Mike Karp was always inspired by the winning trial lawyers he met at Trial Lawyers University. It didn’t take him long to join their ranks. He’s tried four cases to verdict and was named “Outstanding Young Trial Lawyer” by the plaintiff’s bar in Wisconsin in 2024.

“It’s nice to win awards, and it's nice to get big verdicts, but I'm proud of just making progress every day and being a better trial lawyer,” Mike tells host Dan Ambrose. Tune in for a look back at Mike’s fast-tracked career and ahead at his April trial on behalf of an injured motorcyclist. For those attending TLU Beach this June, Mike will teach case framing and premises cases.

This spring, Mike will launch “The Climb,” a podcast featuring conversations with young, successful trial lawyers, colleagues, and mentors. They’ll zoom in on the fine points of practicing – from case framing to trial strategy – and zoom out on the high-level thinking that resonates with jurors.

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Episode Snapshot

• After a four-hour mediation where the Wisconsin couple argued about fishing poles and bait, Mike pivoted away from family law and to personal injury.
• For Mike, attending TLU in 2021 “opened up my mind to a whole new universe of how to approach being a lawyer.”
• Mike describes his four trials, starting with the first that he tried shortly after attending TLU. State Farm offered nothing to his injured client. The jury awarded $160,000.
• When a city garbage truck crashed into a woman’s first-floor apartment, Mike thought he’d solve the matter quickly with a call to the city attorney. In fact, litigation dragged on for a year and a half. He won a jury verdict of $50,000.
• For a client who suffered a mild traumatic brain injury after a car accident, Mike won a jury award of $1.5 million for past pain and suffering and $2 million for future pain and suffering.
• For six years, Mike worked on a slip-and-fall case on behalf of an elderly client who had a history of slip-and-fall injuries. The jury deliberated for 45 minutes and returned with a $12 million verdict.
• In April, Mike will represent a motorcyclist who suffered injuries after hitting a pothole that had existed for some time. 

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We have Mike Karp with us today all the way from Wisconsin. And first I got to ask you, Mike, is what's the weather like in Wisconsin this year from Michigan? And man, it's pretty rough there at this time of year, although as of today's recording, the Detroit Lines just won the conference championship for the first time in their history by whooping the shit out of Minnesota Vikings last night. So there is some upside to that bad weather. But in general, how do you enjoy living in the slushy winter wonderland of, it's not even winter of Wisconsin.

Yeah, yeah, no, congrats to the lions. They look really good this year. Long overdue for them.

Long overdue.

But no, I love living in Wisconsin in the summer, but we basically have a six month winter and yeah, it's overcast every day. It's not just the cold, it's not just the snow. You don't really see sun for months at a time, so that's rough. I try to get out, go to Florida, California, go somewhere with sun a couple times.

Don't forget about Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Las Vegas,

Las Vegas. But yeah, other than that, other than the winners, Wisconsin's a great place to live.

It's great in the wintertime too, because the reality is it really helps you focus on your work because really no distractions, I mean other than obviously you got your family and everything, but the distractions that people in California and Colorado face, the outdoors, the fishing, the enjoying the healthy lifestyle, you don't get any of that Wisconsin, so you can just work. So that's a good thing. And so somewhat sarcastic, facetious, but that's my sense of humor. I lived in Michigan for 45 years. I know what it's like. And now I have this, it's like when you get the sunshine every day and better weather, it's a little more, palatable would be the right word. But Mike, you are only about 34 years old and you've only been doing this a little while and you've had some extraordinary success for such a young guy. But tell us before we talk about that success and how you got there in a fast track sort of way, because I think that's what everybody wants. There's nobody that really wants to pay their dues. Everybody wants to win big as fast as possible and keep winning. And you've managed to do that, which is extraordinary. But tell us, before we get to your processes and how you got there, tell us about your decision to become a lawyer, go to law school.

Well, my dad was a lawyer. My uncle, my dad's brother was a lawyer growing up, saw my dad work really hard, saw that it was a way to make a good comfortable living. And I didn't know right away I wanted to be a lawyer. It was something that I had in the back of my mind. Went to University of Iowa, studied philosophy. I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do after that. I graduated in 2013, took a year off, waited tables, did some odd jobs. Decided after probably three or four months of waiting tables that I didn't want to do that anymore. And then I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. Law school seemed like a good distraction, a good way to enter a field where it would open up opportunities doors for me. And I always knew in the back of my mind, worst case scenario, I could work with my dad if I graduated law school and didn't have a plan.

So I went to law school, went to Marquette Law School here in Wisconsin, interviewed with big law like most people do. I had some opportunities, but decided that I should really be nowhere near a big law firm. It just wasn't, my vibe wasn't going to be suitable for me and what I wanted out of life. So I decided to join my dad, who I had a small firm, it was him and two other attorneys, and they were practicing primarily family law. And there was a little bit of a PI practice that was left over from my uncle who used to do PI work and had at that point retired. And even joining the firm at that point, after graduating law school, I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a lawyer. Part of why I joined my father's practice was to help him with the business side of things, which I did.

I was highly encouraged to pick up family law that was kind of the bread and butter of the practice. And I remember early on I was sitting in a mediation shadowing my dad, and it was an older couple who lived up north here in Wisconsin. And they were arguing for about four or five hours on who gets to keep the fishing poles and the bait. And I just remember coming home that day and thinking, there is just no way I can't even shadow anymore. I just can't even pretend like this is a possible future for me. And so at that point, really the last card in the deck for me was personal injury. There were still some personal injury cases coming through Every once in a while, maybe one or two calls a month. And I said, I just have to make this work. If I'm going to stay here, practice law, I got to try this. And thankfully I started working out personal injury cases and that's when I really started to connect with the practice of law, started to find meaning in it. And eventually I found my way to trial Lawyers University in 2021. And that's when things really opened up for

Me. It's pretty interesting in that my dad was a lawyer too. My uncle was a lawyer. I wasn't really hell bent on. I took a year off and I went to California and hung out and I was painting houses out there. And then I got realized like, man, this sucks. This fucking working stuff

Without a higher education, just coming in at grunt level law school, I'm like, I just got to get an education and do something for the next, I went to night school, so I'd do something for the next four years. And I kept painting houses and stuff. I was a house painter back then, and so I knew about hard work. But the whole, I joined my dad and it was very difficult though to work with. And my dad was like a country lawyer. He did criminal, he did family, he did probate. He didn't do a pi, he referred all the PI out. But my brother was doing the PI then and a couple of my brothers and my sister worked in the practice with my dad. So a lot of parallels there. And I did a family law case too. I was like, oh my God, this is the worst. This is the worst.

These

People are like, they're more depressed than my criminal defense clients were. They're more and more annoying too and more needy. So not for me at all. It's not easy working with your dad. So it's, it's good that it was amazing that people that have good experiences working with their family, I'm always so impressed with that and happy for them because mine was not that, but that's okay. We all got our path to walk. We all got our path to walk 2021 at 2021. You came to the first TLU. How'd you hear about trial Lawyers University?

So I was lucky. I work in an office building where there's a few other lawyers, small practices inside the building. And one of the lawyers that was working on the same floor is us, is attorney Robert Weisbach, who is now my partner. But back then in 20 20, 21 when I was working up these personal injury cases, I mean I had no idea what I was doing. I really did not have any direction. I had no idea what jury selection was. I had no idea how to prepare for trial. I was just kind of figuring things out as I went along. And so Bob was a good resource for me. I would go and knock on his door and say, Hey, what do I do? They filed a motion in Lemonade. What's that? And how do I respond to it? And he'd laugh and help me out with that.

And as we got closer, he started to kind of hand me some books to read and try to help me out on my journey to become a better lawyer, eventually become a trial lawyer. And in 2021 he told me about Trial Lawyers University conference out in Vegas. And I wasn't sure about going at that point. I wasn't fully committed all in on being a trial lawyer. I didn't have that vision for myself, but it was something that was starting to build up in me, and thankfully he convinced me to go out. I think he actually got covid and wasn't able to go, so I went alone. I remember that. But that was one of the best things that ever happened for me in my career because when I went out to Vegas, I remember getting there and it was taking the red pill and the matrix.

I mean, it just completely opened up my mind to a whole new universe of how to approach being a lawyer, the difference between being a lawyer, a litigator or a true jury trial lawyer. And I went home with a few notebooks filled up and honestly lost some sleep just thinking over having clear vision for myself at that point of who I wanted to become and I wanted to be like the Sean Cleggett, the Nick Rowley's, the Rex Pares. I just found it fascinating the way that they were treating these cases, working them up and what they were doing for human beings, and I wanted to be just like them. So ever since 2021, my life has been on a totally different trajectory.

That was our first conference too. And you made it to our first one. Did you watch any of our webinars and stuff prior to that that we had the Zooms that we were doing?

I want to say right before I came out. Were you doing case analysis back then?

Yeah, let's just start out that we renamed it Trial Lawyers University.

Yeah, so I think I watched a few case analysis webinars, but that was really the extent to which I was familiar with TLU before I came out.

We've talked about what a great time this is if you want to be a trial lawyer because you have access now and to the mentors, it's not like you just have to have one mentor. Now you can have multiple mentors because of the way the world's so connected. And let me ask you about that. Who would you say are your mentors?

Yeah, I mean Bob for sure, he's sort of my day-to-day mentor that I'm with physically. And I'm able to go to him, knock on his door and have conversations about cases and go in depth. And now we're actually partners. We've merged our firms and we handle a select number of important cases that are going to trial. But that's the beauty of the time that we're in and the opportunity that Trial Lawyers University gives anyone who wants to become a trial lawyer, you can have 20 mentors. No, you might not be able to text 'em or call 'em on your phone all the time. But through trial, lawyers on Demand, going to the seminars, reading trial guides, Washington Courtroom View Network. I mean I consider Row my mentor. I consider Cleggett my mentor. I consider Panish my mentor. Have I talked to these guys? Yes, briefly.

I don't have a personal relationship with all of 'em. Some of 'em I do. But if you're able to sit down and listen to Panish for three and a half hours, break down how he obtained an eight figure verdict, start to finish in detail with visual aids, with a complete overview of how we prepared for Cross and who the experts were and what the issues were in the case. I mean, that to me is mentorship. What more would you want out of a mentorship than someone taking four hours to break down in detail exactly how they were successful? But if you actually go to the seminars, I mean TLU on demand is great. If you actually go to the seminars, you have an opportunity to meet some of these great trial lawyers. I've become friends with Kimball Jones, talked to Emek Lubeck, Sean Cleggett, Kyle Sailor, Matt Nakajima.

I mean, I've developed a lot of personal relationships by going to the seminars. And one thing that I really, really like about TLU that I don't seem to find at some of the other seminars is just how open and friendly and inviting the atmosphere is. When you go to a TLU event, you're either surrounded by successful trial lawyers or lawyers that are really serious about becoming successful trial lawyers. That's kind of the two people that you're going to meet at A TLU seminar. You go to some of the bigger conferences. I mean there's the vendors, there's lawyers that for some reason don't even practice personal injury or it's like there's just a whole slew of people that you aren't probably going to be meaningful relationships for you. So I love coming out to the TLU seminars and unless I have an issue with my kids or whatever, I'm there.

Yeah. You missed Huntington Beach last year. Apparently your timing was off and your wife was having a baby during Huntington Beach. So I hope you kind of corrected that part of your life so that your wife isn't giving birth in June and conflicting with our conferences. I mean, come on, carp.

I think we're in the clear for a few years.

Okay, great. Because TLU Beach this year is June 4th through seventh, and you didn't make it last year, but you were there a year before. My personal favorite conference, even though Vegas is twice as big, and Vegas was great at Caesars Palace this year, had a great time, met tons of new people, it was great. But to me, there's no place like the beach in June and because we buy out the whole hotel now because you weren't there, we'd almost bought the hotel when you were there in 2023, but last year we bought the whole hotel. I mean, every room has an ocean view with a balcony. So it's just that part makes it great. Having everybody in the same space that you're connected to makes it a very unique experience. But because we have the whole hotel, for example, we can do things you wouldn't normally be able to do, take over the lobby every evening and have a lobby lounge with a DJ and a bar and an open bar and ping pong tables and foosballs just to get people a place to connect that's low pressure after they go out to dinner if they don't want to go out to dinner.

And we have food trucks out front during the parties or the theme parties and the four lecture tracks. But really the eight workshop tracks are, what I'm really always get most excited about is people getting up, getting in small groups, getting connected and getting on their feet and actually practicing the skills of a trial lawyer instead of just listening. I mean, listening is great. You get a lot of strategy, a lot of great ideas, but in my opinion, there's got to be a lot more of the doing when it comes to training. But we got people coming out like Ben Rabinowitz, I don't know if you, his expert witness class that's on Wednesday, June 4th. He did it in New York two years ago when we were there. Then he did it in Vegas. But it is one of the most highly reviewed programs, workshops he does to 30 people. And he's just such a gangster and such a great teacher. And you're going to come out and what are you going to be teaching in Huntington Beach?

Yeah, we're going to be teaching on case framing and premises cases, how to work up your case through depositions and discovery to win an opening statement, how to expand the scope of negligence beyond just the day of negligence, but show and expose that the coverup and the bad conduct that exists far before the date of the injury or the incident. So we'll be teaching that. I don't know what day yet. We got to work that out.

We like to call that systems failures. That's the term I've heard from Claggett over and over. It's a systems failures case. It's not a premises case. It's all the failures that happened ahead of time that led to this.

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we'll have to work out the day. I got a trial that ends that Wednesday, I think the first day of the seminar. But yeah, we'll be out there teaching that you can

Come in hot right off a big verdict. That's the best way, that's the best time to go to a conference after you just had a big verdict, you're flying high. And everybody's like, tell me about what you did. And you're like, please stop asking me to talk about my verdict. Okay, I'll tell you one more time. That's the great thing about my business and my program. It's like every lawyer loves to talk about their verdicts. Who doesn't, right? I mean, who doesn't like to talk? Everybody likes to talk about their verdicts. Great. Getting a verdict isn't an accomplishment. It's a ton of work. It's a personal, I mean it's, it's so personal. It's so much work to really dig into a case and get that verdict. I'm really stoked for this year in 2025 too, because we're not doing a fall program because once June is over, then I'm free for a whole year and I'm really going to work hard on, really work hard on me becoming the trial lawyer, get into the courtroom, trying cases, putting all this learning for the last four years into real practice. So I'm stoked about that because you and I were doing some focus groups in March with this case you got coming up in April with my buddy ard,

Bob Ard. So that's going to be great. So tell us, what I want to talk to you about is your process, because you're only 34, but you've made such, honestly, you've only had four trials. And give us an insight how you got to where you're at at a young age because, and the first, just go over the four if can just kind of go over your four trials with us, we get some perspective of your experience and what you've done to fast track your results.

You want to start with the trials. Okay. Because

Where you got that first trial, because I did a case analysis on, I know all these cases. We did case analysis that are on TLU on demand, and the three that you actually did for money, you did one just for, we should do that case analysis too. The one you just, I don't think we did a case analysis on that one for the lady who had her car broke, I mean, or housebroken by the city. But go ahead, tell us about those different,

I'm proud of that one. I

Bet you are. Should be. That was a fucking mench thing to do.

So my first trial came, I want to say a little less than a year after 2021 TLU. So I was thinking about my first trial. It was scheduled when I was at the conference, and then I came back, I had a bunch of notes and that's when I really started putting things together. The first trial I had was a zero offer case against State Farm. It was disputed liability, it was a missed case, and in fact there was a dispute over whether there was any impact at all. So my client was on a motorcycle riding downtown in Milwaukee at night, and it was around kind of the bar scene. And he said that a Ford Expedition had merged into his lane of traffic and sort of clipped his handlebars and sent him down. And the other driver who was insured with State Farm disputed the entire story and said, no, I was just driving near the bars and I saw a guy wipe out on his motorcycle and I felt really bad.

So I pulled over to the side of the road, I got out of my vehicle and I ran up to him and that's when he accused me of causing the crash. We knew just based on looking at the property, damage on the motorcycle and me talking to my client, I knew that the guy had clipped him, but it was going to be really difficult to prove. The guy that was driving the Ford Expedition, he was a school teacher, he was well-spoken, there were no marks on his vehicle, and State Farm was really entrenched in their defense. So in working up that case, I mean I was frantically reading everything I could. I was reading ball on damages. I was reviewing my notes from TLU, I was talking with Bob and I pieced things together the best I could. I remember in the pretrial conference, we were in judge's chambers.

It was me, the judge, and the defense attorney. And at that point, mediation had failed. They had offered nothing in mediation. And the judge was basically asking, why is this case being tried? Why haven't you settled this case? And I was explaining, well, there's no offer on the table. And defense says that there was no crash. It never happened. So we have two completely different versions of what happened and it needs to be tried. And the judge in no uncertain terms, looked at me and said, this is a losing case. You're not going to win this case. That not significant damages. It's a little less than a year of treatment. I think the medical bills were less than $10,000. It was all soft tissue. There were gaps in treatment, and he kind of went over all the blemishes in the case and then said, well, let me ask you this.

Would you be open to mediating again? And this is of course in front of the defense attorney, and I'm just like, well, what they offered zero the first time and now you basically just confirmed that the case has no value to them. So why would we? And the defense attorney agreed that mediation wasn't going to be useful, so there was no risk in trying the case. There was no offer. We went in, I think it was a two day trial, and I tried the case with Bob, Bob sba. So I first chaired it, I did jury selection, opening, closing, and most of the witnesses, Bob helped me through it and we got a hundred percent liability on the defendant. And it was about, I think $160,000 with interest, the final judgment. So that was trial number one.

Let's just hold on a second because that first trial I think is people underestimate the significance of somebody's first trial because they hear and hear about so many people get sent into these trials when they have no chance of winning, and they get shellacked and it's devastating for their psyche

Because part of the performance, we call it the performance triangle, part of it is the conscious mind structuring, organizing what questions you want to ask. How are you sequencing your information, what visuals you going to use, why dear strategy? That's all the conscious mind. Then we have the unconscious mind, which is the skills, the things that you've practiced, the way your arms, the way you're faced, the voice, everything that happens, however it's going to happen if you trained, it happens one way if you haven't trained, it happens however it happens, but still it's you're not thinking about how your hands are moving or your face is doing most likely unless you've trained. But the third part is the self-image. And people don't take care of their own self images when it comes to being a trial lawyer. I think it's important to do the training, do the practice to get really do the reps, do the focus groups, whatever you got to do to get you to believe in yourself before you have the victory, right?

But it's so important that first victory because it builds upon itself right now when you have that confidence going into your next trial and you walk in with just a little swagger because you have to believe in yourself because so much of this game is the mental game that people don't really recognize the belief system of ourselves. And so that's why I just want to comment how important it's to get that first one under your belt and have it be a positive experience, do the work, get the mentoring, ask the questions and face your fears. I mean, it had to be when you first stood up there in that voir dire, if you're first jury selection, because I know you had Bob there with you, your mentor being your second chair, but what was that like for you standing up there for that voir dire for the first time? Yeah, even with all your preparation,

It's like a deer in the headlights. I mean, you don't get to phone a friend, you don't get a timeout. You're up there and it's you and the panel, and I did the best that I could. I think one thing, no matter how much experience you have, no matter how many cases you've tried, and I base this both on my own experience and lawyers who have tried 50, a hundred cases who I've talked to, you're never a complete version of yourself. You're always an imperfect version that is always trying to get better. And every time that you step in the arena, you just are who you are in that moment. But you have to, what kind of trial lawyer you are is going to be limited by what kind of trial lawyer you think you are. If you're going to step in the arena, you have to have the belief that you're going to win.

If you don't believe in your case and you don't believe in yourself and you have self-doubt, that's going to be a problem. That is going to make you nervous. You're going to have anxiety. And really all you can do if you don't have a bunch of trials and verdicts under your belt, you can get the confidence through your preparation. That's the next best thing. If you don't have the proof already through a series of verdicts that you're proud of, your preparation is what is going to give you confidence. And that's why it's so important. If you don't have the experience, do focus groups. Go out to a TLU seminar and spend time associating yourself with successful trial lawyers. Don't talk to other lawyers who haven't tried cases to get ideas about how to try your case. Don't try to get inspiration from your friends who have never tried a case.

Go talk to some of the best trial lawyers in the country who can tell you what it's like in the courtroom and they can tell you how to approach the problems that you have in your case that's going to give you real confidence. And that's what I was able to do because I went to TLU, I want to say less than half a year before the trial, and I had Bob as a mentor. So that set me up for success. Had I not had those resources, I wouldn't have had the confidence, and I don't think I would've had the result.

Probably not, but I mean, you never know. But the reality is that training and preparation breeds calmness. And when you're calm, you can connect and you're confident because people are like, oh, I just want to be myself up there. And they're shaking and their voice is cracking and they look so insecure, and this is my authentic self. I'm like, your authentic self is a hot mess that nobody's going to follow. So get rid of that person. Find the person that's confident. Work your way to confidence, work your way to calmness. Let's talk about your second trial. What was that one about and how much later was that?

Yeah, second trial, I want to say was I want to say just over six months later, I can't remember exactly. I want to say somewhere around that timeframe. And it was a case that I never thought would wind up in front a jury. I had a woman call me on a random workday, and she said that she had been working with the city of Milwaukee because a garbage truck owned and operated by the city had taken a wide angle turn near her apartment complex. And I guess the drivers, they lost control of the garbage truck and they just bailed. They jumped out of the garbage truck and it wound up smashing through her first floor apartment. It destroyed her teenage daughter's bedroom. Her entire life was in the bedroom, and the teenage daughter actually was in a bathroom that was only a few feet away from where this giant hole in the wall ended up being.

So it was very traumatic for them. And I'm talking to her on the phone and I'm like, well, why do you need me? Why do you need a lawyer? I mean, they just paying for your property damage. And she was explaining, no, they're giving me the runaround. They're not paying for my damages. And they send an adjuster out and they only want to pay for a fraction of it. And I thought, naively, I'm going to call up the city attorney and get this figured out in a few phone calls. Well, that didn't happen. Apparently they just didn't want to pay for the damages. So for a year and a half, we litigated the case. We went to mediation and I thought for sure it was going to get resolved at mediation. And I remember we were mediating for three hours and they kept coming up and they kept coming up.

We were at $9,600. That was 100% of the property damage. That's all we were asking for, just pay for what you destroyed. And they were nickel and dimming and the curtains weren't worth $60, they were worth $10, just a bunch of baloney. And we get to the end of mediation and they're at $9,300 and we're at $9,600. And the mediator said, okay, do we have a deal at 9,300? And I said, no, I've told you since the beginning of this mediation, and I've told you for one and a half years, or I've told them, you can settle the case for a hundred percent of the property damage. That's all you got to do is just pay her what you owe. And they wouldn't come up $300. They refused to come up $300. The mediator seemed like he was mad at me. I was the problem, but I wasn't going to do that to my client.

I just didn't think it was right. And there was a brief moment at the end of mediation, or no, it was right after the mediation. The defense lawyer called me up and she was really upset and she said, why are you doing this? You are not going to try this case. You should have just resolved it at mediation. I know you are not going to try this case. I know you're doing it pro bono. There's no way you're going to wind up showing up on Monday morning and trying this case. And I said, okay, well, I'll see you Monday. So I show up Monday for court. We go into judge's chambers. He kind of looks at everybody like, why isn't this case settled? We kind of talk about mediation a little bit. And the defense lawyer sort of acts like she says, I can't remember exactly she said, but she's like, you know what, judge?

I really don't want to be here. There's no reason we should be trying this case. In fact, I've really tried. I've made so many efforts to try to get this case resolved and I think it should get resolved today. And the judge said, well, are you saying you're going to make an offer you, you're going to make an increased offer? And she kind indicated like, well, yeah, I think we should talk. So the judge says, well, why don't you go outside and see if you can work it out? So we step outside the courtroom and immediately, once the door of the courtroom shuts, the defense lawyer just starts exploding on me. You're going to lose this case. You should never be showing up here and trying this case. It's offensive. You're never going to get more than $9,300. That was super generous and just starts unloading on me with no increased offers.

She had no plan to make any, I don't know why she was telling the judge that. And so I said, look, we're going to try the case. And I had told her all along, if we were going to try the case in front of a jury, we were going to ask for inconvenience damages in addition to the property damage. And that was a hotly contested issue because nobody had been awarded inconvenience damages for a case like this in like 50 years. And there were all these motions about whether or not the jury should even hear the damages. So eventually we tried the case, the judge suspends making any rulings on whether the damages come in until the close of evidence. We make arguments on the record. He says, the damage for inconvenience should come in. And the jury ended up awarding $50,000 on top of the property damage to my client, which was amazing. And I'll never forget her standing next to me and crying tears of joy and just feeling so respected by the jury in that situation after dealing with nonsense for over a year and a half. So that was trial number two.

What were your big takeaways from that trial? I know that when you're playing the game to become the best, whether you win or lose, you do a serious self-analysis of every moment, I'm sure, and think about the things I did. Well remember those things, but things that, wow, man, I bet I could do better on that next time. So what was one of the things where you're like, I bet I could do better on that next time, even on that pro bono case, even as well as it went.

I think one of the things that I appreciated was right before I got up for opening statement, I had my PowerPoint ready and I opened my laptop and the defense attorney, if it isn't already obvious, was very, very difficult. So I opened my laptop up and she goes, what's that? I said, it's my opening PowerPoint and I'm plugging in the HT MI cord. I'm getting ready, putting it on the, she goes, you're not showing that I haven't seen any of these slides. I object to all of it. And then the judge comes in and he's annoyed. He starts, okay, flip through each slide and I don't know what I'm doing and if I don't have to show you, we're having this whole thing. And the judge basically tosses out half my slides and says, you can show this, but not that. And none of it really made any sense.

It was kind of like throwing me a bone, throwing her a bone. Okay, let's get started with the trial. So one thing I learned is you really have to understand what information is necessary for the jury to hear, and how do you deliver it in a way that's effective and memorable and concise, even if you don't have visual aid, even if that's taken away from you. Now, what do you have? Now, this is why Dan's bootcamp and understanding presentation skills is so important because that can happen to you where you can't rely on the PowerPoint to keep your attention. You have to rely on your ability to make eye contact, to use your voice as an instrument, to use your emotional state and be able to connect energetically with the jury. Now that's all you have. And so those are fundamental to your ability to effectively advocate for your client. And in situations where a judge, which many judges do, we hear about it all the time. They say you can't use those visual aids or any of the PowerPoint slides, then it's just you and the jury. And you need to make sure that you have the skills to do that. So after that trial, now with every trial, I do prepare a PowerPoint. I'm ready to use that. I want to use it. But if it gets stripped away from me entirely, I'm ready to go without it.

TLU Huntington Beach is June 4th through seventh, 2025. We've bought the entire passe hotel for the event. So that means everybody at the hotel for those five days is going to be with the trial lawyers. It's going to be great learning. We have four lecture tracks and eight workshop tracks in the workshops and small group training where you can work on your skills of cross-examination, depositions, opening statement, jury selection. But on top of the great learning, we got great networking because every morning we do a full breakfast for everybody outside in the ocean lawn. Every afternoon, a full lunch. And every evening we have theme parties with live music, lots of food and open bars where there's never a wait for a cocktail. And on top of it, all the four days before TLU Hunting Beach, we're going to be doing a dark arts program with Dave Clark. So TLU Beach, you don't want to miss it. It's going to be fantastic. So let's talk about the third trial. Now, this was your first seven figure day, and what was that about?

Yeah, so third trial was a mild traumatic brain injury case, motor vehicle accident, T-bone collision. My client was in her late twenties and she was struck by somebody in a pickup truck, went to the hospital, they diagnosed her with a concussion and a brain bleed. And then she ended up seeing a neurologist and had a lot of chronic migraine issues. Attention issues impacted her work, impacted her. The defendants in that case hired a defense doctor who combed through her medical history and noticed that when she was a teenager, that she had been diagnosed with a benign cyst in her brain. And the location of that cyst was actually in close proximity to where the ER doctors had diagnosed a brain bleed. And so the doctor's theory was, well, the ER doctors didn't know the history of her cyst, and they actually just confused the cerebral spinal fluid around the cyst for blood, and there was no brain bleed. And that if she did have a concussion, she should have been fine after a few months. And any chronic migraines she had were probably attributable to the cyst or work stress or something else. So that case really came down to effectively crossing that defense medical examiner, which we did very well. We waived economics in that case. And the jury awarded one and a half million dollars for past pain and suffering, and 2 million for future pain and suffering for three and a half.

Wow. What was that feeling like when that jury came back?

I think that was the first time that I really appreciated how important it is to value the case, right? Because the jury came back with three and a half million, and I had done a lot of work, golden ruling it and talking to people, doing focus groups, talking to other lawyers, trying to figure out what is the value of this case? What are the value of the harms and losses here? And just like anybody, I think when you're first getting into this, you have different degrees of comfort talking about money and valuing cases. And I had those struggles too. That's a lot of money. Millions of dollars for pain and suffering. That's a lot. But when I saw the jury come back with three and a half million, it just confirmed for me how important it is to do the work of finding out the value early on in the case so that you can try the case effectively.

Because isn't that the most fundamental question? I mean, isn't that one of our most basic responsibilities as trial lawyers to figure out what the value of the case is and to know what that value is, not to be ambiguous or uncertain or wishy-washy about it. The mediator might be the defense lawyers might be, but you need to know and you need to have conviction. And so that was sort of a confirmation for me of, okay, this is the right way to value cases because the jury agreed with it. And that was another turning point for me.

What did you ask the jury for in that case?

6 million.

And what was the highest offer by the defense?

150 grand.

And this case, did you work this case up or did somebody bring it to you to have you try it for them?

I came in halfway through. So I was able to do the deposition, which was a video deposition for trial of the defense medical examiner. And I was able to do all the experts, but the written discovery and all that predated my involvement.

Oh, so there's a video of the defense Medical examiner?

Yeah, that's what the jury saw. He did not come live.

Oh wow. I think we should do a webinar on that sometime. Just that defense medical examiner video.

We did. I showed clips. It's on TLU on demand.

No, I know, but I'm just saying the entire examination. Cause it was so critical because I'm sure in hindsight there's so many things you would do differently as far as the structure, the questioning, and when you had a positive result. I think it's a lot easier to be super critical of our performance than it is when you get kicked in the teeth. You know what I mean? You don't want to keep reliving kicking the teeth, but it's like, Hey, I did the best I could and it was great, but look at all the things now in hindsight with a couple more years of experience and education, I would do it very differently in that way. I think it's a really good way to, as part of process, we're going to talk about your process in a bit too, about getting ready for these cases. And in fact, that was your third trial and the next one cut up. That was a really big one. And so how much time went by between that three and a half million dollars verdict and your slip and fall verdict?

That was like four and a half months, five months. Okay.

And so let's talk about your fourth trial, and that's the last trial that you've had until your next one. That's coming up at the end of April, right?

Yep.

So tell us about your fourth trial.

Fourth trial was a slip and fall on ICE case here in Wisconsin. It was tried in February of last year. It was a case that I worked on for six years. I think the incident happened in like 2019, no, 2018. And then covid hit and all the trials got adjourned and kept getting adjourned, adjourned, adjourned, adjourned because of covid. So this particular trial I think was adjourned five times, like four times because of Covid and one time because of a defense issue or something. So I had a lot of time to think about it, a lot of time to work on it.

Did you prepare every time it was getting ready to go?

Yeah. And what's interesting about it is every time I prepared, it kind of evolved. The opening statement evolved, what sequencing I wanted to do for the witnesses evolved, and I thought about it differently every time I stepped in because you work it up, you're ready to go, and then there's another six or seven month gap. And then when you start revisiting it, you're kind of coming in with fresh eyes and you've learned more. You've talked to people, you have different ideas about things. So that was actually a real blessing that I had so many opportunities to come back to it and look at it with different eyes. But there were a lot of issues in the case. So my client, he was an older man, I think he was 69 at the time of the fall. He was working for a prescription delivery company, and it was winter, it was December in Wisconsin, and he was out delivering medications to a nonprofit Christian group home that took care of adults with disabilities.

That was part of his route. He would drop off these medications and he arrives at the facility, he gets out of his car, he turns the corner to walk up to the front door, and just as he's turning the corner, he slips and falls on ice, goes to the emergency room, gets worked up, no fractures, he has some x-rays done. Everything seems to be okay, does some physical therapy, doing all right, eventually has an MRI. MRI is negative. A few months later he winds up with an orthopedic surgeon who does x-rays again, and now a clavicle fracture is discovered. He ends up getting surgery and after the surgery developed CRPS and is injured left shoulder from the fall. Now that seems pretty straightforward with the exception of the negative imaging. The problem was that my client had 14 prior surgeries before the fall. He had a history of falling, slipping and falling on ice, and he had a prior history of complex regional pain syndrome in his other side of his body on his right side from a work injury that happened like 10 years before the fall.

And he wasn't doing super hot like two years before the fall, about a year before the fall. He was doing pretty good, but his medical history was really complicated. So we had all that going for us. The orthopedic surgeon who performed the surgery died before we had a chance to depose him. So there were just all these issues in the case. The defense felt really, really good about it. It's winter in Wisconsin. So what? The guy wasn't paying attention, and he was a mess anyway. He wasn't watching where he was going. And now you're trying to sue a nonprofit organization that helps adults with disabilities. Good luck. We tried mediation twice, both failed. I think the best offer before trial, which was right before trial was 250 grand. It was a five day trial, and the jury deliberated for 45 minutes. We waived economics. We only asked for pain and suffering. I asked for 12 million and they came back 45 minutes after deliberating with 12 million.

How did you go about valuing that case? Because that's a lot of money based upon the facts and circumstances that you've outlined. So how did you get to 12 million?

Yeah. Well, after the third trial, like I talked about, I was thinking about damages differently. I was thinking about the value of cases differently. And every time you go to TLU and you hear about these big verdicts and you talk to the lawyers that tried them and you understand what the injuries were, and you look at how they were valuing the cases, you gain a new appreciation each time you have those conversations. So going in, I always start with golden rule. I really try to understand, talk to my client, understand what a day looks like in their life, understand what the surgery looked like, what was going through their mind, what was going through their body, how did it affect their relationships, everything that everybody does. But taking the time to really, really try to put myself in the client's shoes and think about what would that be worth to me?

What amount of money would seem acceptable to have to go through that? And of course the answer is always no amount of money, but you have to put a price on it. So the number ends up being really high. When you start with that. Then you take your assumptions and you go into focus groups and you test. You have to ruthlessly test your assumptions as a trial lawyer with everything, with how you're presenting the case, with what visual aids you're using, with how you're looking at the liability. But for sure, you got to look at the valuation and see, do 12 strangers, 20 strangers look at this the same way I do? And if they don't, why? What is it that they're seeing that you're not seeing? Or what is it that they see differently when it comes to the value? So I did all that.

I did golden rule, I did focus groups and I still changed a lot over those seven years. What I thought the case was worth, I was as high as 30 million at times. I was as low, very, very early on in the case as 1 million. And of course, the value changes as you work up the case because you learn more from the experts. You learn more about the defendant's bad conduct. So the value isn't static. You don't know the value day one, but you constantly reevaluate. And then when you get close to trial, that's when you have to have conviction. So the one thing I will say that I regret about this particular case is that the weekend before trial, I had my PowerPoint all finished and I was going to ask for I think $25 million. I went into jury selection, and that particular panel had four or five people.

When I started to get into the money talk that had very negative views on personal injury attorneys and pain and suffering damages, I had somebody get up and say, I just think it's ridiculous the kind of money that personal injury attorneys are asking for. Nowadays, I see these absurd verdicts for three and $4 million, and in the back of my mind as I'm making eye contact with this jury, I'm thinking I'm going to be asking for 25 million. And I had a female police officer stand up and say something similar that she's just really skeptical and lawyers are out for money. People are out for money for slip and ball cases, asking for two, $3 million. And I talked myself down, I talked myself out of the 25 million and before I got up for opening, I changed it to 12. And when it comes to what coverage was available and everything, there were reasons for that that I don't necessarily regret that because I think we got what we could have got on the case.

But when it comes to truly valuing it, what is the true value of the case? I think it was worth a lot more than 12 million. I think the jury got it right. They gave us what we asked for, but I think it was worth more than 12. And I do regret not sticking with my conviction before starting jury selection, that kind of thing. Shouldn't really, looking back on it shouldn't really change my thinking about what the value of the case is. I've already done that work and what one person says at that point shouldn't really have too much of an influence. So that's the one thing I regret about that case.

You've had quite a bit of success thus far in your young career, but out of everything that professionally, what are you most proud of thus far in your career?

Well, this year I won outstanding young trial lawyer by our plaintiff's bar here in Wisconsin. I was proud of that. The reflection of the hard work that I put in that Bob's put in, that our team's put, getting an eight figure verdict was a goal of mine. And that was a vision that I had that was inspired by coming to TLU six figure verdict seven figure verdict, eight figure verdict, keep pushing the limits and keep trying to get, I'll just say this really quick before I tell you about what else I'm proud of. We see these big verdicts, and I think about this a lot. We see nuclear verdicts, big verdicts, and you hear Cleggett and Rally and we all talk about it and we think it's awesome when someone gets a big verdict and it is. But a big verdict is just a just verdict.

That's all it is, is the jury looking at the facts, looking at the evidence, and coming to the same conclusion that other focus groups and other big data studies and the lawyers themselves came to before the case was tried. And so you're looking at big damages. You're looking at somebody getting complete compensation for all the harms and losses they've had to endure, and we shouldn't look at them as these unattainable outliers. We should look at them as just, it's no different than getting a client a $200,000 verdict if that's complete compensation. That's all it is. So when it comes to what I'm proud of, I'm proud of the progress that I've made in a short period of time, and I'm proud of the consistent work that I've put into my practice ever since coming out in 2021. I've used the resources that are out there. I've used TLU on demand, I've networked at the events. I've done a lot of focus groups. I've done hundreds and hundreds of depositions. I've refined my process. And so if anything, it's nice to win awards and it's nice to get big verdicts, but I'm proud of just making progress every day and being a better trial lawyer. The

Process, that's what Nick Saban used to say at Alabama. Absolutely. The process. And so part of your process of training is, I think, obviously I'm biased, but I think TLU on demand. I was doing the Peloton this morning before this, and I had Satch Oliver up watching his depositions, our trial, because I don't get to attend the conference itself when I'm running it. I'm not sitting in the class taking notes and learning this stuff. And so tell us, how do you use TLU on demand to, as part of your process of learning and getting better and getting ready for trial?

I mean, I've grown up as a trial lawyer on TLU on demand. We all talk about AI nowadays. How much data is it trained on? That's my training set is TLU on demand. And it's the best training set that you could possibly imagine because the only thing that you'll find on there is the greatest trial lawyers of our time spending four hours in detail showing you their PowerPoints, showing you video depositions and cross-examination, explaining high level why they made the decisions that they did. And there's not a case that you have in your office that you can't find a similar blueprint for on TLU UN man, there's negligent security, there's complex reasonable pain syndrome, there's missed cases. There's TBI cases, there's wrongful death cases. There's wrongful termination cases. There's not too much that you could be looking at that you can't find on TLU on demand.

So I spend a lot of time using TLU on demand. I commute to work, so I have a 35 minute commute. I load up the mobile app. Sometimes I'll turn it on 1.2 x or 1.5 x speed depending on how quickly the speakers are talking. And by the time I get to the office, I got three or four things to write down that are going to be really useful in my case to not use TLU on demand. I mean, you should go to the seminars because the seminars, you get to actually network and talk with people, and it's a much more intimate setting. And I think you learn more, at least I learn more in that environment. But at bare minimum, for $139 a month, it might as well be $10,000 a month because you're getting to consult with the best lawyers in the country at a high level that you can directly take that and implement it into your case. There's no better resource I it every day.

You can catch what you missed on TLU on demand. It has all of the live conferences that we've done for the last three years, including TLU 2024 in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace. All nine tracks are being recorded. In addition to that, over 385 webinars and we collect the pleadings, transcripts, and PowerPoints for all of these cases. And it's an app for your phone so you can learn anytime, anywhere if you don't have TLU on demand, if you want to try it out, send me an email, dan@triallawyersuniversity.com and I'll send you a complimentary access code TLU on demand. It's the library for trial.

And I think TLU on demand is great for strategy and ideas and putting stuff together, but there's the aspect of the physical part of it because what I think I'm good at besides putting on conferences, I think I'm really good at spotting talent and helping to develop talent or not talent. There's no such thing as talent, but spotty people who are willing to do the work to get the skills and then help them along the way. That's why a few months ago, I can't remember, it was like August or September or something like that, you and Bob and ARD and a couple other folks came out and did my bootcamp out here finally in Vegas. We've been talking about it for a while. I'm like, dude, you got to do my bootcamp. You got to do my bootcamp because with the results you're getting, because most people have never been coached or trained or instructed how to present to a jury how to connect with those 12 people that we need to vote for us.

And you finally did and you had a lot of busy things. So maybe that did all the preparation you should have done to get here, but I'm used to that now with these trial lawyers. I used to get upset. I used to get frustrated. I was less mature then. But now as I've grown up, I've got it that you know what, that everybody's going to do. A level of preparation that Dan Ambrose would like them to do. They are not going to prioritize. But in spite of that, I know it was a while ago, but how did the bootcamp affect how you are going to present cases in the future? Present yourself to a jury.

I mean, the bootcamp is all about the fundamentals of high level presentation and it's stuff that we've all thought about and we all know without really getting into detail that you need to do and be good at, when you step in front of a jury in a courtroom, you need to be able to connect with the jury. We all say that, but how do you do it right? Until you've been trained to connect with your eyes, until you've been trained to control your gestures and be intentional and mindful about how you're using your body, where you're placing your hands, how you're moving around the courtroom until you're aware of your emotional state and when you're raising your voice or talking quicker or you're slowing your voice down to bring the jury into an energy of attention and focus and adding drama to the situation. Until you're aware of those things and you know what you're doing and what not to do, you're not going to be the best trial lawyer that you can be.

So that was my intent in coming to the bootcamp was to number one, increase my awareness of what I'm doing and what I'm not doing and then just be much more intentional with everything I'm doing from a presentation standpoint. Because you can have amazing content, you can have thought very carefully about how to present the case and you might've done a really good job of trimming it down to the most efficient. You might've cut all the fat and you have it down to connecting the dots and you're going to have a great presentation in front of the jury. But if you can't keep their attention and juror fatigue and exhaustion nowadays, we all know it 10, 20 minutes in, if you're not captivating them, if you're not intentional with how you're using your visual aids or how you're using your body or your voice, they're not going to follow you.

And the minute that you start losing their attention, you start losing the case. So you can have really good content, but if you don't know how to present it well, it doesn't really matter. And so that's what I'm really focused on and it requires a lot of hard work, right? And I did not prepare as well as I should have for the bootcamp. It would've been more useful if I did more preparation prior to coming to the bootcamp, but it's certainly not a one and done. It's like you got to practice these things all the time and you can get practice reps in focus groups, you can get practice reps in everyday conversation by just being aware of these things and using them intentionally. And that's something that I'm really thankful that you've instilled in me is like, Hey, you can practice this stuff all the time. You don't have to be in the courtroom to practice this stuff, but first you got to know what the fundamentals are and you need to be aware of it.

And the truth is, if we want to be great, we have to practice every day. I mean not just the physical practice of getting up in front of a focus group or for the training purposes. I dunno if you can see in my own dojo here, I got my training boards up there if you could see him in the background. My buddy was over last night and

Working on, I remember those things too,

Working on his opening statement for a big trial he has coming up. And so I was the only juror. So I'm like, dude, you got to have other people to give pieces to. And I'm like, come back to me every other witness. It's so important even when you're training that you have at least one human being there because that will slow you down, that will get you connected, that will make you more serious about your training. That's why I try to get just changes the training. But besides standing up and practicing like that every day with every person that we come in contact with, we have an opportunity to practice connection by making sure that we make eye contact with them before we start talking. That we're intentional with our emotional state, like the clerk at the store who has a shitty job and has to do the same grind eight hours a day for 15 bucks an hour and go home and just those meaningless lives of desperate desperation, whatever that, I can't remember if somebody said that that's most people's lives, but it's like if you could take the time to perhaps saying, Hey to the clerk, where can I find the at?

Excuse me. Can you tell me where I could find the at and try to have a slightly warm face and activate their mirror neurons and see, can I get this person? Can I affect their emotional state? Can I get them to smile back at me? Is it possible? Because when you do that every day, and people always say that the trial lawyers the same person in the courtroom as they're outside the courtroom, that's true because that's called whatever. That's who you become the great connector. The person who's always mindful because I did a presentation with Joe Freed in Vegas on cross-examination and showed him the materials and stuff and he said, Dan, I'm very interested in what you're doing. I've never thought about stuff as the level you have, but the fact that what I really like is that you train people to be intentional with everything they do.

Be intentional with the movement over your hands. Be intentional what's on your face. Be intentional with the pacing, the pause, pacing and pausing of your voice. Be intentional with your eye contact. And when you do those things, it helps you to relax because it increases your confidence when you feel connected, when you feel like you're no longer like a dancing monkey up in front of the jury, but that you're the sheriff and they're your posse and there's some bad shit going down in this community and I'm going to lead you folks to help right this wrong and make this place safe. When you get that feeling from inside and really the gratitude of having these people come along this journey with you, it really changes the dynamic and the energy and your confidence and your ability to connect and just so much of the confidence game, just so much of the confidence game.

And I'm really excited for this year coming up because tomorrow, I mean today's Monday, January 6th, infamous day in history, but tomorrow we're starting our bootcamp with D Robertas In the afternoon I'm going to spend a half a day on witness prep and direct examination because that's such a critical skill to have your clients do well in deposition and in trial. But then we have four days, and I'm teaching with David d Robertas who's like the best employment lawyer in the country. He's had six verdicts in a row that have eight or nine digits of them unemployment cases. That's just insane.

He's brilliant,

Brilliant. And he's got a podcast too. That's one of my favorite podcasts is his because it's just so insightful. So we're going to work these 10 students that are coming. He's going to be working with them for the next four days on framing and put together as if he was their co-counsel, basically how he would build their cases, how he would take that case and maximize the value of their employment case. And then in March, I'm doing a similar type program with Joe Fried on trucking, and Joe and I are meeting on a regular basis and really putting together the building blocks of all of his 30 years of experience and skill in the trucking area to have 10 students and have 'em take their trucking cases and really maximize the value and not just those cases, but all the learning that's going to go on with it. And then

In April, I'm doing it with Joe, with Satch Oliver with his depositions, our trial methodology, and that's going to be another four and a half day program, but the other two days are going to be with John Romano. And so both of them are coming to co-teach half the program and teach their philosophies. And John's going to be teaching about how he communicates the pain and suffering damages and in May, I'm doing it with Michael Hill on elder abuse. And so I have all these different more specialized programs lined up and that doesn't even mention my favorite week of the year, which is it's going to be this year is February 1st through eighth. We're going up to Tahoe and rented out a couple cabins on the lake and do the ski program maybe next year you come to that one is like Booard came to the first one. That's how I know him. But he

Talks a lot about it

Because the week long of skiing and community and comradery and sharing a big house and I'm really excited for 2025. That's all I can say because I'm just looking out my window here if the mountain's in the train. So it's a nice scene here in Vegas. In Vegas here.

Yeah, I mean the other thing I'll say about the bootcamp and just what you're learning with case framing, the objective is to try to eliminate all unnecessary facts and evidence that don't really help the jury get to the natural conclusion that they need to reach. You want the most efficient, the path of least resistance to get from the beginning of the case to the end conclusion. The bootcamp helps you do the same thing but with unnecessary words and movements because it's really the same thing. You're just eliminating noise and trying to amplify signal. And you can do that intentionally through an awareness of how you're using your voice, what your emotional state is, and actually connecting both with eye contact and just energetically with a group of people. So they're both really important. They should go hand in hand. You can do a really good job case framing, but if you suck at presenting, it's not really going to matter all that much and vice versa. So

Need to have both. I tell the people, you got to have the right, you tell the right story. That's case framing, but you got to be a great storyteller

And great storytellers, they master these things and people always talk about, especially when they start training with me like, oh, this feels, feels robotic, this feels so stiff. Whatever they tell me it feels, I'm like, of course it doesn't feel natural. You're doing something for the first time. How is it going to feel natural? You've just done whatever you wanted up to this point, whatever you thought, instead of intentionally doing stuff. Walking is a big inconvenience for a baby that's used to crawling and it's a struggle and the baby tries and it falls and you have little toddlers, so you see the struggle, but as soon as they start, it's like they don't give up. They don't fall down and quit and say, oh, I'm never going to walk. No, because even that doesn't cross their minds. It does for when you're an adult and you can say, okay, I'm going to not going to do the work.

I'm not going to learn to walk. I'm just going to crawl my whole life and be a little baby. No. Well, that's what some adults do, right? That's what some lawyers do. Oh, this trial didn't go well for me. I'm just going to settle every case. I'm going to find every excuse under the sun. Like lawyer says to me, oh, I haven't had a trial in five years offering me so much money and my clients want to settle all the time. I'm like, you should think about that for a moment, how you're communicating these offers to your clients saying to, oh, we got this money. It's a lot of money and I can't promise what's going to happen if we go to trial. We could get more, but we could lose. I'm very confident in your case, but let me know if you want to go to trial and risk it all. And of course the client's not going to go to trial when these people talk to 'em like that. And then to this lawyer's credit, he's like, I actually thought about what you said, Dan, and he's like, you know what? I think you're right. I think I've been talking to my clients out of go to trial and it was my own fear that was challenging through myself to constantly avoid the courtroom. I'm like, yeah, man, it happens to us all.

Yeah. Well, and then that all starts with awareness. Are you aware that you're doing that? Are you aware of where your hands are placed when you get up in front of a jury? But just to bounce off something that you said there, Sean Clay gets really big on big data. Why? Because it gives you conviction about the value of the case, and it's a solid framework and foundation for feeling confident that when you tell your client the case is worth X, you have a good objective reason for saying that. Whether you are a big believer in big data or not, the important part is that you have conviction about the value of your case so that when you have those discussions with your client about whether to go to trial or not, you're not painting an uncertain picture for them because if you say like you said, oh, we could lose or we could win, or it could be this or it could be that, or who knows, maybe the mediator's, right? If I'm your client, I'm probably taking the safe guaranteed money. I don't feel confident that you even know the value of the case, so how is a jury going to know it? And that's something I think we all as trial lawyers have to look in the mirror and say, how aware are we of how we're looking at the case and how we're communicating to our clients, to the jury, to defense counsel, to mediators. We have to be aware of what we're saying and why we're saying it.

Yes. Your next trial, I have it on my calendar in Fresno, California. What is it? It's the end of April. What's the dates of that?

End of April. April 28th.

April 28th. I have it blocked out on my calendar. Three day trial, Fresno, California.

Love to have you,

Mike, Bob, and Booard. It's going to be great, but we're almost done here. But just tell us some of the processes that you're going to be doing that you're going through right now. I know you're thinking about this case, working on it, getting ready. It's still two and a half months away or so. What are you doing to get ready for your next trial and what's it about? Because I know we're going to be doing a case analysis on it no matter what happens. Carrp, we're doing a case analysis. We got to track your journey.

So it's Bouchard's case. It's a case about a motorcyclist that encounters like a three foot, a wide one and a half inch deep pothole that sits right next to railroad tracks. So he's heading up to the railroad tracks. You can't really see the pothole until you're directly in front of it. His bike goes right in the front part of his bike, clips the edge of the pothole. He wipes out fractures, I think both legs and has had chronic issues ever since, is not doing too well. We've learned through discovery that this pothole existed for a long time, that the city knew about it, that they didn't do anything about it. There's some arguments about whether they did or they didn't and what evidence they have to prove that. But that'll be a three day trial out in Fresno, California. What are we doing to get ready for it?

A lot of work, a lot of focus groups, a lot of thinking about framing. And one thing I'll say about framing, we all know if you want to frame a case, well, you don't start framing it a couple weeks before trial. You frame it long before you start discovery, and you need to have an intention and an objective when you go into depositions because as Satch Oliver says, and so many other great trial lawyers say repeatedly, depositions are trial, discovery is trial. It is not just for fact finding. You need to have an intention and a plan. When you go in and you depose a witness, whether it's a fact witness or it's an expert witness or it's a corporate representative, you need to know what it is that the jury needs to hear to find the truth of the matter and to find in your client's favor.

And that requires a lot of thinking and a lot of work on the front end, not before trial, but on the front end before you get into the deposition. So a lot of that work is being done. Now, once we have that all put together, that's when we ruthlessly test our assumptions. We test our theories of the case in front of a focus group where they can tell us what we're not seeing. They can tell us where our assumptions are, may be misplaced. And then you go through the revision and the editing process to try to get the case down to the simplest, most concise story for the jury because we all know talking about attention span again, nobody wants to hear all the facts and evidence that you collected over three years. You don't have any time for that, and you're going to lose your case if you get up there and you try to bring up every little thing that you learned during discovery.

It needs to be, can you condense it down to 10 points, five points, three points that win your case, and can you go all in on proving those three points or those five points? And so that's what we're doing with this case. I've learned this too from a lot of the lawyers that I've talked to through TLU. There's no one size fits all blueprint for winning any kind of case. It's like a football game. You find a way to win every case, every case, every game is different. And you need to do the hard work of finding out how do you win this case. So that's what we're doing. And we're going to do focus groups with you. We're going to do focus groups out in Fresno. We've already done a few focus groups and we're going to take all that information and we're going to be ready to rock and roll on April 28th.

Rock and roll. I call that you said like speed trial before the speed trial I used to call it. And just for the record, Joe Free gives me credit for naming it speed trial. That was during the pandemic, but I used to call it the minimum

Noted,

The minimum effective dose. How little can we give the jury so that they get the point that they get the story? Exactly. That's why it's cut, cut, cut. We're the director and the producer of this drama of this movie, cut, cut, cut, because it's just like they do in a movie. It's like two hours long. If they didn't cut all that crap out, it'd be six hours. We'd all be bored out of our minds. But that's the director's job to cut out all the fat, to cut out all unnecessary information so that we get the story. And you talked about the depositions and going intentionally with your depositions because Brian Panish is getting ready for trial right now. He's got this big products case against some Chinese companies and for this battery, it's like one of these little batteries, like those flat batteries. I can't what they call, but they're like disc.

They go into watches and stuff like this child swallowed it. But I kind of zoom with him every day to get trial update. Like his update is process of what him and his team are doing to get ready. Of course, he's got three lawyers on it. They just got $650,000 in sanctions. That's a sanction for discovery violations. The guy is just, but I bring it up. I am reading his deposition because he had a deposition of the expert and one because, but how he does it, he stays focused. And when the witness says, well, sure, ask me, is that a yes? Yes or I believe so. I believe so. Would you say? I believe so. What level of certainty are we talking about? Because the jury's relying upon this. But then if you'd ask a question and the witness, of course, these expert witnesses Dodge Dart confused, you won't give you your sound bites.

And then he'll be like, that's not my question, doctor. Let me ask my question again and then we'll try it this way. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes or no, boom. Yes. Okay, now we can move on. But just having, because I read a lot of depositions for various reasons. Obviously I'm working, I become the trial lawyer this year that I think I was meant to be. But depositions are trial, and it's like when you get shit depositions, usually you got a shit case because people that aren't conscious and aren't diligent and don't really put everything into those depositions, they don't have the evidence. And you can't go to trial without the evidence. And no matter, I don't care how good, I don't care what your presentation performance skills are without the evidence, you got no story to tell. So just constant learning. Constant learning. Oh, and I just want to mention too that at the end of February up in Ojai, California, PSR or Pan's Firm is doing their PSR playbook live up in Ojai.

And I went to that conference a couple of years ago and just, it's good educationally, but the people that are at that firm, like the caliber of lawyers and human beings are there just really second to none really one of my favorite law firms, favorite group of people, because I got to know so many of 'em through the pandemic and still get to know them. So you don't give too many shout outs for other conferences due to, but that one, I will anyways, I believe in him. But anyways, Mr. Karp, thank you for joining us here today. Get back to work, and I know you won't have any distractions out there in, because I'm sure it's overcast, slushy, and rainy like it always was in Michigan, so that's why we work to go on vacation occasionally.

Well, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dan.

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