I have struggled to have any enthusiasm this week. I have an appellate brief I'm about to have to write, and I think I'd rather shoot myself.
Sound like my wife. I haven’t worked a full week since before Thanksgiving. All we’ve done is travel.
I've spent the whole week looking at 2022 numbers, figuring out what our ROI on marketing campaigns was , where our expenses grew and by how much, if our cost per case acquisition is too high, and what our overhead adjusted profitably per partner is instead of doing actual legal work. The admin stuff is worse than the legal work. I too want to shoot myself.
I wish I woke up every Monday morning to an email tendering limits ($100k) on a case that I filed suit and have done nothing else.
chiropractor i work with took out a bunch of business loans during covid. like 3 totaling 35k or something like that. he just never paid them back. i helped him in 1/21 negotiate a monthly payment of like 1k a month with them only charging 4% interest. i guess he only made two payments and is now freaking out because i guess they got some sort of judgment and his checking account is like -39k lol like yeah dude what did you think was going to happen? now hes like please call and tell them i can pay 1k a month!! ok i'll try but not sure if they'll be too jazzed about that since you blew them off last time any recommendations? trying to help this dude out, but i also don't really want to spend a ton of time on this.
Against my better judgement, I took on a dental malpractice case. This is only because one of our partners has a connection to the referral source. Biggest mistake of my life. The client calls me multiple times a week demanding to know why his case hasn’t been settled yet. We’re still in presuit by the way. Turns out the dentist who referred him the case told him it was a slam dunk. Now, he calls me today about getting one of those client funding loans. I warn him about that but he insists anyway. Got a call from the funding company and they say he wanted like $50k. They laughed as hard as I did.
Do you ever just straight up say what your bottom line authority is? Most of the time I skip the BS and just get straight to it. But the other side always thinks I’m fluffing the number or that my client will come off the number. And they aren’t telling me what their top authority is ie we arent playing by the same rules.
only if its a lawyer/adjuster that i know or if we are really close on the numbers. otherwise usually not
"I have a new entity for my business so i should be good" bruh you personally guaranteed this shit they can show up to your business tomorrow and change the locks if they want to
That guy is an imbecile. The spam calling product is a pretty good idea, but the full on AI lawyer concept is moronic.
Me [to a colleague in another city]: Here's an estimate to send your client to do ABC scope of work. Colleague: Great, this is perfect. I made some edits saying I'll update my client as the project progresses to let them know if the estimate changes. [7 months pass and the scope of work changes a bit but then a client-imposed fire drill arises the week of Christmas and my colleague and the client expect me to drop everything to focus on their issue, which I do] Me [to colleague]: FYI - Here's my December invoice. We've now exceeded the estimate. Colleague [to me]: I think we really need to stay within the budget you provided them. I need you to cut some costs.
And she just fired us and is going to file a grievance I guess because she thinks the bar will tell me to just give her all the money? sounds like I get to deposit all of the money in a court registry and then a judge gets to split up the money. Awesome
If any of you are personal injury attorneys in LA, head down to the hospital with a stack of business cards. I would bet there are at least 100 people still in critical condition. I saw at least 20 people getting carried out in stretchers after stepping off the escalator onto the slick indoor floors. Stadium is not designed for rain. Coworker of mine on the TCU side saw the same thing, including one guy with blood coming out of both ears needing to be revived.
lol just got off the phone with the ethics helpline at the state bar. their position is that because shes fired me and because i have the money in my trust account i have no duty to try to get further reductions on her medical bills and i can just pay myself, pay her and pay her medical providers and move on definitely not what i was expecting but pretty funny. by firing me she basically just finalized my proposed settlement disbursal
There’s a written ethics opinion that’s close to on point I can rely on it enough to not get in trouble with the bar and I don’t see another lawyer taking her case when she is like he made me pay my medical providers!
We carve out 3 full days of partner meetings to review the prior year and figure out what need to be adjusted. Our overhead crept up big time on us via marketing so we've got to get that back in line. $100k increase in marketing and $100k less PPP in 2022.
i cant decide if i want to include this in my objection to defendant's continuance because her allstate lawyer is leaving their fake firm Plaintiff might have some sympathy for defense counsel if it was an actual law firm needing to replace a lawyer. However, Allstate has over fifty salaried attorneys in Texas, and Plaintiff believes at least one of them can get ready for trial in over two months with the only pre-trial work to be completed on this case is to file pre-trial documents with the Court. Plaintiff deserves her day in Court, and her ability to receive a fair trial should not be impacted by Allstate’s musical chairs of salaried lawyers.
i am also salty this morning because fred loya has just not had a lawyer assigned to one of our cases in over 6 weeks and i just told my staff to start noticing shit
and just sent the crazy lady a letter informing her that i'm paying her, us, and all of her medical providers on monday. can't wait to experience the ensuing shit storm.
Yeah, I would not send that in his court. Maybe make some reference to them having a lot of lawyers so only a short continuance is appropriate. Are you having to try all of you Allstate cases?
the vast majority of them yes. and from my experience all of the judges hate allstate because most of their trials are car wrecks involving allstate
yeah tbh i am really sad this OC left allstate she was like one of the worst defense attorneys i've ever encountered. didn't prep her client at all so she lied during her entire deposition. we had a neutral witness and her questions were as if she was asking them as a plaintiff attorney. and during my doctors deposition it was the same thing. like i don't think she understood that it wasn't a fact finding mission like these depos are going to be played at trial. allstate: oh so the plaintiff reached their maximum medical improvement of 85%? doctor: yes theyre going to have issues for the rest of their life allstate lady: oh wow ok 0 questions about why she hasn't seen a doctor in like 14 months just oh wow shes fucked up forever :(
had 5 last year and have a few that will likely go in the first quarter this year. expecting like 8-15 jury trials a year going forward
won four lost one counting a W for the 8pm mediation after the first day of trial where they settled for 4x their 100k policy limit
I'm guessing anything where the verdict was greater than the pre trial offer is a win? Or do you take into account increased case cost for litigation and thus lower net to the client?
anything higher than their previous offer i count as a W. the wins were 200k verdict 37k verdict on 30k meds moderate PD 25k verdict on 25k meds low PD 375k mediation settlement after first day loss lady who was awful i think i posted about that but i mean she got on the stand and said she was hit by a white car when she was hit by a red truck. 3 car accident where the dude who hit her claimed he was hit by another car and pushed into her and he was adament that there was another car and my client was like yeah i'm not sure there could've been. i think i actually tried a really good case. probably the best i've done at trial. it took the jury 6 hours over two days to come back with a no negligence verdict. combined offers on the 4 wins was like 35k over those four cases. both of the six figure wins had pretrial offers under 7500 i think
Let me start by saying I admire and respect all that trial work. Great job. And you got some great results on some of those. I know TX has some weird rule regarding collateral sources where the jury only considers unpaid medicals after insurance pays or something like that. Is that why you had 37k verdict on 30k in meds etc?
Yeah defendants have experts saying all the meds are overbilled and should be X. So 30k in meds would really be less than a third of that if health insurance paid anything
So it's essentially a $37k verdict on $12k in meds if the juries believe their billing expert. I would def call that a win here. I wonder how much juries pay attention to the billed medicals versus "what insurance will pay" amount etc. Do they go more with the full amount or do they care more what the person will be left with after collateral payments.
they generally split the baby if i have 30k in unpaid meds and the defense expert says it should be 10 then they generally consider 20 if it's more than moderate PD we are going to start nonsuiting the meds going forward and just try the cases on noneconomic damages for the two small verdicts the cars didn't look too bad and my clients were mediocre, so i just wanted to get a moderate verdict and move on