Professional wrestling, like trial work, comes down to storytelling. For a decade, plaintiff's attorney Max Petrunya also wrestled as the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., a villain character built on the lawyers people love to hate. Host Brendan Lupetin traces Max's path from early-career struggles and drinking to therapy, sobriety, and enrolling in wrestling school at 30. Max also shares the Denny's test, a lesson from a friend who helped train him to wrestle, which gives trial lawyers a simple but surprisingly useful way to gauge what jurors will actually remember about a case. Tune in for Max's take on why a trial lawyer's life doesn't have to fit in one box.

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Episode Preview

• Max wrestled as the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., from February 2015 until December 2025 in five states, while practicing plaintiff's personal injury law and eventually running his own firm.
• After trials, Max couldn't work himself out of a depressive funk. He explains why he signed up for therapy, and why it takes the same commitment as going to the gym.
• Max modeled his wrestling character on arrogant, egotistical defense lawyers he had faced, and explains why love and hate sell tickets more than like and dislike.
• The tools Max used in his 90-second promos, including repetition and digestible points, are the same ones trial lawyer colleges teach.
• Although wrestling started as a creative outlet for Max, it grew into an unexpected referral source, leading to trademark cases and contract review for WWE and AEW wrestlers.
• A parody T-shirt sent Max to federal court, where he cross-examined wrestling manager Jim Cornette over Zoom and defeated a temporary restraining order.
• After a cervical spine diagnosis, Max chose to plan his own exit from wrestling, bookending his career against the same opponent from his very first match.

Ready to refer or collaborate on med mal, medical negligence, and catastrophic injury cases? Visit our attorney referral page at PAMedMal.com/Refer. We handle cases in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

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All I wanted to do, truthfully, when I went to professional wrestling school, was just to learn how to get into the ring, to take a bump, to learn how to be a professional wrestler. I had no idea what my career would turn into.

Welcome to Just Verdicts with your host, Brendan Lupetin, a podcast dedicated to the pursuit of just verdicts for just cases. Join us for in-depth interviews and discussions of cutting edge trial strategies that will give you the keys to conquering the courtroom, produced and powered by LawPods.

So when most of us go to law school, we get in there and we have this sort of preconceived notion of the way that our career path could or should go. And I think we can all agree that our lives and our paths can go different directions, but there's still that very set mindset. "I got to get into a firm. I have to do this. I got to make partner and just be a grinding lawyer until it's all over." And we are here today to talk with not one, but two people, a man, a lawyer, and his amazing alter ego. The lawyer is Max Petrunya, who is going to be talking with us today. And the alter ego is the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., a professional wrestler attorney at Law and in the ring. And Max, you are here today to talk with us about the life of not just a trial lawyer, but a life as also a professional wrestler and all the other ways that our careers and lives can go than just the standard boring cookie cutter thinking that is ingrained in us in law school.

So Max, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Brendan. And I should note the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., is the greatest attorney and professional wrestler in the world. So it was always my moniker.

Well, and I love the fact that nobody can really dispute that. You're not allowed to say that I think in real practice, but in the ring, anything goes and nobody can disagree with you ever that you are the greatest lawyer of all time as a professional wrestler.

And I mean, so it's interesting because even though we say we can't say that in our practice, we know lawyers that we've probably worked against in Pittsburgh and the greater region that would consider themselves the greatest lawyers to ever grace the bar. And so kind of tell people my backstory and how I became a professional wrestling lawyer, that is fundamental to the creation of the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., and what that character embodied too. So my name is Max Petrunya. I am still and will always be Max Petrunya for the 41 years that I've been on this earth. I've been a practicing lawyer for 16 years. I spent my first eight years of my legal career from 2010 until 2018 at Robert Peirce & Associates doing plaintiff's personal injury. I've opened my own firm in 2019 to the present, Max Petrunya PC. And from February of 2015 all the way up until December of 2025, I wrestled as the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland as well, and New York.

And that was my escape and my side hustle, if you want to call it, my creative outlet to be a professional wrestler, which I started at the age of 30. And I created this character, the Gavel David Lawless.

So before we get into how you created The Gavel and what your motivation was, I want to take you back in time. And I don't know if you remember this, but for some reason I remember it so distinctly. I was sitting in Panera and Waterworks and you called me and I think this was probably like 2013, 2014. And you reached out about your career, where you're headed, what you should be doing just as a trial lawyer. And I knew you at that point, you had a good reputation, talented young guy coming up. And of course, my default is just hang in there, hustle, get cases, you're going to be an amazing trial lawyer. But I could also get a little bit of a sense of disillusionment in how you were thinking about things that you obviously were very passionate about plaintiff's personal injury law, being a trial lawyer, but I got the sense that, I don't know if you were feeling lost or just there was something kind of like a missing piece with you then.

So can you take us back to where you were at that point in time? I mean, you're a lawyer, you're doing well, you're developing a good reputation, but it seemed like something was missing for you.

Yeah. And I'm very thankful for the fact that I had a lot of struggles with my mental health along the way because for a lot of people who matriculate from undergrad right to law school and graduate, I remember the first day I started working at Robert Peirce & Associates. It was the first time in my life I'd ever stepped into an opportunity where I didn't know what the end point was. Because when you're in high school and your goal is to go to college, you go to college. When you're in college and your goal is to graduate, you spend three to five years there getting a degree. When you're in law school, you spend three or four years depending on what program you're in, and then you're looking to pass the bar exam and start practicing. But for me, I'd never been in a situation in my life where I didn't have that endpoint.

Start practicing, here's your life. And I was going through a lot. I was probably working on more cases than anyone should have been at the time. I was very passionate about making a difference, but it's difficult sometimes when you're representing people who have gone through tremendous loss. I wasn't handling the maturity of going into practice the correct way. I was turning to alcohol as a huge crutch to not deal with the mental health issues that I wasn't focusing on. And so I was lost 100%. And for me, going to therapy and stopping drinking and getting sober was step one in getting my life in a good direction, getting back in shape and becoming healthier to a physical standpoint was another. And then really starting to ask myself, what did I want out of life? And I really do love being a lawyer to this day and I love helping people, but I had done a lot of things in my life in pursuit of a life that I was questioning if I even really wanted.

And one thing that I had always wanted in my life was to be a professional wrestler since I was eight years old and watched Monday Night Raw for the first time and saw the 1-2-3 Kid versus Razor Ramon. And so once I started to kind of reset and ask myself what I wanted out of the world and what I could do to find more fulfillment, got in better shape. I turned 30 and I though it's now or never. I'm either going to be the type of person that says they wish they did something in their life or I'm actually going to go and pursue my passion and pursue my dreams. And I think for me also just being around people in our profession that some struggle with substance abuse and some really struggle with not having pursued their passions in their lives, that was a wake-up call.

And I decided right then and there, I was never going to be that person that said, "I hate my life. I regret not making this decision." And so the people that were working in cool beans at the time around 2014, Marcus Mann and Jack Pollock, they were independent wrestling scene and I had knew they had an affinity for wrestling. So I talked to them. They told me about this wrestling school in McKeesport run by a company called PWX, Pro Wrestling Express. And once I felt like I was healthy enough physically and mentally to make the decision to try out to go to wrestling school, I did that. And that was in February of 2015 when I first started wrestling school. And from there it was just 10 years of a journey that I had no idea what was going to happen. I still really don't know what life's going to throw at me, but I was in a much better position mentally to handle all of that.

And that has helped me tremendously just in my general life, in my practice, in my relationships with my family and people. And just overall, it was the best decision I ever made in my life.

Max, as we're sitting here talking, I'm remembering these kind of points in time in my life, and there was another one that's very relevant with you. We had that one call, I knew who you were, I was kind of excited about where your career was going to go from a trial perspective because I'm sort of a one-track mind in that regard. Then I remember this was a little bit later. It was around, I think 2013, 2014, and there had been some local trial lawyer event and then you, me, and maybe a couple other people went out for drinks later and we were boozing up and had really a lot of laughs. We were just having a great time, but clearly drinking too much. And it's interesting in that I'm remembering at that point in time, you were obviously dealing with your struggles, but I was thinking, "Oh man, this guy's so much fun." But that was also a period of time when, that was not long after I got my first ever really good verdict.

And I had no idea what the sort of, like, the post-verdict emotional dump or dopamine dump was. I'd never really experienced something like that. And I didn't realize it, but I was in this post-verdict depression. And I remember I was myself drinking way too much at that time and I didn't really know what it was, but I remember distinctly when I was probably still drinking too much at that point in time. Then I ran into you, I don't know if it was a year or two later and you told me you don't drink anymore. I mean, honestly, there's part of me was like, "Oh, that sucks because Max is so much fun when we drank together." But on the other hand, I was like, "Damn, that's amazing that you did that then and really kind of made this profound sort of inflection point in your life to move into a different direction." I mean, to the extent that you're comfortable, was there a single moment or was it kind of like an additive, like multiple events and we're just getting to a point it was weighing on you where you're like, "I need and want to make a change in my life?"

So it was a couple of data points into the larger definitive time that I realized that drinking was more or less getting in the way of me dealing with addressing the emotional issues I was experiencing, and I didn't have a clear head to really assess what I wanted in my life. I'm very thankful. We all have these seminal moments in our lives where we're met with a situation. Maybe it's a medical event, maybe it's an accident, maybe it's a loss, right? Some of them are larger than others for people. And so for some people with substance abuse problems, it's a DUI. Maybe it's the loss of employment or the loss of a license. I'm very fortunate that for all the major decisions that I've made in my life, including when I made the decision to ultimately retire from wrestling, which we'll talk about at some point, I really didn't suffer any major catastrophic event that jeopardized me physically, didn't jeopardize my license.

I didn't get a DUI. I never hurt someone in a way that I just couldn't live with. But I knew something was wrong around 2014 just because I shouldn't have felt the way that I did. And especially after I would try cases and I couldn't work myself out of a depressive funk, especially when I just was just not handling things with the job correctly. And so the first step I said was I got to talk to someone in mental health. I signed up for therapy. But just like going to the gym, working out, anything you do in life, it takes a commitment. It's not just, "Hey, I'm doing this so I should get the results." You have to actually make the conscious decision to commit to it. When I first started going to therapy, I remember my therapist saying, "Maybe we need to explore your drinking as what's causing some of these emotional issues.

Maybe we need to explore your drinking as a defense mechanism that you're using to avoid dealing with these things or to explain away why you feel the way you do or why you're acting the way that you do." And so there was an event that I'm not proud of that involved some people where I maybe hurt them emotionally, nothing physical, nothing illegal, but I remember definitively just feeling horrible and my therapist finally saying, "I think we need to really focus on your drinking." And this was the third or fourth time she had brought that up and I had just kind of brushed it off before because of how I grew up and the fact that I had accomplished so much in my life while I was drinking, graduating highest honors from college, graduating highest honors from law school, competing in the national finals for mock trial competition, being one of the few people that had a job when we graduated in 2010 when the market was so awful, but I didn't believe it because at that point, why would I think the drinking had been a hindrance to me when I had achieved so much success?

I owned my own place. I was working at a law firm. And then once I stepped back and got on my own way and did that, it was just everything else just opened up for me to start looking at life differently, what I wanted, the decisions I was making, how things impacted me. And I mean, honestly, it led me to the conclusion that drinking was just a crutch I was using and it was an escape and it wasn't actually providing me any of the benefits of things that were going to get me healthier from a mental or physical standpoint. And so January 1st, 2014, when I had made the decision, I'm done drinking completely, I'd started going to therapy in 2013 at that point. I haven't had a drop of alcohol since then. And then it was just like that's what led to me doing professional wrestling and that's where I've been in my head.

And people will ask me, did I really think I had a drinking problem? I don't know. I think on the one hand, maybe, on the other hand, maybe not, but my life is so great without alcohol in it that I don't even want to roll the dice of introducing that into

My. Before you had this kind of epiphany at that point in your life about the different direction that you wanted to go in, obviously you do well in school, you get through law school, you get a job, but during that period of time, was it in the back of your head that you somewhere were thinking that it would be cool to be a professional wrestler? I feel like on the one hand, obviously you were probably a diehard fan growing up, but of a lot of things in life, the idea of watching them, enjoying them versus going and actually doing it is two very different things. Was it in the back of your mind some kind of itch about, well, maybe I could actually do this?

Yeah. I mean, so I had always had a passion for professional wrestling as both an entertainment form and a form of athleticism, and it's something that I never really grew out of. I had various consumption relationships with professional wrestling throughout my life. So from elementary school all the way up until high school, just obsessed, go to the shows, get the merchandise, play professional wrestling in the backyard with your friends and everything. That's actually why I became a wrestler at high school, in middle school and high school too, was because I thought this was a good trajectory to learn about wrestling. And then college, you have different interests. I got into playing poker a lot and various forms of gambling. Again, do I have an addictive personality? Am I drawn to these kind of deleterious habits? I don't know, but I'd always watched it and stayed on top of it.

And then about the 2012, 2013 was a major inflection point in professional wrestling as well because the WWE had bought WCW at some point. They were kind of the top dog monopoly of the sports entertainment industry, even though there were some secondary promotions. I remember WWE Network was rolling out, which for those of you that aren't wrestling historians, you look at the NFL Network, the NHL Network, all these subscription-based models, WWE Network was way ahead of the curve and it was a way for them to figure out what their income was going to be per month. They transitioned away from the pay-per-view model, which was how all combat sports and professional wrestling had really made their big bucks. And so I remember getting super back into it then and kind of seeing people that I grew up watching coming back. And then once I started to get back to the point where I was in shape, because I had always participated in athletics in some form throughout high school and everything, I got to a point where I was like, "Wow, I'm feeling much better about myself.

I'm lifting more. I've got great cardio. Maybe I could actually do this. Maybe this is something I could try." And the thing about my wrestling journey, which has really been an approach to life, is just take it one day at a time. All I wanted to do, truthfully, when I went to professional wrestling school was just to learn how to get into the ring, to take a bump, to learn how to be a professional wrestler. I had no idea what my career would turn into. And the coolest thing is taking that approach has left me open to never saying no to experiences, to having my head on a swivel, to opportunities that present themselves in the intersection between my passion as a wrestler and my professional career, the people I've met along the way, the stuff I've done, the experiences I've had, the friends I've made.

And so for me, it was just like, "Hey, I think I can do this. It's something that I've loved. Let me see if I can." And some people will say 30 is too old. Some people will say that 30 is perfect. For me, I don't think I could have picked a better time from a both physical and a mental standpoint because that was where I had the maturity to understand what I wanted to get into and what I wanted to do. And from there, everything in my career was gravy because I did it. No one could ever take that away from me. And for me to hold that up as something I wanted to do in my childhood and do that at 30, I was like, I hope I inspire everyone to do whatever it is they're passionate about. If it's, I want to be an actor or an actress or I want to paint or I want to write a screenplay or I want to write a book, just do it.

Don't be the person that says, "I wish I did." Just go after it in whatever capacity you can.

Yeah. I mean, I think so many people, they get into the law and you always hear everyone, people are like, "Oh, my kid's thinking of going to law school." And the vast majority of lawyers are like, "Oh, don't do it." And you just get this sense of dread and doom and they clearly don't like it. And it's like, well, what else are you doing in your life if you don't truly enjoy this work? So I mean, for you in that transition period, when you're really getting your life together and then you pivot into professional wrestling, I know the answer's obvious here, but did it really help your mental health and view and also your practice of law? And also tell us about how you transitioned, you were at a firm, and then how did your life change both as a lawyer and also just your view on the world with getting into professional wrestling at that point?

So I think when you boil down what professional wrestling is, it's just storytelling. The vehicle by which we use to tell these stories of good guy versus bad guy, for lack of a better term, is just the professional wrestling ring and what goes into that, right? Your promos, your character development, how your character reacts to certain things. And so being a trial lawyer and coming from my background in my entertainment and media training that I had through college and law school kind of over-prepared me to be a professional wrestler because when you think about what we do as trial lawyers, the end goal is to take an enormous set of information, your client's story, what happened to them, things that you pour your life into, and you have to summarize it to 12 random people that you've never met before to get them to agree with you and see on your side.

And so with professional wrestling, you're taking your character, being put into a situation and trying to get 10, 100, a thousand, a couple thousand people to get invested in the story you're telling in the ring or the show that you're putting on. And so you have to have a fundamental understanding of how you convey that information to people in the most digestible form possible. And that's what pro wrestling is. And so when I designed my character and I designed the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., what I wear, how I walk to the ring, how I talk, how I consider myself in the world, you have no question about it. You get it from the second I step through the curtain. I'm carrying a gavel. One of the biggest tropes of attorneys, and especially plaintiffs or ambulance chasers is we're always out there giving people our business cards.

Paul Newman, the opening of The Verdict, that movie, he hands a widow a business card at the funeral home, right? Such

A great scene. Such a great scene.

It's awesome. And so one of my friends in wrestling who helped train me, he said, when you think about wrestling, think of it as the Denny's test, which is four people come to a wrestling show, they know nothing about it, they've never seen it before. They go to Denny's after the show. What are you doing that makes them say, "Hey, do you remember this person?" And if you think about the major moments in professional wrestling, it's not like, "Hey, remember that time the Rock threw that really cool Rock Bottom on Stone Cold Steve Austin?" People remember when Stone Cold Steve Austin drove the cement truck to Vince McMahon's Ferrari and put cement in it, or he beat up Booker T in the grocery store or how he would spill beer on himself. They don't remember how many stunners he threw in his WrestleMania 17 match against the rock.

That's just not what it is. But you remember those moments, those iconic moments, those data points. And so for me, it was like, what do lawyers do memorable that I can give to people that they're going to remember me? And the biggest thing was creating these business cards that had my name on it, all my social media information, and I would throw them out to the fans the second I came out. And it was awesome because it connected me with the audience immediately where it was like they had something they could rip up or throw back at me, or some of them would take them home and that had all my social media on it, which is like you walk down the street, you see someone that gets hurt, "Hey, I need help. Here's my business card." That's how they're going to remember you. And so it was just taking that and turning that into a form that was digestible and presentable.

It's the same way when we put together a PowerPoint presentation for trial or we think about a demonstrative that we want to use. What is the audience going to remember? How are they going to connect? What is our jury going to feel? Or how are we going to tell that story to people that know nothing about it? That was what made professional wrestling in the art form of it easy for me to kind of understand and hook into because I'd been cutting promos my entire life. I've been doing this when I go to present a motion before the court or when I go to present a case before a jury, or I'm trying to persuade a client why they should take a certain settlement offer. I'm trying to persuade a defense lawyer about why our position is what it is. So it's fundamentally storytelling. It's just through a different vehicle.

And when people would tell me, oh, professional wrestling is fake, my first question would be, well, what's your favorite movie? Oh, Transformers. Well, that's fake too, because last time I checked, there's not giant robots that come down from outer space that turn into cars. And so it's just the vehicle of telling the story, but it's all the same thing that we do as lawyers.

I want to ask you about your creation of the Gavel David Lawless. That character is what, I think I have the terminology correct, is a heel, correct?

Yes. Yeah.

Why don't you tell the audience what a heel is for those who aren't diehard professional wrestling aficionados?

So for a professional wrestling fan, a heel is the bad guy, the evil villain, and the face or the baby face is the good guy. So think about Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader, the embodiment of pure evil and pure good. And so in wrestling, like and dislike doesn't sell tickets. Love and hate is what sells tickets, right? You want people to show up because they hate your character or they love your character, and it takes a certain way that you present yourself to pull those emotions out of the audience. And so on balance, the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., being the greatest attorney and professional wrestler in the world is always a heel because lawyers are one of the most detestable professions in history. You think about all the jokes about us, how people say the lawyers ruin the world, but by the flip side, nothing gets done without lawyers either.

So I was able to use that and channel this character mostly presented as a heel, but then when I build up enough goodwill at promotions and I had reached my breaking point as a heel, I could transition to a lovable character as well. But really it's presented primarily as a heel or a bad guy because people love to hate lawyers, right? I've got more money than you. I'm smarter than you. I can get stuff done. You're an idiot. I stand above you on the social hierarchy. I'm dining with politicians and judges and the wealthiest people. You're just an idiot in some kick town and you'll come crying to me for help if you need it. But that was really how I embodied that character and put it together. And I used a lot of people that we'd gone up against in our profession on the defense side who were arrogant, egotistical, difficult to deal with, though that everything they did was the greatest thing in the world.

And I channeled that into a character that I was like, who would I hate the most? And it's like the lawyer that's coming out telling you I'm the greatest person in the world.

That's amazing. For everybody listening, we're talking about this character that you developed and that he's this heel, which I think is also kind of a troll, basically. You're just getting reactions and people love to hate characters like this. Two questions. One, do you feel that the reason you went that direction with this character and took on a life of its own being a heel was entirely just because of the stereotype of lawyers in general, or do you think there's a part of your character, like you as a person or you as a lawyer that leans more towards needling people or playing that kind of counterculture type character?

I would say when you look at the reasons why I got into professional wrestling in the first place, I'm at an inflection point in my life, I'm having a difficult time emotionally, I'm trying to find direction. I think for me, I gravitated towards the heel character because it was such an escape from the person I am in my day-to-day life. I would like to think that the Gavel David Lawless, Esq. is the exact opposite of Max Petrunya. I would consider myself, I know everyone probably to a certain level thinks this, but you probably can speak to this from knowing me, but I'm a very kind, empathetic, understanding, compassionate person. And so to a certain extent, the stereotypes of lawyers lend themselves to being the heel, but also taking some of the things that we wish we could say to opposing counsel or how we could act in the courtroom or to a judge or to our clients and channeling that into a wrestling character where I can let out that frustration was the same way of you have a really bad mediation or a meeting and you go hit the speed back for 30 minutes.

So rather than me telling opposing counsel to F off or whatever, I'm channeling that by going and telling the fans that they're morons or acting in an arrogant and egotistical way. And so it was a great escape for me both personally from a physical standpoint, from a mental health standpoint, but also great to just take these creative ideas where I was acting like a jerk and channel them through this character and use that as a filter. And so it allowed me to be a better human being on the flip side of it as well because people loved to hate me when I was in character, but then I would also be able to talk to the fans. And some fans became clients of mine because I was a lawyer and they didn't really know any lawyers, so I would help them out and I picked up clients from being a professional wrestler as well.

And I want to talk in a minute about sort of an interesting intersection between your professional wrestling career and your real life job as a trial lawyer. But just so listeners can get a sense of who the Gavel David Lawless is, you have a great social media feed, even though I don't really do social media, but back in the day when I was on it, I would see some of your posts sometimes and I thought they were absolutely hilarious. So I'll just pick a couple today that jump out to me. I'll try not to kick myself off again.

It'd be a nice walk down memory lane for me too.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So first off, how did you come up with the idea to use the gavel as your microphone?

So the gavel came from my best friend, Rishi Ball, who's the promoter of Four Court Music Festival as well in Pittsburgh. Shout out to them. And he had just given me the idea of saying you should name yourself the Gavel when you get into wrestling. I didn't really even know when I started training what my name would be or even have this idea to do the wrestling character until I got into training and started seeing everything. And then it was just a natural extension. You look at what the gavel represents. It's the ultimate show of authority within the courtroom. It's what the judge pounds to get order, but then it looks like a microphone also. So having that as a natural extension just made a lot of sense to me and it was how can I use this prop to further my character to get the message across?

And so if you look at me and don't hear a word that comes out of my mouth, but see me standing there with the gavel, you get that I consider myself to be in some position of authority.

I mean, so good. You have so many good lines and some of those I'm like, you had to have redone them so many times because the alliteration of getting every word right with the right pop is really impressive. But when you got into professional wrestling, obviously lawyers in general are pretty buttoned up. Obviously there's exceptions to the rule. I think probably plaintiff's trial lawyers are the wildest of the bunch for the most part, but becoming or being a professional wrestler and its own stereotype and stigma that goes along with it — when did you come out publicly to the lawyer community that you were a professional wrestler? At any point did people look down on you and did that bother you at all?

It never bothered me if people looked down on me. In fact, you know, I have always perceived people that look down on other people for pursuing things that they love as people that are either jealous or jaded or upset that they never went after it themselves. And so I think in the world in general, around the time that I had begun practicing law to even now, to just the way our world looks at people and pursuing your passions, I think there's been a big code switch in the sense that it's like can't let one thing define you as a human being. And what I mean is in the 80s and 90s, it was like, don't get tattoos because no one wants to work with someone that has tattoos. And you look at me and I've got tattoos all over me and I didn't get tattoos till I was 35, but people were worried like, oh, if you're in a profession, you have tattoos, people won't take you seriously.

But the truth is the number of tattoos you have has no bearing on your ability as a lawyer or not. It's the work that you put in and the quality of it. And so for me, I never was embarrassed about the fact that I was a professional wrestler because it made me unique. And if people didn't want to work with me because I was a professional wrestler, it's probably people I didn't want to work with in the first place. I wore professional wrestling and still do as a badge of honor because of what it represents in my life and how proud I am of my accomplishments. And my God, if we ever live in a world where people are told to be less than or not be proud of the things that they accomplish, that's not a world I want to be a part of.

And I don't have children, but I can imagine that as a father, you would agree with the same thing. Dude, if your kids do something and they do something well or they accomplish something that they dreamed of, absolutely let people know about it or wear it as a sense of pride. When would anyone ever discourage people from doing that? You know what I mean? So for me, it was always that way of being a wrestler never defined my ability as a lawyer. It just added to my life and made me a better practitioner. One of the things I think I should point out to your listeners and your viewers too is if you look at just those short promos that you played, they're like 90 seconds or less videos. The things I'm using in those videos are things that people at trial lawyer colleges will tell you also.

Repetition, digestible points, making sure your audience understands what you need them to extract. All my promos, I would repeat my name, the show, my opponent, where you could see me. And if you're pulling away one kernel of information from that of like, oh, he has a match this Friday, or oh, this is where it is, that's what we want our jury to do. We want them to take away those most important points when they're evaluating the case or the subtle tricks we use of repeating things in three, which has been an advertising trope for years. These are all things that I had just learned along the way in my law school and professional experience that I could turn into professional wrestling.

Whether you developed this or you just had it, I mean, there's also all of those different techniques, but also this applies to a lot of trial lawyers as well. Not to say you need this in order to be definitively a good trial lawyer, but those videos you have charisma and they're entertaining. You know what I mean? So you're kind of hitting everything. You're getting the key points very quickly into our minds, but in a way where I want to keep watching, I'm amused, I'm interested, and I'm paying attention as a result of it. And I think the other point is just you're doing that in 90 seconds or one minute, which is such an important concept to keep of, "Hey, I've been working this case up my entire past three years and we're finally trying it and this jury's never heard it. And in my opening statement, I need them to understand what this case is about in the first two minutes.

And how am I going to do that where I get them interested and want to hear more very quickly?" And your social media clips are hilarious and entertaining, but they're also doing exactly that.

The other thing is too, when you think about what a professional wrestling show represents from match one to match six or seven or the main event, you're also taking the audience on a ride with storytelling. So I've always been of the opinion that professional wrestling is a sport that not a lot of people will interact with in the sense that you don't have people playing youth professional wrestling. People may have played soccer or Little League or Pop Warner football. So you can turn on a football game or a soccer match or a baseball game and you understand the rules, three strikes, four balls, score runs. In professional wrestling, you don't have that exposure. So every time you're starting a show, you have to attune the people to the rules of professional wrestling. So when I run shows or when I would age in matches, I would say first match, you got to lock up with your opponent and you have to push them back to the rope and have the ref counter rope break.

And that's conditioning your audience to understand, okay, if he gets his opponent over the ropes and they're touching it, they have to break this hold within certain seconds. And then you start building from there and building from there. And maybe in match three, someone hits a move and they win the match one, two, three. So now your audience is conditioned to think that when you see that move get hit, that's going to be the end of the match. And then in match six, you have someone hit that move and then someone kicks out and it builds the drama of the storytelling because you don't know what's coming next. And that is the fun part about taking people on that emotional roller coaster.

That's great. And obviously that applies to your opening statement and your closing and just the way that you might present your case at trial as well.

Yeah. And I mean, Brendan, we connected very early on in our careers and I remember profoundly the impact that you had in my professional development as a lawyer because you were one of the first people I remember that was videotaping your opening statements. I remember us having a meeting amongst our young lawyer conglomerate, where we were talking about, you know, judges that were putting you on, like, chess clocks for like, how much time you could put into your case and really understanding, like, how do I efficiently present this message? Because at the end of the day, if your case is an auto accident where someone got rear-ended and let's say they broke their leg, that's your case. How do you present that message in a way that gets people to care and gets them to find in favor of your client or get whatever award you need? That's the art form of it.

It's not just saying, "My client got rear-ended and they have a broken leg." And there's been many strategies about how you do that. And that's the same thing with professional wrestling, trying new things out, adapting to what your audience requires. And that was what made me a great performer when I would go to different shows because every promotion I worked for, every audience that I came in contact with — it was all different. The art form was the same, but the things that you do or the moves you put in place or how you interact with the audience — it changes based upon the people that you have. And in order to be able to do that effectively, you have to be comfortable with who you are, confident in your character, and be in the head space to be able to pay attention and adapt. And that's what we do in trial.

We all have an idea when we come into trial of like, I'm going to put this witness on, I'm going to ask them this question, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. I mean, you might get to a point where you have six witnesses that you want to call, you call one witness, they get everything in you need to make your case, the jury gets it and you're like, why do I need to call five more people and waste these people's time? They're going to hold it against you.

So going back to what you talked about before, I don't mean to downplay it by calling it a shtick, but Lawless's character would be coming out to the ring and you've got the gavel, your glitzy showboating lawyer, and you've got your business cards that you're just basically almost disrespectfully flipping at the audience like they're lucky to have them. And the irony is that in doing that, even though it's partly in jest, people then contact you because they need a lawyer. And tell us a little bit about the actually pretty significant case that you wound up being involved in that was directly part of a dispute on the, I guess it would be sort of adjacent to professional wrestling.

Yeah. And real quick, I'll say on the business card thing too, when I was the heel, I would throw it at the people in a very maniacal way. When I was the baby face, the way I flipped that was I would pick a kid out of the audience to pass the business cards out to people and escort me to the ring. So it's like, all right, I hate this guy throwing the business cards at me, but now I love this guy who's asked this kid to pass these out in a very respectful way. It was like the way you could take the same thing and get the same point across, but in a different way.

That's great. I love it.

Yeah. I mean, professional wrestling was awesome for a number of reasons and we'll talk about the major case I was involved in, but one other thing that kind of dawned on me whenever I was going through this journey of being a professional wrestler and why it was important, I mean, you and I were members of a number of trial lawyer organizations early in our career, right?

Yep.

Who else is in those organizations? Other trial lawyers. We're all competing for the same body of work, the same cases, we're all going to the same goal. Guess how many trial lawyers there are in professional wrestling? Maybe one or two across the country. So when I'm connecting with people at these shows and people are starting to connect with me on social media, that's leading to individuals that I might never interact with saying to me, "Hey, David or Max, however I know you, my mom got hit by a car or my mom fell at this nursing home. Do you know anyone that could help me?" And it's like, "Oh, I could help you. Or if I can't, there's a referral." Because a lot of our business is based upon how we can connect with these people at a frontline level. So if I'm connecting with people or I'm the only one in that group that knows a lawyer, I'm picking up clients from other wrestlers, from their family members, from audience members, just by reputation or people coming onto me.

So probably the two coolest moments in my career, the first one being when I had to strike someone from a jury in Allegheny County because they knew me as the Gavel David Lawless, we were getting ready to try a case. It was down in Allegheny County and you asked the question to the panel in the room, "Does anyone know any of the parties or the lawyers?" Some guy raises his hand. I'm scratching my head trying to figure out who this person is. We call them up to the individual colloquy. They were like, "Sir, you raised your hand when you said you know some of the parties or the attorneys that are involved. Can you tell us who you know?" And the guy was like, "You're the Gavel David Lawless Esq. and I come to PWX every single month and I've watched you wrestle for the last two and a half years." So I was like, "Well, I guess we got to strike him from the jury." But then probably the craziest and coolest opportunity I got from professional wrestling, which has led to the expansion of my business and relationships that I've made along the way, is I had a friend that got sued by a very famous wrestling personality named Jim Cornette, who was a famous professional wrestling manager from the '70s, '80s, '90s, and early 2000s.

And I got to represent my friend, their clothing company, and a couple individuals who had generated the original image parody T-shirt in federal court in Johnstown before the late great Kim Gibson on a federal trademark lawsuit. And so people can look this up. It's the Jim Cornette versus G-Raver litigation, but my friend G Raver was involved in a very serious incident in a show in Chicago where he was in a match involving light tubes and one of the light tubes slashed one of his arteries and he actually had to get rushed to the hospital and could have lost his life from blood loss. And at the time, Jim Cornette was doing a podcast, a very successful podcast I should mention, called the Cornette Drive-Thru, was also on social media and using it as a platform to do, we'll call it like, who's the guy who comments on the videos?

The Rob Dyrdek stuff, Wild and Out video comments. So he re-shared this video of my friend in his accident and just made a comment that said if the promoter had any sense, he'd charge money for people to come backstage and watch the idiot bleed out because Cornette fancied himself or his character that he created online was like this gatekeeper of traditional professional wrestling where I want everything to look like wrestling did in the mid-South in the '70s and the '80s and the early '90s. These new wave people are ruining professional wrestling, much the same way that I'm sure that if we have 50, 60 or 70-year-old lawyers watching this show, they'll think, "Oh, this 40-year-old tattooed professional wrestler is ruining our profession." Happens all the time. So my friend who's a tattoo artist and graphic designer who was laying in a hospital bed fighting for his life after emergency surgery sees this and he's got nothing better to do at this point because he's out of action for professional wrestling.

So he creates a parody T-shirt with Jim Cornette's face on it that says F, I'm not going to say the word here, but F Jim Cornette and it's got Cornette's face on it with tattoo needles sticking out of his head, tape over his mouth, Xs over his eyes. And so he winds up getting a cease and desist. They start selling it online. He gets a cease and desist from a plaintiff's lawyer in West Virginia, his name's Steve New, and they're like, "F it, we're not going to stop selling it. We're going to continue to sell the F Jim Cornette t-shirt." And so Steve New puts in his letter, "If you guys keep selling this shirt, I'm going to sue you for trademark violation." And they were like, "Okay, we're going to call your bluff." And sure enough, sued him in federal court in Johnstown for trademark violation.

And what happens to wrestlers who find themselves in legal problems? The Gavel.

You call the only wrestling lawyer that you know, Max Petrunya, the Gavel David Lawless. And they said, "Hey, can you help us out?" I said, "Absolutely. Let's go." And at this point, I knew a little bit about intellectual property and trademark law and everything from the help I had given to my best friend Rishi Ball for his music career and some bands that he was involved in his music festival. But I mean, I didn't really understand much about the trademark process, case law. So I said, "You know what? I'm going to learn how to do that." I registered myself for the US Patent and Trademark Office. First trademark I ever got in my career was for the Gavel David Lawless, Esq., which I still own to this day. I've probably done two dozen trademarks at this point in my career since then. So I figured out how to do that.

I researched the case law on trademark violations, parody, and I'm like, "Guys, I'm going to defend you. I got this." And filed a motion to dismiss. We were unsuccessful on that. And then at some point, because they were still selling the T-shirt through their online clearing house, Steve New, who now is a friend, I can say that, I'll talk about him and give him his flowers in a second, filed a restraining order. And so when you file a temporary restraining order in federal court, part of what you have to prove to get your restraining order is likelihood of success on the merits. So in 2020, we got to have a mini trial about the success of the plaintiff's case. Judge Gibson issued a 63-page opinion that denied their temporary restraining order after we got to go to federal court. Dude, I get to cross-examine over Zoom Jim Cornette, who literally the day before I had just watched a match between the British Bulldog and Diesel where he was managing the British Bulldog for their famous wrestlers for everyone that might be listening.

So I got to cross-examine Jim Cornette in federal court. It was awesome. And so I represented my friend successfully. The judge denied the temporary restraining order, and then shortly thereafter, Cornette dropped the case realizing that they didn't have a case because it was a parody. Also, he was going to have a tough time proving damages because if anything, Cornett's merchandise sales increased after this went out. So it was just a fascinating opportunity, and it was the intersection of my hobby/my passion and my career. And then from there, Steve New and I became friends. Steve's actually helping me with some litigation I'm working on in West Virginia. And Steve actually just made the news a couple weeks ago because he was the lawyer that obtained the $9.25 million for the Alabama basketball player against the New York Times for the false light and defamation verdict. Oh,

Wow. That's great.

It was awesome. And it was the coolest experience ever. I became a professional wrestler as an escape from my lawyering life. Now I get to blend the two of them together. And dude, that's led to me trademarking multiple things for other lawyers. I reviewed a contract for one of my friends who's a wrestler who was in a feature film. I've done legal advisement for wrestlers that were in WWE and AEW. I review contracts for them. It's awesome. I have this whole separate practice that I've developed on my own from just being involved in professional wrestling. And it's made me a better lawyer because I know more about the law.

So the Gavel David Lawless has sort of hung up the spurs, right? Officially retired as of when, 25?

December 13th, 2025, which was also John Cena's retirement match. But I want to go on record and say if John Cena's listening, I had that date picked out before he settled on. He

Can't see you, man. He

Cannot see me. So

Tell us what life has been like, because obviously being a professional wrestler has been such a huge part of your life for a little more than a decade, right?

Yeah. My first match was August 8th of 2015 in McKeesport, and my opponent was a man named Cato. My last match was December 13th of 2025 against Cato. Oh,

Very cool.That's a good bookend. It

Was a really good bookend. How

Are you doing since such an important part of your life, but obviously it's so physically demanding. I imagine you kind of have to stop at some point.

Yeah. So the story of my retirement is a unique one. I had been wrestling for five years when 2020 and the pandemic hit, and that was kind of like a brick wall for professional wrestling because the world shut down. We started to have shows starting in late 2020 and picking up the momentum, but it never really returned to what it was in 2020 because the shows we were having regularly around Pennsylvania were some of the highest attended shows anywhere. Pandemic hits, we start getting back into it, new promotions come, old promotions close. And it was 2023 I tore my ACL, but because of how backed up the medical and diagnostic community was at the time, I didn't get a chance to schedule an MRI until six or seven weeks after I hurt myself. So in between that time, I started going to physical therapy, started strengthening my leg up.

I though to myself, there's no way my ACL's torn. I shouldn't be able to do 400, 500 pounds on the leg press with a torn ACL. Turns out my ACL was torn the whole time though. And so I started to see an orthopedic doctor who told me, look, if you can throw a brace on it and work through it and you'll be fine. So I did that, but I always regularly kept up with my doctor's appointments to make sure my knee was in alignment and everything. And so I got a hernia in 24 and got surgery for that. And then when I returned from that three months off from my hernia in 24, I came back and immediately started to notice a deficit that I had with my left tricep. Started out very small. It was just like I had a little bit of weakness or I wasn't able to lift in the same capacity.

And so I had my yearly follow-up with my doctor to make sure my knee was in alignment and I said, "Hey, I think I have something going on with my shoulder." So I got an MRI on my shoulder, no deficits, no tears, maybe a little arthritis, some scar tissue, but nothing major. I got a nerve conduction study done in March. Doctor said, "Yeah, it looks like you might have an impingement in your cervical spine." I got an MRI in my cervical spine in May of 25, and that was where they determined that I had some flattening and narrowing on my disc space at C5-6 and C6-7. And again, at that point, I was barely symptomatic. I had a little deficit in my left tricep, but nothing bad. And so I went and I remember it was May 22nd, 2025. I went and consulted with Dr.

Wecht over at the UPMC Neurology Center, and he said, "Yeah, we can't do anything but surgically operate on that to give you space in the discs." And I remember walking back because I live around the corner from Shadyside, and as people that practice in medical malpractice and know about surgical injuries and what can go wrong, once they start going into your spine, going into your back, it's never really just one operation. And so I just though to myself, I'm 40 years old. I've done this for a decade. I did literally everything I wanted to ever accomplish in professional wrestling. I wrestled at Stage AE in a steel cage. I wrestled an Iron Man match as an homage to Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels, probably is my favorite match in history from WrestleMania 12, the 60-minute Iron Man match.

I saw you wrestle under the Homestead Bridge, and I can't remember if you smashed the hot dog with ketchup on the other guy's face or vice versa, but —

I got nacho cheese smashed in my face two times. It was

Amazing. Yeah.

It was me and my partner, Officer Dan Murphy, Lawless and Order versus T. Ranchula and Sam Donna. Your Panchala,

Right. And

T. Ranchula was the one who smashed Nacho Cheese in my face, not once, but twice. Why

Wasn't it ranched though is what I want to know. Good

Question. So I did that. I was in a ladder match under the Homestead High Level Bridge. I wrestled before thousands of people. I wrestled in Brooklyn, New York during Fashion Week. I wrestled during WrestleMania Week. I wrestled Fandango, Rhino, 2 Cold Scorpio, Shane Douglas, Tony Atlas. I wrestled with Wardlow. I trained with Lee Moriarty, for those of you that follow wrestling at home. For

Us old heads, Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat.

He was on a show that I was on. Kevin Nash, I was on a show with him. I did more than I ever could have imagined in my career. Every day was a blessing. And so when I was walking back from that appointment, I just decided I can't do this anymore. If I was Randy Orton making $8 million a year as a WWE wrestler, I'd get a cervical spine surgery, take time off and go back to the ring. But I'm a 40-year-old man who owns his own law practice and works by himself, who's getting paid 20 to 50 bucks a weekend. I'm not undergoing cervical spine surgery to do this. And so I just decided at that point, the better way to do this would be to just figure out how I could tell some cool stories on the way out. And I called every single promoter that I know that I was working for at the time, and I said, "Here's what's going on.

I'm going to retire at the end of the year. Here's the stories and ideas I have." And we set everything up to that kind of end target. And I wanted my last match to be the match that I had against the first person that I ever wrestled in my career. I got to do that. Now, one thing that a lot of people don't know though, that I'll tell you here was I wasn't really symptomatic with what was going on with my neck for the most part. I was sore, I was having issues, but right after I made that decision, so probably in June, I was wrestling, I took a move, my arm went dead, couldn't even lift my arm. I was lifting my arm with my arm at that point. I finished the match. No one knew there was anything wrong with me, but I spent the last seven months of my wrestling career, six months of my wrestling career with one functional arm.

It wasn't good, but I started to get a little more movement, more mobility. I still have a little deficit on the left side, but I was able to avoid surgery. But that was why I made the decision because it's rare in life that we get an opportunity to pick the end to our story. It's rare that we get to figure that out. And I just really wanted the opportunity to do that. And again, like I talked about my journey to quit drinking and get healthy, I never had anything major or catastrophic happen to me along the way that precluded me from doing that. I'm fortunate that I was able to end my wrestling career on my terms as opposed to just getting an injury and having to cut a promo that says, "Hey everyone, it's been fun, but I have to retire." I got to tell all these cool stories on the way out.

I got to work with some of my best friends along the way. And I mean, no one can ever take away the decade of my wrestling career as the perfect bookend to a start and a finish. It's beautiful. And so my life since then, I've pivoted to acting. I was in an immersive theater show downtown called Closing Time at the Moonside Cafe in June. We're actually coming back in January at the Three Stories Theater. We're waiting on the dates, but six performances, you'll get a chance to come down and watch me act in an immersive theater experience. I have an audition for a Quantum Theatre show coming up in November that I hope to book. But yeah, that's what my life's been is pursuing entertainment in a different form that doesn't beat up my body.

On the bookend, this has been an awesome discussion with you. There's two last things I want to wrap up with. So one, obviously you're continuing on your extra legal entertainment journey, but tell us briefly about you're a solo, like you mentioned. So you leave the big plaintiff's firms and you've been solo for a long time, which is not an easy thing to do, but you have a lot of irons in the fire. And you're working over the last several years, some very interesting cases. So give us a little summary of the kind of work in the plaintiff's realm that you've been focusing on these last few years. Yeah.

So I mean, your bread and butter personal injury is one thing, car accidents, slip and falls, some medical malpractice, some nursing home. I got really big with personally, I do a lot of work with Jason Luckasevic and Goldberg Persky into athlete brain injury. So working on the NFL concussion case, working on cases against the NCAA for brain injury and what the NCAA knew or should have known and didn't warn athletes about for decades. I've gotten the opportunity to work on cases with the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation for Olympic athletes that may have been harmed due to, again, failure to warn about neurocognitive injuries. And then recently for the last two years, Jason and I have been working on sex assault cases, so helping people that were children that were victimized at juvenile detention centers and that were abused as minors. That's been a big focus of my practice.

And I mean, honestly, what I learned from professional wrestling, to absorb as much as you can, to always be open-minded and open to new opportunities and just to learn has been what's allowed me to adapt my practice. And I'm very fortunate that the experience that I got for the eight years working at Robert Peirce & Associates gave me the opportunity to understand how to really work in an efficient manner and take on a lot of cases, but understand how to efficiently go through those and on my own. And if it's not something I can do or can help someone with, then I'll ask for help or I'll send it to someone else. But it's been amazing what I've gotten a chance to work on. And that's led to the sports practice, the sports injury practice has led to me being a better practitioner for athletes. I now teach at La Roche University as part of their sports and entertainment management degree, sports and entertainment law class.

I'm teaching sports governance and policy right now. And then next semester I'll be teaching sports entertainment law and risk management in sports and entertainment. But I've been very blessed, man. Right place at the right time, made the right connections, learned from amazing people, and just continue to always have a passion for doing more and growing and making myself the best human being I really can be. And so getting into acting, connecting with people in that world, continuing to take care of my mind, take care of my body, take care of my professional license and everything, that's been the best thing possible. And if it wasn't for just me stopping drinking, having that inflection point and doing all this, I wouldn't be where I am today. Well,

I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Max, Gavel, this is really a lot of fun. There's a lot more things that I'd like to ask you about. Maybe we'll do another interview in the future because you have a lot of knowledge, a lot of insight to share, and I thoroughly enjoyed this. And I know the people that listen will get a kick out of this as well. Max, before we hang up, if people want to talk to you about anything that you've discussed today or refer a case to you or collaborate on a case, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Max Petrunya, PC is the name of my firm. MaxPetrunyaPC.com is my website and [email protected] is my email. Phone number and all my contact information is on there. But I mean, honestly, I would encourage if anyone has any questions or wants to just talk about anything, I love connecting with new people and being able to figure out how we can help one another. Brendan and I, you've been an unbelievable mentor to me over the years in my professional development and just talking about things, and I want to be that for other people as well, but I also just want to be a resource and just someone that, look, if it's 15 minutes to just ask a question about wrestling and that'll help you forget about the deadline that you have or the stressful case that you have, I'm happy to do that also. Or if you have an interesting story to tell, I want to hear about people that do things outside of the law that have helped their mental health or physical health.

I think it's so important. And I think if I can just leave a closing message to everyone that's listening is your life just does not have to revolve around being a trial lawyer. You don't have to just fit into this one box. If you're passionate about something, if you want to do something, do it in whatever capacity you want. If you want to get into wrestling but your body can't do it, manage or commentate or do video or interview people backstage. If you want to sing songs, sing songs. If you want to act, go on auditions, but don't be the person that's like, "I wish I did that." Don't make excuses, just act.

Love it. You the man. That's awesome stuff. I really enjoyed this. And that is the show for today. Thanks everybody.

If you enjoy the show, please subscribe to the Just Verdicts Podcast on your favorite platform and consider leaving a review. And if you're interested in co-counseling, local counseling or referring a catastrophic injury case, we'd love to work with you. Call us at 412-281-4100 or visit our attorney referral page at pamedmal.com/refer. Thanks for listening.