The "explainer-in-chief" doesn't try to out-medicine the defense experts — he makes the complicated simple, and lets the jury decide. That philosophy drove a $39 million birth injury verdict for Thomas Greer of Greer Injury Lawyers, a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates whose family legacy of law spans three generations. Host Brendan Lupetin sits down with Thomas to break down a case involving a healthy first-time mother whose son was born septic after physicians missed critical warning signs during a prolonged labor. The jury awarded $27 million in non-economic damages alone — $12 million more than Thomas asked for. Thomas walks through his “pay attention, recognize and respond” opening framework, the two client stories that outperformed every expert on damages, and his tactic of cross-examining the defendant about the defense's own upcoming expert to poison that witness before he ever took the stand.

Learn More and Connect

☑️ Thomas Greer | LinkedIn

☑️ Greer Injury Lawyers | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | X | YouTube

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Episode Preview

1. Thomas Greer of Greer Injury Lawyers is a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates — one of the top 100 trial lawyers in the country — who comes from a three-generation legal family in Dunlap, Tennessee, where his grandfather served as a circuit court judge and his father tried over a hundred jury trials.
2. The case, Berto v. UT Regional One Physicians, involved a healthy first-time mother whose baby was born septic after a prolonged labor during which physicians failed to recognize warning signs and act; the child, now nine, suffered intellectual disability and left-side impairment following a stroke at 10 months.
3. Greer built his opening around two standards of care — "pay attention" and "recognize and respond" — and delivered the case narrative in layers, telling the story in different ways to give the jury the repetition they needed without boring them.
4. Two small, human stories about the child — failing to notice his Chuck E. Cheese card had run out after an hour, and crying every time the family dog was taken to be groomed because he couldn't understand the dog would come back — proved more powerful to the jury than any expert testimony on the damages.
5. Greer used a "cross-by-proxy" tactic, questioning the defendant doctor about the defense's own upcoming expert to poison that witness's credibility before he ever took the stand.
6. In rebuttal closing, Greer incorporated a conch shell he had found on a Memphis sidewalk during the trial, using it as a live metaphor for the case: holding the truth up to the jury's ear and acknowledging that, like the shell, Cordell "wasn't supposed to be like this.”
7. The jury awarded $8.2 million for the life care plan, $3.8 million in economic damages, and $27 million in non-economic damages — exceeding Greer's ask of $15 million for non-economics — for a total verdict of approximately $39 million.

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.

Produced and Powered by LawPods

My only rule would be that you have to keep learning and changing and doing things different. If you ever think that you've got it figured out and now I'm just going to go into this case and just do the same old shtick over and over, it's not going to work.

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.

All right welcome back to Just Verdicts. I'm your host, Brendan Lupetin, and today cool blast from the past in my life here speaking with Attorney Thomas Greer from Greer Injury lawyers down in Tennessee. Thomas, thanks for being here today, man.

Thanks for having me, Brendan. I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

Yeah, you know this, but serendipity here. So you and I met a long time ago. I'm trying to think even when that was, but it was when I was heavily drinking the reptile Kool-Aid of Don Keenan and I think you and I spoke at the same, I don't know if it was Reptile Masters or one of those seminars, right?

Yeah, exactly. I think it was probably 2013, 2014. Got to spend a few minutes talking about a verdict that I'd gotten and you had gotten a good verdict too, and we were on the same speaker circuit so to speak.

Yeah. And I remember I was boring everybody to death with my psychology studies and so forth about persuasion and so forth. And I think most of the audience could not have cared less what I had to say. But you afterward, we kind of hit it off because you had a similar sort of interest in little bit of the science behind what works and what doesn't as far as connecting to people and communicating to people in trial. And you put me on a really cool book, which is in my library, but the name of it is escaping me right now. But anyway, it was like kind of kindred spirits as far as that was concerned. So that was 2013 and I feel like I haven't seen you up until very recently. It's a good full circle.

Yeah, I'm glad we're reconnected and so hopefully we won't take another 12 or 13 years to get back together.

I'll brag on you a little bit because the way this all came about was I was trying to find the email of another attorney and there took me to the website of the Inner Circle of Advocates, which is a super prestigious invite only. I think it's the 100 best or 100 top trial lawyers in the country. And I'm scrolling down and then here I see you pop up on there and I'm like, "Is this the dude Thomas Greer from Reptile Seminar 12 years ago?" So congratulations on that, man. That's freaking awesome.

Thank you. Yeah, you see it and you're like, "How did this guy get in here? What has happened? This organization has really gone downhill."

There's hope for me. No, I'm just kidding. No, I was pleasantly surprised, but I wasn't surprised just because you'd been ripping verdicts coming back a long time now and it was just cool to see. And then it was just an opportunity for me to reach out and to see what you're up to. And I heard about this great birth injury verdict that you obtained recently that we're going to talk about today. But before we pivot into the case, I was just reading a little bit. I'm always kind of curious about this. So on your website, it said your dad and your grandfather were both attorneys. Were they injury attorneys?

To some extent. So I grew up in a small town and that's where they practice law. So my grandfather went to law school in the 1940s after the war. Back in those days, you did everything, especially you're in a small town. So he tried hundreds of jury trials, mainly criminal defense, but it was basically anything you could get your hands on and make money on, make a buck on. And then he actually became a circuit court judge sometime in the 70s, right around the same time my dad got out of law school. And so then my dad practiced in the same small town that I grew up in, Dunlap, Tennessee is where I grew up in Southeast Tennessee near Chattanooga. And so my dad had a general practice. You had to. You did everything. You either took the case and learned how to do it or associated somebody.

So divorces, wills, criminal defense, personal injury, workers' comp back when we actually had some workers' comp laws in Tennessee that would help people. But my dad resonated towards trial practice. He loved it. And he tried over a hundred jury trials, well over a hundred jury trials, mainly criminal defense, capital murder cases. So what he really liked to work on were the criminal defense cases and then the personal injury cases where you could make a difference in workers' comp. And I remember growing up being around the fact that my grandfather was a judge, my dad was a lawyer, but as a kid, I think I'm going to be a baseball player. I don't really care that much about it as a young child. And then the older I got and I could appreciate kind of what they did and it fit with my interests. You asked me a very short question about my granddad and my dad and now I'm rambling, Brendan.

So I'll stop now.

No, I'd actually like you to keep going because I'm always interested. I had at least one father and son duo on the podcast in the past. And just as a dad myself, I'm always interested about how the parent's occupation on the kid and like any of us, when you're very young, I'm going to be an astronaut to be a professional athlete of some sort. At what point in time did growing up and your dad's trying cases and you're aware of it, did you ever go watch your dad try a case?

Sadly, I didn't. I went to court with him a lot, especially in the summertime. There was nothing for me to do. So he would drag me around and I would go with my grandfather. So I went to a lot of hearings and a lot of things like that. I may have watched him a time or two in a trial. I just don't have a good memory of it. I watched my grandfather try a case after he retired, went back to practicing law. But as you said, I was always around it and I would hear the stories and I knew the people that my dad helped. As a younger child, I wanted to be an ophthalmologist and the sole basis for that was I had a cousin and his dad was an ophthalmologist and his dad got home every day at 4:30 and he didn't work on Fridays and that seemed pretty cool to me.

And my dad was a great dad. He actually passed away in 2019, but he coached baseball, he coached football. He was at all the things a few nights a week he wouldn't be home for dinner because he was working and he worked on Sundays and if he was in a trial, he was working. And so I guess maybe as a young child I was maybe not resentful of that, but I didn't want to do that. As I got into high school, learned about some of his cases, I could see the impact that he had on people. I do have this one distinct memory of watching him do part of a workers' comp trial and he had this client on the stand who was labor, hardworking guy with not much education. And I watched him do the direct examination of this man and I didn't really understand things.

When he got done, I was asking questions and he was explaining to me basically the workers' comp system that it's a deal. It's a deal between the workers and the company. I can remember distinctly him explaining to me that this guy that wasn't fortunate enough to be able to go to college and do the kind of work that my dad could do that he had to use his body and because of this injury, he couldn't use his body anymore and that's why he was helping this guy. I do remember that. Now that you've asked me that question, Brendan, I do have a distinct memory of that thinking, "Oh, that's pretty cool that my dad can help somebody like that who's in their time of need." Later in college, my dad had a terrible case where a guy was burned over 90% of his body and it was probably his biggest case and saw him just pour everything into that case, time, money, helping the family.

The guy was destitute and we moved furniture. We had old furniture in the basement. And I remember we went to his house, he lived in a trailer and we brought stuff from our house to this man to help him get by and survive while he could hold out for the good settlement that it was eventually achieved. So those are a couple of memories.

Yeah. To the point about working the long hours and as a kid, I don't want to do that. I want something a little more low key, but I always been torn between as a parent, what example are you setting? Because I think probably no different that when you're trying a case or running your firm, despite your best efforts, there's times that you're not making it home for dinner or you're away somewhere trying to get ... And while that's not ideal, I think the silver lining, at least I tell myself this, is that you're setting an example of working hard and continuous evolution improvement effort does bring about good things and brings about success in your business and providing for your family and hopefully that the negatives of not being around as much as maybe an ophthalmologist would be is a net positive, I hope. I don't know how you feel about that.

Yeah, I certainly echo that sentiment and I tried to spend more time and I have spent more time at home and with my kids and I try not to work on the weekends. And I'm fortunate I've been able to come into a job. This building is the only place I've ever worked. I started working for this guy who's now my former partner and I was able to put a lot of time and effort into working really hard, but I purposely had a house that was a mile away from my office. I can take kids to school in the morning if I'm really busy and when they were much younger, I can come home for dinner, have dinner, give baths, help out a little bit, give mom a break and then go back to the office. And then when you're a young man, it's a lot easier to work till one, two in the morning.

And so I did that a lot during trials, during busy periods of my life, would go home, spend time with my family and then come back and work. And then as you build your practice, my goal has been to say, "I'm not working for the sake of working. I want to keep doing less in my practice, things I don't want to do, things I'm not good at, and then focus on the really important stuff, the big stuff. And through that, really the whole goal of this is to help people in my work, but also to have a good life, have a happy life and try to be a good person, try to be a good dad. And yeah, that's most of my thoughts on that.

Let me pivot and then we'll start getting into the case. But obviously I know you from way back as a student of the trial game and I'm curious about your sort of overall thought process about maybe rules of thumb of trial. Not to say that any case is the same and we're always dealing with different issues of what a particular case is, but has your sort of view or your approach to trial changed over time and currently what are the biggest things that you think are most important as far as obtaining winning for your client basically at trial these days?

Great question. I would say my only rule would be that you have to keep learning and changing and doing things different. If you ever think that you've got it figured out and now I'm just going to go into this case and just do the same old shtick over and over, it's not going to work. I think attitudes change. Just the process of learning and trying new things. I'll always try to take one part of a trial and say, okay, I'm going to try to do this better. I'm going to work on this piece of trial advocacy. So this last trial that we'll talk about, I felt like I did a bad job in voir dire and obviously we got a good result, but I just didn't like it. I didn't like how I did it. I didn't like how it flowed. And so that's case I try, that's going to be the focus of how do I really do a better job at Voir Dire?

So I think you do have to learn and change. I'm just by nature a learn. I like to learn, not just for the purpose of getting to the answer, but the learning process is interesting to me. So like you, I don't know what book I would've recommended to you, but I've read everything. The first few cases I've tried, it was David Ball on Damages and that was my Bible and I ripped off stuff directly from that book The Reptile comes out, I just devoured it. And then the life-changing books of Rules of the Road, Rick Friedman and then polarizing the case was a huge game changer to me. I remember polarizing the case came out and I verbatim ripped off large sections. If I remember correctly, there's some excerpts from closing arguments that he had made, just ripped them off, memorized them and regurgitated them.

It was the right case for it. And so again, I'm rambling, but I think the key is just to keep learning. And I'm reading Jim Perdue's book right now and I don't subscribe to this Keith Mitnik. His two books are fantastic. I use a lot of his stuff. I try to use anything that feels authentic to me. Some of the reptile, the edge stuff, a lot of it was great and I still use a lot of it. Some of it was a little bit too dogmatic that you must do it this way and it's, that doesn't feel right to me. I can't say that and be a straightfaced authentic person. So that's really the litmus test for me is learn as much as you can and try new things, but don't try to be somebody else. Don't try to fit into something that just doesn't fit your style.

Yeah. I don't think I could have said it any better as far as viewer touching on the importance of drawing from anything that connects with you. And to your point about just straight up ripping off word for word different things from books, I remember there was a part of the standard David Ball opening and damages one or two when I was following everything so formulaically and there was this one part that I would say and I had no idea exactly what it meant, but I would just say it because that's what David Ball said you say. And then eventually I realized what he was trying to get across and then it clicked with me and then I started saying it the way that it made sense to me and it felt just so much better that way. And whether it's the reptile, that was like the first that and damages the first books that really changed my frame of everything of trying cases.

But you're right then, but anything that's too dogmatic or you must do things this way just doesn't seem to fit trial law because it is so dynamic and dependent on you and the circumstances. By the way, the book you recommended to me a long time ago was called The Person and the Situation. And it was basically all about studies of basically talking about attribution by. Everything depends on, are you focused on the person or are you focused on the situation in which the person was placed, which is I think still a really important concept today. But anyway, yeah, keep learning everybody and reading and improving and taking. And I would say even though I'm maybe not taking things word for word, there's a lot of unoriginal stuff I'm doing at trial because I read about something that I love from this person or that person.

I'm like, I'm going to use that in my next trial. And it's fun to do that when you get to do it.

Same. And then we all, as you do this, the number of years that we've been doing it, you have these things that you can conjure up for maybe your rebuttal close. There's a few things I could do depending on what they say and how do I want to end these things. And that probably comes from somewhere. I'm probably still ripping off something that I read even today. And it's been modified. I'm not memorizing it. I have my own way of doing it, but yeah, you can't get it out of your brain is the point on that. And then your question about trying cases today and what wins cases today, it's cliche. You have to use more than just the spoken word. Yo have to use visuals. You have to use ... I did Lanier. I left him out of the ... I went to his academy one time and learned a lot of stuff there.

He's big on using the Elmo and writing things and I've been doing that. I always try to improve my PowerPoint and PowerPoint's changed. I think I was always pretty good at it. I read books on how to do it the right way, but it's changing even now. I'm using fewer words for a rule in my case instead of having the long drawn out, here's the rule, I try to make it three or four words just as simple as I can make it. In this recent case was the first one was pay attention, just pay attention to your patient. That could have been said in 10 word sentence or it could be just a few words using just a picture as you talk and opening or closing instead of using words at all. Oftentimes you don't need any words on your PowerPoint. So I think the fact that most people are visual learners and to incorporate that into trial, it's a must.

I see defense lawyers and they try to insult me that, "Oh, I don't have the fancy PowerPoint that Mr. Greer does. I'm just going to stand here and talk to you. " That's to your detriment. Okay. Well, when PowerPoint's not fancy anymore, it's been around for 30, 40 years. And if you want to stand there and look at a legal pad and bore people to death, that's fine. You can do that, but it's not going to be successful in most cases.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. So let's talk about one of your most recent trials, Berto versus we were talking about UT Regional One Physicians. So this is a birth injury case, and I've got lots of questions about it based off of what I've read, but why don't tee up for us, give us the kind of case summary of what this case was about.

Okay. So it's a birth injury case, as you mentioned. It's first-time mom. She's in her early 20s, perfectly healthy, no issues prenatally, which is always huge in these cases. I seem to always have some issue with the mother where they can suddenly blame the mom. So she was not overweight. She didn't smoke. She didn't have hypertension or any kind of issues like that. She's full term and she goes into labor and the hospital, she's a great human being, a great person, great mom as I got to know her and she picked the closest hospital to where she lives. She lived in Marion, Arkansas across the Mississippi River from Memphis. And she wanted the closest hospital. So whenever she went into labor, she could get there fast. She had all her prenatal care done there as well through this group. So when she gets to the hospital sometime shortly after midnight, she's in very early labor.

They're not really even sure if she is in labor so that they keep her in triage to monitor her and they find out that she is in labor. She goes from maybe one centimeter to two centimeters in the first two or three hours and they do blood panel. And the only thing that comes back that's somewhat alarming is an elevated white blood cell count and it's pretty high. It's almost 22,000, which is pretty high, I think 14 or 15,000 for a laboring mom would be the cutoff to where you'd say, "Okay, it's now we're concerned." However, she had no other signs throughout the entire labor of an infection, which was what the defense harped on because ultimately I'm foreshadowing here, but there was an amniotic intrauterine infection when the baby was born, he was born septic and that was really the big driver of his brain damage.

And I'd never had an infection case. Typically, infection cases scare me because it's when did it start and anybody can get an infection. And so anyway, back to her labor. So she progresses very slowly. They are not able to put her on Pitocin, which would be to augment the labor to make her have strong contractions and regular contractions because she starts having these prolonged decelerations that we say were concerning. The defense says perfectly normal, happens in every labor. So she's not moving fast. She's not on Pitocin. The late afternoon the next day, they break her water at about 4:00 PM and there's one, which is the first bowel movement of a baby for listeners who don't know that we said it's another red flag. And then she had this right after this, they broke her water. She has an eight minute really nasty looking prolonged deceleration.

So it's eight minutes down into the 60s, but it comes back. That was our cutoff. There was some problems before that. At this point in time, she's still only four centimeters dilated. Labor's not going anywhere. And so that was our cutoff. So you had a doctor that was on shift the first part of her labor until 6:00 PM. And so we said when this happened, he should have delivered her. He should have delivered her before he went home at 6:00 PM. Next doctor comes on, Dr. Shepherd, and by the way, Dr. Shepherd was the head of the residency program at this hospital, very well respected obstetrician, probably does a good job in most of her cases as I told the jury. She was actually given the inducted as one of the first inductees of the Medical Hall of Fame in Memphis, which was they played up during the trial that she was Hall of Fame doctor.

So she comes on and we say she should have looked back over the course of the labor and picked up on what the first guy didn't pick up on and she should have delivered too. And then we gave her till about 10:00 PM when some other concerning signs popped up. So we said about 10:00, baby should have been in the nursery, not the NICU, is what I told the jury. But then after 10:00, more bad stuff kept happening and they didn't do the right thing. This child wasn't born until about 6:00 AM the next morning. It was really horrific to look at the strip and how bad it was even after 10:00 PM all the way to birth. But what happened during the trial is because we had said the standard of care violations occurred before 10:00 PM and we said that anything the child was born before 10:00 PM, no damage, the trial court prohibited us from criticizing their care after 10:00 PM.

So we could only factually tell the jury, "Here's what happened in those hours." We couldn't say, and it was a failure on our part, honestly. We should have had our disclosures say that the standard of care required delivery by 10:00 PM and a continuing violation thereafter. But the thought process, because I had another lawyer that worked the case up, it was pretty smart. The thought process was if you do that, then you muck up the causation and the standard of care violation and maybe you can prove that they violated the standard of care by : in the morning, but now it's too late. And so her thought process was like, "Cut it off at 10:00 PM. Let's be clear." And obviously it worked. And he was mourning about 6:00 PM almost no signs of life. He had a faint heart rate. His Apgar was one and then it never got above four for 20 minutes.

He was a very sick little baby. Due to the infection, he was septic. The placenta was infected and he had about a two-month stay in the ICU and he was placed on ECMO because the damage to his lungs, he couldn't oxygenate the body. So he's put on ECMO for 10 days and then to put on ECMO, you have to use an anticoagulant so he doesn't clot. And so as a result of that, he has a brain bleed. So he has an injury right around the time of birth. 10 days later, he has a brain bleed and they take him off ECMO and they damage his carotid artery, which was not negligent, but they just did. They had to tie off his carotid artery. So then 10 months after he's born, we're not exactly sure what happened. He had an RSV infection. He may have had a seizure, but he arrests for several minutes.

And because of the carotid artery on the right-hand side, he has a stroke at the age of 10 months, which really affected his left side. He could still walk and things like that. And so that was another weird fact. 10 months later, how can I tie all this together? How can we do this? But those are the basic facts of what happened to him. He can talk. He has severe speech and delay impediments, but he's a sweet little boy, but he's intellectually disabled. He'd just never be able to take care of himself when he's in special needs classroom. He's probably operating on more of a five-year-old level than a nine-year-old level. And that was the other hard part of the case was a lot of these birth injury cases, you have these children who are profoundly damaged and you just know they're never going to speak, they're never going to feed themselves or in a wheelchair, they're never going to walk.

And this was different. This was like, what can he do? And so time was on our side with that one because the case was delayed from COVID, but we really needed some time for us to really figure out what he was going to be like. And I think you asked me for a short factual ... It's kind of hard to do, but I think that kind of gives a summary of the case.

Just selfishly, because we have a number of birth injury cases and one issue similar because I saw in the case write up that he was ... Is he nine or 10 now something in that realm? So I think for a lot of these cases, unless like you said, that the child is absolutely catastrophically injured and everybody knows that the future is pretty grim, that if there's less of an injury that you really need time to see how the child does, how do they progress? I think one of the amazing things is how resilient the brain is despite horrific HIE, kids oftentimes they recover to an amazing extent. And then when you add in the cooling process after an event like that, but there are a lot of cases where you have to wait years potentially. And that's a peculiar thing in and of itself because most cases, even outside of the birth injury realm, you have a pretty good idea where your client is and the care they're going to need.

And that creates an impediment, not an impediment, but it adds a layer of difficulty, the case to talk to the family and say, Hey, this is not something that we can rush into to resolve as much as you'd probably like to. We need to see how your kiddo does over time so that we can have a more accurate prognosis and have a better sense of the care that they'll need and so forth. But definitely a unique wrinkle of these cases.

Yeah. And it puts a lot of pressure on these families. To take care of a special needs child is ... Take care of any child is hard. There's no rule book for it or you just do the best you can. And with a special needs child and a single mom, what happens oftentimes, not in this case, is they don't get the care that they really need. And then the defense can also play up the fact that, gosh, now the plaintiff is saying this child needs all of this therapy, but for the past six years, he hasn't gotten anything and he's fine. And so that can be another wrinkle too. In this case, fortunately, like I said, the mom was fantastic and really did a good job with them.

Yeah, that's awesome. What were the big defense battles of why this case wound up trying versus settling? What were they hanging their hat on as far as the defense of this case? You mentioned Hall of Fame doctor, but what else was out there?

Yeah, the big one, there's any medical malpractice case, they can win them. Tennessee's a unanimous verdict state, civil verdict state, and they can win any case. So there's those built-in biases. But on this one, so their big ones were there was this really severe infection. And admittedly, she only had one sign of this infection and the textbooks say they were maybe four or five. I can't remember what all of them were. So one of them was high fever and tenderness and maybe foul smelling amniotic fluid and tachycardia, maybe a couple others. She didn't have any of those things. And so that was their big, gosh, the doctors are not, they can't foresee the future. They just can go on what the signs and symptoms were. There's no signs and symptoms of this infection. Nobody could have predicted this. And so to counter that, we agreed.

We did not say the doctors should have diagnosed this infection. We just said that they couldn't just ignore it either and that there were other things that pointed to this baby not delivering and things getting worse. So we never said they had to predict it, but that was a big one. And then another one, as you probably know in these birth injury cases is even in the bad ones are always long periods where the baby looks fine because they're so resilient and that's how evolution designed babies to be able to tolerate all this trauma and damage during the labor process. So you have hours where our doctors, our experts had to say, "Yeah, if you look at this one hour strip, yeah, you don't do a C-section." So they tried to take all of the bad things the defense did and then put them in isolation and say, "Here's this bad thing, but look, everything bounced back and now the baby's fine." And even between 12:00 and 2:00 AM, the strip looked perfect.

And we had said two hours before was the final countdown, the final time where they should have a C-section and they show this strip that looks beautiful for two hours. My counter on that one, just before I forget to tell you, was the only reason we're looking at this period of the strip is because they didn't do a C-section. We shouldn't know what is on the strip during this period of time. We shouldn't be looking at it because he should have been in the nursery and argued that the evidence that it looked good during that time period was suggested that if they had gotten him out earlier, he would've been fine too. But those are the big ones. They couldn't diagnose the infection, tons of moderate variability and all the good indicators that they want to point to say that, "Oh, this was just an unforeseeable event."

What was it about your voir dire that you weren't thrilled about looking back on it?

Yeah, I'll tell you exactly what it was. Maybe it was because the defense lawyer did better than I thought and I didn't insulate as well as I thought I had. So I'll just tell you what happened. I want to make sure the jury knows I'm not here for sympathy. I'm not going to be talking about it. I don't want it. We're not asking for it. I want to take that away from them very early on. And also I want to make sure they know basically my view on voir dire is when the defense lawyers Stands up. I don't want him to have a question that he can even ask. I want to have covered. And I'll be boring, but I want to take all his thunder. I don't want to hear the, there's always two sides of a story and will you keep an open mind until we go and all the crap that they do.

I want to take all that away from them. So I thought I had done that. I thought I'd taken sympathy away. I thought I had told them to keep an open mind. I thought I'd told him enough about the case. Here's what happened. There's meconium involved. And thought I told him enough to where my good jurors were insulated. Okay. This defense lawyer stands up and he says, and this could have been an error on my part not to object, but I don't like to object. He gives them very short synopsis of the case, which he says he's allowed to do. Since research, maybe I could have objected and the judge may have limited him, but he gives a factually correct, very short summary of what happened. She comes in, this happens. Now here, having heard that is leaning in favor of the plaintiff and three or four hands go up.

So he's now told them the story of the case and they immediately are like, "Well, we don't like that. " And so he gets several of the jurors off for cause that I thought-

Would've been good for you.

Yeah, it would've been good. And I was shocked when their hands went up because I'm thinking, I thought I covered this. So how do I combat that next time? I don't know, but it was very, man, it was bad. I was sick to my stomach when I saw those hands go up. And I'm second guessing myself, why didn't I object? I don't like to object, but why didn't I object? And so that's what I did bad. I guess maybe he did a good job.

Hey, we can always improve. Lanier, I went to his seminar, which was great and I've actually been thinking about going back to it. But even Lanier, arguably one of the best trial lawyers that's ever lived says every time he tries a case, there's something that he picks to try to improve on, whether it's how he does the exam, how he does his Elmos or his imaging and anything like that.

I do that too. I may have stolen that from Marco.

I try to focus on ... Yeah, it's a great just piece of advice for anything, let alone trial. So you're not feeling thrilled about voir dire and you touched on what you did with opening, but how did you frame your opening? I think you said pay attention was one of them. And I imagine you're not doing what the safety rule is anymore.

I mean, yeah. No, I don't even fight that with a motion elective. It doesn't even comport with the jury instructions. So if I'm talking about safety rules and then the jury, here's standard of care instructions, what's this guy talking about? So no, I just use standards of care.

And so pay attention and what were the other ones?

So it was pay attention. It was recognize and respond. And that works almost in any med mal case. I'd use that in a good verdict I got the year before, basically, essentially the same rules. Those were my rules. I try to tell the story two or three times differently, a quick version, maybe a little bit better, longer version. And then maybe as I'm dismantling the defenses retut a little bit because they need that repetition. They don't need to hear the same thing over and over, but they need to hear it two or three different ways. So it's a standard opening that I've been doing for a long time. You lay out the rules and then you then tell the story. And so I'll lay the rules out. I tell a brief story of the case and then I tell a longer version of it and then I'd undermine the defenses, which I think is maybe the most important part of the opening is undermining those defenses, man.

And that's another thing, this comes from Keith Mitnik. It's you can't sit down after you do your opening and be like, "Man, I did a great job on that opening. You got to wait and see what they ...

" Yeah. How are you feeling after the defense opening?

Yeah. So again, on this one, I feel like I did a good opening. I tried to keep my openings no more than 40 to 45 minutes. So it was 45-minute opening. Theirs was very long. Theirs was maybe an hour and a half. Same thing for closing. I did a 45-minute closing, he did two hours. But I tell you this, when he got done with his opening, I was so down and dejected and I'm thinking, "Gosh, I think I did a good job. I addressed everything. I connected. We're right. We should win. We have better experts, everything." And when he got done, I'm kind of sick to my stomach and didn't sleep well and it just kind of dawned on me the next day. The reason he did so good was he just flat out spewed bullshit at the end. He told them stuff that he could not back up.

And so it takes a little while to expose it, but it's a gift. And so that's when I realized I was like, the reason I feel bad is because he said this and I know that's not true and I'm going to make him pay for that. Then I felt better about it.

And did you in the course of your case in chief, whether it was experts or your client, would you at any point harken back to, "Mr. Said this and I just wanted to address that blah, blah, blah," to really underscore the BS factor of their opening.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's so fun, isn't it?

One of the best parts of make them uncomfortable and

Squirm in their seat. Yeah. It's one of the things I always order is the defense opening. So I ordered the opening, I ran it through AI to help me drill down in which I had notes anyway, drilled on his themes. And so then I had five or six things that he said that were just bullshit. And so with my first standard of care expert, whenever we came to that topic, I would say I'd make a big deal out of it. I'd write out the little short phrase on the OMO and say, "Now, if somebody was to have said in this courtroom, ma'am, would that be true?" He'd object half the time. "Just made it worse. "And no, that's not true because of A, B, or D. And then I would dramatically strike through that phrase and then we would talk about other things and then it would be one of his other points.

I'd come back to that. And you don't have to say," If Mr. Defense lawyer said this, they know, the jury knows

Who it was and what you're referencing.

"So yeah, we had a lot of fun with that.

How did you approach your order of proof? Who was your first witness, which I think is always super important to the extent that you can perfectly control it.

Yeah. It's hard in med mal cases. It's hard in Memphis, especially. It takes a long time to get things done here for whatever reason. Our first witness was the big one. It was our standard of care causation, maternal fetal medicine took way longer than I thought, but it was necessary. You had to explain a lot of things, the whole story, the infection. It's a complicated case, even more so than a lot of birth injuries. So I had this great maternal fetal medicine expert. She never testified at a trial before. Super smart, triple board certified and OB and maternal fetal medicine and genetics, just a very smart expert. And so she was first, I think she may have taken the entire first day, including the direct and the cross and she was so good and then it felt our schedule up a litle bit. She was so good.

I had another OB, I just didn't call her because I'm like, " I don't want to really step in it after this has gone so well.

"How did she do on cross as a first time witness?

She just had a really good demeanor. I don't know. I couldn't coach it and she did better than I thought. She conceded when appropriate. Part of their defense, which again, it didn't work, but was to use these ACAG definitions of what is a late deceleration, what is a variable deceleration, what is a early deceleration and get real technical and nerd out on it. And so she had marked up the strip and using those definitions, she was wrong if you use the definitions and she conceded a lot of that, but they spent a good hour and a half, two hours going through in painstaking boring detail. "Oh, what about this one? Are you sure that's a late deceleration?" Maybe it's not. "Okay, let's mark through that one. There's a question mark on that one. And so it was so boring. The cross was so boring and so long.

I remember he had her using a green pin to make these changes. Ostensibly, he was going to come back sometime later in the trial and put it all together, which it never happened, but he's doing this with her. I'll tell you two stories on this one. So then when I come back on my redirect, part of what I did is to say," Yo went through that strip with the defense lawyer and you marked all that green, right? Yeah. Now the areas that we had been talking about to the jury, the parts where this baby was showing signs of harm and the reasons why we should have done a C-section, did you use the green pin on any of those areas? No. Why was he talking about all those other areas? Objection. Okay, so you're making your point, right? So it was not effective. Now the green pin story, I guess the longer you do it, you get away with more, you can just push it a little bit.

Now we're into his case and he had his expert on the stand and he was having his expert go through in painstaking detail parts of the strip and he was having his expert say, "Okay, I was wrong on this particular deceleration or I was wrong here." But he wasn't having them mark it with the green pin. And I don't know what he was going to do with it ultimately. I guess he was trying to blunt maybe a cross-examination where I would have somehow gone to the strip and quibbled over stuff, which I didn't do, but he has his expert basically conceding he made some mistakes. And so I interrupted him and I go, "Mr. Defense lawyer," I said, "Would you like to borrow my green pen? I have a green pen right here." And most of the jury laughs and it goes completely over his head.

He has no idea what I'm talking about. And he goes, "Oh no, it's okay. I don't know. No thanks." And he just convened stories.

So because the fetal heart strips were so critical to your case, did you teach the jury much about that in your opening or did you save it more to have your first expert explain what it is and give the lay of the land of what they're looking at?

Yeah, I gave just the basics of it. This is a late deceleration. It generally means this. You'll hear more about it later. I didn't get into any of the

Super technical what this and that means.

I can't remember them. I can't remember all those rules, but the jury, they're not going to know. And I had a heyday with the defendants themselves. With one of them, I remember they had a board written up with a definition of these things and with the defendant themselves, I say, "There's a difference between the textbook and the real world, isn't there?" Yeah, there is. When you're in the labor and delivery unit and you're looking at these fetal heart monitor strips, you're not getting the textbook out and you're not counting out the seconds of the decel and the ... You're not doing any of that, are you? No, we don't do that. So there's the whole defense of using these technical definitions and saying, "Here's this and here's that. " When they don't do it in the labor hall, what is the point of that? And so I was able to expose that pretty effectively.

Did you have the child, did he participate in the trial at all? Did you have him there at all? How did that work?

No, I didn't have them. I shot a video of him. We thought about using it. Ultimately just decided we didn't need it. His mother could paint such a beautiful picture of his life and his deficits and told really good stories that let the jury know how he was affected. And so we didn't call him or we put a couple of pictures in, I think. Now the defense, of course, they went on her Facebook and TikTok and they pulled videos off of him and they used that to cross-examine her, which was a big mistake in my opinion because they picked the videos where he's at the beach and he's on a cruise with his mom. And it's like, so what? She's allowed to have a life. And we had a good redirect ready for that that made him look bad. But back to the, I'll tell you one thing I think was interesting just in terms of storytelling and how the brain works, we learned by stories going back through evolution and the Bible and before the written word, you had to tell a story to get somebody to pay attention.

And so two things came out. I had one of my lawyers who I've known for 20 years, went to law school with, he helped on the case and he was preparing, he's prepping the mom for a direct that I was going to do or that maybe Jodi was going to do. Jodi Black was the other lawyer and Eric Espy was this lawyer that was helping with us. And so I'm like, "Spend time with her and get me some stories, some good stories that I can use." And so he discovered two stories that were really crucial to showing what the damages were and they were. Number one, when Nuez, that's his mom. When Nuez had a recent birthday, she said, "Oh, it's my birthday, Cordell. Where do you want to go to dinner?" Chucky Cheese. He wants to go to Chucky Cheese. "Okay, we'll go to Chucky Cheese.

Now that's endearing because it shows how good of a mom she is. Her birthday, they're going to Chucky Cheese. She puts one hour worth of playtime on the cards now. You don't use the tokens anymore. It's the card. He's playing, he's having a great time. The hour runs out and he doesn't realize that his card is no longer working. And so for 30 or 40 more minutes, he's going around to these games and he's sticking the card in and he's happy as can be, but he has no idea he's not controlling things. He's nine. A three or four-year-old would more likely know that. I use that against their experts. Tell them the story. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. The other story that came out was they have a little cute little dog and every time they take him to be groomed, Cordell would cry.

It couldn't understand that they're going to get the dog back. So we're going to get the dog back in a couple of hours. It'd be fine. Every time they take the dog, he thinks he's never going to see the dog again. That was more powerful than any pediatric neurologist or neuroradiologist or ... Throw all that in the trash. If you tell a parent or somebody who's been around kids that story of a nine-year-old, bam, like that, he's not normal. He's not going to be okay. He's not going to be able to take care of himself.

Did you have any other condition witnesses besides mom or did you think she was enough?

We tried. We had dad who was still in his life, great dad. They're not together, but great dad, not as articulate as mom, but he did a great job, very short, brief, echoed some things, told a couple of other stories. And then we tried to have some of his teachers and where there was some logistical issues with getting in the mow there, but it was mom and dad.

And oftentimes I feel like you want to get these other people, but it works out just fine. They don't there. Less is more, it seems. And just again, selfishly, who were the experts? So first expert, super triple board certified neonatologist, et cetera. Who else was part of the expertise? Obviously we would've had the life care planner.

Yeah. So we had the maternal fetal medicine OB expert first. We had a neonatologist. She had never testified either. She was from Atlanta. She was fantastic. We had pediatric neurologist who examined Cordell and testified. We had a pediatric neuroradiologist who showed the images and the scans of the brain. I may be forgetting somebody, but those were the causation standard of care type people. And then we had neuropsychologists who had pediatric neuropsychologists who had done some testing on him and testified about his abilities and then a life care planner and an economist.

Gotcha. And what was the approximate life care plan? What did it price out, whether it was per year or total?

Yep. It was total 8.2 million and change. The 80, 90% of that was attendant care. We didn't say he didn't need nursing care, but he needed somebody to take care of him when he becomes an adult. And that was the bulk of the damages on that.

So take us through closing. You said that defense went on for a couple hours and now you got to get up after whatever they're talking about for two hours. What did you try to focus on and what did you think in closing was most effective?

My closing was short. Like I said, I don't think I did enough, I guess. They're experts. They got destroyed. They looked terrible. I just was fortunate to be able to do some good things with their experts. They didn't really have much credibility. I know you didn't ask about that, but I focused on that. And to say basically, if that's the best you can do, what does that tell you? The witnesses that they brought in this courtroom to back them up, what does that tell you? And then go through each of those experts. And just a real quick story on that, something I did that was different this time was they had a standard of care expert and their first witness was doctor number one and then they were going to follow by their standard of care expert. The standard of care expert is one of these guys, he always testifies for the defense, hadn't testified for a plaintiff in 25 years, had a bunch of other baggage, not a lot of baggage, but that was basically it.

Made a bunch of money doing it. Didn't produce a testimony list so where I could go and find his testimony, which I insinuated was purposeful because he didn't want me to find out all the bad stuff he said. But the jury didn't know any of that because I didn't have time in my opening to go over each defense witness. So it was very fortunate because they put their first doctor on the stand. So I got him locked in on what the standard of care was, which was basically he didn't have to do anything. And then I pivot to, who is going to back you up? What are you talking about? What expert is going to agree with you? I don't know. You ever heard of Dr. Weiss? No. So then I put their expert that's going next on the board and I start cross-examining the defendant about the expert and they go nuts.

You can't do this. "Yeah, I can. It's relevant. "I was going to

Say, what's their basis for objection? Yeah.

It's relevant. If Dr. Weiss is his buddy, that's relevant. If he's never heard of him because he's a nobody, that's relevant because he's not an expert. He's not a well-known ... It's all relevant. There's no right answer. I told the judge, just because there's no good answer doesn't mean it's not relevant. So I was able to cross-examine by proxy their first defense witness through the defendant.

And specifically what were some of the ... So number one, I like that point about you've never even heard of this person. He signals they're a nobody, they're not authoritative. Did you confront the doctor with any of the opinions you suspected that this person had written?

Just the bias. It was basically like, you don't know him. You never heard of him. Why is he your expert? My lawyer picked him. Why do you think your lawyer picked him? Objection, blah, blah. Let me tell you this. He hasn't testified for a plaintiff in 25 years. Did you know that? No, I didn't know that. He refused, but then you should go on through the bias and- Great. Yeah, it was really good. So then when Dr. Weiss takes the stand, the jury already all that bias stuff is already there. He's already poisoned when he comes in.

That's really cool. I know it's such a safe, despite the objections, it's a safe, super effective cross because it's collateral and the doctor can't do anything with that other than basically concede or say," I didn't know that. "Yeah. And then the beauty of it is now you've already character stained the defense expert witness who hasn't even gotten up there yet. That's awesome. Any other interplays that worked out with subsequent defense witnesses?

Yeah, their worst witness was their most important witness, which was their neuropsychologist. And so she was not a pediatric neuropsychologist. She was just a general, and so I went after her heart in my opening really hard. And so they had done a lot of work to try to blunt that. And she was from Orlando, Florida. Why are you here in Memphis? There's a lot of good stuff I had with her. And so what I did with her is if she's a generalist. On her website, she does all these different tests. She does pilot testing and everything. On her website, she treats people from six to 99. They wanted to play that up like that was good. To me, that's terrible. So I've got a pediatric neuropsychology. All she does is treat kids. And so I did some stuff with this lady. She had blurted out on her direct.

She's got four kids. When they get sick, where do you take them? What kind of doctor do you take them to? Oh, sometimes I take them to my doctor. I take my kids to a pediatrician. And then it's like, what kind of dentist do they go to? And have you ever had a kid that had their tonsils out? Don't you take them to a pediatric surgeon? You to paint the picture. And then I painted her as this generalist. Let's talk about all this stuff. You know how to do all these tests. You know how to do this one and this one and this one. And then I had a lot of fun with her. I'll finish this story. I'll try to wrap it up. But neuropsych testing is, you show pictures and images to these children and ask them questions and things. And so I said," I want to play a litle game with you.

Let's play a little picture game. "And she goes," I don't want to do that. "I said," We're going to do it anyway. "And so I had these things for every point that I would make against her, I had this little picture game. And so the first one was Jack of all trades, master of none. And so I had pictures up. "What does this mean?" And then I would get the word master out of her. And then I would write them all on the board. The jury knows exactly what I'm doing. I go, "What phrase conjures up when you see these words?" I don't know. Jack of all trades, master none. What does that mean? And then the other thing that she had was all she had studied was in her dissertation, her doctorate was malingering and in tests and catching people lying. So they made a big deal in direct to say, "Well, I'm not saying he's lying.

I'm just saying the test's not valid because of these reasons." So that's why they brought her to say, "All this testing's invalid. We don't know. We just don't know what's going to go on with this kid." And so my image on that one was a hammer finds a nail. If you find what you're looking for, and that's why they picked her. That's what I told the jury in open. That's why they found, that's why they brought her here. And so I put up a picture of a hammer. I go, "What is that? " "I don't know. "I go, " I'm not going to waste time. That's a hammer beside it. Yeah. What's this one? ""I don't know. That's a nail." So same kind of a thing with her. That was a lot of fun, man. I think the longer I've been doing this, the more fun I'm having trying a case and being authentic and being myself.

I do have to guard against being too cute and too sarcastic. That's my nature. I don't want to be irritating. I thought I pushed it pretty hard on this one and I talked to a lot of the jurors afterwards and I just said, "Gosh, did I do too much?" I kind of was getting on my own nerves. I was annoying myself at times because I was just having so much fun and they said no, they thought it was appropriate. I think you have to have some kind of mechanism or self-awareness to know when is it okay to treat this witnes the way I'm treating her. I can't come out of the gate and just go after her. I have to show the jury there's a reason why I'm doing this. But man, I've been having a lot of fun trying cases the last few years.

I don't know how you feel about that.

Without a doubt. And I think like anything, the more you do it, the more you can bend or know where to break the rules, but also recognize where doing so could really backfire. And look, I make tons and tons of mistakes and regret lots of stuff that I do. But I think what's really interesting about what you're talking about and where it does get fun is you're kind of out of the formulaic stuff, you're out of getting in the weeds. And a lot of this stuff, a birth injury case of all cases, that is designed for you to get in the weeds if you want to make that mistake.

While you have to understand all the details, you have to understand how strips work and you've got to understand the medicine and sepsis and how it all interplays. From a jury perspective, it's those bigger, larger points. It's the credibility. It's who do I feel like which side is telling me more the truth than the other? Who do I ... And really, not to overly simplify it, but that is so much of what the case is about of how you win. But I think it's a combination of experience because I'm a huge Rick Friedman fan and I just did this little thing on his book, Becoming a Trial Lawyer, which is my favorite trial lawyer book of all time and he talks about the importance of you can't play it safe in trial. And that goes from just reputationally, everybody says that you do it this way and if I don't do it that way, people think I'm an idiot.

And also the risk of that you might go down in flames on a certain thing that you try or attempt or you think it's the right thing. Sometimes it works out amazingly, but sometimes it doesn't, but you kind of have to just go with your gut. And I think like you said, the more that you try cases, the more you can see those boundaries you can push and which ones not to.

Yeah. And one other thing, I know we're getting probably short on time here, but I have basically stopped taking depositions of the defense experts.

We don't even have it here.

Okay.

But I wouldn't do it myself.

I used to do it. It's like, I want to know what they're going to say. Now it's like, I don't really care what you're going to say. I know what you're going to say. I could write your testimony for you. I'm going to go after you on different areas and then I think it throws them off. They was, "What's this guy going to ask me? " We heard through grapevine after the verdict was like that Tom Greer wasn't even really asking him about the medicine and the case. He wasn't asking them about the medicines. Yeah, why would I do that? Why would I tangle? I consider myself, I remember this, and maybe I'm remembering it correctly, but I remember, I think it was Obama's reelection during the convention, he described Bill Clinton as the explainer in chief because Clinton was such a great communicator, the explainer in chief, which I loved.

And so Jodi Black, who's this very talented former nurse, medical malpractice lawyer that prepares these cases for us for the firm and tries them with me, she knows all that stuff. I can go to her and I can say, "Now, what does that mean again?" And then I consider myself the explainer-in-chief to the jury and that is to be get it right, but also do it be interesting, keep their attention, try to be brief, don't bore them. And I could see this jury, I would get up, I think you would agree that one of some of the funnest parts of a trial is redirect of your expert and cross. And it's like I could see them, they would get done with one of their witnesses on direct and I could see the jury in their seat just move forward when I would start my cross and I would hit them on something and then they would go, "Yep." And then they would sit back like, "Yeah, that guy's full of it too.

I didn't know why yet, but yep, he's full of it too." And it was really fun to watch.

Yeah, I can imagine bringing it to an end. You talked a little bit in your closing about how you were hitting the lack of credibility and the lack of credentials and expertise and just everything of the defense experts. What argument, did you pull anything out from the past or was it just more case specific of how you try to articulate why the jury should award a lot of money to this wine's mom?

Yeah, I think it's a mistake to try to marshal all the facts and go with. They've heard it, they know the case, try to hit the highlights, go after the defense experts and then really spend some time on damages and just acknowledge. Mitnick's got a lot of great stuff on damages models. I don't know if you have read many of these books, but I'll use a lot of his stuff, few examples of why this is fair, spend a lot of time on a life care plan and I didn't do anything special to be honest with you. I think empowerment is huge and a closing is to let them know you are in charge. And with the life care plan, I do it a certain way. I probably stole it from somebody, which is to say, "Look, we have told you what this child needs and it's there.

If you want to take something away from him, you have the power to do that. And I invite you to do that. I invite you to take anything you want to away from me. " I think that's a powerful thing. Here it is. Now you start striking through stuff and I give you the power to do that. And they did. One of the jurors, I talked to jurors later, one of the jurors had a problem with some AFOs or something, some brace that he wasn't wearing. Okay, it was $50,000 less. So okay, that's fine. I can live with that. But let me tell you one, if I got time for one quick story, because this is pretty cool, I'm staying downtown. This trial is in downtown Memphis. All our experts are downtown, so I'm staying in the hotel so I can just not travel back to East Memphis.

Can't sleep one morning early in the trial walking to get a coffee, walking down the sidewalk and I look over and there is a conch shell, a shell like you would see at the beach on the sidewalk in Memphis, Tennessee. And I do adult, "Oh, that's weird." And I stop and take a picture of it. That's weird. And I walk a couple blocks and I go, "I don't know why, but I'm going back. I'm getting that conk shell." There is something about that has meaning. And so I go, it's filthy. And so I take it back and it sits in my hotel room and I think about it. And so then in my rebuttal clothes, I use that story and me finding the contell and gave it some examples of why it was a perfect metaphor for this case. I can't remember what they all were, but the first one was when you see a shell like that, you want to hold it up to your ear and you can hear the ocean.

And I've been trying to hold this shell up to your ear throughout this whole trial to let you know the truth of what happened in this case. And I know you've been listening, you've been having your ear that I've been watching you do it. And then I said, and if you'll notice it's a filthy, it's dirty and we can shine it up and put it on a shelf and at the Cordell, it's not supposed to be here. It wasn't supposed to be on the streets of Memphis and Cordell wasn't supposed to be like this. He was supposed to be a normal little boy. He was supposed to be a normal young man and he wasn't supposed to be like this and we can shine this shell up and we can clean it up and we can give him therapies and we can give him everything he needs in life, but he's not supposed to be like he was.

And then the final thing I think was basically like sort of a passing of the shell to the jury and now it's your turn to hold this shell up to the world and And put down in your verdict what you think the cases were. I can't remember exactly how I did it and hopefully better than I just did it right now. That's awesome. Yeah, I think to find something like that was wild and then to be able to incorporate it in the case was pretty cool. Yeah.

That's one of those things that's not going to be in the Thomas Greer book. Go find a conk shell before your closing. People always want to know, how did the jury come down on the verdict?

Yeah, they gave us, like I said, they reduced the life care plan, maybe 100,000. So they gave 8.2 million our life care plan. They gave our economics right to the penny, 3.8 million. They had a counter economist that had much lower numbers. They had a counter life care plan, but they gave us our numbers. And then the non-economic was 27 million. I'd asked for 15 and they gave 27 million. Now, why did I ask for 15? It doesn't really matter. Tennessee has a cap of 750. That was a low ask for the damage to this kid, but what's the point of me asking for a hundred million? I would be afraid that the judge may throw the case out or it would be viewed. Why might some ego kind of a verdict? So that's what I anchored it at is 15 million. I said, "You can go higher.

You have the ability to do that. " And they did. And I talked to some of them later. They knew that was where they could use their own. I told them this, "This is where your experience as a human being comes into play. You decide what the value of this damage is. " And so they gave some more for the non-economic that I asked for.

Amazing. I think that's a good place to wrap up. Thomas, you shared a ton of great stuff. Really appreciated. Amazing verdict, great outcome. Just really cool stories are woven. So thanks so much for doing this. And like I said, it's just really cool that we could catch up somehow this way. You're down in Tennessee, I'm up here, we're doing our own things and you've really done great and I was really happy to see how well you've done and even happier to do this interview with you. So thanks for taking the time in.

Thank you so much for having me. I feel the same way. I saw your email come through. You said, "I don't know if you remember me. " And I say, "Yeah, of course I remember you. I remember you very well, and I really appreciate being able to reconnect with you and the invite to be on this podcast. I've listened to a lot of your episodes of your podcast at this point. It's a great podcast.

Thanks, man.

Glad you're doing so well.

Great to have you on it and I hope to catch up in person one of these days at some seminar to trial geeks.That's why we remember each other.

Yeah, we'll do it. Okay. Thank you, Brandon.

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 pamdmal.com/refer. Thanks for listening.