Joe Fried has a theory about why verdict values stay low in conservative states. “If there are cases where somebody's asking for $30, $50 million, and they're not getting it, I may need to listen to that. But if nobody is asking for that – if they're asking for $5 million in a wrongful death case – then of course they're not getting $30.” The celebrated trucking litigator returns to TLU to share lessons from two recent cases: a $2.3–$2.4 million verdict and a near-$100 million settlement. Tune in to this conversation with host Dan Ambrose for a masterclass in finding hidden trucking coverage, mediating at the start negotiation, and managing fear – but not getting rid of it entirely. After all, your client hired you to be their voice. “I hope you feel the weight of it.”

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2026 Programming

☑️ TLU Beach, June 3-6, Huntington Beach, CA

Episode Snapshot

• Joe describes a back-to-back trial calendar year in which cases repeatedly resolved days — or even the morning — before trial.
• In Newport News, Joe represented the family of a teenager who was killed when the car he was riding in struck the rear corner of an illegally parked tractor-trailer.
• The jury returned a verdict of $2.3–2.4 million — beating the defense's pre-trial offers by roughly a million dollars.
• In a different case, Joe represented a 10-month-old girl who was left an incomplete quadriplegic after a truck rear-ended her 16-year-old mother's car. The life care plan was approximately $30 million – and the case settled for just under $100 million.
• At the upcoming TLU Beach, Joe will present on these topics: applying trucking methodologies to non-nine-figure trucking cases (Thursday); understanding his updated “speed trial” approach (Friday), and then back-to-back sessions on connecting with witnesses and covering trucking cases from the basics through advanced strategies (Saturday).

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All right. Welcome Joe Fried back on the TLU podcast with a whole bunch of new experiences in the past year. You've been learning constantly to continue the mission of, honestly, helping people become better lawyers, but more specifically better trucking lawyers. So this is great stuff, Joe.

I would go the other way, say trucking lawyers, but really just being better lawyers. I mean, we created an environment for us to do that, a platform for us to do that. I remember us talking about this way before COVID and look at what this has grown into. I'm so proud of what it is. I hear from people all the time how it's making a difference for them. So congratulations on what you've built. You should be proud of it.

Well, I appreciate that. We've all built together. I get the privilege of being kind of like the conductor of an orchestra.

Of people who don't want to play together, right? You got to get a little better at this. No, I'm teasing. I'm seriously, and this isn't supposed to be a Dan Ambrose Accolades moment, but for people who don't know, watch the level of commitment and work that you've put in to get to where this is. And this wouldn't be where it is without that amazing work and an effort to constantly get better and better. Not only with the materials that go in, programming that goes in, but the whole setup. I just wanted to publicly say what a great job I think you're doing with this stuff. We're

Going to really experience it in person come June 2nd. You wait and see. But that's for another conversation. But right now, Joe, you've had a pretty active year as you always do because it doesn't matter where you're at, you're always pushing to get better. And so I know you tried a case recently in Virginia. So give us a little bit about that case and what it was about and the things that we learned.

First of all, crazy year, yes. I mean, literally starting the second half of last year, it was literally back-to-back trial calendars and it was back-to-back cases that would get all the way up to days before trial, even morning of trial and then resolving. It was absolutely nuts. We'll talk about one of those results after we talk about this, but everything led up to then finally a case actually, one of the ones that wasn't sure would go to trial does go to trial, which I know people who are trial lawyers understand. The ones you think you're going to try, you don't try. The ones you don't think you're going to try, you end up having to try. So the Virginia case was an interesting case, a wrongful death case of a 17-year-old boy, really nice young man. The case went to trial in Newport News. The basic facts are a tractor trailer driver stops his truck in front of a Popeye's to run inside ostensibly because he had to go to the bathroom urgently.

So he leaves his truck out front and it's a three-lane road. It turns his flashers on, runs inside along comes ... Meanwhile, the school lets out for the day a car load of young kids driving home from school in a BMW. And you can probably already tell where this is going to go, but a young driver, inexperienced driver, ends up hitting the rear corner of the trailer that's parked there. Our client was a passenger in the rear of that car. The trailer came in right sort of almost through the rear side window and took him out. The challenge in the case was that under Virginia law, there's this big difference between negligence from a causation perspective for a vehicle that stopped on a roadway. It can be deemed not the cause of a crash. It can be deemed a condition. There was a lot of pretrial stuff that had to do with that.

We got through all that stuff and ultimately the defense in the case, which was to obviously blame the young driver of the car and to say that they owned that they were negligent in parking where they parked. They said their driver shouldn't have parked in front of Popeye's, not the cause of the crash. The cause of the crash, 100%. This kid who happened to not be licensed and that came into trial and was inexperienced and was probably driving too fast and dot, dot, dot. That was what the whole case was really about. They focused on the driver of the car. We focused on just trying to say truck driver can't illegally and improperly park like that and have zero responsibility.

I think I understand clearly that trucks parked on the side of the road in front of a Popeyes really.

We won the liability case. We didn't end up getting the numbers that we wanted in the case. And I think there are two reasons for that. Well, first, any questions about the facts, I didn't do a great job laying them out, but he's actually in the road. He's actually in one of three lanes. So he's not on the shoulder. He's actually in the lane.

Just objectively, it sounds like a challenging case that I think most people probably would've passed on because of even with the technical violation, there seems like so much contributory fault on the part of the driver, but I don't know what the separation is in Virginia as far as that goes.

The other thing that made it challenging is this is a road that there are businesses on and sometimes people do stop to make deliveries at these businesses and things along those lines so long, straightaway, all those kind of things. There were definitely challenges in the case, though I really felt like we could win the liability side and we did win the liability side. There was a lot of comparative fault. Remember, we've got a passenger in the car so that helped us a lot, but there was a lot of focus on the idea that our young passenger got into a vehicle with somebody who was unlicensed and some things along those lines. So they were fighting liability. They were fighting causation on a number of fronts, but that was the main thing.

So for the 17-year-old young man who died, how did you think about telling the jury what number? What's the value of this young man's life?

Yeah, so that's where it became interesting. And sometimes you learn things at trial you wish you had known before trial. You know what I mean by that? I know from your old, especially from your old criminal defense days, I'm sure you learned some things every now and then during trial from your old trial days, right? Yo try to avoid that and that's what discovery is supposed to be all about. But we learned some things about our case that I wish I'd known before. The biggest one was that I knew the mom was 40 years old at the time of the crash and she had what I thought to be a beautiful relationship with her son, although it was not typical. I mean, she was a single mom. She had had him when she was young. She had had lots of challenges growing up herself, lots of challenges in relationship.

So he almost was like her friend and her son and he was the one who kind of had the ability to pull her out of dark places, if that makes sense, because she would go to dark places. And I thought that that was a beautiful story and it would've been had that been the whole story. We had a lot of problems in the case, and I think this is a warning sign for anybody. When we went to family members and asked them if they would testify, we got a very lukewarm and negative response in terms of, "Well, we just don't want to be involved. We just don't feel like we're the right people to talk about this. " In hindsight, it was a giant red flag because so many of our cases, and this is whether it's trucking or anything else, they're built on the backs of lay witnesses, not expert witnesses.

They're actually built on the backs of your before and after witnesses and people who could speak to relationships and things along those lines. And in this case, we knew we were having challenges with that, but there was this beautiful story and that story was developed through psychodramatic techniques and using psychodramatists and others to build it out. The problem is that it was worse than that. And actually we had people from the family who ended up testifying for the defense in the case about the challenges in the relationship between the mom and the son. I think that, I mean, obviously it did tremendous damage to, we asked for like $30 million or something like that on the death case and we'll talk about your question in a moment. I would not have asked for the numbers that I had asked for had I known that an example was after we presented that the kid was 17 years old, he had a girlfriend, sometimes he wouldn't stay at home, he would be with the girlfriend and the mom allowed that to happen, those kind of things, which we really didn't think were a big deal.

We thought that was sort of the extent of the challenges in that, but a family member testified that the son actually lived with him more than with the mom and really did a lot of damage, basically had very little good to say about the mom. And literally that's what came out and it came out through the defense as witnesses who were family members of ours. So all of that is to kind of give you a flavor for why the case went sideways. And I blame myself for not knowing because as whoever is the lead in a case has the responsibility of doing that. We did the right things in terms of talking to people and trying to get them on board with us. We should have done more in my opinion. We did not appreciate intrafamilial challenges in the case and I think we could have done a better job with that, frankly.

So had we known those challenges, I wouldn't have asked for as big a number as I did for Virginia. In Virginia, those numbers are really, really high asking for $30 million in a death case. In fact, at the mediation of the case, I remember talking to the mediator about, I'm not sharing anything confidential from the mediation. I just want to make sure that's clear. But I remember I'm always concerned about that because I had a case in Florida. We tried the case and one of my associates at the time got on a podcast like this and talked about what happened at mediation and the defense filed a motion to vacate the verdict. There were some peculiar law that says if you violate confidentiality, it can vacate a verdict. I ended up having to testify in front of a judge and all this stuff. Thankfully, we survived that, but I'm very sensitive to ... The reason I'm bringing this up is because I think it's a teaching point for people.

A lot of times you've heard me say before that I think we're stuck in paradigms on value. And a lot of the times what happens is that becomes self-perpetuating. So you're in a state like Virginia where historically the numbers are low, but the numbers stay low because people ask for low numbers in those ... What I've told mediators in the past often is when they come back and they say, nobody gets those kind of numbers here in X, Timbuktu, in this case, Virginia. What my response is, are there cases that are going to trial where those kind of numbers are being asked for? If there are cases where somebody's asking for 30, $50 million and they're not getting it, I may need to listen to that. But if nobody is asking for that, if they're asking for $5 million in a wrongful death case, then of course they're not getting 30.

And so I challenge mediators, show me actual trial results where people have asked for big numbers and that's going to be persuasive to me. If you don't have that, then you telling me that this community doesn't produce those kind of numbers isn't really all that influential to me because I think that the plaintiff's bar, largely because of what all of us have done collaboratively, has gotten really good at asking for big numbers. That's why there are big numbers, especially post- COVID. So going back to your question in this particular case, what I was looking to do in Virginia in this case, and the reason that I agreed to try this one is I wanted to try to break this paradigm of numbers in Virginia in cases like this where they were saying literally one to $2 million is what happens in these kinds of cases.

If you can get to two, two and a half million, you settle these cases. I was like, "You know what? Somebody other than the defense and mediator and an insurance company's going to have to say that to me. " In this case, it turned out to be right. We still beat their numbers by about a million bucks from the offers and things, but it was not anywhere near where I wanted the case to go. At the same time, given the challenges that came out during trial, hell, I would've settled the case for those numbers had I known those issues. So we all learn in trials. And I think that for me, I got a lot of congratulations after from a lot of people saying, "Wow, in that case, you did great." And I felt like crap because I thought we wanted to do a lot better.

We wanted to do better not only for the mom and this family, but we wanted to do better for Virginia. We wanted to be able to show if you go and you ask for the right numbers, you'll go and get bigger numbers. You live to fight another day and I hope to do that in Virginia and another opportunity.

If you're in Virginia, you're listening to this and you got a good trucking case that you might need some assistance on. This could be the test case for Joe to get the 20 or 30 and help you get it. So that'd be great. I'm sure people would be happy about that too.

Sharif Gray, who's going to be out at TLU, got a really nice verdict.

I know.

He's one to watch. He's a really great lawyer and a super guy. So if you don't know him, he's somebody, look for an opportunity to get to know him.

Yeah, he's only been doing it for a few years. He's really learned fast, put to use what he's learned because his first TLU I think was in 2022 because I think Claggett bought him a scholarship or something like that and brought him out there. And so that's only four years. That's pretty good to learn that fast and I think I got $20 million verdict or something on that sex abuse case. And then he did a webinar on it and he's also presenting on it at TLU Beach.

I'm going to try to, if he's presenting at a time when I can get away from one of my presentations, I told him I'd poke my head in and give him some accolades because I think really highly of him. He's definitely an up and comer. He loves trial and he's trying cases. So huge respect for that young man.

And he even did a conference out there in Virginia and brought you and Eric Gerard and a few other folks out there to present at it. And Kenny Berger

Yeah, he did a great job. He put together really a very heartfelt program where people rolled up their sleeves and got into it pretty quickly. I mean, it was pretty deeply is what I should have

Said. Wish I could have made it. Now, so what was the final result of that trial, the final verdict?

I think we got 2.4 million on it and I think that's right, 2.3 or 2.4 or right between that.

And then mostly it offered you beforehand was like a million and a half or something like that.

Yeah. And that was even soft. That was kind of a soft offer. We could get it done in this range all the way up until trial, the numbers were south of a million that were being offered. So it kind of felt like it felt easy, like what they held back from me and I give the trial lawyer on the other side a lot of credit. I mean, she had the family members in her pocket and I didn't know.

You had no choice. So even though you didn't get

What you want. So it was one of those things where I kept asking myself, and I'm sure other lawyers have had this experience where, what am I missing? What am I missing? Well, I was missing something. So that was that.

What are you missing here? Those sneaky defense lawyers not showing all their cards beforehand, give you full information.

I think that in a state like Virginia, they're more emboldened. They just haven't had a lot of big numbers have come out, kind of they're bold on it. That's right. It was. It lined up

Because that was a tough case, that case you got that verdict then.

It lined up really well and if people don't know that story, they should listen to them. There's a lot to learn from it. The bigger question that you ask is how do you look at damages in these cases? And you've heard me say this before and others have too. When you get to non-economic damages, they're by their very nature and by definition they're non-economic. You have to build a construct for the jurors to appreciate what that looks like. Why things like the want ad or talking about this in terms of a new job or things like that. I mean, these are all efforts to, or even a per diem type argument. These are all different ways to create a construct so that regular people can start thinking about economics in a non-economic situation. I mean, we don't say somebody has a $50 headache. No, no, that's a $300 headache.

I mean, that's not the way we normally talk outside of a courtroom. We don't talk about pain in terms of money anywhere outside of a courtroom. So we're creating a construct and that's both good news and bad news. Since you're creating a construct anyway, the limitations that people have are self-created limitations. They're based on what they believe their construct that they're stuck in. Could be an appropriate construct or it could be an inappropriate construct. Nonetheless, I think it's important. The first step here is to recognize that we're dealing with constructs. And so there's not necessarily a right or wrong, but a lot of lawyers become self-limiting because they believe there's a range of value for a certain kind of a case that they've been taught to believe is true and then it becomes self-perpetuating. That's what they ask juries for. That's what they ask the insurance company for.

It becomes a way of being stuck where people don't even realize that they're stuck there. And you've heard me say this and I say it as often as I can to lawyers. I say, "You want me to give you the keys to doubling the value of your next case?" Ask for twice as much, ask for four times as much. I mean, get out of the paradigm that you're stuck in, go through the struggle of asking yourself, why is this wrong? And I think what you're going to find is the only internal dialogue that says this is wrong or this is too much is the construct that you're stuck in. I mean, you have a belief that a broken arm case is worked between X and Y. So when you get Y, you walk around feeling awesome, "Hey man, I got the high end of the range." Well, it's only the high end of the range because you define the range where it is.

What if we set that number that you just got at the low end of the range and you shoot for three times that amount or you might not get three times that amount, but you might get twice that amount and now you're retraining yourself and everybody else on what that value proposition is. That's why we're in the position we're in now as plaintiff's lawyers in the country where some people, including me, I mean, I think we're reaching some levels and some kind of cases that are unsustainable, nine figure results and single event cases or I applaud them like we all do on our side, but it's hard to sustain those. If that became the norm, I'm not sure our economy could sustain those.

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

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

So we're beginning with an ending with community and great learning. So TLU Huntington Beach, June 2nd through 7th. Be there. We'll see you.

I don't think it'd be the norm and I think most of us get chopped down a bit by the judges and the courts and to keep the economy in somewhat balanced, right? That's why great settlements like the one that we're about to talk about are a great thing because it's an agreement. It's not like some jury said it. It's like, "Hey, the insurance company and the truck company and you all agreed this is the settlement and shake hands and move forward." Let's move to that one because I know that was a result that you're pretty proud of and rightfully so the result. I mean, it's tragic face.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of confidentiality around it because that's what happens with big numbers usually. We try to keep things not confidential, but the other side ultimately wants it confidential. And then if you really think about it, when you get to big enough numbers, it's probably better for your own client for a lot of those numbers to be confidential, at least to protect them from

Their family members.

Lots of friends who come out of the woodwork and-

They forgot they had.

In some cases, even these days protect them from what might happen with ICE or things along those lines. I just had a case that we were forced to settle on the eve of trial the week before trial because the family could not deal with the stress of going ... They were undocumented and I had to resolve a case for what feels like 10 or 15 cents on the dollar because they wouldn't go to court. And even once I fixed that and said, "Well, we'll do it by Zoom," which is far from ideal, but more ideal than not showing up for trial, they still were worried. They thought their result, if we went and got a 50 or $60 million result that ICE would be after them.

Sure. Trump would made a big deal of it. Easy undocumented worker coming and taking advantage of our insurance companies.

I said, "Look, I don't want that to happen. If you have to leave the country with $50 million, you're probably okay. You can buy your other country for that. " They didn't see it that way and ultimately we had to accept an offer that I thought was way too low. That's happening more and more. People need to understand we lawyers need to understand that there's a population of people in the United States right now who are living in abject fear of being able to participate fully in our system. And if you're not talking to them about that and they're not talking to you about that, you should bring it up. It's a big issue and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. We always had issues with how do you deal with at trial, legal status and all those kind of things, but it's at a different place now.

I think if they have young children, then it's a scary time for a lot of people. Jumping into this case, I'm not going to identify the defendants in the case. I will tell you that it was a case that involved sort of on the surface level, there was a trucking company and then we were also saying that there were other people in addition to that initial trucking company who were responsible for the crash because the initial trucking company, basically there were two other company, two other trucking companies really because of the way it worked. Both of them together only had a couple million dollars in coverage.

Where'd you find the rest of the coverage or the rest of the money?

So again, with being careful not to breach confidentiality, I mean, today's day and age because of a number of things that have happened over, let's say the last five or six years in trucking, one of the very common sort of scenarios that you have is you will look at a wreck report and you'll look at a set of facts and you'll see, okay, here's a driver and they're working for this motor carrier and you go through the process of getting the insurance for that motor carrier and there's a million or two million or whatever in coverage or 750 in coverage, which is the minimum federal side. And still what I see is most lawyers don't look beyond that. They don't know how to, they don't appreciate. And that's really where the difference between learning how to do trucking. One of the big things that you're learning is that the transportation cycle that involves commercial trucking is interesting and it's different than what most people understand.

And there's all kinds of different players who may be involved in that. And if you have a case where you have catastrophic injuries or death and you have insurance limits that don't satisfy the case, then one of the biggest things that we're having to do, and for years this is where our value play really came in as lawyers, was to be able to come in in those situations and find another avenue of coverage. And sometimes it was finding it through a trailer and finding out how to figure out how to attach the insurance from a trailer or a chassis or a dolly or something like that to a case. Oftentimes though, it's looking for other parties who may also have responsibility. And so in this case, that's what happened. We had a situation where you have a 10-month-old child who becomes an incomplete quadriplegic at age 10 months old.

By the time trial, case got pushed really hard to get to trial, but the child was three years old getting ready to go into trial and she was essentially paralyzed from, think of the chest bone down. She is one of the cutest little things you've ever seen in the world. There were all kinds of challenges with the family though. We had a mother who had a history of being somewhat irresponsible, frankly, 16 years old at the time of the crash. The crash happens at three o'clock in the morning. She's out with her baby at three o'clock in the morning. There were all kinds of issues about whether the child was properly restrained or not in the vehicle, those kind of things. The child actually got taken away from the mom by DFCS at the hospital because of the wreck. So there were all kinds of challenges in the case.This was a case Joe Camerlingo and I handled together.

This was a case where it were no holds barred. This is one of those cases that becomes a full-time job. Interestingly, this was a case that was scheduled for trial in December. I think I started our discussion today saying I was on these back-to-back calendars. We thought all the time this case was going to settle and then it didn't. And so we were right up against the trial and it's sort of like almost like in a situation where you're driving down the road and a truck moves out of the way and suddenly you see the hazard. That's what happened in this case because we were so focused on other cases that were getting ready to go to trial and then had to flip into this one and make sure it got put together as cleanly as possible. So I don't know what else you want me to talk about at the case, but I mean from a value perspective in this case, this is a case that got resolved for just under $100 million.

How much of that was the life care plan for this child?

The life care plan I believe was depending on which version of it you believed was somewhere in the $30 million range. This was interesting because lots of things drive value and drive value decision making in the case. I believe the value of this case was north of $100 million, significantly north of $100 million. If you take the liability risks out, which there were significant liability risks, this was a case just real quickly. I mean, our teenage mom driver was driving about under 15 miles an hour on a highway at three o'clock in the morning. She had a flat tire and along comes a truck and hits her from behind, but there are all kinds of peculiarities in the case. I mean, not the least of which is just three o'clock in the morning and you have a young driver out there with their baby and everything that you might read into that.

But then there were all kinds of peculiarities like both the mom and the child were both found outside of the vehicle afterwards, but there really wasn't a mechanism for them to be ejected from the vehicle because of the way it happened. So there was all kinds of even confusion at the scene. How does this even happen? Mom had severely broken legs so she couldn't have gotten out of the vehicle. She couldn't have taken the baby out of the vehicle. But I mean, it was just really, really messy, the facts. And there wasn't any way to resolve that messiness because there weren't witnesses or even experts who could really definitively answer the questions. They would get to a point where they're just scratching their head. What Experian shows us is that the weirder the facts are it always works against the plaintiff because we have the burden of proof and we're asking for a lot of money.

So jurors, I think, need to be able to pull the dots together or else they feel like you haven't met your burden of proof. And so you have to be really careful in those kinds of situations. But going back to the value side of this case, I mean, we had a $30 million or so life care plan. You got a long lifetime where this young girl needs to be taken care of. So it's easy to ... And then you've got the non-economics, right? It's easy to go ask for millions and millions of dollars a year in a case like that for someone who has become at 10 months old and incomplete quadriplegic. The problem is the venue that we were in has never allowed the appellate courts have never allowed a nine-figure verdict in a single event case to stand. They've always found a way to undo it.

Those kind of things start to weigh. So even once you get past the insurance company or you get them thinking about big numbers, there are some times in cases there are upper limits that you have to start to consider from an appeals perspective and this was that case. I think that if we tried that case, if we got by liability, it would've been a $200 million case. But it was also a case where just literally a couple of weeks before trial, the offer was less than $10 million because of the liability issues. And so the lesson that comes from that, I think everybody has heard a million times, but people seem to forget and that's the best numbers come when the actual fear of trial is upon everybody. So those lawyers, and there are lots of them out there, I used to be one of them that would stop my feet at the end of a mediation and be pissed off that they didn't offer me what I wanted.

You should really just be smiling. You really have to be thinking about mediation as a stepping stone as the beginning of a negotiation, not where the end of a negotiation happens almost always. There's exceptions to that, but almost always that's the case. Almost always there's more money coming if you stay the course and you show them that you're willing to go to the trial. That's why even that case we talked about, the Virginia case, you just got to go to trial. I mean, you got to show them you're the lawyer who will take the case to trial and that scares them more than anything else I know.

And also obviously being in trial and having some results, because people just want to talk about going to trial, but they don't want to train to get ready for trial. They just think somehow because they're a lawyer, they're just going to be themselves up there that it's all just going to flow until They get there and then they realize the commitment, the time, the stress, and really the nerves that affect every human being up there when there's all that money, all that pressure on the line without training, most people just don't perform. It's like you want to just become a professional, you want to be a quarterback in a real football game. Forget about the NFL, even a lower level game, but you don't want to actually get up there and take passes and throw pads. You just want to study the playbook. That's most lawyers just want to study the playbook and don't actually practice the skills of presenting and connecting with the jury.

And so that's something that people got to do if they want to go to trial. They got to get ready, get yourself ready.That's why I started, that's one of the reasons that motivated me besides the pandemic to do what I do is because I stuttered the first six months of being a lawyer just in court, just talking to the court. You know what I mean? Because I know those nerves are real. This fear is real and people don't want to talk about it, yet they just think it's going to disappear somehow when they step into courtroom, which is the craziest thing ever.

There's a lot of ways that this discussion can go in that regard. I agree. I mean, being a trial lawyer, being like many other professions is an exercise in fear management at some level. I mean, I don't think you really want the fear to go away entirely. I think you want to use it as a catapult to other things, but at the same time, I totally agree with you that this is a skill. I don't think anybody would say, "I'm going to get up and try to ... I'm going to recite a poem. Let's just get something even simpler than a trial. I'm going to recite a poem to a room full of strangers. I'm never going to practice doing that ever before I do it. " I mean, for most people, I think they would at least agree it's not going to be their best performance if they did that.

And now add to that that we're charged with a pretty heavy thing. I mean, somebody came and hired you to be their voice, to be their advocate, to make justice happen for them. I think shame on you if you don't do everything you can to prepare yourself to be the best advocate. I hope you feel the weight of it. It's not just, "Oh gee, I got this great case. What the hell are you going to do with it? " I mean, if this was your favorite person in the whole world, would you want you representing them or would you want the person who's ... I think the other thing, and I think you would agree with this, becoming a trial lawyer is not a once and done thing. Even the training that you get. I mean, some people say, "Well, I was on my advocacy team in school." Great.

That's a great first start. Do you really feel competent to go and direct and cross and do all the things that need to be done? Before that, understanding the strategies that you can only really understand. And I don't mean only strategies in terms of legal strategies. I mean communication strategies. To have a plan of how you're going to approach a witness and how do you want to present? What do you want to look like up there? A lot of lawyers, they don't appreciate it. And then what happens in my experience, Dan, is that you don't do it for a few years.You get a few years in, then the fear, then it's like, shit, I'm not even sure I know how to put a photograph into evidence. I also feel shame around that. And so I'm not going to own that. I just got to almost become a faker and I'm just going to fake it from here on out because I don't want anybody to know.

And the reality is we have people who come to TLU, we make it safe to say, "I don't know. " And we make it safe to say ... And even if you think you know, you may not know, by the way. So I guess what I'm trying to say is it's a light. Hopefully people who are doing this for a living, this is what you want to be. They call it practicing law for a reason. Practice, become better. I mean, I've been doing this for 30 plus years. I've got a lot of trials. I still think there's another level for me. So I want to keep pushing, keep learning.

There better be. So it makes it fun too is the continued growth. If you peaked out, well, what fun would it be if you weren't always trying to get better?

I agree. What I'm trying to do is encourage people who might listen to this, who might be in that camp who have allowed themselves to fall into a place where, well, I just haven't done it so it's too late for me. We've got people who've come through some of the trainings that you and I have done who are first trial in their 60s. They have to suck all that up and come in, be with a bunch of young kids, whippersnappers and not feel like they know what they're doing. To see them afterwards when they go and they do something out in the world and they come back and they go, "That was awesome. I didn't think I could do it. " And they can because that's the other thing about trial work is if you do the work, it's not rocket science, but you can get dramatically better just with even a little bit of training, you can become dramatically better at communicating and doing this thing called trial.

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

I'm doing a bootcamp before the TLU Beach at my Hermosa house and one of the guys coming is 75 years old. And I told him, I said, "Man, I am working with you as much as we need to work together because this is going to be a transformative experience for you because the fact that you're 75 but you're still that hungry to work this hard to learn these new skills, it hasn't been easy. We've been working hard because it's just like the reality is when we get older, there is cognitive decline in every one of us, whether you're a professional athlete or you're a engineer or an accountant or a lawyer. In some way, that you have to figure out how to train around and take into account that doesn't work as fast as it used to, just like our bodies aren't a strong as they when we were 30.

It does. It doesn't mean that you can't be even more effective than when you were cognitively fully in 150%. You have to learn how to own where you are and take it from there. There's going to be improvement opportunities. Here's the reality in my experience, and I think you'll agree with this, most lawyers, even people who profess to be trial lawyers, they've never been really trained. They've never, ever actually been trained. I remember Jerry Spence one time, I was getting ready to try a case. It was kind of like a career early case for me. California was going to be a long trial and I had this kind of famous defense guy against me. I remember him coming up to me and kind of putting his big arms on my shoulders and looking at me and saying," I hear you've got this big case coming.

"I said," Yes, sir. "And he said," I hear this guy who's trying the case against you is been practicing law for 50 plus years. "I said," Yes, sir. "He goes," I know a little bit about that. "I said," Yes, sir. "And he said," Let me tell you, most lawyers, even trial lawyers with 50 years, they don't actually have 50 years of experience. They have one year of experience repeated 50 times. "And I thought that was very insightful because what he was telling me was most lawyers do something once and then they rinse and repeat it. I mean, I don't care if you file a complaint, you've got your complaint, you just change the names for the next complaint. You've deposed a neuropsychologist once, you're deposing them again, you pull your outline out from the last one, you make a few tweaks and voir dire. Most trial lawyers, they have the same damn voir dire every time.

They just change a few points. Opening follows the same exact ... So we're creatures of habit and just like all human beings. But the good news and bad news of that is that there are patterns that make sense and that if you don't like the pattern you're in, if we can open your eyes to ... I'm always talking about shifting the paradigm, that's my word, but that's a paradigm shift. If we can open your eyes and you can say," Oh shit, I didn't know that I could do that. "I'm sure when you do some of your presentation skills work, it's the first time people have ever even contemplated or thought about where their eyes are looking when they're talking about something, what's going on with their hands, how do they interact with a board? Right now they just do it. There's no consciousness to the process.

And once there is consciousness to the process, now we have opportunities. Now you can say," Okay, wait, well shit, there's a million ways we can do this. Let's figure out for the particular lawyer what's the best one. And for someone who's 75 years old, it may be different than for somebody who's 25 years old. For women, it may be very different than for men in terms of what is the best way to approach something. So I don't think it's even a one size fits all scenario. Anyway, I've rambled. What I'm hoping is that there's somebody out there who needs to hear this and who will take a deep breath and say, "Yeah, despite my feelings about how I am and where I am right now, I do want to get better at this. " And that's what this whole thing's for. And I just want you to know that it's a safe place because you would be, whether you come to a small program or the big program, you're coming to a place of like- minded people who have all felt that same way and who it's not a showoff place.

It's not a place where somebody's swinging around saying, "I'm the best." What you'll see is people who you think are the best who are still working on becoming better. And I think that's what makes it so special is you got very top of the ladder of people who are still looking in the other room and saying, "I'm here to teach, but I'm also here to learn." When you teach that 75-year-old, Dan Ambrose, you're going to learn from the 75-year-old too, right?

Always learning is patience when I'm teaching too and being a better teacher because thinking, "Okay, my only job is to make this person better. That's it. Nothing else matters." To be able to communicate with this individual so they understand the concepts and skills that they need to adopt and learn and help them to control their facial expressions. Most people never thought, "What's going on with their face when they're talking to people? " It makes a difference. You look like this if you have a relaxed face and some warmth when you say hi to somebody, what your face just naturally warms up unconsciously or you say good morning to people. But when you're in the pressure of trial, you look like most people are stressed. Well,

What happens when you're the pressure of trial, you fall to your defaults and what if you've never actually even looked at any of the defaults? You never consciously ... What I'm trying to suggest to people is that you can keep getting better and better from wherever you are. There's always a path forward. TLU is a great place to do that because it's a safe place to do it. I think a lot of people get stuck in a place where they don't know there's a place they can go and just say, "Look, I don't feel like I know what the hell I'm doing and I just need help." My hope is that that will invigorate some people to come and to get excited again about the process of becoming a better and better trial lawyer, which in my experience, and I think yours too, Dan, it makes us better people overall.

Learning how to communicate better with a jury also teaches you how to communicate better with your staff and with your people at home. And

That's why I tell people that come to my bootcamps. I'm like, "You have become great. The skills that you just started to learn, you need to practice them every day. Before you start talking to one of your staff members, you better think about eye contact and think about what's going on in your face. It matters in the connection. Same thing with your spouse or your family members. It's like learning these habits of mindfulness and intentionality with everything that goes on with our voice. And think about practicing speaking more slowly when you're trying to communicate because the pressure of a courtroom speeds everybody up until you become intentional with your breathing. People stop breathing when they present. It's the craziest thing. They try to get a 30-second statement out in one breath and their fresh falls off. You see the stress to their body because they're not breathing properly.

I remember when I started working with our friend Dave Clark, he said, when you can make the unconscious conscious, then you're going to be fucking dangerous.

That's actually what I was trying to find those words is once people see this, it will make the unconscious conscious. They will suddenly go, oh my gosh, I never even considered X. Once you've considered it, you can't unsee it. It is conscious now. And sometimes that brings on some fear. It's like, oh. Or it also brings on some light bulb moments where people go, "Oh, maybe this is why I have trouble communicating with people, or this is why I'm misunderstood by people, or this is why blah, blah, blah." Hugely important is the recognition that this is a teachable skill. Everybody can get better. Some people have the natural quote gift of gab and other people have more challenges with that, but everybody can continue to get better. To me, that's exciting.

No, it is exciting. And one place we're going to do that is at TLU Beach. And this is our fifth year doing it at the same hotel. And our third year in a row, we bought out the whole hotel and I really am stoked for this year because every year, trimmed it down to one program a year, although next year we're going to do two because we do an advanced deposition program, led our friend Philip Miller, I try to put it all into it, not just an educational, but an experience for people overall where try to raise the bar every year and really my goal is to people come leave like, "Wow, that was an amazing experience." Not just the learning, but all the friends that they made, all the connections and having a great time for five days, because this is a tough job and it's a lonely job too.

It's very lonely and to be able to ... Most of us as we get older don't make a lot of new friends because there's just no time and commonality of interest. But on top of great learning, I try to make TLU really a friend machine because ... And in this year, like we're doing on Tuesday night, on Tuesday night, we're having a dinner party for everybody that's there, whether they're an attendee or an exhibitor. And so that way, and to sit down, buy out the entire restaurant and have the entire restaurant at the hotel. The LaRey is a great restaurant to ourselves and I'm even going to give people ... We do our personal bios. Whoever's sitting at your table, you're going to have their bios before you get there, kind of know who you're sitting with and really start to build connections before we even started just to create a more robust program.

And I love my theme parties and you've also agreed. Wait till you see it. We're just designing the wells, designing your tracksuits, going into the printer. You're going to be very excited. Your free Goldberg, Joe Fried tracksuit. So the most important starts with the education at TLU and you're teaching quite a bit this year. As we always do, we put you to work. This is no vacation for you.

You go home, you now have a community of people you're going to be interacting with that you didn't before, that you can ask questions to, that you can learn from, that you know are like- minded to you. So I think it's super important. But yeah, let's talk about content because you got me working my ass off on this.

That's right. So on Wednesday it's just workshops. So you have Wednesday off. So you're going to get to be able to enjoy Wednesday. There's going to be eight workshops on Wednesday. None of those you're teaching. You're taking the day off getting ready. But Wednesday afternoon there is a golf outing. I know you don't have time for golf because neither do I. But a lot of people like golf. So I thought we'd accommodate our golfers. Ted Wacker's hosting that. And there's also pickleball and then our friend Kurt Zanders take people go- kart racing. Then we have our little opening party. And this year too, we're going to have a poker tournament every night in the presidential suite. Besides our lobby lounge with the ping pong tables and my nephew Harrison, DJ at BCME being the DJ, I got an official DJ booth this year. We're always stepping up our game.

He's actually a really good DJ. I've seen his work before and he jokes around a lot, but when he gets out there being a DJ, he's damn serious and he does a good job. I know. I know he is. I said,

"It's good thing you don't make a lot of money because you probably just moved to Abisa for a few years at BJ." He's like, "Hell yeah, I would. I'll come back when I'm 35 and be a lawyer, but I want to go be a DJ rockstar for a few years." I'm like, "I wouldn't blame you. I could understand that. "

I wanted people to know he's serious about it. It's not just a playgame for him. He's really good.

Yeah. Well, he'll appreciate you saying that because he takes a lot of pride in his DJ. But Thursday morning, you and our good friend, Satcha Oliver. Oh yeah, we're having a Friday. We're having the Satchel Oliver Wild West party. So he's bringing 500 pounds of Oliver Angus beef. And he's like, "I got to have a wod fire grill, Dan. Don't be giving me no gas grill for my beef." I said, "Okay, Satch." And we're going to have a mechanical bull too. So Satch could show up his rodeo skills on the mechanical bull if he wants to. I don't think he should do that after age 40, but that's just my general. I'm getting older. Don't do silly stuff like ride mechanical bulls.

I think I'd like to bring a blow up trial exhibit of a release form and we can have him sign that release before he gets on that bull. Let's jump in because I know we're both running a little bit. Yeah, so Thursday morning, Satch and I are going to spend three hours. I love teaching with Satch. He pushes me and I push him. If you look at depositions or trial, you'll see a lot of stuff that I think would somewhat influence by me. And if you look at speed trial, you see things have been influenced by Satch and we continue to collaborate and think about it. But historically what struck us recently was that when we've presented on this in the past, we have focused on cases that are frankly huge trucking cases, nine figure result of satches or some nine figure result of mine.

I had somebody come up to me and gently remind me that I think the way he said it was mere mortals out here are not handling nine figure cases regularly. And look at all this effort that goes in that's hard to do when it's not a nine figure case or an eight figure case. I talked to Satch about that and we agreed that what we would do this year was really try to bring these concepts that we've been teaching for big cases, but bring them down to quote regular cases, regular trucking cases. So we're going to be focused on those kinds of situations where the more typical truck crash cases and how do you apply the methodologies that he and I have worked on together for so long in those kind of cases over a three hour time period, that's what Thursday morning is. Friday morning I am going to do three hours myself where I'm going to sort of provide my updated thoughts on speed trial.

It'll have a trucking bend to it, but frankly, it's designed for anybody and anybody would benefit from this. Some parts of it will have to do with liability and thoughts on that side, things that you've heard me talk about before, reducing things to binary sort of light switch concepts, but then also a lot of damages materials, a lot of things to do from a damages perspective on speed trial, new thoughts on damages presentations. So that's going to be my three hours on Friday. And then on Saturday I'm doing you've got me multitasking for the first hour. I'm going to be doing a presentation on connecting with witnesses That's part of the program that Phil Miller is doing. It's really a mastermind kind of bootcamp kind of on deposition skills and part of the idea of depositions is to bring intentionality to how do you want to connect with the witness.

I'm going to spend a little time talking to you. I think it's about 45 minutes or so talking about that. And then I'm going to disappear from that room and go back into the room with Joe Camerlingo where together we are presenting a one-day sort of mastermind trucking that really is designed to take people, even if you have no trucking background at all, really kind of make sure we're going to cover the basics. We're going to do some more advanced stuff too, but we're going to cover the basics and then we're going to pick a few cases that we feel are representative from people who are attendees. We're going to ask for that in advance. So if you do come to this, we're going to ask you to the next two Wednesdays, Wednesday next week and Wednesday the following week, we're going to ask you to spend about an hour to an hour and a half with us so that we can build this community for us to get to know exactly what you need from this program and then to help us pick a couple of cases from what you have to be teaching cases for the afternoon part of the program, which we'll pick probably three cases and use those three cases to be the springboard, to teach people how to work up cases from the beginning, what to be thinking about in them, how to make sure that you know where all the coverages are, you know all the potential players are, all the potential rules and causes of action, then how to limit those down a lot speed trial into being the most effective that you can be in the preparation of those cases.

And then we'll take what Joe and I call sort of the value adders to these cases, what most people think about when they see a truck case to where do we see value adds, how to do that in these cases. And then the afternoon we'll be taking those three cases from people who are attendees taking what we've learned in the morning and applying it to actual real world facts in the afternoon. Joe and I have also committed to anybody who is part of our specific program. We will help make some time for you privately if you feel a specific need. It's why we need to know what you want out of the program. If we can address those things in the group and there's enough people who need that, then that's what we'll be focused on. But if there are individual things that you need for your case that you feel stuck about, one or both of us will make ourselves available to you.

We'll figure out how to do that, whether it's a TLU or even if necessary, jump on a Zoom afterwards. We really want to provide value to the people who are in the group. That's what you've got me doing out there and I'm working diligently to get ready for it.

December 8th through 12th, you and Joe see our teaming up again and we're going to do another trucking bootcamp like we did last August at the Pasaya Hotel. We had about 15 participants. It was great. It was a fay program where you spent an hour each morning with each group and an hour each afternoon with each group because there was three groups and we kept the groups together so you'd help them with their trucking cases and the time they weren't working with you. They were working with myself and my other coaches on developing their performance skills, their cross-examination skills, their witness prep, their presentation skills. They use an opening and closing. And so that program was one of my favorite programs ever just because of the community, the size, the work that was being done, the focus, people working on their cases and working on their skills.

That's going to be great. I mean, it really was nice last time because what it allowed, it was already a small group by design. We capped it at 15 people and I think we actually had a few who were on a waiting list that we couldn't get to. We on purpose didn't want to make it bigger than that so that people have time when they're doing work with you, they actually have a lot of time on their feet so much so that you're tapping out you've got so much time. You're on your feet doing the work on that side. But also what it allows me to do is really before that ever happens we have a couple of sessions where I get to know what are the one or two cases that you've got concerns about or what are the one or two skill sets that you really want to work on as a truck lawyer specifically?

What are the things that will advance your ball personally? And then in small group settings, I get to put that together and really work with people on specific cases on their specific things that they need themselves. It's a way for, and this time I get to do that with my great friend and colleague, Joe Camerolingo. We do a lot of cases together. We're partners in the Florida law firm together. He's a fantastic lawyer. It will be an intense few days, that's for sure. Both about the time you're done working on trucking for a little while, we're not overloading you each day on content. It's a split between content and on your feet work presentation skills. If you really want to spend some intense time doing that, be on your feet, literally I bet by the time between the two sessions, I bet you're on your feet at least an hour a day, yourself, you, you can't hide in this program.

You come prepared to work, you're working in the evenings, getting ready for the next day. It's an intense thing to go through, but I still am communicating with people from last year on it regularly. We text together, we help them on cases. On one case I'm doing with one of the guys who was there that we've agreed to team up on. Not every one of them am I in touch with, but more than half of the people who were in the program last year I'm communicating with regularly. So they've become friends and I'm helping them and they help me.

Me too. I've been most all of them. I talk to them and check in and see how they're doing. And a lot of them will be back at TLU Beach. Some won't because they have young kids like, "Ah, I started a new job. I can't get them like, all right, next year buddy, let me give you the date so you don't miss it. " Something to plan around. All right, Joe Fried. What's going on down there in Florida? You just taking a little time off or ...

Well, I'm with my wife down here. I bought a house a few years ago in Sarasota area. The hurricanes took it out. We're finally hopefully getting close to being able to be spending some time back in Sarasota, which I'm looking forward to. Well,

That's what's nice about Southern California. We don't have hurricanes.

Yeah. And you have less bugs and less humidity. You got other problems, but we won't talk about those right now.

Okay. Sounds good. All right, Joe. Thanks. I'll see you in about 19 days from today. So by the time this gets published, it'll probably be 12 days from today. So thanks, Joe. Have a great one. Bye-bye.

Appreciate you. Thanks a lot.

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