Hill Law Firm Cases: Recent Episodes
Justin Hill, Hill Law Firm
This podcast will cover actual personal injury cases and legal issues handled and addressed by San Antonio's Boutique personal injury law firm, Hill Law Firm. After the insurance industry has spent millions of dollars over decades to convince the public that insurance companies and big corporations are victims of our justice system, many in the public believe it. This podcast will discuss actual cases, defenses, legal issues, and a variety of other legal topics addressed in our San Antonio personal injury practice. We will discuss the people, the facts, defenses, and the background of actual cases that ended in a lawsuit in the Bexar County courthouse or other places in Texas. We will discuss public safety issues, litigation issues, laws and statistics about Texas, what personal injury lawyers do, and how plaintiffs are consistently victimized by insurance companies and big corporations.
The holidays are here. More people are on the road and that means more accidents. We cover some of the safe holiday driving tips to try to help our San Antonio neighbors avoid crashes and make sure everyone stays safe on the Texas roadways. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast where we not only talk about what's going on at our firm, we also talk about ways to not need a law firm like mine, safety tips, how to live a safer life, how to drive safer, how to be safer on the roads and in your home and in the work. Today, we're talking about holiday driving. It's right around the corner and actually, Thanksgiving holiday is already behind us. If you drove then and you're fine now, good for you. We're glad you were able to drive safely. As the Christmas holidays approach, we hope you also drive safely. The CDC, we all know a lot about CDC now that we have lived through this pandemic, but they also do injury prevention and control and they've released some tips for holiday safe driving. They also started by pointing out that it looks like 2020, we'll see a 7% increase in deaths, roadway fatalities which is surprising to everybody because actually, there were less miles and time driven by people in 2020. In 2019, they said there was about 36,000 people killed in crashes. I expect it to be closer to 39 in 2020. Even less people on the road has not led to less traffic fatalities. Be careful out there. San Antonio has a lot of roads, a lot of people on the roads, and the holidays just make for even more traffic. Some safety tips they recommend for everybody to follow. Number one is, the real obvious one, is do not drive when you are impaired. In 2019, alcohol-impaired driving was part of- or contributed to over 10,000 crashes in the United States. That's not just alcohol, drugs, marijuana. If you're on medication in which you shouldn't drive, don't drive, call a taxi, call an Uber, have a friend drive. Number one tip that we've been hearing our whole lives. Remember it and plan ahead. Also, distractions. That's the new thing that's leading to a lot of crashes that we see here at our law firm, a lot of people in San Antonio. If you're just driving around or sitting on the phone, one of the things the CDC points out that- if you are receiving a text message and reading it, driving at 55, that you are likely keeping your eyes off the road for almost the distance of a football field. Five seconds not looking at the road is almost the length of a football field at 55 miles an hour. Just remember, put your phone down, pull over if you need to use your phone. Also, check the weather. Us in San Antonio saw one of the worst traffic backups mass casualty events. It's probably the worst that I've ever seen or heard of was the Fort Worth pile-up last year with the ice on the road. I have hit ice in Fort Worth before. It is a very scary thing to hit that unexpectedly. Check the road safety tips, check the weather on the road. Make sure before you head out, you got a plan. Make sure you know what to do. If you do hit bad weather, get a hotel, stay the night, try to avoid it. Some child passenger safety tips they recommend. Make sure your kids are in the age-appropriate seatings whether it's a car seat or a booster seat, make sure the seat belts fit them properly. There's a lot of analysis that goes into properly restraining a child in a vehicle. Make sure you're up on that and make sure you've got the right booster or car seat. Make sure you take off their puffy, bulky coats and things like that before you strap them in because that can limit the effectiveness of a car seat or...
Your San Antonio Personal Injury Law Firm, Hill Law Firm, has been very busy the second half of 2021. From new cases, to settlements, to community involvement, we have a lot to share. This short update covers mostly the injury lawsuits that have settled recently. Sexual assault, on the job, car wrecks, and other cases have been part of our recent settlements. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Welcome back to Hill Law Firm Cases. We haven't had an episode in a while. I wanted to update everybody on what's going on over at our law firm. First, happy holidays, happy Thanksgiving, and a Merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah, and whatever you celebrate, we hope you have a good holiday. We wanted to update everybody on what we've been up to. The firm has gone through a lot of changes over the last couple of months. We've been very busy from a work side, from a staffing side, from all types of things going on. It's a very busy time of the year as it relates to lawsuits. It's also very busy as it relates to our involvement in the community and our work with nonprofits. We recently attended Restore Education, big fundraiser, a spelling bee in which me and Gabriel from the Hill Law Firm were able to take home first place. It was a lot of fun, but we've also been involved in zoo activities and San Antonio Bar Association activities, and other fundraisers. It's important for us to be involved in our community, but not just from some of the vanity type charities and where people want to put their names on, but real small charities that need the help and need donors and need people who can put in hours to help. We're really involved in those as well. I just wanted to talk a little bit about what we've been going through in the last couple of months in terms of our cases. What kind of cases we've been working on, how those cases have been turning out for us, and I think it's good to just start and walk through some of the settlements we've had over the last 45 days. Some of them have been real victories for our clients and for our law firm and for the justice system as a whole. To start, we recently settled a case against a major insurance company that really had in bad faith and in a really bad way treated our client poorly. She was rear-ended in a car crash in San Antonio. No fault of her own. The other driver said she was messing with her cup of coffee. When she rear-ended our client, our client ended up requiring a shoulder surgery. Now she had had a shoulder procedure just months before this. We had imaging and doctor's notes and everything showing that she was fully healed before this crash, but the insurance company, as they tend to do, lodged frivolous defense that was trying to allege that even though we had records and notes and doctors saying she was fully healed and fine with complete range of motion and no pain prior to the crash, they tried to say that the previous issue is what required her to have surgery after this crash. They hired a doctor who charged about $17,000 to agree with them. I don't think he was in any way impartial. In his deposition, he said that he had given 20 to 40 depots over the last three years, but whenever he was pushed and we got documents on it, he had actually been deposed over 120 times over the past couple of years. This was a real victory because after the deposition of this expert, we increased our demand from our demand at mediation, and that's pretty abnormal when the insurance company will agree to accept an increased demand. We settled it for more than we were willing to settle at mediation, more than they ever wanted to pay, but it was a real victory for our client....
Recently, H.E.B. grocery stores have announced a massive recall of millions of pounds of chicken products due to the risk of listeria contamination. Listeria is a deadly pathogen that can cause illness and is of particular risk to pregnant women. If you have purchased these possibly listeria contaminated HEB chicken products, return them immediately. If you ate one and feel ill, seek medical attention now. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] There are not many law firms in San Antonio that handle as many food poisoning cases as we do and we have. Probably the most recent largest food poisoning lawsuit in San Antonio revolved around a outbreak at Pasha in San Antonio. That involved hundreds of people who were injured and became sick as a result of eating contaminated food. That case recently resolved. Recently in the news was a story that HEB was recalling some 8.5 million pounds of ready-to-eat Tyson Food chicken products that included some of their Meal Simple products. If you live in San Antonio or you shop at HEB, you know what these Meal Simples are. They're ready-to-eat meals, you buy them and heat them up. Also, included in the recall, were some Tyson grilled chicken breasts, fajita chicken, grilled and ready pulled chicken, a bunch of Tyson products, a bunch of Meal Simples to include Meal Simple buffalo chicken, pepper trio chicken, barbecue chicken, curry chicken. Then even some of their SoFlo products, which is pizza, their buffalo chicken pizza, and their crustless Buffalo chicken pizza had been recalled. They've all been recalled as it relates to a potential outbreak of Tyson chicken with a pathogen known as Listeria. You may know of Listeria from the Blue Bell recall a few years back that almost shut down Blue Bell. Listeria is a really nasty illness. Listeria can and does kill hundreds of people in America a year. It's something that can be through proper food handling techniques eliminated or very, very limited from contaminating food. One of the bad things about Listeria is that it can be a very, very deadly, and very dangerous sickness specifically for pregnant women. Pregnant women are 10 times more likely than other people to get a Listeria infection. On top of that, it can cause all kinds of complications with the pregnancy and really anybody who would be at risk from other illnesses, older people, people with weakened immune systems, but in particular, pregnant women have a real risk with listeria. Some of the facts include that pregnant Hispanic women are 24 times more likely than the general population to get a Listeria infection. This is straight from the CDC website. According to the CDC is the third leading cause of death from foodborne illness or food poisoning in America and that approximately 260 people die per year. What we know right now is that HEB has taken on upon themselves to withdraw some and recall some 8 million pounds of chicken. If you have any of these products, you need to throw them away or go back to HEB and get a refund. If you think you have eaten some of them and you feel sick, please go to the doctor. Food poisoning is something people talk about like it's a tummy illness, but in reality, food poisoning is very dangerous and can kill people and does kill people. If you think you have been part of the Listeria HEB food poisoning outbreak and you'd like to seek counsel, please reach out to us. if you have not been injured by this, but have some of the products, call HEB, get a refund, and let them properly dispose of any products you have. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. We'll try to keep you all up to date on what's happening in Texas and what's happening in San Antonio and what's...
Vehicles can be very dangerous places for children. A lot of the dangers are unknown or less publicized. In this series, we are trying to cover and discuss some of the most common dangers in vehicles for San Antonio and Texas residents. Transcript: Justin Hill, San Antonio Injury Lawer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: Welcome to another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases where we talk about what's going on at the Hill Law Firm, but we also talk about ways to keep yourself and your family safer on the roadways, on the job, in everyday life. One of the things we want to talk about today is keeping our kids safe in the vehicles. If you get on the internet, there's all kinds of information about properly installing and fitting car seats and children's helmets or bicycles, all types of information about how to increase the safety of your child in a range of environments and in a range of situations. One of the things we want to talk about today is some of the more uncommon, I'll say, but very serious dangers associated with vehicles that we typically hear in the one-off story, the tragic story that you hear in the news and think, "That couldn't happen to me," but are real dangers and really happen to normal people doing their best every day. In San Antonio, one of the things that people know about our city is it's very hot. You come around the San Antonio River Walk during the summer holiday when you get a lot of families down here going to SeaWorld, and I still look around and think, "Jeez, how is this a holiday for some people?" Because I'm very hot-natured, and I sweat, so I do not enjoy being out those really hot two or three months during the summer. One of the things to consider in those hotlines or really all the time of the year, especially in South Texas, where it never gets too cold, is the risk of heatstroke. People talk about this oftentimes, and you hear about this in the media where people leave a dog or leave a child, unfortunately, in a vehicle, even for a short amount of time, and it can lead to heatstroke. It's one of the leading causes of non-crash-related causes of death for children, and it can happen when kids are left in a hot car alone, and it doesn't take long to leave them in there for the vehicle to get so hot that their core body temperature gets too hot, and it can just overwhelm their little bodies. For example, the inside temperature of your car can rise almost 20 degrees Fahrenheit in 10 minutes. If it's 100 degrees outside, you're talking, it's 120, 130, within 10, 15 minutes. Once a child's body temperature gets above 104, it's a very bad deal, and once it gets above 107, it can be fatal. These are really serious concerns. There's lots of things that we need to think about. We're going to talk about a few of those things, but one of them is just habit. As it relates to your vehicle, get in the habit of checking all of your seats before you lock the door and walk away. Make sure that you keep your vehicle locked if you have young children. 3 out of 10 heatstroke deaths in vehicles involve children just crawling into a vehicle and accidentally closing themselves into it. It's not being left. Almost 30% are preventable just by locking your car and keeping your keys away from your children. Third, pay attention to other vehicles you see. If you see a child or a dog, in my opinion, in a vehicle in a hot day or, really, any day, make sure to call the authorities if it looks like, or you even suspect a slight risk that the child could be in danger. Never leave your kid in the car. Even if you just have to run in for a second, don't do it. People do not fully appreciate the risks of vehicle getting hot and
On this episode, we discuss the use of seatbelts in Texas. The statistics, the law, and the campaign to increase usage are discussed. In San Antonio, it is important that everyone follows the Click it or Ticket campaign when possible. We cover some interesting details about seatbelt usage. Transcript Justin Hill, Injury Lawyer: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast where we typically talk about what's going on at our law firm here in San Antonio, Texas. We talk about our cases, we talk about results, we talk about personnel and just good things that are happening as well. One thing we really try to focus on as well is safety. We're a law firm that represents people injured through no fault of their own, in most cases. We're in a practice area where if people, companies, government agencies enforced and implemented safety procedures, we'd be out of business. That's the long-term goal of our industry, to regulate safety such that it becomes economically responsible and the right thing morally for businesses and people to do. For example, automotive safety has increased significantly over the last 20 or 30 years in large part due to lawsuits. Everybody's familiar with Ford, Firestone and some of those lawsuits, but everything from airbags to rollover safety to the strength of your roof to the way tires are manufactured now, all of those things have been affected for the better through lawsuits and litigation forcing industry to be held responsible when they either take shortcuts or just ignore safety altogether. Too often and many of those industries, the marketing department had more say than the safety people. Did a feature sell was more important than did it save lives. If you've been driving around Texas, you know that our state also works to improve road safety in the state of Texas. Just here in San Antonio, driving around, you see a lot of billboards talking about the number of fatalities on the roadway and injuries on the roadway. Click It or Ticket campaign, it's one of the things we're going to talk about today. In preparing for this, a statistic that really stood out to me as shocking is that November 7th of 2000, more than 20 years ago, was the first or was the last day in Texas in which there was not a roadway fatality as a result of an automobile accident or some sort of accident on the roads. As a result of that, Texas has taken up the Click It or Ticket campaign and not as a direct result but due to the fact that our roads have a long way to go to be safer, one of the things that state of Texas has done is create and implement this Click It or Ticket campaign. It is passed and pushed by the Texas Department of Transportation and according to NHTSA, which is the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. They said that the Click It or Ticket initiative in Texas is estimated to have saved over 6,000 lives, prevented over 100,000 injuries and saved Texas almost $25 billion since the campaign began just 18, 19 years ago. It's been a highly successful campaign. As the run-up to the new year, the state of Texas renewed their push and published a lot of data to talk about why wearing your seatbelt remains a very important piece of contributing to roadway safety. It reduces the risk of dying in a crash by 45% for people in the front seat and it reduces the risk of dying in a pickup truck crash by 60%. Mostly as a result of rollover vehicles being much more prevalent in pickup truck accidents. Through some data and analysis, the state of Texas said that more than 90% of Texans have gotten into the habit of using their seatbelt every time they get in the vehicle but...
Join us to hear about some of the dog bite and dog attack cases we are currently handling at Hill Law Firm. Both involve our San Antonio neighbors being attacked and injured by dogs that were not properly restrained or handled. Transcript: https://www.jahlawfirm.com/personal-injury/dog-bite-lawyer-san-antonio/ (Dog Bite Attorney) Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill, and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing what we have going on at our firm, safety information, general information about our cases, and really just whatever I think will be helpful for our listeners, helpful for our industry, and helpful for you and your family just from a safety perspective. If you keep up with our law firm, either on social media or through this podcast, you know that I love dogs. We have Winston, he's been my dog for 12 years, we even have a Meet-the-Team episode on this podcast with Winston. It was done as a joke, but also he's part of the team. He's in the office quite a bit. He's my best friend and it's great that I have an office where I can bring him in. When we bring him in, we're careful with him. He's a nice dog, we know he's a nice dog, but when he's outside, he's on leash. I make sure that I monitor him around people. If I'd ever seen him show any sign of aggression, I would not let him be around people, he would just be sitting in my office with the door closed with me and probably leashed or something. Luckily, he is not one of those dogs, he's a good dog, goes around and gets belly rubs. Unfortunately, a lot of people have dogs that aren't like him. My personal views aside on why people keep dangerous or aggressive dogs is neither here nor there, but people do have them. For many reasons, there are duties under the law by which they have to keep them leashed, safe, away from people. Texas actually has causes of action by which you can file a lawsuit against somebody who doesn't maintain their dog in the correct way. For example, Texas has a cause of action, which is a way to sue somebody, there's a cause of action for negligent handling of animals. If you can prove the defendant was the owner or the possessor of an animal, and we've seen that before, we've had people that say, "Well, I didn't own it, I was just babysitting the dog." Well, Texas doesn't care. If you're a owner or possessor of an animal, you owe a duty to exercise reasonable care to prevent that animal from injuring others. If you can prove they breached that duty of reasonable care, you can hold them responsible for any injuries that they caused. You see this often, for example, where somebody has a dog that, has either been aggressive or bit somebody before, they have house guests over and the dog bites somebody. They weren't reasonable on allowing a dog that had a history to be around people and injure them. Or you have instances in which a dog has a history of getting out of the yard and attacking people. Well, the fact that it got out the 10th time is enough for us to hold them responsible, not because they knew it was going to attack but because they knew it could get out of the yard and then all bets are off if it was going to attack. There's also causes of action under the law for what's called negligent per se. If you can show that the dog owner violated a law or city ordinance or municipal code related to a dog, you may be able to hold them responsible under those provisions. For example, in Texas, in San Antonio, there's a leash law that if you have a dog it needs to be on a leash, and we've sued many people for violations of that. We're currently representing multiple people who've been injured by dogs in our lawsuit and I want to talk about
Damond Garza has been a defense and a plaintiffs attorney in San Antonio for almost 20 years. He has tried over 40 cases to juries and leads San Antonio's trial lawyer association. He is a good friend and offices next to us at Hill Law Firm. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. All right. [music] Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. Today, I've got Damond Garza with me. Damond is a lawyer in San Antonio, a friend, and he's also a lawyer that we work with on some cases. He is the current president of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association and his reign ends tomorrow, right? Damond Garza: I think officially on the 21st, actually. Justin: He's also a stickler for technicalities as you will learn. I asked Damond to come on and talk about practicing law. Really, the point of these has been younger lawyers. That's been the thought process and that's been the response from people. When I tell you who will respond about you being on here, then you'll understand. You'll be like, "Oh, okay. I understand your audience now." You're not the first SATLA president I've had on there. Damond: That makes me a little- Justin: Second. Damond: -less special feeling, but that's okay. Justin: First [unintelligible 00:01:22], I mean. I think that's what they say in that one show. Javier was on. I think he's the only one that would have been SATLA president. Bill Marler was on. There's been books written about him. Mikal Watts was on. He's been indicted and has a book and movie coming. Damond: No books or movies based on me yet, unfortunately- Justin: Indictments? Damond: -or fortunately. No indictments that I'm currently aware of. Justin: I think you would know. What is SATLA? Damond: SATLA a local trial lawyers association that is comprised of a little bit over 400 members these days. Primarily lawyers here in the Bexar County area, but we have a good contingency out of South Texas and we have members really spread as far as Alaska, even because it's a group of lawyers who represent folks, who represent people against companies, organizations, insurance companies who tend to have a lot more power and influence in the courts. We represent those folks against those powerful folks whenever they suffered a loss, injury, death, economic loss, something like that. We put our minds together to share information, to help each of us better represent our clients. The folks who usually defend injury cases have large organizations, they share information to help strengthen their defenses. We try to pool our resources to better combat against those forces who would otherwise deny the availability of the courts to regular people who have suffered a loss. Justin: San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association is not limited to San Antonio lawyers. I think there used to even be in Alaska person. Damond: We still have a very active member from the State of Alaska, we've got people from the East Coast, the Midwest, the Southeast, and everywhere far-flung in between. Justin: A very robust idea and document sharing through our Listserv, but the rules are just lawyer and do not regularly represent insurance companies. Is that basically the breakdown? Damond: More or less. Yes, you have to be a lawyer who represents people for the most part, but the biggest thing is you cannot represent insurance companies or any corporation or governmental entity regularly. Justin: To get in, they apply, they have to have multiple people that vouch for them, pay their dues, which are really not bad. Damond: Our dues are actually significantly lower than a lot of...
Texas trucking crashes and commercial motor vehicle accidents are a product of a booming transportation and oil and gas industry. We discuss some of the lies and dishonesties about these crashes being used to push tort reform. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Two professors at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway completed research recently using hair and urine samples for drug testing, and they were also studying whether hair drug testing has any racial bias to it. One of the things they found was that if we move to hair drug testing instead of urine, more than 300,000 truckers would be removed from the roadway. They would be unable to pass their drug test because they will have used illicit drugs in whatever time allowed to show up on a hair drug test. The authors were asked to do this by a trucking industry association because the trucking industry associations were considering hair drug testing. This really shocking finding came out of their research that basically said that urinalysis is insufficient to really pick up illicit drug use after some amount of time. If we really want to crack down on people who think it's okay to drive 80,000-pound vehicles and also use drugs that we should use hair analysis. Now, the obvious import for the industry is we can't lose 300,000 drivers overnight. What would we do? Where would we find those 300,000 people to make up for those jobs? That would likely mean they'd have to raise wages and make their jobs more appealing. The researchers went on to talk about how all those people should be pulled off the road, and they don't care what the industry has to do to fix that problem. That it's really just so reckless for trucking companies to have this information. To know that if they did a hair test that they would find some of their truckers were using drugs or alcohol, and they still don't do it. This is a study that came out this year, just six months ago. This is really important right now because what's happening in Texas is a coalition of trucking companies and trucking industry trade groups, and highly most likely also insurance companies are pushing for reforms of our legal industry so that they're held less accountable when they cause crashes. Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the trucking association here in Texas have teamed up, and they say that lawsuits and people injured on the road are putting them out of business. Texas doesn't even have close to the highest trucking insurance premiums, but the trucking industry is saying we can't afford these premiums so we have to get legislative changes to our legal system. It's worth noting that they're not discussing changing the way insurance is handled in Texas. They're not discussing changes to their own industry that allows for a lot of trucking crashes in Texas that involve texting and driving, alcohol-related driving, and lots of really egregious gross negligence. It is criminal, but almost homicidal behavior. If you were behind an 80,000-pound vehicle and you're texting and driving or drunk, you know that you've got a really high likelihood of hurting somebody or killing somebody. But the industry isn't trying to address that. What they want to do is say, "Hey, legislators. Please shield us from lawsuits because we're not self-regulating," which is leading to a lot of bad lawsuits and a lot of injured and killed Texans too that people forget to talk about, so they want the legislator to fix it. Just for some background information, Texas has had an explosion in the oil and gas industry which has led to an explosion in the support industry for that, supporting oil and gas, and a lot of that is trucking. We've had a lot more trucking...
We get a lot of questions from potential and current personal injury clients. We address those questions today! Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. This is going to be our second edition of a lawyer Q&A that we have put together. I've asked my staff and I myself have done the same as we get common questions from people that call the office or from our current clients that we get. I've already done Part 1 of this series. It looks like we've got about another 40 or 50 questions that we have compiled, and I'm going to just go through some of the most common questions we get. If I didn't hit the question that you have, try and listen to Part 1 of this series and we might've covered it there. In Part 1, we talked about honors and awards we've received, how we get paid, what a fee arrangement is? Who's responsible for out-of-pocket? How much time do we spend on a case? What is a case worth? How are we paid? What happens if you lose? Then questions about our firm, what percentage of our case load is personal injury? Do we get cases referred by their lawyers? Do we handle complex cases in cases against Fortune 500? The questions that you have, feel free to listen to our lawyer Q&A Part 1, that's up on our website, jhlawfirm.com. Today, I'm going to start with a common question that I personally have gotten. One of those questions we hear a lot is, "Have you handled personal injury cases like mine before," and/or questions such as, "Have you ever tried a personal injury case like mine?" One thing I always have to tell everybody when they call and ask you a question like that is that every case is unique. Every case is unique from the fact that what our plaintiff has gone by case and also the liability against the defendant and the ability to recover against the defendant is going to be different. For example, we have handled lots of car accident and vehicular accident cases, but I've never seen two that are exactly the same. Have had the same plaintiff, have had the same liability, and have had the same insurance company and lawyers. Every case is different. My first boss always said a lawsuit is a lawsuit is a lawsuit and as long as you can learn and understand the substantive law, then you get evidence to support your substantive law, you go try it to a jury under the same rules of evidence that don't really change depending on what type of case it is. We can never tell somebody, we have handled a case exactly the same as theirs. Ethically, we are bound to only take cases that we feel we are competent to handle. It's the reason I turned down a mortgage, a dispute case that came in last year. When a bank asked me to go try a case on their behalf regarding a mortgage fraud claim, it's not something I have done before. Honestly, I didn't feel too motivated to get into a trial representing a large bank. We have tried lots of different types of personal injury cases, dram shop cases and negligence cases, car wreck cases, on-the-job injury cases. We have the ability, the resources, the knowledge and the know-how to work up, prepare and try a personal injury case, a product liability case, dram shop case, 18-wheeler case, on-the-job injury case. Even though the case may have some differing details, we feel like we are competent, ready and able to handle those cases. The next one we're going to hit up is, "Do cases like mine usually settle out of court or go to trial?" I tell all clients that the vast majority of cases settled before trial and there's multiple reasons for that, but the biggest reason is at the end of the day, the defendant has to ask themselves, do they prefer to let a jury decide, which means...
All injury attorneys in San Antonio and the rest of Texas see an uptick in cases during certain Holidays. Christmas is no different. There are more people on the road, more parties involving alcohol, and more fire hazards present. Transcript: San Antonio Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] We are now in December, which means everybody is full on Christmas mode. We've put away the pumpkin spice lattes, we've shelved the cornucopia and turkey and dressing until next year. Now, we're onto peppermints and hot chocolate and Christmas trees and all the wonderful things associated with Christmas. Another thing about Christmas, though, it is associated with lots of its own specific dangers. We want to talk a little bit about this. The great people at the National Safety Council, which is one of America's leading non-profits regarding safety information and safety advocacy, has put together some holiday safety information. I wanted to share that with our listeners. It's truly broken down into two things, or three things. We're going to be on the road a lot. We're going to be decorating. Lots of things involve fire this time of year, so let's talk about that. The holidays are a dangerous time to be on the road. I think, in 2017, they said there was almost 300 deaths on Christmas Day on the roadways. Alcohol was a factor in a third of those. What we know is that people go out and they celebrate on Christmas Day, Christmas Eve. People travel for Christmas, a lot of people are on the roadways. A few things, it's cold outside, prepare your car for winter travel. Depending on where you are in Texas, that probably don't mean much, other than to watch the news, watch the weather, make sure you're not driving into an eye storm, especially if you're going up to North Texas, like where I am from. Here, in beautiful San Antonio, I think it's probably unlikely that there will be much ice on the road or snow on the road or the need for change or anything like that. Depending on where you are and where you're traveling, make sure you prepare for the weather, whatever that may mean, and prepare for a breakdown in cold weather as well, just in case that were to happen. If you're going for a long drive, make sure you get a good night sleep. You don't want to be fatigued or drowsy while you're driving. Also, don't drink and drive. A lot of people like to celebrate the holidays with a drink or two or too many. Just make sure that you don't get behind the wheel after that. Plan your travel ahead. Traffic during the holidays picks up. Plan your travel so that you know where the traffic is, maybe how to avoid it, and then you have plenty of time to get to where you need to be. You may have people in the car with you. Avoid distractions. Make sure that you're not on the phone or watching a TV or not paying attention. Make sure everybody in your car is buckled up. This might be one of the only times a year that everybody is in the car together. Make sure that you follow all safety protocols with your kids and/or family in the car. Be a defensive driver because, remember, some of those other people on the road will have partied too much and may be a drowsy driver. Pay attention to those on the road. Next thing we want to talk about is decorating safely. In our house, we say, "You got to be careful with poinsettias because they can kill dogs." Poinsettias and things like that can also poison children, so be careful with the plants that you use. Be careful with the tree that you use. If you've got a artificial tree, make sure it's fire-resistant. If you have a real tree, make sure it's fully watered and there's no source of flame around it, because those trees...
The Texas Department of Transportation recently released data showing an increase in traffic fatalities and crashes in the oil rich areas of Texas. South of San Antonio and out in West Texas are areas with large oil and gas stores. That has lead to more traffic and more crashes. Transcript: Oilfield Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] I think it's fair to say that no matter where you live in the state of Texas, you know that Texas is associated with oil and gas production. I came from a town called Burkeburnett, Texas. It was known as boom town and there was actually a movie with Clark Gable named Boom Town about Texas' oil production. Everybody's heard about Spindletop. The movie Giant spends a long time discussing our Texas moved from cattle ranch and farms to oil and gas. The movie There Will Be Blood. The TV show, Dallas, Texas' oil and gas is as any other state in the union and probably the most of all States. With that being said, Texas is in a new peak of oil and gas production. In 2017 Texas oil production exceeded the peak of oil production that Texas on 1972 and then they beat that production in '18 and '19. Without a doubt, Texas is going through a huge renaissance or revitalization of oil and gas production in the state of Texas. A lot of that has to do with the technology advances and fracking or hydraulic fracturing and finding new energy plays in the Barnett shale, the Eagle Ford shale, the Granite Wash, the Hainesville and Bowser shell and the Permian basin and the Wolf camp and you could go on and on about all these new areas where oil and gas companies have found essentially oceans of oil under the ground. What that means is there's a lot of oil production, meaning there's a lot of people working in the oil and gas industry and there's a lot of people working in the sectors that support the oil and gas industry. In San Antonio, for example, there's a lot of people that work in industries that support either the Permian basin or the Barnett shale and that can range from delivering water to taking wastewater, to loading mining and delivering sand to building pad sites and to actually be in a roughneck out in the oil patch, either as a driller or in a frack crew or any of the other areas that are supporting the oil and gas production in the state. That also trickles down to just regular jobs like gas station workers, grocery store workers, the HEB in Karnes City or outside of Kennedy was seeking people to work and were paying high wages because they could not get workers because workers were going to the oil and gas industry. This also means that a lot of people are on the roads in communities that aren't used to that. The traffic in the Midland Odessa area and the Permian basin area in the Barnett shale, is in numbers unseen before. A lot of that traffic is 18-wheeler traffic and commercial motor vehicle traffic. What we found is that traffic crashes in these energy producing areas have increased just substantially. For example, in 2019 TxDOT said there was over 205,000 crashes in counties defined as the Texas energy sector and that's defined by the Texas Railroad Commission and it includes large portions of West Texas, South Texas and some metropolitan areas or edges of metropolitan areas like Dallas and Fort Worth and even El Paso. The number of crashes represents an approximately 3% increase from the year before and these crashes led to almost 1700 fatalities. Now we personally have worked on a lot of these cases and a lot of them involve unqualified drivers or drivers over hours. A lot of them involved distracted drivers driving 18-wheelers, 80,000-pound vehicles and...
Have you ever had questions about hiring a personal injury attorney or about how the practice works? In this series of Q&A, we are going to tackle some of the most common questions we get at Hill Law Firm. Transcript: San Antonio Personal Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. One thing I wanted to do was cover some frequently asked questions we get. We get a lot of discerning clients that come and meet with us, or one of those reasons is because a lot of clients that end up calling us are clients that have done a lot of research into client satisfaction and reviews and looked into a bunch of different law firms. Nobody's going to hire our law firm because we got a slogan or a jingle. We don't carry hammers or other types of tools. We don't have a phone number that's really easy to remember. What we are is a good law firm and does good work for people. We get a lot of questions from people when they call about hiring us, and a lot of those questions I've tried to keep track of and write down. I'm going to just walk through some of them. This is going to be a multi-part series where I just hit up a bunch of questions that people ask. One of the questions we get is, how do you get paid? Our law firm is a contingency fee law firm. That means that you don't pay us hourly, you don't pay us a flat rate. A lot of lawyers get paid by the hour. A lot of lawyers get paid by the flat rate. For example, if you get a DWI, you're going to have a criminal defense lawyer say I'll handle your case for $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000. It's a flat rate, no matter what happens. Our law firm gets hired on a contingency fee, which means we get a percentage of recovery if there is a recovery. If there is no recovery, we don't get any money. We don't get any fees. We don't even get our expenses back if there's no recovery. If there is recovery, we get our fees as a percentage of the recovery, and we get our expenses back. One thing that makes us a little different, I think, is that our client always makes the decision on when to settle a case. We can tell them we disagree with them. We could tell them we think it's too high or too low, but they tell us what to do. At the end of the day, they get to make the final decision on how to settle their case. We have been asked, have we received honors or awards? I think this is a funny question because if you look, there are so many lawyers that get all sorts of awards. If you're a lawyer, you get a letter probably once a week or every other week saying you've been named top this or top that, now give us $500 for your certificate. A lot of these awards are made up. There was a famous example where a lawyer bought an award for his pet chicken because he wanted to point out how worthless most of these awards were. Some of the awards are peer vote based. I, Justin, has been named Texas super lawyer rising star for almost 10 years. Now, that's peer-based in which other lawyers vote on you, and it's done through Thomson Reuters. We've also been nominated for other things and gotten some of these other awards, but I think that's probably the best one in terms of how you gauge things because it's voted on by their attorneys. We get asked if we offer free and confidential case reviews. The answer to that is always yes, with the caveat that we can't give people free legal advice. I can talk to them about their facts. I can talk to them about their potential case. I can tell them if it's a case we would take or not take or who I would call if I was them. What we can't do is give them legal advice when they're not our clients. With that being said, also, whatever they share
Unfortunately, the COVID crisis has created situations that make settling and trying personal injury cases in San Antonio and the rest of Texas much more difficult. Courts are shutdown. Doctors offices are running with low staff. And, getting evidence needed can be slowed. We discuss expectations for our clients in this episode. Transcript: San Antonio Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, this podcast has been an attempt to make sure our listeners, make sure our clients, our former clients, our potential future clients not only know what we're doing on a day-to-day basis in terms of the type of work we work on, but also who works with us, what's going on in the legal industry and what to expect if you ever need our services. One of the more common questions that we're getting these days revolves around the COVID crisis, the court shutdowns, what to expect, and how it's going to impact their personal injury lawsuit. In San Antonio, the court systems have been shut down for months at this point, very few things have been moving forward. The courts have been looking for people willing to try their case by Zoom, but not many people want to try a personal injury case by Zoom for a variety of reasons. We get these calls from our current clients asking what to expect and what's the delay and what's going on. We have to walk through this uncharted territory that we're in right now as it relates to the COVID crisis. From our law firm standpoint, I just wanted to discuss a few things. With the COVID crisis early on here in San Antonio people weren't going to work, people weren't driving on the highways and the streets. That meant there were less car crashes. There were less on the job injuries. There were less people needing our services. What that meant practically was our phones weren't ringing as much on intake and new cases but it was still ringing, but it allowed us to start focusing solely on moving the cases that we had at that time in light of the fact that there were a lot of hurdles to moving cases with the COVID crisis looming. One thing I have to tell all of my clients now and our future clients is that the question of how long will it take to resolve my case is up in the air at this point. There's a lot of reasons for that. The one that most people know about is that the courts are not trying cases right now. We're able to get hearings, we're able to do some things, but from a plaintiff's standpoint, in a personal injury case, the deadline or the backstop time in terms of a cases lifespan, is the trial date. If you don't have a trial date, the other side feels no pressure because there's nothing looming for them to worry about. They don't have to worry about allowing 12 people here in San Antonio decide the merits and value of the case. They can delay and just sit tight because there's no risk for them, but practically there's other considerations as well that we have to talk to our clients about. For one, depos are more difficult. We're able to do zoom depositions, they're happening all over America, the state of Texas is no different, but they're much harder to handle for certain types of depositions. A fact witness, that's not that bad, but when it comes to very document-intensive depositions of experts or doctors or corporate representatives, it's more difficult to the extent that some of them we have to really weigh whether or not we want to wait to handle that deposition in-person because it will be a more effective deposition. Some of the other things that people don't think about is medical records right now. Not only are doctors harder to get to see patients...
What are the laws in Texas about interacting with school buses? That is the question we discuss on this episode of San Antonio's go-to personal injury law firm podcast. Join us to learn more. Transcript: Personal Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm cases where we're going to be talking about school bus safety in the state of Texas and in San Antonio. One of the things about our law firm is we are a safety advocacy law firm as well as a personal injury plaintiffs law firm. It's very important for us that what we do makes our community safer, and specifically, what we do make San Antonio safer city for everybody to live in. I always joke with people that I wish we got put out of business by everybody following the laws, by products being made safer, and by people doing what they're supposed to do. I hope we don't get put out of business by political changes in which our legislators and insurance companies try to protect and shield insurance companies and corporations from any liability when they do wrong. One of the things I like to talk about is, in a case, usually there's some standard by which people have violated that led to somebody being injured. For example, if somebody is on their phone or drunk, and they cause a crash, they violated that law and that safety standard about drinking and driving, or texting and driving and caused a crash. In that example, San Antonio is one of the worst cities in the state of Texas in the United States for drinking and driving. These are issues that if people would follow the law, and do correctly, I wouldn't get those types of cases, and that would be great for everybody in our city, our state, and it will make our community safer. One of the things I want to talk about today is school bus safety. We all have been stuck behind a school bus before, we've probably all hated that experience, especially if you're stuck behind a school bus that stopping over, and over, and over, and you can't get around it. I remember growing up, I lived out in a rural area, and we'd be stuck behind buses for a long time on our way home. That was part of it and I actually rear-ended the school bus as a kid, so I'm glad that people follow the laws when they do because I was one of those kids that could have been injured. [clears throat] The State of Texas has laws on how we are supposed to interact with and treat school buses when they're on the road. Some of the laws involve all drivers must stop for flashing red lights on a school bus regardless which direction you're traveling. We've all seen a school bus start to slow, and the yellow lights on the back of it start flashing, and then they turn red. The law on that is that they're essentially the same as a stop sign, that no matter which side of the road you're on, whether behind it or fixing to pass it, you're required by Texas law to stop. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, kids exiting and entering a bus might dart across the road or step out when a vehicle is trying to pass. If you're old enough to drive, you've probably got better judgment, hopefully, then, a six-year-old who's running across the street and just wants to get home, or just wants to get on the bus. If you see the red lights, come to a complete stop. Another thing about school bus safety is that you're allowed to continue your trip once the bus has moved, and the flashing lights have stopped flashing, or if the school bus driver lets you pass. You can end up passing the bus if you need to, you just can't do it with its lights flashing. The fines in Texas for this type of bad behavior can lead to $1,000 fines in the state of Texas. Some of the...
Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin: In the Hill Law Firm podcast, we try to not only discuss the cases that we handle but elements of cases that we handle, the way we handle cases, people we work with on cases. The podcast is designed to give information generally about the types of cases we handle from start to finish, from intake to end, the questions that arise along that process, as well some substantive cases that we handle as well. We've talked recently about the discovery process, depositions, what they are, what they're intended for, and why they are a part of the process. One of the most common things that we as attorneys have to do in personal injury cases are prepare our clients for their depositions. When a plaintiff files a lawsuit, they're usually alleging that somebody else was at fault for causing their injuries and that they suffered injuries and as a result of those injuries they suffered damages. Those damages can include pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, physical impairment, all in the past and in the future. It can also include wages lost in the past and future or wage-earning capacity for people that can't work anymore. It almost always includes medical bills in the past and the future. When we prepare our clients for their depositions, there are some things that are pretty standard among all cases. I want to walk through a few things I tell my clients in preparing for their depositions. We have a few rules that we go through, some general information about presentation and how to prepare. Now, this is not intended to be information anybody should use in their own personal case. They should always consult with their own attorneys. I think it's important to generally hear how we go through our process. If you're one of our clients and you have a call coming up with me, or you have a deposition upcoming with our law firm, here's some of the stuff you're going to hear and here's some of the things that everybody should do, in my opinion, when it comes to a deposition. I always tell my clients there's a few rules as it relates to a deposition. First and most important, the number one rule is, to be honest. We're not here to make up a case, we have a case. Honesty is the most important thing in a deposition for a few reasons. One, because it's important that we tell the truth of our case so that we can all understand what a jury is going to hear about our case. Two, because I'm not going to represent somebody who's not being honest. Three, honesty is something the jury can pick up on. Be honest even when it's uncomfortable because a jury wants to know that you're being honest, and a jury wants to know that you're being fair because at the end of the day, we're going to ask them to be fair. You need to be fair as well. Another thing about honesty is that the law allows only certain things and only certain pieces of evidence to go in front of the jury. For example, certain criminal convictions if they're so old or certain types, aren't allowed to be told to a jury. The law says only certain types and only certain types of crimes in a certain time period can be told to the jury. Those limitations sometimes go out the window if they witness lies about them. It's important they're honest so that they don't create an evidentiary problem for themselves. Another rule is answer the question. The purpose of a deposition is a question and answer session with the other side under oath. I tell my clients, listen to the question, understand the question, and answer the question. There's multiple reasons for that, but for the most part, one is you want to make sure you understand the question before you answer it...
At Hill Law Firm, we handle many motorcycle crashes every year. Unfortunately, they often involve very serious injuries due to the disparity between automobiles and motorcycles. If you are driving around San Antonio, share the road with those on smaller vehicles. Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] At Hill Law firm, we handle all types of personal injury, car wreck, motorcycle, pedestrian accidents, bicycle accidents. Another thing we handle fairly regularly are crashes involving motorcyclists. Crashes involving motorcyclists are unique for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is that they typically involve very serious injuries due to the fact, they usually have a big difference between the vehicles either impacting one another or you have the result of somebody falling off or being thrown off a motorcycle at a high rate of speed. One case I handled many years ago and took to a jury verdict involved a fireman who was on his motorcycle. When he was turning into a gas station, the person behind him wasn't paying attention and struck him. They hit this man at a pretty high rate of speed, estimated to be somewhere between 40 and 50 miles an hour. Our client the firefighter was just grievously injured. He ended up losing a portion of his leg in the crash and was never going to be able to be a firefighter again. That particular crash involved another driver who had been drinking before. It highlights the dangers involved in motorcycle vehicle crashes. It's likely that if our client had been in a passenger vehicle at the time, that he might not have suffered such serious injuries. We're currently working on a case in San Antonio, Texas involving a motorcyclist who was pulling into a gas station. The gas station had hired a company to do power washing and pressure washing of the parking lot. At the entrance, they had put two cones far apart from each other, not blocking the entrance. In those cones, they put metal posts and they strung a wire. Now that wire covered the entire entrance of the gas station, but the wire was not very visible, it was almost impossible to see. Our client, as they drove into that wire, fell off their motorcycle as did their passenger, and they were both seriously injured. A car would likely have driven through that wire. A car would have sustained damage but it's a very different experience than if you're on a motorcycle and you're knocked off of that motorcycle. In Texas, July is considered, Share the Road, Look Twice for Motorcycles Campaign month. The Texas Department of Transportation puts out this annual campaign every July of 2020. In particular, it's done to enforce the, End The Streak Campaign in the state of Texas. Currently, Texas has not had a single day without a roadway fatality since November 7th of 2000. Due to that, the Texas Department of Transportation has tried to create a campaign through social media and other news related awareness pieces to try to lower and reduce and potentially, hopefully, eliminate roadway fatalities for at least one day. The Share the Road, Look Twice Campaign regarding motorcycle safety is one of those. In the press release, the state points out that on average one motorcyclist dies every day on Texas roads. The cities with the most motorcyclist fatalities include Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Odessa. The six month period from May through October is the deadliest six month period for motorcyclists in the state of Texas and accounts for over 60% of all motorcycle fatality crashes. In the press release put out by the Texas Department of Transportation, they cover a few things that we should all do to make sure that we are
We tell our San Antonio personal injury clients that we are not the type of San Antonio injury law firm that will wait a long time, send a lot of letters, and hope the other side insured company pays us without doing much work. We file our Texas personal injury and car accident cases. We think our clients are treated better when their cases are filed, set for trial and prepared for trial. Transcript: Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: With every new case that we get in the door, I have to sit down with a client and have to discuss with them expectations for the process, what to consider going forward, and try to set their expectations about a process that really is unfamiliar with most people. It's unfamiliar because most people aren't used to having to go through a long, drawn-out process to find resolution to a problem. They usually should be able to be resolved without court intervention. Insurance companies have realized that the longer they delay a case, the more time they can have holding on to money in their reserves. There is a financial incentive for insurance companies to hold on to their money and delay the payment of claims, even claims that they know they should pay out. One of the first things I tell clients when they come to meet with me and discuss hiring me is that unlike a lot of law firms and a lot of lawyers, I'm going to file the case. I'm not going to do what a lot of people do. There's a different strategy among lawyers. Some lawyers take the position that they want their client to finish treating, do everything they need to do, figure out all of their damages, then send a letter, and try to resolve the claim. Then, if that doesn't work 6, 9, 12 months down the road, then they'll file a lawsuit. I was trained at a young age to file a lawsuit immediately because insurance companies have proven, time and time again, over a long period of time, that they're not planning on doing the right thing. If they do the right thing, they're not going to do it early on. I explain to my clients there's a few reasons that we need to file their lawsuit, and also explain to my clients that if they want one of those law firms that is going to go through a letter-writing campaign of trying to get their case resolved, without putting it in the court system, then I might not be the lawyer for them. One of the first things I tell them is that insurance companies rarely, if ever, will disclose the amount of insurance available in a case. Whether it's a $30,000 policy in a car crash, or a $10 million, $20 million policy available in some other type of claim, including an 18-wheeler case in which someone lost their life, it's very rare day that an insurance company will tell you what sort of insurance policies you're dealing with, the layers of the insurance, or the insurance carriers. Some states require that the insurance carriers tell you how much insurance there is, what the limits are, and who the carrier is. Texas does not require that unless a lawsuit's filed. If a lawsuit is filed, the defendants have to disclose the amount, the limit, the carriers, and all that information allows you to properly and adequately advise your client. It also allows you to potentially put the defendant in a Stower situation, which puts a lot of pressure on the insurance company to evaluate your claim because in those situations, there could be risk if they do not pay a claim when it would have been reasonable to do so. Another reason that we file cases early on is we're the plaintiffs. We have the burden of proof. We need to be on the offense. We have to prove our claim, we have to push the case to trial, and trial is the only risk that most defendants...
We get a lot of questions about how we evaluate cases. People whom we tell we cannot accept their case often want to know why. In this episode, we attempt to clarify how we evaluate cases. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Just recently, we got a call from a man whose wife died in a very tragic incident in the hospital. He wanted us to take his case and help him out. He had called many lawyers before, he had gone on for years trying to find a lawyer that would help him. There weren't any that would help him. He called the state of Texas and filed a grievance or complaint against the doctors and hospitals involved. That investigation cleared the hospital and doctors. He then appealed that decision, and he lost. He was a very passionate man who had lost his wife, he was angry, he was upset, he was grieving. By the time he called us, the time to do anything, in terms of filing a lawsuit, had passed because the statute of limitations puts a limitation on how long you have to file a lawsuit. He didn't understand why we couldn't help him, and I don't know if it was because he was just so upset or if he just didn't understand it. It made me think I want to do a little bit of talking about how we evaluate a case when it comes into our office, because sometimes we can't help people with their cases, and that can be for a variety of reasons. Generally, when we get a call on a new case, we get all the facts and all the information that we can get. One thing I always like to ask the person on the other line, who's trying to hire us, is, "Who's at fault? Who do you think is at fault for this incident, for your injuries, for your loss of a loved one?" That's the first step I have to figure out. Did somebody do something wrong? Did somebody else's acts or inaction cause the incident that either left somebody injured or led to the wrongful death of somebody? I have to tell people when they call us sometimes that the law cannot right all wrongs. The law sets out when a person has legal redress to take them to court to seek compensation or justice through the form of compensation for the wrong that was committed. We have to ask, "Who did something wrong? Was it an entity? Was it a corporation? Was it a person that their actions cause some harm?" The next thing we have to know is, what is the harm? Did you have an injury? Did somebody pass away? Are you just angry that somebody wronged you, but there was no injury? We have to analyze whether the wrong caused the injury. In the law, we have to prove that the wrong that we're talking about, the bad act, led to somebody's injury. It's not enough that there was a wrong and then there was an injury. We have to show that they're connected. The law calls it "causation," we have to show that the wrong was the proximate cause of the injury. It's not enough for conjecture, and it's not enough that you know it really deep in your gut. You see this a lot in instances in which people are exposed to chemicals, or a landfill, or drugs. Everybody's seen the commercial on TV where it asks, "Have you taken this drug and suffered these injuries?" By the time those things are on TV, there's been a long history of studying and research and studies that typically leads to some understanding that these drugs cause these injuries. It's not enough that somebody believes that the drug they took caused this bad side effect. There has to be science, there has to be some proof of causation, proof enough that a judge will say, "That's valid causation." One of the other things we have to consider is, does the law allow for this kind of lawsuit? Sometimes we have a wrong, and we have an injury that was caused by the...
We have represented some very courageous clients. Two cases we had, one in San Antonio, led to not only a monetary settlement but also the changing of company policy. Personal injury cases can make our communities safer for everyone. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Some of the most rewarding cases we get to work on here at Hill Law Firm, are cases that involve not only a settlement for the client that makes them happy and makes them feel like justice was served, and a full measure of justice was served, but also there are cases in which we were able to affect policy changes, sometimes through the law, sometimes through products and sometimes just internal company policies. I want to talk about two of the latter. In two cases we've handled, we've been able to change the policies of a company in the way they do business. The first involved a company that allowed one of their employees to take people out drinking on a company credit card. After he had been out drinking on a tab picked up by his employer, to entertain clients of his employer, he got in his company vehicle and as he was driving down the road, he crossed the center line and crashed into our client. That case was worked up over many months and led to a substantial monetary settlement that made the client very happy. She was very satisfied with what they had done in an attempt to make it right, but that wasn't enough for her. She wanted to make sure that this wouldn't happen again. We told the defendant that we would accept her monetary settlement, as long as it also came of policy changes. Among those was a training program for anybody that had a company vehicle. This included a four-hour training program for anybody with a company vehicle to know how they could and could not use it. Also, the company instituted policies with regard to how the company credit card could be used, and it could no longer be used to pick up alcohol tabs for their clients. Finally, the company instituted a no-questions-asked policy for its employees, that if they're intoxicated and need a ride, the company would pay for a taxi or a rideshare company to pick them up. At the end of the day, my client by standing her ground, not only made the company safer, she made the public at large safer. The second example of this is also related to a drunk driving case. In that case, we pursued a bar and the bar had policies that encouraged servers to upsell their patrons. For example, if a patron said they wanted to buy 12-ounce beer, they were encouraged to tell them that for just a small amount more monetarily, they could get a double the size beer. In that case after the settlement, we were able to talk to them about those policies and get them changed. Also, we instituted the policy as part of the settlement. The defendant agreed that after anybody had two drinks, that the computer system, the point-of-sale system they use, would generate a ticket where the manager would have to go do a quick check on anybody. Just a, hello, lay eyes on them and see if they seem to have their faculties. Plaintiff's lawyers too often get a bad reputation, mostly due to media and insurance companies. They want to sensationalize and turn plaintiff's lawyers and victims into villains, but the reality is, these cases that are prosecuted by plaintiff's lawyer like the ones here in San Antonio, Texas, make the road safer, they make companies safer and they make it safer for the general public at large.
Recently, we settled a case for a young lady that was a passenger in a vehicle that ran a red light. In the intersection, her vehicle was t-boned by a VIA bus. This case had a lot of tricky issues due to the number of claims sure to be filed. We settled this case early for maximum limits. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Recently we were able to settle for what was a surprisingly good amount for a client. It was a case involving a car crash in which a car was T-boned by a VIA bus. This case had some difficulties. One of them was our client was very close family friends with the driver of her vehicle. However, that driver was at fault. Another complication was there was about 25 people on the VIA bus, Texas law provides that the insurance company can pay out whatever claims they want. They don't owe a duty to multiple plaintiffs to be fair to everybody. They can payout their money, wash their hands of it, and be done. We knew this and we knew that provided some sort of need for speed. We had to hurry up and make sure that our client's rights were protected. Our client at the end of the day would be competing with 25 other claims, assuming those 25 other people were injured. Our client suffered serious injuries. She was a young lady, barely out of high school, suffered a very serious cut to her face, some broken teeth and some other internal injuries. Luckily for her, she had health insurance and she was able to get all the medical care she needed. She seems to be on a road to full recovery. We were able to resolve her case without filing a lawsuit, which is pretty rare anymore in these times. The defendants understood that she had serious injuries. She had a scar on her face that would not heal anytime soon and the juries normally feel a certain level of sympathy for women who have injuries such as hers. On top of that, we expected the insurance company to toss all the money in a pot and tell everybody to fight over it. What was working in our favor was like most cases, we were the most aggressive. We pushed hard, we stayed on it. We got the insurance company everything they needed early on, and we told them we were going to be filing the case by a date certain if they didn't resolve our claim. I was surprised, and anymore in our industry it's pretty rare to be surprised, and I was surprised that they made a full policy offer for our client without having to file a lawsuit. It was much higher offer than I thought they would make, especially that early on. On top of that, we were able to get a full offer of the under-insured benefits from our client's insurance. Our client was able to put this to bed without having to follow a lawsuit, be deposed, go to trial. It was a great result for her and is going to provide money to pay for her college.
About 10 years ago, a terrible bus rollover happened in South Texas that killed two and injured many other Texans. Justin Hill worked on that case for years fighting off every defense raised by the major bus company. In the end, we held them accountable. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. In 2008, a commercial bus rolled over in South Texas. It was all over national news. It shut down the interstate for hours. I was hired by the families of the two people killed in that crash and about five other people that were injured. That case is one of those cases that took on a life of its own. The defendants decided that they were going to spend as much money as they could fighting the claims and they were going to make no attempt to reasonably or fairly settled them. The case drug on. One of the young men on the bus who was killed had young children and a young wife. He worked for the company, but at the time he was traveling on a personal ticket. He had gone to visit family. He had taken out a free ticket and the reason for travel was personal. In spite of this, his employer, the bus company, tried to force him to take workers' comp benefits. Now, they do this to try to limit his recovery because the workers' comp system limits the amount of damages if somebody is killed on the job. We thought it was pretty clear he was not on the job at the time, he was dead heading back to work. He worked in a ticket area and he wasn't a driver, but they took the position he was on the job so they could try to limit his recovery. The other woman killed left four adult children and a husband. The bus companies tried to blame the manufacturer of the bus, the manufacturer of the bus that they continued to buy buses from. They tried to say that there was some defect in the bus, even though it was 17 years old and had what we calculated to be well more than 4 million miles on it. The driver in this crash had lost control after a driveshaft had broken. Now, drive shaft breaking isn't the most common problem, but it happens regularly and that doesn't cause buses to roll over left and right. Now the bus company argued that that is what caused it to rollover. They hired more than 20 experts and spent what had to be 2 or $3 million defending this case. They wanted make everybody that sued them and their attorneys spend as much money as possible and waste as much time as possible. We never gave up. We stuck to the case, and most of the cases were settled a month out from trial. However, the poor young man who was stuck in the worker's comp system, his case went up and down in the appeals court for almost 10 years, until finally his case resolved and his wife was finally able to get money to help care for herself and her children. I've said before, we handle a lot of bus cases and this was the bus case that sort of defined my early career. I learned a lot about buses, about the companies, about the manufacturer of buses. I learned a lot about the economics of the companies and how they have such buying power that the manufacturers of buses will change the entire way they build buses to make specialized versions for their big customers. We continue to represent victims in bus crash cases, and we continue to hold bus companies accountable when they do wrong.
When we file an injury lawsuit in San Antonio or anywhere in Texas, we know that the defendants and insurance companies will create some defense whether it is true or not. When it comes to car crashes, we know the playbook and we know the defenses they will use. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: We've represented a lot of San Antonians in car crash cases. Without failure, I have to warn and prepare my clients that no matter what the facts of the case are, the other side is going to come up with some defense. In car crash cases in San Antonio, there have been enough trials and enough cases that we know the playbook from the defense side. Recently, I went to a CLE and I heard one of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Brethren, discuss how he calls the defense's the PIG defenses, P-I-G. In 99% of car crash cases, the defense is going to say one of these defenses. First they're going to say, "The person injured in the vehicle had a preexisting condition." This could be from the person really honestly, it had an injury to the same location they injured in this crash, to the fact that they went to a chiropractor 20 years prior, and the chiropractor mentioned that they were going to do a full body adjustment. They'll try to contort that to say that the client had some preexisting condition. Currently, I'm working on a case in which the client after getting rear ended by woman not paying attention, had shoulder surgery. Now, the defense is saying since she had had shoulder surgery a while before this crash, that it's the previous injury or the previous surgery that caused her injury in this crash. They ignore the fact that the previous surgery had nothing to do with a traumatic injury. It had nothing to do with the portion of her shoulder that was injured in this crash. It had nothing to do with anything related to this crash. It was just in the same general vicinity of her injury in this crash. They'll go to all lengths to say that some previous medical condition is what caused the injuries from the car crash. The 'I' is impact. Another thing they like to do is say, "Well, there's no way that somebody could have been injured in this impact. Look at the pictures." Now, they have to admit that all the studies show that there is no amount of impact by which an injury cannot occur. People can be injured at any speeds depending on how they're positioned, the dynamics of the crash, the size of the vehicles and their condition. Some people are more susceptible to injury than others. Older people are more susceptible than teenagers. That's the second most popular defense we see. The third, the 'G', is gaps in treatment. In normal everyday life, we all try to walk off injuries and try to see if they'll resolve on their own. However, insurance companies ignore the fact that people do not want to go to the doctor unless they absolutely have to. They'll try to turn that into a defense and they'll say, "Well, you had a gap in your treatment." It doesn't matter if the gap is one week or four weeks or four days. They're going to say that at some point, there's so much distance between two doctor visits, that either you weren't hurt or you hurt yourself some other way. It's odd having to discuss with clients, how these PIG defenses will be used to try to defend the case. Then at any other point in life, you would want to see if time heals your injuries, but the insurance companies will use that against you. They'll use it against you if you put time between your doctor visits, and then if you don't, they'll use it against you that you went to too many doctor's visits. One thing can be clear is the insurance companies are never going to...
We represented a young San Antonio man, with another law firm in San Antonio, whom was injured when he was at a friend's and a hot tub fell on him. He injured his knee and shoulder and had surgery. The hot tub delivery company were held responsible. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Truly, one of my favorite things about being a lawyer is the ability to work with other good lawyers, learn from other lawyers, whether that's an old gray hair, it's a new lawyer. Our world, in the legal profession, people talk about the practice of law. I think that's an important point because we're all trying our best to learn and we should learn every day. We call it "The practice" because there's no perfection. You cannot be the world's best mason without trying a lot, you can't be the world's best plumber without trying a lot. All of these trades and professions you learn all the time and one of those professions where people should learn all the time is the legal profession. I have the opportunity on occasion to work with young lawyers, older lawyers. Right now, I've got Sean Luchnick with me here, who's a younger lawyer compared to myself, not young in terms of knowing what he's doing but he got the opportunity to intern/work with me when he had just gotten licensed. We got to work a case together. I have him on here today. I want to talk about that case. [unintelligible 00:01:36] thank you for being here. Sean Luchnick: Justin, thank you for having me. Justin: One thing about [unintelligible 00:01:41] is I always have to teach him, so you got to talk close to the mic. We're going to talk about a case. We don't use names. We don't use numbers. Neither of us wants to get in trouble with a bar. It's important I think for our listeners to understand the personal injury law, personal injury lawsuits are not confined to what you see on television, they're not confined to what you see in the news and they're not confined to what the insurance companies and defense lawyers want you to think about us. [unintelligible 00:02:09] and I had the great honor of working a few cases together. One of the cases we work together involved one of his friends who he's known a long time, who was at a home, when a large piece of equipment, a hot tub was being delivered. The delivery people basically enlisted him to help out with the delivery. Is that fair to say? Sean Luchnick: That's exactly right. Justin: Okay. He's just a guy hanging out at the house, people show up to deliver a hot tub. As I work to the case with your help, the allegation was they were very ill-equipped to deliver a giant hot tub. What would you say about that? Sean Luchnick: Yes, so pretty much it's happening. My friend, he is at a other friend's house. The house they're at, it's my friend's house, and my friend is at my other friend's house. A hot tub is being delivered to my friend who owns the house. The company gets there. When they get there, it's two people who work for the company delivering the hot tub. They're starting to put this hot tub onto a dolly and they're pointing around the side of the house, let's say so here's the house. The hot tubs on the dolly coming around the side. Justin: Sorry about this way. It's heading north and it's about to take a 90-degree turn to the east, fair? Sean Luchnick: To the east. Yes. Which would be where the patio is where it's going to ultimately get installed. Justin: Okay, they're delivering a hot tub to a patio in the backyard but they come to the front yard, they unload the thing, they're heading north, they're going to take a 90-degree turn to the east. What...
We have handled two 18 wheeler crash cases that involved jack knifed 18 wheelers blocking all lanes of travel. One of these cases was in San Antonio. Both of these cases involved fatality crashes. Tractor trailer drivers are expected to be safe and not create dangers. When they do, deadly accidents occur. Transcript: Speaker 1: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] 18-wheelers are the largest vehicles on the road. They're largest in terms of length, they're largest in terms of weight. They drive at highway speeds with the rest of us on the road. Due to their size, if they're to hit a passenger vehicle, it's a much different crash than two passenger vehicles hitting each other. 18-wheelers can weigh as much as 20 or 30 times the weight of a passenger vehicle. Hill Law Firm has handled a lot of 18-wheeler crash cases, and a lot of them have had very, very tragic consequences. We've handled two cases in which the 18-wheeler driver, the defendant driver, somehow or another came to block all lanes of travel, with his trailer running perpendicular to the roadway. In both of these cases, the 18-wheeler driver was somehow reversing and jackknifed his vehicle across all lines of travel. In both of these cases, it was at night and in both of these cases, our clients were doing what they were supposed to do; minding the laws, driving the speed limit, paying attention when they came upon a trailer in the night, blocking all lines of travel. One of these cases we handled involved four men going to work. It was a car full of people at about six in the morning in the fog when an 18-wheeler driver had blocked all lanes of travel by getting jackknifed across the roadway. When they hit that trailer, they underrode it, and it cut off the top of the passenger vehicle. Two men were killed in that crash and two men were very seriously injured. The other case involved a man who was going to work who was also in an 18-wheeler. It was a dark part of San Antonio and there was a curve. As he came around that curve, the 18-wheeler trailer that had been jackknifed was parked shoulder to shoulder across all lines of travel. Our client must have seen him because he attempted to move to the far right and break, but he wasn't able to break and move in time. He crashed into that trailer, and he did not survive the crash. Both of these cases bring to light the importance that 18-wheeler companies hire safe drivers. San Antonio, statistically, has a big problem with 18-wheeler crashes in this county. The rules and laws say the 18-wheeler drivers and 18-wheeler companies can use the roadways. However, they're held to a little higher standard than normal drivers. Their drivers have to have more schooling, have to have different licensing, have to have different requirements and employers have to jump through certain hoops before they hire these truckers. The law states that if you're going to drive a bigger, heavier, longer vehicle on the roadways, that you have to do a few things that other drivers don't have to. Those additional hoops and those additional safety measures are there to make sure that the normal motoring public is not put in harm's way by negligent and unsafe trucking companies and truckers. Unfortunately, in those two cases, the trucking companies and the truckers hadn't followed the rules and that's what led to these terribly tragic accidents. We're going to talk more about some of the other ways 18-wheeler drivers and 18-wheeler companies occasionally create dangerous situations on the roadways that lead to San Antonio crashes. [music]
There are many wrong way crashes in San Antonio, Texas. The State has even studied the problem due to the number of those types of crashes in San Antonio. Recently, we represented a young lady hit head on by a drunk driver and then she was hit by a second vehicle seconds later. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. San Antonio has had a problem with wrong way drivers for many years. Different organizations and DOT and other government agencies have researched this to try to figure out why San Antonio has a higher incidence of wrong way crashes than other cities. This is especially true in the 1604 corridor on the North side of the city. If you live in San Antonio and you read the news, you see these every so often. They are not uncommon to see crashes involving wrong way drivers on 1604. It's not limited to 1604 in San Antonio, but some of the other roads just do not have the same level of problem. Our law firm has handled many wrong way crashes in San Antonio. About five years ago, we were hired to represent a young lady who was driving home on 1604 after being at work. It was pretty late at night, and as she was driving, she was hit head on by a drunk driver. Many of the wrong way crashes on 1604 happen in the middle of the night, and many of them involve intoxicated drivers. For our client, that's was what happened. She was hit head on by a drunk driver, and while she was unconscious and her vehicle was disabled in the roadway, she was hit by another vehicle as well. She spent 10 days in the ICU. Somehow or another, she was able to make a pretty good recovery. She had soft tissue injuries that were going to be with her for life, she had broken bones. She had scars on her face. In that case, the drunk driver's insurance and the drunk driver settled as soon as they could. They knew they couldn't defend the case. The driver who hit her the second time at first attempted to say that they had no liability, even though the roadway was lit in this portion, and even though there was, by all statements, about three minutes between the first crash and the second. After a few months, his insurance also settled their portion of the case. However, our clients uninsured under insured motorist coverage, took about nine months to settle their case. Due to changes in the law, there's very little risk if insurance companies deny their insurance claim for UM or UIM coverage. In the end, we were able to settle this case for the limits of three different policies for this young lady injured by a wrong way drunk driver off 1604. Unfortunately, unless many things change and they figure out why this problem occurs up there, wrong way crashes in San Antonio are going to continue to be a problem, and I expect we'll continue to represent victims of these wrong way crashes. [00:03:42] [END OF AUDIO]
If you are injured in a car accident, you should immediately seek medical attention. This is a question we hear a lot from people that were recently in a crash. The only way to know how injured you are is to let a trained medical professional evaluate your injuries. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] In our ongoing series here on Hill Law Firm cases we've been discussing some of the common questions we get from people following car crashes. As previously stated, sometimes we get calls while people are still at the scene of a car crash and sometimes they call us weeks, months or maybe even a year following. We mostly had been talking about the calls we get from people we know at the scene of a crash. Usually, these are former clients or friends of clients or family members or friends that we've known and they'll call us because they want to make sure they don't do something wrong that allows their insurance or the other side's insurance to deny their claim. One of the questions we get often is, should I go see a doctor. Across the board, I tell clients when they come in at any stage of the litigation or their case claim process that I'm not a doctor. I can't give them medical advice and if they think they're hurt, they need to go see somebody. What the insurance companies like to do is they like to say that if you didn't go see a doctor in X number of days following the crash, that you must not have been hurt. I don't play those games. I don't let the insurance adjuster tell my clients whether they're hurt or not. I let the doctors decide whether somebody is injured. A few examples I always think of is one of the more common examples is we'll get calls from people following a crash and they'll say, well, I'm stiff or I feel weird, but I'm not in a lot of pain. In the next day or 24 or 48 hours later, they call and they say that they're in terrible pain. At the scene of the crash, people seem to have adrenaline or something going on in their system that lets them know they're hurt, but they're not feeling the pain just yet. At any point along that process, I tell them, "If you start to hurt, you need to go see somebody." Another thing that we see a lot is people who bang their heads in crashes or with their heads so fast, they end up with a concussion, and those symptoms present overtime sometimes. We'll have clients that'll say after a crash that they have a really bad headache and then they start realizing they have problems sleeping. They realize that they're nauseated. Maybe they're dizzy and maybe they're having memory issues, but some of those symptoms come on overtime. What we tell everybody, our clients, our friends, our family is that if you think you're injured, you should go see a doctor or a medical professional but the only one that can determine whether or not you're injured or in pain is you. Listen to your body, listen to yourself, and if you think you've been injured following a crash or an accident or an incident, go see a doctor. Go seek professional medical help. [music] [00:03:37] [END OF AUDIO]
Commercial buildings are supposed to keep the property safe so that invitees into the property do not get injured or killed from a dangerous condition. In this case we represented a young girl that fell through the stairway railings that were 10 inches wider than the code allows. She suffered a major traumatic brain injury as a result of this property owners negligence. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Speaker: About four years ago, we had the pleasure of representing the mother and grandmother of a young elementary school-aged child who was injured at a bank. On that day, the grandmother was going to visit with her wills trust and estate attorney. Now that attorney shared office in a bank building. The bank was one of these multinational Fortune 500 banks. They had a bank building, but they didn't really care to update it or make it safe. While this little girl and her grandmother were walking up the stairs, the little girl tripped. What normally would just be a little trip and fall on the stairs turned into a very tragic situation. When this little girl fell, she fell to her left, to the left where the stairwell railings should have stopped her. However, the stairwell railings were too wide. They were outside of code. They were not narrow enough to stop a child from falling between. As this little girl fell between them. Her grandmother reached and grabbed and she was able to grab her shoe which came off of her granddaughter's foot. The grandmother was doing everything right and paying attention and the young girl was a little girl who tripped on stairs. The reason she fell through this stairwell 25 feet under her head was because the bank had failed to ensure that their stairwell railings were up to code and that they were safe, and that even though they invited the general public to be in that building, to be paying customers, and to go visit their tenants, they didn't care to make sure that their bank was a safe building for children, adults, and their tenants. This little girl fell 25 feet under her head. She crushed her skull, she had a bad brain injury. The case proceeded, and the bank made any number of defenses that they thought they could use to defend and avoid liability in this case. First, they tried to argue that the bank railings were up to code based on 1974 codes when the building was built. After we were able to prove that to be untrue because they made major renovations on the building and therefore, had to bring it up to code. They moved on to the next argument, and that was, yes the kid was hurt and maybe the bank railings weren't up to code, but this little girl made a full recovery and therefore, she was fine. There was multiple experts involved who had done neuropsychological testing of this young lady imaging of her brain and other diagnostic tests. In the end, the defense lawyers put up an expert who purported to be an expert in brain injuries. In that deposition, he had to admit that there were indications on some of the testing that this young lady was going to develop a seizure condition as a result of this brain injury. In mediation, we were able to settle this case for an amount of money that will take care of this young lady's medical needs for the rest of her life. We were also able to hold the bank accountable for failing to do what they should have done. If a business is going to invite people onto their grounds and into their building to transact business, they have a duty to make sure that building is safe, and they have a duty to make sure that they keep it in a safe manner and a safe condition. [00:04:43] [END OF AUDIO]
The lessons learned early in my practice guide the way I work personal injury cases today. My first deposition was of an investigating officer in a quadruple death wrongful death product liability case. I learned a lot in that case and practice law differently because of that deposition. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] As attorneys, we always look back on cases and we reminisce and we look back and think about what we learned and didn't learn. Early on in my career, I was lucky to be hired by one of the best law firms in the state of Texas in the United States. Probably the Premier Product Liability Law Firm in the United States at that time. I'd been at the firm about two weeks when one of the partners told me that he wanted me to take a deposition, sort of baptism by fire. As I start preparing for the deposition, I realized this is a really big deposition. Some law firms give young associates busy work and the firm I was at, let me do real work. I was going to be deposing the investigating DPS trooper, regarding a car crash that involved tire delamination. Now, what that is, is that when a tire is defectively manufactured, the tread can come off of a tire at highway speeds, which can cause drivers to lose control. In this case, these drivers were going North on 281 when their front left tire delaminated, suffered a traumatic tread separation and cross the center line hitting the other car head-on. Everybody in both vehicles died in this crash. I was deposing the DPS trooper regarding the cause of the crash, what he found, what he saw, who he talked to. It was a very in-depth deposition. I remember I prepared for days. On the way to that deposition, the lawyer I was working with on the case asked me what my plan was, and I told him. To this day, I'm not sure if he was doing it to mess with me or test me or just a disagreement, but he told me on the way there 30 minutes before, that he wouldn't do any of the things I was doing. Rightfully, I was terrified, I was confused. I went and took the deposition, I think I sweated the whole time but learning on a case with so much riding on it, such a heavy weighty case, forced me to prepare in a way that I wasn't used to. This is the very start of my career but I felt the importance of what I was doing at that point and that importance led to my preparation. I still follow that philosophy today as I prepare for depositions, or I prepare for trial. I look back on that deposition and I think, "No, I would do it exactly the same way I had planned to do it." We all have to learn the way we do things in our own style. I take depositions of troopers and wrongful death cases the way I prepared to that day and the way I still think is the right way to do it. One thing that I've learned through my career is nothing can beat preparation.
We represented a lady that was at her hardware store to pick up some supplies. While walking out of the store, she tripped on a bold that was left in the concrete after a recent renovation. Her fall led to her braking a part of her should that required her to have surgery. This San Antonio case settled quickly after filing. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. We handle all types of personal injury cases here at Hill Law Firm. One of the types of cases people hear about often are slip and falls or trip and falls. They're spoken of negatively as though somebody injured, when a property is unsafe, is somehow at fault. Sometimes they are at fault, but sometimes they're not. The law in Texas has become so difficult that it's very hard to prove one of those cases, and never get in front of a jury on any case like that. We don't do a ton of premises liability cases at Hill Law Firm, but we do some of them. One of the cases we handled was for a woman who was injured at a hardware store. The hardware store recently had a renovation. They had moved the front of the store out, they had put an even an overhang area in front of the store, they had changed a lot of the areas where people come and go to expand the size of their store. My client was at the store picking up something, when she was walking out towards her car. What she didn't see was that when they renovated the store, they had left a bolt sticking about one inch out of the concrete. This bolt was right in the middle of the walkway, and the store had just opened up after the renovations. The color of the bolt was almost identical to the color of the floor. My client was walking, looking at her receipt, when she kicked the bolt and fell. My client was about 65 years old and not as agile as she used to be, and she fell on her shoulder and broke her shoulder. The incident was on video, and the hardware store shaved down the bolt the next day. They admitted that they had accidentally left that bolt there. They admitted that they had created a dangerous condition for our client, that they had a duty to remove any dangerous conditions, and they had not. Due to the trip and fall of my client in the San Antonio hardware store, she had significant medical bills. She had a surgery. I thought she was going to require a second surgery, but her first surgery and rehabilitation did the job. Luckily for her, the defendant, in this case, realized that this was a trip and fall that they were responsible for. They did the right thing, and they resolved her claim early. [00:03:28] [END OF AUDIO]
Sometimes when a drunk driver kills someone, not only can they be held responsible civilly and criminally, but the bar that over served the drunk can be held civilly liable as well. In this case, two people were killed and two were injured. Four families forever changed by a bar and person making bad choices. Transcript Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. At Hill Law Firm, we handle personal injury cases, and we also handle wrongful death cases. Some people don't understand the tie in and how they're related to each other, but generally, the law is very similar, cases approved almost the same way. A couple of years ago, I was reached out to by four different families, one of the most tragic cases I've ever worked on. Four young adults, fresh out of high school, were in town catching up. A couple of them worked at a local restaurant, and were getting off, and one of their buddies picked them up. They were going over to one of their houses to catch up after they had all been gone, some to college, some to the military. They were stopped at a light, when all of a sudden they were rear-ended by a drunk driver. The two passengers in the back were killed. The two passengers in the front were seriously injured. Both of them suffered brain injuries, and both of them suffered bad soft tissue injuries. The woman who hit them didn't even know where she was. She thought she was still on the highway. She thought she had her kids in the car. She told the police officer she hadn't even been in a crash. She was so intoxicated, she didn't even understand what was going on. All of the families hired me to represent them. They all agreed to waive any conflicts they may have, and they wanted to make sure they were all together in this because it was a tough thing for all of them to do, and all of their kids had grown up together as great friends. We found out the lady that hit them had been drinking at a bar celebrating her 25th birthday. Her coworkers had taken her out and got her drunk. Then they sent her on her way. Even though she was clearly intoxicated, as the video from the bar showed, she kept getting served. Then her friends, her so-called friends, let her get in the car and drive. She lived in the Northeast side of San Antonio, but she was in the Southwest side when this crash occurred. She thought she was almost home, she told the cop. She had no recognition of where she was, what had happened, or how to even get to her house. The families in this case hired me, my law firm, to handle the case for them. Once we were able to get our hands on the video from the bar, and the TABC certifications from the bar, it was pretty clear that the bar was not following the rules. The video showed that this person was intoxicated, and the TAB certification showed that they had servers serving alcohol who were not certified. The bar tendered its policy limits pretty quickly thereafter. I stay in touch with some of these former clients. I stay in touch with two of the young men who were injured, one in the military. We also helped him apply for military benefits that he did not know existed. Even though we represent clients for one case, we help them where we can because we got into this for the right reasons. Dram shop cases are difficult, and very few lawyers handle them anymore because they think they're too difficult to prove. We're one of the few law firms in Texas that have tried Dram shop cases to verdict. We continue to represent victims of drunk drivers against drunks, and it gets the bars that get them drunk.
Some of the hardest cases we have worked on include sexual assault lawsuits arising out of the sexual assault of minors here in San Antonio. These cases are difficult legally and emotionally. One such case we took led to a change in Texas law that we are very proud of because it helps all Texans. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] A lot of people we meet with, we have to explain that the law is not made to right every wrong, but the law is written the way it is written due to legislators and courts who have interpreted it a certain way and decided that certain things would be actionable in the civil system. Sometimes the laws need to change because they, by operation, are unfair. One of the early cases I worked on, which I've talked about in this podcast, involved the sexual assault of a minor. I got involved in that case because at some point along the way, a sexually-oriented business establishment, a strip club, had sued her. When she was being trafficked, she was taken to a strip club at one point. After she was rescued, the strip club sued her and the attorney for the strip club got on the news and said that she looked like Miss America and looked like she wanted to be there even though she was 14 years old. The strip club sued this 14-year-old girl for, according to them, jeopardizing their TABC license. Somehow or another, this young lady was referred to me because nobody knew how to help her. Two years out of law school, I can't say I really knew how to help her at that time, but I was going to help her. I represented her as a defense attorney first, the one time in my career I was a defense attorney, and then the strip club decided that was a really bad idea on their part and they wanted out of it, but it was too late at that part. We pursued them for allowing this to happen in their bar for not using diligence, and what we felt was something they knew was happening and they just turned a blind eye to it. They filed a motion to dismiss our case in the court. The law at the time was that if somebody suffered mental injuries without physical injuries, that they don't have a claim in Texas except for a few limited circumstances. This was not one of them. The trial judge told us that that was the law and he didn't feel it was just, but he had to grant their motion, so the case went up on appeal. On appeal, the appellate court said that they thought the law was unjust as well, and they wanted the Supreme Court to give guidance, but for now they were going to change the law and say that if a minor was in a sexually-oriented business, and the law protects minors from entering those businesses, that the court was going to recognize that she would have suffered a mental injury. This was new law in Texas. The Supreme Court chose not to decide this, so for now, in one appellate division in the state of Texas, we were able to change the law and make new law. This is new law that protects minors. It protects children. It protects them against predators. In this sexual assault case, I was able to represent my client in a way that, not only at the end of the day, stood up for her rights, but due to her courage, we were able to change the law in the state of Texas, at least in one appellate division, so that children are more protected now than they were before. [music]
Josh Fogelman of Austin and Justin Hill teamed up to represent a nice lady injured when a ceiling tile fell and hit her on the head. The ceiling tile had become soaked with water due to an improper AC repair. This leak was known and never fixed. When the tile hit her in the head, she suffered serious psychological and neurological injuries. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Occasionally, on this podcast, we get to have our friends, our colleagues, our co-counsel/co-workers on to join us and discuss cases and issues and other things we've worked together. I have Josh Fogelman here with me today who's an injury lawyer in Austin, a really good friend of mine and classmate from Baylor Law School. Him and I had the occasion over time to work on a few things together, but today, we're going to talk about a case we worked on out of Austin. We're not going to say the name, Josh. We're not going to say any amounts. It was a really fascinating case with a really fascinating client that had a really fantastic result. Tell me what you remember about the factual scenario. Josh: This was definitely an interesting one. We represented a woman who was visiting Austin from out of state with her husband. They were staying at a hotel in Downtown Austin. Our client was sitting in the lobby of the hotel waiting to speak with the concierge desk and a ceiling tile collapsed and fell and struck her while she was sitting there in the lobby. It was an interesting injury case because this particular client had a pretty extensive history of some physical and psychological injuries. She'd actually been a civil rights activist who was very involved in the civil rights movement. Because of her involvement in the civil rights movement, she had actually been subjected to a number of physical attacks that had left her with permanent injuries, as well as some pretty serious post-traumatic stress syndrome. When she was hit by this pretty heavy falling object, she was not expecting to strike her. It triggered both her physical and psychological injuries in a permanent manner. Justin Hill: One of the things that was interesting about that case was the incident was on video, correct? Josh: It was. There was some security camera footage of the incident. It was pretty alarming. Justin Hill: Yes, which takes away some of the defenses that we've seen. We talk about that on this podcast a lot. These frivolous defenses, made-up defenses, you see them in all the cases. I always have to tell clients, "No matter what your facts are, if it's on video, they're still going to have a defense to your case." In our case, it seemed like the defense ran the gamut from, "Okay, that happened, but blame all these other people," to then, "Okay, maybe it was our fault. Now, let's blame her pre-existing injuries and her pre-existing psychological issues." What did you find to be the toughest element of that case? Josh: I thought the toughest element of that case was proving the extent of her harm. One of the things that we struggle with with personal injury lawyers is so many of the cases that we see, you can actually look at photographs of the physical injuries. It's very clear what has happened to a person. Oftentimes, they will walk into the courtroom with a permanent reminder of what those physical injuries were, whether it's the loss of the limb or some permanent scarring, something of that nature. But when you're dealing with primarily psychological injuries, it can be a little bit more challenging to really present that in a way that you feel comfortable and confident a jury will identify with and understand. This was one of those cases....
Texas has a number of laws passed and created to protect people from the dangers associated with guns. Many of the laws are created to protect children and vulnerable populations from the dangers of guns. In our Law in 10 series, Steven Lopez and Justin Hill discuss some of these laws. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Steven Lopez: Hi, I'm Steven Lopez here with Justin Hill, we are both attorneys here at the Hill Law Firm. We're going to talk today about a case that we're dealing with here at the firm, and talk about one of the laws that applies to that case, and it has to do with guns safety. We recently started working on a case, Justin, that involves gun safety. It's an unfortunate incident where a person left a loaded firearm in a place where an eight-year-old could readily access it. They ended up gaining access to that gun and losing their life. Today I thought we'd take some time and talk about gun safety and law under the Texas penal code that has to deal with not only a negligent use of a firearm, but what can happen when negligently using that firearm leads to the wrongful death of a child. Justin Hill: Yes, I think that's a good point for us to move into some of the things that we get calls about at the law firm. Because we'll get calls where people just want advice on the law, which we can't really give advice on the law if we don't represent somebody. We can touch on some of the big parts of the law that we see in our day to day practice, and that's what you're doing here today. In light of this case you just filed up in Bell County. I think it's a perfect time to talk about,firearm safety, and the laws you're going to talk about. Because you yourself, you're kind of a gun guy and a gun owner. Steven: I don't know if I'd call myself a gun guy. I do own a couple of firearms, I do hold a concealed handgun license. I'm not the person that carries a gun around every single day. I do have a license to do that, I do believe in the second amendment. I also believe that with owning a gun, and especially if you have a concealed handgun license that, that is an awesome responsibility. It comes with just a lot of responsibility in how you use and operate those firearms. Justin: Yes, I never got my CHL. It's interesting to me to go to the class, but I've always thought it's either going to get stolen. Somebody else is going to get their hands on it. I have some guns, but I didn't mean you were crazy about guns, but you have guns. You're a supporter of the second amendment. You have your CHL. You've been to the class where they teach you a lot about these laws. Even in light of that, the case where we're suing the man who had a CHL, and still just ignored some of these very important laws. What's the big criminal law we're going to be talking about in that case as we move forward on that Bell County case? So Our listeners can understand, and specifically our gun-owning listeners can understand that there's a lot of responsibilities about owning a gun outside of just what you're taught in the class. Steven: The law we're going to be talking about today is Texas penal code section 46.13. That's a law that deals with where you can leave your gun when children are around. Just the plain text of the law says, "A person commits an offense if a child gains access to a readily dischargeable firearm, and the person with criminal negligence fails to secure the firearm or left the firearm in a place to which the person knew, or should have known the child would gain access." Now that's a lot of legal words we're going to go ahead and break that down for our listeners, and for people who own guns and have them around
Our client was rear-ended by a cement truck. The driver of that truck didn't have a commercial driver's license and he and his company knew that. Regardless, they let him have the keys to this large vehicle and put him on the road. He injured my client to the extent she had to have neck surgery. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. A podcast discusses real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. or confidentiality reasons names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: As the oil and gas boom in Texas has taken over the trucking industry, a lot of trucking companies that require their drivers to be licensed and safe have stooped to hiring truck drivers who maybe aren't licensed and maybe don't have a good driving record. A couple of years ago, we were contacted by a young lady who was rear-ended by a cement truck. It was not that big of a hit, however, she was very seriously injured. Her injury required her to have surgery on her neck. Working on the case we were able to find out a few things: one that truck driver, the 18-wheeler driver, the cement truck driver that is, did not have a current commercial driver's license. Now, that seems pretty unheard of, and it is pretty unheard of. Once we started digging into it, however, we found out that this man had been ticketed for not having a driver's license multiple times. When he was ticketed, his employer would pay those tickets. In this case, an employer knew they had a driver who did not have a commercial driver's license and was, therefore, illegal to drive. They gave him the keys to a fully loaded, very heavy cement truck, and sent him out on the road. Unfortunately for my client, she was in front of this trucker when he failed to stop and he rear-ended her vehicle. Now she has fixation in her neck, which means some of the spinal columns have been fused together. She'll never be the same again, due to the negligence of this truck driver and his company, she's been forever injured. While working at this case the defendants tried to come up with any defense they could, but they could never get over the fact that they gave the keys to a truck, to a trucker who didn't have a license. In the end, we were able to resolve this case. In the end, I think, we were able to change the way this company did business. Not only did that happen, this trucker was criminally prosecuted because what he was doing was illegal at the time. At Hill law firm we not only like to represent our clients in the civil matters for the monetary damages they have suffered, we also hopefully can use the civil matter to effectuate change in some of these companies that need to change their policies. This is one of those cases where we were able to change the policies of a company. While our client will never be the same and never fully recover from her injuries, she received a settlement that made her very happy, that she thought was fair under the circumstances, and she got to change the policies of a company to make sure it would never happen to somebody else again. [music]
Hill Law Firm handles all types of personal injury cases in San Antonio and all over the State of Texas. In this episode, we discuss some of the cases we signed and filed in the past month or so. They include 3 different cases stemming from allegations of sexual abuse, a worker injured on the job, an 18 wheeler crash, and a case involving the negligent securement of a firearm. Hill Law Firm handles a very diverse docket of cases. Transcript: San Antonio Injury Attorney, Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. As I started this podcast, part of the reason to do it was so that I could explain to clients and potential new clients and people in our industry the type of work we do as a law firm. These are not things that we publish or put out there, but it's important, I think, that people understand what type of work we do for multiple reasons. One of which is, I can't say how many times I've had in town, reach out to me and tell me that they didn't know the type of work we did, or that they would have referred me somebody if they'd only known that was the type of case we handle. I started this podcast with part of the idea of giving a little bit of background in who we are and what we do. Today, I want to talk a little bit about just a general month. I want to talk about some of the cases that we filed over the last 30, 45 days or so to give you some flavor about the type of work we do. As a lawyer, really, my entire career is representing victims of sexual assault, sexual violence, sexual harassment. It's just always been something I've been very passionate about. It's something many lawyers won't take or handle, so I've gotten a lot of calls by people that have nowhere else to turn. This month is kind of different in that we've had a lot of those cases come in, and we filed three cases involving some sort of sexual assault or sexual harassment. We filed two cases. We brought in two cases involving allegations of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church. One of those cases has been filed in Houston. One of those cases is here in San Antonio, and it's not currently filed. The one in Houston has been in the newspaper, the Houston Chronicle ran an article about it. We represent the victim who was assaulted when she was still a minor by the youth minister at the church. That youth minister ended up being convicted and is a registered sex offender. He was hired by the church just a very short amount of time before this assault occurred. In our lawsuit, we alleged that they failed to screen who they were hiring, supervise who they were hiring, or train them properly. On top of that, they put this man in close approximation with young children without knowing really anything about him. That case is filed in Harris County. The one in Bexar County that we've yet to file involves a priest sexual abuse allegation for many years ago, involving a priest who's a well-known pedophile criminal, and the church has admitted as such about this priest. The third case we filed in Bexar County, Texas, involved the owner of a business who was running fake Craigslist ads to get women to come into his office for a fake interview. When they were there for the interview, he would assault, harass, and otherwise try to take advantage of these women who were trying to get a job in these tough economic times. He's now been arrested and indicted in Bexar County, Texas. We have filed a civil lawsuit against him for these actions as well. Some of the other cases that we filed this month include a traumatic brain injury case filed in Harris County, Texas. We represent a young woman who went to a restaurant,...
Steven Lopez is going to chronicle his transition into the San Antonio, Texas personal injury law practice at Hill Law Firm. At recording, he has been at the firm about 3 weeks and will join a few times to discuss. Join Steven and feel free to send us questions. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to this episode of the Hill Law Firm podcast. Today, my guest is a previous guest. This is the first repeat guest on the Hill Law Firm podcast section. Now he's a member of the law firm. Steven works with us, so this is going to be meet the team and also get caught up on what Steven's doing and what he thinks and what he plans to do here. Thanks, Steven. Welcome. Steven Lopez: Awesome. Thanks. Happy to be here. Happy to make history. Justin: [chuckles] Welcome to the Law Firm as well and happy National Tequila Day. Steven: Awesome. Thanks. Justin: As a perk here, I have provided Steven a margarita that he's going to have later and I also provided myself to get a little bit about what's going on here. We've got a Q&A with you talking a little bit about where you're from. We put it on our website a blog post with a Q&A, more information on who you are as a background. I don't want to cover that, but I want to talk to you a little bit about your time here. You're in your seventh year as an attorney. Steven: Seventh year. Justin: In our world, the seventh year is the most marketable year for a lawyer. Five to eight-year lawyers are the most sought after. I got you at the peak of your career- Steven: Price. Justin: [laughs] Let's talk a little bit about first impressions. You got here, what are some of the first impressions you have of working here and your caseload and what you think? Steven: Sure. Well, I met all the staff, got situated during that first week, and really what was really outstanding to me was the relationship that everybody seems to have here. It's a very small firm and everybody just talks to each other like normal people. You can tell that the staff feel respected and feel that their input's worthy and that people listen to them. There's not really a hierarchy, a boss-employee vibe that I got when I got here. It was very warm from all levels, from the top down. It's a flat aces and just dove in. I got a lot of interesting cases with some really hurt people that I was able to meet and talk to and get involved right from day one. For me, that's the most rewarding part is meeting our clients and getting to work on some interesting cases. Justin: Our law firm is unique. I tell everybody that we meet and part of what we say on our website is you're going to get a whole bunch of individualized attention. We're very intensely focused on the cases and clients, and that's together, which is going to be exciting and fun. Steven: Yes, which is great. It's always good to know that you've got someone in your corner, someone that's also familiar with the facts and the legal issues in your case and you're just not on an island out there fighting by yourself because 9 times out of 10, the defense firms and insurance companies have a whole squad of lawyers that are pitted against you. It just feels good to have a strong team and somebody in your corner. Justin: You got involved and you got caught up on our file system, you got caught up on our document management system, our phones, our computers, all that. You did that on the weekend, on your own time as you were transitioning over here. One of the things that I've asked you to take a lead or role in to get some of the stuff off of my plate, honestly, is intake. You're going to be working with Josh, and I...
Due to future economic needs for babies injured in the birthing process, they are some of the only medical malpractice claims in Texas that remain viable. The causes of birth injuries due to medical error can stem from failure to screen the mother and baby prior to the birth to failing to monitor the health of the mom and baby during the process. Either way, these cases are hard to prove and require expertise. Expert medical malpractice lawyer Brian Steward joins us to discuss. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] All right. We're back with another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, and we're here talking with Brian Steward regarding medical malpractice lawsuits. Brian is a local lawyer in San Antonio, an injury lawyer, a mediator, and he has had a long history handling medical malpractice from plaintiff's and defendant's side and also pre and post law changes that made it almost impossible in the state of Texas to bring these types of cases. One of the ways these types of cases have lived on though is in the birth injury context. That's mostly because if somebody is injured at birth, a baby is injured at birth, their medical needs into the future are so significant and so catastrophic really for their families that the claims are still viable and the crazy cost of paying for experts to work these cases up is justifiable in those situations. Brian, one of the only ones I've ever had experience with, was whenever I was in one of my old law firms. We got a call regarding a terrible birth injury and the baby was going to be injured for life. It was going to have cognitive issues for the rest of its life. The issue was whether or not during birth, there were signs that the oxygen had been deprived to the baby as it was being born. It turns out, after experts and all this, we didn't have a viable claim. The experts said, "This is a real risk that can happen," and the doctors did everything right in this particular situation, and it could not have been avoided is what we were told. We didn't have a viable claim, but I had spent enough time working up that case and started to realize just how catastrophic-- Before we talk about the law, when families go through a birth, it ends up with a baby that has a terrible injury, what are they looking at lifetime? Do the kids just bounce back or a lot of times they're looking at lifetime future medical needs? Brian: Most of the children who are delivered and survive that initial 48- to 72-hour period will ultimately be diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which is a catch-all for brain damage as a result of diminished or total lack of oxygen for a period during the time of the birth. Justin Hill: Let me just interrupt. You mean most of the babies that survive who have had some sort of hypoxic or lack of oxygen injury during delivery? Brian: Right. Justin: Okay, sorry. Brian: When those children and those parents ultimately are trying to evaluate what's taken place, what happens is, unless they're told at that time, which most hospitals won't do, they're trying to look at three, six, nine, 12 months later and that child is failing to make certain landmarks, certain benchmarks, and they're trying to figure out what these developmental delays are due to. The problem with that is that unless you know what you're looking for and unless you, as the parents, were suspicious of the events over the last few hours or days before delivery, you're going to miss it. There are things that happen and the rules that obstetricians and Labor and Delivery Departments are supposed to follow that are set in stone. They didn't just appear, and they're not because of lawyers, they're because the...
One of the most common causes of medical malpractice in Texas is surgical error. This includes when the wrong body part is surgically affected, when a surgical instrument is left in the body or when a surgical error complication that is not a known risk occurs. When this happens, people can be killed or forever injured. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] All right, I'm here again with Brian Steward discussing medical malpractice cases. Brian's a medical malpractice and personal injury lawyer in San Antonio, with just a broad array of experience in all kinds of medical malpractice and personal injury issues. We've talked previously about misdiagnosis, failure to diagnosis and a couple of other common causes of medical malpractice, and now we're going to talk about surgery. Brian, you and I recently were talking about a case involving a surgeon that during a neuromonitoring of the surgery, there was something missed, and that led to a very serious injury to one of your clients. Let's just walk through, let's start with just generally surgical errors and how that can happen in a case, and how as a lawyer you go about evaluating those claims. Brian Steward: Sure. Surgical mishaps, problems or errors in surgery are cases where you look at what the presentation is, you look at what the problem is, and then you try to evaluate what the response was. What did the surgeon do in response to the symptoms that the patient was providing them with? Some of these cases are fairly simple, and they're the cases we all read about years and years ago, where surgery is done on the wrong leg or they fixed the wrong knee, they fixed the wrong ankle, they replaced the wrong hip. Those are easy cases. Obviously, they made a mistake, and the nurses and the people in the operating suite made a mistake. What we're seeing more and more is surgeries in elective surgeries' situations where the person, the patient doesn't get the outcome that they expected. Now, outcome expectations are very different than a surgical mishap or a surgical mistake. An outcome problem is where your patient, your potential client believes, "Okay, this is what I was told, that this is what I expected. I was told I was going to get a knee replacement surgery and I was going to be able to walk and play golf and return to my life like I was 35 years ago". Those are expectation cases, and those are hard cases because of this thing called informed consent. Before any of us have had any meaningful surgeries, we have filled out a form. We don't remember the form, but we filled out a form, and that form, which was created by the Texas Legislature, with the help of the Texas Medical Association, basically sets out the risk for that procedure, which means you thought that these guarantees were made by the surgeon, when in essence and truthfully, you weren't guaranteed anything. What you were told is, "Here are the potential risks, here are the potential hazards, and hopefully you will get a good outcome". That surgeon's good outcome, the medical profession's good outcome is different than your belief in what a good outcome is. Trust me. When you're looking at these surgical cases, both from the patient standpoint and from the lawyer standpoint, you are looking at mistakes which are glaring mistakes, whether it's wrong location, whether it's something that another surgeon, thousands of miles away or in a teaching facility or a teaching hospital would say, "I never would have done that". Those surgeries, although you wouldn't think that they'd be prevalent, actually are. Justin: I got to think one of the hardest parts of an expectation case, because I've gotten calls on these
One of the most common causes of medical negligence and a leading reason for medical malpractice lawsuits is the misadministration of drugs in a hospital setting. Whether it is giving the wrong drug or too much of the right drug, these acts of negligence can kill or forever injure patients. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed, however, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin: I'm here with Brian Steward on this new edition of Hill Law Firm Cases, discussing medical malpractice. Brian's not a specific medical malpractice lawyer, but he's had a long history of handling medical malpractice cases from the plaintiffs and the defense side. He's somebody I would go to with questions regarding medical malpractice because in my career, for the most part, medical malpractice cases had been very limited by the laws in the state of Texas on what is viable and what kind of cases can actually be brought anymore. On the last episode, Brian and I discussed one of the first cases that got him involved in medical malpractice lawsuits and it involved the misadministration or misprescription of a prescription drug. What was it, Brian? Brian Steward: The drug was actually a chemotherapy drug called dynemicin and it's a drug that's used through an IV to pediatric patients who suffer from cancer, specific types of cancer. The case, which was 1992, involved the over administration of that drug, which means that this child who is already suffering from cancer gets-- I think it was five times the accepted dose of this medication. Any of you who've dealt with cancer or loved ones who've dealt with cancer, know that there's a balance in prescribing chemotherapy and radiation. The balance is you want to stop the cancer while also allowing the host, the person, to survive. With dynemicin, if you overprescribed it to that extent, it essentially shut the host down and ultimately took the life of this child. It's one of those things where we think about misprescriptions, and you hear about it all the time. You hear about the person who goes to the pharmacist and they're supposed to get one drug and they take this drug for two days, then they realize it's not the correct drug and they go back. That's the tip of the iceberg on these cases. I think if you look at the literature and you look at the history, in hospitals currently, the misadministration of medications is probably the most prevalent malpractice that's committed because of the system and the way drugs are prescribed and ultimately used. Justin: Brian, where's the failure in that? Is that the doctor prescribed the wrong amount, the tech administering or the hospital pharmacist? Where's the chink in the chain? Brian: It's a systemic failure and part of it is language. I handled a case out in West Texas about six years ago, doctors use and nomenclature for the prescription of drugs and it says Q1, which is once a day, Q2 which is twice a day, Q4 which can be four times a day. Now, that's fine if the doctor and the nurse are on the same page, if the nurse is not on the same page as that doctor, and you see a Q4 that can be four times a day, that can be four times an hour, that can be four times a week. It's a mess. The big hospitals' systems, all have pharmacy software. They have pharmacy hardware in place to take in these pharmacy orders from the doctors and make sure that the actual medication has been ordered is appropriate. The problem is there's the human factor, and the human factor is the pharmacist that types that in, can override the system. Even though there's a system that says, "This is too much", that pharmacist can say, "No, this is exactly what's ordered on this standing order from this doctor and I'm...
When a doctor or medical professional fails to diagnose or misdiagnoses a treatable condition, it can lead to long term injuries or death. This is one of the most common causes of medical error in Texas. We discuss this with Brian Steward. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Welcome to another episode of Hill law firm cases. I'm here with Brian Stewart again, as we've been talking about medical malpractice. Brian is was one of San Antonio's best, most knowledgeable medical malpractice attorneys. He's done plaintiffs and defense work and we've been talking about the most common reasons and bases for medical malpractice lawsuits specifically in Texas in San Antonio since we have our own unique set of laws I guess is the best way to put it. Brian, let's talk about misdiagnosis. I've had calls before and only almost all the calls I have gotten have been related to the failure to diagnose or the misdiagnosis, not failure to diagnose. The misdiagnosis of some medical condition that the misdiagnosis led to worse complications or death in the future. Talk to me about that, how those are evaluated and what you've seen in your practice. Brian Stewart: The thing about failure to diagnose and misdiagnosis cases is that you're always looking retrospectively, meaning you're looking backwards, which means once it's finally diagnosed, it's easy to figure out what it was. Unfortunately, we don't get the luxury of preparing those cases in that way. We have to look at what the physician or the healthcare provider knew at the time that patient presented. That makes those cases difficult, not impossible, but difficult because at many times, we will know vastly more than that healthcare provider knew at the time of presentation, which means that the decisions that we're trying to make when we're looking and evaluating these cases are much different than the decisions that the healthcare provider was making. There's an exception, and the exception is fractures. The exception is health. When healthcare providers take X-rays, take CTS, taking MRIs, and they interpret a film and then two days, three days, a week later, they call back and say, "Yes, we actually do see a fracture", those are slightly different cases on the liability part because it's fairly easy to determine, "Okay, someone missed something". The problem is the damages aspect of those cases because the delay in the diagnosis typically doesn't change anything in those fractures. Where you get a lot of calls, and these are heartbreaking calls are in cancer cases, cancer failure to diagnose or delay in diagnosis, because you have people who, they rely upon their health care providers, they follow the instructions, they get the testing, whether it's mastectomies or various other exams, and they believe that they're doing fine until they find out ultimately that they're not, so then you try to work backwards to figure out what was missed. When you do that you determine or you understand that someone may have misinterpreted a test or not ordered the test that would have been diagnostic, meaning they didn't order the test that would have given them the answer that they're looking for, and now you have a patient or a patient's family, unfortunately, who's asking you to try to determine, "Hey, what happened here?", and should they have done something sooner and would they have changed the outcome, and changing the outcome is where these cases rise and fall. Justin: You have to prove that at some point that if it had been properly diagnosed whenever it should have been found, that the outcome would have been different. Specifically with cancers, there are some that...
Due to some changes in the law, medical malpractice cases in Texas are less common and harder to prove than ever before. The quality of care has not improved, but injured people have fewer options. Medical error continues to be one of the leading causes of death in the United States but in Texas, and San Antonio, the ability to hold wrongdoers accountable is significantly limited. Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: On this episode of Hill Law Firm cases, I have good friend, good lawyer, good former defense lawyer Brian Stuart here with me. I wanted to talk to him a little bit about medical malpractice cases, because we get calls on medical malpractice cases and oftentimes I have to tell people one, you don't have a case, and really the only answer to ever having a case is to vote and get involved politically. Brian, talk to me a little bit about your background in medical malpractice from- on the defense side to the plaintiff's side. Brian: It actually started before that. Believe it or not, when I was an undergrad, I was premed. For two summers I worked at University Hospital as an RT. It was fascinating. It was great stuff. I really believed and my parents certainly believed that I was going to be a doctor, until I took organic in the summer between my sophomore and junior year and realized maybe there was something else out there. Despite that, I always was interested in the medicine. When we started, when I graduated from law school, I worked at a firm in a plaintiff's firm that did some med mal. One of the best cases we worked on was a case against the [unintelligible 00:01:39] involving daunomycin, which is a drug that's used for chemotherapy. It was used on a child and they overdosed the child and the child died. The partner and I worked it up. We did a lot of work on both the medical side and also the product side, because there was a system in place. There was a pharmacy system in place that should have prevented this but for some reason, the pharmacist overrode that and allowed the medication to be prescribed. After that case and after working with some really fantastic lawyers on both sides, I was hooked. When I switched sides and started doing defense work, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to do med mal, because I wanted to learn it. I wanted to interact with the doctors and the nurses. I thought it was something where my science and my medicine background would be an asset, and it was. I did that and I worked for Columbia HCA and their system, defended cases from El Paso to Laredo to Brownsville, and saw some of the craziest things come in the door as far as cases, mistreatment. Again, met some fantastic lawyers on the plaintiff's side who were prosecuting those cases. Some lawyers who because of their experience and their intelligence were able to figure out that what the medical charts said wasn't exactly what took place. I knew just from my experience that a lot of cases would go away, because when people saw the chart and the way it was written they thought, "There's no way I have a case." In fact, if they ever got to the point where they could talk to the nurses and the doctors they would realize that a lot more went on than appeared in that chart. When the opportunity arose and I was able to switch sides and do plaintiff's work again, one of the things I always wanted to do was keep a med mal docket. I don't do many of them but I always have a few of them that I'm looking at and going through because regardless of the legislation that's passed in 2003 and afterwards, there's still medical malpractice out there. A lot of what I do is explain to people what the law is and explain...
Hunter Craft has handled some of the biggest cases against car makers, trucking companies and major corporations in the United States. He blazed his own path and had hard times along the way. Now, he is running a great practice and doing great work for people in need. He joined the podcast to talk about being an attorney and give advice to young attorneys. He is my friend and the closest thing to a mentor I ever had. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin: All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. I just made Hunter Craft listen to our ominous intro music, which the podcast that I started for the law firm has really kind of changed since I've started it and it's become more of just kind of a-- I really think if you just listened to the podcast, you would learn everything you need to know about my law firm, who's here, who we work with, and the types of cases we handle. Honestly, I think that's been a pretty big success. Hunter, thank you for being here. Hunter Craft: Justin, thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to visiting with you. Justin: Yes, a little color commentary. Hunter is who I tell people has been the closest thing I've had to having a mentor. As a lawyer, he was a Attorney at Watts when I started, he then became a capital partner with his name on the wall at some point, which was well deserved. I worked in his office. I worked on cases with him, and then over time, we started our own law firms, and still occasionally, we work together. I rely upon Hunter heavily to provide me guidance, sometimes tell me when I'm being an idiot, and really just be a great friend. I'm glad you're here and I want to talk to you about the things that I think are interesting about you. Like I told you before the show, the context is, a lot of people nerd out about being lawyers. I tell people you're the best lawyer they've never heard of because you're not into the pomp and the stuff on Facebook and all that, you do it quietly and you do a great job. I'm getting the opportunity to ask you questions that I'm sure a bunch of lawyers wish they could. Hunter: Well, I appreciate it. I tell you, I've told a million people that the greatest compliment I've ever gotten is the one you gave me, and that is that you refer to me as the greatest lawyer that people have never heard of. It's a source of pride with me. I've always been taught, and since growing up under my father, that it doesn't take pomp and circumstance, you don't need billboards, you don't need TV ads, you don't need to brag about everything that happens is good, if you do a good job for your clients and you're fighting every lawyer out there, to whom that will eventually be relevant, will know about it. Justin: I think to everyone that comes across your path, they know who you are. It's funny in my world, there are so many lawyers I run across and talk to, and there's some that have never heard of you, and then the ones that have worked with you or against you have nothing but great things to say. Let's just get started. You and I are both Baylor Law graduates. You were there a little bit before me. You left Baylor and got the job at one of the firms that everybody leaving Baylor wishes they could get. Fulbright & Jaworski, man, that was one of the top echelon firms. What drew you to Fulbright? Then honestly, you weren't there that long, so what drew you to leave? Hunter: The obvious answers on Fulbright, it was one of the jobs that everybody really wanted. You got to crawl into an elevator and go up 41 flights and get out and hear the Dane and look around and see some of the greatest talent in the country...
Bexar County courts require mediation in almost all cases prior to trial. Mediation is an effort to settle a case through the use of a third party neutral whom tries to help find a resolution. Brian Steward is one of San Antonio's finest mediators and he answers questions. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. We're here talking with Brian Steward. Brian Steward is a San Antonio personal injury lawyer. He's been doing it a little bit longer than I have. He's got a few more gray hairs than I have. He also has recently started mediating. I wanted to get him on, talk a little bit about what is mediation. This is really a podcast for clients and people that are trying to learn about the process. I want to start first is, what did you think about mediation and what was your way of explaining it to your clients prior to going through mediation training and becoming a professional mediator? Brian Steward: Sure. Mediation is an interesting process. It began in Bexar County in 1992 when Judge Charlie Gonzalez says, "We're going to start employing mediation." I had absolutely no idea what it meant and I've come to love it. Mediation to me as a lawyer and to my clients means, we have an opportunity to sit down with a third party, an impartial third party, listen to the evidence, listen to our case and try to resolve it. The mediator is not going to fix your case. He's not going to decide your case. The mediator is going to listen to your case and make some suggestions. The mediator is also going to go into the other room where the defendants are, listen to them, and also make suggestions to them. By that, I mean, the mediator has more information than even your lawyer does during that mediation process. If you trust the process and you trust that mediator, sometimes you'll be able to get cases resolved. This is an opportunity. Mediation is an opportunity for plaintiffs, normal people to get the benefit of the mediator's knowledge on this case in the context of these county cases going on in this county in trials that are being tried currently on issues that will face you in juries that will decide your case. Justin Hill: I'll just be candid. I have a problem with mediation, in that, I feel too often than not the other side is showing up trying to buy a case for cheap or settle a case for cheap as opposed to evaluating risk and actually trying to resolve the case. I always tell my clients, "Look, our goal of mediation--" My question for you is going to be, what has your goal of mediation been for your own clients? Because what I tell my clients, "My goal in mediation is, let's figure out how much they have brought today to settle your claim and let's get them to offer the maximum amount that they have to settle your claim. Then you can make an informed decision on whether or not that is sufficient." That's always been my goal. That's always been my plan. I've never seen mediation as the sole goal of settling the case because I don't want to lean on my client or tell them, "Hey, you need to settle the case." I want to know how much did they bring to settle your case so the client can then make a decision. Has that been what you've told your clients in the past or how have you, as a practicing lawyer, gone about explaining the goal to your clients? Brian: There are two things that you bring up that are important. The first issue and the first focus is, I want to make sure, as the lawyer for the injured party, that I get the most possible money on the table during this mediation. Sometimes you'll realize fairly soon that that's not going to...
Bill Marler got his first food poisoning case when he was less than four years out of law school. Against the odds, he almost single handedly changed the food industry in the United States. He has represented thousands affected by food poisoning and recovered hundreds of millions. Most importantly, he is a really humble and nice guy. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. Bill Marler just had to listen to my overly-dramatic intro music, but we're learning as we go. We were just talking. I said it's crazy. You don't have a podcast and you said you don't have time and COVID allowed me this free time to do something I'd been wanting to do for a while. Bill Marler is, I don't even think it's arguable, the foremost food injury lawyer in America which has created you to be one of the foremost food safety experts probably around the world. What I want to talk to you about, food cases, how you got into it. You sent me a little bit of background information. I'm in San Antonio. Migrant farmworker is something that's in the past history of so many people in this city and lawyers I know and friends of mine. Talk to me about how you had some time working as a migrant farmworker. Bill Marler: [laughs] Yes. When I was 16, it was the summer between my sophomore and junior year in high school. My parents were both teachers, really good people. I had decided that I didn't want to hang around the house and hang around the little town I was living in for the summer. I wanted to go seek adventure. A friend of a friend of a friend said, "Oh, man, you could work in the apple orchards and pear orchards of Eastern Washington and make a fortune." I was like, "Gosh, that sounds like a great idea." I told my mom and dad. I said, "I'm going to do this." They're like, "No, no, you're not. You're going to get a job here." I was like, "No, no, no, I think I'm going to do it." "No, no, no, you're not going to do it." One Saturday, when they're-- to the grocery store, I packed a duffel bag and hiked down to the road. You could hitchhike back then. By eight hours later, I wound up in a little town on the Columbia River that's known for raising cherries, apples. I worked that whole summer from Eastern Washington to Eastern Oregon to the eastern side of British Columbia, which is called essentially the Okanagan Valley. It's where all Washington fruits and vegetables were raised. Now, with global warming, it's the hot spot for wine. Now, Oregon pinots and Washington cabs are right up there because we warmed up the planet enough that up here in the Pacific Northwest can grow good wine. It was a really interesting experience. I think the thing that I took away from it was just how hard those people work. Back then, this is 1970s. Back then, it was White, Black, Hispanic, but a lot of poor Whites. It was a different demographic than really what you see now. Although in slaughter facilities across the Midwest, a lot of the people in the slaughter facilities are Eastern European. I learned a lot about immigrants. Justin: When you were doing it, was that not the Hispanic migratory farmworkers? Would they not get up that high? Bill: It was very few. There were a handful. Nowadays, that is what it is. Right now, Washington and the COVID thing, Washington as a state has done pretty well, considering we were the first state that blew up, but we're doing really well in Western Washington. In Eastern Washington where food production is, we're starting to see some of the small towns that have food production facilities blow up with COVID problems. Exactly the reasons for that is that people...
Another San Antonio personal injury lawyer joins us to talk about a case that was joint ventured between his law firm and Hill Law Firm. The case involved the partial amputation of a finger at a day care. A young child lost part of her finger due to a danger on the premises. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm here with one of my great friends, San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer, Sean Luchnick. He practices law on the north side of San Antonio. He's a young lawyer, but I wouldn't say he's inexperienced or not knowledgeable. He knows what he's doing. To his credit, he is not somebody who's too bold or too brazen to think he's got a lot to learn. He's here with me today. We're talking about some cases we've worked together. At this point, we've probably worked 10 to 15 cases together, and if you really take it out from when you interned with me, we've probably worked 30 cases together. It's great to have him on to chat some cases. We talked previously about a case, probably the first case that he had a lot of hand in working with me, and we're going to talk about another case involving a daycare injury, and I've talked about it before on this podcast. Let me just ask, it's always great to get a fresh perspective from a young lawyer. I remember the first time somebody asked me to represent them about their child being injured. I felt this very profound sense of weight and headiness to that. That's a real serious thing. To this day, anytime somebody asks me to represent their child, I still feel a very bizarre responsibility. I feel it in all my cases, but when somebody's putting their child's injury in my hands, it's just a different thing. Did you feel anything different when you were reached out to by that family that we represented together regarding that daycare case? Was there some sort of emotional response that you had that was abnormal or new or different? Sean Luchnick: Well, first off, I want to say thank you, Justin, because you said I was a great friend of yours. You're a great friend of mine. I appreciate you didn't just say as a good friend or a colleague. That made me feel good inside. Justin: I mean it. Sean Luchnick: Onto your question, sometimes it's hard. You always want to try to put yourself in somebody else's perspective. I don't have children. The closest thing I have to a child is a dog. Justin: You have 10 dogs. Sean Luchnick: I have about four, but if you count my parents' dogs, you could say I have 10 dogs that I'm family members with. My firstborn, Bear, I care for him greatly. I couldn't imagine how it would feel if there was an injury to Bear and it was because somebody else maybe wasn't doing their job the way they should do. They weren't abiding by their standard of care. Justin: We don't want to marginalize children with dogs. There's a whole different perspective when you have children, which at some point, you will have children. There's a headiness to somebody calling you and telling you they've got a child who's been injured in a grievous way. We had a child who had part of her finger chopped off. That's a real serious call. It's got to create some sort of emotional response in you. What was your first reaction to that? Sean Luchnick: My first reaction was someone who was a friend of a friend. Again, I even had to tread lightly myself because we're attorneys but we're also counselors. When they're asking us stuff about the merits of a case, I don't want to, in any way, downplay what happened to their daughter because it is a horrible injury. Again, the photos were incredibly...
Workers are often taken advantage of in the State of Texas. We represented a worker in San Antonio whom was hired to do a job and given very little information regarding the dangers associated with it. The contractor knew the structure was rotten and put him on the roof anyway. His fall when the roof collapsed broke both of his legs and limited his ability to ever work again. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] One of the more common questions we get from new clients or people that are meeting with us, especially in South Texas in San Antonio is whether or not somebody has a claim or a right to file a lawsuit or a claim if they're undocumented. In Texas, they have a claim. If somebody is injured through no fault of their own, the negligent party or the wrongdoer doesn't get to say, "Well, since you're undocumented, you don't have a right to recourse." Luckily, in Texas, that's not the law. One case I worked on, involved a construction worker, a man in his middle age who was working with a company that did a lot of odd jobs purported to be a roofing company, but when you dig into it, maybe they weren't. They had been hired by a house flipping group to replace the roof on a house that was being flipped. If you know about house flippers, some of them cut corners, and some of them do work as cheap as possible. That's what we were dealing with in this case. They hired a group that didn't know what they were doing. My client had been called by a friend, a friend who knew his cousin and asked if he could come help on a roofing job. My client was not a skilled worker or a skilled roofer, he was a laborer and he was told to start tearing off shingles. It was probably his third time ever on a roof. While he was tearing off shingles, a portion of the roof collapsed. While the house flipper had a copy of the inspection report showing rotted wood and rot under the roof, they had not shared that information. My client fell off the roof when it collapsed, and he suffered what has to be the worst lower leg injury I've ever seen in my career. A lower leg injury that the treating trauma surgeon said had an outcome over life that was less positive than people with diabetes, AIDS, cancer. It's a lower leg injury that forever will alter his mobility, his ability to work, and his quality of life. As expected, the house flipping company tried to blame everybody but themselves. At first, they said there was no inspection. Then there was an inspection and they said that it was made available. Then they said it wasn't made available, but they would have made it available if anyone had asked. They also tried to say they didn't do anything to control the manner and method of the work of the roofing company even though all the roofers said that the house flipping owner got on the roof, told them what to do, when to do it, and what order to do it. Specifically for us, he told them what portion to tear off of the roof that collapsed. The part of the roof that collapsed wasn't part of the original structure, but with some add-on patio that somebody had added on, and they'd never done it correctly. That was in the inspection report as well. After we were able to pull back all these layers of frivolous defenses, we were able to get a full measure of justice for our client who was injured on the job through no fault of his own.
We hear the craziest defenses to our injury lawsuits. One recurring defense is that a vehicle is stolen and therefore there is no insurance coverage. Almost universally, there is no police report showing that the vehicle was stolen but it is an attempt to avoid liability. We fight these defenses. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: A few fiestas ago, a young couple were driving through an intersection when they were hit broadside by a lady that ran a red light, was speeding and was high on methamphetamines. The crash was so severe that the husband didn't survive the crash. We represented the wife and their children. In cases like this, there's lots of investigation that has to be performed to make sure that anybody who caused or contributed to the cause of the crash is held responsible. Through our investigation, we were able to find out whose car this driver was driving, where she had been, what she had been doing, where she got her drugs from. We needed all that information to make sure that we had fully and completely investigated the possible cases and any possible liability against any third parties. We're going to talk about frivolous defenses on this podcast. This is one of those cases where I ran into the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle. Insurance companies can deny coverage if they can show that a vehicle was stolen or is being used without permission. Certain insurance companies are almost infamous for doing this. They'll say that vehicles are stolen anytime. They don't like the facts of the case or anytime they think they can muddy the water. In this case, they tried to say the vehicle was stolen. What our investigation found was that this was the ex-wife of the owner of the vehicle. What we were able to find out that she had been at his house with him and that she had made a mention of using the vehicle. Now, he said he told her she couldn't and she took the keys. Now, we were able to search to see if any criminal charges had been brought or any police report had been filed. What it looked like to us based on the documents we found was after the crash happened and they found out about the crash, then they decided they were going to file a police report. Whether they were instructed to by their insurance company or not, we don't know. What we do know is they denied our clients any level of justice for a long time, trying to ride out this frivolous defense. In the end, they were able to delay a settlement in this case using this made up theory. We were able to figure out that this defense was frivolous. It was being manufactured as a way to deny coverage. As we continue to push the case, something happened on their end. Most likely they were looking at a trial date, and they finally agreed to settle the case for the full policy limits. This is a great example of the frivolous defense of a stolen vehicle that insurance companies like to use. Almost never is there a police report to corroborate the idea that a vehicle was stolen. However, that doesn't stop insurance companies from using this frivolous defense to try to deny justice or delay justice. [music]
We represented a young man who was rear-ended at a high rate of speed by a distracted driver on I-35 in San Antonio. The driver was going approximately 60 miles per hour when she hit our client. Luckily, he was able to walk away from the crash with injuries that would not keep him from doing his job or walking. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] The most common cases we handle, just because the volume of these cases is the highest, are car crashes. Car crash cases in San Antonio make up the bulk of most personal injury lawyers work. A lot of people roll their eyes at this or scoff at this, but the reality is that insurance companies have made it necessary to hire a lawyer and oftentimes file a lawsuit just to get a fair settlement on what is an uncomplicated car crash case. While there's lots of discussion over frivolous lawyers and frivolous lawsuits, there's very little discussion over frivolous defenses. Defenses made out of whole cloth, as a way to deny, delay and defend a claim. Insurance companies only get paid by the money they hold on to or the money they don't pay out. They don't make money by paying out claims. This makes me think of a recent case we just settled, in which I represented a young engineer going to Austin to visit his girlfriend. It wasn't yet rush hour, but it was probably about 3:45. I-35 headed north towards Austin around the Windcrest area. If anybody's been there, they know that traffic slows and speeds up. Sometimes it stops. My client's following the law, following the rules, traffic stops, he stops. About two seconds later, he's hit by a vehicle going about 60 miles an hour. What that lady was doing, we don't know, but she wasn't paying attention and she's lucky she didn't kill him. Those kind of speeds can kill, or traumatically injure everyday people. Our client got very lucky. While he was injured, he didn't have a life-time debilitating injury that he would never be able to recover from. He has a back injury that will be with him the rest of his life, but he's gonna be able to work and he has a concussion that mostly resolved, but he hasn't lost his ability to do his job as an engineer. I tell people about cases like this and they cannot believe that it didn't settle, but it didn't. The case got filed, the defendants moved that case to federal court, they required depositions, discovery, they dug into my client's past medical history. They were looking for any way to deny his claim. That's what insurance companies do. In the end, the insurance company did the right thing but they made sure that plaintiff, my client, felt stress, felt pressure, felt like he had done something wrong. These are the cases we handle day to day. Car crash cases are not easy cases anymore. They were at some point in history out here, but insurance companies make their money by denying these cases. We continue to represent car crash victims because they are some of the most preyed upon of injured people, because insurance companies think they can convince juries that it's made up or frivolous and in doing so, they'll pull out all the stops.
Lawrence Morales has worked in the area of employment litigation and law since he got out of law school. He has defended employers but now spends most of his time standing up to workers whom were treated poorly in violation of the laws protecting workers. He came on the podcast to discuss the type of work that he does. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. All right. Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm with Lawrence Morales, who's a local employment lawyer who I went to law school with. Hi, Lawrence. Lawrence Morales: Hi, Justin. Justin: We've done a Q&A series of local lawyers, what they do, why they're into what they do. Lawrence and I have worked a handful of cases together. We have a couple of cases going on right now. I asked Lawrence to come on, talk about what he does, who he is. Then we're also going to have a separate episode talking about some stuff we're both going to get into together. Lawrence, you are mostly an employment lawyer from the plaintiff's side. At least you do other things, but from the plaintiff's side, you do employment work. What is your interest in employment work? Why did you get into that? What's your passion? Lawrence: I've been doing labor employment now for about 15 years. My passion is really helping people navigate through this complicated scheme. Right or wrong, people identify themselves with what they do for work, and the realities that they spend more time at work than oftentimes they spend with their family. Sometimes there's a disruption in that. Maybe something they caused or maybe something that they didn't cause. When there's that disruption, they need help. Fortunately, I've been able to do that. The other lawyers at my firm, including you, when you help us on certain cases, have been able to help people when there's that type of disruption at work. Justin: I've heard some of the politicians talk about the dignity of work, and I've always really appreciated that idea that our identity and our reason we get out of bed in the morning, is often tied to our professions. Is there anything in your backstory or your history that made you really have a passion for workers, or did you just get into it as a lawyer and realize this is something that really motivates me? Lawrence: I think both. Some of my family, growing up, had bouts where they unfortunately didn't have work. As a child, I saw the effect that that had on them. I recently read a study that the number one way to get depressed is to stop working. If you want to stay engaged, if you want to stay happy, if you want to live a longer life, frankly, don't retire because the schedule, the purpose of going to work, interacting with people, those social interactions, is important. We're there to help if there's a problem with that. Justin: We said that in our own household right now with what's going on with COVID, just being stuck in your home really, it affects your mood. I'm sure for a lot of workers going to a work environment that is not friendly, or welcoming also starts to affect them. You and I have worked cases involving hostile work environment, situations or environments where workers are made to feel bad or made to feel unwelcomed due to things that are outside their control, race, sex, religious identity, other things like that. What are the types of cases you work on in the employment context? Lawrence: Sure. Anytime there's a dispute between an employee and an employer, we can get involved. On a typical week, we'll get 50 calls from potential clients. The vast majority of those will be tied to terminations, people saying they were terminated for 'unlawful or wrongful...
Ladder safety is a very important issue at worksites and workplaces. When people fall from ladders they can suffer very serious and even fatal injuries. OSHA investigates falls and ladder injuries and will sanction companies that violate OSHA regulations. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Lately, we've been discussing worker safety a lot on Hill Law Firm Cases Podcast. Specifically, we've been talking about the most common violations and most common OSHA citations and what they relate to. We've handled a lot of worker safety cases, and a lot of cases involving on-the-job or work site injuries. One case type that we see consistently involves ladder safety. For whatever reason, either due to height or due to the operation, or for whatever reason, in my career I have seen, represented, and even sometimes told people that they didn't have a case, cases involving and arising out of injuries and falls from ladders. One particular case I looked at recently involved a man who was doing work at a beach house in preparation for a storm coming in. While he was working, putting up boards on the windows, the ladder fell out from under him. His injuries included two crushed heels, a broken leg, and a broken ankle. That's one thing about ladder cases is every time I've seen a ladder injury, the people that have been injured have always suffered very serious, long-term complicated injuries. I've seen leg injuries. I've seen injuries to arms. We've represented a man who suffered a brain injury. At my previous firm, I worked on a case in which somebody was paralyzed as a result of a ladder fall. All this to say that ladder safety is of utmost importance, whether it's on-the-job site or in your home. The reason for that is that a fall from height, we know can cause debilitating serious injuries and even fatalities. We've been talking about OSHA violations and OSHA citations, and one of the commonly cited set of regulations that employers are cited for failing to follow revolves around ladder safety. OSHA has a set of standards and regulations and rules that employers and employees are supposed to follow when they're on-the-job site. OSHA's regulations for ladder safety are outlined for whether it be a step ladder to a type of ladder used in orchards. Very specific regulations about all types of ladder usage. On top of that, for all of our listeners, OSHA puts out an OSHA quick card on portable ladder safety. Why this is important is because a lot of people use ladders at their homes, not only at their job sites, but at their homes, their businesses that they may own, or just in their day-to-day operation they'll use ladders to accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished. Because of that, normal people who are not laborers or not people that work on ladders every day are often put in positions where they could fall and injure themselves severely as a result of using a ladder. I recommend anybody that's going to be using a ladder to review the OSHA quick card on portable ladder safety, because it outlines and details a lot of things that can be helpful for everybody. It goes through a few things, including read all the labels and markings and follow them to the extent that they're on the ladder, and explain how you should use it. Another thing that people oftentimes forget is, be careful where your ladders going because if there's an electrical line and you have an aluminum ladder, that could lead to an electrocution. You should always inspect your ladder and make sure there's no damage to it. Whether that damage be a locking mechanism that doesn't work, a bent portion, a broken rung, or any other part of your ladder that doesn't work or is broken, you...
Recently, a monumental Supreme Court decision clarified that employees cannot be fired or discriminated against due to their LGBTQ status. Justin Hill and Lawrence Morales, both of San Antonio, have handled many cases involving employees that have suffered discrimination. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed; however, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: All right, welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. On Monday, June 15th, 2020, the US Supreme Court came out with an opinion Bostock versus Clayton County monumental decision. I'm here with Lawrence Morales, who's one of the best, and in my opinion, the best employment lawyer in town for plaintiffs, or probably a business too, but they're not normally the people I represent. For people that have been wronged on the job and need some answers, Lawrence is the guy to go to. He's the guy I personally go to. I asked him to be on the show today to talk about the Bostock versus Clayton County opinion. Him and I are going to do some cases and represent some people who are going to fall under these new protections. Lawrence, what happened? Lawrence Morales: On Monday, there was a landmark decision that basically extends protection under one of our discrimination laws to about one and a half million more Texans than previously existed. Let me back up and tell you a little bit about the origins of this law. The law is the Title VII Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is the law that basically bars discrimination and has barred discrimination against race, national origin, sex, color, for the last 40 years. A big question has been whether people who are transgender, sexual orientation, and gender identity are protected classes under that law. By way of background, we'll get a lot of calls sometimes and people will say, "I got fired because I'm a homosexual. Can I bring a claim?" Unfortunately, until Monday, the answer to that question was, "It depends on where you live." There were 29 states in the United States that basically did not have any state law protection for gender identity or sexual orientation, and Texas was one of them. We had to say, "Sorry, go to the EEOC, file a charge of discrimination. This is an issue that's going up to the Supreme Court, and hopefully, it'll be decided in your favor." Thankfully, on Monday, that day finally came, and now it is safe to say that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes under Title VII. Justin: I love the fact that you pointed out 1.5 million Texans are going to fall under this new law or this new decision, which means 1.5 million Texans have additional protections on the job by a law that was passed by a Texan and LBJ. Lawrence: That's right. It was signed into law by LBJ. That's exactly right. The good way to describe it was after the 2015 same-sex opinion, you could get married on Monday morning to somebody of your same sex, but then you can get fired that afternoon because you got married to somebody in your same sex. On Monday that changed. Do you want me to tell you the story about how ironically we have a segregationist to thank for the law that came or the decision that came out on Monday? Justin: Yes. Lawrence: Okay. The story is about a guy named Howard Smith-- Justin: I don't get a lot of questions, so I appreciated that question. Lawrence: I'm trying to help. Howard was a United States Congressman from Virginia for about 30 years between the 1930s and the 1960s. Among other things, he was an unapologetic segregationist. He opposed racial integration. At the time, in the early 1960s, there was a lot of movement with black rights. Martin Luther King was making great strides in trying to push for an...
One of the most important parts of our jobs is to make sure that we understand our client's case and injuries. Mild traumatic brain injuries or concussions are often overlooked and misunderstood. In injury cases, they require a special amount of expertise to properly evaluate and present. At Hill Law Firm, we make sure to discuss concussions with our personal injury clients when we meet to make sure they do not ignore symptoms they may have. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: When I started practicing law, there wasn't much attention or import given to concussions. Back then, people would say that you rang your bell or that you just banged your head too hard. What happened with the NFL brought this issue and the seriousness of concussions to the forefront of everybody's minds. All of a sudden, people that had downplayed concussions were able to see the actual effects that concussions had on people in the near term and the long term. This also changed the way attorneys and insurance companies approached and addressed concussions. Attorneys used to ignore, if not downplay, the severity of a concussion in a case. Insurance companies used to give it little or no weight in evaluating the claim. That's changed. One thing we do with all of our cases as they come in, is we make sure to screen our clients for issues related to concussions and whether they suffered one. We're not medical providers and we can't provide medical advice, but one thing we make sure to do is tell our clients to give their doctors a complete and accurate picture of any symptoms they've suffered following their crash, or whatever incident led to their head injury. We walk through a screener with our clients and it's amazing how many times when you actually start asking them the questions, they recognize that they're suffering something they did not know they were. We asked them questions about whether or not they had a loss of consciousness or an alteration of consciousness following the crash. Were they knocked out? A lot of times, people say they weren't knocked out and then admit there's a long period of time they just don't remember. We then walk through symptoms, headaches, ringing in the ears, light, sound sensitivity, memory issues, vision issues, dizziness, nausea, difficulty concentrating, balance issues, sleep problems. There's a whole litany of symptoms that can arise from a concussion. It's important that our clients tell their doctors all of the symptoms they're suffering if any following a crash. The only way a doctor can properly provide medical advice and treatment is with a complete picture of what's going on. More lawyers are doing it now than they were before, but we take special interest and pride in how much attention we give to our clients, and how we ensure that we make sure that every issue our client is dealing with is properly investigated. The only way we know what our client's medical picture is going to be, is if they go to all their doctor's appointments and listen to their doctor's advice. We encourage our clients to go to all their doctor appointment visits and follow their recommendations. After that, we're able to get a full picture of our clients' injuries and any long-lasting effects or medical needs they may have. Mild traumatic brain injuries are one of these areas that we take special interest in because it's one area that a lot of lawyers ignore and it's an area that a lot of clients attempt to ignore. Nobody wants to admit they're having issues with their head or their brain or concentration or memory. One thing that we're sure of is that when we meet with a new client, that we walk through every possible issue
We represented a nice lady injured when she fell in a store in San Antonio after some construction equipment was left bolted in the walkway. Her injury was on video, it was not her fault, and she had a serious injury. However, her use of social media created problems for her case that we did not anticipate. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] My clients are always shocked when I tell them to prepare that the insurance company on the other side will probably hire somebody to perform surveillance on them. Now, this doesn't happen all the time or really even half the time, but it happens more than you would think. Not only will they hire private investigators to follow people around, video them, take pictures of them, they'll also hire companies to do online surveillance where they will dig into their social media. The goal of the insurance company in these situations is to muddy the water enough, that they can make that plaintiff scared to go to trial. Rarely but sometimes, social media has done enough damage to a case that it has affected the value and the likelihood that you could win a trial. One such example involved a client I represented who had a very serious arm injury. Her arm injury was so severe, she required surgery, months of rehabilitation, and she had very limited use of her arm after her injury. In the deposition, the defense lawyer asked her questions about what she could do with her arm and she told him as honestly as she could, what she could do with her arm at that time. However, when we got to mediation, they presented us with pictures and videos of our client doing more with her arm than she could at the time of her deposition. Now, they took the position that she was lying in her deposition, and our client said she just was slowly getting better and was able to do more with her arm. Now, this client wasn't dishonest, but it shows you the links the insurance company will go to try to say that a personal injury victim is dishonest and making things up. Now, this lady was injured through no fault of her own. Her surgery and rehabilitation and her mounting medical bills are not her fault, but in mediation, the insurance company and defense attorney spent the majority of their time trying to say she was a liar. My client was very scared of going in front of a jury because she was worried they would think she was dishonest. Her case resolved that day, even though I didn't think it was the best choice for her. At the end of the day, the client has the decision whether or not to settle their case. She was worried about what happened at trial with that social media stuff coming in front of a jury. It just reminds me and it's a story I tell all my new clients to not put anything on social media, to assume that the defense attorneys and insurance companies are going to look at all your social media and try to find a way to say that it represents something that you say doesn't exist. Whether to say that you're more injured or less injured, or to say that you look happy when you say you deal with depression on occasion. Insurance companies will do anything they can to delay and deny claims. When it comes to social media in a case, I tell all my clients, just put it on hold until after your case results. [music] [00:04:02] [END OF AUDIO]
We have handled many sexual assault cases. Sometimes, those cases require special experts to evaluate the harm done to the victim and what type of treatment would be needed. In this expired, we discuss with a treating clinical psychologist about the role of experts in sexual assault cases. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: In about 2013, me and my law firm were hired to represent the mother of a young lady who was assaulted whenever she was just an infant. We were representing her because under the laws in Texas you can't represent a minor. What we were trying to do is establish that the family that allowed this to happen were partly responsible. The laws in Texas are such that, typically, somebody can't be held responsible if they're not the bad actor, or they didn't know the bad actions were going on. What we were able to establish in the case was that not only were they also bad actors, but they had plenty of reason to believe what was happening in their house was a criminal act and something they could have protected against. In that case, it presented a lot of difficult damage issues that we had to work out. We had to be able to describe how a trauma at a young age could affect a young lady as she grew up. In that case we hired a psychologist, Dr. Casey Howard, to help us out. We hired her to be an independent voice to evaluate and determine whether or not this young lady was suffering any ill effects or damages as she grew older Dr. Howard's joined us here today. Dr. Howard, would you walk through the steps that you went through in making your independent evaluation on whether or not this young lady was suffering any effects of trauma? Dr. Casey Howard: Absolutely. I first met with the client, we'll call her Jane Doe, and got an idea of how she's functioning today, the issue she was having at school, the issue she was having at home, and what had basically been going on with her. Then I also met with mother independently and talked about mother's view of the-- Her perception of her daughter's issues and the different steps that they had taken as far as she had been in and out of therapy and the issues that she'd had. Something very, very interesting about this case is that the daughter, at that point, was not aware of her history of sexual abuse, and so I was really not gaining a trauma history like I would in most cases I was gaining a symptom presentation. I also talked to her current therapist to find out her perception of things. Then I administered a psychological battery of tests to Jane Doe as well and some measures that required parental identification. Justin Hill: Okay. You had an opportunity to meet with the young lady, her mother, and also perform psychological testing to see if any symptoms were presenting or any diagnoses were available. Dr. Howard: Yes. Justin Hill: One of the difficult things in this was, as you said, that she didn't have any conscious memory of it occurring at the time, but we were also unsure if she had learned of it later on in life as it had been a publicized criminal conviction. Dr. Howard: Absolutely. Justin Hill: With this a lot of times independent experts as you were in that case have to do outside research and see what the literature is out there to determine whether or not it supports or contradicts what you're thinking. Did you do any independent research as it relates to this case? Dr. Howard: I did. Because this case was so unique. The second I met with this girl I thought, "She is a child. She is a classic PTSD from sexual abuse person." If I didn't know her history-- Just after meeting her and evaluating her, she...
A San Antonio Sheriff's Deputy was on patrol late at night on loop 1604 when he was hit head-on by a wrong way drunk driver that tried to flee the scene. The deputy went to the emergency room once but was otherwise uninjured. He waited 23 months to call our law firm. When he did, we filed suit and got his case resolved for the maximum amount of insurance. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Speaker: When a Bexar County Sheriff's officer was hit by a drunk driver, he called the Hill Law Firm. About a year ago, we were contacted by a sheriff's officer here in Bexar County, San Antonio, Texas. He told us how about 22 months prior, he was out patrolling on 1604 near 35 when a drunk driver was coming head-on in the wrong lane of travel. The sheriff's officer was able to get over to the right-hand line and almost onto the shoulder when he was hit by the drunk driver. The drunk driver was going highway speeds the wrong way down 1604 at about three in the morning. The sheriff's deputy was sitting disabled on the side of the road, injured and the driver kept driving. The driver hit another car and finally became disabled when he hit the retaining wall. He tried to flee, but he was stopped. He was arrested, he was charged with drunk driving and intoxication assault. This the sheriff's deputy didn't reach out because he was worried about making a claim. He didn't want to be seen as somebody who was making a claim for being injured in the line of duty. He thought it was his duty and his responsibility to do his job and being injured on the job was something he thought was part of his job. When I spoke to him, I let him know how that wasn't part of his job and he had a claim against that drunk driver's insurance and the drunk driver. The drunk driver didn't have any personal assets, he didn't have any money so the only thing he had was an insurance policy. Luckily, for this deputy, he wasn't that injured. He went to the emergency room and he saw his PCP, got some medication for pain and muscle relaxers, but he was able to make a full recovery. He didn't really know what to expect and I told him that we would take care of everything. One thing an insurance company doesn't want to do is go to trial against a police officer, a sheriff's deputy, injured in the line of duty, especially when they'll be defending a drunk driver. We took his case and we were able to resolve it for the maximum amount of policy limits available within just under three months. [music] [00:03:07] [END OF AUDIO]
We represented the mother of a young man whom was hit by an SUV in a crosswalk while the driver was texting on her phone. The young man suffered a broken hip but made a great recovery. We filed a lawsuit and proved that the other driver was distracted. Pedestrian accidents are one thing we do a lot of at Hill Law Firm. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: When an Air Force captain in San Antonio needed an attorney for the injuries her son suffered, she called the Hill Law Firm. In 2017, a young man was walking across the street in front of his elementary school. At the time, the school was having one of those Scholastic Book Fairs. The kids were encouraged to stay after school and shop. His mother had let him stick around. He was in fifth or sixth grade at the time. When he was leaving school, he was walking across the crosswalk with the lights flashing. At or about the same time, a woman was driving her SUV and wasn't paying attention, she was looking at her phone. She hit this young man and threw him, what witnesses say, 20 feet in the air. He came down in the roadway. He was taken to the emergency room and he was very badly injured. A multitude of test were performed and imaging was done and it turned out that he had broken his hip, that she had hit him hard enough with her vehicle to break his hip. We filed this case against that distracted driver. Her insurance company showed up and said that it wasn't that bad because his hip wasn't displaced. They tried to argue the fact that his hip was still in correct alignment, albeit broken. Made it not that serious of an injury. This was one sure way to anger our client, the mother. We pursued this case while her son continued to get monitored by doctors. We weren't sure how his recovery would progress. It turns out he made a full recovery. His hip was able to heal. He was able to get back to what he did before. He didn't complain of any pain or mobility issues. We weren't going to buy the insurance company's argument that the fact that his hip break wasn't displaced meant it wasn't that serious. What was serious was they had insured and were defending a woman who was playing on her phone when she hit a young little boy. A little boy who was doing the right thing using the crosswalk with the lights flashing. It was a wonder she didn't kill him and this wasn't a different case. In the end, as we got closer to trial, the insurance company dropped this frivolous defense and they paid the full policy limits. [00:03:16] [END OF AUDIO]
Sean Luchnick is a personal injury attorney in North San Antonio practicing with his wife and father. He joins us to talk about some of the challenges and lessons from his first few years of practicing. Transcript: Justin: Welcome to Hill Law firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Sean: I hope you're off too. Justin: Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases Podcast. I've got Sean Luchnick with me right now. Sean, thanks for being here. Sean: Thank you for inviting me, Justin. Justin: You're one in a long, illustrious list of lawyers in San Antonio who have joined me on the podcast to talk about the law, being a lawyer, and the type of work we do. Sean: I'm honored that you had me here today. Justin: Well, you work for the Luchnick Law Firm, it's you, and your father, and your wife? Sean: Yes, that's why it's named after my last name. Justin: What type of work do you all do? Sean: We do predominantly a personal injury, but any case that comes to the door, we're all ears. Justin: Yes, you all are going to do a big massive antitrust case? Sean: Absolutely. That's why I'll refer to you. Justin: Okay. Sean, how long have you been practicing? Sean: I've been practicing for about three years. Justin: Did you always know you're gonna be a plaintiff's lawyer? Sean: Well, when I knew I was going to be a lawyer, I knew I was going to be a plaintiff's lawyer. I didn't know I was always going to be a lawyer. Justin: You had dreams to be a football player? Sean: Yes, I did have dreams to be a football player. Justin: You played at Penn State and then UTSA? Sean: Yes. I was pretty realistic that probably going professional wasn't something I would-- Justin: Were you? When you were in high school, were you thinking you were going to be pro? Sean: Yes. [laughs] I mean, if you're in any profession, you got to have the dreams and aspirations for the highest level. Yes, at that time, not to boast about myself but no one at the high school level could stop me, so until I got to a point where you get to a point where there's people that are just so incredibly talented, you probably think you're going to be at the highest level. Justin: I was recently watching a CLE with Brian Panich. He was one of the most successful plaintiffs lawyers in America. A trial lawyer out of LA. He was a college football player and he said that working with other athletes he has found to be beneficial in our profession because he thinks athletes and growing up in athletics, you learn competition, you learn how to work together. What are some of the things that you think have translated from playing football at a high level to being a plaintiff's lawyer? Sean: I think that's what Panich said in the podcast or webinar you watched. It makes a lot of sense. A lot of my cases I feel a lot of passion, which I think comes from my competitive nature. The thing about the law, it's a little different. When you're playing football I could just get really mad and go wall up somebody on a play if this guy pisses me off. In the courtroom, it's a little bit different, but you still can do things like that. You get gratification at winning. It's one of the few things in the world I think we could really win or lose. I think if you have that background-- Justin: Did you watch that webinar? Sean: I watch portions of it, yes. Justin: That is one of the things he said there are very few professions in life where there is a winner and the loser. Sports is one. Courtrooms are another. Sean: Absolutely. I couldn't agree with that more. Justin: In terms of teamwork, you all have...
A lot of clients ask questions about who is the best San Antonio personal injury or car wreck lawyer in San Antonio. The best lawyer for your case is the one that does the best job on your case. I tell potential clients to pick someone they are comfortable with and they believe will do a good job for them. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. Are you the best car crash lawyer in San Antonio? Those are the types of questions we sometimes get when we're meeting with a potential new client for the first time. What's happened in San Antonio is, all you see on TV and billboards and buses anymore seems to be lawyer advertisements, how great lawyers are, how wonderful their firms are, and how they have these gigantic numbers that 99 out of 100 times have no bearing on most cases because every case is unique. That's created this world where everybody wants to know, will their case be as good as the one they saw on the bus or the TV or the billboard. I always tell my clients, "I'm not here to tell you I'm the best, and there's really no way to determine what the best is." If you've been in a car crash in San Antonio, you want a lawyer who's going to be the best for your case, and your case requires more than just somebody screaming at you on television or pointing at you in a billboard. You want somebody who's going to give you personalized service. You want to know that your lawyer is your lawyer, and you're not going to be shuffled around 20 lawyers, and three different departments, and never know who's calling you next. You want a lawyer who knows how to prepare your case for trial because a lawyer that prepares her case for trial is going to get offered more money, and if it goes to trial, they're going to be able to properly try your case to get you the maximum recovery. The most important thing is, you want to hire a lawyer you feel comfortable with, that you feel that they're going to take care of you, they're going to do the right thing for you, that you can communicate with. There is no best when it comes to any individual case. What there is is a whole lot of misinformation and a whole lot of overloading of information out there. How do you find the best? You meet with them, you read their reviews. If you can talk to former clients, try that. Ask them what their experience is in San Antonio, or whatever venue your crash occurred in. Find out, can they try your case? Do they try cases? At the end of the day, you need to make a judgment call on who you think is going to be best for you in a case. There is no great lawyer answer to who is the best. There is going to be somebody that is the best for your case and the best for you. Do your homework and find that best car crash lawyer for your case and for you personally. [00:03:46] [END OF AUDIO]
After two people are in a crash, there is no way to know how the other will react. They may be angry, hurt, confused, etc. We get asked from people and clients if they should speak to the other driver. I tell them to use their best judgement, not share too much information, but try to do so with the police present if you must. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] We've been discussing questions we get from clients or potential clients or family and friends following a car crash here in San Antonio. Normally, we get the same standard questions and, normally, we give out the same standard advice. There are a few things that should be done after a car crash and that's what we're trying to talk about in this series of podcasts. One of the things that we are always asked about and that we always discuss is how to interact with the other driver. Whether you're at fault or they're at fault or they're at fault but blaming you or vice versa, there are a few things that need to be done. One, we always tell everybody to call the authorities. If it's an emergency, call the emergency line which is 9-1-1. If it's not an emergency, there's no injuries, there is no public safety danger and no cars on fire and no reason to believe an emergency exists, call the non-emergency line. At the end of the day, it's always better to have a third-party document what they see and what they know and what they've been told. You don't want the insurance company at the end of the day accusing you of making something up or saying that a crash occurred or accusing you that a crash actually did not occur. A police officer is able to give an additional report and we think it's important that anybody contact the police officer. However, something we always get asked is what interaction should they have with the other driver. Sometimes, after a crash, the other driver's irate and threatening, maybe borderline hostile or violent. In those situations, we tell people, stay in your car. Keep it closed and locked if you can and call the authorities. In other instances, people are just trying to do the right thing and, most of the time, people want to do the right thing. So, we tell them, exchange insurance information. If you can take a picture of their insurance card, do that. Share your insurance information as well and share names and phone numbers. At the end of the day, both of you want to make sure the situation gets handled appropriately and normally people aren't trying to hide the ball. Now, if the other driver has something to hide, they don't have a driver's license, they've been drinking, they were texting on their phone or maybe they don't have insurance at all, you might find it difficult to get information from them. I always tell people it's important to try to get that information from them. If they won't give you that information, take down their license plate. Take down whatever information you can take down. That way, if they drive off or take off or in the wind later, you have some information that you can fall back on, identifying who was involved in that crash. The most important thing we tell people is use your best judgment. If somebody wants to try to help you work through things and they're being nice and friendly, then share information because you both want to get the same thing. You both want things taken care of and you both have car insurance for a reason. If for some other reason, such as hostility, the other person in the car crash is difficult or scary, then stay in your car and let the authorities handle it. [00:04:01] [END OF AUDIO]
Recently, I heard a San Antonio Police Officer discuss with a crowd of when 911 should be used. One of the examples he used was following a car wreck especially if there are injuries, public safety hazard, a fire, or anything that may be an emergency situation. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Our law firm gets phone calls from people that have been in accidents, car crashes, on-the-job injuries at any number of times in the process. Sometimes, we get a call while people are still at the scene. Sometimes we get a call a week before somebody statute of limitations is fixing to expire. One of the more common questions we get when people are calling us from the scene is, "Should I call 911?" That's a very specific question that really we, from afar, on the telephone, can't make a judgment for. 911 is an emergency phone system, and in San Antonio, luckily, I've seen some literature whereby guidance is provided on when to use the 911 phone number as opposed to the non-emergency line. Now, in a car crash, oftentimes people do call 911 because there are issues of public safety, there's an emergency situation, there's injuries, but sometimes it is not an emergency situation. The information I'm going to provide now, that has been provided to me by an officer once that I just jotted down on some notes, is no specific rules or regulations and it's not an exhaustive list. What I was told one time whenever we were talking about that question was, he said that he always tells people that if there's anything involving a fire, that if there's a car fire, a fire following an accident, an explosion, always call 911 about a fire. Anytime there's a medical emergency or people think there is a medical emergency, the people should call 911 as that's what 911 is for, it's an emergency hotline. He told me that if you think you've witnessed a crime or a crime is being committed, that that too is an emergency and you should call 911. Finally, the last thing we talked about for a while was he was talking about a car crash, that in the instance of a car crash, he says you should call 911 if there's even a chance that somebody's hurt. Maybe they're not all obviously hurt, maybe they just feel dizzy, but if there's a chance that somebody is hurt, you should call 911, or if the crash creates a situation that could lead to more injuries or more accidents such as blocking lanes of travel, or rolled over vehicle, a vehicle that was about to catch fire. We can't give an exhaustive list to our clients, especially when they call us on the telephone at the scene of a crash on when to dial 911, but we will relay the information that has been relayed to us. [music] [00:03:19] [END OF AUDIO]
Sometimes we get calls from people that were just in a car crash in San Antonio. They want to know what they should do and how they should respond. One question we get asked is about taking photos of the crash. We always tell people to document as much as you can if you are not too injured to do so. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] I've previously discussed on this podcast how sometimes we get calls from clients or friends or family members who've been in crashes and the crash has just happened. They literally might be on the side of the road or still in their vehicle following the crash before police arrive before anybody shows up to help. The first thing they do is call, me somebody in my office. Usually, in those situations, it's because it's somebody we've known for a long time, former clients, people we've known from high school or growing up or family members. We get all kinds of questions but we always tell them there's a few things they need to do. One of the things we talked to them about is take pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words is something we've always heard. A picture doesn't lie is another thing we've always heard. Following a crash, people that have been injured or people who were in the crash, sometimes aren't thinking clearly. Sometimes, they're not 100% sure what even happened. Between that crash and after they spoke to lawyers and after they spoke to their insurance company, spoke to whoever else tells them their opinion of what happened or their version of events. Memories can change. One thing that keeps people honest is photos. I always tell people if they've been in a crash, take as many photos as they can of their car, of the other cars, of people that are around the roadway, the weather, lights, if they're there. If it was at an intersection with lights, or if it was an intersection with stop signs or yield signs, just to take as many pictures as they can because you don't know when those are going to matter. I learned this lesson maybe the hard way whenever I was a very young lawyer. I was assigned to work on a case that was another attorney's case because I was probably a year out of law school. When I was working on the case, in a deposition, the defense lawyer showed up with a bunch of pictures. He said those pictures he had received from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they were pictures that depicted a rollover accident. The rollover accident involved a tire that had failed. The allegation was that the tire failed due to a manufacturing defect and that caused the vehicle to rollover. The pictures he showed me looked a little different than the pictures that we had received. The pictures that were really important to him were pictures that I did not recognize. Now, they look similar to pictures I'd seen, but they seemed bigger and broader and showed more. What they showed was additional facts that we did not know at that time. What we learned after the fact was that the DPS had produced pictures to us in a cropped format. They had taken the photos and they had cropped them down to what they thought were the important portions of the picture. That's how they had given them to us. That's the part of the official file that was produced. The defense attorney was able to get copies of the un-cropped photos in their native format. Those photos showed things that were important to our case but were not important to the DPS. The big part was they were very important in determining how the crash occurred and what happened after the tire had suffered the failure. It's important at the end of the day that all photos are produced, that all photos are taken, that all photos are preserved....
Distracted driving in San Antonio is a major problem. Everywhere you go, you see people texting and driving or distracted in other ways. This is the cause of many car crashes in San Antonio. We oftentimes find out that distracted driving was a cause of a crash after we request phone records and take depositions. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] After doing this for as long as I have, I've seen enough cases now where I can tell the other driver was distracted who caused the crash. In San Antonio, just driving around the roadways, you can see drivers looking at their phones, playing with whatever's in their lap, messing with their coffee or some other nonsense that's making them not pay attention to the roadways. Distracted driving is one of the biggest causes of crashes in San Antonio and the rest of the United States. Everybody has a phone. Everybody has a smartphone and far too few people put it down when they drive. It's hard to prove these cases because nobody wants to admit they were texting and driving or looking at their phone. However, sometimes at the scene, I have clients who say they saw them coming in their rearview or from their left and they could see that the person was looking at something in their lap or their hand. Distracted driving is one of the largest causes of crashes in the city. At our law firm, we do a couple of things to make sure that we protect our clients against distracted driving. One of the things is we always get the phone records of the defendant driver. That will let us know if they were on their phone right about the time of the crash. Whether texting or receiving a text or on a phone call, we can see that. Sometimes now, people have cameras in their cars. The rise of GoPros and these other types of cameras in the vehicles allow us to sometimes actually see what was going on. Also, we're able to sometimes find witnesses. More than 50% of the time, distracted driving is related to a smartphone, texting and driving, or some other use of a phone that causes distraction. We currently have two cases in which the other driver said they were playing with their coffee when the crash occurred and one lady got covered in coffee. People trying to eat while drive or check directions while drive all of these things lead to distracted driving accidents. At any given time, our firm has a dozen or so cases that are definitely attributable to a distracted driver. Distracted driving is one of the scourges on our roads in San Antonio, something we take very seriously and something we continue to investigate on every single car crash case or other crash that comes into our office. [00:03:34] [END OF AUDIO]
We recently filed a lawsuit in San Antonio on behalf of a young woman that slipped and fell in a bathroom at an amusement park. The fall did not injure her but the big sharp piece of metal that was jutting out cut her arm wide open. The piece of metal was bent and twisted and sharp. It created an unreasonably dangerous condition on the premises. Transcript: ٍSpeaker: Welcome to Hill law firm cases. A podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Speaker: Every case that comes into the office is different. One thing I can tell every client is that almost without fail the insurance company and defense attorneys will make up some excuse and some defense as to why. First, they're not at fault and if they are at fault you're not hurt and if you were hurt it wasn't their fault. If you were hurt and the jury believes you're hurt well you're better now. No matter what the case or what the facts, I can count on one hand the number of times the other side is agreed they're at fault, and they owe money. We're currently working on a case in which a young lady, less than 10 years old, went to the bathroom at an amusement park. Now, this bathroom was close to where the aquatic rides are located so the bathroom would get wet inside. The Aquatic Park knew that. They knew the bathrooms could get wet. It's their duty to make sure that they have a flooring surface that does not get slippery when wet. These flooring surfaces exist and the amusement park knows that. This case was different. When this young lady slipped, her arm hit the side of the bathroom stall. That by itself should be fine. However, the bathroom stall had a piece of metal, a metal flange that had been folded out. Essentially, a piece of metal was sticking out when it should not have. Our client's arm hit this piece of metal as she was falling down. Her slip was due to the slippery floor but her cut that required 28 stitches down her arm was due to this metal flange that inexplicably was bent out facing outward. Sharp, rusty and exactly where somebody who fell who hit this bathroom stall would hit. The insurance company called us and as they do, they had a defense. Their defense was well she slipped because it was wet, and she should've known it was wet. Sometimes I never know if they're making up their defenses, or they just don't understand the claim. I agreed with her that the floor was wet and our client slipped on a wet floor but that doesn't excuse or changes the fact that there shouldn't be a dangerous piece of metal sticking out from a bathroom stall. As I said earlier, they never admit to this but you could tell by her silence that she agreed that they had a dangerous premises defect in that bathroom and that premises defect led to this cut on my client's arm. Now, this young lady got 28 stitches. She'll have a scar for life. She's going to hear the defense say it's her fault for slipping in a bathroom. The slip isn't what caused her injury. That's what premises liability cases are. That if a business wants you to come onto their property and spend money that they have to keep their premises in a safe condition. They have to remedy dangerous defects on the property, and they actually have to inspect and look out for them. They don't get to just hide behind the log and when somebody is injured say, "Well, we didn't know about it". All too often that's the attempt of companies and their insurance companies to try to avoid liability. However, in this case where this young lady slipped and fell in San Antonio and cut her arm open, they're not going to be able to avoid liability with that excuse. [music] [00:04:37] [END OF AUDIO]
Handling cases with other law firms is a great joy. We get to learn together and work cases with new perspectives. One of the largest food poisoning outbreaks in San Antonio history is being prosecuted by Hill Law firm and our co-counsel. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] One thing we get to do in our practice as a small boutique San Antonio personal injury law firm, is work with other attorneys. I've seen in my career where attorneys have ended up either getting run over by a defense lawyer, outspent by a corporation, or just buried, because they either have too much pride or something else where they refused to involve other attorneys. In my career, I've had multiple occasions to involve other attorneys on cases. Sometimes, it's due to capacity at the law firm, where I need help. Sometimes, it's due to a very specialized part of law that I want to learn on. In both situations, I've found that it's always been helpful. My client's always been better served. The client pays no more fee, the attorney's share fee, and share work. One thing this does allow though is the attorneys get to work together and learn from each other. Some of the things I've learned from other attorneys, on cases I've brought them in on, stick with me today and have changed the way I practice law. Currently, probably five cases in my firm I'm working with another attorney. One case involves a food poisoning outbreak. In this case, we represent probably 30 people who were injured in a food poisoning outbreak in San Antonio, Texas. I've handled food poisoning outbreak cases and food poisoning products cases for the entirety of my career, but on this one, the numbers started getting higher and higher. I reached out to an attorney I'd worked some food poisoning cases with before out of the Northwest. Not only is he an expert in food poisoning cases, he was the first, the pioneer. He took on Jack in the Box and E. coli outbreak when everybody said he was losing his mind and that he was going to never make a penny. That his clients were never going to see their day in court, and they were never ever going to get compensated for their injuries. Well, they were all wrong. Because of that, he pioneered the litigation against companies who make people sick due to contaminated food. Because in his hard work, food and fast-food restaurants and grocery stores are safer now. Now there's a consequence if companies don't take food safety seriously. I've learned a lot from this attorney about food poisoning litigation. I've learned a lot of just differences in styles, in advocacy, in the way they do things. They call it the practice of law because we should be practicing law, and we should be practicing to get better every day. Working with other lawyers and law firms in my career has, without a doubt, made me a better lawyer, and my law firm a better law firm. [music]
When a personal injury case settles without trial, the other side insurance company will require a release. A release means that they are paying money to settle the claim and that you agree to that amount and that you won't sue them again. We always get questions about releases so we address it here. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Oftentimes we're called about cases involving people that were injured at some sort of park or a private club or a gym where they have signed releases. This often creates complications in their case. Gyms, in particular, like to make all of their clientele sign releases so that they're not held responsible if somebody is injured or suffer some sort of personal injury while working out of their gym. In San Antonio, every gym case I've seen has a personal injury release. Now, the releases in Texas require certain things to be held enforceable. One of the quirks in Texas is what's called the Express Negligence Rule. The release actually has to say that the party is releasing the gym or whatever group from acts of negligence by its employees or the corporation. I had one case in which the Fortune 500 company actually failed to put those words in their release. A couple of words would have protected them from any litigation and they would have been able to injure my clients without recourse. However, we fought the release and a judge agreed with us that this Fortune 500 company had failed to follow the law. Now, releases aren't always rock-solid. We tell everybody that has a release, that thinks they have a claim to let us take a look at the release. People that are injured and suffer personal injuries should not be held to where they can't get any recovery because of a release unless that release strictly complies with Texas Law. Another location you're seeing in these releases a lot is these trampoline parks that have become very popular. A lot of young kids go to trampoline parks. They have birthday parties at trampoline parks. As you can expect, a bunch of kids bouncing high into the air can lead to a lot of injuries. There's been a lot of litigation and a lot of injuries that have arisen from incidents at trampoline parks. Now, without fail, the trampoline park has a release, but they can't hold that release against a minor. Most of the people injured and playing trampoline parks are minors. That's one thing I always tell people that are worried that they can't bring a claim or that their kid can't bring a claim because of a release is that, first, minors can't be released. Second, releases have to strictly comply with Texas Law to be enforceable. Anybody that calls our firm with an injury that thinks that they're barred from bringing a claim due to a release, we always ask them to come meet with us, talk to us, and let us review the release. If the release in our opinion isn't enforceable, we fight that release to the courts. We let the courts decide because unless a Fortune 500 company or some other big business checks all the boxes and follows the law, they shouldn't be able to hide behind a release when they injure somebody else. [music] [00:04:18] [END OF AUDIO]
Steven spent time in LA trying to make it in Hollywood before going back to law school at Baylor Law School. Since then, he has been an injury lawyer, a solo, a family and criminal practitioner and heavily involved in our community. Steven joins to chat about his practice and San Antonio. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] All right, welcome to another episode of Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. As we've been doing, we have a few Q&A sessions with local lawyers. We like to get them on and talk to them about things. Today we have Steven Lopez, who's a partner with the Law Offices of Oscar Garza? Steven Lopez: The Law Firm of Oscar A. Garza. Justin: Okay, I'll make sure I got it right. Steven went to Baylor like myself. He was a little bit behind me at Baylor. It's a small group of lawyers here in town that are Baylor lawyers. I want to talk to him about a few things, talk to him about his community involvement. Because he's a little bit behind me, I want to talk to him about where his career is going and what he sees in our city. First, Steven, where were you born and raised? Where'd you do college and all that? Steven: I was born in Chicago, Illinois. That's where my mom and dad lived when I was born. I was there for only about a year. I got to Texas as soon as I could. Justin: What neighborhood in Chicago? Steven: Southside. I was born in the south side of Chicago. Tough. It was tough- Justin: White Sox people. Steven: - living out there as an infant. That's where I got all my street cred. Justin: You went to the RGV. Steven: Yes, and I lived in the valley. I'm from Harlingen, Harlingen Cardinal. Cardinal spirit never dies. It's still alive and well in my blood. That's where I went to high school. After high school, went to UT. After UT, spent about nine years in Los Angeles and then went to Baylor Law School in 2009. Then did some time in Dallas after law school and then moved here about 2015. Justin: Little known fact, Steven went to LA to make it as an actor. Your big break was a commercial, which one? Steven: My big break was a Breakfast Jack commercial. Justin: Jack in the Box? Steven: Jack in the Box, but I did get edited out quite heavily. If you see the commercial today, you can see my head pushing a guy in a bed through the drive-thru. Justin: I feel like I remember that. Now, we're not going to say the number, but when you told me how much money you got paid for that, it was a shocking amount of money for a commercial that you had a three-second spot. You made it, but then you decided, "This isn't enough for me. I'm going to go to law school." What made you choose Baylor Law? Steven: Well, I wouldn't say that I made it. Justin: Kind of made it. Steven: I made some money. That commercial was the highest paying thing I did nine years. Mostly, I went on a lot of auditions, went to a lot of classes, and bartended at night. Justin: Was it like Barry? Steven: It was a little bit like Barry. There used to be a show with Brian Green, I think his name was, produced by George Clooney, about being an actor in LA. It was on HBO. Justin: Brian Austin Green? Steven: No. Justin: Of 90210? Steven: No, maybe not Brian Green. Justin: Okay, we're getting sidetracked. This is a lawyer podcast. How'd you end up at Baylor? Steven: I ended up at Baylor because it was the best school in Texas that accepted me. Justin: I think that's fair. Did you want to do litigation? Steven: I did. I wanted to do litigation. I thought it'd be best on my feet. It was a toss-up between SMU and Baylor....
Depositions are a part of any lawsuit. In San Antonio, the lawyers here are very quick to request and get a deposition of all parties in a lawsuit. A deposition is just a questioning under oath with lawyers present in the simplest terms. In this episode, we discuss what a deposition is and why it is part of the process. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names, and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: We've been talking about the different parts of the case. Whenever somebody signs up with our office, we try to set their expectations, explained to them the process, and try to guide their understanding of what's going to happen so that they're not surprised when certain things do happen. They're not surprised by the timeline by which they happen. They understand how many different things are normal in this process. That at first glance to somebody who's never done it before, it might be scary. We've talked about the discovery process, which comes after filing a lawsuit and the other side answers to that lawsuit. Then the law allows a period of what's called discovery. Discovery is an opportunity for both sides to develop facts to investigate the claim, to get information from the other side that will help them understand what the case is and prepare for trial. One of the elements of discovery is depositions. Depositions are a very normal part of any lawsuit. It's very rare we have cases in which depositions do not occur once a lawsuit is filed. For the most part in a normal car wreck case, that usually just means the deposition of the plaintiff and the defendant and may be an investigating officer and maybe a medical doctor or provider. On the other end in a very complex product liability commercial bus case I had early in my career, that case had over a hundred depositions of witnesses and experts and all different people involved from the liability and the damages side of the case on both sides. The depositions are a very normal part of the process, and the deposition is a chance for each side to ask questions of another. It could be the plaintiff's asking questions of the defendants, the defendant asking questions of the plaintiff or both sides asking questions of investigating officers, eyewitnesses, medical providers. It's a chance to ask questions under oath. It's a chance to discover facts about your case, to investigate lingering questions that either side may have about the case. It's a chance to prepare for trial, know what will be said at trial, and to understand the risk. Deposition testimony in Texas can be used in trial the same way someone was sitting on the stand. Their trial or deposition transcript can be used in the trial, their video can be played in the trial. Now, I always tell my clients whenever they're getting ready for a deposition, for one to relax, the deposition is not a very high pressure or formal. For the most part, it's usually done in an office setting, in a conference room, for example. There will be attorneys from all the parties there. Sometimes that just means an attorney from each side because there are only two parties in a case or when there's 10, there might be 10 lawyers. There'll be a court reporter there, typing everything down that they then put into a booklet, a transcript of the deposition. Sometimes there's a videographer and the videographers videoing the deposition, and that video can be played in trial. Depositions are informal. Generally, they're not high pressure and generally, people don't get out of control. For the most part, they're a slow methodic question-answer setting. The lawyer asking the questions or ask their question and the witness will then answer their question and back and forth. For the most part,...
You all have seen him on social media but now is your chance to hear directly from the official office dog, Sir Winston Dexter Hill. He rarely speaks but he won't shut up in this interview. Transcript: Bark! Bark bark! Bark bark bark!
Javier Espinoza has made a name for himself in San Antonio and all of Texas as one of the leading experts in work injury law and on the job injury lawsuits. He is a friend of our firm, a very giving and sharing member of the San Antonio bar and a great attorney. We were lucky to get him on the show to share some of his wisdom. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: All right, this is another episode of Hill Law Firm podcast as I have Javier Espinoza here with me today who has been kind enough to do an episode of the Alamo Hour. I'm holding him over to discuss work injury cases with me. Javier is one of the best lawyers in our city, one of the best lawyers in the state. He is really chosen to focus, not exclusively, but in a big way on work injury cases. Our law firm has worked multiple cases with his law firm and even when we don't involve them, they've been an invaluable resource to myself and others in the city, and others around the state who have questions about representing injured workers. Javier, thank you for being here and I just want to start, why did you get so focused into work injury cases in your career and in your practice? Javier Espinoza: Well, the main reason is because I came to a new city from El Paso and when I got here, I was relatively unknown. I pretty quickly had to develop a niche, and number one, it was a niche that I really, really liked. Having come from a working-class family, I think it was a real natural fit to represent workers, but the bigger, I guess, business sense of it is it's very difficult to compete with everybody. I very quickly developed, I needed to pick a niche. When I started picking the work injury niche, I just fell in love with it because I fell in love with clients and I fell in love with the type of law, and it's so different than your regular average case that it really gave me a leg up, I felt. Justin: Yes, and that's important to talk about. Everybody that advertises, advertises as though a widget is a widget and a case is a case, and it's all the same. One of the biggest surprises to me as I started building my own practice and seeing more cases was the prevalence of arbitration agreements in work injury cases, work injury situations. What are some of the nuances to work injury that make it a little different than say, a car wreck or an 18-wheeler wreck? Javier: Sure. Well, there's three very specific types of work injuries. Number one, somebody gets injured at work. If they have workers' compensation, then you can't sue the employer, you've got to go follow workers' compensation claim and that is administrative, that is through the state of Texas, it's regulated. It is a whole other world from any type of lawsuit. If the employer does not have workers' comp, then it's considered a non-subscriber, they don't subscribe to workers' comp. You have to file a claim directly against the employer. The difference between a work injury non-subscriber claim and let's say, a car wreck case, is that a lot of times you file a lawsuit in a non-subscriber case and the employer has paid all their wages, has paid all their medical. They say, "What are you suing for?" Versus a car wreck where you're suing for past medical, future medical, impairment, all that stuff. Well, in a work injury case, that's essentially what you're suing for, is the intangibles, the mental anguish, impairment, pain and suffering, and if there's any evidence of future medical that is not covered by the employer or any difference in pay, the lost wages. Damages wise, they're very, very different. Liability wise, they are completely different. In a non-subscriber case, you...
Josh Venegas is usually the first voice anyone hears when they call Hill Law Firm. He handles all of our intake call, medical records, and generally helps out wherever and whenever needed. He never leaves without asking if there is anything else we all need. Clients love him and there is a reason why. He was raised and lives just a mile or so down the road from the office. Learn more about Josh. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin: All right. Welcome to another episode of the Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. We're doing a series called Meet the Team. We think it's important that we give our clients and potential new clients a little bit of information about who we are as people, and especially during the shutdown and especially during these times where we see each other less and less. I think it's important people can put a face to a name and a name to some background information. I'm here with Josh Venegas right now. Hi, Josh. Josh Venegas: Hola, boss man. Justin: Thank you for being here. Josh: No worries. Thank you for having me. Justin: Josh, I've got some questions for you. I want to just get some information from you. We're going to put it on our website. We're going to have it on our podcast. We're going to have it on our YouTube channel as well, if you even know we have one of those. Josh: I did not know we had a YouTube channel, but all right. Justin: All right, Josh, how long have you lived in San Antonio? Josh: All my life. Justin: Born and raised? Josh: No, I was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. We moved over to Houston before I could even walk, and then, slightly after, we moved here to San Antonio. I mean, my whole life has been here. Justin: I think you've told me you've lived in the same general part of San Antonio the whole time too. Josh: That's right. I used to live-- The first house that we lived at was on Blanco and Fulton. Then, once I hit 15, we moved over here by, I would say, San Pedro and Fresno would be the closest cross streets. Justin: Okay. Really, the near central, just north of downtown part of San Antonio. Josh: Yes, that's where I've been my whole life. Justin: You went to Edison? Josh: I went to Agnes Cotton Elementary, Mark Twain Middle School, and then, I went to Edison. Justin: Mark Twain is now a Spanish immersion maybe or something. Josh: I drive by there and it's-- I don't know. It's just completely- Justin: It's some sort of magnet. I think. Josh: It's something. They changed the entrance of [unintelligible 00:02:20]. Justin: You're from San Antonio, but you were born in Mexico. Do you speak Spanish? Josh: Yes, very much so. Justin: I think that's important for a lot of our clients to know we've got you who speaks really good Spanish, Marisa who speaks less good Spanish, and me, who doesn't speak much. I mean, I can get around Mexico if I have to. Josh: It's good, though. At least, the basics. Justin: Yes. Josh: Hola. Como estas? Justin: I've been told my accent is so thick people can't understand what I say anyway. Josh: Yes, there's no point? Justin: Yes, right? Before you came and worked here, you had worked in other law firms. About how long had you worked in the legal world or other law firms? Josh: I was working for Heard & Smith. They're a disability firm. I was there for roughly about seven years, six and a half, seven years. That was the only other job that I've had that is considered like a law firm job. Justin: You're still pretty young, so that's the majority of your adult
We have covered what some of the most common questions we get from those in car wrecks in San Antonio. Whether injured or not, car crashes create a lot of uncertainty and questions for those in them. We do our best to address some of the most common questions and considerations. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] On the Hill Law Firm cases podcast, we've been going through a series of real-life questions that we get asked from clients or family members or friends following a car crash. When people are in car crashes, they often think the first thing I'm going to do is call the police and sometimes the second thing I'm going to do is call an attorney. We've all been conditioned to know that at the end of the day, insurance companies are going to do whatever they can to deny or delay our claims. It might be clear as day that we're not at fault, but the insurance company is going to find some way to say we're at fault. People know that they want to call an attorney to make sure they don't do anything that shoots them in the foot later on or allows their insurance company to have some loophole to deny their claim. Two of the more common questions that we get that I always tell people they shouldn't be stressed about are can I move my vehicle and what should I do about witnesses? The first question is a pretty common question we get and it's something that the police and public media is often discussing and that is can you move your car? If you've been in a crash, should you move your car to the side of the road? We always tell people to follow with the San Antonio police department says, if you call the San Antonio police department, they'll tell you what the best thing to do is. Normally they tell people that if it's not an emergency situation, the cars are operable and you can safely do it, to move your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to get through. Otherwise, you might be causing a traffic jam that keeps police or ambulance or fire from getting to your vehicles. We always tell them to listen to the police, listen to the 911 operator, whoever you're talking to on their advice. Generally, what they say is that if the vehicles are operable, that you can safely do so, to get your car to the side of the road to allow traffic to continue to flow and to not create another danger for other drivers. The second question we get is, should I take down a witness's information? It's very common. We get clients that come see us a couple of weeks after a crash and say, "Yes, there were witnesses. I saw them there and they told me they would help me if they could," but nobody took down their information. What we see a lot is that the police officers will take down their information, but it's not part of the police report and we never see it again. Sometimes police reports will have the name and phone numbers of witnesses and what they said, but more often than not, our clients will tell us there were witnesses to the crash that they spoke to, but that those witnesses are not in the crash report. We always tell people that if you have witnesses that saw the crash, take down their name, take down their phone number. If you can do a little video or audio recording with them at the scene, that's great too. The important thing is we want to know how to get in touch with them at the end of the day because when the other side's insurance company is going to start blaming you or trying to say it's 50, 50, the most powerful evidence against those frivolous defenses are third parties with no skin in the game who saw the crash and will honestly say what caused it. [music] [00:04:06] [END OF AUDIO]
Justin Hill asked Josh Fogelman to team up and help with the trial of a UM/UIM car crash cases in Williamson County, Texas. Our client was wrongfully denied her policy benefits that she had paid for over many years. The jury in Williamson County sided with our client and made sure she was awarded every single dollar of his UM/UIM benefits under her Allstate policy. This verdict was one of the top 100 verdicts in the State of Texas for 2019. Transcript: Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin: On today's episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, I've got a good friend of mine and previous co-counsel and classmate and friend and all of those wonderful things, Josh Fogelman, who's a really established and accomplished personal injury lawyer in Austin in the firm of Fogelman & Von Flatern, FVF Law, and he's sitting here with a really cute hat with a bird FVF on it. Josh and I had the pleasure and benefit and honor of trying a case, I guess it would be a little past a year ago now. Josh: That's right. Last spring. Justin: In Williamson County, so Georgetown. In our industry, there's always good places to file a lawsuit and try a lawsuit. Then historically, there's bad places to file and try a lawsuit. Georgetown's always been considered maybe one of the worst places in the state of Texas because the understanding is juries don't think cases are worth much money is generally the idea, right? Josh: Yes, it's just Williamson County north of Austin is a really conservative, historically Republican county. You've got at least the reputation of having very conservative jurors there. Personal Injury Law conservative jurors tend to have a little bit of a more conservative viewpoint of valuation on personal injury cases. Justin: While it shouldn't be political, this idea of tort reform and runaway juries has permeated parties. The Republican Party has been the party carrying the mantle of we need to do stuff to rein in jury verdicts. Right or wrong, that sort of has permeated politics. It's become part of the discussion and that's bled over into some venues. What we realized in Williamson County is maybe that isn't true or maybe the demographics are changing. We ended up with a diverse jury in that case. Our foreperson was a 19-year-old woman with a nose ring if I recall. Josh: Yes. What was interesting about our Williamson County jury is it reminded me a lot of our Travis County juries. I think that that's a lot to do with the growth of Austin and a lot of the Austin mentality being pushed outside of the city and county limits up into neighboring jurisdictions, neighboring counties like Williamson County. Justin: What we didn't even see in the jury selection is we didn't really see a whole lot of far-right or anti-lawyer or anti-tort thinking either. We had a pretty fair jury. If I recall in our panel, we had a whole lot of people who had been screwed over by insurance companies before. Josh: Yes, that's true. Beyond that, we also had a really fair judge. I was really impressed and surprised with the judges leaning up there. As far as the Republican judiciary is concerned, I thought that we got some pretty good and fair rulings from Judge Lambeth up there in Williamson County. Justin: She let us try our cases. You get judges sometimes that are very involved in the trial, the case in terms of they want to give their two cents or they want to guide the way the trial is working. She let us try our case. She let the defense do what they wanted for the most part within the rules. She let us do what we wanted and she let us have as much time as we needed, which I was pretty surprised by. From the jury standpoint, you...
Mikal Watts is a San Antonio personal injury lawyer with a nationwide varied practice. He is considered one of the best of his generation and his jury verdicts speak for themselves. He has been involved in product liability cases, personal injury, mass torts, and commercial litigation. It was great to sit down with my old boss and mentor. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill law firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] I'm here with Mikal Watts. He was my original boss. This is Hill Law Firm cases podcast and I'm going to talk with Mikal, who was the whole reason I came to San Antonio. He was really an inspiration for me wanting to get into, not just plaintiffs work, but products work, which I missed at the back end of it, but I got to do incredible things at his firm and I got to see incredible things and I got to be part of things that nobody my age got to do. Mikal: You did incredible things. Justin Hill: Thank you. I did my best, but to be fair, I'm now on my own and I was only able to do that with the set of skills and the quiver that I left your firm with, so I thank you so much for that. I wanted to do these small podcasts for my law firm to talk about how we do things, why we do things, what we are. One of the things I sit down with every client that I learned from you early on, is I say, "We're going to file your lawsuit, we're going to push it fast, we're going to get to trial as quickly as we can." That's something I learned from you. What was your philosophy, because so many people in our industry, they wait 'til this and they send a letter, and then if that doesn't happen-- What was your philosophy to file and push? Mikal: You can follow as a gentleman and not be a jackass, right? You can just get the process started, apply pressure as a gentleman. To be honest with you, I tried a case last fall that I lost in San Antonio, tough case, but you were in there kicking ass on some guy. They were trying to continue the case and you were pushing, and I said, "I taught him that. That's awesome." Justin Hill: It's true. Mikal: I was proud of you. The good news is that probably settled because you applied pressure. You can apply pressure without being rude, and it's not dishonorable to tell a defendant, "No, we're going to move, we're going to get a trial setting. You've got the time between now and the trial setting to settle the case." That's what you've done and that's what I saw last fall, which is awesome. Justin Hill: Everything I've learned in my process has really been from your firm. Mikal: Litigation is all about applying pressure. It's either applied to you or you apply it to somebody else. A good plaintiff's lawyer is going to apply it to the defendant and then get paid earlier. Justin Hill: We have a burden to carry and I always explain that to clients, too. It's tougher on our end. We have to carry a burden. What is your philosophy going into a trial knowing that you have the harder road to hoe? Look, you are always good friends with defense lawyers. It was one of those things that I've never met in anybody else. You have good relationships with them, they respect you, you treat them well, but you push your cases. How do you approach a case knowing you have the burden to carry and how do you explain that to your client? Mikal: We shouldn't file the case unless we think we can get there, but most of us file cases because we think it's a righteous cause. Then, when we have the righteous cause, we can be friendly with the defense lawyer, but they know that we're ready to whip their ass and that's what we try to do, and that's clearly what you do. Justin Hill: I remember one time when I was a young lawyer, you...
This client was rear-ended on I-35 in rush hour traffic. After the negligent driver's insurance paid their policy limits, the Plaintiff made a claim on her own insurance the policy coverage she had pay for over many decade. Allstate denied her claim and forced her to go to trial. The jury sent Allstate a different message. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. When people buy car insurance, they oftentimes add what is called UM/UIM coverage. What that does is that provides an additional layer of coverage if somebody is injured by an under-insured or an uninsured motorist. Unfortunately for Texans, some changes in the law have meant that these insurance carriers oftentimes do not honor these policies. They low ball, they deny and they delay paying these claims. I handled one such claim for a friend's mother. She was injured grievously in an I35 rear end collision in San Antonio. What happened next was pure abuse by her insurance company. The other driver's insurance paid their policy limits. She had about $80,000 in medical bills and the other driver's insurance was 100,000 and they paid all of it. When she made a claim on her own uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, they offered her $500, and then they withdrew that offer. This was a case against Allstate, and Allstate is famous for doing this to people. Now, this information isn't confidential because Allstate made this case go to trial. They took an elderly woman to trial over the policy that she had been paying for for decades. She paid premiums on time for decades, and when she tried to make a claim for the policy she paid for, they made her a zero offer and they forced her to go to trial. They do this to bully people because they know that the expenses and the time are not worth it to most people. I tried this case on behalf of this woman. The jury didn't agree with Allstate, even though Allstate hired experts that cost them $2,000 an hour for their deposition, the jury didn't buy it. After a three or four day trial, the jury returned a verdict for this woman for $386,000. Cases against your own insurance company are some of the most frustrating cases for clients as well as attorneys. We have to explain to our clients that, yes, you did pay for this policy and yes, you're current on your end of paying, but they're not going to pay you what they owe you. We have to explain to them the changes in Texas law, and we have to explain to them that the insurance company doesn't care, that they make their money by holding onto this money and delaying the claim. We continue to represent clients and claims against their own insurance companies because it's important to us that people aren't bullied.
Law school classmate, friend, co-counsel, and fellow injury lawyer, Joshua Fogelman joins Hill Law Firm Cases podcast to discuss injury law, San Antonio, and trying case. He also discusses the business of personal injury law and opening multiple offices. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases. I'm here with Josh Fogelman, again. The point of this podcast is I want to talk about the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis, the issues we run into every day, so to give an inside look at a personal injury law firm in San Antonio. Josh has worked in San Antonio. He has a law firm in Austin called Fogelman Von Flatern. Or is it fvflaw.com? Josh Fogelman: That's right, fvlawfirm.com. Justin Hill: fvlawfirm.com. They're a great plaintiffs personal injury firm up there, handle stuff all over the state of Texas. I wanted to get Josh on here and just get some sort of off the cuff responses, some insights on what he thinks about the personal injury, profession and practice. We've previously talked about a case we tried to verdict the UIM case. Then we worked another case involving a premises liability, sort of a strange case that involved air conditioning companies and a hotel company and strange medical experts and all kinds of stuff. It was a real complex case. It was a lot of fun. Let me tell you. My favorite thing about practicing law, the one favorite thing I get to do in the finite is, I like to cross-examine expert witnesses. I found that too often, they're unprepared and too often, they are pompous in their unpreparedness. It really creates this great situation where you've got somebody who is very proud of themselves, very confident and has not prepared. That is just a great situation for lawyers that want to spend the time preparing, knowing they're talking to somebody smarter than them, knowing they've got to overcome this hurdle, but the same time knowing that other side probably didn't prepare and stay up as late as you did or spend the last five days getting ready. What's one of your favorite things to do within the working up of a case or within litigation that you enjoy? Josh: I really enjoy the medicine side of what we do. I love learning about how injuries affect the body, how the body recovers from injuries and really trying to visualize what's going on inside someone's body that's causing them some sort of pain or impairment. I just really enjoy that stuff. Justin Hill: I started doing more and more of it. Do you use the visual aids of the medical illustrations much in your cases? Josh: Yes, we're starting to do that more and more as well. Trying to help a jury visualize and understand the lingo of what it is that you're talking about so that they can get through the medical terminology that can be cumbersome for anybody to understand and then helping to paint a picture for them in a way that they can relate in the real world so that they can really understand the gravity of what is going on inside our clients' bodies. We use full stuff. Justin Hill: I have a case right now. We did the video tour of the injury. It's a whole video that kind of hits each injury area of the body and plays it out. I think I still like the old big boards better with just a big drawing with labels because I think there's a dramatic effect of carrying and holding a board. It's not a video clip, which any more trials got so many videos and at one less I think I like. One thing I think is very hard in our profession, from the medical standpoint is, I think it's very hard to take the deposition of one of your clients treating doctors. There's a certain amount of distress, I think, between...
Marisa Segovia is the head paralegal and has previously been a receptionist, head of intake, and basically done all tasks at Hill Law Firm. She moved to San Antonio from El Paso in 2016 and has been an invaluable asset to the firm. Clients love her and she loves what she does. Get to know her here. Transcript: Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. All right, welcome to this episode of our Hill Law Firm podcast. This is now also going to be a video on our YouTube channel. We're doing a series of episodes on meet the team in COVID and shut down days. Just generally there's too often that we don't get to meet with our clients early on because either they're too far away, or they don't want to come into the office, or for whatever reason, they'll have a lot of interaction with us prior to really getting to know us. I wanted to take an opportunity to introduce some of the people in my office for those who maybe don't get in early enough or just want to learn more about our law firm. I'm here right now with Marissa Segovia. She is really the office manager, kind of jack of all trades, sort of runs the show around here. Marissa, I'm going to ask you a few questions, introduce yourself. When did you move to San Antonio? Marissa: I moved to San Antonio, I believe it was the summer of 2016. Justin: Okay. Where were you born and raised at? Marissa: I was born in Austell, Georgia, and I was raised in El Paso, Texas. Justin: Okay. I didn't know you were born in Georgia [unintelligible 00:01:41] El Paso. All right. You've been working here for how long, three years? Marissa: A little over three years now, yes. Justin: All right. I've actually used you as an example. I was asked one time for advice for people seeking jobs, what to do and what not to do. When I was interviewing for a receptionist at the time you came, and you were there about an hour early. I thought you were a different human being because everybody kept counseling or showing up late. You showed up an hour early. What had you been doing up until that time? Marissa: As far as- Justin: For a job. Marissa: - job, okay. I worked at a front desk at a hotel. Justin: Okay. I think it would be the kind way to say that it really wasn't the fanciest hotel in town. Marissa: Correct. That's a nice way of putting it. Justin: Yes. When I met with you, I knew if you could handle that, doing night shift at a rough hotel that you could probably handle anything. Why did you apply to work at Hill Law Firm? Marissa: Really it was for a better job opportunity. Justin: Fair enough. You had not been involved in the law before? Marissa: Not at all. Justin: Okay. You were going to college at the time? Marissa: I was, yes. Justin: Okay. What were you studying? Marissa: Criminal justice. Justin: Okay. You had some interest in the justice system, and we were a law firm, so it made sense. Marissa: Yes, it did. Justin: Okay. When you came over, you applied for a receptionist job. Just honestly, at the time it was me and you, and one other person. A paralegal, you and me, right? Marissa: Correct. Justin: Then it would have been about a little over a year ago, you got moved up to a paralegal position. Marissa: Correct, yes. Justin: Okay. Let's talk about growing up. You grew up in El Paso. Texas is notorious for lawyer advertisements. I know some of the ones that are in El Paso. I think maybe they had the strong arm out there. They had a few of those. What were your perceptions on personal injury law firms or personal injury lawyers prior to coming to work in here?...
A friend's parents were traumatically injured in a hit and run case but their insurance company did everything they could to deny their UM/UIM claim. We tried this case to verdict. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. I had the pleasure of representing an elderly couple, many years ago who were involved in a hit and run crash. They were driving down the highway at highway speeds when somebody rear-ended their vehicle. Now, they weren't rear-ended hard, but hard enough for them to lose control of their vehicle. Their vehicle careened hard to the left and they hit the dividing wall. Both of these clients of mine broke their neck. One of them also broke their back. Luckily, neither of them were paralyzed or killed in this crash. However, they had a long road to recovery. As it was a hit and run and they were so tragically injured, they did not get to take down the license plate of the other driver or get a make and model of the vehicle. They had taken out insurance for situations like this, an uninsured or underinsured motorist policy, which covers them in hit and run situations. Once they were coming out of their hospital stays and they were still in a halo and a back brace respectively, they made a claim on this policy. Little did they know that while they were still in the hospital, the insurance company was preparing to deny their claim. While they were in the hospital, the insurance company had sent out an accident reconstructionist to the wrecker yard to try to start proving up that they had just lost their control of their vehicle and that they were not struck. You see, there's a quirk in the UM/UIM policies that if there's not contact with another vehicle, the insurance company doesn't have to pay. Sometimes you'll hear insurance companies say, you weren't hit, you were just run off the road and as long as there's no contact, that's not enough to make a claim. While my clients were recovering from broken backs, their insurance company was preparing to deny their claim, and deny their claim they did. I was hired to represent them to sue their own insurance company to try to get the policy that they had paid for, for years. Since it was a big policy, the insurance company pulled out all the stops to fight them. They never once tried to do the right thing. They never once tried to make a fair settlement offer of their claim. Multiple experts were involved, medical and accident reconstructionists, and in the end, this case had to go to trial. Even though these two people had taken out their insurance policies to cover them for certain situations such as a hit and run driver, their insurance company was working against them the whole time. In the middle of the trial, the insurance company decided to make an offer. An offer that was many, multiple times larger than anything they'd ever offered prior to trial. Insurance companies, too often, work against their own insureds, and too often, insureds expect them to do the right thing, while behind the scenes, the insurance company is preparing to deny, delay, or defend. In situations like that, sometimes we get handled to sue the insurance company.
It is a high honor when a defense lawyer calls and says they want to settle your case first and for a premium to get you out of the case. That is exactly what happened after Justin Hill deposed the two defendant drivers in this case. He got them both to admit they could have avoided the crash. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. In Hill Law Firm we handle more bus crash cases than probably most law firms in the state of Texas. We've handled bus crash cases against some of the largest busing companies in the world. One such example is a case involving a international bus line that takes people from Texas into Mexico. One day while this bus was making one of its routes south, as it was approaching a disabled 18-wheeler on the shoulder, it failed to get over into the left-hand lane to pass it. At about the same time, that 18-wheeler driver who was working for one of the largest companies in the world, was trying to get a speed up to get back into the slow lane so he could get on his way. He had his hazards on and the bus driver thought he had stopped. As can be expected, the bus driver failed to get over and he ended up hitting the large 18-wheeler truck. This caused the bus to roll over in the median. Our client, an elderly woman, was thrown from her seat into the luggage compartment where she was stuck. She had a broken arm and a broken shoulder. She was not found until the wrecker was there fixing to tip the bus back onto its wheels. Only then did somebody hear her cry for help. In the depositions for this case, I was able to establish with both of the drivers. The first, the bus driver would have been able to get over completely to the left and avoid this accident had he tried. He also said he would have been able to come to a complete stop if he had started to slow when he saw the truck. In the same vein, the trucking company driver stated that he could have waited on the shoulder until the bus passed, and then it wasn't a lot of traffic, and then he would have been fine waiting and getting on the roadway after. Both of the defendants called us early on and settled our claims first. In the end, some of the other lawyers had to take their case all the way to trial. It wasn't that we got a low settlement. We got an early settlement because we were the law firm doing the hard work. We had hired the accident reconstructionists, we had the expertise and knew what we were doing. Because of that, the defendants knew that we would either improve the value of all the cases, or they could resolve our claim first, get us out, and then deal with lawyers that did not have as much experience in bus cases. We continue to handle bus cases and currently have one bus case in San Antonio, Texas at this time. It's something we're passionate about and it's something we think the industry needs to better regulate. If you have any questions about a bus case, you know how to reach us.
A retired couple was traumatically injured when their front left drive tire suffered a catastrophic tire tread separation while driving at highway speeds in West Texas. This case involved very complex issues of accident reconstruction and engineering. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: I was very lucky as a young lawyer to get a job with one of the best plaintiff's personal injury and commercial litigation law firms in the United States. I cold-called him coming out of law school hoping for the best. That was a non-traditional path. I didn't follow an application out, and send a resume in, and wait three weeks. I went after the job I wanted. One reason I wanted that job was because I wanted to do products liability work. I wanted to be able to represent people who were injured due to the dangerous design and defect of products. A lot of people understand this as cases based on things like the Ford/Firestone recall, or Ford rollovers, or other vehicle defects. One of the most famous examples is asbestos or lawn darts. There are certain products that are dangerous, and they're unreasonably dangerous for what their intended purpose is. Luckily, at my first job, I got to work on some of those cases. One of them involved an older couple who had retired. They had decided they were going to buy an RV. They were going to travel around. They were going to enjoy their golden years. While they were coming back from a trip to Colorado, they suffered what's called a tire delamination, a tire detread. These are defects in tires. When a tire doesn't fully cook or cure together, the tire can fall apart. This is different than a blowout. This is different than all the treads you see on the road. Usually, that is tread associated with retreaded tires. Passenger vehicle tires are not retreaded, and they should not fall apart. The same is to be said for RV tires. The RV tires in the front aren't allowed to be retreaded. They have to be new tires, and they should not fall apart. In our case, our clients were driving highway speeds when the front left tire delaminated. What this meant is that their vehicle pulled hard left. Based on the accident reconstruction, it pulled left, it went left and it was not moving. Unfortunately, for our clients, in the area where there was not much other than wheat fields, they hit head on a concrete box culvert. Both of the passengers were critically injured, lower leg injuries, and just a series of injuries, and complications related to their traumatic injuries. A couple of things happen after that. We sued the tire maker for making a defective tire. This was one of the largest tire makers in the world, and they gave us the runaround. This tire was made overseas because they had reached capacity in the United States. They forced us to go overseas to Italy to depose factory workers. On top of that, the way these cases are typically defended is an accident reconstructionist hired by the tire company will say something along the lines of, “Yes, even if that did happen, these are controllable events.” They usually say, “You take your foot off the gas and you let your vehicle slow down, while you try to maintain speed.” There's testing showing that that is not necessarily true and that there are uncontrollable events following tire delaminations. What we had in our case was a RV owner's website by this tire company. It actually discussed this exact scenario. That if this were to happen on the drive axle that the driver should accelerate until they're able to straighten out their vehicle. This is different advice than is given for passenger vehicles. Once we got into our case, we found out that's exactly...
Sometimes loved ones call looking for lawyers for their parents or family members. In this case, a daughter called seeking counsel for her parents. The negligent driver was very underinsured so claims against his insurance broker had to be fully explored before resolving this crash case. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] When I was a young lawyer, I remember a defense lawyer referring to one of my colleagues as a pioneer. He said they were an early settler. He said it as a joke, making fun of them, saying that they settle early and they settle for too low amounts of money. I knew at that time I was never going to be that kind of lawyer and we've never had the reputation of doing anything other than working our cases hard aggressively and getting the best outcome. About five years ago, I was hired by an elderly couple who were probably in their 80s. I was contacted by their daughter. Their daughter was trying to find the right lawyer for her parents. Not only because of the facts of the case but because of who they were. They were plainspoken country folks and she wanted somebody who could talk to them and they would trust. I went and met with them. I ended up on a four-wheeler with her 80-year-old father. In that case, they were hit by a man who is seriously underinsured. He lived in a very large house. He had a lot of expensive cars, but right after this crash, he had filed for bankruptcy. He had an insurance policy, but it was just too low. Then we started checking other boxes. Sometimes you can hold an insurance agent responsible if they don't fully explain and/or provide the policy coverages needed by their insured. In this example, if the man had a lot of assets and money, but the insurance agent didn't tell him he needed more in coverage, he possibly could have had a claim against his own agent. We checked all these boxes and ran down all these paths for these very nice people. In the end though, due to the bankruptcy and a few other things, we were only able to recover the amounts of insurance the negligent driver carried. It was not an insignificant amount, but the next thing the insurance company wanted to do was settle with one of our clients, but not the other. Luckily, my clients listened to me and trusted me. I told them we need to stick together. At mediation, the insurance company brought forward adjusters, which was the first I'd seen that, even though this wasn't a high-risk case in the bigger picture. In the end, they offered two-full-policy limits for both of these people. The clients were very happy. The daughter keeps in touch with me and I've kept in touch with how her parents are doing. At Hill Law Firm, our clients are not our clients just for the case. Our clients are part of our family and we stay in touch with them as long as we can. [music]
When a young boy knocked over a gas can, a nearby pilot light ignited the fumes and caused an explosion. A toddler died and two people suffered serious injuries. This case was handled all the way through the bankruptcy courts to a resolution. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Product makers in America are required to make their products so that they're not unreasonably dangerous and defective for their intended use. Generally that means you design against any sort of dangers. When you manufacture, you make sure that it's up to specs and not dangerous and if you can't get rid of it, then you weren't against any dangers. A few years ago I represented a family who lost one of their children, a young toddler. Now this young little man was out in the garage while his dad was trimming the hedges by hand, not six feet away. At some point, this little kid and his brother picked up the gas can, and because it was heavy and they were both less than the age of five, it tipped over and when it tipped over, the gas ran and it pooled in the garage. A water heater nearby turned on, ignited the gas, and the vapors went back into the gas can and the gas can exploded. In the end the father, the older son were both badly burned and the youngest son was burned so bad that he did not survive. We took their case and we represented them against the water heater manufacturer as well as the gas can maker. What the water heater manufacturer and the gas can maker both knew was that they both made products that were unsafe. The water heater manufacturer knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor around the open pilot light that it could ignite fumes from things such as gasoline or other chemical products that are often stored in garages in or around water heaters. On top of that, the gas can manufacturers knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor in the spout of their gas can, vapors could migrate and those vapors could get ignited. That flame could go back into the can and explode the entire gas can. They knew that because early on in some of the depositions before insurance companies got involved, the owner of the company admitted that he had been planning to do that and that he knew the cost was very low. He had quoted the cost and he said it was about a quarter per gas can. 25 cents per gas can to save countless lives. Hundreds if not thousands of people were burned or killed as a result of these exploding gas cans, and the numbers have to be similar for the water heater manufacturers that knew they also had a product that was going to end up burning or killing people. We represented this family against the gas can manufacturer as well as the water heater manufacturer. The water heater manufacturers settled early. While they never admitted wrongdoing, we had all the trade papers showing they knew that they had a problem and they needed to fix it. As it relates to the gas can manufacturer, they settled as well, because our testing showed that in 50 tests with a flame arrestor and 50 tests without a flame arrestor, the flame arrestor worked 100% of the time. In the 50 tests with the flame arrestor not once did the migration cause the can to explode. This was one of the toughest cases we ever worked on emotionally and from a legal engineering standpoint, it was very tough from an emotional standpoint, just due to the loss the family had suffered. Luckily for that family and the other families that stood up to these manufacturers, both of the products are now safer than they were before. That gas can manufacturer went bankrupt, was purchased by another one, and now make a gas can that is much safer. The water heater manufacturers as a trade association almost...
A young man was over served at one of the largest sports bar franchises in America. The servers had been trained to upsell patrons to larger volumes of alcohol. In this case, the server did just that and the patron became intoxicated. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: We handle more drunk driving cases in San Antonio than probably any firm our size. Due to our relationship with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and history in handling cases involving drunk drivers, we get referred a lot of cases by their attorneys, and we get hired by a lot of people who are interviewing lawyers to help them in a drunk driving case. Oftentimes, drunk driving cases have multiple angles. One involves the drunk themselves and the claim against them. Sometimes there are also claims against bars. Generally, Texas law states that bars can be held responsible if they overserve someone and that person goes out and hurts somebody else. This reminds me of a case we handled in South Texas on behalf of a fireman. This fireman was off duty and was riding motorcycles with his friends. As he was passing a gas station, a young man pulled directly in front of him pulling into the gas station. The firefighter was unable to stop and ended up losing his leg. In this case, we found out that this young man had been drinking at one of the largest sports bars in America. After we dug into it, we realized this was his 21st birthday. He won an experienced drinker. When he would order a beer, the server would encourage him for only $0.25 more to double the size of the beer. This young man did not understand his tolerance or how much alcohol he was consuming. On top of that, at some point he was so intoxicated he probably didn't even know what he was doing. Now, this large corporation was happy to upsell these drinks because the profit margin is so good and they knew they'd make more money. This case proceeded all the way to trial. The defendants tried to argue that our client was at fault. They tried to argue that the young man who hit him wasn't that drunk. It was only a little bit more than double the legal limit. In trial, they must have realized that they were probably wrong because while the jury was out, they made us a settlement offer that my client accepted. What we learned in that case was multiple things, but one is that even these multinational bar and restaurant groups give their servers almost verbatim scripts on how to upsell alcohol. It's not enough that they're serving alcohol. They want you to drink more alcohol, and they want to make more money. That's something we've learned that we've been able to use in other cases in the future. Now this crashing the settlement, and the result was never going to bring our client his leg back, and he was never going to be the same. At the end of this, the important part was that he felt as though he was taken care of, and he felt that the result we got him was a good result. He also felt that justice had been served, and that that business was not going to do business the same anymore.
Scaffolding is a common sight at construction locations. Improper construction or use of scaffolding can lead to serious injuries or deaths. Hill Law Firm has handled scaffolding related injury cases in San Antonio. On this episode, we talk about how violations of OSHA scaffolding regulations are one of the most common reasons OSHA cites employers. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: In this series, we've been talking about the most common causes of OSHA violations in worksite injuries and deaths. We get called from a lot of injured workers and their families, and we always have to sit down and talk to them regarding what happened on the job, what the employer should have been doing, what the employee should have been doing in some circumstances. One of the questions we always ask is, did OSHA investigate? OSHA doesn't investigate every incident, but they investigate a lot of them. In those investigations, they'll determine whether or not the employer did what they were supposed to in following OSHA regulations. If they find that the employer did not follow OSHA regulations, oftentimes, they'll fine them or, in some way, sanction them. After they finish their investigations, oftentimes, we're able to get a copy of their full investigative report. Oftentimes, that'll include witness statements, interviews, pictures, and their conclusions of what the employer did wrong. We've been talking about what the most commonly cited violations are for OSHA violations in these investigations, and the number three most commonly cited regards the general safety requirements regarding scaffolding. The discussion around scaffolding typically is that it should be designed by a qualified person, constructed in accordance with the design, and loaded and in accordance with a good design. Employers are bound to protect construction workers and other workers from falls and falling objects while they're working at, near, or on scaffolding at heights of 10 feet or higher. We all know what scaffolding is. It's that framework of what looks like a metal skeleton with pieces of wood plank going up the side of the building, and maybe, people are using it to paint or construct a new structure. Due to the heights and what's going on, people fall or are hit by falling objects often. In a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72% of workers injured in scaffolding-related accidents were due to either the planking or other support structure giving way and falling or the employee slipping due to the planking or structure being slick, and also people on the scaffolding structure being struck by falling objects. OSHA's regulations are very in-depth and detailed. Employers are required to know these regulations, and oftentimes, they'll have OSHA-certified employees on the job site to ensure that everybody is satisfying the OSHA regulations regarding whatever dangerous activity they're performing at the time. OSHA has regulations regarding multiple different types of scaffolding or raised working equipment. For example, they have regulations on scissor lifts and working safely with scissor lifts, ladderjack scaffolds, supported scaffolds and working safely with those, tube and coupler scaffolds, narrow frame scaffolds, general scaffolding. They also have regulations regarding scaffolding in construction environments, as well as shipyard environments. What we know is that if you're working from height around dangerous objects or heavy objects or falling objects, that safety should be paramount. The scaffolding requirements by OSHA are intended to make sure that workplaces stay safe when people are working at, near, or on scaffolding. We'll
Fall protection is a very important topic for people that work from heights. One of the most common reasons employers are cited by OSHA in San Antonio, Texas and beyond is for violating fall protection regulations in incidents where workers are injured on the job. When employers do not provide proper fall protection and enforce the use of it, workers can be seriously injured or killed on the job. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: One of the earliest cases I worked on as a young lawyer involved a worker who was injured on the job. In that case, OSHA did a full investigation following his injury to determine whether or not the employer had followed the OSHA required regulations regarding safety. I learned, in that case, how difficult it is to get information from OSHA, how important they are in the investigation, and what the outcome is of their investigation. That case involved a man who was injured after falling from a scaffolding. There were questions about whether or not he was provided the safety equipment, and whether or not he was using it properly at the time his injury occurred. OSHA is a federal agency who is tasked with evaluating and enforcing safety rules and regulations on employers and at worksites. Generally, their goal is to make sure that they require employers, and those in control of worksites, to make sure that they're safe. If somebody's injured on the job and OSHA does do an investigation, if they find violations or deficiencies regarding OSHA standards, they have the ability to find and sanction employers. In 2019, they listed what their most commonly cited violations were. The number one most commonly cited violation was fall protection, and the general requirements of fall protection outlined by OSHA. This is a standard that outlines where fall protection is required. It goes on to say what types of systems are required, what has to be given to employees. It's designed to protect employees, if they're walking, working, standing, or whatnot, on surfaces that don't have a protected edge, like a fence or a wall, and it's above six feet. In those situations, employer should know that they have to follow OSHA regulations regarding fall protection. Some of the most commonly cited sections of the fall protection guidelines that lead to employers being sanctioned or fined include employees that are working in the residential section, the residential construction area, and that their activities, if they're six or more feet above the ground, that they have to be protected by some guardrail, or a safety netting system, or they have to be wearing a personal fall protection, or fall arrest system. Now all of these OSHA regulations get very deep into the specifics of what fall protection is required, and when it's required. For example, we know that OSHA regulations require that if employees are working on a roof that is considered to be a steep roof, that doesn't have protected sides, that they're required to have things such as toe boards, or nets or other types of harness, or fall arrest systems. The fall protection guidelines of the OSHA regulations are there to ensure the safety of workers that are working at heights. We've discussed previously how fall protection is so important, because falls and slips and trips are one of the leading causes of injuries and deaths on the worksite. We're going to go ahead and outline some of these other most commonly cited OSHA regulations over the next few episodes of Hill Law Firm Cases. [music] [00:04:41] [END OF AUDIO]
OSHA has the ability to fine and sanction employers that do not take care of the safety of their employees and workplace. One of the more common violations includes not warning or training on the dangers associated with chemicals used, kept or made at a location. Too often workers are injured through exposure to toxic chemicals. Sometimes, those employers pay a fine for violations of the hazard communications regulations. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. A lot of workers in Texas and in San Antonio work in industries in which they're exposed to dangerous chemicals or other types of hazards. Currently, we're working on a few cases, one in which a young man was exposed to hydrogen sulfide, and he was a transport driver. Somehow or another, he came to have a vessel containing this dangerous gas in his vehicle and nobody told him what he was carrying. In another case, we represent a bunch of workers who were working in a grocery warehouse when a bad ammonia leak happened. Many of them, likely hundreds, were exposed to some amount of ammonia, whether they were working at the time, driving by, on the plant, or just in the general area. It was a very, very large exposure. We've talked recently about OSHA, and how OSHA afterwards will get involved in on the job injuries and exposures to determine whether or not the employer did everything they should, following all the federal rules and regulations. If not, they will do an investigation and oftentimes fine or somehow sanction those employers. They do this to make sure that employers maintain a safe workplace and that employees have all the chance they can to not be injured on the job in a variety of ways. We've talked recently about the most common causes of employers getting sanctioned or written up or fined by OSHA. The most commonly cited violations. We spoke recently about fall protection being the number one cause of OSHA citations. The second most commonly cited cause of OSHA citations and violations are the hazard communication sets of rules and regulations. Now, these standards address a few things, but they're typically revolved around chemical hazards in the workplace. That involves chemicals that are being produced on-site in a facility, or chemicals that are brought on the facility off-site but used in whatever processes happen at that location. Some of the more commonly cited portions of the hazard communication regulations include that employers are required to keep some sort of written program on-site. That written program has to provide certain things such as labeling, warnings, safety, safety data sheets, training to the employees, information availability to the employees. Generally, just the idea that if people are working around dangerous chemicals, they should be trained on what they are, trained on how to respond to an emergency, and understand how to handle them in a safe manner. Another thing that is commonly cited in the hazard communication guidelines is whether or not employees are continuously trained as new chemicals are brought on site. When a new employee is hired and there's dangerous chemicals on the location, OSHA requires that those new employees are trained on them, as we previously discussed. OSHA also requires that if new chemicals are brought onto the property that employees get trained on them. Not only trained, but they also need to be labeled, warnings need to be available, and the safety data sheets should also be provided. Another big part of the hazard communication requires labeling. Not only should people be warned, they should have the safety data sheets available, but also all these chemicals should be properly labeled. The labeling should...
Texas has one of the worst records in the United States for workers injured on the job. There are lot of causes of injuries on the job and we cover the most common causes of Texas workplace injuries in this episode. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: San Antonio is a city full of blue-collar workers. There's a lot of hardworking people in San Antonio that work in dangerous jobs. Because of that, we get called from a lot of people or their family members that have cases that involve injuries on the job or incidents where somebody has lost their life while working. We get a lot of calls about whether this is normal, what did the employer do or not do that they should've done, what the injured party could've done to help prevent this. Oftentimes, we're asked questions by our clients if we think they did something wrong. More often, we get clients that tell us that they had repeatedly told their employers and their bosses about some danger or some safety equipment or some need that was not met. What we see more often are workers who are very conscious of their safety and the safety of their co-workers. They want a safer work environment. They want the best equipment, and they want to all be held to that high standard to make sure nobody got hurt. We see the normal on-the-job injuries that track what the state and the federal government says are the most common on-the-job injuries. The National Safety Council actually did a breakdown on what the most common cause of work-related injuries are. They broke it into three categories, and the first being overexertion and bodily reaction. This includes things such as physical effort that leads to some injury, lifting, straining, stressing. This also includes repetitive motion. Some jobs necessarily require the worker to be in a position to where they have repetitive stress or strain or vibration put on their body. These are the most common causes, according to the National Safety Council, and that makes sense. People hurt themselves lifting and straining and pulling and pressing. The second most common cause of injuries on the job were slips, trips, and falls. This includes different types of incidents where the worker maybe catches themselves, but injures themselves while catching themselves, falling from high objects, falling down objects such as stairs. This also includes incidents where structures collapse. We spoke recently about a case where we had a roofer who was roofing a patio structure, and the whole structure collapsed under him. He suffered very serious leg injuries-- leg injuries that were so bad that he probably won't work again. This also includes people that are jumping trying to avoid a fall. People that attempt to catch themselves sometimes harm themselves while doing that. The third most common leading cause of work-related injuries listed by the National Safety Council are contacts with objects and equipment. This includes things like a moving object striking a worker, whether it can be an I-beam being lifted by a cable on a crane, a vehicle, a forklift. We've seen all of those examples in our own office. This includes a worker striking against an object or equipment. It would include being kicked or pushed or pulled into a piece of equipment. We've also seen incidents such as a worker's body being squeezed or pinched or crushed between equipment, shifting objects, or falling objects. People that work in dangerous industries where there are large pieces of moving equipment are much more susceptible to these types of injuries. We've also seen incidences in which a worker is injured as a result of friction or pressure between the person and some...
When workers must clean or maintain machinery, they must have a way to secure the machinery in a way that no energy is unleashed on the worker. OSHA's lockout and tagout regulations ensure that employers have a plan and method to lockout equipment and to train employees. With the large numbers of injuries to workers in Texas, this is very important for employers to follow and know. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. In law school, we were able to take a class called Personal Injury Trial Law from a local injury lawyer. We joked that the class was show and tell because of what he did in his teaching methods was more akin to showing and telling us the type of work he does, the reason his job exists, the hazards that plaintiff's lawyers and injury lawyers had been able to eradicate from society, and generally, it was entertaining, in that it was so real world for us. Constitutional law is not something people sit around and talk about, but everybody knows somebody that's been in a car crash, and a lot of people know someone that's been injured on the job. I remember one of the stories he told us was about a man who lost both of his hands while at work. He worked with a metal press, and what he had to do was put sheet metal in this press, and then the metal press would stamp out little circular disks. The way the machine was built was that he had to position both of the sheets of metal and the stamp in a certain location, but then to operate the stamp, he had to push two buttons at the same time. Those buttons were about four feet apart. If you think about it, he had to be able to use both of his hands to push those buttons. The reason it was designed that way was so you wouldn't get your hands stuck in the equipment. What you didn't want was your hand to be there when the stamp came down. At some point, the employer decided that that was slowing down the process, so they removed the hand buttons that required two buttons at once and replaced it with a foot pedal. Well, as you can imagine, removing that safety equipment meant there was nothing stopping that energy and force if a hand was in the way. One day, this man was doing his job as he had done for about 10 years, but he was using the foot pedal that had been added to the machine. He pushed it while his hands weren't out of the way, and they were both partially amputated. I remember thinking how crazy that was, and now that I've done this job for over a decade, I realize that some employers care that much about speeding up processes and that much about making more money per hour of work. We've been talking about OSHA violations and the most common OSHA violations. One of the most common OSHA violations is violations of the lockout/tagout procedures outlined by OSHA. Lockout/tagout is intended to help employees avoid getting injured by hazardous energy. Different types of energy sources include hydraulic, pneumatic, mechanical, electrical, chemical, thermal, or other sources of energy that can come from machines or equipment, and that those types of energy can be hazardous. What we know is that oftentimes, machinery and equipment have to be maintained, and when equipment and machinery have to be maintained, there needs to be some way to secure them, so that the parties maintaining them won't be injured by some hazardous energy being unloaded into them or a part of their body. What we know is that hazardous energy, such as mechanical energy, which I was talking about with the man who lost a portion of his hands, that type of energy needs to be harnessed or stopped when equipment is being worked on. If it's not, people can be injured. Employees can be injured. They can be killed,...
One of my earliest cases was representing a 19 year old woman when she was hit head-on by a drunk driver right outside San Antonio, Texas. The crane operator had been out entertaining company clients and buying them alcohol with his company credit card. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin: Since I became a lawyer, I've been very involved with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I've sat on the board, I've been chairman of the board, the advisory board here in San Antonio in South Texas. I've donated to their causes, I've walked in their walks, and I've represented a lot of victims. One of the first cases I worked on involving alcohol, as a young lawyer, involved a man who got drunk on the job. Not on the job physically while out laboring, but drunk on the job while he was out entertaining clients. He took out some of the bigwig clients. He had a company credit card. He had a company vehicle. He had a company cell phone. He was high ranking in the company. He took out the clients and they had way too much to drink. Then he hopped in his company vehicle and he was driving down the road. Then he decided to look at his company phone. When he did, he crossed the centerline of the road and he hit my client head-on. My client was 19 years old. I always remember this case for a few things. One, it was very early in my career and I learned a lot. Another thing was my client was in a vehicle that was one of the safest vehicles on the road. She was hit head-on with a delta-v, meaning change in speed. It was probably 70 miles an hour. In most vehicles, my client would not have walked away. In this crash, however, because she was in one of the safest vehicles on the roadway, she walked away with a broken arm. I always remember that, and I always learned a lesson on how safe your vehicle is matters. I took her case and I represented her against this corporation. My client was a freshman in college, and the defendant was one of the largest crane companies in Texas. They originally took the position that this guy wasn't on the job and he was out just messing around with his own buddies. Once we started deposing their clients, they didn't like that. They didn't want us to know how they ran their business, how hands-off they were with their corporate credit cards, or what they encouraged their employees to do. I remember as a young lawyer feeling like I did not know what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to fight. I knew I was in the right. I knew that there wasn't some amount of money they were going to pay me to just go away. I fought and we worked up the case. At some point, they made an offer on the case that I still look back on and I can't believe I turned down, but my client listened to me and trusted me to do the right thing. Their next offer was almost double what I had just turned down. We accepted that offer. That case ended up paying for this client's college, and it started what's been a long run for me representing victims of drunk driving. We continue to represent people that have been injured in drunk driving crashes in San Antonio. We also represent victims of drunk driving in what are called dram shop cases in San Antonio, where we sue the bar owner for over-serving people. In this case I just talked about, we looked into the dram shop case, but we didn't think it was a good dram shop case. This was a very formative case for me. I learned a lot. I still look back on this case as one of the cases that set a tone and a path for my career that I follow today.
This case resolved in 2019 and involved a ride share driver who was rear-ended by a drunk driver at a high rate of speed. This case involved a lot of complicated medical and legal issues. We were able to get this case resolved and have a very happy client. Transcript Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] In 2016, I was contacted by a young man the morning after a bad crash he had been in. He asked if he could meet and I met him on a Saturday morning. When I met with him, he told me the only thing he wanted was his vehicle paid for. His vehicle had been totaled in the crash and that vehicle was the way he made his living. I asked him if I could see pictures of the crash and he showed me. The crash was so bad that the vehicle that hit him, a pickup truck, had gone all the way through his trunk, all the way through the back seat and the pickup truck's bumper was touching the headrest of the driver's seat. This wasn't a small car. This was a four-door, full-size car. I was shocked this man was sitting here with me and I talked to him about how he was feeling. This was a crash that happened in San Antonio at 2:00 in the morning. When the client started talking, he had told me he was hit by a drunk driver. The drunk driver didn't even recall the crash happening. My client didn't recall anything until he woke up in the hospital. At this point, I realized the client was probably dealing with more of a medical problem than he thought he had. When he had gone to the ER, they released him with a headache diagnosis because he was an uninsured person. Unfortunately, for uninsured people, they oftentimes get released from hospitals faster than others. We made sure this young man got in to see doctors, to make sure that he was okay. At the time he was hit by the drunk driver here in San Antonio, he was working with a rideshare company. He was on his way to pick somebody up but did not have anyone in the vehicle. If he had, there was no chance that person would have survived. We prosecuted the case against the drunk driver who turned out didn't have insurance. We prosecuted a case against the bar where he had just left who got him intoxicated and then let him hit the road. That bar also didn't follow the TABC rules. They had servers who did not have licenses. TABC allows bars to protect themselves from claims if they certify their servers. They send them to a class and that class teaches them about proper and safely serving alcohol. We also pursued a claim against the rideshare company. The rideshare company provides uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage for their drivers. As bad luck would have it, the drunk driver, in this case, didn't have insurance at all, so the underinsured or uninsured motorist coverage kicked in. Our client had a bad head injury, back and neck injuries. He went to neurocognitive rehabilitation for months. He did his best to get back on his feet. This was a man who had a college degree and could no longer find a job. He had a hard time remembering words, recalling names, keeping things in order. He went back to job training. He got retrained to do a job. This case was put on hold by the district attorney's office for a little while due to the drunk driver's criminal case. Once it came out of being put on hold by the district attorney's office, we were able to resolve the case. First against the rideshare company, and then against the bar where the drunk driver had gotten drunk. The settlement of this case ensured that our client was going to be able to get the medical care he needed and proper job retraining that was necessary for him to find a job in the future. Not only was it a great result, it was for a great young man who...
This client was on the job working as a forklift driver. He was unloading the truck of one of the largest companies in the world. The driver of the truck failed to secure the truck and it started to roll as this man was backing up his forklift. The forklift fell and he ended up needing back surgery. Transcript Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. In 2015, I had the pleasure of representing a man who was injured on the job. My client, in that case, was a man who had been in and out of jobs doing his best to provide for his family, and had settled on working for a temp agency as it was the only way he was able to get steady work and provide for his family. One of the jobs they had sent him out on required him to drive a forklift. While he had not worked as a forklift driver much in the past, he received a lot of training by his temp agency, and therefore, they were able to hire him out quite often. He was working at a shipping facility, where trucks would back up to a dock, and he would enter the truck, unload the truck, and then the truck would go on, either fully loaded or empty at that time. One day, my client was unloading a truck of a major international carrier of products and goods. The driver of that truck had gotten out, and he failed to follow the requirements of the dock. One of the requirements of the dock was that when a truck is pulled up to the dock, their tires need to be chocked, which meant blocks needed to be put under the tires so that they could not roll away. As is very foreseeable, the truck driver forgot to chock his truck. My client was in the back of his truck, unloading it when it slowly started to roll. As my client reversed his forklift out of the back of the trailer, his forklift got stuck between the dock and the trailer. Knowing what was going to happen at that point as the truck continued to roll away, my client didn't have many options. He could have jumped out and maybe been crushed under the weight of a forklift, or he could sit there and write it down. As he had been trained, he stayed in the forklift and wrote it down. The forklift fell, hit the ground, broke, and my client suffered serious injuries. The injuries to my client necessitated that he received back surgery. He was a young man, 41-42 years old, and now he had spinal surgery. His ability to work in the future was forever affected. The dock and the multinational shipping company initially tried to say that It wasn't their fault. Then the videos came out, the work we did came out, the witnesses came out. It didn't take long before they realized that they would have a very hard time in trial saying that my client did something wrong. In the end, this case settled for a favorable amount for our client, provided for him and provided for his lost wages and medical needs in the future. [music]
We meet with a lot of residents of San Antonio following car crashes that just have a lot of questions. As an injury law firm, injured car crash victims usually turn to us for answers. In this episode, I try to line out some of the most common questions we get in San Antonio from those injured in car crashes. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: On Hill Law Firm Cases podcast, we're going to do a series of questions and commonly repeated inquiries we get regarding car crash cases in San Antonio. We end up discussing potential cases with way more clients than we ever sign and then we ever represent. A lot of people we meet with just want some answers. A lot of people we meet with don't have a case and I have to tell a lot of people that come and meet with us that not every wrong has a right under the law and that not every case is provable or is a case for the courts. We're a personal injury law firm and so we don't represent people that have a $500 property damage claim to their bumper and we have to explain that to them as well. What we do get are a lot of common questions. There's a lot of common questions regarding car crash cases in San Antonio that we deal with regularly. In this series, in Hill Law Firm Cases regarding car crash questions, we're going to try to address those. Some of the questions that we get include, "What should I do after a car crash? Should I take pictures? Should I move my car to the side of the road? Should I go see a doctor after a car crash? When should I call 911 if I've been in a car crash?" Some of the other things we hear are about insurance companies. "Should I call my insurance company following a car crash? Should I talk to their insurance company after a car crash?" We get asked a lot, "What interaction should I have with the other driver? Should we exchange information? Should we share phone numbers? Should we share our insurance information?" Then oftentimes we get asked questions regarding evidence. "Should I take pictures and what pictures should I take? Of the car crash scene, of the vehicles involved or the intersection, and should I get witness information? Should I take down their phone numbers?" There's a lot of common questions that arise out of a car crash. In San Antonio, it's very, very normal for us to sit down with people and hear those same questions. The point of this series on Hill Law Firm Cases podcast is to discuss those questions in a general sense. Every case is different. Every fact scenario will have a more specific answer, but to the best of our ability, we're going to answer these general questions and try to provide guidance to people that have been in car crashes in San Antonio. [music] [00:03:55] [END OF AUDIO]
In this case, we were hired as local San Antonio counsel to represent a woman injured by fake butter flavoring. This is an injury often seen in popcorn factory workers and can cause damage necessitating lung transplants. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Sometimes we get to work on really out-there cases. I say out-there, in that, people don't even know this is going on behind the scenes. One of these cases is what's called a popcorn lung case. Some people found out a few years ago, maybe a decade ago, that popcorn workers were developing a lung injury. A lung injury that's pretty rare. It's called blood bronchiolitis obliterates or popcorn lung. It was called popcorn lung because it was something being seen among popcorn factory workers. After digging into it, it was determined that something called diacetyl was causing this condition. Diacetyl is used in a lot of different products in the popcorn industry. It is a fake butter flavoring. It is something that should not be inhaled. However, when it's heated, it can be vaporized. What this has led to is a lot of factory workers who end up with a debilitating lung condition that sometimes requires lung transplants, but it doesn't heal and it does not get better. My law firm was able to work with another out-of-town law firm on one of these cases. This case was different. It didn't involve a factory worker. It involved a lady who worked at a popcorn store. A lady that had worked at a popcorn store in a mall for almost 20 years. Day to day, 40 to 60 hours a week. She was using this chemical not knowing that it could cause her this condition and that this chemical could cause her to wind up on a lung transplant list, which is where she currently is. Injured workers are something we feel very passionate about at our law firm. Workers too often are taken advantage of either purposely or purposely kept in the dark about the dangers that they're dealing with day-to-day. This case is still ongoing. It's a case that has had somewhere close to 80 defendants. Most of them have resolved their claims but some of them are still fighting it. It's one of my great joys in life to be able to represent injured workers in cases involving product liability. It's something I'm very passionate about. We represent people that are injured by dangerous products and this case is one of those cases that many people don't even know exists. We've had judges lift their eyebrows and require a long explanation because it's new to them, but that's what employers hope happens. They hope that they're able to injure people under the radar and not get caught. This isn't all employers. Most employers do their job and they care about the safety of their employees but the ones that don't, they don't want to be held responsible. It's a great joy when we're able to hold them responsible.
In 2019, we represented a man whom was walking through a grocery story in San Antonio, Texas while a manager of the store was ignoring safety protocol and broke a champagne bottle. The bottle exploded due to pressure and caused glass to stick in his arm. The injury was so severe he could no longer make a fist or grip anything. We worked his case over 10 months and settled the case for an amount that will take care of this man until he retires. Transcript: Justin Hill [00:00:04] Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill law firm for confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Our law firm here in San Antonio gets called on lots of different types of cases. Well, you called on all types of things that we do and some that we do not handle and we do not handle the case. We do our best to refer the caller to somebody that could. And if we can't, we send them to the San Antonio Bar Association that runs a great referral program. Sometimes we don't do a very good job of picking the case at the start because sometimes we don't have a good full picture. About a year ago, we were called on a case from a woman who said her husband was injured in a store. She said her husband was injured. As a patron at a store when the manager at that store broke a glass bottle. And that glass bottle cut this man. We saw pictures of the cut. They weren't very large and he had healed and he had three stitches. And we told her, look, they've they've tried to make some sort of attempt to resolve your claim. We'll try to walk you through it. Because at the time, it did not seem as though he had significant injuries. As we continue to talk to her, she kept asking us to take her case. And I didn't want to waste your time. I didn't want to make her think that. The case was worth more than it was. This man was injured at a store, was a premises liability case. It was a negligent activity case. But his injuries were not significant at the time. After about six weeks, she called back. As we had been continuously walking her through the process and said that her husband could no longer make a fist. And I didn't understand what was going on, so I got him in and we talked and she went and had an MRI of her husband's arm done and it turned out that there were still glass in his arm and that multiple ligaments. And tenders, tendons in his arm had been severed. Now, this is a man who, for his job, did rebar work. He had to use his hands and not only use his hands, he had to have a strong grip. And now this man can even make a fist. We started work in this case representing this man at this point when we found out his injuries. He needed surgery and very detailed post-surgical hand therapy. He had a strange injury that required very specialized surgery and very specialized rehabilitation. We were able to make sure that he got all that treatment and at the same time, prosecutor's case against the store. Now, the store took the position this was just an accident, which is very common anymore. The idea that an accident. Means that nobody has to compensate the injured party. Well, it's pretty, pretty foreseeable that if you're loading champagne bottles onto a top shelf, that one could fall, one could explode and one can hurt someone. This wasn't an accident so much as this was poor planning. Negligent layout out negligent activity. These bottles could've gone on the bottom shelf or they did not. Create a hazard for people walking by. And these bottles could have been put in tracks the same way Coca-Cola was at this store. However, they did it their way, which was the unsafe way, and it led this man to be an injured. Early on in the case, the defense lawyer told me that he was never going to pay me X amount of dollars and that he had never paid anyone more than X amount...
If a business carries business interruption insurance, it may cover losses due to the shutdown from COVID-19. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Currently we're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. In San Antonio that means offices will be shut down shortly. This is something that's going to be with us for a little while. What we know is that a lot of people in our community are suffering. Businesses are suffering, their employees are being laid off. What we're doing currently is we're helping out with small businesses and big businesses and all kinds of businesses. A lot of businesses have taken out what's called business interruption insurance. What this provides is under certain conditions, insurance policies provide for lost profits or revenues depending on the language for periods of time in which a business is either closed or shut down. Now, whether or not coverage will exist in this scenario will depend upon the language of the insurance policy. Currently we've agreed to review insurance policies for free. We've reviewed about 10 as we sit here right now and we expect more to come in the future. We've also reached out to Launch SA, a small business incubator, and told them we will be willing to review business interruption policies for their clients. What we're trying to do is provide some clarity and guidance in this pandemic for small businesses. A lot of small businesses feel as though they have no recourse and a lot of them did not even know they had purchased this coverage. Small businesses are like normal people. They buy insurance. Sometimes their insurance agent tells them they need other things and they say yes. What we're doing is providing this service for free and if it exists and the insurance company wrongfully denies or delays the claim, which they will likely do, we will represent these people as they make claims against their insurance companies. This is not what we do every day, but this is what we're doing right now. It's something we're doing to help, some guidance we're providing to small business who feels as though they have no answers. If you need us to look at your business interruption policy, just shoot it to us. We'll take a look for free.
When a local small business rock hauler was stiffed on bills, they hired Hill Law Firm to pursue these breach of contract claims in San Antonio, Texas. Transcript: Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] My first boss likes to say that a lawsuit is a lawsuit, a case is a case and if you know how to try a lawsuit, you can try any kind of lawsuit. Most of what we handle here is personal injury cases and most of what we do is San Antonio personal injury cases. However, we've handled cases all throughout the state of Texas in multiple different states, and we've actually traveled out of the country to prepare these cases. Recently I was asked by a small business owner who has a trucking fleet, whether I could help him out. Well, what was happening was one of his customers was running up big bills on him and then refusing to pay, and it sounded like once one of them started to do it, a few of the other customers started to as well. When he came to me, he had about $90,000 in outstanding invoices from four or five different customers who were refusing to pay him. Now, this is a lot of money for a small business owner. What I assumed was happening was the customers thought that he wasn't going to go out and hire a lawyer to fight them on it. He didn't have the money to hire a lawyer to fight them on it. What him and I agreed to was a contingency fee arrangement. I would help him work these cases. I would help him get his money and at the end of the day, he could pay me a percentage of what we recovered. He agreed to that. He was happy to agree to that because he was looking at getting nothing because he couldn't afford a lawyer, and they knew that. I pursued all four or five of those customers for the unpaid invoices. They were surprised that he was doing this. They did not expect it, but we were able to get him 95% of what was owed to him back within 30 days. He was very happy about this. We've done this for other small business owners, breach-of-contract cases are something we do handle. It's not most of what we handle or a large portion of what we handle, but in the right situation and the right circumstances, we represent small business owners or medium or large businesses when they need to pursue another party over a breach of contract. Like I said at the start, a case is a case and a lawsuit is a lawsuit. We have the ability to handle any kind of lawsuit. When it comes to breach-of-contract cases, most people think they have to go hire an hourly lawyer. However, at Hill Law Firm, we handle breach-of-contract cases on a contingency fee.
When Allstate insurance company denied the claim of one of their insureds after a bad car accident, Hill Law Firm tried her case to a jury. We find it very important to stand up for those whom are taken advantage of by their own insurance companies. Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] I say that Hill Law Firm is a boutique personal injury law firm for a few reasons. One is; we work your case in a small group in an intense setting and we're your advocates for your case. Your case don't get shuffled around multiple different layers or departments or attorneys. We're a trial firm. We prepare cases to try them in front of juries. The last case I tried was about nine months ago at this point. That case was on behalf of a woman who had been stiffed and denied and delayed by her own insurance company. This woman had paid premiums for over two decades to her insurance company, Allstate. At the time she needed to make a claim, they went out of their way to come up with any kind of defense they could. They spent more than 25% of the entire claim, the entire maximum amount of policy available defending it. They spent 25% of the entire amount of coverage defending the claim against their own insured, who had paid them money for this coverage. They hired out of town lawyers, they hired experts, and this case went to trial. One thing that makes us different from a lot of firms is we prepare our cases for trial, we don't prepare our cases for settlement. In this case, for example, we took the deposition of their expert. Their key expert was a doctor who was hired, who's a well known doctor in San Antonio, Texas, who's hired often to say somebody's not injured. Now, this doctor I ended up deposing four times over the next 60 days on four different cases that he had popped up on. He's somebody that doesn't get hired to give an honest opinion. He's somebody that gets hired to give a certain opinion. This doctor, Dr. Burns, is somebody we're going to see for the rest of our career. Early on in this deposition, I established with him that the area he was testifying about this client's neck was not even an area he practices in. He admitted it's an area that he sends his own patients to see a specialist. While he's not a specialist to treat people day-to-day for neck injuries, he was in this case, because Allstate paid him a bunch of money. In trial, the defense lawyer finally had a chance to look at the video, because he wasn't there for that depo, he sent in an associate. He decided that it would do more damage than good to let that doctor testify. In trial after dragging this lady through the mud for four years, they decide that they're going to try the case without even having any experts. They're just going to argue she's hurt, but not that bad. Well, the jury in Georgetown, Texas didn't agree, and the jury awarded her a substantial sum of money, almost $400,000 for her car crash case. That's the last case we trialled and we have a handful of cases set for trial this year at Hill Law Firm or boutique law firm, because we prepare cases intensely for trial. After the next trial, I'll do another episode of Hill Law Firm cases and talk about that trial as well. [music]
In 2017, a young man working for a city was crushed by a faulty piece of heavy equipment. We represented him and worked his case to a very good resolution. Transcript Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. [music] Justin Hill: A few years ago, I had the distinct honor and privilege of representing a young man who I've known almost my whole life. He's somebody I grew up with. He's somebody I've known. Our parents have even worked together. He's somebody that whenever we got out of high school, stayed home, hard worker, blue-collar man. He worked for one of the local municipalities. He worked as a heavy equipment operator. One day while they were out clearing brush, he had to do some work on one of these pieces of heavy equipment. While he was working on the heavy equipment, he had to open up the arms of the heavy equipment. This allowed him to maneuver and do some welding that needed to be done. Without getting into too many details of the engineering side of it, what happened was a catastrophic failure of the hydraulic system, in this piece of heavy equipment. What that meant for this young man I've known almost my whole life was that he got crushed within this equipment. Any other person, this would have been the last we heard of them. This guy knows a tough old boot. He'd worked as a rodeo clown. He's one of the few people who could have withstood what happened to his body. However, he was gravely injured, broken back, broken hips, burns, the kind of injuries you don't bounce back from. I spoke to him after this happened and I told him if he ever had any questions, to let me know. One of the great joys in my career was I actually got to work this case with another lawyer from my home town. We represented a hometown guy working together as hometown friends. We brought in experts from out of town. We brought in one of the best experts on hydraulic heavy equipment from Utah. We tested this equipment. Many lawyers wouldn't spend the kind of money that is required to properly work up a product's case, but we did and we were able to replicate this failure. A failure that was due to a manufacturing and design defect in this piece of heavy equipment. These are difficult cases. Engineering is difficult. We were able to prove that this heavy equipment failed because it was designed improperly and we knew it was designed improperly because this company themselves had followed a patent to fix this problem. They just had not incorporated it yet. Without even having to file a lawsuit, this company, multinational international company, asked us to mediate. At mediation, we were made a fair offer, an offer that was way more than we expected this early in the litigation and my client chose to settle it. It will always be one of my favorite cases because I got to represent somebody who I've known since we were kids and played Peewee football with. [music]
In 2011, we represented a woman whom was injured getting off a major bus line's bus in San Antonio. The company knew her by name and the driver knew her by name. They always helped her by placing a stool for her to use. She had limited mobility and vision. One day, the bus driver did not place the stool as he had every other time. She fell and broke her leg. This case had many novel issues and led to a good resolution for our client. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] One specific area of practice I've been very involved in my entire career has been bus accidents, bus crash cases. I've handled bus crash cases against all of the major busing companies in the United States. I've handled them all over the state of Texas and other states. There's a lot of things about a bus crash that makes it unique. One is that they're held to a higher degree of care under Texas law. They are called what is referred to as a common carrier. They receive money to transport people and the law says you can do that, but if you do that, you're going to be held to a higher standard of care. I'm going to talk about a lot of the different bus cases I've handled on Hill Law Firm Cases, but one in particular I thought was very interesting. We were contacted by a lady whose mother had fallen and broken her leg getting off one of these buses. At first it sounded just like a lady had fallen. Then we started digging into the case. The client was in her mid to late eighties. She had limited mobility. She had been riding these buses for years, the same bus company and the same route. She would travel to see family and she did it about once a month. She usually had the same of three or four different drivers. Most of them had come to know her by name. They all helped her get on and off the bus. In particular, one thing they did was they provided her a stool to get on and off the bus. Due to her age and her health, she was unable to step up to the first step without that stool. It had become so commonplace that it was always there. On one day they had stopped in San Antonio and as she was getting off the bus, the driver had forgot to put the stool there. As she was getting off, she expected the stool to be there as it always had been. It was not. She fell and she broke her leg. At her age a broken leg means that her mobility will even be more limited throughout the remainder of her life. We were able to work that case and bring in the Americans with Disabilities Act. We worked the case different than other law firms because we're different than other law firms. At first, the bus company took the position this lady had just fallen, and then after witnesses deposed said that she was always taken care of, that everybody knew her and that she was always given a stool, they changed their tune. We were able to resolve this case. That client still keeps in touch with us. Even though that case is more than 10 years old, the client is still alive. We stay in touch with her. We stay in touch with her daughter. That's one thing that makes us different is we stay in touch with our clients. They keep us updated on how they're doing in life. It's one of my favorite things about being an attorney. I've always enjoyed doing bus crash cases. It's something that we think we're oddly positioned for, we're better at than many and we handle more than most. This one was an atypical bus crash case because it wasn't so much as a crash as it was a premises liability case and a negligent activity case and arguably an ADA violation. Our ability to bring in all of those elements to prove our case is what changed this case and what led to a settlement.
We represented a young toddler whom was injured when a dangerous door was known to the staff at a day care and never fixed. The door would close dangerously fast due to it being broken. One day, at this daycare in San Antonio, this door closed and amputated a portion of our clients finger. Transcript: Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases. A podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill and The Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Justin Hill: Sometimes we end up representing parents when their children were injured. As you can imagine these are pretty tough situations because parents are very protective of their children, and they're scared, and their kids are hurt. They want to make sure they're making the right choice not only for themselves but for their children. We recently settled a case that arose from an injury at a daycare center. Our clients had a three-year-old daughter who was at a daycare center in San Antonio, Texas. While she was at that daycare center, the teacher was leaving the class. The procedure was that if a teacher left the class, the class had to be moved from one classroom to the other so that another teacher could monitor the kids. They weren't to be left alone. While they were moving from one class to another, the teacher let the door start to close. What we didn't know was that this door did not have a soft close mechanism. All the other doors did but this door was broken. This door was broken, and they knew it was broken. The reason you want soft close mechanisms is because of pinch points. In schools with a bunch of little children those are very important. What happened was our client's young daughter had her hand in the door hinge and when this door closed quickly it popped off and cut off a portion of her finger. As you can imagine the parents were scared, and angry, and upset. They're worried about their daughter. It was a very traumatic situation for them and their daughter. When they went to the school to get answers they were told by one of the teachers who was speaking freely. Freely means before she had been told what to say or not say by an insurance company that that door had been broken for a while. They knew it was broken. They needed to fix it. They had talked about fixing it. They knew they had something on the premises that was dangerous that could have injured a child. When it did injure a child this teacher was honest enough to admit it. Luckily for this young lady, her hand, her finger healed without too many complications. The unsightliness of it has gotten better. The scar has improved, the fingernail that they weren't sure if it would return has come back. This case was able to resolve very early on. The day care center did not want to deal with a injury lawsuit regarding one of their injured toddlers. This case was able to resolve for a fair amount that the parents wanted to take. An amount that I think was very fair under the circumstances. In the end, it will be an amount that will likely pay for all of this young lady's college. It has paid off all of her past medical bills. We represent a lot of people who come to see us over the injuries to their children. It is one of the things that we really enjoy doing is being able to represent children, people who are not at fault for their injuries, people who we should all be looking out for. We've handled a lot of cases involving kids that are injured, and we'll talk more about those on the Hill Law Firm cases podcast.
Around 2017, a group of approximately a dozen people were having dinner on a patio just outside of San Antonio, Texas. Suddenly, a fire pit exploded rocked their nights and caused many to suffer serious injuries. Transcript Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. [music] Around 2017, a group of local San Antonians had met at a private establishment. They were going to have dinner with their family, sit around, talk, catch up. They were seated on a patio at a place that required a membership to go to. They were eating dinner. They were having drinks. Their kids were playing out in the grass, when all of the sudden a large explosion rocked the entire area. Some of the people were thrown out of their seats 20 feet in the air. One of the persons almost lost a toe. Many of them were burned. Most of them suffered closed-head injuries. The defendant, the place where they were, tried to sweep everything under the rug. They told the news that nobody was hurt. They didn't even let the news come to the site. The manager actually was drinking beer while the fire department was still cleaning up. I represented these people. I represented about 12 of these people, multiple families, some children. Once we got into the case, we found out a few things. One was that this was a homemade fire pit, that somebody had just been asked over a beer to create. Another thing we learned is that the staff members had never really been told how to operate this fire pit and it wasn't very intuitive. There were lots of valves, lots of piping, some valves controlled different pits than you would think, and what we learned on that night was the person who was operating the pit wasn't trained on how to operate it, didn't seem to know what he was doing and at some point was unable to get one of the burners to light. Instead of ensuring that that burner and that propane was no longer flowing, he put a lid over the top of the burner. What happened then is over a couple hours, propane filled the center of this table. The table became full of propane and then at some point it exploded. This case went on for almost two years and had a lot of experts involved, including propane experts, experts on how to train employees, and most importantly, experts on mild traumatic brain injuries because now we're in a time post-NFL where people understand that even though maybe somebody doesn't have a very obvious brain injury, concussions over time can lead to a lot of complications. We worked on this case and made sure that all of these people were able to see some of the best professionals in San Antonio regarding their injuries. After a couple of years, this case was able to resolve for what we think was a very fair and favorable settlement for our clients.