Juries tune out — so Aaron Broussard tries his cases at what he calls "TV pace or TikTok pace," sometimes putting on 10 to 15 witnesses in a single day to keep jurors awake and engaged. The Lake Charles, Louisiana trial lawyer spent his first five years as a self-described "settlement lawyer," handling roughly 200 cases his father's firm didn't want. After attending the Trial Lawyers College, he tried 30 jury trials in five years. His biggest result came this past year: a $35 million wrongful death verdict after a cement truck hit a family on their way to daycare, killing an 8 year-old girl. Broussard joins host Dan Ambrose ahead of TLU Beach to discuss the slippery settlement slope and how he redefines "reasonable" for a jury.

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Episode Snapshot

• Aaron's father, a lawyer and judge, was shot in his dominant left arm at 18 in 1968 and learned to do everything — including shooting shotguns and fishing — with his right hand.
• Growing up on the family farm, Aaron's father dictated each day's chores onto cassette tapes that Aaron played back on his boombox every morning.
• Aaron's first jury trial was a forcible rape case he won by acquittal — and his client paid him by painting the foreclosure house Aaron had just bought.
• After one good injury case earned his firm more money than his previous 90 cases combined, Aaron started shifting toward higher-quality cases.
• The Trial Lawyers College transformed Aaron's career: he tried 30 jury trials in the five years after, compared with just one before [44:30].
• To stop jurors from tuning out, Aaron now runs "speed trials" at TV or TikTok pace — sometimes putting on 10 to 15 witnesses in a single day.
• Aaron built a written "Sprint process" for his firm designed to move cases rapidly from the filed petition straight to the first set of depositions, eliminating the bottlenecks that leave files sitting in early stages.
• In his record $35 million wrongful death case, Aaron asked the jury for $90 million against only a $1 million insurance policy.
• The "equal trade value" damages argument never rang true to Aaron — there's no equal trade for the loss of a little girl — so he now confronts the money question head-on.

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The most dangerous place you can be as a trial lawyer is to think you've got it figured Out. I'm still trying to get better. I still have the passion for it. I believe in it. Everyone can learn to do what I do. And yet there's a group here that continues to get extraordinary verdicts. Trial Lawyers University is revolutionizing educating lawyers to be better trial lawyers. It's been invaluable to me. Trial Lawyers University, where the Titans come to train. Produced and powered by LawPods.

Well, we got Aaron Broussard with us today all the way from Lake Charles, Louisiana with our last podcast prior to TLU Beach. So good morning, Aaron.

Good morning.

Got me up nice and early here, about 5:30 California time. Early rises, is it? You've been rising early your whole life, is that right?

Most of it.

Most of it. How'd you get started? Where'd the big idea come from to become a trial lawyer?

Oh, I don't really remember. My dad was a lawyer and a judge and I don't know if it was just always a given that was planted in my mind that that's what I was going to do or I understood it because I would always go to court with him, hang around the office and I really just don't make the decision. I can remember as far back as fifth and sixth grade saying that's what I was going to do, not with any real intent or thinking about what it meant, just never thought about doing much else. Never veered from it.

So your dad was a lawyer and a judge. I always find that to be weird because you're telling me, how has a successful lawyer decided to become a judge? It's like from being like LeBron James and now you want to be a referee.

Well, I guess a little bit more backstory on that. He was in the Navy and when he was young, obviously, and then he got shot at close range in his dominant arm, which is his left arm when he was 18 years old and not in the line of service on a hunting trip. And he still can't use it. Since 1968, he hasn't been able to use his left arm and he had to learn to do everything with his right arm. That kind of set him on a different course. He was discharged and went to the school and had to learn to write with his right hand all that stuff and then went to law school and he came back as a late 20s lawyer in the small town of Lake Charles. And then we're actually from a smaller town across the river named Sulphur, Louisiana, which is pretty small, but was very small then.

That's where I was raised and that's where he still lives. And so working there, he just kind of hung out his own shingle. He didn't go to work for anybody, but he was a hustler and did every kind of law, every kind of case he could get his hands on, became known for being a hard worker and well known and everything and decided there was a judge in the little town of Sulphur that had been there for 30 years and he told my dad he was going to retire. He wasn't going to run anymore. So my dad decided he would run, this is my dad was 38 year ... No, no, no, I get it right. 37 years old at the time, he started campaigning and about halfway through his campaign, the judge that has said he was going to retire, the 30-year incumbent decided not to retire.

My dad was already too invested into it and so he ran against him and beat him. And he beat him by walking the entire town, maybe low population back then. Now it's probably 40,000 people, but back then it was probably 20, but he walked the entire ... He had a map in his campaign office and he would draw, he would highlight the roads as he walked them, pretty much walked the entire town. And that's what he would do every election. He got reelected three times until he retired. And to your question, why would anybody want to do that while also practicing law? It's actually a boost to the law practice if you wanted to be for this very special job in Louisiana and Sulfur. There's not many city court jobs like it. It's where you work depending on how hard you push things and how well you run your court.

You can work three days a week, nine to 12, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then you can still practice law. The second half of the day and all day Thursday and Friday, it's sort of free advertising, right? You can be represented by a local judge and you get paid even back then in the 80s and 90s, it was a six figure salary and he gets benefits for life because he took retirement from that job. So he gets retirement and full benefits for life from the job. So coveted job around here. It's a good deal.

It's a good deal. It's a good deal for him. So Louisiana, Lake Charles, where my buddy Mark Delphin also lives. That's why I've been there before. But tell us about, you grew up on a farm, so how did that help shape who you are?

Yeah. So my first eight years was actually in the little town of Sulfur and a little sub part of Sulfur called Maplewood, which was actually an old military town. And that's where I lived until I was eight years old. My dad is a hunting and fishing fanatic, which he had to learn also to do with his right arm. And so his entire life, he can shoot a 12 gauge, 10 gauge and 20 gauge, which are really big shotguns for people who don't know shotguns, 10 gauge and a 12 gauge. And he can shoot it with one arm better than the vast majority of people that you'd ever hunt or fish with. He rigged fishing poles on a special way so he could fish. And every vacation of my childhood was centered around hunting and fishing. We didn't go to the beach. We didn't go to whatever.

We went to Colorado or we went to Texas or we went wherever every vacation was hunting and fishing. And we had different leases for deer hunting and different leases for die hunting and all this business. And that's what I knew on a Saturday morning. I knew that's what I was doing. My dad was waking me up at five in the morning before dark and we were going fishing and we weren't coming home until after dark every weekend. We lived in town and this big farm that was well known in our area came up for sale through a bank. It had got foreclosed on after the owner died and had sat empty for a long time. Pretty good story as to how he got shot at it. This all happened about the same time he got elected judge and that might've been the second time he got elected judge.

He might've got elected judge the first time when he was 30. And then the second time when he was 32 and then the second time when he was 30, he was elected the first time when he was 32 and the second time when he was 38. So I missed out the timeline a while ago. His first election was 32. Second election was 38. Point is, we moved out to the farm and then we moved back to my old house for second election and then moved back out to the farm. He bought the farm because it was great hunting and fishing and he got a shot at the farm because the bank president had him put in jail when he was a kid. He was racing somebody on the road with some people and him and his friends were cutting up and ran some girls. I don't know if they ran them off the road or they were in a race or harassing him or whatever.

The girl's dad was the president of this local bank that made my dad stay in jail for the night when he was a teenager and the guy always felt bad about it and he knew my dad left to hunt and fish and this place was well known for being some of the best hunting and fishing in the area. It was 3,000 acres. So he gave my dad kind of the shot at it. It was more than 3,000 acres because it was 3,000 where the farm is and then there was 500 acres in different places. When he was 38, he bought it and we all moved out there and it was kind of a culture shock for me. When I lived in town, I was already mowing the grass with a true blue push lawnmower and everything at eight years old and all that stuff. But then we moved out to ... I still had all my friends around me, so to speak, in the neighborhood where I could ride my bike to their houses.

And then when we moved to the farm, it was middle of nowhere. I didn't have a neighbor for two miles and there was a lot of work to do. My life changed in that respect whereas during the summer every day or on the weekends, my dad would have his, he used a dictaphone a lot, but everybody used dictaphones a lot back then. I mean, we had the dictaphones with the cassette tapes. And before he went to work in the mornings, he would walk around the yard or around the farm or whatever with his dictaphone and dictate my work for the day and then he would leave the cassette tape on the kitchen table. That was my first thing I had to do in the morning was put the cassette tape into my little boombox and listen to it and make my list and start working on it.

Sometimes I get my list done, sometimes I wouldn't. And if I got my list done during the summer, I was allowed to ride my bike to town, which was 15 miles and I'd go play basketball and hang out with my friends and then ride back 15 miles, which didn't bother me back then. Keep

You fit.

Yeah. People talk about triathlons. You

Do triathlons?

No, I was just saying when I was 10 years old, 10 years old, 11 years old, I was riding a bike.

Oh, basically doing a triathlon and got it. Got it, got it, got it. Being from Louisiana, did you go to LSU?

I did not. So I lived from Lake Charles, just sort of my direction in life all the way through school. I was a little bit of a troublemaker. What

Does that mean, a litle bit of troublemaker? Did you ever go to jail?

I guess just going from a young age, I was always kind of in the principal's office and cutting up a little bit. Not real trouble, just a little misfit in class because I was bored because I kind of led a dual life. I made straight A's my entire schoollastic career and I didn't miss a day of school until 11th grade or something like that, all the way from kindergarten until 11th grade. Had the longest running streak of somebody not missing a day of school. You get a street going, you want to keep it. But on the other hand, I didn't hang out with the smart people and wasn't friends with them. I was friends with the people who had already flunked twice and been held back and struggled in school. I love to run with them at school and outside of school and cut up and get in trouble, which caused my dad grief because he was the judge in the little town and I was always getting in trouble and it didn't reflect well on him.

But then that carried on into maybe fortunately or unfortunately into my high school days where I got in a little bit more trouble and a couple brushes with the law and arrested a couple times. So all my friends were a couple years older than me, maybe had one of them in school. The rest of them are car salesmen or construction workers or hadn't quite figured out what they were going to do and all that business. That's who I love to be around. I detested the thought of being at a school and being away from them. So I went to a local state school in Lake Charles called McNeese State, which everybody over here called Ryan Street High, which it's on Ryan Street here in Lake Charles. And you literally kind of felt like you were still in high school. Nothing against Magnese. They've come a long way.

But back then, sometimes you're sitting in a classroom and literally in a desk like you had in fifth grade with the cubby hole and everything. And so I had some great teachers there. I didn't go very much. They did not have a very strict attendance policy back then. I understand that's changed, but I did not go to school very much. I would skip weeks at a time sometimes. I was waiting tables and partying every night, just doing enough to keep my grades up. And I moved out when I was 17 and that never went back. Right during the Christmas break of my senior year of high school, I went and started living in a camp with some people, piddled around and skipped from ... I mean, I'd go back and stay a night or two and whatever, but I didn't spend much time at home my senior year at all and check in very much.

I would stop by and rob the mail to get graduation checks out so I could blow them. Renting my first apartment, like I said, I hadn't been back since. Nothing against home, but I was having too much fun. I spent a lot of time at LSU during undergrad because I had friends that did go to LSU, and of course it was a great place to ... LSU is well known as a great place to go party. And yeah, LSU football games, probably a good thing. I'd probably just got in more trouble at LSU. And when it came time to go to law school, good score on my LSAT. I crammed for two days before it. I had never looked at it before and just went and bought old exams from the McNeese Library and crammed for it in my dad's cookhouse out on the farm, but he was out of town so I had nobody to bother me.

Scored in the top 9% in the country or something like that. And so I just got a flood of letters and everything, but I was going to go have my time at LSU. But that same year they had a new dean come in to LSU while he was gung-ho to have me come there and they sent me a letter offering me a scholarship. The next letter I got in was that I was probably going to be denied because of character and fitness or whatever. So I immediately started making phone calls and there was a very famous lawyer south of here in a tea tiny town called Cameron, Louisiana. And his name was JB Jones. And then there was, for anybody who's ever been through Louisiana, you've seen Gordon McKernan's billboards. Gordon McKernan's father was a very well-known trial lawyer and Jerry McKernan. JB called Jerry McKernan.

Jerry McKernan called the Dean and the Dean met me halfway between Baton Rouge and Lake Charles in a town called Lafayette to have lunch. So I went and had lunch with the Dean Castanos or something his name was. Anyway, for LSU. Me being the little son of a bitch I was, I didn't realize the significance of the dean of LSU Law School driving an hour and a half to have lunch with me. No telling. I probably went there with ... Anyway, I went and hung out with him, had lunch. And I thought it went well, but apparently maybe not good enough because I got denied from LSU over my transgressions during undergrad, just some of the shit I got in trouble with and then ended up going to Tulane, which actually ended up being a blessing because Tulane was ... They caught the Ivy League of the South or whatever, right?

Very serious school. So everybody at Tulane called it the trangle effect. Everybody from Tulane was either from the East Coast and went to school on the West Coast for undergrad and then didn't get accepted into Ivy League schools and came there or wanted to come there or vice versa. They grew up in West Coast and went to school on the East Coast and then came there. They retired of West Coast to East Coast and wanted to say they lived in New Orleans. Nobody was from Louisiana at Tulane. There was hardly anyone. In fact, the entire three years I went there, we had 300 people per class. So you had 900 people there when I got there, then you add another 600 behind me. So that's 1500 people. I went to a state school, McNeese State. They recruit heavily from out of state. They don't even teach Louisiana law.

You have to take it as an elective. We had the whole code, Napoleonic code thing. It turned out to be a really good thing for me. It straightened me up. When I started there, I could tell everybody was very serious about school, much more serious than people I had been around before. The professors were serious. I actually taught the entire time and didn't let out class early every day and you had to be there and it still didn't quite sink in, except I went out about two weeks into school. I went out one night downtown New Orleans and I was driving back uptown probably half lit and about 20 AM. We had little scanner cards. I didn't like reading on computers, I still don't. And so I was going to go into the library with a drink and print out all the cases I needed to read, whatever homework I had I needed to read or whatever.

And so I went strolling through the law school and up to the third floor where the library was, where the free printers were. And when I opened the library, half my class was sitting there with all the fucking, whatever you call the things before they had, I guess they weren't AirPods, earpods, whatever, and all their apples because everybody had to have an apple, at least they did. And they were all just sitting there studying, like studying their ass off on a Friday night in the middle of the night. That kind of woke me up. I was like, oh my God, these people are serious. And so it kind of straight ... Over the course of being at Tulane, I established a much better ... Plus I didn't know anybody there. So I was kept to myself, stayed in my little tiny shotgun apartment. I established a much better, what do you call it, routine of waking up early and maybe got back to my roots a little bit, working and getting that done.

And for the first time I had a clean apartment, started cooking a lot more and all that business.

TLU Hunting Beach is going to be the greatest Trial Lawyers Event in history. It all starts off on Tuesday, June 2nd with a dinner hosted by Finch at the Lorea. We're buying it out and the pool area around it for our 300 of our closest friends. Wednesday we're just doing workshops. We got Ben Rubinowitz and Mike Kelly doing expert cross. We got Phillip Miller, Ed Ciarimboli teaching advanced deposition. We got six more workshops besides that. But if you're not interested in training that day that afternoon, you can go out with Ted B. Wacker and go for the first annual TLU golf tournament or racing go- karts with Kurt Zaner or playing pickleball with Supio. That evening, we got the opening party. We got the lobby lounge at night with ping pong, foosball, DJ and open bar. And then Thursday, Friday and Saturday, we got five lecture tracks, eight workshop tracks, full breakfast for everybody every morning on the ocean lawn for 700 people.

Great lunches every day. This is our fifth year at the Paseo. The food's amazing. Ask anybody who's got the best food on the conference tour. It's TLU. Then Thursday night, we're buying out the Laraya and the tree house above it and doing a party hosted by Supio that's going to be an 80s tracksuit party. Friday night we're having the first ever Sach Oliver Wild West party. Sach is bringing 500 pounds of Angus beef. We're going to be grilling out. We're going to have a mechanical bowl. It's going to be a great time. Lots of new friends being made. And finally on Saturday, we're closing out the socializing with the I prey ski adult swim pool party. That's on Saturday night. Finally, but that's edit though. Sunday morning we're starting with connections and a great meal and we're ending it. Sunday morning we're having brunch with Scott Frost from the Frost Log hosting our brunch on Sunday morning.

So we're beginning with an ending with community and great learning. So TLU Huntington Beach, June 2nd through 7th. Be there. We'll see you. All right. So you go to law school there at Tulane and tell us about your career and becoming your own businessman, your own trial lawyer. So where'd you get started?

I left for law school. I remember thinking this is going to be great when I get back in three years. I'll be back in Lake Charles. I'll actually have a little bit of money now. I'll be a lawyer that's going to make this picking up women and going out thing a lot easier. I'm just going to come back and insert my-

Historically, it's true.

Yeah. I'm going to come insert myself right back into my old life. It's kind of the way I thought about it when I left for law school. When I came back from law school, I never went back to the party in all night. I mean, don't get me wrong, still hang out with my buds. But the other backstory is all my friends who were car salesmen and construction workers, now I'll make more money than all those people that went to school. One of them owns a Ford dealership. Two of them own Ford dealerships, two different Ford dealerships. One of them owns his own construction business. One of them owns a gigantic insurance firm. So everything worked out, but I lost track. What was I telling you?

So the 30 is a trial to get to where you are.

I got much more serious. And my first five years, I kind of break my career into chapters. My first five years, I want to call myself a settlement lawyer maybe. We all hang those shingles outside to say we're trial lawyers or whatever. And that's what everybody, especially back then, it wasn't as much of a cuss word and everybody was trial lawyers, trial lawyers this. And it was still called the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association. I called onto the litigation part pretty heavy. When I walked in, my dad and them just kind of gave me almost 200 cases, gave me some experienced paralegals. The beauty of it, I took for granted then that I learned later that not everybody had it like me. They just let me go. They didn't give me assignments on their cases. They did give me some assignments on their cases because they didn't feel like doing the writing anymore, so they make me do the writing.

So I would help them out with their cases, but I just had my own cases and if I had questions, I could go to them. Otherwise, I was just allowed just to go figure it out. And I realized kind of now that a lot of people are, I think, unfortunately sheltered in firms and bigger plaintiff firms and in bigger defense firms for sure. They're not allowed to make decisions, which is the only way you learn, right? They're just told what to do and all that stuff. They don't really know what the fuck they're doing. They've never made decisions and failed and been wrong and learned the hard way. Those people developed way slower. I developed pretty quick in a microwave because, like I said, I had 200 and something cases and none of them were ... And it was obviously the 200 cases my dad and his partner did not want.

The three of us, we kind of operated separate law firms. They had their paralegals, they had their paralegals, I had my paralegals, we had a receptionist and a bookkeeper. That was kind of the office and it was like that for a long time. So in my first five years, I only had one civil trial that actually started and I got through voir dire and it settled. But I had a rape trial, a forcible rape trial that's kind of a good story. This lady came into my office when I was probably 25 or 26, this office right here and sat down at my desk. And the reason she came is because we had some hurricanes. Everybody remembers Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Okay. I moved out of New Orleans 20 days before Hurricane Katrina and moved back to Lake Charles. So I took the bar, moved out.

I took the bar July 31st of 2005, moved out immediately the next day. And then Katrina came like August 26th or August 25th or whatever it was. I barely got out in time. But everybody forgets about Hurricane Rita because everybody was so busy worrying about Hurricane Katrina. One month later in Lake Charles, Hurricane Rita was actually just as powerful of a storm and did just as much structural damage. We didn't have the massive flooding. And of course, everybody over here kind of got outside with their hammers and fixed their stuff. And her son, this lady that came in was a prisoner in a local prison. And when they were evacuating the prisoners for the hurricane, two of the buses that had all the prisoners ran into each other. And so all the prisoners were making personal injury claims to get bail money. And so she came in here asking me to represent her son in that personal injury claim.

And the whole time she kept rubbing her shoulder and I finally said, being a good intuitive young lawyer, I said, "What's wrong with your shoulder?" And she's like, "Well, I hit a cow yesterday morning on the way to work and my postal worker and it was dark." I said, "What color was that cow?" She's like, "The black cow." In Louisiana, that's a strict liability case. If you have a cow and you're not in an open pasture area that's designated by statute and you have a cow on the road and somebody hits it, you're done. It's an open and shut case. It's just about damages and finding some insurance. But most of the time, these people who own cows have some kind of insurance either on their ranch home or on the ranch itself. Signed her up and then I said, "Yo, I'll go help your son." And so I'm 26, I go to the prison, I listen to his story, get him signed up on the PI case.

And then I said, "Tell me about your criminal charges. I'm just curious as a young lawyer." And he starts telling me about the whole deal and I'm thinking to myself like, "I can win that. " I said, look, I asked him what he did for a living and he was a painter. And I had just bought a house in the sheriff's cell and I don't know about other states, but I know some other states do have this, but in Louisiana, they have what's called the sheriff's sale when a house goes to foreclosure or you get a judgment against somebody and you have to seize it and sell it. And a sheriff's cell wipes the deed clean. So it doesn't matter what creditors are out there, it doesn't matter what old people come out of the woodworks or whatever, you got a clean deed to whatever you buy in the sheriff's sale.

And it often goes at a very discount price. I had just bought a house in the sheriff's sale that needed a lot of work and a lot of painting. And so I made the agreement with him. I said, "I'll represent you on your forcible rape case." They were offering him 20 years if you agree to paint my house. He made the deal, take his case and typically in probably every town when you go for your first arraignment or you go for your first hearing or whatever, they keep bumping the trial down the road or whatever. And I guess the old gray haired DA spotted maybe an easy opportunity. He walked up to me in court on the first day I was there and he said, "What do you think about being on the priority list and getting this case done?" I was like, "Man, let's do it.

Whatever." So he said, "All right." He said, "I'm going to bump you up." So next thing I know, I'm in front of the judge and we're picking a trial date for that summer. I said, "Let's do it. Yeah, that's fine. Let's go. " I break out whatever old dusty ass trial books my dad had downstairs and I did move court in law school, which of course he equipped me to do a forcible rape case. Anyway, tried him and acquitted. They offered him 20 years the day before trial, five years during deliberations and he turned them both down and got out. The defense was, it was actually in the local papers of fake makeup sex. That was my defense and that's what it was. He was a bad person. I told the jury that from the start of, I was smart enough to do that. I told him, "I wouldn't leave him in the room with my girlfriend.

Look at the guy." It did teach me a lot about jury trials. The lady who led the charge to acquit him, sister had been killed as a result of domestic violence and that's really what this was. He suspected and probably was correct that his girlfriend was sleeping around with his friend and they were all at a party drinking and him and the friend got in a fight and then he threw the girl in the car and took off and kind of threw the rural marshes, kind of like a drunk John Grisham book or something out in the middle, nowhere in Louisiana and proceeded to beat her terrible thing. And he described it vividly on the first video that they took of him, proceeded to beat her. He was drinking and getting high and pulled her over and beat her some more and then eventually passed out.

And after she was driving back towards the Lake Charles area where they lived, he woke up and I was in the domestic violence clinic at Tulane. So I knew the pattern of people who beat women when they wake up or when they come back, they feel bad and they want to make up. It's a cycle. They want to get mad, they want to fight and then they want to make up. She knew that cycle too and knew that even though he was still drunk and high, he wanted to make up. In fact, he wanted to make up twice on the road, which she did. And then when they got to the house, he wanted to make up again, at which time he finally passed out at like seven in the morning or something like that. And I believe this whole time that she was just fake making up with him.

She didn't really want to make up with him. She knew that she didn't make up with him, he would beat her some more, which was probably absolutely true. So that's why I called it fake makeup sex. And so she didn't want to do it. She did it in order for him not to beat her again. When he passed out, she slipped the keys out of his pocket. She went straight to the police and they went and arrested him in bed. He gave a full confession to those exact facts on video. So that was my first jury trial. No, that was my last criminal trial.

First and last. Thank God, dude.That's why you have money. There's no money in criminal. It's as stressful. Stressful as hell, as you probably found out, having somebody's life in your hands. How'd you become the civil trial lawyer you are today?

So I had handled, like I said, a ton of civil trials. I mean, not civil trials, civil cases at that point. All of them were kind of small and my dad didn't pay me in keeping with his raising of me. He didn't pay me very much. I was getting paid 30 something thousand dollars a year. I keep my checks.

I know exact life. I worked for my dad too, maybe $500 a week. I was a house painter making $3,000 a week when I was working in the summertime. I'm like, this is bullshit money.That's why I didn't even go to work as a lawyer my first five years because it was crazy. It was like slavery in its own way, like child slavery, like making up for being raised. It was terrible. But anyways.

I always keep my checks here. So when people start, sometimes when people start, I want them to know that I worked in this office right here for less than $40,000 a year for five years. While my friends who graduated Tulane with me went instantly to making six figures. And when my dad would tell me then, he was like, "Oh, you're going to make so much more money than one day." I was like, and blah, blah, blah.

As soon as you quit working for me.

Yeah, right, right. But he told me to keep track. H said, "You're a liability to me, blah, blah, blah.You're not going to make any money." So he said, "Keep track of the money you make on a piece of paper." So I did. And of course I was doing a lot of work on their cases, their valuable cases. But the good thing about keeping track of those cases, it's something that hit me like a ton of bricks was the first time that I had a really good case. I represented this older lady who got hit by these two assholes driving a company truck and messed her back up. When I settled her case, I was probably like 20, 29, something like that. When I settled her case, I made more money off her case for the firm, not for me, for the firm than I had in the previous like 90 cases I had settled.

And I was like, shit, she's so much nicer. She was so much easier to deal with than all those people and serious injuries. I said, "This is what I need to be doing. I don't need to handle all these other cases." So I should have made a drastic shift, but I made a slow shift towards handling more quality cases and everything and really trying to push on the firm to head that direction. But it's the old school mentality, which I'll get into later, but you got to take every case that walks in the door. I always say you make money in this business by the cases you turn down. But back to how I moved into actual trial work, one time my dad was like, "Look, they got a CLE in New Orleans. You want to go to a CLE in New Orleans," or maybe I found it online or something like that.

So I said, "Let's go make a trip over there and go with this CLE." All the CLEs I had done at that point were what I call local CLEs. Maybe an hour from here, I might drive. And it was just some local organization putting on a CLE about property damage or car wrecks or something like that. Nothing like being back in school, "Please God let me out of here." When I went to this one, it was two guys, two people. It was Don Keenan before he was Don Keenan. So it was before reptile, before all that stuff, before ... I didn't know who the hell he was when I walked in there and wasn't super well known across the country like all these people are now. Before the day of the celebrity trial lawyer, I'll call it. And then there was the McElhaney who used to write in trial magazine or was it AAJ?

AAJ, he used to write the little cartoon, that one page cartoon. He was a professor up in Minnesota or something like that, Jim McElhaney.

I've heard of him. I don't know who he is. I know who Keenan is.

Great trial stuff. I mean, he wrote some books and everything and he was great. Anyway, both of them were great back then and I had never been presented with that kind of presentation. Dom was doing this whole thing about how he runs his firm. His whole firm back then was based on a book called the Marine Corps Way, specialized departments and they would push forward and they only accepted 10 cases a year and he had this many verdicts over this mountain, this much, but it was mind blowing stuff to me. And McElhaney was super engaging, super great speaker. Of course, he's a law professor, so he's used to walking around a room and working the room and everything, but he was great. And I left there sort of with a inspiration to like, damn, I got to see what this is all about. Shortly after that, just seeing David Ball too.

David Ball come to not too far from here and I'd watch David Ball and when he was in his heyday, he had just released, I don't know if it was the first damages book maybe and he was up there telling you exactly how you had to do everything, but hell, it sounded great. As long as you follow this formula and do it like this and you hold your hands like this and you're going to fucking win. It sounded good. It gave you a lot of confidence. What I always said was some trial books, although they have great tools that you pull out of every trial book. I think the selling point for a lot of trial books was the selling of a formula to give people enough confidence to go forward. But anyway, and then shortly after that was reptile. And so when I was 29, I went to a early reptile seminars in Dallas where they rented out one of these giant hotels in Dallas and did this two day tag team event with Don and David Ball and Charles, whoever the guy was that worked with Don, this whole choreographed event for the weekend.

And David Ball started talking about the Charles Lawyers College and I had never heard of the Charles Lawyers College. I'm not even sure I'd ever even heard of Jerry Spence. And I didn't have my laptop with me because I still ran around with yellow pads a lot back then. I was taking my notes and everything, but the girl in front of me or the person in front of me had one of these gigantic laptops, the screen's about as big as a TV and she instantly looked up to Charley's college. And so I read the whole thing over her shoulder about what it was about and I wrote it down and went back and instantly applied. I didn't get in at first. I was on the wait list and I pestered them daily because the Charles Lawyers College They accept people. My point as a 30-year-old white dude is the least likely to get in.

Yeah, a little diversity. Yeah, that's the word I'm looking for. Nothing diverse about me. So I was down the pecking order, down on the waiting list. And anyway, four days before it started, they called me and told me the lady called me on my cell because I had pestered her so much and told me I was in. So I made my plans, took off. Luckily I was not married with kids at the time. Yeah, went up there, stayed for, that was the July college for 28 days or whatever it was. Made some great friends and everybody I think takes different things away from the Trial Lawyers College. Some people don't really go try cases. They have more of a support group. Some people- Yeah,

They're like a little diversity, buddy.

Right.

Little diverse. You're nothing diverse about you. A support group for losing trial stories is what Dave Clark calls it. They come back every year and whine about their defeats and get "Oh, it's not your fault." I'm like, "Yeah, it is your fault. You suck. You shouldn't be in the courtroom, but they won't tell them the truth." They didn't like the truth. They didn't like my truth. I tell them the truth, people like, "Oh, you're mean." I'm like, "No, it's mean to be a shitty trial lawyer and go represent people and act like you know what you're doing and lose their case." That's mean. But anyways, I digress.

But like I said, I noticed that after leaving it, everybody took something different away. People took divorces away, right? People took relationships. Some people got married to people they met there. And just for me, what I took away was I still have three, four very good friends, one super close friend that I made there that would pick back up when we talk about 75 hard and still vacation with him every year and see him all the time and talk to him every week and work cases with him. But Eric Penn, the other thing, I guess what I took away as far as lawyering is just the inspiration just to go, I'm just going to go try cases. I think what happens to lawyers, and it's not a bad thing, especially what happens to good litigators. When you haven't been to trial, what do you do?

You're afraid of the courtroom so you litigate, you scorch the earth if you're a good litigator. And some people are terrible litigators and they get terrible settlement offers because then they're not hard workers and they don't see the angles and all that stuff. And then they have really good litigators out there. They have a lot of really good litigators out there that have never been to trial or maybe been to one trial in their life. They get great settlements and all that stuff, but they scorch the earth. They just take five hour depositions every time. They send out massive discovery, they get massive documents, they work this whole big thing up and then they ask a million questions. The gigantic deposition outlines, the other side gets an expert, they deep dive that expert, they get everything, all the skeletons and the expert's closet, they take them in the deposition, they hammer them for seven hours, this, that and the other.

They build this gigantic file all with the real, not gold, but everybody knows it's going to settle. And that's what they're going to do. That's what the defense wants to do. The defense loves it because they get the bill to shed out of the file. They love a scorched earth plaintiff lawyer. They love them, especially one that works at a steady pace, not too fast. And I was getting good money for my cases and all that business and building hours. That's who I was for my first five years. I was scorching the earth because that's, but I wasn't trying any cases. And I think what happens is lawyers, one, litigate the shit out of a case. And then two, they get on what I call the slippery settlement slope is when you're sitting there in a mediation or talking about settlement and you start this type of talk to yourself.

Well, if I got this in court, the judge would never give me a J&OV. I can never get it changed on appeal. Hell, if I got this in court, people would be slapping my back in the hallway telling me what a great job I did. Well, juries, you never know with all it takes with one or two jurors and we could end up with a lot less. And if we walk out right now, we won't have any more expenses. Line up the fucking excuses we can all tell ourselves. And here's the deal. Rick Friedman wrote a book, and I can't remember which book it was, but I read it while I was at the Trial Lawyers College. They sell little books in a gift shop there or whatever. He actually had a chapter on this. There's nothing wrong with all those reasons. All those reasons are true.

You probably are getting a good result for your client. You probably are getting them a fair settlement and you are getting them some money and you're moving on with your life. They're moving on with their life risk-free and that's part of the wheel of the system. We can't try every case. These cases got to be settled. If you're doing a good job in your case and you settle, no harm, no foul. I got nothing against people who aren't trying cases and they're just settling cases. And that's really, when I say I got nothing against them, I commend them. They're a necessary part of the system. But the fact of the matter is if you continue to put yourself on that slippery slope, you were never going to become a trial lawyer. You can't become a basketball player without playing basketball. You can't become a pool shark without playing pool.

You can't do those things without the experience. It's impossible. And that's kind of what Jerry gave a big barn talk. Jerry would give these inspirational off the cuff barn talks in the mornings back then. And one of his talks was just about going to trial. Stop worrying about this, stop worrying about money, stop worrying about settlement, stop worrying about litigation, go to trial, get in the courtroom, go to trial. Everything else will work out if you just go. And so at the same time, I'm reading this book from Rick Friedman and his idea was people get caught up in the duty to their client not to put their client at risk and that's why they end up settling their current client. And he says, "I'm not trying to embark on any ethical rules." Or that's what he said. And that's what I say too. But you also have to look at your clients and the system as a whole.

And so if you don't go to trial when you're in your 20s and 30s, by the time you're 45 and 50, you'll be the exact same trial lawyer you were then. You'll be no better. The mistake that people think or believe is that by litigating, they get better in the courtroom. And that's absolutely not true. I think to some extent by litigating, you get worse in the courtroom because you get caught up in shift that you don't know what matters. The analogy that I use about, I always go to basketball because I played a lot of basketball when I was a kid. The analogy I use is this. Take a team, two basketball teams and they're both being introduced to basketball for the first time. One team is never allowed to practice. They're only allowed to scrimmage and play games against each other. They're five on five.

There's 10 man teams. That's all they're allowed to do. They're never allowed and the coach can stop them and say, "No, no, no. These are the rules. It's how you ... " Whatever. And they go play basketball. That's all they're allowed to do. Kind of like kids on the playground when they're kids. They don't, "Hey, let's practice today instead of playing." Everybody's going to say, "Shut up. We're playing." And then you take the other team and you say, "You're never allowed to actually play the game of basketball. All you're allowed to do is practice. You can practice free throws, you can practice three pointers, you can practice passing, you can practice dribbling. And then at the end of five years or two years or one year or six months, whatever, the two teams play each other. Who's going to win? It's going to be a blowout from the people who played every day because there's certain things about playing the game.

There's two parts to it. There's certain things about playing the game that you can't replicate and practice. The other part is in practice, if you do nothing but practice, which I like into doing nothing but litigating, you don't know what to practice. And you start practicing the wrong things, maybe practicing the wrong plays, practicing the wrong skills that really don't matter or that you're good enough at or whatever. You don't get any feedback from playing the game. And the way I liken that to trial practice is once you go to trial a couple times or maybe one good time, you look back at all the shit you've been doing and you say, damn it, I didn't need to do any of that. I was asking the wrong questions. I thought I was taking a good deposition and I wasn't, not for trial purposes. I gave the expert a total preview of what I was going to do at trial.

Now he sounds pretty reasonable. I showed them all my tricks. Just like yesterday, I had this deposition yesterday. This case I had yesterday is a terrible case as a nurse practitioner. This lady went to a behavioral health clinic where she was treated periodically. And when she showed up, her doctor had called in sick that day. So this nurse practitioner steps up and says, Hey, I can see you today. So he brings her in his office, pulls the curtains, which kind of weird. He's the only one in the office that had curtains on his office that he had installed personally, pulls the curtains, gets her crying, gets her emotional, and then rapes her on the first time you ever met her. And so of course we're suing the hospital and all that business. And he was sleeping with two other patients or at least one other patient and he was sleeping with a coworker and the hospital knew about it, him sleeping with a coworker, his subordinate, not just a coworker, a subordinate.

When I was deposing these people yesterday, it's what I was getting on. I was deposing different people who worked there. They had all had some contact with the defense and tried to be coached a little bit and everything like that. And when it got to the last deposition, I had listened to their recorded statements from the police. The police went and took all their recorded statements. And so I had her recorded statement kind of outlined. And as I started to ask her questions, immediately I knew her story had changed. Her story had veered off and she was not telling the same story she told the police. She didn't really know what was going on between him and other things. She never saw anything improper. She never saw him be flirtatious or never had any reason to suspect anything, whatever and da, da, da. And that's not what she told the police.

So the police was very noticeable. It was well known in the office. Nobody could have missed it, blah, blah, blah. When you listen to a recorded statement, when I make a notes, I write down those keywords, noticeable, well known, couldn't miss it. So that just had my bullet points because I want those. I like those. Those are soundbites for trial. Well, so when she starts lying, the guy with me, great lawyer, kind of send me a piece of paper suggesting to do what I would have done in my early 30s before I started going to trial a whole bunch. I would have pulled out that statement, played it for her and impeached her right there in the deposition. Right there. "This is what you told the police. This is what you did this. This is what you said. Now you're saying this and this that and the other da, da, da.

You're telling a different story. I had a trial right there." And you walk out of the deposition, "Oh, I got her," or whatever. And then when she goes to trial, maybe she tells a story somewhere in the middle of it or they coach her to finagle those words. When I said this to the police, I meant this and you ruin it. As soon as she was lying, you change right there. You say, "Okay, the deposition's over when it's over." It's over when it's over. I like to tell people. And so when she starts lying, I just said, "Okay, I remember I have those keywords written down in front of me. " I said, "So to you, it wasn't even noticeable." No, I wasn't noticeable. And what you're telling us now is was not well known in the office. I hadn't confronted her with the fact that she used those exact words in her statement, but you want us to come from Raja Dodd thing.

You want to loop those words where I made her use the word noticeable four times. Her deposition lasted 13 minutes, 14 minutes. I said, "So it wasn't noticeable to you. You didn't see anything. And it's a little bit of polarizing the case, which I love Rick Friedman. Push her out on the limb as far as she'll go. Wasn't noticeable to you. You would've never told anybody it was noticeable. It wasn't well known. Nothing in the office that you saw. You were in the open area. If it had been happening, you would've seen it, this, that, and the other, da, da, da. Let her lie. Lock the light and then end the deposition and walk out. Okay. Now you have her just locked in there. So if they decide to bring her to trial, it's not only that you neutralize that witness, things like that can shift the scope of the case because now the hospital's bringing in people that are willing to lie.

And that's the kind of stuff that jury's like, that's what's going on here. That can shift the dynamics of a case when you catch somebody in a cold ass lie like that with using their own words. In the other depositions that day, it lasted an hour because those people were willing to tell the truth and I got as much out of them as I could. But this one, like I said, 13 minutes because when them to start lying, lock them in and let them go.

Aaron, speaking of locking them in, where you are coming to TLU next week in Huntington Beach and you're doing a workshop and a lecture out there. So what is your workshop about in Huntington Beach?

My workshop is called 10-minute openings and it's kind of two parts to my thinking on that. One, I've become a big believer in, with Joe Fried calls speed trial. So we've all tried cases and think we were killing it. One time, the one that sticks out to me, I had this doctor in a mid-mal case. I obliterated him in the first 30 minutes, but I was in about my second hour of obliteration. My eighth great point where everyone was devastating in and of itself, but I was having too much fun. Thought I was killing it. I thought I was Perry Mason or Gerry Spence or somebody. And I looked over and the juror in the middle was sleeping. I looked over at the jury like, ha, you sleep. And I was like, oh, nobody was paying attention. I mean, he wasn't just sleeping. He was in REM sleep.

And I was like, "Golly." And the other thing, through a lot of trials, a lot of my early trials that lasted too long, you hear those groans when like, "Oh, they're calling another witness or they're calling another doctor." The jury kind of shifts. You can all feel it. They're like, "No, not another one." And then in closing, same thing. And when you get up and closing, it's like you feel like you don't have any steam. You don't have anything left to say. You said it all in opening because you did a big long ass hour opening. You asked every witness every question you could. And so you've asked the same question of 20 people and then you're going to get up in opening and tell them the same shit again. I don't know. So that's what we would do. And I felt like my closings were always flat until rebuttal.

When the defense got up and said something new, then I had some fire. But I felt like my closings were always flat and the jury was disinterested. So a couple years ago, I really just said, "Okay, no matter what, I'm just going to go lightning fast." So now I'm running through 10 witnesses a day, sometimes more. I think one time one day I put on 15 witnesses, I call it TV pace or TikTok pace, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off. We think as lawyers, we're not covering all the ground, but what good does it do to cover the ground if they don't hear it? You got to give them those bits and pieces and get the people up and down. And then what I found when I did that, when I do fast openings and I do fast voir dire and I do fast everything, when you get to closing, they're actually still paying attention.

They got their notebooks out, they're writing, they're excited to hear what you got to say because now they've been watching a TV show or a TikTok show. They hadn't been sitting through the most boring experience of their entire life. Feel the difference in the courtroom. I feel the energy better in a courtroom when you move fast. So the 10-minute opening thing, people to get to the point, resist the urge to go through your whole case, resist the urge, undermine every defense. I'm big on looking at defenses like, "Okay, is this one that I really need to pre-address?" And I'll kind of act like I didn't even know they were going to say that later in the trial. I couldn't believe in opening, the defense lawyer got up there and said this and do something with the whatever. There's a whole book on this called the sponsorship theory that when you pre-mention the defenses and then they get up and mention them, now they've heard it twice.

You're sponsoring by you bringing it up, you actually give it more credibility. You force them to bring it up, force them to be the awkward ones to bring up something and bring up this. And the trial's not over after openings. I know that used to be a popular thing that after voir dire and openings, but you can't stop them from saying what they're going to say in openings. By sponsoring some of their defenses and dragging shit out too long, all you do is make their openings more effective. You open the door for them to walk in like, as you heard Mr. Bruce Horn say, his client was a dirt bag or whatever. The 10-minute opening thing, that's part of it is just really getting down to the nuts and bolts. If you only had 10 minutes, what are you going to get in there and say?

And the other part is sometimes what I'm working with is to resist this structured opening that's read to the jury or very choreographed or whatever and to just be a person and talk to them. I did a lot of work with Josh Karton over the years who I met at the Trial Lawyers College. And I guess tailing back to the Trial Lawyers College thing, when I left there in the next five years, I tried 30 jury trials as compared to the five years before that when I only tried one. It was a drastic change. I always tell people when I'm back to what I was talking about, like talking off of the cuff and I come up with all tricks for myself. I'll get somebody up in the room and I'll just say, "Hey, tell me how to get to your house from work, to explain to us all how to get to your house from work.

I drive down this street, this, that, and the other da, da, da. Sometimes I take this road depending on the traffic and it's that and the other da, da, da, and I drive and whatever." And everybody can do it without a script and without thinking about it, they can just get up there and tell you how to get to work. That's kind of thing I think we need to think about our cases more. You need to be able to tell people about your case and the same relaxed feeling that you tell somebody how to get to work. And then also everybody's all obsessed with storytelling and they go read these books, how to tell a story and where to start with. You have to have a hook and you have to do this and you have to have a punchline and all this. And then it doesn't sound like a good story.

It sounds like shit. But look, everybody knows how to tell a story. We all have a story that we can tell in our lives that has a punchline that we've told to sitting around.

That script is Daisy Duke in her shorts, bro. And a general lead, that's the Dukes of Hazard running away from Enos and Sheriff Boss Hogg. It's the same script over in ... Oh, it's funny, like forensic files. I'm like, that's crazy because I still watch that show when it's on it because even though it's 20 years old, they haven't made a new forensic files in 20 years. It's like you're watching shit you could tell was made in 2002. Okay. What's your lecture going to be about at LU?

The way I thought about the lecture is that there's enough lawyers out there. There's enough famous trial lawyers out there with amazing talents showing everybody what they can do and great openings and great cross-examinations and stuff like that, that maybe some of that stuff achievable by normal man and maybe some not and all that stuff. But I thought maybe my lecture is more of the nuts and bolts of the day in and day out things that if you want to be a successful trial plaintiff lawyer, not necessarily just a trial lawyer, but a plaintiff lawyer that you need to do. If you want to get good settlements, you want to run a good office, you want to have good trials, it kind of goes all the way through trials of writing appeals and everything. And it's just kind of like my top tips. If you started the beginning of a case when the person walks in the door to the time the appeal is over, what are those just what I think essential things to do are?

I mean, the most basic one is like my office and me, I follow up relentlessly. There's not something that falls through the cracks. It's like a cardinal sin in my office if I find out the discovery that we served was never answered or discovery we drafted never went out or a letter that we requested a deposition and they never gave us the dates and we didn't follow up on it and make it happen. Once the order's given or once the thing happens, it cannot fall through the cracks. What I've learned over the years that when you go audit files in a lot of offices, that's what you find. They didn't follow up on this, they didn't do this. And defense lawyers, look, I always try to visualize things. When a defense lawyer gets a letter from you or an email or discovery, they take it and they put it in a stack right over here and they're never going to touch it again unless you follow up on it.

They're never going to touch it again, unless they need some billing to do. You have to follow up on it three times sometimes, we all know. But if you don't have that mindset and a system for the technology that you want to use and your whole office is not trained to do it, then what you're going to find when it comes to settlement time or mediation time or trial time is that you have a lot of loops out there that haven't been closed. That's one thing and really teaching that. Another thing is what I call my, in our office, we have a name for it and it's written out called our sprint process and that's again to avoid bottlenecks. So the vast majority of times when you go out there and just look at, I walk into a personal injury firm and I'm looking at a case they want to refer or if I was going to talk to them about their cases or whatever, they're just going to have cases that are sitting there.

We hadn't got that one yet. The petition hadn't been filed or we filed a petition. What's going on? We ever served this, we have discovery or we hadn't taken any depositions. They're just kind of sitting there in this different stages of the early stages most of the time, that stage between the petition and the first deposition. And so when I was working those first, but my firm I did eventually take over the firm and it has greatly expanded since then. Now we have four offices and a lot of different attorneys and kind of those specialized departments and caseload is not 200 cases of lawyer. It's about 25 or 30 cases a lawyer try to push things really hard. And so the Sprint process is designed to move cases steadily from the petition to the first depositions and that no bottleneck. So when this happens, next thing it triggers this.

Next thing it triggers this and this happens and I don't waste time with written discovery after the first couple of depositions. Only discovery I want to do before depositions is how much insurance you got. And otherwise, it's a sprint.That's what I call it the sprint process. I want a sprint from that petition to the first depositions because after the first set of depositions, then you keep depositions set and that's where you're going to win your case anywhere or get it ready for trial. But a lot of times not every case needs to go to trial, not even close to every case needs to go to trial. And after those first depositions, a lot of times everybody kind of knows what the score is and what's going on and defense lawyers want to talk, what the insurance is and a lot of cases go away then.

It's not the cases I'm working on. I'm talking about the attorneys in my office. This is what I'm teaching them and this is what the paralegals are doing. And I have that sprint process designed so that from the time the petition is filed, the next thing the attorney has to do on the case at all is to meet the plaintiff for their deposition prep. And so it goes from the petition being filed. The paralegal has all authority from then on to grant extensions to answer because they're always going to ask for that. They know to send out the discovery. They know they can grant one extension for the discovery because the judge is going to give it to them if you don't grant it. They know to file the motion to compel immediately. They know to set up the discovery conferences. It's all, like I said, typed out.

Immediately when we file a petition or beforehand, we're ordering every medical record of our client past and future. In other words, related and just going 10 years back, the same stuff we know the defense is going to get. Used to, we're having it summarized now. Now we're having Eve summarize it and we're having it summarized so that you can, just like this last trial I just had last week, my client had some previous neck and back complaints. People don't remember that shit. You got to have your medical records in hand before the plaintiff's deposition to make sure that they are educated on their own medical history, so to speak. And all that stuff needs to happen seamless as fast as possible so that when that plaintiff walks in for their deposition prep and we offer our plaintiff up, we try to do the opposite. Instead of resisting offering our plaintiff up for deposition, we're saying, "Hey, take our plaintiff's deposition." The next day we're taking your guys' deposition and we start with the lowest level employee.

Why start with the lowest level employee? I think it's usually the best place to start. Not always, but I try to remove any decision making. That way the paralegal doesn't have to go to the attorney and say, "Who do you want to depose first?" And then wait on the attorney to make a decision.That's just more delay. Depose the driver or depose the person involved or depose anybody's name. You don't give a shit. Set a deposition. Just get a deposition on the books of the plaintiff. Sometimes people, I think, get paralysis by analysis. "I need to do this first. I need to do that first. Just get one set and get in there.

Guess what though? If people are not there because they miss it, because they're not, I don't want to say they're losers, but they just have bad judgment by not coming to Huntington Beach next week, just saying, but it's all going to be on TLU on demand in about a month. If you do make it, you'll have to see Aaron's presentation, but there's five lecture tracks there you get to choose from. Eight workshop tracks. And hopefully you're going to get there on Tuesday, Aaron, for our Finch welcome dinner. And then we got golf, pickleball and surf camp and go- kart racing for little social stuff before the real conference begins. This year we're going to have, besides all the great education, super fun. We got a poker tournament every night. The lobby turns into a gaming lounge every night with ping pong, foosball, and a DJ and open bar.

Not that we drink anymore, but just saying there's that for people that do like to drink. I'm not one of them. You probably don't remember this. When's the last time you were at TLU? Was it Vegas or somewhere? A couple years, four years ago, 2022?

I had a trial every year. End of June.

Oh yeah. Well, we really up to date. I'll just give you the block off dates. Every first week of June, you can just block that off in the future so you don't have a trial then. So you can come out to the beach and hang out and socialize and learn. But we have great theme parties this year. We got an 80s tracksuit pool party. We got Sach Oliver, our boy Sach wrote depositions at trial. He's having a wild west party, so he's bringing up like 500 pounds of Oliver Angus beef, wood fire grills, mechanical bull. Then we're going to have a rooftop Opry ski party hosted by our buddy Phillip Miller. Broussard, we got ... So it's your first beach event. So I appreciate you giving me five years to get my shit together. But just like you took you five years to ... This is like your second five years, this last five years of mine where you did 30 trials and you learned how to become a trial lawyer.

I learned how to put together a conference over the last five years and you and about 800 of our closest friends are going to be the beneficiary of it. So I just want you to know that. We're looking forward to all happening next week at TLU Beach. So this thing will probably come out hopefully on Monday. And if people are last minute, they haven't heard of it. If somebody hasn't heard of it, I'm like, where do you live in a cave somewhere? You got wifi where you live, buddy. You got cell phone service, but anyways. So Psych Broussard, it's going to be great and we're starting a bootcamp. I do these bootcamps at my house here in Hermosa Beach. And so we're doing the first four days of our bootcamp here. I got about 15 people rolling into town tonight for that. So I'm pretty stoked about all this, Mr. Broussard that-

Packing at a bootcamp the weekend before the conference?

Yeah. Then we're all going to the conference. So this is like my version of the Trial Lawyers College, although it's only 10 days. We do five days of bootcamp, then we do five days of conference. Well, the first day's pretty light because Tuesday just goes till noon and then we got Tuesday afternoon off, people want to go socialize and then the conference starts the next day because everything for the conference has already been basically done. All the stuff that I have to do organizationally wise and most of it. Still got to pick up the Gulf four steps, still got to organize the seating for dinner parties and stuff, but most of it's all done. And I got a few other instructors here helping me out. So I do this every year now because that way I get to spend 10 days with my new best friends that come to bootcamp.

Me, I'm a social guy, so I got to find things to hang out. You're here this year. But before we close, Mr. Broussard, I need to ask you how many cases you think you've tried. I'd like somebody's approximately 87, but I'm not keeping count.

Somewhere around 50 something. I'd have to go back and I stopped counting, but I did stop counting.

Tell us about what you think is your greatest result in the courtroom for whatever reason you think is the greatest. One you're most proud of. I know you got so many. It's like having kids. Can't pick out which one you like the best.

Yeah. When I start thinking of greatest, I start thinking of toughest, I start thinking of funnest. My biggest result was a wrongful death case this past year for 35 million. And there wasn't much. There was some cross-examination, but it was really tastefully putting on the death of a young lady, not being offensive to the jury, but that cement truck ran into the back of a family going to daycare and just kind of this terrible crash.

Let me ask you about this wrongful death case. She's got $35 million. How old was the girl that died?

She was eight.

So how did you go about articulating your damage argument for that? Because that's always the hardest thing, isn't it? A child death? Because Panish is in trial right now on a double wrongful death case against some socialite rich lady who was drunk. I don't know if you've seen all the clips on social media and stuff of it with a baseball player because it's on CVN, but because I was talking to him about it and he's like, "Geez, yours ambulance are tough because he's out in this place called Van Eyes." And they just talk about blood money and how do you sue for ... Why would you ever go and it's terrible tragedy to ask for money? But then obviously you did this, but how did you articulate, quantify, do you think persuade the jury that the number should be in that range?

I'll say two things that I came up with for that trial that I've been using since then. And I was in a struggle with that exact question. I've never been one where money came naturally to me. We're talking about money and I always, even when I would work with Karton and I'd work with different people, they would say, "Man, you just got to go stand in the mirror and say a million dollars over and over again because you quiver." And I think that was part of my, this kind of maybe deep seed legit, but part of my raising, I was raised, my dad had money. I lived extremely hard life as far as ... I say hard life. I don't ever want to say that. I had a good life. I would hunt and fishing. I did stuff and I had friends. I'd play basketball.

I hate when people say, "I lived a hard life. Fuck, we don't know what a hard life is in America."

Yeah, I bet you were.

Yeah. What I mean is I worked hard and I did tractors and plows and all that farm shit and roofing houses when I was 10 years old and stuff like that. I mean, plumbing, this, that, and the other. And that's all still a big part of me. And I guess the other part of it is too, this is maybe a little whatever is when my dad became more affluent or whatever, my family split up. And so I kind of always thought that money was at the root of all evil back then.

You just had to earn your own money to spend it. You just weren't getting hand out every day like your friends were.

Just what you said, converting some terrible tragedy to money always just didn't feel right to me and I always struggled with it. In preparation for this case, I kind of struggled with that for a while until I finally came up with the opposite of what I think a lot of people do. Riley used to do the whole-

Equal trade value.

Equal trade value, yeah.

Come on,

Man. I had boards made for it and everything. Anyway, I used to use that all the time. It just didn't ring for me. There's no equal trade value for the loss of a little girl. And so we always kind of run from that. Money's not going to do any good. So instead of running from it, I sort of confronted it with the jury in voir dire and in opening, just like, money is not going to bring her back. Money's not going to make this better. Money's not going to affect the way she feels. It's not going to do that and the other. It's all we have. So if the money's not going to bring her back, and I didn't do it like this, but if money's not going to bring her back and if money's not whatever, you can't ever make it right. The purpose of compensation is to make things right, to balance the scales.

You can't ever balance the scales. You're never going to be able to balance the scales in this case, no matter how much money you own the $100 million, whatever, it's not going to make it better and it's not going to balance the scales. So I'm not telling you to give them $100 million. So what am I telling you to do? And what in the world do you do? I know you got to be sitting there thinking as a juror, how the hell do you put a price on the loss of this little girl and what happened to this family? And what I can say is that while your verdict can't balance the scales and can't really do real justice because real justice is balancing the scales, it's if you knock my mailbox down, you fix my mailbox, you burn my house down, you build me a new house, you can't do real justice in this case.

Unless we could step into a time machine, push a button and spin the earth back on its axis, then we could, but we don't have the power to do

That. Real justice is a myth in these cases, what can you do? You can render a verdict that is symbolic of justice. You can render a verdict that when somebody who knows the facts of this case like you knew or you're going to know that knows the facts of this case, that has seen what you have seen, here's your verdict, they will feel like it was justice. It will symbol justice for what this family lost. And so justice in a case like this is not a measurement, it's a feeling. And when you come out of that jury room and when you sign that form, you're saying that you've done the best justice that you can do. It's not full justice, it's not real justice, it symbols justice under the facts of this case. I like to put some significance on signing that verdict form that it means something.

And the other thing I I got ready for in this case is what do we always hear from the defense? The plaintiff is telling you they want millions of dollars. We are not saying to award these people zero, but we want to be reasonable. $100 million, $10 million, that's so much money. There's more money than they ever make in their whole lives. We're asking just for you to be reasonable. I like to take what I call ownership of words in the trial. What I mean by ownership of words is be the first one to get out there and define something or take ownership of defenses, to define things. The ownership of reasonable. The way I do that is you're going to hear in a second, I anticipate, and I think you've already heard it during the trial, that they're just going to ask you to be reasonable.

The word reasonable can be used in different ways and it's used in different ways in the English language. Sometimes when people, they go to a restaurant and I say, "I went to a restaurant last night and I ate there and the food was very good." Oh, and the prices were very reasonable. What we mean by that is that the food was good and pretty cheap. It wasn't expensive. That truck was very reasonable. This that and the other, like the way your grandma used the word reasonable. That's the way the defense wants to use it. In a courtroom, reasonable means one thing. 100% compensation. Reasonable means justice. If you try to discount or cheapen the result in this case because they ask you to be reasonable, you're not being reasonable. It's not reasonable to do that. This is a courtroom. I try to redefine the word reasonable, take the wind out of their sales so when they get up and say, "We just want to be reasonable."

How'd you get to 35 million or some number that they decided that? I assume you asked them for more than 35 million.

Yeah, I think I asked them for 90.

What was her highest offer to settle prior to trial?

I think gave 15 to mom, five to dad. Dad had a $3 million bystander claim. He showed up on the scene shortly after the crash. Mom had terrible PTSD and she had a seven million on her own claim. Part of the two kids got hurt in a crash, but not near as bad. So complicated there and there was no offer to settle before trial. There was only a million dollar policy and the defense lawyers or the adjuster, I don't know why. I think early on in the case before I was involved, they had some phone conversations with the people who had the case and maybe got heated or something and they never made an offer. They never made an offer until three days before trial, like the offer they should have sent a long time ago, which is we're tendering our $1 million policy with interest, we're playing cost, we do all this stuff.

But in our mind that was three days before trial was they had already breached their duty, their good faith duty. And so in Louisiana, you don't have to have ... In a lot of states in order to get bad faith or to collect an excess judgment, you have to have a clear running with the Bulls type offer and then you have to have a failure to pay it. In Louisiana, it's better to have that. Absolutely better to have a demand and a failure to pay it, but you don't have to have it. The insurance company is required to take affirmative steps to settle a case when it should be settled. And they didn't take those affirmative steps until three days before the trial. So we have a whole nother case pending now trying to collect as much of that as we can. And actually the appeal of the underlying case, in other words, the appeal of the 35 million is the opinion should be coming out any day.

Well, that's a pretty good result, Broussard. I'm glad you got to ask you about your record result. It's always nice to reflect upon that because it's a culmination of a lifetime of work typically. It just doesn't happen by itself. Boom, I got this basic result. It's a result of years and years of pounding the wall and trial and error is no pun intended. Losing sucks. And I think you probably guess you've lost your fair share in this 55 trials. They haven't all gone your way.

I did not lose one for the first six years. Yeah. Then I got kicked in the stomach. When you get kicked in the stomach, it hurts. I got kicked in the stomach one time. I got defensed one time in 15 minutes, so that hurts. Guess what case it was?

The driver was sleeping?

The case with the jar was sleeping.

Oh, the juror was sleeping. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a real good connection with that jury, Broussard. Hopefully you picked it up from there.

No, the juror. Remember I said that to the jury member?

Nobody's listening. Who cares? How do people get ahold of you if they're down there in Lake Charles and want to hang out with you or go fishing or maybe talk to you about a case?

Totally crushed the merits of the case but did not crush the trial. Yeah. So as far as fishing goes, it's a good ... I live 45 minutes from the Gulf of Mexico and 45 minutes from Texas. So I'm right down in the boot, right down in the hill of the boot of Louisiana shaped like a boot. I'm way down in the hill. Closer to that, I have a camp on the water.

In what town?

Right down on the Gulf Coast.

I've been fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, my cover picture on my phone when I call people, it's me holding a big red snapper with a Detroit police shirt on and that was out there in the Gulf of Mexico at one of those oil rigs.

So you went out on Venice probably?

Yeah, I did. That was pretty cool.

Venice is the opposite side of the state and it's a very popular destination. You can get to ... The water gets deeper faster out there where we're just as popular for inshore fishing. People go offshore fishing, plenty of them out of our area, but you got to go further just because of the makeup of the ocean floor out there or the Gulf floor. My camp's inland just a litle bit. Can see the Gulf of Mexico from the third floor of my camp, but it's inland fishing, you can fish right off the dock. But yeah, so my cell phone is 337-274-5164. My firm is brousardnoll.com, B-R-O-U-S-S-A-R-D-K-N-O-L-L.com. My email address is AaronBroussard@gmail.

Family needs to get a hold of me. Everybody knows how to do that though. It's 248-808-3130 or [email protected]. And if you don't come to Trial Lawyers University and you don't have TLU on demand and you want to see Aaron's presentations or any other ones from some of our fellow decent trial lawyers like Brian Panish or Nick Rowley or folks like that or Sach Oliver or Joe Fried, we got a few of them lined up out here, Broussard. So we're glad that you could join the lineup with your peers. It's going to be great. I'm so fired up for it. I can't tell you. I'm excited when it comes. I'm excited when it goes. I just been up since two in the morning. All I do is think about all the shit I got to do. And just like a trial, you think of everything you go wrong and all this shit, did you fucking forget anything?

Did you plan everything? Did you grab everything? I got so much stuff around that. You know what I mean? Just so many details to make it all come out knowing that if I miss one of them, I mean, unless it's like the name badges or something like that, probably not the end of the world, but I'm not going to miss some though Bruce. Don't you worry. I got to dialed in. If I got Aaron Broussard coming, he said, "I'm only coming, Amber. You bring your A game." I said, "Don't you worry, Aaron. I've been working on this for many a year." All right. Well, it's good hanging out with you. Before we go though, 75 Hard, what inspired you to do such an insane thing because you have your jug of water, but what is 75 Hard for those people that don't know?

Yeah, so 75 Hards is 75 days straight of not drinking, which for a Louisiana person is the hardest part. So every day-

Can you not smoke weed either?

I did not during that time. It's not that I have anything against it. I didn't during that time because that would probably lead to me having a drink.

Okay.

You work out twice a day, 45 minutes each, at least, at least three hours apart and one of them has to be outside. You drink a gallon of water every day. You have to take a picture of yourself every day, which you have to read 10 pages of a book every day. The 10 pages of a book, not hard for me. You get used to the gallon of the water after about a week. You just get more thirsty and get it knocked out. I just carried a gallon of water around with me. And what Dan's talking about is after I got done with 75 hard, I switched to a half gallon. So I carry that around with me now. So I don't carry the gallon around anymore. The two workouts a day, most days was not a problem, but some days you get stuck in an airport or something like that and you're getting to where you're going at midnight and you got to go for a run or a walk or whatever out in the middle of the rain or whatever.

I took a lot of bike rides in the rain and the not drinking for me is a Louisiana boy who especially indulges a good bit and more than I should have in life. In Louisiana, if you say, "I'm only going to drink on special occasions, you're drinking four nights a week." Every night some kind of party or some kind of get together or some kind of event or LSU game or whatever. There's always some reason to drink. So that was really tough. I did not make it the entire 75 on the drinking. I finished everything else. I quit on day 69 because my buddy Eric Penn that I said we'd circle back to, who I met at the Trial Lawyers College or 16 years ago, one of my best friends, we traveled together and he's got a sailboat in the BBIs that I'm lucky enough to go to on a yearly basis and wonderful person, even better attorney, one of the best trucking attorneys in the country.

He had the Werner verdict that became kind of world famous or six, seven years ago for 90 something million, 89 million down in Houston, Texas. And the Supreme Court last summer, Texas reversed it and zeroed him. So he called me and said, "Hey, I'm coming to the camp." He said, "You're going to have a drink." And I said, "Okay." I guess if he lost a hundred ... This was when I broke the 75 hard thing, day 69, I said, "Okay, if you-

Was it to celebrate though or was this the day guy's verdict taken from him?

Oh, taken from him.

Oh, a gut wrench to say the least?

Yeah. Yeah, it was tough. I felt like if I had went 69 days without a drink, I could have done the 75.

Yeah, you proved it.

Whatever.

You didn't prove anything to anybody. It's just for yourself.

Yeah, I got to. I was on cruise control after about 45 days.

I'm not that disciplined. I know it. So I start to even start stuff like that, Bruceard. I know I'm not going to finish.

It was tough.

I've only got so many years on this earth. I don't want to be miserable for 75 of them.

I have not attempted to do it again. Not yet. Maybe one day.

I'm Orlando de Castroverde. I've been a subscriber to TLU on demand ever since the start. Anytime I listen to a particular episode that's relevant to a case that I'm working on right away, I'm sharing it with my team saying, Hey, you got to listen to this. If you want to be the best trial lawyer that you can be, sign up for TLU on demand today.

All right. I'll see you a week from now, you'll be waking up at the Paseo Hotel, getting out to do a little yoga in the morning.

Yep.

A little closer than you.

And how far is that from your house?

No, it's like 15 miles, 17 miles. It's that kind of 45 minutes. We're going there today though. I'm going there. I head out there right when I finish up because we got to go down and do some dessert tasting because I'm very important dessert and I mean, they forget fucked up desserts because they're not ... They give cannolis that have been sitting out and they're soggy. I'm like, "This is bullshit. Can I serve my friends this crap?" I got to go make sure that even the desserts, that's how I'm going to go there this last day, plus I got to go check some things with people. We find some menus because we're having dinner parties every niht, Aaron. I hope you are SVP'd for the 80s tracksuit dinner party hosted by Supio on Thursday night and the Finch welcome party on Tuesday. Just hoping you did.

You get on it. There's still time. We still got room for you. You call me. I had an extra ticket for you. All right, take care. Bye. Thank

You, brother.

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