to a hostile work environment because of those things, that's now covered, too.

Justin: What does that mean?

Lawrence: For example, sexual harassment, like for a long time, women and men sometimes as well, for example, may be subjected to a hostile work environment, whether it's sexual advances or crude jokes, or all types of pejorative statements and comments made to being a woman. Now if you've been harassed or ridiculed because of your gender identity or your sexual orientation, then there is a hostile work environment claim under Title VII for you, because that is based on sex.

Justin: That's an important point because I bet there's a lot more of that happening out there than people losing their jobs because their bosses, they don't like who you love.

Lawrence: That's fair. Even jokes, every day where people are making fun of you, making comments, who knows. That would be covered if it crosses the line. Then we can obviously talk about that some other time.

Justin: As this flushes out, Lawrence, you're going to come back on, we're going to talk about what we're working on. We're going to get some of these cases. We're going to work on some of these cases together, and we'll update listeners and update your firm, my firm, our clients, on what we're working on and how this works out, because there's still a lot of unknowns, I think it's fair to say.

Lawrence: No doubt.

Justin: All right. We'll have you back on. We'll catch up on where this law is going now, but this is a new area or a broadened area of the law. Thank you for being on, and we'll talk to you soon.

Lawrence: Thank you.

[00:17:50] [END OF AUDIO]

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in Lawsuit Screening

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

One of the most important parts of our jobs is to make sure that we understand our client's case and injuries. Mild traumatic brain injuries or concussions are often overlooked and misunderstood. In injury cases, they require a special amount of expertise to properly evaluate and present. At Hill Law Firm, we make sure to discuss concussions with our personal injury clients when we meet to make sure they do not ignore symptoms they may have.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin: When I started practicing law, there wasn't much attention or import given to concussions. Back then, people would say that you rang your bell or that you just banged your head too hard. What happened with the NFL brought this issue and the seriousness of concussions to the forefront of everybody's minds. All of a sudden, people that had downplayed concussions were able to see the actual effects that concussions had on people in the near term and the long term.

This also changed the way attorneys and insurance companies approached and addressed concussions. Attorneys used to ignore, if not downplay, the severity of a concussion in a case. Insurance companies used to give it little or no weight in evaluating the claim. That's changed.

One thing we do with all of our cases as they come in, is we make sure to screen our clients for issues related to concussions and whether they suffered one. We're not medical providers and we can't provide medical advice, but one thing we make sure to do is tell our clients to give their doctors a complete and accurate picture of any symptoms they've suffered following their crash, or whatever incident led to their head injury.

We walk through a screener with our clients and it's amazing how many times when you actually start asking them the questions, they recognize that they're suffering something they did not know they were. We asked them questions about whether or not they had a loss of consciousness or an alteration of consciousness following the crash. Were they knocked out? A lot of times, people say they weren't knocked out and then admit there's a long period of time they just don't remember.

We then walk through symptoms, headaches, ringing in the ears, light, sound sensitivity, memory issues, vision issues, dizziness, nausea, difficulty concentrating, balance issues, sleep problems. There's a whole litany of symptoms that can arise from a concussion. It's important that our clients tell their doctors all of the symptoms they're suffering if any following a crash. The only way a doctor can properly provide medical advice and treatment is with a complete picture of what's going on.

More lawyers are doing it now than they were before, but we take special interest and pride in how much attention we give to our clients, and how we ensure that we make sure that every issue our client is dealing with is properly investigated. The only way we know what our client's medical picture is going to be, is if they go to all their doctor's appointments and listen to their doctor's advice. We encourage our clients to go to all their doctor appointment visits and follow their recommendations.

After that, we're able to get a full picture of our clients' injuries and any long-lasting effects or medical needs they may have. Mild traumatic brain injuries are one of these areas that we take special interest in because it's one area that a lot of lawyers ignore and it's an area that a lot of clients attempt to ignore. Nobody wants to admit they're having issues with their head or their brain or concentration or memory.

One thing that we're sure of is that when we meet with a new client, that we walk through every possible issue that we can with them to make sure that they're doing everything in their power to not give the insurance company an excuse to deny their claim or delay their claim.

[music]

Arm Injury Case Harmed by Social Media

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We represented a nice lady injured when she fell in a store in San Antonio after some construction equipment was left bolted in the walkway. Her injury was on video, it was not her fault, and she had a serious injury. However, her use of social media created problems for her case that we did not anticipate.

Transcript:

[music]

My clients are always shocked when I tell them to prepare that the insurance company on the other side will probably hire somebody to perform surveillance on them. Now, this doesn't happen all the time or really even half the time, but it happens more than you would think. Not only will they hire private investigators to follow people around, video them, take pictures of them, they'll also hire companies to do online surveillance where they will dig into their social media. The goal of the insurance company in these situations is to muddy the water enough, that they can make that plaintiff scared to go to trial.

Rarely but sometimes, social media has done enough damage to a case that it has affected the value and the likelihood that you could win a trial. One such example involved a client I represented who had a very serious arm injury. Her arm injury was so severe, she required surgery, months of rehabilitation, and she had very limited use of her arm after her injury.

In the deposition, the defense lawyer asked her questions about what she could do with her arm and she told him as honestly as she could, what she could do with her arm at that time. However, when we got to mediation, they presented us with pictures and videos of our client doing more with her arm than she could at the time of her deposition.

Now, they took the position that she was lying in her deposition, and our client said she just was slowly getting better and was able to do more with her arm. Now, this client wasn't dishonest, but it shows you the links the insurance company will go to try to say that a personal injury victim is dishonest and making things up.

Now, this lady was injured through no fault of her own. Her surgery and rehabilitation and her mounting medical bills are not her fault, but in mediation, the insurance company and defense attorney spent the majority of their time trying to say she was a liar. My client was very scared of going in front of a jury because she was worried they would think she was dishonest. Her case resolved that day, even though I didn't think it was the best choice for her. At the end of the day, the client has the decision whether or not to settle their case. She was worried about what happened at trial with that social media stuff coming in front of a jury.

It just reminds me and it's a story I tell all my new clients to not put anything on social media, to assume that the defense attorneys and insurance companies are going to look at all your social media and try to find a way to say that it represents something that you say doesn't exist. Whether to say that you're more injured or less injured, or to say that you look happy when you say you deal with depression on occasion. Insurance companies will do anything they can to delay and deny claims. When it comes to social media in a case, I tell all my clients, just put it on hold until after your case results.

[music]

[00:04:02] [END OF AUDIO]

Sexual Assault of a Minor Expert Psychologist

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We have handled many sexual assault cases. Sometimes, those cases require special experts to evaluate the harm done to the victim and what type of treatment would be needed. In this expired, we discuss with a treating clinical psychologist about the role of experts in sexual assault cases.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: In about 2013, me and my law firm were hired to represent the mother of a young lady who was assaulted whenever she was just an infant. We were representing her because under the laws in Texas you can't represent a minor. What we were trying to do is establish that the family that allowed this to happen were partly responsible. The laws in Texas are such that, typically, somebody can't be held responsible if they're not the bad actor, or they didn't know the bad actions were going on. What we were able to establish in the case was that not only were they also bad actors, but they had plenty of reason to believe what was happening in their house was a criminal act and something they could have protected against.

In that case, it presented a lot of difficult damage issues that we had to work out. We had to be able to describe how a trauma at a young age could affect a young lady as she grew up. In that case we hired a psychologist, Dr. Casey Howard, to help us out. We hired her to be an independent voice to evaluate and determine whether or not this young lady was suffering any ill effects or damages as she grew older Dr. Howard's joined us here today.

Dr. Howard, would you walk through the steps that you went through in making your independent evaluation on whether or not this young lady was suffering any effects of trauma?

Dr. Casey Howard: Absolutely. I first met with the client, we'll call her Jane Doe, and got an idea of how she's functioning today, the issue she was having at school, the issue she was having at home, and what had basically been going on with her. Then I also met with mother independently and talked about mother's view of the-- Her perception of her daughter's issues and the different steps that they had taken as far as she had been in and out of therapy and the issues that she'd had.

Something very, very interesting about this case is that the daughter, at that point, was not aware of her history of sexual abuse, and so I was really not gaining a trauma history like I would in most cases I was gaining a symptom presentation. I also talked to her current therapist to find out her perception of things. Then I administered a psychological battery of tests to Jane Doe as well and some measures that required parental identification.

Justin Hill: Okay. You had an opportunity to meet with the young lady, her mother, and also perform psychological testing to see if any symptoms were presenting or any diagnoses were available.

Dr. Howard: Yes.

Justin Hill: One of the difficult things in this was, as you said, that she didn't have any conscious memory of it occurring at the time, but we were also unsure if she had learned of it later on in life as it had been a publicized criminal conviction.

Dr. Howard: Absolutely.

Justin Hill: With this a lot of times independent experts as you were in that case have to do outside research and see what the literature is out there to determine whether or not it supports or contradicts what you're thinking. Did you do any independent research as it relates to this case?

Dr. Howard: I did. Because this case was so unique. The second I met with this girl I thought, "She is a child. She is a classic PTSD from sexual abuse person." If I didn't know her history-- Just after meeting her and evaluating her, she had all the symptoms of someone who's had sexual abuse; including some sexual acting out, a lot of anxiety, depression, nightmares, things like that. Yet she had no cognizant awareness that we knew of at that point of the abuse.

I did a lot of research on infant childhood sexual abuse, infant abuse, and how it plays out in later adult life. There is actually a pretty significant body of research out there that shows even if you were too young to remember the abuse then you still have symptoms and impacts that appear later on in life.

Justin Hill: I think that was one of the really eye-opening things for me in that case was that the defense insurance companies were saying the whole time, "Even if this did happen and even if you can prove liability, that we don't think you can ever prove this child suffered any injuries or damages because she doesn't have a working memory." What we were able to determine based on the literature and the peer reviewed literature out there was that that's not true. Correct?

Dr. Howard: Absolutely. Yes.

Justin Hill: You continue to work as an outside expert witness on occasion but that's a real small portion of what you do. Fair?

Dr. Howard: Absolutely, less than 5%.

Justin Hill: Most of what you do is actually clinically treat, diagnose and help people that have had real traumas in their life and are dealing with the after effects of that.

Dr. Howard: Yes. I have a PTSD and trauma treatment clinic.

Justin Hill: Okay. We're going to talk with you a little bit more, Dr. Howard. Thank you for enlightening us. I think the point of this is that we like to point out when we have new clients come in that even in very difficult legal situations that we do whatever it takes to hire whatever experts are needed or whatever consultants are needed to make sure that we get true and correct answers so that we can properly and adequately represent our clients.

[music]

Wrong Way Drunk Driver hits Bexar County Deputy

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

A San Antonio Sheriff's Deputy was on patrol late at night on loop 1604 when he was hit head-on by a wrong way drunk driver that tried to flee the scene. The deputy went to the emergency room once but was otherwise uninjured. He waited 23 months to call our law firm. When he did, we filed suit and got his case resolved for the maximum amount of insurance.

Transcript:

[music]

Speaker: When a Bexar County Sheriff's officer was hit by a drunk driver, he called the Hill Law Firm. About a year ago, we were contacted by a sheriff's officer here in Bexar County, San Antonio, Texas. He told us how about 22 months prior, he was out patrolling on 1604 near 35 when a drunk driver was coming head-on in the wrong lane of travel. The sheriff's officer was able to get over to the right-hand line and almost onto the shoulder when he was hit by the drunk driver.

The drunk driver was going highway speeds the wrong way down 1604 at about three in the morning. The sheriff's deputy was sitting disabled on the side of the road, injured and the driver kept driving. The driver hit another car and finally became disabled when he hit the retaining wall. He tried to flee, but he was stopped. He was arrested, he was charged with drunk driving and intoxication assault.

This the sheriff's deputy didn't reach out because he was worried about making a claim. He didn't want to be seen as somebody who was making a claim for being injured in the line of duty. He thought it was his duty and his responsibility to do his job and being injured on the job was something he thought was part of his job. When I spoke to him, I let him know how that wasn't part of his job and he had a claim against that drunk driver's insurance and the drunk driver.

The drunk driver didn't have any personal assets, he didn't have any money so the only thing he had was an insurance policy. Luckily, for this deputy, he wasn't that injured. He went to the emergency room and he saw his PCP, got some medication for pain and muscle relaxers, but he was able to make a full recovery. He didn't really know what to expect and I told him that we would take care of everything.

One thing an insurance company doesn't want to do is go to trial against a police officer, a sheriff's deputy, injured in the line of duty, especially when they'll be defending a drunk driver. We took his case and we were able to resolve it for the maximum amount of policy limits available within just under three months.

[music]

[00:03:07] [END OF AUDIO]

Distracted Driver Hits Child in Crosswalk

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We represented the mother of a young man whom was hit by an SUV in a crosswalk while the driver was texting on her phone. The young man suffered a broken hip but made a great recovery. We filed a lawsuit and proved that the other driver was distracted. Pedestrian accidents are one thing we do a lot of at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: When an Air Force captain in San Antonio needed an attorney for the injuries her son suffered, she called the Hill Law Firm. In 2017, a young man was walking across the street in front of his elementary school. At the time, the school was having one of those Scholastic Book Fairs. The kids were encouraged to stay after school and shop. His mother had let him stick around. He was in fifth or sixth grade at the time.

When he was leaving school, he was walking across the crosswalk with the lights flashing. At or about the same time, a woman was driving her SUV and wasn't paying attention, she was looking at her phone. She hit this young man and threw him, what witnesses say, 20 feet in the air. He came down in the roadway. He was taken to the emergency room and he was very badly injured. A multitude of test were performed and imaging was done and it turned out that he had broken his hip, that she had hit him hard enough with her vehicle to break his hip.

We filed this case against that distracted driver. Her insurance company showed up and said that it wasn't that bad because his hip wasn't displaced. They tried to argue the fact that his hip was still in correct alignment, albeit broken. Made it not that serious of an injury. This was one sure way to anger our client, the mother. We pursued this case while her son continued to get monitored by doctors. We weren't sure how his recovery would progress. It turns out he made a full recovery. His hip was able to heal. He was able to get back to what he did before. He didn't complain of any pain or mobility issues.

We weren't going to buy the insurance company's argument that the fact that his hip break wasn't displaced meant it wasn't that serious. What was serious was they had insured and were defending a woman who was playing on her phone when she hit a young little boy. A little boy who was doing the right thing using the crosswalk with the lights flashing. It was a wonder she didn't kill him and this wasn't a different case. In the end, as we got closer to trial, the insurance company dropped this frivolous defense and they paid the full policy limits.

[00:03:16] [END OF AUDIO]

Q&A with Sean Luchnick

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Sean Luchnick is a personal injury attorney in North San Antonio practicing with his wife and father. He joins us to talk about some of the challenges and lessons from his first few years of practicing.

Transcript:

Justin: Welcome to Hill Law firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Sean: I hope you're off too.

Justin: Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases Podcast. I've got Sean Luchnick with me right now. Sean, thanks for being here.

Sean: Thank you for inviting me, Justin.

Justin: You're one in a long, illustrious list of lawyers in San Antonio who have joined me on the podcast to talk about the law, being a lawyer, and the type of work we do.

Sean: I'm honored that you had me here today.

Justin: Well, you work for the Luchnick Law Firm, it's you, and your father, and your wife?

Sean: Yes, that's why it's named after my last name.

Justin: What type of work do you all do?

Sean: We do predominantly a personal injury, but any case that comes to the door, we're all ears.

Justin: Yes, you all are going to do a big massive antitrust case?

Sean: Absolutely. That's why I'll refer to you.

Justin: Okay. Sean, how long have you been practicing?

Sean: I've been practicing for about three years.

Justin: Did you always know you're gonna be a plaintiff's lawyer?

Sean: Well, when I knew I was going to be a lawyer, I knew I was going to be a plaintiff's lawyer. I didn't know I was always going to be a lawyer.

Justin: You had dreams to be a football player?

Sean: Yes, I did have dreams to be a football player.

Justin: You played at Penn State and then UTSA?

Sean: Yes. I was pretty realistic that probably going professional wasn't something I would--

Justin: Were you? When you were in high school, were you thinking you were going to be pro?

Sean: Yes. [laughs] I mean, if you're in any profession, you got to have the dreams and aspirations for the highest level. Yes, at that time, not to boast about myself but no one at the high school level could stop me, so until I got to a point where you get to a point where there's people that are just so incredibly talented, you probably think you're going to be at the highest level.

Justin: I was recently watching a CLE with Brian Panich. He was one of the most successful plaintiffs lawyers in America. A trial lawyer out of LA. He was a college football player and he said that working with other athletes he has found to be beneficial in our profession because he thinks athletes and growing up in athletics, you learn competition, you learn how to work together. What are some of the things that you think have translated from playing football at a high level to being a plaintiff's lawyer?

Sean: I think that's what Panich said in the podcast or webinar you watched. It makes a lot of sense. A lot of my cases I feel a lot of passion, which I think comes from my competitive nature. The thing about the law, it's a little different. When you're playing football I could just get really mad and go wall up somebody on a play if this guy pisses me off. In the courtroom, it's a little bit different, but you still can do things like that.

You get gratification at winning. It's one of the few things in the world I think we could really win or lose. I think if you have that background--

Justin: Did you watch that webinar?

Sean: I watch portions of it, yes.

Justin: That is one of the things he said there are very few professions in life where there is a winner and the loser. Sports is one. Courtrooms are another.

Sean: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with that more.

Justin: In terms of teamwork, you all have three lawyers at your firm. You've got a bunch of staff, much bigger law firm than my law firm. Do you think the team aspect of it translates into the law profession? Or do you find it more of one-off you're doing things on your own?

Sean: No, I think the team aspect, absolutely. I think you got it when you play sports, there's a great camaraderie in the locker room, so I tried it at our firm. I think our employees love working for us.

Justin: When you all settle a big case, do you dump water on your dad's head?

Sean: No.

Justin: Gatorade?

Sean: Gatorade, yes, not water.

Justin: Okay. We talked about this last time, but the audio was pretty poor, so we're going to make another run at this. What are some of the things that are part and parcel of what we do working the case and trying to get a case ready for a trial that you have found to be some of the more difficult things to learn, and some of them that you think, I've just really taken to this like a fish to water.

Sean: Difficulty-wise is stuff that I guess wouldn't really be that hard. Just I probably should have worked full time for someone like you for a while just to get the hang of it. When you're trying to do things on your own, you don't, my firm doesn't have what I call litigation support staff. A lot of these just basic things, learning how to file things like this deadline, stuff like that. Just I got to learn do it on my own.

The depositions, mediations, preparation, that stuff came natural to me I feel, but the little more basic, medial tasks, I had to get accustomed to doing them myself. Then teaching others so I could delegate it, so they do it. I'm not ultimately doing day-to-day stuff. That doesn't help me settle cases.

Justin: I don't think I'm good at mediation, do you think you're good at medi-- Is there an ability to be good at mediation when a non-lawyer adjuster walks in, and they've just decided, here's what your case is worth?

Sean: It just depends. It's a strategic thing. If it's a case where you think you have a high chance of settling at mediation, I don't mind putting on a presentation, showing them what I got, what they're going to get a taste of if it goes further. A lot of times, you don't want to do that, because you may have some smoking gun. You don't want to reveal it at the mediation in case it doesn't settle.

Now, you gave them a preview of what's coming so they could prepare better for it. You got to gauge at every case, but I've had some. A lot of them had to do with defense counsel may be making some mistakes they didn't know, and I sprung it on them. The mediators always say, "You should have told him this before because they could have got more authority," but I tend to think that's just an excuse they have.

Even on those, we've had pretty substantial settlements at that mediation. I think if it's the right one, and you have a good vibe of getting it settled, maybe you trust the defense attorney that they are going to bring some money, and the right people are there to make the decisions that day, I sometimes will put a show on at mediation.

Justin: Have you done any corporate rep or expert depose?

Sean: Expert, not corporate rep.

Justin: Okay. When you say expert, defense experts, or treating doctor types?

Sean: Treating, I've only done a defense expert once, which is annoying because there's a lot better than taking your own witness. I've done several--

Justin: I think treating doctors are hard depose.

Sean: They're hard depose. I have a script I stick to and it went pretty seamless the last few I've done, but they're definitely when you do your first few, its--

Justin: How did you go about preparing for your first few?

Sean: I pretty much typed out every single question I wanted to ask, and reviewed it myself.

Justin: Why did you do that?

Sean: I just wanted it to flow well. I knew where I wanted to go, but I was very well-educated on the case, the plaintiff's treatment, all of that. I figured that if I laid the groundwork, not that I wanted the expert to give his opinion. I wanted to guide him to the answers that I wanted to help the case.

Justin: Did you find that asking question-by-question or having scripted questions made it harder to listen?

Sean: I didn't think in that context. I think when you're deposing someone else, like an adverse witness, you can't script your questions, because you don't know how they're going to answer.

Justin: Me and another lawyer who's a little bit ahead of you in our generation, he had some expert depose coming up. There is something that I forgot this young lawyer that you're never even taught how to prepare. I didn't know how to prepare, so I read other people's depose, and that's how I learned to prepare. This lawyer asked if there was a paper, I could give him showing how to do this. I thought that was just--

I didn't even really understand that basis. Then I had to step into his shoes and thought, "Man, you're never taught how to prepare." What is your method of preparation when you're going into a depo that you think is new or novel or you're not 100% sure how to handle it?

Sean: Well, I've seen another lawyer. He's an older lawyer too. I've seen people that they Google, how to depose an expert in this, right? It gives him legitimately question-by-question how to do it. I have, I'm not gonna lie. I've maybe taken a template, and taken a few things just to make sure there's not some obvious question that I need to ask this person that I'm missing.

I think the majority of the time I do what you did, where I would look at depose, some of your depose I looked at, and saw the questions you asked. How you would lead into it also. Of course, watching depose early on, I got to see you do a lot. That helped me to prepare. I'd say a hybrid approach, but mainly reading other depositions.

Justin: Do you like the business side of being a lawyer or the trial side of being a lawyer? You had your first two trials this year. You had two back to back and they were probably great learning experiences. What do you prefer more? I mean, into each their own. We've got a lot of good friends that are great business guys don't really care to be a lawyer. Then we've got friends that don't get to run a business, but really like being a lawyer.

Sean: I'd say, I mean, the trial is just incredible. It's a lot of fun. A lot of stuff going on. You talk about the competition aspect. Not only is it whether you win the case that day on the verdict, at the end of it, in the morning, you have three motions you're ruling on. You're constantly getting wins and losses throughout the process. You could have a case, I saw you try a case that may be the outcome wasn't good, but you clearly won throughout the case, right? From the competition--

Justin: You can't change the facts.

Sean: You can't change the fact. You had to hold your head high when you walked out. The only thing about trials, it's a lot of preparation, right? Honestly, to be in a situation where if I could just go I think we were on that same webinar the other day with Mick Nick, he just gets to do the trials. That would be a dream to just step up there do the trials. Of course, there's a lot of stuff when you go to trial. Especially in a bigger case, a lot of doctors--

Justin: Would it be a dream to be gone 80% of the year, every year living in comfort inns and suites?

Sean: Probably not that much, but I mean--

Justin: Yes, there's a romanticism to it, but it's exhausting.

Sean: I'd rather do it more than two weeks. [crosstalk] Yes, I'd say that. I don't know if I could be one of the people that does it like all the time on the jet every day doing that stuff. Again, to each their own. When you get to the point where you're getting monster verdicts and you're renowned and doing that, maybe I would want to be on the road 80% of the time.

Justin: You were a lawyer learning and then you got two back to back trials that went on for a couple of weeks. What were the biggest things you learned being part of a trial team?

Sean: Really just being a part of a trial team, nothing's given to you at all. You could think it's the easiest little thing that there's no way they're going to fight you on. I mean, you're going to get fought on every single issue. Things they know they're going to lose. They're going to fight you on just, it's exhausting. You got to be ready to put in the work every day it's a marathon. I think that aspect of not being exposed to trial prior to that, I didn't realize how crazy it is.

Justin: The work ethic?

Sean: Yes. The work part of it is just unbelievable. What you got to do. I mean, you could get through it and not put in way more work than your typical day, but if you want to win on everything and have it as perfect as possible, you are going to get little to no sleep and you're got to be at the top of your game.

Justin: I remember I'd taken-- not a time, but quite a few depots for a young lawyer when I've tried my first case, and then I was cutting depots. I thought, why the hell did I ask so many questions because then it's just more work for me getting ready for trial when at the end of the day I'm going to be taking a four-hour depo that I'm patting myself on the back about and thought I did great, but I'm only using 30 minutes of in trial and it just took up three hours of my day trying to cut it up. I' learn how to try to prepare my evidence with an eye towards presenting it, not with an eye towards just asking every possible question under the sun.

Sean: That's an incredible point because that probably is the main thing, I learned at trial was exactly that. That you start thinking, wow, I'm going to take my depositions completely different because all that really matters is this. Not, which you probably it has helped me in the future prepping my depositions of what to ask. There are certain things that when you get to that stage where you're fighting every little thing, and I'm like, man, if I would have asked this in this previous deposition, we wouldn't even be dealing with this right now. Maybe if I would've filed summary judgment on this, or did certain motions or it would just-- You got to prepare it up to the trial, like you're going to the trial and then it's the most seamless trial possible at that point.

Justin: Well, I don't think they were ever seamless?

Sean: They are never seamless, but at least you could try to work towards that. I'll be honest, the first trial I was part of which is my fault, was not prepared that good. There was a lot of problems like we weren't really prepping on how we're going to present our evidence the best. We were trying to figure out how we're even going to get our evidence out there and do certain things. That was not a good experience.

Justin: I know you got an eye towards admissibility too.

Sean: Yes, for sure. That's good. I mean, now that it's happened, it won't happen again.

Justin: Yes, Sean, you and I have worked a handful of cases together. You were an intern here at one point if people want to learn more about your law firm, what's a website?

Sean: luchnicklawfirm.com.

Justin: L-U-C-H-N-I-C-K?

Sean: L-U-C-H-N-I-C-K L-A-W F-I-R-M.com.

Justin: All right. We have a few other episodes where we've talked about some of the cases where we've worked on, in the future we'll talk some more and learn more about how you're progressing as a lawyer and learn more about your career.

Sean: Sounds good.

Justin: Thanks, Sean.

Sean: Thanks.

[00:13:29] [END OF AUDIO]

How Do I Find the Best San Antonio Car Accident Lawyer

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

A lot of clients ask questions about who is the best San Antonio personal injury or car wreck lawyer in San Antonio. The best lawyer for your case is the one that does the best job on your case. I tell potential clients to pick someone they are comfortable with and they believe will do a good job for them.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

Are you the best car crash lawyer in San Antonio? Those are the types of questions we sometimes get when we're meeting with a potential new client for the first time. What's happened in San Antonio is, all you see on TV and billboards and buses anymore seems to be lawyer advertisements, how great lawyers are, how wonderful their firms are, and how they have these gigantic numbers that 99 out of 100 times have no bearing on most cases because every case is unique. That's created this world where everybody wants to know, will their case be as good as the one they saw on the bus or the TV or the billboard.

I always tell my clients, "I'm not here to tell you I'm the best, and there's really no way to determine what the best is." If you've been in a car crash in San Antonio, you want a lawyer who's going to be the best for your case, and your case requires more than just somebody screaming at you on television or pointing at you in a billboard. You want somebody who's going to give you personalized service. You want to know that your lawyer is your lawyer, and you're not going to be shuffled around 20 lawyers, and three different departments, and never know who's calling you next. You want a lawyer who knows how to prepare your case for trial because a lawyer that prepares her case for trial is going to get offered more money, and if it goes to trial, they're going to be able to properly try your case to get you the maximum recovery.

The most important thing is, you want to hire a lawyer you feel comfortable with, that you feel that they're going to take care of you, they're going to do the right thing for you, that you can communicate with. There is no best when it comes to any individual case. What there is is a whole lot of misinformation and a whole lot of overloading of information out there.

How do you find the best? You meet with them, you read their reviews. If you can talk to former clients, try that. Ask them what their experience is in San Antonio, or whatever venue your crash occurred in. Find out, can they try your case? Do they try cases? At the end of the day, you need to make a judgment call on who you think is going to be best for you in a case. There is no great lawyer answer to who is the best. There is going to be somebody that is the best for your case and the best for you. Do your homework and find that best car crash lawyer for your case and for you personally.

[00:03:46] [END OF AUDIO]

After a San Antonio Car Crash, Should I Speak to the Other Driver?

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 03:00:00 -0600

After two people are in a crash, there is no way to know how the other will react. They may be angry, hurt, confused, etc. We get asked from people and clients if they should speak to the other driver. I tell them to use their best judgement, not share too much information, but try to do so with the police present if you must.

Transcript:

[music]

We've been discussing questions we get from clients or potential clients or family and friends following a car crash here in San Antonio. Normally, we get the same standard questions and, normally, we give out the same standard advice. There are a few things that should be done after a car crash and that's what we're trying to talk about in this series of podcasts.

One of the things that we are always asked about and that we always discuss is how to interact with the other driver.

Whether you're at fault or they're at fault or they're at fault but blaming you or vice versa, there are a few things that need to be done. One, we always tell everybody to call the authorities. If it's an emergency, call the emergency line which is 9-1-1. If it's not an emergency, there's no injuries, there is no public safety danger and no cars on fire and no reason to believe an emergency exists, call the non-emergency line. At the end of the day, it's always better to have a third-party document what they see and what they know and what they've been told.

You don't want the insurance company at the end of the day accusing you of making something up or saying that a crash occurred or accusing you that a crash actually did not occur. A police officer is able to give an additional report and we think it's important that anybody contact the police officer. However, something we always get asked is what interaction should they have with the other driver. Sometimes, after a crash, the other driver's irate and threatening, maybe borderline hostile or violent. In those situations, we tell people, stay in your car. Keep it closed and locked if you can and call the authorities.

In other instances, people are just trying to do the right thing and, most of the time, people want to do the right thing. So, we tell them, exchange insurance information. If you can take a picture of their insurance card, do that. Share your insurance information as well and share names and phone numbers. At the end of the day, both of you want to make sure the situation gets handled appropriately and normally people aren't trying to hide the ball. Now, if the other driver has something to hide, they don't have a driver's license, they've been drinking, they were texting on their phone or maybe they don't have insurance at all, you might find it difficult to get information from them.

I always tell people it's important to try to get that information from them. If they won't give you that information, take down their license plate. Take down whatever information you can take down. That way, if they drive off or take off or in the wind later, you have some information that you can fall back on, identifying who was involved in that crash. The most important thing we tell people is use your best judgment. If somebody wants to try to help you work through things and they're being nice and friendly, then share information because you both want to get the same thing. You both want things taken care of and you both have car insurance for a reason.

If for some other reason, such as hostility, the other person in the car crash is difficult or scary, then stay in your car and let the authorities handle it.

[00:04:01] [END OF AUDIO]

When to Call 911 Following a San Antonio Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 29 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Recently, I heard a San Antonio Police Officer discuss with a crowd of when 911 should be used. One of the examples he used was following a car wreck especially if there are injuries, public safety hazard, a fire, or anything that may be an emergency situation.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin Hill: Our law firm gets phone calls from people that have been in accidents, car crashes, on-the-job injuries at any number of times in the process. Sometimes, we get a call while people are still at the scene. Sometimes we get a call a week before somebody statute of limitations is fixing to expire. One of the more common questions we get when people are calling us from the scene is, "Should I call 911?" That's a very specific question that really we, from afar, on the telephone, can't make a judgment for.

911 is an emergency phone system, and in San Antonio, luckily, I've seen some literature whereby guidance is provided on when to use the 911 phone number as opposed to the non-emergency line. Now, in a car crash, oftentimes people do call 911 because there are issues of public safety, there's an emergency situation, there's injuries, but sometimes it is not an emergency situation.

The information I'm going to provide now, that has been provided to me by an officer once that I just jotted down on some notes, is no specific rules or regulations and it's not an exhaustive list. What I was told one time whenever we were talking about that question was, he said that he always tells people that if there's anything involving a fire, that if there's a car fire, a fire following an accident, an explosion, always call 911 about a fire.

Anytime there's a medical emergency or people think there is a medical emergency, the people should call 911 as that's what 911 is for, it's an emergency hotline. He told me that if you think you've witnessed a crime or a crime is being committed, that that too is an emergency and you should call 911. Finally, the last thing we talked about for a while was he was talking about a car crash, that in the instance of a car crash, he says you should call 911 if there's even a chance that somebody's hurt.

Maybe they're not all obviously hurt, maybe they just feel dizzy, but if there's a chance that somebody is hurt, you should call 911, or if the crash creates a situation that could lead to more injuries or more accidents such as blocking lanes of travel, or rolled over vehicle, a vehicle that was about to catch fire. We can't give an exhaustive list to our clients, especially when they call us on the telephone at the scene of a crash on when to dial 911, but we will relay the information that has been relayed to us.

[music]

[00:03:19] [END OF AUDIO]

Should I Take Photos After my San Antonio Car Crash?

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 27 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Sometimes we get calls from people that were just in a car crash in San Antonio. They want to know what they should do and how they should respond. One question we get asked is about taking photos of the crash. We always tell people to document as much as you can if you are not too injured to do so.

Transcript:

[music]

I've previously discussed on this podcast how sometimes we get calls from clients or friends or family members who've been in crashes and the crash has just happened. They literally might be on the side of the road or still in their vehicle following the crash before police arrive before anybody shows up to help. The first thing they do is call, me somebody in my office. Usually, in those situations, it's because it's somebody we've known for a long time, former clients, people we've known from high school or growing up or family members.

We get all kinds of questions but we always tell them there's a few things they need to do. One of the things we talked to them about is take pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words is something we've always heard. A picture doesn't lie is another thing we've always heard. Following a crash, people that have been injured or people who were in the crash, sometimes aren't thinking clearly. Sometimes, they're not 100% sure what even happened. Between that crash and after they spoke to lawyers and after they spoke to their insurance company, spoke to whoever else tells them their opinion of what happened or their version of events.

Memories can change. One thing that keeps people honest is photos. I always tell people if they've been in a crash, take as many photos as they can of their car, of the other cars, of people that are around the roadway, the weather, lights, if they're there. If it was at an intersection with lights, or if it was an intersection with stop signs or yield signs, just to take as many pictures as they can because you don't know when those are going to matter. I learned this lesson maybe the hard way whenever I was a very young lawyer.

I was assigned to work on a case that was another attorney's case because I was probably a year out of law school. When I was working on the case, in a deposition, the defense lawyer showed up with a bunch of pictures. He said those pictures he had received from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they were pictures that depicted a rollover accident. The rollover accident involved a tire that had failed. The allegation was that the tire failed due to a manufacturing defect and that caused the vehicle to rollover.

The pictures he showed me looked a little different than the pictures that we had received. The pictures that were really important to him were pictures that I did not recognize. Now, they look similar to pictures I'd seen, but they seemed bigger and broader and showed more. What they showed was additional facts that we did not know at that time. What we learned after the fact was that the DPS had produced pictures to us in a cropped format. They had taken the photos and they had cropped them down to what they thought were the important portions of the picture.

That's how they had given them to us. That's the part of the official file that was produced. The defense attorney was able to get copies of the un-cropped photos in their native format. Those photos showed things that were important to our case but were not important to the DPS. The big part was they were very important in determining how the crash occurred and what happened after the tire had suffered the failure. It's important at the end of the day that all photos are produced, that all photos are taken, that all photos are preserved.

Anytime somebody is in a crash, I always tell them, take as many photos as you can that you're comfortable taking of as many things that are around you at the time. Following your crash, you might not know what's going to be important a year later down the road. Take those pictures to preserve that evidence.

[00:05:12] [END OF AUDIO]

Distracted Driving in San Antonio

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 25 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Distracted driving in San Antonio is a major problem. Everywhere you go, you see people texting and driving or distracted in other ways. This is the cause of many car crashes in San Antonio. We oftentimes find out that distracted driving was a cause of a crash after we request phone records and take depositions.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

After doing this for as long as I have, I've seen enough cases now where I can tell the other driver was distracted who caused the crash. In San Antonio, just driving around the roadways, you can see drivers looking at their phones, playing with whatever's in their lap, messing with their coffee or some other nonsense that's making them not pay attention to the roadways. Distracted driving is one of the biggest causes of crashes in San Antonio and the rest of the United States. Everybody has a phone. Everybody has a smartphone and far too few people put it down when they drive.

It's hard to prove these cases because nobody wants to admit they were texting and driving or looking at their phone. However, sometimes at the scene, I have clients who say they saw them coming in their rearview or from their left and they could see that the person was looking at something in their lap or their hand. Distracted driving is one of the largest causes of crashes in the city. At our law firm, we do a couple of things to make sure that we protect our clients against distracted driving. One of the things is we always get the phone records of the defendant driver. That will let us know if they were on their phone right about the time of the crash. Whether texting or receiving a text or on a phone call, we can see that.

Sometimes now, people have cameras in their cars. The rise of GoPros and these other types of cameras in the vehicles allow us to sometimes actually see what was going on. Also, we're able to sometimes find witnesses. More than 50% of the time, distracted driving is related to a smartphone, texting and driving, or some other use of a phone that causes distraction. We currently have two cases in which the other driver said they were playing with their coffee when the crash occurred and one lady got covered in coffee. People trying to eat while drive or check directions while drive all of these things lead to distracted driving accidents.

At any given time, our firm has a dozen or so cases that are definitely attributable to a distracted driver. Distracted driving is one of the scourges on our roads in San Antonio, something we take very seriously and something we continue to investigate on every single car crash case or other crash that comes into our office.

[00:03:34] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Slip and Fall Cutting Arm

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 22 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We recently filed a lawsuit in San Antonio on behalf of a young woman that slipped and fell in a bathroom at an amusement park. The fall did not injure her but the big sharp piece of metal that was jutting out cut her arm wide open. The piece of metal was bent and twisted and sharp. It created an unreasonably dangerous condition on the premises.

Transcript:

ٍSpeaker: Welcome to Hill law firm cases. A podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

Speaker: Every case that comes into the office is different. One thing I can tell every client is that almost without fail the insurance company and defense attorneys will make up some excuse and some defense as to why. First, they're not at fault and if they are at fault you're not hurt and if you were hurt it wasn't their fault. If you were hurt and the jury believes you're hurt well you're better now. No matter what the case or what the facts, I can count on one hand the number of times the other side is agreed they're at fault, and they owe money.

We're currently working on a case in which a young lady, less than 10 years old, went to the bathroom at an amusement park. Now, this bathroom was close to where the aquatic rides are located so the bathroom would get wet inside. The Aquatic Park knew that. They knew the bathrooms could get wet. It's their duty to make sure that they have a flooring surface that does not get slippery when wet. These flooring surfaces exist and the amusement park knows that. This case was different. When this young lady slipped, her arm hit the side of the bathroom stall. That by itself should be fine.

However, the bathroom stall had a piece of metal, a metal flange that had been folded out. Essentially, a piece of metal was sticking out when it should not have. Our client's arm hit this piece of metal as she was falling down. Her slip was due to the slippery floor but her cut that required 28 stitches down her arm was due to this metal flange that inexplicably was bent out facing outward. Sharp, rusty and exactly where somebody who fell who hit this bathroom stall would hit.

The insurance company called us and as they do, they had a defense. Their defense was well she slipped because it was wet, and she should've known it was wet. Sometimes I never know if they're making up their defenses, or they just don't understand the claim. I agreed with her that the floor was wet and our client slipped on a wet floor but that doesn't excuse or changes the fact that there shouldn't be a dangerous piece of metal sticking out from a bathroom stall. As I said earlier, they never admit to this but you could tell by her silence that she agreed that they had a dangerous premises defect in that bathroom and that premises defect led to this cut on my client's arm.

Now, this young lady got 28 stitches. She'll have a scar for life. She's going to hear the defense say it's her fault for slipping in a bathroom. The slip isn't what caused her injury. That's what premises liability cases are. That if a business wants you to come onto their property and spend money that they have to keep their premises in a safe condition. They have to remedy dangerous defects on the property, and they actually have to inspect and look out for them. They don't get to just hide behind the log and when somebody is injured say, "Well, we didn't know about it". All too often that's the attempt of companies and their insurance companies to try to avoid liability. However, in this case where this young lady slipped and fell in San Antonio and cut her arm open, they're not going to be able to avoid liability with that excuse.

[music]

[00:04:37] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Food Poisoning Joint Venture

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 20 May 2020 10:00:00 -0600

Handling cases with other law firms is a great joy. We get to learn together and work cases with new perspectives. One of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in San Antonio history is being prosecuted by Hill Law firm and our co-counsel.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

One thing we get to do in our practice as a small boutique San Antonio personal injury law firm, is work with other attorneys. I've seen in my career where attorneys have ended up either getting run over by a defense lawyer, outspent by a corporation, or just buried, because they either have too much pride or something else where they refused to involve other attorneys. In my career, I've had multiple occasions to involve other attorneys on cases. Sometimes, it's due to capacity at the law firm, where I need help. Sometimes, it's due to a very specialized part of law that I want to learn on.

In both situations, I've found that it's always been helpful. My client's always been better served. The client pays no more fee, the attorney's share fee, and share work. One thing this does allow though is the attorneys get to work together and learn from each other. Some of the things I've learned from other attorneys, on cases I've brought them in on, stick with me today and have changed the way I practice law. Currently, probably five cases in my firm I'm working with another attorney. One case involves a food poisoning outbreak. In this case, we represent probably 30 people who were injured in a food poisoning outbreak in San Antonio, Texas.

I've handled food poisoning outbreak cases and food poisoning products cases for the entirety of my career, but on this one, the numbers started getting higher and higher. I reached out to an attorney I'd worked some food poisoning cases with before out of the Northwest. Not only is he an expert in food poisoning cases, he was the first, the pioneer. He took on Jack in the Box and E. coli outbreak when everybody said he was losing his mind and that he was going to never make a penny. That his clients were never going to see their day in court, and they were never ever going to get compensated for their injuries.

Well, they were all wrong. Because of that, he pioneered the litigation against companies who make people sick due to contaminated food. Because in his hard work, food and fast-food restaurants and grocery stores are safer now. Now there's a consequence if companies don't take food safety seriously. I've learned a lot from this attorney about food poisoning litigation. I've learned a lot of just differences in styles, in advocacy, in the way they do things. They call it the practice of law because we should be practicing law, and we should be practicing to get better every day. Working with other lawyers and law firms in my career has, without a doubt, made me a better lawyer, and my law firm a better law firm.

[music]

Releases in Personal Injury Cases

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sun, 17 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

When a personal injury case settles without trial, the other side insurance company will require a release. A release means that they are paying money to settle the claim and that you agree to that amount and that you won't sue them again. We always get questions about releases so we address it here.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Oftentimes we're called about cases involving people that were injured at some sort of park or a private club or a gym where they have signed releases. This often creates complications in their case. Gyms, in particular, like to make all of their clientele sign releases so that they're not held responsible if somebody is injured or suffer some sort of personal injury while working out of their gym.

In San Antonio, every gym case I've seen has a personal injury release. Now, the releases in Texas require certain things to be held enforceable. One of the quirks in Texas is what's called the Express Negligence Rule. The release actually has to say that the party is releasing the gym or whatever group from acts of negligence by its employees or the corporation.

I had one case in which the Fortune 500 company actually failed to put those words in their release. A couple of words would have protected them from any litigation and they would have been able to injure my clients without recourse. However, we fought the release and a judge agreed with us that this Fortune 500 company had failed to follow the law.

Now, releases aren't always rock-solid. We tell everybody that has a release, that thinks they have a claim to let us take a look at the release. People that are injured and suffer personal injuries should not be held to where they can't get any recovery because of a release unless that release strictly complies with Texas Law. Another location you're seeing in these releases a lot is these trampoline parks that have become very popular.

A lot of young kids go to trampoline parks. They have birthday parties at trampoline parks. As you can expect, a bunch of kids bouncing high into the air can lead to a lot of injuries. There's been a lot of litigation and a lot of injuries that have arisen from incidents at trampoline parks. Now, without fail, the trampoline park has a release, but they can't hold that release against a minor.

Most of the people injured and playing trampoline parks are minors. That's one thing I always tell people that are worried that they can't bring a claim or that their kid can't bring a claim because of a release is that, first, minors can't be released. Second, releases have to strictly comply with Texas Law to be enforceable.

Anybody that calls our firm with an injury that thinks that they're barred from bringing a claim due to a release, we always ask them to come meet with us, talk to us, and let us review the release.

If the release in our opinion isn't enforceable, we fight that release to the courts. We let the courts decide because unless a Fortune 500 company or some other big business checks all the boxes and follows the law, they shouldn't be able to hide behind a release when they injure somebody else.

[music]

[00:04:18] [END OF AUDIO]

San Antonio Injury Lawyer Steven Lopez Q&A

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 13 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Steven spent time in LA trying to make it in Hollywood before going back to law school at Baylor Law School. Since then, he has been an injury lawyer, a solo, a family and criminal practitioner and heavily involved in our community. Steven joins to chat about his practice and San Antonio.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

[music]

All right, welcome to another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. As we've been doing, we have a few Q&A sessions with local lawyers. We like to get them on and talk to them about things. Today we have Steven Lopez, who's a partner with the Law Offices of Oscar Garza?

Steven Lopez: The Law Firm of Oscar A. Garza.

Justin: Okay, I'll make sure I got it right. Steven went to Baylor like myself. He was a little bit behind me at Baylor. It's a small group of lawyers here in town that are Baylor lawyers. I want to talk to him about a few things, talk to him about his community involvement. Because he's a little bit behind me, I want to talk to him about where his career is going and what he sees in our city. First, Steven, where were you born and raised? Where'd you do college and all that?

Steven: I was born in Chicago, Illinois. That's where my mom and dad lived when I was born. I was there for only about a year. I got to Texas as soon as I could.

Justin: What neighborhood in Chicago?

Steven: Southside. I was born in the south side of Chicago. Tough. It was tough-

Justin: White Sox people.

Steven: - living out there as an infant. That's where I got all my street cred.

Justin: You went to the RGV.

Steven: Yes, and I lived in the valley. I'm from Harlingen, Harlingen Cardinal. Cardinal spirit never dies. It's still alive and well in my blood. That's where I went to high school. After high school, went to UT. After UT, spent about nine years in Los Angeles and then went to Baylor Law School in 2009. Then did some time in Dallas after law school and then moved here about 2015.

Justin: Little known fact, Steven went to LA to make it as an actor. Your big break was a commercial, which one?

Steven: My big break was a Breakfast Jack commercial.

Justin: Jack in the Box?

Steven: Jack in the Box, but I did get edited out quite heavily. If you see the commercial today, you can see my head pushing a guy in a bed through the drive-thru.

Justin: I feel like I remember that. Now, we're not going to say the number, but when you told me how much money you got paid for that, it was a shocking amount of money for a commercial that you had a three-second spot. You made it, but then you decided, "This isn't enough for me. I'm going to go to law school." What made you choose Baylor Law?

Steven: Well, I wouldn't say that I made it.

Justin: Kind of made it.

Steven: I made some money. That commercial was the highest paying thing I did nine years. Mostly, I went on a lot of auditions, went to a lot of classes, and bartended at night.

Justin: Was it like Barry?

Steven: It was a little bit like Barry. There used to be a show with Brian Green, I think his name was, produced by George Clooney, about being an actor in LA. It was on HBO. Justin: Brian Austin Green?

Steven: No.

Justin: Of 90210?

Steven: No, maybe not Brian Green.

Justin: Okay, we're getting sidetracked. This is a lawyer podcast. How'd you end up at Baylor?

Steven: I ended up at Baylor because it was the best school in Texas that accepted me.

Justin: I think that's fair. Did you want to do litigation?

Steven: I did. I wanted to do litigation. I thought it'd be best on my feet. It was a toss-up between SMU and Baylor. They were more tied in the rankings at the time I got into both. I chose Baylor because it was the boot camp of law school.

Justin: And better value.

Steven: Yes. It was supposed to be more challenging, so that's why I did it.

Justin: What did you learn in your acting classes that you think translates well into the practice of law that we do which is personal injury litigation?

Steven: Acting itself is truth-telling. You try to find the truth in whatever situation you're in, be honest with your emotions, honest in who you are in the moment. I think that translates really well to being in front of a jury, having stage presence, but also realizing that you're not faking it, and you're always giving a version of yourself and just having the confidence to show your blemishes and show your vulnerability in front of people. It helps a lot in front of a jury and in what we do with clients as well.

Justin: Do you think you learned that there or knew it before? Knew it before it got better?

Steven: Before law school or before Hollywood?

Justin: Hollywood.

Steven: I definitely learned to be more vulnerable in LA. I don't think I saw it as much of an asset as much as I did when I went to law school. You got to remember, in LA, I'm 20 years old, I'm 21 through 30. At that age, regardless of your training, I think you're not as confident in who you are as a person. Especially being out in LA, where it's rejection after rejection after rejection, comparing yourself to really attractive people every day and getting rejected quite often. Works your self-esteem a little bit. There's just a lot of insecurity that you're dealing with when you're out in LA. Whereas when I went to Baylor and learned to use those talents that I had, I was more secure in who I was at that point.

Justin: Were you told that you had to wear boots in trial? Because I was. That's an aside. The next thing I want to talk to you about, you're really involved in the city, you're really involved in some organizations, why is it important to you to be involved in the community in which you work?

Steven: I think it's important to be involved in the community because as lawyers, but generally, as people, we have an obligation to give back and to ensure that the doors that were open for us are open for the next generation. On a selfish angle, I think also that you don't really see how well you've got it until you try to give back to people that are most vulnerable or try to tackle a problem. Being in the position to be able to give back, or to have the free time, or to be financially stable enough to donate to a cause and to give time to a cause is also very self-fulfilling. I think it's important to help the community, but also it can be a little selfish as well.

Justin: Enjoyable?

Steven: Yes.

Justin: I've had a few people on and run the gamut between lawyers that are less experienced than you to lawyers that are national spotlight. What are some of the things that you think are the most enjoyable parts of working a case? What are some of the things you find to be the steepest learning curve in trying a case? Just talk to me generally about your views, and likes, and challenges, and things that you find frustrating. It's a practice of law. We're all learning all the time. What are some of the things you continue to learn and have found it to be a steeper learning curve?

Steven: I think for me, the parts that I enjoy about the practice of law are the interaction with the clients, being able to help them when they're the most vulnerable and most needy. With my background in theater and film, I enjoy the storytelling aspects of it. If I can meet a client, get to know them, sit in their living room, and be able to tell their story, I think that's my strength. Where I struggle a little bit more is personally, I try to be a bit of a perfectionist in certain things. If I don't have something exactly right, it affects my confidence in things like deposing an expert who's really good, who has tons of experience in a subject where they're well more versed than I am on.

I think that part is a steep learning curve for me because I think, well, if I don't have this science down perfectly, or if I don't know enough as much as the doctor that I'm deposing, it erodes my confidence a little bit. That's a steeper learning curve to me, as opposed to the opening statements, closing, where you're really telling the emotional story of a case. I think that's where I excel.

Justin: Which we get to do so rarely anymore. So few cases go to trial. I remember, as a young lawyer, I was very, very-- like you said, I had anxiety, and tension, and nerves about making sure I got it subjectively and substantively right. Everything had to be right from the science, to my questions, to blah, blah. I remember sitting in a depo with Tim Maloney who is an injury lawyer here in town. We were working a case together. I took a great cross, I thought, and I got all the facts and specific admissions that I needed lined up perfectly.

I remember him getting to the witness and saying, "Well, whatever you did that the bus crashed, do you think that's a good idea? Is it a good idea to have buses that crash?" I remember just thinking how flippant and nonchalant it was, but it allowed me to come into who I was, I thought, at that point, because I already knew how to prepare substantively, I didn't know how to be myself in those moments. I was probably a year out of law school. That was really important to me. Have you had those moments as a young lawyer? Now you're in your sixth year or seventh year of practicing?

Steven: Seventh.

Justin: In your seven years, have you had those moments? Can you recall any of those moments when you've either sat in a trial or sat at a depo and thought, "Wow, the light bulb just went off for me on this thing."?

Steven: I've had those moments deposing defendants. I haven't had those moments in expert depositions yet, but deposing a defendant a few moments where you know it so well and you know the facts so well that you can throw it away. There's a thing when you're learning a script or something, you get it down cold so well, and then you throw it away. I think in the practice of law, I have only been able to throw it away on one part of my cases.

I can throw it away, deposing the defendant if I know the story I want to tell, because I know it cold enough, and I know those facts hard enough to where I'm confident that I can bring around whatever point I'm trying to make, even if we get lost in the weeds. Whereas with an expert sometimes, if I get lost in the weeds, it's still hard for me to come back. I don't have, at this stage in my career, this overall confidence, "Hey, I can get this guy to do whatever I want and let's just see how it goes."

Justin: I remember thinking that exact same feeling and I remember trying a case early on in my career and realizing that if you're in the weeds, all 12 of those people are in the weeds, too. One reason I love what we do is it changes every day. Every time you take a deposition, you learn something. Every time you feel insecure, you realize that we all feel insecure about things because we're all learning, but I remember thinking that same thing and thinking, how can I ever go head to head with them, but at some point, they get into the weeds so much, nobody's going to believe them, because nobody's going to know what they're saying. Which is a double edged sword on our end to that we have to ask good questions that people can understand.

Moving forward, what are some of the things that you really want to learn more or get better at? I know, you recently tried a case and the defense lawyer told me how incredible you were. He went on and on about how good you were, but outside of that, what are some of the areas of what we do day-to-day that you want to get better at?

Steven: Thank you for that. I think in that trial in particular the one you're speaking of, that was one of those moments in closing where I thought they're with me.

Justin: Felt it.

Steven: We're connecting emotionally, they're with me and that felt really good, so thank you to that lawyer for that compliment. I want to get to that point with the science. In my practice, we deal primarily with a lot of car wrecks. There's the science of spinal injuries, but also the science of reconstructing an accident and those are the two types of experts that I primarily deal with, and I would like to get more comfortable in that area. At a certain point, I think it's realizing that, "Hey, you know enough to go attack this guy." You don't have to put yourself through eight years of med school to be confident enough to go head-to-head and deposition with those guys.

Justin: Because they're always going to know the science better.

Steven: They are.

Justin: If you were getting $1,000 an hour for a demo, like most of those doctors, wouldn't you know it better?

Steven: I would well if I also went to school with them, right? The most experienced trial lawyers and the ones that I look up to, they know that, right? They're a little more relaxed in those depos and a little more confident and I think that's where my anxiety is through the roof in those depositions, and I'd like to get to the point with that subsides. [crosstalk]

Justin: Anxiety makes you work harder and prepare more.

Steven: Well, it's a double-edged sword, right? Where's the trade off? Where's that sweet spot? Is something that I think we're-- [crosstalk]

Justin: One of my mentors would torment me with the anxiety as a young lawyer. If I was preparing for something and he knew it, I would get texts early and late about, "Did you do this? Did you think about that?" It just drove me nuts. It made me a better lawyer. It made me work harder than I would expect to. Okay, Steven, we're trying to make these short and pithy, if you will. We're going to have you back on at some point. We'll talk about how you're progressing. I hope this podcast provides a local sounding board for our local bar, which I think is the most special in Texas because we all get along. We all like each other. We all help each other. Thank you and we'll have you back on.

Steven: Thank you.

What is a Deposition?

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sun, 10 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Depositions are a part of any lawsuit. In San Antonio, the lawyers here are very quick to request and get a deposition of all parties in a lawsuit. A deposition is just a questioning under oath with lawyers present in the simplest terms. In this episode, we discuss what a deposition is and why it is part of the process.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names, and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin Hill: We've been talking about the different parts of the case. Whenever somebody signs up with our office, we try to set their expectations, explained to them the process, and try to guide their understanding of what's going to happen so that they're not surprised when certain things do happen. They're not surprised by the timeline by which they happen. They understand how many different things are normal in this process. That at first glance to somebody who's never done it before, it might be scary.

We've talked about the discovery process, which comes after filing a lawsuit and the other side answers to that lawsuit. Then the law allows a period of what's called discovery. Discovery is an opportunity for both sides to develop facts to investigate the claim, to get information from the other side that will help them understand what the case is and prepare for trial. One of the elements of discovery is depositions. Depositions are a very normal part of any lawsuit. It's very rare we have cases in which depositions do not occur once a lawsuit is filed.

For the most part in a normal car wreck case, that usually just means the deposition of the plaintiff and the defendant and may be an investigating officer and maybe a medical doctor or provider. On the other end in a very complex product liability commercial bus case I had early in my career, that case had over a hundred depositions of witnesses and experts and all different people involved from the liability and the damages side of the case on both sides. The depositions are a very normal part of the process, and the deposition is a chance for each side to ask questions of another.

It could be the plaintiff's asking questions of the defendants, the defendant asking questions of the plaintiff or both sides asking questions of investigating officers, eyewitnesses, medical providers. It's a chance to ask questions under oath. It's a chance to discover facts about your case, to investigate lingering questions that either side may have about the case. It's a chance to prepare for trial, know what will be said at trial, and to understand the risk. Deposition testimony in Texas can be used in trial the same way someone was sitting on the stand.

Their trial or deposition transcript can be used in the trial, their video can be played in the trial. Now, I always tell my clients whenever they're getting ready for a deposition, for one to relax, the deposition is not a very high pressure or formal. For the most part, it's usually done in an office setting, in a conference room, for example. There will be attorneys from all the parties there. Sometimes that just means an attorney from each side because there are only two parties in a case or when there's 10, there might be 10 lawyers.

There'll be a court reporter there, typing everything down that they then put into a booklet, a transcript of the deposition. Sometimes there's a videographer and the videographers videoing the deposition, and that video can be played in trial. Depositions are informal. Generally, they're not high pressure and generally, people don't get out of control. For the most part, they're a slow methodic question-answer setting. The lawyer asking the questions or ask their question and the witness will then answer their question and back and forth.

For the most part, people have to stay calm and reserved in depositions because there are consequences if people lose their tempers. Depositions can be used in a trial for multiple things. Oftentimes, the witness being deposed will be at trial. For example, the plaintiff is going to be at their own trial. In those instances, the depositions are not normally played unless the witness changes their answer. In those instances, the depositions can be used to impeach or point out how the witnesses either being dishonest or change their answer, but in a way to call their character into question.

Depositions are one of the most common things that happen in a lawsuit, and the testimony for the most part in depositions is way more valuable in most cases than what is received in paper discovery. In our next episode, we'll talk about how to prepare for a deposition, but in this episode, we just wanted to discuss what a deposition is, generally, how it is used, and how it is an integral part of the discovery process.

[00:05:45] [END OF AUDIO]

Meet the Team: Sir Winston Dexter Hill

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 08 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

You all have seen him on social media but now is your chance to hear directly from the official office dog, Sir Winston Dexter Hill. He rarely speaks but he won't shut up in this interview.

Transcript:

Bark! Bark bark! Bark bark bark!

Q&A With Javier Espinoza

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 06 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Javier Espinoza has made a name for himself in San Antonio and all of Texas as one of the leading experts in work injury law and on the job injury lawsuits. He is a friend of our firm, a very giving and sharing member of the San Antonio bar and a great attorney. We were lucky to get him on the show to share some of his wisdom.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin Hill: All right, this is another episode of Hill Law Firm podcast as I have Javier Espinoza here with me today who has been kind enough to do an episode of the Alamo Hour. I'm holding him over to discuss work injury cases with me. Javier is one of the best lawyers in our city, one of the best lawyers in the state. He is really chosen to focus, not exclusively, but in a big way on work injury cases. Our law firm has worked multiple cases with his law firm and even when we don't involve them, they've been an invaluable resource to myself and others in the city, and others around the state who have questions about representing injured workers.

Javier, thank you for being here and I just want to start, why did you get so focused into work injury cases in your career and in your practice?

Javier Espinoza: Well, the main reason is because I came to a new city from El Paso and when I got here, I was relatively unknown. I pretty quickly had to develop a niche, and number one, it was a niche that I really, really liked. Having come from a working-class family, I think it was a real natural fit to represent workers, but the bigger, I guess, business sense of it is it's very difficult to compete with everybody. I very quickly developed, I needed to pick a niche. When I started picking the work injury niche, I just fell in love with it because I fell in love with clients and I fell in love with the type of law, and it's so different than your regular average case that it really gave me a leg up, I felt.

Justin: Yes, and that's important to talk about. Everybody that advertises, advertises as though a widget is a widget and a case is a case, and it's all the same. One of the biggest surprises to me as I started building my own practice and seeing more cases was the prevalence of arbitration agreements in work injury cases, work injury situations. What are some of the nuances to work injury that make it a little different than say, a car wreck or an 18-wheeler wreck?

Javier: Sure. Well, there's three very specific types of work injuries. Number one, somebody gets injured at work. If they have workers' compensation, then you can't sue the employer, you've got to go follow workers' compensation claim and that is administrative, that is through the state of Texas, it's regulated. It is a whole other world from any type of lawsuit. If the employer does not have workers' comp, then it's considered a non-subscriber, they don't subscribe to workers' comp. You have to file a claim directly against the employer.

The difference between a work injury non-subscriber claim and let's say, a car wreck case, is that a lot of times you file a lawsuit in a non-subscriber case and the employer has paid all their wages, has paid all their medical. They say, "What are you suing for?" Versus a car wreck where you're suing for past medical, future medical, impairment, all that stuff. Well, in a work injury case, that's essentially what you're suing for, is the intangibles, the mental anguish, impairment, pain and suffering, and if there's any evidence of future medical that is not covered by the employer or any difference in pay, the lost wages.

Damages wise, they're very, very different. Liability wise, they are completely different. In a non-subscriber case, you cannot take the employee's negligence into account. You're not supposed to because the statute specifically says, "You can't take their negligence into account." However, the Texas Supreme Court has scaled that back a lot under the guise of no duty. I know you and I have talked about that where the Texas Supreme Court has held if somebody falls from a ladder, for example, used to be I could get out there and say, "Well, the employer chose not to have workers' comp."

If the employer's 99% at fault, they didn't train them properly, they should have had somebody holding the ladder. It was an old ladder that rocked on him, anything. 1% negligence, the employer bought it all. Now, what the Texas Supreme Court has said is, "If the employee knew that it was rickety, if the employee knew it was old, if the employee knew that he should have somebody holding the ladder, then he was aware of the danger and the employer owes no duty to the employee."

If an attorney takes one of these cases and thinks, "Oh, easy. 1%," the nuances is where they get you, because once they go take your client's deposition, they tumble, "You knew the ladder was old. You knew that you could fall. You knew you should have had somebody hold the ladder, right?" “Yes, yes, yes.” Here comes to summary judgement, judge. We have no duty to this person because he was aware and he chose to get up there.

Justin: I look at some of the cases I've done now on the job and I thought, "How did we get what we got?" Because if the defense, which I think is also a fair point that some defense lawyers don't really know how to defend these either and think that same way. They ignore that really solid defense that they have, and sometimes it works out in our favor.

Javier: For sure. We had a really, really good arbitration result on a case where we thought they had a defense and they stipulated to liability.

[laughter]

All right, we're not going to fight you on it because they come in thinking the same, 1%, right? 1%. And if they don't normally practice in the non-subscriber world, they're not aware of these cases that have come up from a texture court that have scaled it back. They remember still from 20 years ago, 1% and you pretty much have bought it all.

Justin: We have to tell clients and you have to do it more than I do, that we have an unfriendly Supreme Court. We currently have an unfriendly legislator. If you think you're going to take your case up and win the day on making new law or making a exception for yourself, that's just not going to happen right now.

Javier: There's not been a positive Texas Supreme Court case on non-subscriber law come out probably in the last 15 years.

Justin: We're about as low as you can get in terms of worker safety, as high as you can get in terms of worker fatality and about as bad in terms of worker protections from the core. This is a really bad trifecta.

Javier: It even gets worse whenever [unintelligible 00:06:10] makes the arbitration provision.

Justin: Sure. Let's talk about that.

Javier: Sure. What the Texas Supreme Court has done, and not just the Texas Supreme Court, but it came down from the federal government, the American Arbitration Act way, way back in the early 1900s. They decided that if two companies are going to fight and they're going to have this big multi-million dollar spat, it's probably better to go to an arbitrator or arbitrators that are familiar with the systems, that are familiar with the trade, and that makes sense.

Justin: It was created for specialized types of disputes.

Javier: Exactly, but it's poured over probably around 2003, 2004 is when we first started seeing them spill over into the employment context. Where if you worked for HEB, if you worked for Whataburger, if you worked for Lowe's that are all non-subscribers, they would make you as part of your orientation, sign an arbitration agreement saying that you were agreeing to not ever sue in state court but go to an arbitrator. We fought those tooth and nail and through probably mid-2005 through about 2010, it was pretty well-settled law from the Texas Supreme Court that if you sniffed arbitration, you were stuck in arbitration.

Even if you died at work, it even could bind your kids and your spouses that were bringing a claim for your death. It's very fruitless now to fight arbitrations. We've just embraced them.

Justin: Taking one step back, I think a lot of people don't realize that in Texas, you used to either have workers' comp and if you didn't, you could get sued in the courts. Then Texas, and I think just Oklahoma, created this weird in-between where they said, "We're not going to carry comp, but we also don't want to get sued. We're going to create this Kwazii comp, but we manage its system and if you do sue us, you have to sue us in arbitration. Really, Texas is unique in that we have this third rail for employers to avoid having to go in front of a jury, I guess is the best way to put it.

Javier: Well, we didn't talk about that but Texas truly is the only state in all of the United States that does not have mandatory comp. Oklahoma has a mixers' comp but Texas is truly the only one that if you want to open up a roofing company and we want to have 1,000 employees sitting on roofs and doing whatever they want, we don't have to have workers' comp.

Justin: I didn't know that.

Javier: We are very, very unique in that sense. I think what was happening is they were just getting a lot of big jury verdicts. They said, "Well, why don't we go to this arbitration system," and here is the kicker, that a lot of attorneys call me sometimes and they tell me, "What? How do I explain this to my client?" Because if the American Arbitration Association is the association that was picked by the employer when they made this contract between them and the employee, we have to go to the American Arbitration Association and we pick a arbitrator randomly and by, we can agree to this one, we can agree to that one, and whoever they can agree.

If there's one that we both don't strike, that ends up as our arbitrator, but the employer pays $100-- Well, we pay a $200 filing fee. The employer pays all the arbitrator costs, all the arbitrator fees every time there's a hearing, the arbitrator charges and I can tell you that we've had one to two-day arbitrations where the arbitrator made $22,000 to $25,000.

Justin: I think that's a great point because, say, you're injured at Fortune 500 company and you're John Doe. Well, John doe has one day in front of this arbitrator and triple-A, the American Arbitration Association, and Fortune 500 company maybe has 500 arbitrations over a 10-year period, where they're paying them $22,000. They know where their bread is buttered, the system is stacked against these injured employees. I think that's why it's important that people, when they're injured on the job, hire lawyers that know what they're doing. What makes your firm different in terms of how you work a case for a injured worker?

Javier: Well, here's one point that I want to make in relation to that. There was a study and I can't set it off the top of my head. There's a study that was done as to the outcomes of arbitrations and they definitely went more for employers

that we're regularly in front of arbitrators. It was almost equally well for firms that were in front of the arbitrators over and over.

I tell a lot of our referring attorneys, “Look, here's a good non-subscriber case you've got, you can go follow the arbitration. I can show you how to do the arbitration and help you along the way, but understand, we probably have about 300 arbitrations in our firm at any given point. We see the same arbitrators over and over.” There's certain arbitrators we've arbitrated with two or three times. I tell you what, if we've lost one and we felt like we've been treated unfairly, we will never agree to that arbitrator again.

Justin: He doesn't make his $22,000 a day.

Javier: I know that the employers do the same thing. I'll tell you, obviously, without disclosing names, but we had a really, really good hit against a big retailer at a CLE because these arbitrators are attorneys as well. Some of them were older attorneys. I saw this attorney at a CLE and just said, “Hello, how are you doing sir? Good to see you,” and just a very small chat. He said, “How's the arbitration world treating you?” I said, “We're fighting, kicking and screaming. How's your arbitration practice going?” He goes, “It's fine but I never been picked by that company again ever since we had that joint arbitration together.”

An arbitrator telling me, I've never been picked by a company that I issued an award against, do you think that they don't have that on their mind-

Justin: Of course.

Javier: -whenever they're issuing these awards and that's the big company that may be another $22,000, $25,000 in three different cases for the year?

Justin: To be fair, you're a qualified arbitrator, I think?

Javier: I am a qualified arbitrator, but I never get picked. I think my reputation is pretty well set that I represent plaintiffs and I'm pretty plaintiff-oriented. I don't think any defense attorney has ever agreed to me.

Justin: I guess it works out like that. I see some of those panels, sometimes the lists of them and I honestly rarely have a clue who any of them are. I've seen my former aunt on it once or twice, and I’ll keep that to myself, what her name is. Your firm and my firm, we're working on a case right now and I'm a one man shop, and I had a good on the job injury case came in, and I called Joan and I said, “I'm in depos in East Texas. I need somebody to come meet with this guy. We'll work it this way if it's regular lawsuit, we'll work it that way if it's arbitration. It turns out arbitration, we're going to work the case together, but you are all going to show me some ropes on arbitration.”

Because it's a little bit of a different process. You don't pick a jury and you don't-- The filing system is different and how-- It's basically a hearing in a conference table. At the end of the day, is your trial, right?

Javier: It is. We work them up very similar to a trial in the sense that we send out discovery, we have discovery fights, we have motions to compel, we have depos, we have everything. If there's any practitioner that's listening to this right now, that if I can give them a golden nugget, a morsel, your arbitrator is your fact finder, is your judge, is your jury, bailiff, everything. This person is everything. Right?

Defense attorneys that are well versed in arbitration do and what we do, being well versed in arbitration, is we throw everything at the fact finder. If the defendant was accused of pedophilia, whatever, well, we throw it out there and they file a motion to strike that evidence or whatever, but once it's heard, it's difficult to unhear it. We had a client that had a long criminal history from way before, had no relevance to this injury, had no relevance to anything, but they asked him, “Have you ever been arrested,” and he goes, “I can't remember.” That's all he said. “I can't remember. I don't remember.” They said, “Well, are you sure?” “I don't remember.”

They filed a motion to dismiss the arbitration because our client had lied under oath and then they attached the long list of criminal history he had.

Justin: You can dismiss an arbitration if somebody is dishonest?

Javier: No.

Justin: Just made up.

Javier: All they want would do was they wanted to put all of the criminal history of our client in front of the arbitrator because that's the fact finder. Same thing. We went back and said, “Judge, we asked them if there's other lawsuits and they said no, or whatever. They weren’t truthful. Here's all the others we have against them, here's all the work injuries we had.” You throw everything at them, and of course, the judge says, “None of that is relevant on either side. Let's hear this work injury,” but they've already heard it. Those are things that we do in arbitration, is we just throw everything out there.

Justin: Which you see people do in trial sometimes, but they risk a mistrial if the judge won't give a limiting instruction or something. There are consequences doing it in front of a jury.

Javier: Well, not just that, but usually the judge is a gatekeeper. If you and I go try a case and there's a big criminal history that is beyond the 10-year, is not relevant, whatever, we're going to file a motion on alimony. Judge, this should never get out in front of the jury. The judge is the gatekeeper. Jury never hears that if they make the right call. When you're going to the judge at any time, you should never hear this, you're hearing it. We use that a lot to our benefit and we'll file summary judgment.

Justin: The point is that there are specific strategies for arbitration that are separate apart from what we were all taught in law school or in our first few trials.

Javier: Oh sure, completely different. Whereas, a jury may be a little more sympathetic to your client that has a fractured ankle, because that's the first time and maybe only time they're going to hear about that on the [unintelligible 00:15:18]. When you go in front of an arbitrator, it's pretty cut and dry because this guy or woman may have heard an arbitration three weeks ago about a guy that died, or then-

Justin: Or defended a hundred death cases.

Javier: Exactly. They don't have a lot of that sympathy factor. Definitely, it is a very different strategy to arbitrate case versus trying a case.

Justin: Even when you have wins, there's a lid on damages that's not there sometimes in a jury case.

Javier: I evaluate cases. One of the big evaluations is, is that arbitration or is it trial? If it's arbitration, you're definitely knocking off a few points.

Justin: Two more questions and we're going to finish this, and then people can hear the rest of what we're going to talk about, because we're going to really get into some of your more high-profile cases on the Alamo Hour. What types of cases are you all currently taking? Because you’ve recently, not super recent, but kind of recent, added a workers’ comp division. What are the cases you all are taking now?

Justin: We have strived to really be a full-service work injury firm. We have two attorneys that solely do workers' compensation, Amanda Spencer, Jesse Bustillos. We have Steven Sachs who solely does some cars, but from the work injury standpoint, he does all of our 451s, which is somebody gets hurt at work, they follow worker's complain, they get fired, 451 employment claim.

Then we've got Denique, Villaseñor-Hernandez, Lara Brock, Jade

Meet the Team: Josh Venegas

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 04 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Josh Venegas is usually the first voice anyone hears when they call Hill Law Firm. He handles all of our intake call, medical records, and generally helps out wherever and whenever needed. He never leaves without asking if there is anything else we all need. Clients love him and there is a reason why. He was raised and lives just a mile or so down the road from the office. Learn more about Josh.

Transcript:

[music]

Justin: All right. Welcome to another episode of the Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. We're doing a series called Meet the Team. We think it's important that we give our clients and potential new clients a little bit of information about who we are as people, and especially during the shutdown and especially during these times where we see each other less and less. I think it's important people can put a face to a name and a name to some background information. I'm here with Josh Venegas right now. Hi, Josh.

Josh Venegas: Hola, boss man.

Justin: Thank you for being here.

Josh: No worries. Thank you for having me.

Justin: Josh, I've got some questions for you. I want to just get some information from you. We're going to put it on our website. We're going to have it on our podcast. We're going to have it on our YouTube channel as well, if you even know we have one of those.

Josh: I did not know we had a YouTube channel, but all right.

Justin: All right, Josh, how long have you lived in San Antonio?

Josh: All my life.

Justin: Born and raised?

Josh: No, I was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. We moved over to Houston before I could even walk, and then, slightly after, we moved here to San Antonio. I mean, my whole life has been here.

Justin: I think you've told me you've lived in the same general part of San Antonio the whole time too.

Josh: That's right. I used to live-- The first house that we lived at was on Blanco and Fulton. Then, once I hit 15, we moved over here by, I would say, San Pedro and Fresno would be the closest cross streets.

Justin: Okay. Really, the near central, just north of downtown part of San Antonio.

Josh: Yes, that's where I've been my whole life.

Justin: You went to Edison?

Josh: I went to Agnes Cotton Elementary, Mark Twain Middle School, and then, I went to Edison.

Justin: Mark Twain is now a Spanish immersion maybe or something.

Josh: I drive by there and it's-- I don't know. It's just completely-

Justin: It's some sort of magnet. I think.

Josh: It's something. They changed the entrance of [unintelligible 00:02:20].

Justin: You're from San Antonio, but you were born in Mexico. Do you speak Spanish?

Josh: Yes, very much so.

Justin: I think that's important for a lot of our clients to know we've got you who speaks really good Spanish, Marisa who speaks less good Spanish, and me, who doesn't speak much. I mean, I can get around Mexico if I have to.

Josh: It's good, though. At least, the basics.

Justin: Yes.

Josh: Hola. Como estas?

Justin: I've been told my accent is so thick people can't understand what I say anyway.

Josh: Yes, there's no point?

Justin: Yes, right? Before you came and worked here, you had worked in other law firms. About how long had you worked in the legal world or other law firms?

Josh: I was working for Heard & Smith. They're a disability firm. I was there for roughly about seven years, six and a half, seven years. That was the only other job that I've had that is considered like a law firm job.

Justin: You're still pretty young, so that's the majority of your adult working life was at a different law firm.

Josh: Pretty much, yes.

Justin: The majority of your working adult life has been law firms.

Josh: Is in law firms, yes, pretty much.

Justin: I don't want you to say anything ill about your previous employer or any reason you left, but there was something that made you apply here. What made you apply at my law firm?

Josh: Just the different scenery as well as-- I always say that you don't leave a job, you leave a manager or supervisor.

Justin: Sure.

Josh: It was just not a good work environment.

Justin: Time for a change.

Josh: It was time for a change, yes. Things that I needed, I never had at that time. We would have to go back and do our job over again because they would tell us everything at the end of the week, "Oh, by the way, you need to do this when you're doing that." It's like, "You could've told us that on Monday. We could have done it the whole week." It was double the work for what we were doing. I don't know if you guys ever mess with Social Security benefits, but dealing with that office-

Justin: It's tough.

Josh: - any Social Security office, it's very tough.

Justin: But you wanted to stay in the legal world?

Josh: Yes, definitely.

Justin: Any reason why?

Josh: I just had an interest in it. I remember when I was in the fifth grade, my teacher wanted me to become a lawyer, and I was like, "No, I want to be an architect. I want to draw. I want to be an architect." I eventually went to school for architectural drafting. It was not what I was expecting. I just stumbled upon Heard & Smith. They were like, "Hey, we're hiring." It was like, "We need a Spanish speaker."

Justin: It's never too late to go to law school, Josh.

Josh: No, never too late.

Justin: Never too late. We're a small firm, so it's funny titles here. I think they're funny. You handle all the intake. You're the first person people see when they come. You handle a lot of the front of the house stuff. I mean, you do a bunch of things here. You went from a big law firm. Heard & Smith is a big law firm, a lot of people, a lot of employees, tons of clients. What has been some of the biggest changes for you going from a large law firm to- we're a boutique, small law firm?

Josh: Just the, I guess, the attention that we put to the clients because you're right, Heard & Smith was-- I mean, we had clients all over the country. It was a nationwide law firm. People would call in, and they would literally just be a number. "What's your Social Security number? Okay. Thank you, Mr. Smith." Having worked here, it's not a big load. It's very-- What's the word I'm looking for?

Justin: Hands-on.

Josh: Yes, very much so. I feel that it's a lot more personal when you don't have a lot of cases to look over.

Justin: It better be.

Josh: You can actually speak with a client and remember, "Oh, yes, I spoke with you just last week. I said this, this, and this." Having to work with a big firm, you couldn't really keep tabs on who you spoke. You would have to look into the notes. By the time you scroll over note after note after note, it's not even worth it.

Justin: I had a client tell me recently that you are her best phone friend.

Josh: Is that- [crosstalk]

Justin: Let's not use names.

Josh: Okay.

Justin: We did have a client say you're her best phone friend because you'll spend so much time on the phone.

Josh: Like I said, I build a rapport with people.

Justin: Yes, you should.

Josh: Especially being in this line, you got to be like, "Hey, how are you doing? Are you doing all right? If you need anything, let us know."

Justin: It's the worst moment in their life a lot of times and it's important they have somebody they can talk to.

Josh: That's good. That's a good way to put it, yes.

Justin: What is your favorite thing about working here?

Josh: Honestly, it would have to be the people. It would be Marisa and you. Marisa always includes me when making a decision. "Hey, what do you think we should do here?" She always makes me feel part of the team.

Justin: You are. [laughs]

Josh: Justin, the boss man, I've never had a boss like Justin, like you. You listen to what I have to say. You give your input. You look out for your employees, whether it be here at work or, "Hey, be safe at home, don't do anything crazy, use Uber, do your thing." That's the real main thing.

Justin: I hope you all are looking out for me, too. [laughs]

Josh: Definitely, definitely. That's the main thing. The smaller firm, it's more personal.

Justin: It's the family feel.

Josh: Very much so. Marisa and I, she's like my sister. We mess around with each other.

Justin: Your wife is here.

Josh: Yes, exactly.

Justin: I talked to Marisa about this. Marisa went from the first step in the door, never being involved in a law firm, now, she's head paralegal. She's Jack-of-all-trades. What are you hoping to do next here? What do you want to learn? What are some of the things you've seen here and thought, "I want to know more about that"?

Josh: It really is what Marisa's doing, actually. She was the one that trained me to do what I'm doing now. Having her do that and then having her do the whole paralegal thing, she really does a lot. I really do got to give credit to her. She would help me out, and yet, still have time to do her job. That's what I'm really wanting to do.

Justin: It's a steep learning curve once you really start getting into it.

Josh: Exactly, yes. I didn't really know a lot about personal injury until I started working here, but she made that transition so easy. It was really good to have her there.

Justin: You were new here, but her transition was very abrupt. She went from doing what she was doing to me saying, "Now, it's time." She was very uncomfortable, but she found her way to swim. She's doing a great job. No names, general details if you want to, any cases here that just stood out and changed your perception of the firm or the practice? Me and Marisa talked about a case, we represented a woman whose husband passed away in a crash. She talked about how that was just such a big moment for her emotionally to see what we do has such important implications for some people.

Some of the cases we've worked on have not been big numbers. Some of the most important cases for me, for example, I represented a young lady who was a victim of sex trafficking. I was right out of law school and the case went on for eight or nine years. It was never a huge number because there were no big numbers to get, but it was such a big thing for me as a lawyer, learning the process and realizing how important it was to not only change policy, but we changed some laws on that case. Has there been any cases you've seen here and you thought, "Wow, this really changes my perception or perspective of what we do"?

Josh: Yes.

Justin: No names.

Josh: Without saying any names, he had a cut on his arm and he was a Spanish speaker. That was really the first case I had my hands in. Since I was pretty much the guy that speaks Spanish here, they would kind of just, "Hey, I need you to ask him this. Make sure you ask him that." It also gave me an idea of what the paralegals do on their end. That specific case really stands out.

Justin: I don't know, were you here when we signed that case or did you start right after we signed it?

Josh: It was right after we had started.

Justin: Because they called multiple times, and I told them that I would help them try to settle their case on their own and that they didn't need me because all they could tell me so far was that he had about half-inch scar on his arm. That's all.

Josh: Right.

Justin: The calls kept coming. She kept calling me, and I kept talking to her and telling her like, "This process probably isn't right for you." Then, calls and says he can't make a fist anymore. It was the first time that we know, "Oh, there's a structural problem." It's not just a half-inch scar which is what they had told us. Turns out, he ends up having eight or nine ligaments severed in his hand, forearm. He had lost use of his arm, strength in his arm, and he was a non-English speaking, concrete worker, who really, more than most of us, needed use of his hands, and he needed them to be strong. It was a real interesting case for me too, but yes, I understand. I mean, that was a-- We had a great result for a guy who I had originally told him, "I can't represent you." I mean, it's just things go that way sometimes.

Josh: Exactly.

Justin: All right. You're effectively born and raised in San Antonio. We've attended some fiesta events together. Do you have any favorite fiesta event?

Josh: I would have to say, the Day Parade.

Justin: Okay.

Josh: Yes. Not so much the parade itself but I guess what goes on around the parade.

Justin: Spectacle.

Josh: The first time I ever went was maybe about four or five years ago and-- Never been to the Day Parade. I've always gone to the Night Parade but never been to the Day Parade, and a group of friends, they just dragged me out there. It was the most fun I've had at fiesta.

Justin: If it's not too hot.

Josh: Yes, I know. We did- [crosstalk]

Justin: Where'd you sit?

Josh: We didn't sit. We walked because we lived right behind where the parade ended.

Justin: Okay.

Josh: The Finesilver building. We just walked it. We walked the whole thing.

Justin: Nice.

Josh: We ended up by the Alamo Plaza. There was like a bar or club back there somewhere. We ended up there.

Justin: That's where the news has its stage set up, at the Alamo Plaza.

Josh: Yes, all that. We were behind the- because we went past the Alamo and we ended up going like a block down to like a bar. I think it was a club. I'm not really sure.

Justin: Yes, well, sometimes that happens during fiesta.

Josh: Yes, I know. It was great. That was like the best time I had.

Justin: Are you a Spurs fan?

Josh: Oh, very much so.

Justin: Favorite Spurs player?

Josh: It's a toss-up between Manu and Duncan.

Justin: Okay. I mean, all good choices.

Josh: Toss-up between Manu and Duncan.

Justin: I didn't know if you were going to go somewhere strange and you're like, "Brent Barry."

[laughter]

Josh: Brent Barry? Sean Elliot, with that miracle shot?

Justin: Yes.

Josh: I remember being there.

Justin: You've got a young daughter. What is one of y'all's favorite things to do in the city? Do y'all go to the DoSeum or museums or the River Walk or anything y'all like to do here?

Josh: She likes to go to the zoo. The thing about that is, I take her to the zoo, as soon as we pass the elephants, she's like, "I'm good to go." [laughs] She just wants to go see the elephants, and then, she wants to go.

Justin: She knows what she likes.

Josh: Yes. Other than that, we just pretty much stay home. She likes to draw a lot, so we're always on different drawing apps. She's always messing with her iPad and things like that.

Justin: Cool.

Josh: If we're going out, she's like, "Dad, let's go to the zoo." It's like, "All right, well, let's go." Then, as soon as we hit the elephant-- I always try to go around the elephants to make sure we get that last but she's like, "No, dad. It's this way."

Justin: I think they're going to try to combine some of the exhibits there so that the giraffes and the zebras and maybe the elephants and rhinos all can go in between-

Josh: I heard that.

Justin: - the habitats. They're doing something.

Josh: Yes, I saw like on Facebook. For the whole quarantine thing, I saw them on Facebook, and they were like, "We're going to be putting in--" There were people asking questions. They were like, "Are the rhinos going to the okay with the giraffes?" They were like, "Yes, I mean, everyone's pretty cool." [crosstalk]

Justin: They've got the ostriches in there too.

Josh: Yes, they do.

Justin: Which look gross when you see them up close. [laughs]

Josh: Yes, I don't like them. They look weird. It's like a furball with a long neck.

Justin: All right, Josh, thanks for doing this. Thanks for all you do here. We'll do this again. I think it's important because, as you know, we have so many clients that just decline to even want to come in. They'll just do everything by phone so it's important they can look at us and hear us know who we are as people. Thanks, we'll do it again. Appreciate it.

Josh: Appreciate you.

[00:14:18] [END OF...

Things to Consider After a San Antonio Car Wreck

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 04 May 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We have covered what some of the most common questions we get from those in car wrecks in San Antonio. Whether injured or not, car crashes create a lot of uncertainty and questions for those in them. We do our best to address some of the most common questions and considerations.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
On the Hill Law Firm cases podcast, we've been going through a series of real-life questions that we get asked from clients or family members or friends following a car crash. When people are in car crashes, they often think the first thing I'm going to do is call the police and sometimes the second thing I'm going to do is call an attorney.
We've all been conditioned to know that at the end of the day, insurance companies are going to do whatever they can to deny or delay our claims. It might be clear as day that we're not at fault, but the insurance company is going to find some way to say we're at fault. People know that they want to call an attorney to make sure they don't do anything that shoots them in the foot later on or allows their insurance company to have some loophole to deny their claim.
Two of the more common questions that we get that I always tell people they shouldn't be stressed about are can I move my vehicle and what should I do about witnesses? The first question is a pretty common question we get and it's something that the police and public media is often discussing and that is can you move your car? If you've been in a crash, should you move your car to the side of the road? We always tell people to follow with the San Antonio police department says, if you call the San Antonio police department, they'll tell you what the best thing to do is.
Normally they tell people that if it's not an emergency situation, the cars are operable and you can safely do it, to move your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to get through. Otherwise, you might be causing a traffic jam that keeps police or ambulance or fire from getting to your vehicles.
We always tell them to listen to the police, listen to the 911 operator, whoever you're talking to on their advice. Generally, what they say is that if the vehicles are operable, that you can safely do so, to get your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to continue to flow and to not create another danger for other drivers.
The second question we get is, should I take down a witness's information? It's very common. We get clients that come see us a couple of weeks after a crash and say, "Yes, there were witnesses. I saw them there and they told me they would help me if they could," but nobody took down their information. What we see a lot is that the police officers will take down their information, but it's not part of the police report and we never see it again.
Sometimes police reports will have the name and phone numbers of witnesses and what they said, but more often than not, our clients will tell us there were witnesses to the crash that they spoke to, but that those witnesses are not in the crash report. We always tell people that if you have witnesses that saw the crash, take down their name, take down their phone number.
If you can do a little video or audio recording with them at the scene, that's great too. The important thing is we want to know how to get in touch with them at the end of the day because when the other side's insurance company is going to start blaming you or trying to say it's 50, 50, the most powerful evidence against those frivolous defenses are third parties with no skin in the game who saw the crash and will honestly say what caused it.
[music]
[00:04:06] [END OF AUDIO]

Jury Verdict UM/UIM Case Talk with Co-Counsel

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 01 May 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Justin Hill asked Josh Fogelman to team up and help with the trial of a UM/UIM car crash cases in Williamson County, Texas. Our client was wrongfully denied her policy benefits that she had paid for over many years. The jury in Williamson County sided with our client and made sure she was awarded every single dollar of his UM/UIM benefits under her Allstate policy. This verdict was one of the top 100 verdicts in the State of Texas for 2019.
Transcript:
Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.
[music]
Justin: On today's episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, I've got a good friend of mine and previous co-counsel and classmate and friend and all of those wonderful things, Josh Fogelman, who's a really established and accomplished personal injury lawyer in Austin in the firm of Fogelman & Von Flatern, FVF Law, and he's sitting here with a really cute hat with a bird FVF on it. Josh and I had the pleasure and benefit and honor of trying a case, I guess it would be a little past a year ago now.
Josh: That's right. Last spring.
Justin: In Williamson County, so Georgetown. In our industry, there's always good places to file a lawsuit and try a lawsuit. Then historically, there's bad places to file and try a lawsuit. Georgetown's always been considered maybe one of the worst places in the state of Texas because the understanding is juries don't think cases are worth much money is generally the idea, right?
Josh: Yes, it's just Williamson County north of Austin is a really conservative, historically Republican county. You've got at least the reputation of having very conservative jurors there. Personal Injury Law conservative jurors tend to have a little bit of a more conservative viewpoint of valuation on personal injury cases.
Justin: While it shouldn't be political, this idea of tort reform and runaway juries has permeated parties. The Republican Party has been the party carrying the mantle of we need to do stuff to rein in jury verdicts. Right or wrong, that sort of has permeated politics. It's become part of the discussion and that's bled over into some venues. What we realized in Williamson County is maybe that isn't true or maybe the demographics are changing. We ended up with a diverse jury in that case. Our foreperson was a 19-year-old woman with a nose ring if I recall.
Josh: Yes. What was interesting about our Williamson County jury is it reminded me a lot of our Travis County juries. I think that that's a lot to do with the growth of Austin and a lot of the Austin mentality being pushed outside of the city and county limits up into neighboring jurisdictions, neighboring counties like Williamson County.
Justin: What we didn't even see in the jury selection is we didn't really see a whole lot of far-right or anti-lawyer or anti-tort thinking either. We had a pretty fair jury. If I recall in our panel, we had a whole lot of people who had been screwed over by insurance companies before.
Josh: Yes, that's true. Beyond that, we also had a really fair judge. I was really impressed and surprised with the judges leaning up there. As far as the Republican judiciary is concerned, I thought that we got some pretty good and fair rulings from Judge Lambeth up there in Williamson County.
Justin: She let us try our cases. You get judges sometimes that are very involved in the trial, the case in terms of they want to give their two cents or they want to guide the way the trial is working. She let us try our case. She let the defense do what they wanted for the most part within the rules. She let us do what we wanted and she let us have as much time as we needed, which I was pretty surprised by. From the jury standpoint, you do more work in Williamson County and Travis County than I do. Do you think there's a change in jurors due to the demographic change? Or do you think more people are just coming to grips with insurance companies that will do whatever they can to deny, delay and defend claims?
Josh: I think there's a combination of both. I've actually seen bad juries in Travis County. I've seen worse juries in Travis County than I've seen in Williamson County on some occasions. There always is going to be some variation from jury to jury. Definitely, when we start asking the jury questions and talking to them about what their experience with insurance companies has been, that is going to be a topic that's going to shape the way that the jury responds when you're asking them to allow money.
Justin: Normally in a case, we're not allowed to talk to a jury about insurance. When you're in a case like this, it was an uninsured, underinsured motorist claim. We've talked about that on my podcast here before, where people have paid their premiums, they have taken out a policy to protect themselves. When they need that policy, they ask for it. All too often, almost 100% of the time anymore it seems like, the UM/UIM carrier says either, "No, we're not giving it to you," or, "We're going to make you a very low-ball offer." In our case, we had both. We had a low-ball offer that then became a no offer. We could get into the imaginations of the weird legal arguments there. In our case, we were allowed to tell the jury, hey, this is plaintiff X versus Allstate Insurance Company. That prompted a whole lot of discussion from our panel about people's experiences with insurance companies. Do you remember that?
Josh: Yes, I remember vaguely some discussion about people and their experiences, but I think that one of the advantages that we have in any of those cases where you are suing an insurance company like we did in the [unintelligible 00:05:53] case is when you're in a venue where people value the money that they're going to be asking a defendant to pay, it is a tremendous advantage to have the named defendant, the person who is going to be writing the check be a named insurance company. I think that was one of the things that also contributed to our success in that particular case, as you didn't have your jury looking at their neighbor at the defense table or their neighbor up on the witness stand.
It was an insurance company that many of those jurors had had negative experiences with. A little bit of a different sense of fairness, even though jurors aren't supposed to take sympathy on the defendant, no matter who it is, they do. It's a lot easier to take less sympathy when it's an insurance company that's dragged you through the mud before.
Justin: In that case, we got a really good verdict. It was south of $400,000. The judge, I think, told us it was the best verdict in 10 years in an injury case or something like that if I recall correctly. What were some of the lessons you learned from that case? In my perspective in that case, I found it real interesting the way the jury split up the award, partly because our client had not had treatment in a while, so they didn't give her much in future noneconomics, but they gave her all of her future medical needs, which was a strange breakup in the jury charge. What are some of the things that stood out to you in that case that you learned in that case and that guide you in the future of working on UM cases?
Josh: If you remember, Justin, you and I came up with a pretty good strategy early on that we were not going to ask for a lot of money in the way of intangible damages, so things like pain and physical impairment. Any time that we're dealing with an underinsured motorist coverage claim, we're limited in what our best day in court could be, because your best day in court, you're going to get an insurance policy. It's not an endless depth of pocket.
We came up with a strategy, in that case of this particular client had a lot of future medical needs that were hard numbers that we decided we had a really good chance at asking that particular jury to allow us because our client was genuine and she was trustworthy and she was honest and she was legitimately hurt. Our strategy in that particular case was reading the jury and hearing what they had to say in [unintelligible 00:08:34] examination when we were talking to them at the beginning of the case, we decided that we were pretty confident with that particular defendant that they would be sympathetic to our client in what her hard actual future out-of-pocket costs would be. Those were enough to get us well beyond the insurance policy that we needed.
I think looking at what you're actually trying to accomplish in the case, in understanding the jury that you have and understanding the client will help you narrow the focus on what you're going to ask for and identify what is your justification for asking the jury for what you're going to ask them.
I thought that was a really interesting perspective in that case because oftentimes we go in there and you have a lot of different opportunities to ask the jury to fill in the blank for all these different types of damages. Your instinct, of course, as a plaintiff's lawyer and someone who's representing someone is to get as many of those blanks filled with as much money as you can. That's sometimes not really in your best interest or your client's best interest. I learned that from that case.
Justin: I learned early in my career, ego can sink a trial as well. You start asking for more than-- Maybe you lose touch with your own case because you've lived it and breathed it for so many years and the defense lawyer's gotten under your skin and you think they've treated your client unfairly, and at some point, you lose touch. That was really a good thing about me bringing you in on that case. You've brought me in, I've brought you in. You've got a fresh pair of eyes to look at the case and give me your honest opinion, which helps me take a step back and think, "Okay, I hadn't thought of that. This helps." We had a great result in that case, you did a fantastic closing.
Jury afterwards talked to us. One of the things I remember them saying was how fantastically prepared we were. I've learned that from day one in my career from my previous bosses about how much preparation matters. Especially in trial, a jury will pick up on who's prepared, and being prepared makes it look as though you're not making it up on the fly. If you're prepared, you've got a case, you've got a narrative that's honest, and that comes across. Too often, you get defense lawyers or other lawyers that are putting it together as they go, and too often than not I think that appears as though they're making it up on the fly.
Josh: Absolutely true. That case was against Allstate, a lot of these insurance companies employ their counsel. This particular counsel wasn't an employee, but a lot of those insurance companies do and Allstate does in a lot of their cases as well. These defense lawyers are set for two, three, four trials sometimes on any given week and they just don't have the time to prepare a defense the way that they should.
That's an advantage that we have because we got one case going to trial that is going to eat up, the month before that trial is going to be dedicated to getting ready for that trial. A lot of that also, of course, has to do that with the fact that, in my opinion, it's harder to be a plaintiff's lawyer in a lot of circumstances.
Justin: It is. No, it just is. We have a burden to carry.
Josh: That's right. We got to put the evidence on and we got to get the jury to listen and understand. Understand the why it is that we're there using their time, which we value as well. The preparation for sure made a difference in that case.
Justin: Well, I'll end it on that the defense lawyer, in that case, somehow or another now fancies himself a personal injury plaintiff's lawyer in San Antonio and runs advertisements, which is just such opportunism in my mind. To me, it just cuts me the wrong way. Either you've got a passion for what we do or you don't, and if you have a passion for what we do, you can't be running your law firm on Allstate dollars, is my two cents. We're going to end it on that. That's this episode. Thank you, Josh, for joining us, and we'll have Josh back on again.
[00:12:43] [END OF AUDIO]

Famous Trial Lawyer Mikal Watts Q&A

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0600

Mikal Watts is a San Antonio personal injury lawyer with a nationwide varied practice. He is considered one of the best of his generation and his jury verdicts speak for themselves. He has been involved in product liability cases, personal injury, mass torts, and commercial litigation. It was great to sit down with my old boss and mentor.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] I'm here with Mikal Watts. He was my original boss. This is Hill Law Firm cases podcast and I'm going to talk with Mikal, who was the whole reason I came to San Antonio. He was really an inspiration for me wanting to get into, not just plaintiffs work, but products work, which I missed at the back end of it, but I got to do incredible things at his firm and I got to see incredible things and I got to be part of things that nobody my age got to do.
Mikal: You did incredible things.
Justin Hill: Thank you. I did my best, but to be fair, I'm now on my own and I was only able to do that with the set of skills and the quiver that I left your firm with, so I thank you so much for that. I wanted to do these small podcasts for my law firm to talk about how we do things, why we do things, what we are. One of the things I sit down with every client that I learned from you early on, is I say, "We're going to file your lawsuit, we're going to push it fast, we're going to get to trial as quickly as we can." That's something I learned from you. What was your philosophy, because so many people in our industry, they wait 'til this and they send a letter, and then if that doesn't happen-- What was your philosophy to file and push?
Mikal: You can follow as a gentleman and not be a jackass, right? You can just get the process started, apply pressure as a gentleman. To be honest with you, I tried a case last fall that I lost in San Antonio, tough case, but you were in there kicking ass on some guy. They were trying to continue the case and you were pushing, and I said, "I taught him that. That's awesome."
Justin Hill: It's true.
Mikal: I was proud of you. The good news is that probably settled because you applied pressure. You can apply pressure without being rude, and it's not dishonorable to tell a defendant, "No, we're going to move, we're going to get a trial setting. You've got the time between now and the trial setting to settle the case." That's what you've done and that's what I saw last fall, which is awesome.
Justin Hill: Everything I've learned in my process has really been from your firm.
Mikal: Litigation is all about applying pressure. It's either applied to you or you apply it to somebody else. A good plaintiff's lawyer is going to apply it to the defendant and then get paid earlier.
Justin Hill: We have a burden to carry and I always explain that to clients, too. It's tougher on our end. We have to carry a burden. What is your philosophy going into a trial knowing that you have the harder road to hoe? Look, you are always good friends with defense lawyers. It was one of those things that I've never met in anybody else. You have good relationships with them, they respect you, you treat them well, but you push your cases. How do you approach a case knowing you have the burden to carry and how do you explain that to your client?
Mikal: We shouldn't file the case unless we think we can get there, but most of us file cases because we think it's a righteous cause. Then, when we have the righteous cause, we can be friendly with the defense lawyer, but they know that we're ready to whip their ass and that's what we try to do, and that's clearly what you do.
Justin Hill: I remember one time when I was a young lawyer, you said, "I always told my wife that if anything happens to me, you need to call this lawyer." I still remember who that lawyer was and it's funny, I have chosen vendors in my practice because of who that lawyer was and you spoke so highly of them. When you speak to friends and family and say, "I'm going to hire a lawyer," what are some of the things I should look for? You're in such a high level of litigation now, but on the normal lever, car wrecks and things like that, on the job injuries. What do you tell people to look for?
Mikal: What I want is people to go down and try cases, and people that are not afraid to take a loss down to courthouse, because nine times out of 10 the jury's going to do the right thing. So, what frustrates me is when people who need that new bass boat or that new car, settle a case for less money than they should and are afraid to go down and see what our fellow citizens here in San Antonio are going to do, because I have absolute faith that whether it's here in San Antonio, or in San Francisco, or in Gulfport Mississippi, juries do the right thing the vast majority of the time. So, I think we sell our clients short by being worried about being in that small minority where they're going to screw you, because they don't. Juries do the right thing.
They fare it through nonsense, they achieve justice in the overwhelming percentage of the time.
Justin Hill: Mikal, everything I've learned in the philosophies I've got as a lawyer, I've either learned from you or some of the lawyers in your firm. As it relates to San Antonio-- My firm now in San Antonio based, we've got one office, we're always going to have one office, we're going to represent people here, we're going to know the courthouse here. What do you think are some of the things that are a little bit different about juries in San Antonio and trying cases in San Antonio?
Mikal: People in San Antonio are good people and it's a great town. It's that joke, "I wasn't born here, but I got here as soon as I could and I'm not leaving." I think this is the best place in America to live. I think jurors here do the right thing. I think the richest people up in the northwest are respectful to the poorest people down in the southeast. We're all equals and we all show up for jury duty. We treat each other with respect. We all want this town to grow. We want this town to do well. We want its citizens to do well. So, there's no town in America I'd rather try a case because I know that the integrity and the honesty and the fabric of the jury pool in San Antonio is as good as it's going to be anywhere else.
Justin Hill: That's going to do it for this episode of the Hill Law Firm podcast. If you want to know more about where I came from and how I learned, research Mikal and his firm. That was where I became the lawyer that I am today. Thank you. We'll be back next time. We'll have more insights and more about what we do.
Mikal: [unintelligible 00:06:11]
[music]
[silence]

I-35 Rear End UM/UIM Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

This client was rear-ended on I-35 in rush hour traffic. After the negligent driver's insurance paid their policy limits, the Plaintiff made a claim on her own insurance the policy coverage she had pay for over many decade. Allstate denied her claim and forced her to go to trial. The jury sent Allstate a different message.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. When people buy car insurance, they oftentimes add what is called UM/UIM coverage.
What that does is that provides an additional layer of coverage if somebody is injured by an under-insured or an uninsured motorist. Unfortunately for Texans, some changes in the law have meant that these insurance carriers oftentimes do not honor these policies. They low ball, they deny and they delay paying these claims. I handled one such claim for a friend's mother. She was injured grievously in an I35 rear end collision in San Antonio.
What happened next was pure abuse by her insurance company. The other driver's insurance paid their policy limits. She had about $80,000 in medical bills and the other driver's insurance was 100,000 and they paid all of it. When she made a claim on her own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, they offered her $500, and then they withdrew that offer. This was a case against Allstate, and Allstate is famous for doing this to people.
Now, this information isn't confidential because Allstate made this case go to trial. They took an elderly woman to trial over the policy that she had been paying for for decades. She paid premiums on time for decades, and when she tried to make a claim for the policy she paid for, they made her a zero offer and they forced her to go to trial. They do this to bully people because they know that the expenses and the time are not worth it to most people. I tried this case on behalf of this woman.
The jury didn't agree with Allstate, even though Allstate hired experts that cost them $2,000 an hour for their deposition, the jury didn't buy it. After a three or four day trial, the jury returned a verdict for this woman for $386,000. Cases against your own insurance company are some of the most frustrating cases for clients as well as attorneys. We have to explain to our clients that, yes, you did pay for this policy and yes, you're current on your end of paying, but they're not going to pay you what they owe you.
We have to explain to them the changes in Texas law, and we have to explain to them that the insurance company doesn't care, that they make their money by holding onto this money and delaying the claim. We continue to represent clients and claims against their own insurance companies because it's important to us that people aren't bullied.

Q&A with Austin Injury Lawyer and Previous Co-Counsel Josh Fogelman

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 10:45:00 -0600

Law school classmate, friend, co-counsel, and fellow injury lawyer, Joshua Fogelman joins Hill Law Firm Cases podcast to discuss injury law, San Antonio, and trying case. He also discusses the business of personal injury law and opening multiple offices.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm here with Josh Fogelman, again. The point of this podcast is I want to talk about the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis, the issues we run into every day, so to give an inside look at a personal injury law firm in San Antonio. Josh has worked in San Antonio. He has a law firm in Austin called Fogelman Von Flatern. Or is it fvflaw.com?
Josh Fogelman: That's right, fvlawfirm.com.
Justin Hill: fvlawfirm.com. They're a great plaintiffs personal injury firm up there, handle stuff all over the state of Texas. I wanted to get Josh on here and just get some sort of off the cuff responses, some insights on what he thinks about the personal injury, profession and practice. We've previously talked about a case we tried to verdict the UIM case. Then we worked another case involving a premises liability, sort of a strange case that involved air conditioning companies and a hotel company and strange medical experts and all kinds of stuff. It was a real complex case. It was a lot of fun.
Let me tell you. My favorite thing about practicing law, the one favorite thing I get to do in the finite is, I like to cross-examine expert witnesses. I found that too often, they're unprepared and too often, they are pompous in their unpreparedness. It really creates this great situation where you've got somebody who is very proud of themselves, very confident and has not prepared. That is just a great situation for lawyers that want to spend the time preparing, knowing they're talking to somebody smarter than them, knowing they've got to overcome this hurdle, but the same time knowing that other side probably didn't prepare and stay up as late as you did or spend the last five days getting ready.
What's one of your favorite things to do within the working up of a case or within litigation that you enjoy?
Josh: I really enjoy the medicine side of what we do. I love learning about how injuries affect the body, how the body recovers from injuries and really trying to visualize what's going on inside someone's body that's causing them some sort of pain or impairment. I just really enjoy that stuff.
Justin Hill: I started doing more and more of it. Do you use the visual aids of the medical illustrations much in your cases?
Josh: Yes, we're starting to do that more and more as well. Trying to help a jury visualize and understand the lingo of what it is that you're talking about so that they can get through the medical terminology that can be cumbersome for anybody to understand and then helping to paint a picture for them in a way that they can relate in the real world so that they can really understand the gravity of what is going on inside our clients' bodies. We use full stuff.
Justin Hill: I have a case right now. We did the video tour of the injury. It's a whole video that kind of hits each injury area of the body and plays it out. I think I still like the old big boards better with just a big drawing with labels because I think there's a dramatic effect of carrying and holding a board. It's not a video clip, which any more trials got so many videos and at one less I think I like.
One thing I think is very hard in our profession, from the medical standpoint is, I think it's very hard to take the deposition of one of your clients treating doctors. There's a certain amount of distress, I think, between lawyers and doctors for one. Two, treating doctors are just random doctors that somehow got involved in this and sometimes they don't want to be helpful. Sometimes they want to be helpful to their client, but they don't really understand the legal lingo, so they don't really know how to answer your question. I just find it kind of a difficult process, especially when you have a doctor that's never been through it before.
What do you find to be one of the harder things to do?
Josh: I think that's correct. To focus in on specifically what I think is hard about deposing a treating doctor, they speak a different language. When they are evaluating a case and providing an opinion, it's not something that you or I can understand without having spent a significant amount of time doing research and really understanding the particular case and the particular medical terminology. They're fluent in that. They do. That's how it comes across in a deposition as well, which means that's what a jury would ultimately be hearing. I find it challenging and enjoyable to take that complicated medical language and break it down in a way that helps turn the doctor into a teacher. It's a lot of fun.
Justin Hill: It's great when you do that. It's also very difficult when you've done all the research, you've done everything, you've got all the papers, you got all the documents and the doctor just doesn't agree. Either they haven't caught up on the medicine or they're from a different line of thinking. There's just so much unpredictability about treating doctor depositions, I think.
I have never tried a case in Austin. I have had hearings up there, I have worked on cases up there. Austin's a very different animal than San Antonio. You spent a significant amount of time with me in San Antonio and just in your life in San Antonio, I know you and your dad used to love to come down here. What are just your general perceptions on San Antonio and the people and how it differs from everywhere else you've been in Texas?
Josh: Well, the people here are incredibly friendly and warm and welcoming and open and nice and easy to get along with, which just makes it a great place to come. I've told you this time and time again, that I considered moving down here. My wife would move down here in a heartbeat. We love it down here, we spend a lot of time down here. We spend far more time in San Antonio than we spend in any other city in Texas, besides Austin.
It reminds me a lot of the way that Austin was when I was growing up 20 years ago. 20, 30 years ago. It still has that small-town feel. People are polite to one another. It's a community. It has that community feeling. It doesn't feel like a type of place where everybody is rushing to keep up with the Joneses. We've lost some of that in Austin.
Justin Hill: One thing I've noticed about the difference between the injury practice or personal injury bar in San Antonio and Austin is, in San Antonio, we are very congenial. We help each other. I could call one of the biggest billboard advertisers here in town and say, "What works for you?" What doesn't work for you?" "How much money do you spend?" They would share with me. We're competitors, but we share. We try to help each other. Austin's kind of not like that. The bar up there is a little more competitive, which I've known because I'm friends with a bunch of you guys. I think the way you feel about our town is also the way our bar is, which is great.
Have y'all ever thought about opening offices outside of Austin and if so, what is your analysis? One of the things that I talk a lot about my firm is that we're a San Antonio firm, we're going to be a San Antonio firm and that's all we're going to be. It's important to me. Y'all have a bigger operation, more lawyers, everything, bigger budgets, everything. Have you thought about opening offices outside Austin and how do you analyze that process of doing so?
Josh: Yes, we have thought about opening offices outside of Austin. We've thought about opening an office here in San Antonio and that would be the next logical place for us to come, if we were to leave Austin or if we were to expand outside of Austin. The analysis there is, we're not done growing in Austin. We are a mission-driven law firm.
Justin Hill: I like that.
Josh: We still have quite a bit of ground that we want to cover in Austin and that's not because of greed it's because the mission and the vision of our law firm is to help displace maybe some of the other law firms who tend to be a little bit more predatory. We are focused on educating people so that they can make informed decisions. We feel like our firm brings something positive to an industry that, as you know, is historically tainted by people throwing around dollar bills and private jets, [chuckles] and things of that nature on--
Justin Hill: Millions of dollars from insurance companies saying that we're that way.
Josh: Absolutely true. You kind of get it from both sides there. A long way of me for answering your question, our analysis of where we would go depends a lot on what would be the best opportunity for us to continue disseminating that message and being able to expand and move forward with that mission in a meaningful way. We've talked about it time and time again, that San Antonio is a great community and we think that this would be a good place for us to come.
Justin Hill: Well, you're always welcome here, Josh.
Josh: [laughs] Thank you.
Justin Hill: All right. That's going to do it for this episode. I wanted to have a little Q&A with Austin personal injury lawyer, Joshua Fogelman. Thank you for being here, Josh. We're going to also throw something up on our YouTube channel, discussing business practices and young lawyer stuff and just generally, discussion about personal injury law, personal injury lawyers and sort of the practice of what we do on a day-to-day basis.
Josh: I appreciate you having me.
[music]
[00:10:24] [END OF AUDIO]

Meet the Team: Marisa Segovia

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 05:00:00 -0600

Marisa Segovia is the head paralegal and has previously been a receptionist, head of intake, and basically done all tasks at Hill Law Firm. She moved to San Antonio from El Paso in 2016 and has been an invaluable asset to the firm. Clients love her and she loves what she does. Get to know her here.
Transcript:
Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. All right, welcome to this episode of our Hill Law Firm podcast. This is now also going to be a video on our YouTube channel.
We're doing a series of episodes on meet the team in COVID and shut down days. Just generally there's too often that we don't get to meet with our clients early on because either they're too far away, or they don't want to come into the office, or for whatever reason, they'll have a lot of interaction with us prior to really getting to know us. I wanted to take an opportunity to introduce some of the people in my office for those who maybe don't get in early enough or just want to learn more about our law firm.
I'm here right now with Marissa Segovia. She is really the office manager, kind of jack of all trades, sort of runs the show around here. Marissa, I'm going to ask you a few questions, introduce yourself. When did you move to San Antonio?
Marissa: I moved to San Antonio, I believe it was the summer of 2016.
Justin: Okay. Where were you born and raised at?
Marissa: I was born in Austell, Georgia, and I was raised in El Paso, Texas.
Justin: Okay. I didn't know you were born in Georgia [unintelligible 00:01:41] El Paso. All right. You've been working here for how long, three years?
Marissa: A little over three years now, yes.
Justin: All right. I've actually used you as an example. I was asked one time for advice for people seeking jobs, what to do and what not to do. When I was interviewing for a receptionist at the time you came, and you were there about an hour early. I thought you were a different human being because everybody kept counseling or showing up late. You showed up an hour early. What had you been doing up until that time?
Marissa: As far as-
Justin: For a job.
Marissa: - job, okay. I worked at a front desk at a hotel.
Justin: Okay. I think it would be the kind way to say that it really wasn't the fanciest hotel in town.
Marissa: Correct. That's a nice way of putting it.
Justin: Yes. When I met with you, I knew if you could handle that, doing night shift at a rough hotel that you could probably handle anything. Why did you apply to work at Hill Law Firm?
Marissa: Really it was for a better job opportunity.
Justin: Fair enough. You had not been involved in the law before?
Marissa: Not at all.
Justin: Okay. You were going to college at the time?
Marissa: I was, yes.
Justin: Okay. What were you studying?
Marissa: Criminal justice.
Justin: Okay. You had some interest in the justice system, and we were a law firm, so it made sense.
Marissa: Yes, it did.
Justin: Okay. When you came over, you applied for a receptionist job. Just honestly, at the time it was me and you, and one other person. A paralegal, you and me, right?
Marissa: Correct.
Justin: Then it would have been about a little over a year ago, you got moved up to a paralegal position.
Marissa: Correct, yes.
Justin: Okay. Let's talk about growing up. You grew up in El Paso. Texas is notorious for lawyer advertisements. I know some of the ones that are in El Paso. I think maybe they had the strong arm out there. They had a few of those. What were your perceptions on personal injury law firms or personal injury lawyers prior to coming to work in here?
Marissa: I would say really law firms in general, I didn't really have an idea of personal injury work just because I never really had to deal with it. Law firms in general, I would say, I just really thought they're intimidating, and that's pretty much--
Justin: Well, it's kind of true.
Marissa: Yes.
Justin: I guess really like most people, generally your experience with personal injury firms at that time had been the TV commercials, the billboards or whatever. You've worked here for almost three years now. What's your perception now just generally of the plaintiffs work, and what we do here in our office?
Marissa: Okay. Now, I see how helpful it is to hire an attorney. Back then, like I said, I just really didn't think about it too much. Now, especially the type of work that we do, I see that it could take a lot off of a person's plate.
Justin: We hear that sometimes.
Marissa: Yes.
Justin: As it relates to your experience in a law firm, we're the only law firm you've worked at, but you've dealt with multiple other law firms because you're on the phone with them, you hear from them, you hear former clients come in and say, "This is what they said." Is there anything that you've noticed that we do differently as a law firm than what you have experienced or seen from other law firms?
Marissa: That's a really good question.
Justin: Thank you.
Marissa: I've heard a lot where clients call, and they say either they can't get a hold of their attorney or they're just not helping them in some sort of way. Here I think that's what we do differently, in the way of responding to clients and keeping them updated. I don't think I have ever seen a problem come through. I actually haven't seen.
Justin: Not one that we know about.
Marissa: Yes. That came through our office. I think that should go.
Justin: It's important for multiple reasons.
Marissa: Correct.
Justin: We could get grieved, they could sue us, they could fire us.
Marissa: Correct.
Justin: Which, I mean- and just generally have a bad reputation. Let's talk about your time here. You've worked on a lot of different cases in a lot of different ways. You have become friends with some of our former clients, and they still call and check on you on occasion. We have some that came in here and brought us flowers recently. Are there any specific cases or things that stand out in your mind, as sort of the day you realized, "Oh, we're working on bigger things here than just making widgets." We're working on big important issues in people's lives. Don't use their names.
Marissa: Okay. I think the one case that stood out to me was- it was involving two 18-wheelers. Our client passed away, and we represented his wife and kids.
Justin: Four kids.
Marissa: Yes, his wife and four kids. I think that one was- it just--
Justin: Just because of the emotional import.
Marissa: Yes. It hit way differently, and I'm glad how it resulted.
Justin: Yes, it turned out great. I think people who are listening wouldn't understand-- The way our old office was set up, you could hear everything from start to finish from whenever they came in and had their initial consult until they're still coming in after the case is resolved, and we're really good friends. I had lunch with them just two weeks ago. Was there anything about that case that changed how you felt about your job? There was a time whenever--
I was a young lawyer, that I had a job, and then there was a time, and when I realized my job actually has like a purpose. We're serving a higher purpose than ourselves. Did that affect you that way or did you feel that way before? Has there been something different that changed the way you feel about it?
Marissa: That's definitely how I felt. You realize a lot when you're actually working through the case and working on the case. Yes, you see a lot.
Justin: Yes. The hours got crazy for a little while. It's a very heady experience. You got to think from my perspective. I'm probably at that time 12 years older than her youngest son, and she's put her trust in our law firm to do it. It's a strange world we're in, and we got to do really good things for some of our clients, and we did a great thing for her. Let's talk a little bit about you outside of the office. What are some of the things you like to do? I know you like to hang out with your sister who's kind of a wild child, but what are some of the things you like to do outside of the office?
Marissa: Yes. I am an avid reader. I do read quite a bit. I like working out. My sister and I really enjoy working out as much as we can, and really hanging out- friends. Nothing too crazy.
Justin: You and Lindsey have started a internal book club that's basically just you two.
Marissa: Yes. For now.
Justin: You're in a small office. It's hard to have a big thing.
Marissa: For now. We'll get more people involved.
Justin: Yes, maybe Josh.
Marissa: Maybe.
Justin: You lived in El Paso up until really four years ago. What are some of the things about San Antonio-- Well, I have to say one of the things I know you don't like about San Antonio is you haven't found a good burrito. What are some of the things about San Antonio you do really like?
Marissa: Fiesta.
Justin: Yes, right. What are your favorite fiesta events?
Marissa: It's hard to pick one, because I feel like I've been going to different events each year, so I'm getting a feel for every one, but honestly all of them are great. I like them all. I think just the environment, seeing everyone together, and we didn't have anything like that in El Paso.
Justin: Right. Which fiesta events had you done prior to coming to work here? I bet with your sister in [unintelligible 00:09:49].
Marissa: Yes. Definitely in [unintelligible 00:09:52]. I want to say Oyster Bay also with my sister.
Justin: That would make sense.
Marissa: She went to St. Mary's, so we definitely did the first year I was here. I don't think we've done it ever since then, but I did go to that event the first year. Then, I also went to a couple of events with the firm here after that.
Justin: When we do a fiesta day. We skip out and go eat and drink.
Marissa: That's always nice.
Justin: What are some of the things you're hoping to learn as you're here? It's sort of, the sky is the limit. The more you want to do, the more you can do. Our job is different every single day. What are some of the things you're hoping to learn or hoping to accomplish at our firm throughout your career?
Marissa: I think it's just really mastering it. I learned really everything. I learned something new every day. Every time I learn something, it just makes me want more.
Justin: Sure. You've been great about-- Anybody understands in any job, you have people that want to learn more and you have people that just want to not get attention. They don't want the spotlight. You are very consistent about saying, "Hey, next time we have one of those sit-downs here, the three things I want to be taught." I appreciate that and I think that's great.
I think that's important too, that our clients know that whenever they hire our law firm or hire me, they're hiring you, they're hiring Josh, they're hiring everybody in our office who if you're trying to learn, that's better for them and better for all of us. Thank you, Marissa. We're going to do this again in the future. These are just intros, get to know the team. This will be on the Hill Law Firm podcast and on our Youtube channel, so thank you.
Marissa: Thank you.
[music]
[00:11:52] [END OF AUDIO]

Hit and Run Driver UM/UIM Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:30:00 -0600

A friend's parents were traumatically injured in a hit and run case but their insurance company did everything they could to deny their UM/UIM claim. We tried this case to verdict.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
I had the pleasure of representing an elderly couple, many years ago who were involved in a hit and run crash. They were driving down the highway at highway speeds when somebody rear-ended their vehicle. Now, they weren't rear-ended hard, but hard enough for them to lose control of their vehicle. Their vehicle careened hard to the left and they hit the dividing wall.
Both of these clients of mine broke their neck. One of them also broke their back. Luckily, neither of them were paralyzed or killed in this crash. However, they had a long road to recovery. As it was a hit and run and they were so tragically injured, they did not get to take down the license plate of the other driver or get a make and model of the vehicle.
They had taken out insurance for situations like this, an uninsured or underinsured motorist policy, which covers them in hit and run situations. Once they were coming out of their hospital stays and they were still in a halo and a back brace respectively, they made a claim on this policy. Little did they know that while they were still in the hospital, the insurance company was preparing to deny their claim. While they were in the hospital, the insurance company had sent out an accident reconstructionist to the wrecker yard to try to start proving up that they had just lost their control of their vehicle and that they were not struck.
You see, there's a quirk in the UM/UIM policies that if there's not contact with another vehicle, the insurance company doesn't have to pay. Sometimes you'll hear insurance companies say, you weren't hit, you were just run off the road and as long as there's no contact, that's not enough to make a claim.
While my clients were recovering from broken backs, their insurance company was preparing to deny their claim, and deny their claim they did. I was hired to represent them to sue their own insurance company to try to get the policy that they had paid for, for years. Since it was a big policy, the insurance company pulled out all the stops to fight them. They never once tried to do the right thing. They never once tried to make a fair settlement offer of their claim.
Multiple experts were involved, medical and accident reconstructionists, and in the end, this case had to go to trial. Even though these two people had taken out their insurance policies to cover them for certain situations such as a hit and run driver, their insurance company was working against them the whole time.
In the middle of the trial, the insurance company decided to make an offer. An offer that was many, multiple times larger than anything they'd ever offered prior to trial. Insurance companies, too often, work against their own insureds, and too often, insureds expect them to do the right thing, while behind the scenes, the insurance company is preparing to deny, delay, or defend. In situations like that, sometimes we get handled to sue the insurance company.

Bus v. 18-Wheeler Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:45:00 -0600

It is a high honor when a defense lawyer calls and says they want to settle your case first and for a premium to get you out of the case. That is exactly what happened after Justin Hill deposed the two defendant drivers in this case. He got them both to admit they could have avoided the crash.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. In Hill Law Firm we handle more bus crash cases than probably most law firms in the state of Texas. We've handled bus crash cases against some of the largest busing companies in the world.
One such example is a case involving a international bus line that takes people from Texas into Mexico. One day while this bus was making one of its routes south, as it was approaching a disabled 18-wheeler on the shoulder, it failed to get over into the left-hand lane to pass it. At about the same time, that 18-wheeler driver who was working for one of the largest companies in the world, was trying to get a speed up to get back into the slow lane so he could get on his way.
He had his hazards on and the bus driver thought he had stopped. As can be expected, the bus driver failed to get over and he ended up hitting the large 18-wheeler truck. This caused the bus to roll over in the median. Our client, an elderly woman, was thrown from her seat into the luggage compartment where she was stuck. She had a broken arm and a broken shoulder.
She was not found until the wrecker was there fixing to tip the bus back onto its wheels. Only then did somebody hear her cry for help. In the depositions for this case, I was able to establish with both of the drivers. The first, the bus driver would have been able to get over completely to the left and avoid this accident had he tried. He also said he would have been able to come to a complete stop if he had started to slow when he saw the truck.
In the same vein, the trucking company driver stated that he could have waited on the shoulder until the bus passed, and then it wasn't a lot of traffic, and then he would have been fine waiting and getting on the roadway after. Both of the defendants called us early on and settled our claims first. In the end, some of the other lawyers had to take their case all the way to trial. It wasn't that we got a low settlement.
We got an early settlement because we were the law firm doing the hard work. We had hired the accident reconstructionists, we had the expertise and knew what we were doing. Because of that, the defendants knew that we would either improve the value of all the cases, or they could resolve our claim first, get us out, and then deal with lawyers that did not have as much experience in bus cases.
We continue to handle bus cases and currently have one bus case in San Antonio, Texas at this time. It's something we're passionate about and it's something we think the industry needs to better regulate. If you have any questions about a bus case, you know how to reach us.

Defective Tire Injures Texas Couple

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 00:45:00 -0600

A retired couple was traumatically injured when their front left drive tire suffered a catastrophic tire tread separation while driving at highway speeds in West Texas. This case involved very complex issues of accident reconstruction and engineering.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin: I was very lucky as a young lawyer to get a job with one of the best plaintiff's personal injury and commercial litigation law firms in the United States. I cold-called him coming out of law school hoping for the best. That was a non-traditional path. I didn't follow an application out, and send a resume in, and wait three weeks. I went after the job I wanted. One reason I wanted that job was because I wanted to do products liability work.
I wanted to be able to represent people who were injured due to the dangerous design and defect of products. A lot of people understand this as cases based on things like the Ford/Firestone recall, or Ford rollovers, or other vehicle defects. One of the most famous examples is asbestos or lawn darts. There are certain products that are dangerous, and they're unreasonably dangerous for what their intended purpose is.
Luckily, at my first job, I got to work on some of those cases. One of them involved an older couple who had retired. They had decided they were going to buy an RV. They were going to travel around. They were going to enjoy their golden years.
While they were coming back from a trip to Colorado, they suffered what's called a tire delamination, a tire detread. These are defects in tires. When a tire doesn't fully cook or cure together, the tire can fall apart. This is different than a blowout. This is different than all the treads you see on the road. Usually, that is tread associated with retreaded tires.
Passenger vehicle tires are not retreaded, and they should not fall apart. The same is to be said for RV tires. The RV tires in the front aren't allowed to be retreaded. They have to be new tires, and they should not fall apart. In our case, our clients were driving highway speeds when the front left tire delaminated. What this meant is that their vehicle pulled hard left.
Based on the accident reconstruction, it pulled left, it went left and it was not moving. Unfortunately, for our clients, in the area where there was not much other than wheat fields, they hit head on a concrete box culvert. Both of the passengers were critically injured, lower leg injuries, and just a series of injuries, and complications related to their traumatic injuries.
A couple of things happen after that. We sued the tire maker for making a defective tire. This was one of the largest tire makers in the world, and they gave us the runaround. This tire was made overseas because they had reached capacity in the United States. They forced us to go overseas to Italy to depose factory workers.
On top of that, the way these cases are typically defended is an accident reconstructionist hired by the tire company will say something along the lines of, “Yes, even if that did happen, these are controllable events.” They usually say, “You take your foot off the gas and you let your vehicle slow down, while you try to maintain speed.” There's testing showing that that is not necessarily true and that there are uncontrollable events following tire delaminations.
What we had in our case was a RV owner's website by this tire company. It actually discussed this exact scenario. That if this were to happen on the drive axle that the driver should accelerate until they're able to straighten out their vehicle. This is different advice than is given for passenger vehicles. Once we got into our case, we found out that's exactly what our client had done. He was prepared. He did the right thing.
After years of litigation, the tire company did the right thing, after defending it and saying our client failed to properly react, and that the tire was perfect. Without admitting liability, through their actions, they showed us that they felt our client deserved justice, and we were able to get the case resolved.

San Antonio Head on Crash Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

Sometimes loved ones call looking for lawyers for their parents or family members. In this case, a daughter called seeking counsel for her parents. The negligent driver was very underinsured so claims against his insurance broker had to be fully explored before resolving this crash case.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
When I was a young lawyer, I remember a defense lawyer referring to one of my colleagues as a pioneer. He said they were an early settler. He said it as a joke, making fun of them, saying that they settle early and they settle for too low amounts of money. I knew at that time I was never going to be that kind of lawyer and we've never had the reputation of doing anything other than working our cases hard aggressively and getting the best outcome.
About five years ago, I was hired by an elderly couple who were probably in their 80s. I was contacted by their daughter. Their daughter was trying to find the right lawyer for her parents. Not only because of the facts of the case but because of who they were. They were plainspoken country folks and she wanted somebody who could talk to them and they would trust.
I went and met with them. I ended up on a four-wheeler with her 80-year-old father. In that case, they were hit by a man who is seriously underinsured. He lived in a very large house. He had a lot of expensive cars, but right after this crash, he had filed for bankruptcy. He had an insurance policy, but it was just too low. Then we started checking other boxes. Sometimes you can hold an insurance agent responsible if they don't fully explain and/or provide the policy coverages needed by their insured.
In this example, if the man had a lot of assets and money, but the insurance agent didn't tell him he needed more in coverage, he possibly could have had a claim against his own agent. We checked all these boxes and ran down all these paths for these very nice people. In the end though, due to the bankruptcy and a few other things, we were only able to recover the amounts of insurance the negligent driver carried.
It was not an insignificant amount, but the next thing the insurance company wanted to do was settle with one of our clients, but not the other. Luckily, my clients listened to me and trusted me. I told them we need to stick together. At mediation, the insurance company brought forward adjusters, which was the first I'd seen that, even though this wasn't a high-risk case in the bigger picture. In the end, they offered two-full-policy limits for both of these people.
The clients were very happy. The daughter keeps in touch with me and I've kept in touch with how her parents are doing. At Hill Law Firm, our clients are not our clients just for the case. Our clients are part of our family and we stay in touch with them as long as we can.
[music]

Exploding Gas Can Lawsuits

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

When a young boy knocked over a gas can, a nearby pilot light ignited the fumes and caused an explosion. A toddler died and two people suffered serious injuries. This case was handled all the way through the bankruptcy courts to a resolution.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Product makers in America are required to make their products so that they're not unreasonably dangerous and defective for their intended use. Generally that means you design against any sort of dangers.
When you manufacture, you make sure that it's up to specs and not dangerous and if you can't get rid of it, then you weren't against any dangers. A few years ago I represented a family who lost one of their children, a young toddler. Now this young little man was out in the garage while his dad was trimming the hedges by hand, not six feet away. At some point, this little kid and his brother picked up the gas can, and because it was heavy and they were both less than the age of five, it tipped over and when it tipped over, the gas ran and it pooled in the garage.
A water heater nearby turned on, ignited the gas, and the vapors went back into the gas can and the gas can exploded. In the end the father, the older son were both badly burned and the youngest son was burned so bad that he did not survive. We took their case and we represented them against the water heater manufacturer as well as the gas can maker. What the water heater manufacturer and the gas can maker both knew was that they both made products that were unsafe.
The water heater manufacturer knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor around the open pilot light that it could ignite fumes from things such as gasoline or other chemical products that are often stored in garages in or around water heaters. On top of that, the gas can manufacturers knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor in the spout of their gas can, vapors could migrate and those vapors could get ignited. That flame could go back into the can and explode the entire gas can.
They knew that because early on in some of the depositions before insurance companies got involved, the owner of the company admitted that he had been planning to do that and that he knew the cost was very low. He had quoted the cost and he said it was about a quarter per gas can. 25 cents per gas can to save countless lives. Hundreds if not thousands of people were burned or killed as a result of these exploding gas cans, and the numbers have to be similar for the water heater manufacturers that knew they also had a product that was going to end up burning or killing people.
We represented this family against the gas can manufacturer as well as the water heater manufacturer. The water heater manufacturers settled early. While they never admitted wrongdoing, we had all the trade papers showing they knew that they had a problem and they needed to fix it. As it relates to the gas can manufacturer, they settled as well, because our testing showed that in 50 tests with a flame arrestor and 50 tests without a flame arrestor, the flame arrestor worked 100% of the time.
In the 50 tests with the flame arrestor not once did the migration cause the can to explode. This was one of the toughest cases we ever worked on emotionally and from a legal engineering standpoint, it was very tough from an emotional standpoint, just due to the loss the family had suffered. Luckily for that family and the other families that stood up to these manufacturers, both of the products are now safer than they were before. That gas can manufacturer went bankrupt, was purchased by another one, and now make a gas can that is much safer.
The water heater manufacturers as a trade association almost have agreed to change the way they make open pilot light water heaters so that they have a flame arrestor that protects the flame from igniting flammable vapors. At Hill Law Firm, we handle product liability cases because we believe it's important to make the products that we use day to day safer.

Drunk Driver Dram Shop Crash Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

A young man was over served at one of the largest sports bar franchises in America. The servers had been trained to upsell patrons to larger volumes of alcohol. In this case, the server did just that and the patron became intoxicated.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: We handle more drunk driving cases in San Antonio than probably any firm our size. Due to our relationship with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and history in handling cases involving drunk drivers, we get referred a lot of cases by their attorneys, and we get hired by a lot of people who are interviewing lawyers to help them in a drunk driving case.
Oftentimes, drunk driving cases have multiple angles. One involves the drunk themselves and the claim against them. Sometimes there are also claims against bars. Generally, Texas law states that bars can be held responsible if they overserve someone and that person goes out and hurts somebody else.
This reminds me of a case we handled in South Texas on behalf of a fireman. This fireman was off duty and was riding motorcycles with his friends. As he was passing a gas station, a young man pulled directly in front of him pulling into the gas station. The firefighter was unable to stop and ended up losing his leg.
In this case, we found out that this young man had been drinking at one of the largest sports bars in America. After we dug into it, we realized this was his 21st birthday. He won an experienced drinker. When he would order a beer, the server would encourage him for only $0.25 more to double the size of the beer. This young man did not understand his tolerance or how much alcohol he was consuming. On top of that, at some point he was so intoxicated he probably didn't even know what he was doing. Now, this large corporation was happy to upsell these drinks because the profit margin is so good and they knew they'd make more money.
This case proceeded all the way to trial. The defendants tried to argue that our client was at fault. They tried to argue that the young man who hit him wasn't that drunk. It was only a little bit more than double the legal limit. In trial, they must have realized that they were probably wrong because while the jury was out, they made us a settlement offer that my client accepted.
What we learned in that case was multiple things, but one is that even these multinational bar and restaurant groups give their servers almost verbatim scripts on how to upsell alcohol. It's not enough that they're serving alcohol. They want you to drink more alcohol, and they want to make more money. That's something we've learned that we've been able to use in other cases in the future.
Now this crashing the settlement, and the result was never going to bring our client his leg back, and he was never going to be the same. At the end of this, the important part was that he felt as though he was taken care of, and he felt that the result we got him was a good result. He also felt that justice had been served, and that that business was not going to do business the same anymore.

Most Common OSHA Violations: Scaffolding

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 11:45:00 -0600

Scaffolding is a common sight at construction locations. Improper construction or use of scaffolding can lead to serious injuries or deaths. Hill Law Firm has handled scaffolding related injury cases in San Antonio. On this episode, we talk about how violations of OSHA scaffolding regulations are one of the most common reasons OSHA cites employers.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: In this series, we've been talking about the most common causes of OSHA violations in worksite injuries and deaths. We get called from a lot of injured workers and their families, and we always have to sit down and talk to them regarding what happened on the job, what the employer should have been doing, what the employee should have been doing in some circumstances. One of the questions we always ask is, did OSHA investigate? OSHA doesn't investigate every incident, but they investigate a lot of them.
In those investigations, they'll determine whether or not the employer did what they were supposed to in following OSHA regulations. If they find that the employer did not follow OSHA regulations, oftentimes, they'll fine them or, in some way, sanction them. After they finish their investigations, oftentimes, we're able to get a copy of their full investigative report. Oftentimes, that'll include witness statements, interviews, pictures, and their conclusions of what the employer did wrong.
We've been talking about what the most commonly cited violations are for OSHA violations in these investigations, and the number three most commonly cited regards the general safety requirements regarding scaffolding. The discussion around scaffolding typically is that it should be designed by a qualified person, constructed in accordance with the design, and loaded and in accordance with a good design.
Employers are bound to protect construction workers and other workers from falls and falling objects while they're working at, near, or on scaffolding at heights of 10 feet or higher. We all know what scaffolding is. It's that framework of what looks like a metal skeleton with pieces of wood plank going up the side of the building, and maybe, people are using it to paint or construct a new structure. Due to the heights and what's going on, people fall or are hit by falling objects often.
In a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72% of workers injured in scaffolding-related accidents were due to either the planking or other support structure giving way and falling or the employee slipping due to the planking or structure being slick, and also people on the scaffolding structure being struck by falling objects. OSHA's regulations are very in-depth and detailed. Employers are required to know these regulations, and oftentimes, they'll have OSHA-certified employees on the job site to ensure that everybody is satisfying the OSHA regulations regarding whatever dangerous activity they're performing at the time.
OSHA has regulations regarding multiple different types of scaffolding or raised working equipment. For example, they have regulations on scissor lifts and working safely with scissor lifts, ladderjack scaffolds, supported scaffolds and working safely with those, tube and coupler scaffolds, narrow frame scaffolds, general scaffolding. They also have regulations regarding scaffolding in construction environments, as well as shipyard environments.
What we know is that if you're working from height around dangerous objects or heavy objects or falling objects, that safety should be paramount. The scaffolding requirements by OSHA are intended to make sure that workplaces stay safe when people are working at, near, or on scaffolding. We'll continue to cover the most common OSHA violations, but it's worth noting that in San Antonio, with the boom in construction, more people are working at heights and on scaffolding, and unless employers are doing what they're supposed to do and being as safe as they possibly can, that some employees will be injured working at, near, or on scaffolding.

Most Common OSHA Violations: Fall Protection

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 10:00:00 -0600

Fall protection is a very important topic for people that work from heights. One of the most common reasons employers are cited by OSHA in San Antonio, Texas and beyond is for violating fall protection regulations in incidents where workers are injured on the job. When employers do not provide proper fall protection and enforce the use of it, workers can be seriously injured or killed on the job.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: One of the earliest cases I worked on as a young lawyer involved a worker who was injured on the job. In that case, OSHA did a full investigation following his injury to determine whether or not the employer had followed the OSHA required regulations regarding safety. I learned, in that case, how difficult it is to get information from OSHA, how important they are in the investigation, and what the outcome is of their investigation. That case involved a man who was injured after falling from a scaffolding. There were questions about whether or not he was provided the safety equipment, and whether or not he was using it properly at the time his injury occurred.
OSHA is a federal agency who is tasked with evaluating and enforcing safety rules and regulations on employers and at worksites. Generally, their goal is to make sure that they require employers, and those in control of worksites, to make sure that they're safe. If somebody's injured on the job and OSHA does do an investigation, if they find violations or deficiencies regarding OSHA standards, they have the ability to find and sanction employers.
In 2019, they listed what their most commonly cited violations were. The number one most commonly cited violation was fall protection, and the general requirements of fall protection outlined by OSHA. This is a standard that outlines where fall protection is required. It goes on to say what types of systems are required, what has to be given to employees. It's designed to protect employees, if they're walking, working, standing, or whatnot, on surfaces that don't have a protected edge, like a fence or a wall, and it's above six feet. In those situations, employer should know that they have to follow OSHA regulations regarding fall protection.
Some of the most commonly cited sections of the fall protection guidelines that lead to employers being sanctioned or fined include employees that are working in the residential section, the residential construction area, and that their activities, if they're six or more feet above the ground, that they have to be protected by some guardrail, or a safety netting system, or they have to be wearing a personal fall protection, or fall arrest system.
Now all of these OSHA regulations get very deep into the specifics of what fall protection is required, and when it's required. For example, we know that OSHA regulations require that if employees are working on a roof that is considered to be a steep roof, that doesn't have protected sides, that they're required to have things such as toe boards, or nets or other types of harness, or fall arrest systems. The fall protection guidelines of the OSHA regulations are there to ensure the safety of workers that are working at heights. We've discussed previously how fall protection is so important, because falls and slips and trips are one of the leading causes of injuries and deaths on the worksite.
We're going to go ahead and outline some of these other most commonly cited OSHA regulations over the next few episodes of Hill Law Firm Cases.
[music]
[00:04:41] [END OF AUDIO]

Most Common OSHA Violations: Hazard Communications

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

OSHA has the ability to fine and sanction employers that do not take care of the safety of their employees and workplace. One of the more common violations includes not warning or training on the dangers associated with chemicals used, kept or made at a location. Too often workers are injured through exposure to toxic chemicals. Sometimes, those employers pay a fine for violations of the hazard communications regulations.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
A lot of workers in Texas and in San Antonio work in industries in which they're exposed to dangerous chemicals or other types of hazards. Currently, we're working on a few cases, one in which a young man was exposed to hydrogen sulfide, and he was a transport driver. Somehow or another, he came to have a vessel containing this dangerous gas in his vehicle and nobody told him what he was carrying.
In another case, we represent a bunch of workers who were working in a grocery warehouse when a bad ammonia leak happened. Many of them, likely hundreds, were exposed to some amount of ammonia, whether they were working at the time, driving by, on the plant, or just in the general area. It was a very, very large exposure.
We've talked recently about OSHA, and how OSHA afterwards will get involved in on the job injuries and exposures to determine whether or not the employer did everything they should, following all the federal rules and regulations. If not, they will do an investigation and oftentimes fine or somehow sanction those employers. They do this to make sure that employers maintain a safe workplace and that employees have all the chance they can to not be injured on the job in a variety of ways.
We've talked recently about the most common causes of employers getting sanctioned or written up or fined by OSHA. The most commonly cited violations. We spoke recently about fall protection being the number one cause of OSHA citations. The second most commonly cited cause of OSHA citations and violations are the hazard communication sets of rules and regulations.
Now, these standards address a few things, but they're typically revolved around chemical hazards in the workplace. That involves chemicals that are being produced on-site in a facility, or chemicals that are brought on the facility off-site but used in whatever processes happen at that location.
Some of the more commonly cited portions of the hazard communication regulations include that employers are required to keep some sort of written program on-site. That written program has to provide certain things such as labeling, warnings, safety, safety data sheets, training to the employees, information availability to the employees. Generally, just the idea that if people are working around dangerous chemicals, they should be trained on what they are, trained on how to respond to an emergency, and understand how to handle them in a safe manner.
Another thing that is commonly cited in the hazard communication guidelines is whether or not employees are continuously trained as new chemicals are brought on site. When a new employee is hired and there's dangerous chemicals on the location, OSHA requires that those new employees are trained on them, as we previously discussed. OSHA also requires that if new chemicals are brought onto the property that employees get trained on them. Not only trained, but they also need to be labeled, warnings need to be available, and the safety data sheets should also be provided.
Another big part of the hazard communication requires labeling. Not only should people be warned, they should have the safety data sheets available, but also all these chemicals should be properly labeled. The labeling should clearly mark out what the chemical is and what dangers are associated with it. For example, things like flammability, whether it's caustic, whether it's dangerous to be breathed, and they should all be specific to whatever chemical it is.
Now, as we discussed, we have a few cases currently regarding workers who were exposed to dangerous chemicals. In those cases, there's always going to be a discussion about whether or not the employees knew what the chemicals were, knew how to respond to a release of the chemicals, knew what the dangers of the chemicals were. That's going to be a big issue in any case involving industrial exposure, including the cases we're currently handling.
We're going to continue to walk down OSHA's most commonly cited violations so you'll have some sort of understanding as to what the most common violations are of employers at the worksite, and what we think probably tracks pretty closely to what some of the most common causes of injuries are on the worksite.

Leading Causes of Workplace Injuries in Texas

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 02:45:00 -0600

Texas has one of the worst records in the United States for workers injured on the job. There are lot of causes of injuries on the job and we cover the most common causes of Texas workplace injuries in this episode.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: San Antonio is a city full of blue-collar workers. There's a lot of hardworking people in San Antonio that work in dangerous jobs. Because of that, we get called from a lot of people or their family members that have cases that involve injuries on the job or incidents where somebody has lost their life while working. We get a lot of calls about whether this is normal, what did the employer do or not do that they should've done, what the injured party could've done to help prevent this.
Oftentimes, we're asked questions by our clients if we think they did something wrong. More often, we get clients that tell us that they had repeatedly told their employers and their bosses about some danger or some safety equipment or some need that was not met. What we see more often are workers who are very conscious of their safety and the safety of their co-workers. They want a safer work environment. They want the best equipment, and they want to all be held to that high standard to make sure nobody got hurt.
We see the normal on-the-job injuries that track what the state and the federal government says are the most common on-the-job injuries. The National Safety Council actually did a breakdown on what the most common cause of work-related injuries are. They broke it into three categories, and the first being overexertion and bodily reaction. This includes things such as physical effort that leads to some injury, lifting, straining, stressing.
This also includes repetitive motion. Some jobs necessarily require the worker to be in a position to where they have repetitive stress or strain or vibration put on their body. These are the most common causes, according to the National Safety Council, and that makes sense. People hurt themselves lifting and straining and pulling and pressing.
The second most common cause of injuries on the job were slips, trips, and falls. This includes different types of incidents where the worker maybe catches themselves, but injures themselves while catching themselves, falling from high objects, falling down objects such as stairs. This also includes incidents where structures collapse.
We spoke recently about a case where we had a roofer who was roofing a patio structure, and the whole structure collapsed under him. He suffered very serious leg injuries-- leg injuries that were so bad that he probably won't work again. This also includes people that are jumping trying to avoid a fall. People that attempt to catch themselves sometimes harm themselves while doing that.
The third most common leading cause of work-related injuries listed by the National Safety Council are contacts with objects and equipment. This includes things like a moving object striking a worker, whether it can be an I-beam being lifted by a cable on a crane, a vehicle, a forklift. We've seen all of those examples in our own office. This includes a worker striking against an object or equipment. It would include being kicked or pushed or pulled into a piece of equipment.
We've also seen incidents such as a worker's body being squeezed or pinched or crushed between equipment, shifting objects, or falling objects. People that work in dangerous industries where there are large pieces of moving equipment are much more susceptible to these types of injuries. We've also seen incidences in which a worker is injured as a result of friction or pressure between the person and some source of injury.
Maybe somebody isn't crushed or squeezed, but just the friction or pressure they're put under can cause very serious injuries. Something we see and hear of more often than one would think are incidences in which somebody is in a falling or collapsing structure, whether it's a building or a trench.
There's lots of safety precautions that workers are supposed to follow and employers are supposed to mandate when workers are working around structures that could collapse or fall or shift. One thing we do know is that Texas doesn't have a great track record on worker safety. Here in San Antonio, we have a lot of workers that work in dangerous industries. Because of that, we continue to represent injured workers, and we will continue to do so.
[music]

Most Common OSHA Violations: Lockout/Tagout

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 01:30:00 -0600

When workers must clean or maintain machinery, they must have a way to secure the machinery in a way that no energy is unleashed on the worker. OSHA's lockout and tagout regulations ensure that employers have a plan and method to lockout equipment and to train employees. With the large numbers of injuries to workers in Texas, this is very important for employers to follow and know.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
In law school, we were able to take a class called Personal Injury Trial Law from a local injury lawyer. We joked that the class was show and tell because of what he did in his teaching methods was more akin to showing and telling us the type of work he does, the reason his job exists, the hazards that plaintiff's lawyers and injury lawyers had been able to eradicate from society, and generally, it was entertaining, in that it was so real world for us.
Constitutional law is not something people sit around and talk about, but everybody knows somebody that's been in a car crash, and a lot of people know someone that's been injured on the job. I remember one of the stories he told us was about a man who lost both of his hands while at work. He worked with a metal press, and what he had to do was put sheet metal in this press, and then the metal press would stamp out little circular disks.
The way the machine was built was that he had to position both of the sheets of metal and the stamp in a certain location, but then to operate the stamp, he had to push two buttons at the same time. Those buttons were about four feet apart. If you think about it, he had to be able to use both of his hands to push those buttons. The reason it was designed that way was so you wouldn't get your hands stuck in the equipment. What you didn't want was your hand to be there when the stamp came down.
At some point, the employer decided that that was slowing down the process, so they removed the hand buttons that required two buttons at once and replaced it with a foot pedal. Well, as you can imagine, removing that safety equipment meant there was nothing stopping that energy and force if a hand was in the way. One day, this man was doing his job as he had done for about 10 years, but he was using the foot pedal that had been added to the machine. He pushed it while his hands weren't out of the way, and they were both partially amputated.
I remember thinking how crazy that was, and now that I've done this job for over a decade, I realize that some employers care that much about speeding up processes and that much about making more money per hour of work. We've been talking about OSHA violations and the most common OSHA violations. One of the most common OSHA violations is violations of the lockout/tagout procedures outlined by OSHA.
Lockout/tagout is intended to help employees avoid getting injured by hazardous energy. Different types of energy sources include hydraulic, pneumatic, mechanical, electrical, chemical, thermal, or other sources of energy that can come from machines or equipment, and that those types of energy can be hazardous.
What we know is that oftentimes, machinery and equipment have to be maintained, and when equipment and machinery have to be maintained, there needs to be some way to secure them, so that the parties maintaining them won't be injured by some hazardous energy being unloaded into them or a part of their body. What we know is that hazardous energy, such as mechanical energy, which I was talking about with the man who lost a portion of his hands, that type of energy needs to be harnessed or stopped when equipment is being worked on.
If it's not, people can be injured. Employees can be injured. They can be killed, electrocuted, burned, crushed. They can lose portions of their body. They can have degloving injuries, cuts. There's all different types of injuries. What OSHA requires are certain procedures called lockout/tagout procedures. What that is intended to do is to make sure that the hazardous energy is controlled whenever somebody is working on some piece of equipment.
Think about it this way. That pneumatic press we were talking about earlier, if you're working on it, you don't want it to come on while you're under it. There are certain procedures, whether it be a chain or a lock, where you can ensure that that piece of equipment cannot move while it is being maintained. What we know is it's one of the most common causes of injuries on the work site are violations of lockout/tagout procedures. There's no real blanket answer to what is a lockout/tagout, because every situation is different.
Employers are required to develop and maintain lockout/tagout energy control programs at their work site. There are different devices and equipment that can be made and maintained that ensure that workers aren't going to be putting themselves in danger of injury when they are working on equipment.
Another thing that employers are required to do under OSHA regulations is not only to have a plan and a program, but they have to make sure their equipment can be locked out and tagged out, so that it can be worked on. What I can't do is go into every single OSHA provision regarding lockout/tagout procedures, but it's important to just think that if you're working on something that could be dangerous, there should be a way to alleviate that danger. That's the intention of the lockout/tagout OSHA regulations.
What we know is that if somebody is injured on the job, their employers are usually going to try to blame them. What we also know is that OSHA regulations put a lot of responsibilities on the employers that they can't just push off onto their employees. One of those responsibilities is that they maintain a safe work environment. In maintaining that safe work environment, they have to have properly implemented and followed lockout and tagout procedures.

Drunk Driving Crane Operator Crash

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

One of my earliest cases was representing a 19 year old woman when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver right outside San Antonio, Texas. The crane operator had been out entertaining company clients and buying them alcohol with his company credit card.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin: Since I became a lawyer, I've been very involved with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I've sat on the board, I've been chairman of the board, the advisory board here in San Antonio in South Texas. I've donated to their causes, I've walked in their walks, and I've represented a lot of victims. One of the first cases I worked on involving alcohol, as a young lawyer, involved a man who got drunk on the job. Not on the job physically while out laboring, but drunk on the job while he was out entertaining clients. He took out some of the bigwig clients. He had a company credit card. He had a company vehicle. He had a company cell phone. He was high ranking in the company.
He took out the clients and they had way too much to drink. Then he hopped in his company vehicle and he was driving down the road. Then he decided to look at his company phone. When he did, he crossed the centerline of the road and he hit my client head-on. My client was 19 years old. I always remember this case for a few things. One, it was very early in my career and I learned a lot. Another thing was my client was in a vehicle that was one of the safest vehicles on the road. She was hit head-on with a delta-v, meaning change in speed. It was probably 70 miles an hour.
In most vehicles, my client would not have walked away. In this crash, however, because she was in one of the safest vehicles on the roadway, she walked away with a broken arm. I always remember that, and I always learned a lesson on how safe your vehicle is matters. I took her case and I represented her against this corporation. My client was a freshman in college, and the defendant was one of the largest crane companies in Texas. They originally took the position that this guy wasn't on the job and he was out just messing around with his own buddies.
Once we started deposing their clients, they didn't like that. They didn't want us to know how they ran their business, how hands-off they were with their corporate credit cards, or what they encouraged their employees to do. I remember as a young lawyer feeling like I did not know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to fight. I knew I was in the right. I knew that there wasn't some amount of money they were going to pay me to just go away. I fought and we worked up the case.
At some point, they made an offer on the case that I still look back on and I can't believe I turned down, but my client listened to me and trusted me to do the right thing. Their next offer was almost double what I had just turned down. We accepted that offer. That case ended up paying for this client's college, and it started what's been a long run for me representing victims of drunk driving. We continue to represent people that have been injured in drunk driving crashes in San Antonio. We also represent victims of drunk driving in what are called dram shop cases in San Antonio, where we sue the bar owner for over-serving people.
In this case I just talked about, we looked into the dram shop case, but we didn't think it was a good dram shop case. This was a very formative case for me. I learned a lot. I still look back on this case as one of the cases that set a tone and a path for my career that I follow today.

Uber Driver Hit by Drunk Driver

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

This case resolved in 2019 and involved a ride share driver who was rear-ended by a drunk driver at a high rate of speed. This case involved a lot of complicated medical and legal issues. We were able to get this case resolved and have a very happy client.
Transcript
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
In 2016, I was contacted by a young man the morning after a bad crash he had been in. He asked if he could meet and I met him on a Saturday morning. When I met with him, he told me the only thing he wanted was his vehicle paid for. His vehicle had been totaled in the crash and that vehicle was the way he made his living. I asked him if I could see pictures of the crash and he showed me. The crash was so bad that the vehicle that hit him, a pickup truck, had gone all the way through his trunk, all the way through the back seat and the pickup truck's bumper was touching the headrest of the driver's seat. This wasn't a small car. This was a four-door, full-size car. I was shocked this man was sitting here with me and I talked to him about how he was feeling.
This was a crash that happened in San Antonio at 2:00 in the morning. When the client started talking, he had told me he was hit by a drunk driver. The drunk driver didn't even recall the crash happening. My client didn't recall anything until he woke up in the hospital. At this point, I realized the client was probably dealing with more of a medical problem than he thought he had. When he had gone to the ER, they released him with a headache diagnosis because he was an uninsured person. Unfortunately, for uninsured people, they oftentimes get released from hospitals faster than others. We made sure this young man got in to see doctors, to make sure that he was okay.
At the time he was hit by the drunk driver here in San Antonio, he was working with a rideshare company. He was on his way to pick somebody up but did not have anyone in the vehicle. If he had, there was no chance that person would have survived. We prosecuted the case against the drunk driver who turned out didn't have insurance. We prosecuted a case against the bar where he had just left who got him intoxicated and then let him hit the road. That bar also didn't follow the TABC rules. They had servers who did not have licenses.
TABC allows bars to protect themselves from claims if they certify their servers. They send them to a class and that class teaches them about proper and safely serving alcohol. We also pursued a claim against the rideshare company. The rideshare company provides uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage for their drivers. As bad luck would have it, the drunk driver, in this case, didn't have insurance at all, so the underinsured or uninsured motorist coverage kicked in. Our client had a bad head injury, back and neck injuries. He went to neurocognitive rehabilitation for months. He did his best to get back on his feet. This was a man who had a college degree and could no longer find a job. He had a hard time remembering words, recalling names, keeping things in order.
He went back to job training. He got retrained to do a job. This case was put on hold by the district attorney's office for a little while due to the drunk driver's criminal case. Once it came out of being put on hold by the district attorney's office, we were able to resolve the case. First against the rideshare company, and then against the bar where the drunk driver had gotten drunk. The settlement of this case ensured that our client was going to be able to get the medical care he needed and proper job retraining that was necessary for him to find a job in the future. Not only was it a great result, it was for a great young man who continues to be one of our friends and stays in touch with us on a very regular basis.

On the Job Injury Leads to Back Surgery

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

This client was on the job working as a forklift driver. He was unloading the truck of one of the largest companies in the world. The driver of the truck failed to secure the truck and it started to roll as this man was backing up his forklift. The forklift fell and he ended up needing back surgery.
Transcript
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
In 2015, I had the pleasure of representing a man who was injured on the job. My client, in that case, was a man who had been in and out of jobs doing his best to provide for his family, and had settled on working for a temp agency as it was the only way he was able to get steady work and provide for his family. One of the jobs they had sent him out on required him to drive a forklift. While he had not worked as a forklift driver much in the past, he received a lot of training by his temp agency, and therefore, they were able to hire him out quite often.
He was working at a shipping facility, where trucks would back up to a dock, and he would enter the truck, unload the truck, and then the truck would go on, either fully loaded or empty at that time. One day, my client was unloading a truck of a major international carrier of products and goods. The driver of that truck had gotten out, and he failed to follow the requirements of the dock. One of the requirements of the dock was that when a truck is pulled up to the dock, their tires need to be chocked, which meant blocks needed to be put under the tires so that they could not roll away.
As is very foreseeable, the truck driver forgot to chock his truck. My client was in the back of his truck, unloading it when it slowly started to roll. As my client reversed his forklift out of the back of the trailer, his forklift got stuck between the dock and the trailer. Knowing what was going to happen at that point as the truck continued to roll away, my client didn't have many options. He could have jumped out and maybe been crushed under the weight of a forklift, or he could sit there and write it down.
As he had been trained, he stayed in the forklift and wrote it down. The forklift fell, hit the ground, broke, and my client suffered serious injuries. The injuries to my client necessitated that he received back surgery. He was a young man, 41-42 years old, and now he had spinal surgery. His ability to work in the future was forever affected.
The dock and the multinational shipping company initially tried to say that It wasn't their fault. Then the videos came out, the work we did came out, the witnesses came out. It didn't take long before they realized that they would have a very hard time in trial saying that my client did something wrong. In the end, this case settled for a favorable amount for our client, provided for him and provided for his lost wages and medical needs in the future.
[music]

San Antonio Car Crash Common Questions

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We meet with a lot of residents of San Antonio following car crashes that just have a lot of questions. As an injury law firm, injured car crash victims usually turn to us for answers. In this episode, I try to line out some of the most common questions we get in San Antonio from those injured in car crashes.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: On Hill Law Firm Cases podcast, we're going to do a series of questions and commonly repeated inquiries we get regarding car crash cases in San Antonio. We end up discussing potential cases with way more clients than we ever sign and then we ever represent. A lot of people we meet with just want some answers. A lot of people we meet with don't have a case and I have to tell a lot of people that come and meet with us that not every wrong has a right under the law and that not every case is provable or is a case for the courts.
We're a personal injury law firm and so we don't represent people that have a $500 property damage claim to their bumper and we have to explain that to them as well. What we do get are a lot of common questions. There's a lot of common questions regarding car crash cases in San Antonio that we deal with regularly. In this series, in Hill Law Firm Cases regarding car crash questions, we're going to try to address those.
Some of the questions that we get include, "What should I do after a car crash? Should I take pictures? Should I move my car to the side of the road? Should I go see a doctor after a car crash? When should I call 911 if I've been in a car crash?"
Some of the other things we hear are about insurance companies. "Should I call my insurance company following a car crash? Should I talk to their insurance company after a car crash?" We get asked a lot, "What interaction should I have with the other driver? Should we exchange information? Should we share phone numbers? Should we share our insurance information?"
Then oftentimes we get asked questions regarding evidence. "Should I take pictures and what pictures should I take? Of the car crash scene, of the vehicles involved or the intersection, and should I get witness information? Should I take down their phone numbers?"
There's a lot of common questions that arise out of a car crash. In San Antonio, it's very, very normal for us to sit down with people and hear those same questions. The point of this series on Hill Law Firm Cases podcast is to discuss those questions in a general sense. Every case is different. Every fact scenario will have a more specific answer, but to the best of our ability, we're going to answer these general questions and try to provide guidance to people that have been in car crashes in San Antonio.
[music]
[00:03:55] [END OF AUDIO]

Popcorn Lung Injury Caused by Diacetyl

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

In this case, we were hired as local San Antonio counsel to represent a woman injured by fake butter flavoring. This is an injury often seen in popcorn factory workers and can cause damage necessitating lung transplants.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Sometimes we get to work on really out-there cases. I say out-there, in that, people don't even know this is going on behind the scenes. One of these cases is what's called a popcorn lung case. Some people found out a few years ago, maybe a decade ago, that popcorn workers were developing a lung injury. A lung injury that's pretty rare. It's called blood bronchiolitis obliterates or popcorn lung.
It was called popcorn lung because it was something being seen among popcorn factory workers. After digging into it, it was determined that something called diacetyl was causing this condition. Diacetyl is used in a lot of different products in the popcorn industry. It is a fake butter flavoring. It is something that should not be inhaled. However, when it's heated, it can be vaporized. What this has led to is a lot of factory workers who end up with a debilitating lung condition that sometimes requires lung transplants, but it doesn't heal and it does not get better.
My law firm was able to work with another out-of-town law firm on one of these cases. This case was different. It didn't involve a factory worker. It involved a lady who worked at a popcorn store. A lady that had worked at a popcorn store in a mall for almost 20 years. Day to day, 40 to 60 hours a week. She was using this chemical not knowing that it could cause her this condition and that this chemical could cause her to wind up on a lung transplant list, which is where she currently is.
Injured workers are something we feel very passionate about at our law firm. Workers too often are taken advantage of either purposely or purposely kept in the dark about the dangers that they're dealing with day-to-day. This case is still ongoing. It's a case that has had somewhere close to 80 defendants. Most of them have resolved their claims but some of them are still fighting it.
It's one of my great joys in life to be able to represent injured workers in cases involving product liability. It's something I'm very passionate about. We represent people that are injured by dangerous products and this case is one of those cases that many people don't even know exists. We've had judges lift their eyebrows and require a long explanation because it's new to them, but that's what employers hope happens.
They hope that they're able to injure people under the radar and not get caught. This isn't all employers. Most employers do their job and they care about the safety of their employees but the ones that don't, they don't want to be held responsible. It's a great joy when we're able to hold them responsible.

Arm Injured by Exploding Bottle in San Antonio

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:30:00 -0600

In 2019, we represented a man whom was walking through a grocery story in San Antonio, Texas while a manager of the store was ignoring safety protocol and broke a champagne bottle. The bottle exploded due to pressure and caused glass to stick in his arm. The injury was so severe he could no longer make a fist or grip anything. We worked his case over 10 months and settled the case for an amount that will take care of this man until he retires.
Transcript:
Justin Hill [00:00:04] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm for confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Our law firm here in San Antonio gets called on lots of different types of cases. Well, you called on all types of things that we do and some that we do not handle and we do not handle the case. We do our best to refer the caller to somebody that could. And if we can't, we send them to the San Antonio Bar Association that runs a great referral program. Sometimes we don't do a very good job of picking the case at the start because sometimes we don't have a good full picture. About a year ago, we were called on a case from a woman who said her husband was injured in a store. She said her husband was injured. As a patron at a store when the manager at that store broke a glass bottle. And that glass bottle cut this man. We saw pictures of the cut. They weren't very large and he had healed and he had three stitches. And we told her, look, they've they've tried to make some sort of attempt to resolve your claim. We'll try to walk you through it. Because at the time, it did not seem as though he had significant injuries. As we continue to talk to her, she kept asking us to take her case. And I didn't want to waste your time. I didn't want to make her think that. The case was worth more than it was. This man was injured at a store, was a premises liability case.
It was a negligent activity case. But his injuries were not significant at the time. After about six weeks, she called back. As we had been continuously walking her through the process and said that her husband could no longer make a fist. And I didn't understand what was going on, so I got him in and we talked and she went and had an MRI of her husband's arm done and it turned out that there were still glass in his arm and that multiple ligaments. And tenders, tendons in his arm had been severed. Now, this is a man who, for his job, did rebar work. He had to use his hands and not only use his hands, he had to have a strong grip. And now this man can even make a fist. We started work in this case representing this man at this point when we found out his injuries. He needed surgery and very detailed post-surgical hand therapy. He had a strange injury that required very specialized surgery and very specialized rehabilitation. We were able to make sure that he got all that treatment and at the same time, prosecutor's case against the store. Now, the store took the position this was just an accident, which is very common anymore. The idea that an accident. Means that nobody has to compensate the injured party. Well, it's pretty, pretty foreseeable that if you're loading champagne bottles onto a top shelf, that one could fall, one could explode and one can hurt someone. This wasn't an accident so much as this was poor planning. Negligent layout out negligent activity. These bottles could've gone on the bottom shelf or they did not. Create a hazard for people walking by. And these bottles could have been put in tracks the same way Coca-Cola was at this store.
However, they did it their way, which was the unsafe way, and it led this man to be an injured. Early on in the case, the defense lawyer told me that he was never going to pay me X amount of dollars and that he had never paid anyone more than X amount of dollars. This case resolved for more than 10 times what that amount was. In the end, the defendant, the defense lawyer, realized we made a mistake. And this man got very seriously injured and his injuries meant he'd probably never be able to go back to his old job again. Laborers don't have a ton of job options when they can't use one of their arms. That client was very happy with the results. He was very happy that we tried our best to help him out. Without having him have to pay us at first. And then he was relieved when we agreed to take him on as a client and work his case. This man was injured in a store in San Antonio through no fault of his own. And after a year of litigation, multiple depositions, lots of experts, we were able to resolve his case for a very favorable sum.

Business Interruption Claims

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

If a business carries business interruption insurance, it may cover losses due to the shutdown from COVID-19.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Currently we're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. In San Antonio that means offices will be shut down shortly. This is something that's going to be with us for a little while. What we know is that a lot of people in our community are suffering. Businesses are suffering, their employees are being laid off. What we're doing currently is we're helping out with small businesses and big businesses and all kinds of businesses. A lot of businesses have taken out what's called business interruption insurance. What this provides is under certain conditions, insurance policies provide for lost profits or revenues depending on the language for periods of time in which a business is either closed or shut down.
Now, whether or not coverage will exist in this scenario will depend upon the language of the insurance policy. Currently we've agreed to review insurance policies for free. We've reviewed about 10 as we sit here right now and we expect more to come in the future. We've also reached out to Launch SA, a small business incubator, and told them we will be willing to review business interruption policies for their clients. What we're trying to do is provide some clarity and guidance in this pandemic for small businesses. A lot of small businesses feel as though they have no recourse and a lot of them did not even know they had purchased this coverage.
Small businesses are like normal people. They buy insurance. Sometimes their insurance agent tells them they need other things and they say yes. What we're doing is providing this service for free and if it exists and the insurance company wrongfully denies or delays the claim, which they will likely do, we will represent these people as they make claims against their insurance companies. This is not what we do every day, but this is what we're doing right now. It's something we're doing to help, some guidance we're providing to small business who feels as though they have no answers. If you need us to look at your business interruption policy, just shoot it to us. We'll take a look for free.

Small Business Breach of Contract

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

When a local small business rock hauler was stiffed on bills, they hired Hill Law Firm to pursue these breach of contract claims in San Antonio, Texas.
Transcript:
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
My first boss likes to say that a lawsuit is a lawsuit, a case is a case and if you know how to try a lawsuit, you can try any kind of lawsuit. Most of what we handle here is personal injury cases and most of what we do is San Antonio personal injury cases. However, we've handled cases all throughout the state of Texas in multiple different states, and we've actually traveled out of the country to prepare these cases. Recently I was asked by a small business owner who has a trucking fleet, whether I could help him out. Well, what was happening was one of his customers was running up big bills on him and then refusing to pay, and it sounded like once one of them started to do it, a few of the other customers started to as well. When he came to me, he had about $90,000 in outstanding invoices from four or five different customers who were refusing to pay him.
Now, this is a lot of money for a small business owner. What I assumed was happening was the customers thought that he wasn't going to go out and hire a lawyer to fight them on it. He didn't have the money to hire a lawyer to fight them on it. What him and I agreed to was a contingency fee arrangement. I would help him work these cases. I would help him get his money and at the end of the day, he could pay me a percentage of what we recovered.
He agreed to that. He was happy to agree to that because he was looking at getting nothing because he couldn't afford a lawyer, and they knew that. I pursued all four or five of those customers for the unpaid invoices. They were surprised that he was doing this. They did not expect it, but we were able to get him 95% of what was owed to him back within 30 days. He was very happy about this. We've done this for other small business owners, breach-of-contract cases are something we do handle. It's not most of what we handle or a large portion of what we handle, but in the right situation and the right circumstances, we represent small business owners or medium or large businesses when they need to pursue another party over a breach of contract. Like I said at the start, a case is a case and a lawsuit is a lawsuit. We have the ability to handle any kind of lawsuit. When it comes to breach-of-contract cases, most people think they have to go hire an hourly lawyer. However, at Hill Law Firm, we handle breach-of-contract cases on a contingency fee.

UM/UIM Car Crash Trial in 2019

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 23:30:00 -0600

When Allstate insurance company denied the claim of one of their insureds after a bad car accident, Hill Law Firm tried her case to a jury. We find it very important to stand up for those whom are taken advantage of by their own insurance companies.
Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
I say that Hill Law Firm is a boutique personal injury law firm for a few reasons. One is; we work your case in a small group in an intense setting and we're your advocates for your case. Your case don't get shuffled around multiple different layers or departments or attorneys.
We're a trial firm. We prepare cases to try them in front of juries. The last case I tried was about nine months ago at this point. That case was on behalf of a woman who had been stiffed and denied and delayed by her own insurance company. This woman had paid premiums for over two decades to her insurance company, Allstate.
At the time she needed to make a claim, they went out of their way to come up with any kind of defense they could. They spent more than 25% of the entire claim, the entire maximum amount of policy available defending it. They spent 25% of the entire amount of coverage defending the claim against their own insured, who had paid them money for this coverage. They hired out of town lawyers, they hired experts, and this case went to trial.
One thing that makes us different from a lot of firms is we prepare our cases for trial, we don't prepare our cases for settlement. In this case, for example, we took the deposition of their expert. Their key expert was a doctor who was hired, who's a well known doctor in San Antonio, Texas, who's hired often to say somebody's not injured.
Now, this doctor I ended up deposing four times over the next 60 days on four different cases that he had popped up on. He's somebody that doesn't get hired to give an honest opinion. He's somebody that gets hired to give a certain opinion. This doctor, Dr. Burns, is somebody we're going to see for the rest of our career.
Early on in this deposition, I established with him that the area he was testifying about this client's neck was not even an area he practices in. He admitted it's an area that he sends his own patients to see a specialist. While he's not a specialist to treat people day-to-day for neck injuries, he was in this case, because Allstate paid him a bunch of money.
In trial, the defense lawyer finally had a chance to look at the video, because he wasn't there for that depo, he sent in an associate. He decided that it would do more damage than good to let that doctor testify.
In trial after dragging this lady through the mud for four years, they decide that they're going to try the case without even having any experts. They're just going to argue she's hurt, but not that bad. Well, the jury in Georgetown, Texas didn't agree, and the jury awarded her a substantial sum of money, almost $400,000 for her car crash case.
That's the last case we trialled and we have a handful of cases set for trial this year at Hill Law Firm or boutique law firm, because we prepare cases intensely for trial. After the next trial, I'll do another episode of Hill Law Firm cases and talk about that trial as well.
[music]

Heavy Equipment Crush Injury Case

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

In 2017, a young man working for a city was crushed by a faulty piece of heavy equipment. We represented him and worked his case to a very good resolution.
Transcript
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: A few years ago, I had the distinct honor and privilege of representing a young man who I've known almost my whole life. He's somebody I grew up with. He's somebody I've known. Our parents have even worked together. He's somebody that whenever we got out of high school, stayed home, hard worker, blue-collar man. He worked for one of the local municipalities. He worked as a heavy equipment operator. One day while they were out clearing brush, he had to do some work on one of these pieces of heavy equipment. While he was working on the heavy equipment, he had to open up the arms of the heavy equipment.
This allowed him to maneuver and do some welding that needed to be done. Without getting into too many details of the engineering side of it, what happened was a catastrophic failure of the hydraulic system, in this piece of heavy equipment. What that meant for this young man I've known almost my whole life was that he got crushed within this equipment. Any other person, this would have been the last we heard of them. This guy knows a tough old boot. He'd worked as a rodeo clown. He's one of the few people who could have withstood what happened to his body.
However, he was gravely injured, broken back, broken hips, burns, the kind of injuries you don't bounce back from. I spoke to him after this happened and I told him if he ever had any questions, to let me know. One of the great joys in my career was I actually got to work this case with another lawyer from my home town. We represented a hometown guy working together as hometown friends. We brought in experts from out of town. We brought in one of the best experts on hydraulic heavy equipment from Utah. We tested this equipment.
Many lawyers wouldn't spend the kind of money that is required to properly work up a product's case, but we did and we were able to replicate this failure. A failure that was due to a manufacturing and design defect in this piece of heavy equipment. These are difficult cases. Engineering is difficult. We were able to prove that this heavy equipment failed because it was designed improperly and we knew it was designed improperly because this company themselves had followed a patent to fix this problem. They just had not incorporated it yet.
Without even having to file a lawsuit, this company, multinational international company, asked us to mediate. At mediation, we were made a fair offer, an offer that was way more than we expected this early in the litigation and my client chose to settle it. It will always be one of my favorite cases because I got to represent somebody who I've known since we were kids and played Peewee football with.
[music]

Broken Leg after Bus Fall

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

In 2011, we represented a woman whom was injured getting off a major bus line's bus in San Antonio. The company knew her by name and the driver knew her by name. They always helped her by placing a stool for her to use. She had limited mobility and vision. One day, the bus driver did not place the stool as he had every other time. She fell and broke her leg. This case had many novel issues and led to a good resolution for our client.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
One specific area of practice I've been very involved in my entire career has been bus accidents, bus crash cases. I've handled bus crash cases against all of the major busing companies in the United States. I've handled them all over the state of Texas and other states. There's a lot of things about a bus crash that makes it unique. One is that they're held to a higher degree of care under Texas law. They are called what is referred to as a common carrier. They receive money to transport people and the law says you can do that, but if you do that, you're going to be held to a higher standard of care. I'm going to talk about a lot of the different bus cases I've handled on Hill Law Firm Cases, but one in particular I thought was very interesting.
We were contacted by a lady whose mother had fallen and broken her leg getting off one of these buses. At first it sounded just like a lady had fallen. Then we started digging into the case. The client was in her mid to late eighties. She had limited mobility. She had been riding these buses for years, the same bus company and the same route. She would travel to see family and she did it about once a month. She usually had the same of three or four different drivers. Most of them had come to know her by name. They all helped her get on and off the bus. In particular, one thing they did was they provided her a stool to get on and off the bus. Due to her age and her health, she was unable to step up to the first step without that stool. It had become so commonplace that it was always there.
On one day they had stopped in San Antonio and as she was getting off the bus, the driver had forgot to put the stool there. As she was getting off, she expected the stool to be there as it always had been. It was not. She fell and she broke her leg. At her age a broken leg means that her mobility will even be more limited throughout the remainder of her life. We were able to work that case and bring in the Americans with Disabilities Act. We worked the case different than other law firms because we're different than other law firms. At first, the bus company took the position this lady had just fallen, and then after witnesses deposed said that she was always taken care of, that everybody knew her and that she was always given a stool, they changed their tune. We were able to resolve this case.
That client still keeps in touch with us. Even though that case is more than 10 years old, the client is still alive. We stay in touch with her. We stay in touch with her daughter. That's one thing that makes us different is we stay in touch with our clients. They keep us updated on how they're doing in life. It's one of my favorite things about being an attorney. I've always enjoyed doing bus crash cases. It's something that we think we're oddly positioned for, we're better at than many and we handle more than most. This one was an atypical bus crash case because it wasn't so much as a crash as it was a premises liability case and a negligent activity case and arguably an ADA violation. Our ability to bring in all of those elements to prove our case is what changed this case and what led to a settlement.

Child Injured at Daycare in San Antonio

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 03:00:00 -0600

We represented a young toddler whom was injured when a dangerous door was known to the staff at a day care and never fixed. The door would close dangerously fast due to it being broken. One day, at this daycare in San Antonio, this door closed and amputated a portion of our clients finger.
Transcript:
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases. A podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Justin Hill: Sometimes we end up representing parents when their children were injured. As you can imagine these are pretty tough situations because parents are very protective of their children, and they're scared, and their kids are hurt. They want to make sure they're making the right choice not only for themselves but for their children. We recently settled a case that arose from an injury at a daycare center. Our clients had a three-year-old daughter who was at a daycare center in San Antonio, Texas. While she was at that daycare center, the teacher was leaving the class. The procedure was that if a teacher left the class, the class had to be moved from one classroom to the other so that another teacher could monitor the kids. They weren't to be left alone. While they were moving from one class to another, the teacher let the door start to close. What we didn't know was that this door did not have a soft close mechanism. All the other doors did but this door was broken. This door was broken, and they knew it was broken.
The reason you want soft close mechanisms is because of pinch points. In schools with a bunch of little children those are very important. What happened was our client's young daughter had her hand in the door hinge and when this door closed quickly it popped off and cut off a portion of her finger. As you can imagine the parents were scared, and angry, and upset. They're worried about their daughter. It was a very traumatic situation for them and their daughter. When they went to the school to get answers they were told by one of the teachers who was speaking freely. Freely means before she had been told what to say or not say by an insurance company that that door had been broken for a while. They knew it was broken. They needed to fix it. They had talked about fixing it. They knew they had something on the premises that was dangerous that could have injured a child. When it did injure a child this teacher was honest enough to admit it.
Luckily for this young lady, her hand, her finger healed without too many complications. The unsightliness of it has gotten better. The scar has improved, the fingernail that they weren't sure if it would return has come back. This case was able to resolve very early on. The day care center did not want to deal with a injury lawsuit regarding one of their injured toddlers. This case was able to resolve for a fair amount that the parents wanted to take. An amount that I think was very fair under the circumstances. In the end, it will be an amount that will likely pay for all of this young lady's college. It has paid off all of her past medical bills.
We represent a lot of people who come to see us over the injuries to their children. It is one of the things that we really enjoy doing is being able to represent children, people who are not at fault for their injuries, people who we should all be looking out for. We've handled a lot of cases involving kids that are injured, and we'll talk more about those on the Hill Law Firm cases podcast.

Restaurant Patio Explosion

Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0600

Around 2017, a group of approximately a dozen people were having dinner on a patio just outside of San Antonio, Texas. Suddenly, a fire pit exploded rocked their nights and caused many to suffer serious injuries.
Transcript
Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.
[music]
Around 2017, a group of local San Antonians had met at a private establishment. They were going to have dinner with their family, sit around, talk, catch up. They were seated on a patio at a place that required a membership to go to. They were eating dinner. They were having drinks. Their kids were playing out in the grass, when all of the sudden a large explosion rocked the entire area. Some of the people were thrown out of their seats 20 feet in the air.
One of the persons almost lost a toe. Many of them were burned. Most of them suffered closed-head injuries. The defendant, the place where they were, tried to sweep everything under the rug. They told the news that nobody was hurt. They didn't even let the news come to the site. The manager actually was drinking beer while the fire department was still cleaning up.
I represented these people. I represented about 12 of these people, multiple families, some children. Once we got into the case, we found out a few things. One was that this was a homemade fire pit, that somebody had just been asked over a beer to create. Another thing we learned is that the staff members had never really been told how to operate this fire pit and it wasn't very intuitive.
There were lots of valves, lots of piping, some valves controlled different pits than you would think, and what we learned on that night was the person who was operating the pit wasn't trained on how to operate it, didn't seem to know what he was doing and at some point was unable to get one of the burners to light. Instead of ensuring that that burner and that propane was no longer flowing, he put a lid over the top of the burner. What happened then is over a couple hours, propane filled the center of this table. The table became full of propane and then at some point it exploded.
This case went on for almost two years and had a lot of experts involved, including propane experts, experts on how to train employees, and most importantly, experts on mild traumatic brain injuries because now we're in a time post-NFL where people understand that even though maybe somebody doesn't have a very obvious brain injury, concussions over time can lead to a lot of complications. We worked on this case and made sure that all of these people were able to see some of the best professionals in San Antonio regarding their injuries. After a couple of years, this case was able to resolve for what we think was a very fair and favorable settlement for our clients.