Claim OwnershipFirst Off, Let's Kill All the Lawyers
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Chiropractic Health Dr Srour Joins us LIVE with David Heffernan
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. It's an off misquoted Shakespearean statement from back in the 1500s. But probably still hold some truth today when you talk to people. And you know, one of the things I've found over the last 30 years of practicing and doing personal injury work is people do like to bash lawyers until they've got a lawyer or need a lawyer. And so the thought behind this show was to talk about different areas of law types of law, trending topics of law. And one of the things I thought we'd do today, we're going to shift gears a little bit. My guest today is Dr. Charles. Sure, sir. All right. I got it. I got it. Right, totally. I'm only saying that one time, you're now Charlie, the rest of it. But he is a Doctor of Chiropractic. And we're going to talk about some of the interplay, I think, between lawyers between chiropractors, I want to talk about his practice, educate a little bit about types of injuries, treatments, and everything else that are there.
And I think there's a lot of similarities in some things, Charlie, so mark, and I did a show a few weeks ago, you know, hopefully, the governor will sign this, this change of law, and the auto law, which is going to get rid of PIP and the whole no fault scheme, which hopefully will then get rid of the one 800 car accident clinic and the chiropractic clinics that that you have there. So I think I think personal injury lawyers tend to get bashed a lot. I know chiropractors get bashed a lot, but but I want to show you that lawyers get bashed more, because I looked this up. So here's the ultimate list of lawyer jokes. Okay, you see how thick this is? Okay. Although it's a guy, it's got a few good ones. So how many lawyer jokes are out there? There's a lot of wager. Now there's only three, the rest are true stories. So but, but then I looked up chiropractor jokes. It's only like six pages. And frankly, there's only one that's any good in here. So how many chiropractors does it take to change a light bulb?
How many? Just one but it takes six visits. Okay, so, so here's, here's the thing, you know, I mean, I've been helping people in South Florida along with my partner Mark care for 30 years. I've never chased an ambulance. I've never run into the back of an ambulance. You know, and, and I know that, that your chiropractic business is far different from what the people see on the billboards in the advertisements to go back and forth. So let's talk about that a little bit. So let's talk about you. First off, you're from Canada, where you grew up. Alright, what brings you to the US. So I went to school, university, Toronto, then I graduated and did my chiropractic in California. Okay.
It was just far distance wise, it was far timezone wise. So I wanted to be on the East Coast, I kind of fell backwards with an opportunity to work with a group guy who was the chiropractor for the Miami Dolphins, and hired me on the spot over a phone call. And I came down to South Florida, and kind of fell backwards into a great office with a great philosophy, sports injuries, which was my passion. I played tennis as a kid, and competitively throughout until To this day, and I just had a good opportunity to work with this guy and in that environment, and we ended up treating, you know, the Miami Dolphins for many years, the Florida Panthers for many years, some of the Marlin players.
And you know, one thing led to another, I took over the practice, and my wife had kids and we and we love it here. And we've had you in South Florida since then. Yeah. So you run pro healthcare, which is where so pro healthcare is in North Miami.
It's a, you know, sports injuries was the base behind it. But since you know, practicing for 20 years, you start to expand into Family Health and some auto accidents. It's multidisciplinary. We do chiropractic, physical therapy, massage therapy we have, we have mental health counseling. So we have several different you know, we tried to make it like a one stop shop for all of that. But at the same time, it's more of a what my goal was always to be more of that concierge type. It's not, I'm not a concierge doctor, but I try to offer those services where I'm involved, I'm doing the work.
There may be a time where I need to hire others to do things for me as I get older, but, you know, as long as I can do it, and I'm in, I'm in there, I'm in the grind and I love doing it. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about chiropractic medicine. And you talk I think, you know, you describe sort of a holistic approach. Yes. Okay. So, so let's talk about what chiropractic medicine is because I want to dispel some of the
myths, just like there's myths about personal energy lawyers, you know, that they're all chasing cases and the chiropractor's, you know, they just want that 10,000 and paper, anything else, let's talk about because chiropractic medicine been around a long time, you've already dispelled one myth, you're actually very well educated. So there is, you know, you are a doctor. It's not a medical degree, but but it's still eight years of, you know, postgraduate education or more. And, and I got to see you did all kinds of things really well, like, you know, graduated magna cum laude, and Dean's list. And so that's impressive. So you're well educated Now, what's, what's the practice about? So, you know, the practice is about what, you know, there's many different philosophies, like there's many ways to practice law, you know, you have your philosophy, your partner has his philosophy, maybe they're the same, maybe they're a little bit different.
You know, chiropractic, the, the origin of it is really, it started out as manipulation of the spine, to free the nervous system, allow the body to heal itself without the use of surgery and drugs.
That's evolved over time. Whereas in the past, they were not accepting of rehabilitation and massage therapy and modalities, physical therapy, all the all the other things that go along with it.
But
as time has gone on, things change, and those kinds of things, because, you know, the realization of how important those things are not just about spinal manipulation, but you know, if someone has need certain rehab has certain weaknesses, and that kind of thing. So it's, it is a holistic approach. And that's kind of the you know, there was no way for the old philosophy chiropractor to work in a
Miami Dolphins or, or, you know, a professional athletes, sort of arena with doctors that don't think alike, right. So you have to mold yourself. Now, that's, you know, when you're doing your own thing in your own clinic, you have your philosophy, what is surgical, what is not surgical, when do I need to refer it out for, you know, an orthopedic consult or something like that.
But that's the basis of what we do,
trying to heal or speed up the healing for patients without the use of drugs, surgery, when needed, then there's a time in place. So have you seen a shift, because I know,
for a long time, you know, Western medicine, didn't want to acknowledge some of these things. And I had a case years ago, that involved in acupuncturist at the University of Miami.
And I wound up doing some research on that and was blown away by the fact, countries were doing open heart surgery under acupuncture and things like that. Maybe it wasn't documented in a textbook, but it's 1000s of years of treatment and care. And again, a holistic approach of aligning things in the body and everything else. So have you seen that start to shift now? Where where there's sort of a merging between these two? So, yes, and no, I mean, I'm not I'm not going to get into the political side of things. Big Pharma. And so
what we see what good they've done for everyone. But at the same time, you know, what I tend to see in my office is, someone gets injured, they've tried everything else. And then
often the last straw, and especially early in my career, and suddenly you get them better. And they didn't need to go through what they went through. They, you know, they were not carried properly, they were mis diagnosed, they were treated improperly overly medicated, whatever it might be, and you get them better. And then suddenly, you become their guy, you know, that's you're there guy for everything.
And so, they come to you for the advice that comes to you. So in one way it takes certain patients an injury that they are not getting, they're not improving, they're not getting better, their quality of life has gone down, and they're looking for something else.
And then there's the other side are people who this generation is more open minded.
And you start to see a merge of the two. There's no question the population over the 20 years has changed. Now that you're seeing chiropractors on the sidelines in professional, you know, every movie star talks about their chiropractor, you know, Hollywood, you know what it is, it's more in the media.
It is sort of becomes more popular. So it's definitely shifted. And there's definitely there's that, you know, you have different connotations different in different arenas, but I work with many medical doctors, you know, nutritionists, I, you know, in my building where I, you know, my building, I've got all kinds of doctors to me and we cross refer
Daly, and it's a great relationship, I think it's really important. So you talk about sort of the, what I guess would be the term maintenance because there's, I think there's a phase, and we'll talk about that in a minute of treatment of acute injury and things like that, that there's a great benefit to what are also seems now to be some philosophy of, of maintaining. And we're seeing I think, that shift in mental health as well, that people are now starting to get more time to maintain their mental health. And some of these things are sort of coming out of the darkness say, no, it's okay to sort of get
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. It's an off misquoted Shakespearean statement from back in the 1500s. But probably still hold some truth today when you talk to people. And you know, one of the things I've found over the last 30 years of practicing and doing personal injury work is people do like to bash lawyers until they've got a lawyer or need a lawyer. And so the thought behind this show was to talk about different areas of law types of law, trending topics of law. And one of the things I thought we'd do today, we're going to shift gears a little bit. My guest today is Dr. Charles. Sure, sir. All right. I got it. I got it. Right, totally. I'm only saying that one time, you're now Charlie, the rest of it. But he is a Doctor of Chiropractic. And we're going to talk about some of the interplay, I think, between lawyers between chiropractors, I want to talk about his practice, educate a little bit about types of injuries, treatments, and everything else that are there.
And I think there's a lot of similarities in some things, Charlie, so mark, and I did a show a few weeks ago, you know, hopefully, the governor will sign this, this change of law, and the auto law, which is going to get rid of PIP and the whole no fault scheme, which hopefully will then get rid of the one 800 car accident clinic and the chiropractic clinics that that you have there. So I think I think personal injury lawyers tend to get bashed a lot. I know chiropractors get bashed a lot, but but I want to show you that lawyers get bashed more, because I looked this up. So here's the ultimate list of lawyer jokes. Okay, you see how thick this is? Okay. Although it's a guy, it's got a few good ones. So how many lawyer jokes are out there? There's a lot of wager. Now there's only three, the rest are true stories. So but, but then I looked up chiropractor jokes. It's only like six pages. And frankly, there's only one that's any good in here. So how many chiropractors does it take to change a light bulb?
How many? Just one but it takes six visits. Okay, so, so here's, here's the thing, you know, I mean, I've been helping people in South Florida along with my partner Mark care for 30 years. I've never chased an ambulance. I've never run into the back of an ambulance. You know, and, and I know that, that your chiropractic business is far different from what the people see on the billboards in the advertisements to go back and forth. So let's talk about that a little bit. So let's talk about you. First off, you're from Canada, where you grew up. Alright, what brings you to the US. So I went to school, university, Toronto, then I graduated and did my chiropractic in California. Okay.
It was just far distance wise, it was far timezone wise. So I wanted to be on the East Coast, I kind of fell backwards with an opportunity to work with a group guy who was the chiropractor for the Miami Dolphins, and hired me on the spot over a phone call. And I came down to South Florida, and kind of fell backwards into a great office with a great philosophy, sports injuries, which was my passion. I played tennis as a kid, and competitively throughout until To this day, and I just had a good opportunity to work with this guy and in that environment, and we ended up treating, you know, the Miami Dolphins for many years, the Florida Panthers for many years, some of the Marlin players.
And you know, one thing led to another, I took over the practice, and my wife had kids and we and we love it here. And we've had you in South Florida since then. Yeah. So you run pro healthcare, which is where so pro healthcare is in North Miami.
It's a, you know, sports injuries was the base behind it. But since you know, practicing for 20 years, you start to expand into Family Health and some auto accidents. It's multidisciplinary. We do chiropractic, physical therapy, massage therapy we have, we have mental health counseling. So we have several different you know, we tried to make it like a one stop shop for all of that. But at the same time, it's more of a what my goal was always to be more of that concierge type. It's not, I'm not a concierge doctor, but I try to offer those services where I'm involved, I'm doing the work.
There may be a time where I need to hire others to do things for me as I get older, but, you know, as long as I can do it, and I'm in, I'm in there, I'm in the grind and I love doing it. Alright, so let's talk a little bit about chiropractic medicine. And you talk I think, you know, you describe sort of a holistic approach. Yes. Okay. So, so let's talk about what chiropractic medicine is because I want to dispel some of the
myths, just like there's myths about personal energy lawyers, you know, that they're all chasing cases and the chiropractor's, you know, they just want that 10,000 and paper, anything else, let's talk about because chiropractic medicine been around a long time, you've already dispelled one myth, you're actually very well educated. So there is, you know, you are a doctor. It's not a medical degree, but but it's still eight years of, you know, postgraduate education or more. And, and I got to see you did all kinds of things really well, like, you know, graduated magna cum laude, and Dean's list. And so that's impressive. So you're well educated Now, what's, what's the practice about? So, you know, the practice is about what, you know, there's many different philosophies, like there's many ways to practice law, you know, you have your philosophy, your partner has his philosophy, maybe they're the same, maybe they're a little bit different.
You know, chiropractic, the, the origin of it is really, it started out as manipulation of the spine, to free the nervous system, allow the body to heal itself without the use of surgery and drugs.
That's evolved over time. Whereas in the past, they were not accepting of rehabilitation and massage therapy and modalities, physical therapy, all the all the other things that go along with it.
But
as time has gone on, things change, and those kinds of things, because, you know, the realization of how important those things are not just about spinal manipulation, but you know, if someone has need certain rehab has certain weaknesses, and that kind of thing. So it's, it is a holistic approach. And that's kind of the you know, there was no way for the old philosophy chiropractor to work in a
Miami Dolphins or, or, you know, a professional athletes, sort of arena with doctors that don't think alike, right. So you have to mold yourself. Now, that's, you know, when you're doing your own thing in your own clinic, you have your philosophy, what is surgical, what is not surgical, when do I need to refer it out for, you know, an orthopedic consult or something like that.
But that's the basis of what we do,
trying to heal or speed up the healing for patients without the use of drugs, surgery, when needed, then there's a time in place. So have you seen a shift, because I know,
for a long time, you know, Western medicine, didn't want to acknowledge some of these things. And I had a case years ago, that involved in acupuncturist at the University of Miami.
And I wound up doing some research on that and was blown away by the fact, countries were doing open heart surgery under acupuncture and things like that. Maybe it wasn't documented in a textbook, but it's 1000s of years of treatment and care. And again, a holistic approach of aligning things in the body and everything else. So have you seen that start to shift now? Where where there's sort of a merging between these two? So, yes, and no, I mean, I'm not I'm not going to get into the political side of things. Big Pharma. And so
what we see what good they've done for everyone. But at the same time, you know, what I tend to see in my office is, someone gets injured, they've tried everything else. And then
often the last straw, and especially early in my career, and suddenly you get them better. And they didn't need to go through what they went through. They, you know, they were not carried properly, they were mis diagnosed, they were treated improperly overly medicated, whatever it might be, and you get them better. And then suddenly, you become their guy, you know, that's you're there guy for everything.
And so, they come to you for the advice that comes to you. So in one way it takes certain patients an injury that they are not getting, they're not improving, they're not getting better, their quality of life has gone down, and they're looking for something else.
And then there's the other side are people who this generation is more open minded.
And you start to see a merge of the two. There's no question the population over the 20 years has changed. Now that you're seeing chiropractors on the sidelines in professional, you know, every movie star talks about their chiropractor, you know, Hollywood, you know what it is, it's more in the media.
It is sort of becomes more popular. So it's definitely shifted. And there's definitely there's that, you know, you have different connotations different in different arenas, but I work with many medical doctors, you know, nutritionists, I, you know, in my building where I, you know, my building, I've got all kinds of doctors to me and we cross refer
Daly, and it's a great relationship, I think it's really important. So you talk about sort of the, what I guess would be the term maintenance because there's, I think there's a phase, and we'll talk about that in a minute of treatment of acute injury and things like that, that there's a great benefit to what are also seems now to be some philosophy of, of maintaining. And we're seeing I think, that shift in mental health as well, that people are now starting to get more time to maintain their mental health. And some of these things are sort of coming out of the darkness say, no, it's okay to sort of get
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Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan, I've been practicing personal injury law in South Florida for nearly three decades, actually over three decades now, which is sort of scary. The intent behind these podcasts is quite simple. There was a Shakespearean line back in the 15th century. It's been interpreted in a lot of different ways. But we know one thing, it drew a lot of laughter at the time when it was said, and a lot of people chuckle when you say it today. So the goal today, and in all these shows, is to bring in lawyers, and we're going to divert a little bit on that, and get to know him a little bit, find out what they do, and then kind of maybe one by one, take them off the kill list. The good thing is my guest this morning isn't directly on the kill list, because he's not a lawyer. But a lot of what he does is intricately tied with lawyers. And so, we're going to explore that today and have some fun talking about some really interesting things that are a byproduct of what happens in law. And my guest this morning is Felipe Blanco. Felipe, how are you?
Good morning, David. It's great to be here with you. The title is definitely very attractive.
Well, you know, it gets the people's attention. You know, there was I had some alternative titles that I'll go with you before. Felipe and I are actually also then going to do an endorsement for hair product for men, as an aside just to generate a little cash flow and on the broadcast, but, but we'll keep that minimal. Felipe, let's talk a little bit. Before we get into what you do, let's talk about you a little bit. Born in Cuba, you come to Miami when you're how old?
I came, right before I turned five years old. Okay. Yeah, I grew up in Miami, went to a small private school. up basically, in those times, you went from basic kindergarten through eighth through 12th grade. And so I did that. And then I, I was at Florida International, when it was six buildings in a very small space.
Clearly, something that's changed over the years…without a doubt my three children who actually work on my team as well, also went to Florida International. And when I visited the campus 20 years later, I was shocked by the amount of growth that the institution had.
Yeah, I hadn't been out there in a while. And I went out for a memorial service. And I mean, it's, it's no, it used to be this sort of tiny, little commuter campus. And they've really, really done a nice job, of building that and building the reputation of that school.
Let's talk a little bit you get into financial planning, you're the managing director and a financial advisor with RBC. Tell me sort of what gravitated to that what's, what's the appeal to finance. And then we'll talk a little bit about what you do there. And then we're going to merge that into what you do with lawyers.
Sure. So I was always from a very young age, interested in finance, investments, mathematics, so on and so forth. So it was, you know, I was fortunate enough to have an incredible teacher during high school, that was that there was a was my math teacher, and she inspired me to really focus on numbers and that aspect of it. And then when I got to, when I got to FIU, I had decided that I want to be a finance major, but I also was blessed with meeting a professor that taught a number of investment courses and financial courses. And he befriended me and became a mentor for lack of a better term. And that created the passion around this business. So, I initially started in traditional banking, where I was doing consumer lending, corporate lending, so on and so forth. And then in the year 2000, when a lot of my clients that I had developed a relationship on the banking side, said, Look, we're at an age where we're monetizing our business and we're selling, you know, we trust you, why don't you? Why don't you help us on the financial side, so I transitioned to more of a wealth management role. Okay, let me apologize, my all my computer, and I have no idea how to link it from my phone, I turned my phone to silent, but I can't manage my computer.
So, we're good. We know you're good with numbers, but maybe not on the technology side of things, right? Without a doubt. That's why you hire, hire people to do that. We're not going to talk about financial investments now, particularly given what's going on and makes things a little chaotic. And that's a whole different show. But years ago, and this is how you and I have met and everything else, but years ago, you started to sort of carve out a niche to start working with lawyers on cases where there are settlements for minors or settlements for people with special needs. And that money's got to get set aside and taken care of so how did that start to evolve
it by Chance. When I joined, when I joined Mellon, they had they own a local bank called United National which was known as the lawyer's bank. But within that, within that space, they were a big lender, to personal injury attorneys. They were lending to the attorneys to finance their cases through pre-lit and lit until they monetize. As a result of that relationship, I started getting introduced to personal injury attorneys. And as a result, helping them initially just post-settlement on the, you know, post settlement or verdict on the management of the funds. And then subsequently, the role expanded to where I was working with them, even in the pre-litigation and litigation stage, and then helping them with financial analysis, and other factors. So, what started as an opportunity, then started developing more and more that for the last 20 years, that's been growing. And I can say right now, probably about 90 to 95% of my time is spent working with personal injury attorneys throughout the country, in one way, shape, or form, to help them and their clients during the different stages of their case. And then along the way. And my wife always tells me that I hit the jackpot in the sense that it's a business I'm very passionate about because I help families that have gone through tragedy. But also, I get to work with folks that have become my friends. So, I know that title is to kill lawyers, but it happenstance that I'd say that probably 95% of my friends are folks that I do business with, then at five o'clock change jacket, and then socialize with so I get to work with my friends in addition to helping families with, with, with that have suffered through a tragedy.
So, you know, at least some of the ones we can take off the list, which is good to know. Right? Correct. All right. So, let's walk through that process. So and because I don't know that the general public understands that. But a lawyer, Pei lawyer, and we've worked on cases with this, but has somebody who suffers a devastating injury, okay. In order to then determine I mean, what people have to understand is, you got to get some kind of number to take care of those people. And so, lawyers work with life care planners who will put together a plan to say, these are the things because they're only going to get one day in court, these are the things this person is going to need to be able to be taken care of adequately and completely for the rest of their life. Here's where you sort of come in now. So okay, we figure out what that number is, you try to resolve the case, best you can or the verdict or settlement, then what happens to that money and what measures you're taking to protect to make sure that this person is protected, not only so that they've got funds, but also protected that those funds are adequate to take care of them.
Yeah, I the first, the first step that you have to recognize, as a financial advisor that works with these types of cases as that this is one-time money. Unlike traditional wealth management, where you're dealing with high net worth individuals or professionals that have recurring income, you have to start with the premise is, hey, this is their one at-bat, and they're not going to get another at-bat, this money has to really be there for their ongoing care. So understanding that component, and then to really spending the time and working with their professionals, care managers, nursing staff, so on and so forth. So you understand, as best you can, what medical needs are unique to this person and their injury going forward. So that those are the first two steps that you initially take to understand where you are and where you're going. And then once you have an understanding around that is to build, you know, try to put together a portfolio that today is invested in such a way based on historical performance and, and, and, and, and, and other factors where you can invest it in the right way, in order to try to ensure that that money is there for when they need it on a going-forward basis. Understanding that trying to guess the medical needs of that person for the next 25 years is was a moving target. Because things can get worse things can get better new technologies, new procedures. So, you have to build enough flexibility within that within that structure to allow that. And then
I think and I think that's where the whole team comes in. Because you've got to work with physicians, you've got to work with life care planners, you've got to, you know, best you can sort of take that crystal ball and say, Okay, this 19-year-old who has a devastating injury, brain injury, whatever it is, but they're going to live you know another 60 years. So how do we make sure that's all taken care of? And then I guess, you know, you've got to intertwine with that to say, Okay. And sometimes it's not 100% recovery, because you've got liability issues or there's, there are limits. So how do we maximize this money? And, and I think one of the things that are changed, and we'll talk about the court guardianship aspect, but where people like you have come in and made a difference. For the longest time, it was, well, let's just buy him an ann
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan. I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for a little over three decades, hard to admit that. And the goal behind this podcast was simple. You know that that line uttered back in the 15th century by Dick the Butcher, lawyers love to argue, oh, that was flattering of lawyers. But the bottom line is people laughed, okay. And people still laugh when they hear it today because people think it's not a bad idea. So, the goal here is kind of one by one. Let's bring some people in. Let's introduce you to some South Florida lawyers get to know him a little bit, what they do varying aspects of law, and maybe one by one, we can kind of take them off the kill list. My guest this morning, checks a lot of boxes for me. First off, a phenomenal, phenomenal trial lawyer. Been doing this just about as long as I have. But good friend, a fellow member of the Orange Bowl committee, and kind of all around good guy. So Kevin, welcome.
Hey, good morning. Thank you, Dave. I am not sure I should get all his accolades, but I'll take them especially from somebody like you. I appreciate it.
So Kevin is located in South Florida and has gone over to the West Coast. Kevin's over in Naples and the partner Wicker Smith and Kevin, I looked at it. I mean, Wicker Smith's been around a long time, we've seen lots of things change in the landscape of South Florida, and a lot of firms come and go and a lot of the stalwarts when you and I first started practicing, they're not there anymore. Still hectares and things like that. Wicker Smith's been around a long time and done well. So talk a little bit about wicker Smith.
Well, sure, I'm happy to you know, wicker Smith is as you know, started as a kind of an old-time Miami firm with a couple of guys I just wicker, and James Smith. And I don't think they could have possibly imagined that their little law firm would grow into this nearly 300 Lawyer law firm that we have that has actually branched outside of even South Florida and Florida. You know, we have 11 offices in the state of Florida. We also have offices in Georgia, we just opened up Atlanta, but we've had one in South Georgia for a few years. We have an office in Nashville, Tennessee, and we have an office all the way out in Phoenix, Arizona for some unexplainable reason. Now, we have a terrific partner out there. And, and we just sort of grown. And the interesting thing about wicker Smith's growth is that we grow what we call organically. In other words, you know, some firms will go into a town and they'll go look for a lawyer or a particular type of practice to buy or to purchase, or to merge with wicker Smith's growth has been more organic, meaning that we would have somebody who was a wicker Smith lawyer, move to a different town and open it up, because that person knew how wicker Smith ran their office and ran the shop. And that's what I did, right? You know, I'm a Miami guy, as you know, I worked in the Miami office for a few years. And we got a call from a client over on the west coast that said, hey, the firm that used to represent us is actually decided to go be plaintiffs law firms. And so, they're not going to defend our hospitals and doctors anymore. And would you guys do that? And so, they, Tom Graham, who was one of our senior partners at the time, was kind of winding his career down and said, Yeah, I'll go to Naples, which I think was where everybody goes, when they wind their career down. And he opened this office up, and about six months later, he had more work than he could do. And some of the senior guys came to me and said, Hey, would you consider going to Naples, Tom is going to retire in the next few years. And we'd like to build an office over there. So that's what I did. And it was a blessing. It was a challenge. It was a sacrifice, because I you know, I was a Miami kid. I grew up there. I had family, as you know, in the health care world, my dad, and I had some pretty good connections. But this was an opportunity that even to me, I could tell this was a super chance. And I've been blessed that it's worked out as well as, as well as it has. And we've sort of done that around the state opening up different offices where mostly it's a lawyer that started in one and transitioned up and opened up an office for us. So that's kind of how wicker has grown. And we've been really fortunate.
We are going to talk about your practice in a minute. But you know, in looking at the BIOS and going over this, I'm scanning things and I'm like, looking at all the offices and I go, wait, they have an office at Palmetto Bay, in the village of Palmetto Bay, which I live in. So I was surprised to see that pleasant to see at the old Burger King headquarters. I guess you guys have taken some space in there. It's just good to know because when I'm going to run for village idiot, which I plan to do at some point, I know I can have the backing of wicker Smith now that they're in Palmetto Bay.
Absolutely. We can round up some votes for you for that. All
right, well, let's go back a little bit. You are Miami guys, as you said. So, tell me a little bit. I know you're a noble. What is it that prompted you then to get into law? Was that something you always wanted to do? Or what sort of drove you to law school and, and the practice of law?
So yeah, I did. I graduated from Florida State. I didn't know much about the school until I started looking around. Yep, I wanted to play sports. So that was kind of that was part of my drive. I got some really good advice, David, about my junior year, I started thinking I really want to go to law school. I think that's what I want to do. I used to play tennis on Saturday afternoons and mornings with my dad and a group of mostly his friends. But you know, looking back on it, it was quite a collection of the who's who, in Miami. You know, we had federal appellate court judges like judge Pete Fay that would play tennis with us every Saturday and I go have lunch with them and write nothing I knew him as Judge Bay. And that was the nice source to get some information from as to what the whole thing is about very well respected. There were a number of lawyers that also played in that group. One guy that in particular that sticks out is a former divorce lawyer. He's now passed away Ed Vining, who was a good friend of mine, and he was a terrific storyteller, as many trial lawyers are. And he used to just regale us at lunch. We used to go to this place called villain Ted. I'm sure you remember Bill Clinton,
I know it. Well. There are things I don't remember for Bill and Ted's but I do know Well, exactly. So, we'd sit there, and advising would regale us with these. Now, I realize maybe some fantastical stories about how he would try this great cause. And he would make this judge cry on the bench. And I'm sure that never happened. But either way, they were just fascinating stories. And I thought, Well, I think maybe I would like to do that. I'd like to be a lawyer. So, I started talking about that with my dad, in my junior year. And my dad gave me some really good advice at that time. He said, Look, it's a good profession. I think you would do great, but I'm going to give you the advice to take a year off before you go to law school after you graduate. And he said, Go do something, right. Because I'm not you can't just lay around, I'm not going to support you but go work. You know, go to Europe and travel and work your way around and maybe go to Colorado and work a ski season. And what jumped out to me as I had a buddy of mine and I went to high school with whose father sold all of the catering to the cruise ship industry. And so he had sold this company to Royal Caribbean. I reached out to his son who I knew and I said hey, Lou, is there anything fun to do on a cruise ship? I'd never even been on a cruise ship, right? Oh, yeah. You want to be an assistant cruise director. I was like, Okay, that sounds fun. So, David, I took my dad's advice. I took a year off between undergrad and law school and I signed up and worked as an assistant cruise director for the Royal Caribbean cruise line. And it was a terrific year I cruised three and four-day cruises to the Bahamas. And then I did seven-day cruises to the Eastern Caribbean. And then seven-day cruises to the Western Caribbean, I met people from all over the world who still have friends to this day of people that I met working on a cruise ship. So that was sort of a nice detour. But it was really good advice to sort of getaway because you know, once you go to law school, and you get out, you know, you're on the wheel, right? You can't, there's no year to take off, especially right out of law school. So it was a great time, it was a good break for me. And then I went to law school, which I had to I deferred my acceptance a year. And the rest is sort of as we say legal history.
Alright, the only question I have then is so let me get this right. You're an assistant cruise director. You're hanging out on cruise ships with beautiful young women and men and everything else. You've got drink tickets at your access to give them out to entertain and you came back and went to law school like I'm sorry. Why are you not a cruise director today?
Okay, I can I can understand the question about that I get asked that a lot. I will tell you to know it's an interesting life to literally just pick up and live on a cruise ship for years what I did because I You're never off right so and as a cruise assistant cruise director you know I was Julie from The Love Boat right and it's really the service industry and so anytime that you were out of your cabin, you were in an I was in sort of a polo shirt and shorts or slacks and I but I was on the right because people were always coming up to ask me what to do or where to go or I was hosting games you know I used to run bingo and eat shooting off the
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan and I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for nearly three decades. And the goal behind this show and we get a lot of feedback, it's a Shakespeare quote, that he meant it as a compliment. It might have meant it as a compliment, but people laughed when that line was uttered back in the 15th century. And there are people that today still think killing all the lawyers, maybe not be a bad idea. So, goal behind this podcast is to bring in other local in South Florida. And actually, we've had people out of state international lawyers to kind of introduce them to the community find out about what they do, and maybe one by one, we'll take a few of them off the kill list. My guest this morning is a friend, a classmate, we were reminiscing unfortunate goes back further than we'd like to recall. And my goal is to get them off the kill list. But I might have a hard time because I've got an issue because apparently Gary hasn't aged in the 30 years since we went to law school, my guest, Gary Mars, looking great, my friend. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. All right. So let's, let's talk a little bit just sort of general background, what is it that got you and then we're going to get into? You know, you've been in a very specialized practice for the last 30 years. But what got you into law school? What was it always a desire to be a lawyer? Was it you know, I wasn't sure what I was going to do, or where did it? Where did it start? Yeah, there are those that are, I think, are those of us who there that is a bit freaky. So, I've always been prime, pretty much designed to be a lawyer. So, I went to Emory undergrad, which is, you know, pretty much a pre professional school. So, everybody was in med, everyone's going to medical school, right about three or four of us on my dorm floor that were going in a different direction. They all ended up half of them probably went into the business school from there, and a few went into law school dribble went into actual loads of medicine, but I was always on a track to be a lawyer, just kind of how I'm wired. So that was kind of a given. But yeah, so by ology, I guess I could say, you've done something that's a little unique and you look at and you know, we're kind of blessed and partner with Mark care, one of our classmates and, you know, we've got a group of people from that long ago that still stay in touch. And it's a nice network of friends to have. But you've done something unique, and that, that you went to a firm coming out of law school, Siegfried Rivera, and you've stayed there, you're a shareholder there, and you've carved out a phenomenal practice there. Talk about sort of that first transition, because oftentimes, lawyers go somewhere, they get their feet wet, they learn a little they go, but you've dug in and build yourself a phenomenal practice at a great firm been around for 40 plus years. But talk about how you went up there. And let's talk about how your practice developed. So, I actually, if you remember, when, when we came out of law school, there was a kind of a little bit of a glut in the market. At that point. I really like bankruptcy. I really was intrigued by the whole, you know, setting up the bankruptcy plans and working through that I thought I was, you know, that was my area. But there weren't a lot of jobs. There were a lot of people lateral laying around at that point, because it was a really bad job market. So, while there was a good job market for laterals, not as good for people coming out, right, right. So, you have to meet you. And you know, the good news with the University of Miami and I guess most law schools are doing it now. You know, we had a really good development
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. This is the 2022 version, which, frankly, feels a lot like 2021. I'm not sure what has changed. One thing that hasn't changed is the reason we do this show. I'm David Heffernan, I've been practicing personal injury law in South Florida for about 30 years now. The goal behind the show as it was uttered in the 15th century by Shakespeare, yes, we can all be open to interpretation. But bottom line is people laughed. And some people still feel like it's a good idea to kill all the lawyers. My goal is to bring in local South Florida lawyers and lawyers from all around actually, and maybe one by one, educate people on what they do who they are. We have realized the quality of the lawyers that we've got in this community and one by one, we can take them off to the kill list. My guest this morning is going to be easy to take off kill list is because not only is he a great lawyer, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But he's one of the most active people I know in the community, Florida Bar, a guy who really gives something back. Roland Sanchez from Medina. Raleigh, welcome, my friend.
Thank you, David. I said, once again, I apologize for all the technical issues, man.
Like, like I said, 2022, much like 2021. We just we just deal with it, we pivot and we roll. So let's start with you. Let's start with law school. Why did you go to law school? What was what was the driving? Was it a goal to be a lawyer? What did you want to do?
Well, you know, it's interesting, we have a typical immigrant story. As an immigrant, the first thing comes to mind is to feed your family, you know, and there's certain professions in the, in the Cuban culture, that, you know, are sort of tried and true ways of, you know, feeding for your feeding your family, right, you're a calling doctor, doctors, lawyers, and that was sort of I was ushered in that way. And then, by the time I finished University of Miami like you did, it just seemed to be the natural course. And the natural next step for me, in terms of vocation,
and the vocation you were starting on, was as a tax lawyer, which I guess if you want security, because taxes are going to be around forever, but you start in the world of tax, what was that appeal? And then let's talk about how that you sort of shifted off that a little bit.
You know, I really, you're a litigator, and David, you know, I mean, you worry about things like evidence and other stuff, and things of that nature, or pleadings, and I just had zero interest in any event, in fact, if I had to do what you do, I don't know that I'd still be practicing law.
Because I had to do tax, I'd have hung myself a long time ago.
I really gravitated towards that and in law school, it's only thing I really liked was the corporate classes, the security transaction, the tax courses, my undergraduate degrees in finance, and economics. And so it seemed to be once again, really the one thing that I liked the most, as I was trying to get my JD.
Alright, so you come out, you start kind of that big, firm track, I think it would national firms and everything else, kind of get your feet wet, I'm sure and get that experience, then you decide to do I guess, the great American dream that we all have, you know, start your own firm. Tell me about that. And how is it you got this group of friends together and decided to take that leap?
You know, I spent about 15 or 16 years, at, you know, large, large firms haul the night, McDermott will and Emery, where I became a partner. And, you know, I had given it 15 years and still wasn't particularly happy. And day in and day out basis, nothing against the big firms. It was just sort of, you know, the things that I liked the most, and maybe it was a little more entrepreneurial. And because of that, I just decided that after 15 years, you learned you learn a thing or two, just by just by showing up, right? And, you know, it wasn't an easy decision, I you know, that the decision to delete, sort of a nice certain paycheck is not for everybody. But, you know, frankly, for me, it made all the difference in the world. You know, just being able to do my own thing. Work with the people I want to work with, you know, the practice of Lies can be tedious, it's certainly the intensity of it is relentless. And so, sort of who's the people that I'm going to be working with the kind of the kind of stuff that that I wouldn't be doing? Really pretty Jimmy made all the difference in the world in terms of providing some happiness. And because of that, I decided to start my own firm.
So you start and you've got a collective group of friends, how was it decided? This is going to be the group.
Um, you know, happenstance. One of them is Peter Gonzalez who's a commercial litigator, Peter and I are just we're in addition to be law partners, we're very good friends. Very similar in many ways. There's another lawyer public Assata that the three of us really started, you know, what is now SMG que De Santis Medina, obviously, is an M, and G is Gonzalez, Nikki was Kosala. And Pablos wife, Amelia Kursaal, is also a partner. And so she part of the key really is, is, obviously is her surname as well, too. And so it was really it was people that I liked, they all came from big firms as well. You know, as much as you know, we big firms get criticism, the truth of the matter is, especially for you know, what I do transactional law, you know, there's no better place to get that experience, you know, so the first few years, first 567 years, I mean, I was working, you know, not even a 10s of millions, but hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions. And so you don't you I wouldn't have got that experience anywhere else. And so from that, in that regard, you know, I call him out, you know, 15 years at a big firm, you know, seems like 45 years
ago, watching some other things on your way out at that point. Right. So I actually 4545 years of work. So same thing.
Yeah, no, I mean, if you look at the time sheet, that's correct, the numbers add up to about 45 years. But it was just, it was time, like, I mean, I was if I was ever going to do it, after about 15 years, it was just, it was opportunity. And then you know, Lord, you don't you know, this, we're risk averse, generally. And so, it was either do it now or never do it. And, and like I said, I had a couple friends, Pablo, and Peter, that really made the decision significantly easier in order for me to take that step.
So, tell me about the firm now. I mean, because you pretty broad, what you do. I mean, you've sort of got this boutique firm, but you offer a lot of the services that the big firms offer. And tell me about sort of the practices that are there, and what's the philosophy behind your firm?
Yeah, no. And, and so at our firm, you know, we've been we've been growing just by finding lawyers that we'd like personally. But also, you know, there's two requirements, you have to be a good person, you have got to be a good lawyer. Right. And so, we have a wide array of services. You know, we have Lesley eagle, who's, you know, one of the best entertainment lawyers in the southeast. We have David Pena, who's an immigration attorney. You know, we obviously have commercial litigators, Peter Gonzalez, and then we get solid. Mitch manlier. I mean, Carlos Garcia, Perez, I mean, we, you know, we could offer a whole, like, a whole team of litigators. We have transactional guys, Joe Gomez, who was a partner at David voices forum at Boys. Boys. Schiller, thank you very much. And like I said, for us if it made a lot of sense that it's going to pick up lawyers in different practice groups, right. And so, it didn't, you know, do we really need another corporate lawyer, a real estate lawyer? No, we really don't, you know, we do need a good entertainment lawyer, good immigration lawyer, good health care attorney. And so, from our perspective, once we sort of got the, you know, the basics, you can set transactional, and litigation, it became important to pick up little groups, you know, tax, you know, tax lawyers, estate planning attorneys. And that's really that's really how the growth comes. But if you know if any of those sort of core group and there's six of us approximately, well, no, there is six, you know, if somebody does, if you don't like them, or you had issues with that particular attorney, then you know, we're not even having that conversation. Right. And so, it really is a you know, there's not a lot of administration in our firm I mean, you know, we been at big firms where there's multiple layers of administration we literally have one right and so
it's nice when six guys sit down behind the door and go look, we're going to agree on this one way or the other.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean listening and like I said, from the perspective of growth, literally, you know, one day is all that needs to happen to Nick somebody and so yeah, we in you know, this David, we spend so much time in the office and so the people around you, you just have to have a certain a friendship and confidence and trust. And if you don't have that people to your left and to your right, that he can make sort of he can make work already, which is like, you know, as we discussed pretty tough. For me makes it even. it aggravates everything, frankly.
Well, I've noticed one of the things that I was looking at stuff on your firm is, is yes, while you're sort of this boutique firm, it hasn't limited you to South Florida, I see that you do transactions, Latin America and all of these other countries. So, kind of talk about the evolution of how you continue to grow that aspect of the practice.
I think that's really client base. Right. And so, we have clients. The nice thing about the nice, even though I don't know, I think by 2827 28, lawyers, it's a decent size. And you know, our roster of clients, you know, you know, knocking
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan and I've been practicing personal injury law here in Miami for nearly three decades. The goal behind this show is simply to bring in other lawyers from South Florida and other areas, in different areas of practices of law, get to know them a little bit, talk to them a little bit, find out about their practice. By the end of the podcast, maybe one by one, we can sort of remove them from the kill list. This one should be relatively easy. My guest this morning is Suzanne Amaducci Adams - good friend, phenomenal lawyer, fellow Orange Bowl member, and board of directors. So, we've got a lot to talk about. This is going to be an easy show because your type of law is something I know very little about. First off, how are you?
I'm doing great. Thanks, Dave. Good morning.
Good morning. All right. So let's talk about let's go way back for a little bit. What is it that drove you to practice law?
Well, I was torn between the business school and law school didn't know what I wanted to do. Actually, originally, I wanted to go into the hotel business. Okay. I was told as a woman at the time, I mean, I'm pretty old. I was told as a woman at the time, there really weren't many opportunities there. And the highest rank that I would achieve would be an executive housekeeper. Now, if you know me, I am not a good housekeeper and that didn't seem like the best path career path for me. So, I ended up going to law school. So how do you wind up at Vanderbilt? Fine school.
You know, it was one of those things I was between going to school in Boston, a bunch of friends had gone to Vanderbilt, it was kind of an unknown school. Now. It's the greatest you know, it's probably one of the hardest schools to get into. But it was unknown and I flew down I saw the campus and I decided let's try something new. Let's try the South. I knew nothing about the south at the time. Nashville certainly was not what it was like today.
Right? Well, yeah, Nashville has changed quite a bit great, great city.
Great City. But let me tell you, it was nothing like that. It was nice, you know, it was a suburban campus yet right next to downtown. Incredible southern influence. And it was a good time I learned a whole bunch about a different part of the country that I didn't know about
Then we drive you further south geographically. But as I like to describe Miami, I think Miami is almost a northern city that's just located southern geographically.
I was slowly moving my way south to the warm weather. I hated the winters. And I was always a big boater, so I needed to be near the water.
Gotcha. All right. So, we get you down here you go to the University of Miami law school. And then your career path seems to take you where you had desires before. You're still sort of in the hotel industry to some degree, but a little different in you're not a housekeeper you're doing $6 billion deals and things like that. So
billion, maybe a little bit,
you know, was a $6 billion deal. So, let's talk about your practice and how this sort of evolved into what you've done.
My passion is really development, and the hotel and Marina business. I worked in hotels as a kid, I love the business. It was great. I'm a big boater. So that's another asset I just happen to know a lot about and the best attorneys are the attorneys that understand their client's business, right so it healthcare doctors, you need to understand insurance, all sorts of stuff with real estate, you got to understand the way the building fits together. But then with these operating businesses like hotels and marinas, you have to understand the business, you have to understand where the money comes from, you have to understand, you know, the expenses, how to mitigate expenses, like I can walk in a marina and I can understand the condition of it, I can understand pretty much the revenue from looking at the type of boats that are there, which boats are there. And all the different businesses that are Marina, you've got fuel, you've got repair facilities, you've got restaurants, you've got bars, it's a big business. So, it's a good mix between business and law. All right.
We're going to delve into that a little bit. Now just as a personal question, how in South Florida Do we not have more marinas more waterfront restaurants? I mean, we have such a beautiful venue and there just seems to be a shortage of all of them. You got a Fort Lauderdale seems to be a ton more marinas. You know, you've got restaurants and down here just not many.
Well, there are a lot of marinas, okay. The boating activity has exploded exponentially, especially during COVID. So, there's just a shortage. Now as far as the waterfront restaurants are concerned, what's our most expensive real estate waterfront? It's really hard to make a go of it if you're a restaurant operator, and your rent is incredibly high because you're on the water. So there are a few, right? It's a very expensive endeavor.
Because my whole path was to start the next restaurant on the water. So what like
everyone wants to own a bar? Everyone wants to own a bar. It's a really bad idea. No, I know. And then everyone who doesn't have a boat wants to own a marina because they want all their friends to comment. It's like every other business, it's a difficult business, you really need to know what you're doing.
I want to focus on your firm a little bit because you are the partner and the head of the real estate division. I know a lot of lawyers over there. Just a very, I think, unique firm in that. It's a big firm, but you're Miami-based, but you're an international practice.
So, you know, it's, we're perfect in my mind. And that's why I'm there. And that's why I've been there for over 20 years. But we're the anti-big firm, firm. Okay, we operate like a big firm, but we don't have solely a Florida footprint with solely of Miami office, people say, you know, how can you survive in this kind of environment where all these big firms are getting together? There are all these law firm mergers? Well, we're different, right? So, we have, I always like to say we're kind of like a boutique hotel, right? So, you go to a boutique hotel, because you want a very high level of service. And a discerning client can go anywhere they want, but they go there because of the high-level service and the high level of expertise. Okay, we have more real estate lawyers and land use lawyers than anyone in town. Period. Right. Okay. And now right now, we also have a litigation department and an international tax and, and whatnot. And corporate of course, but you know, when people are coming to Miami, what do they need? They need, you know, local knowledge, they need an expert. And we all came from large national firms like we all understand that model. We didn't like it. We like local decision-making. So, we operate as if we're a big firm, but we have one office and I do work all over the country. I don't do work. I've done work in Alaska. I've done work in Hawaii. My biggest project right now that I've been working on for like almost 20 years, is in Bridgeport, Connecticut, right? It's a 100-acre development deal in Bridgeport building a Bass Pro, we built a marina an office building a restaurant, Chipotle T mobile's dollar box. I'm getting ready to build a hotel with 2000 multifamily units. I mean, it's like a lifelong project. Right? Although it's in Connecticut, it's not here. Right? That's fantastic.
See, now we can take bills and summer golf to kill us. Because you're the anti-lawyers, which well, which is what I always sort of like, and that's why I sort of started this as a joke, you know, to kill all the lawyers and then all the lawyers, of course, well, you know, Shakespeare meant, that is a flutter echo. I get it. But people laughed, you know,
I don't care. There are some lawyers that want to kill him, right? I mean, the one thing that's maybe I guess you haven't litigation to, but in real estate, you know, you're constantly negotiating deals, and at the end of the day, I have to make a deal, or I didn't do a good job, right. And at the end of the day, I make it a little bit more of this, and you make it a little bit more of that. But at the end of the deal, end of the day, we need to make a deal. Okay, and you see these people over and over and over again. I deal with the same 10 lawyers in New York all the time, right? Same couple of lawyers in LA the same few in Chicago. It's amazingly a small world. But you know, you got to be nice, you got to be respectful, and you got to be a straight shooter.
Well, and to me, you got to set your ego aside, okay. What's the best for my client? Okay, I deal with personal injury, you deal with yours? So at the end of the day, it's not about me, it's not about you, it's what's the best outcome for the client? And I think too many times lawyers kind of lose focus on that because they want to make it about that without a question. And you know, it's not about the fees. Okay, sure. The fees are expensive, okay. That's the way it's going to get done. But I get paid for results. My clients come back to me because I got the deal close, no matter what craziness I had to go through no matter what problem I had to solve. I got the deal done. I got them their result. And for them, that's priceless. Same with you, you get them a good result. It's priceless. Right.
So, we've talked about a lot on the show with other litigators and everything else, the effects that COVID had, and that was because the courthouse is basically closed and the change and all of that, but you're in tell hospitality, that had to have a huge COVID had to have a huge impact on that because people stopped traveling. I mean, where is it all going? And are we starting to see it come back and hotels coming back? And so many different answers to that question. So, I closed a hotel loan refinance in Chicago, like March 9, we
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan. I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for about three decades now. The goal behind these podcasts is quite simple. I bring in lawyers from various aspects, different careers, different things, talk about different areas of law and sort of one by one hopefully, we can take them off the kill list and prove that maybe Shakespeare was wrong back in the 15th century. This morning it will be an easy task. My guest is a friend, colleague, an excellent lawyer, and I dressed up this morning actually put a jacket on because in some aspect now as you're going to find out, she's my boss. So let me introduce Jeannie Jontiff. A pleasure to have you on this morning. How are you?
I'm great. Thanks, David. Good morning. Nice to see you.
Likewise, likewise. So let's start with the simple stuff. Let's go back a little bit. You went to U. M law, and we've got some parallel paths there. But before you get there, what got you into the practice of law? Ah,
a very circuitous route. I started out as a musical theater major, I kind of switched into political science, but with still a dance, a minor in dance. And then I don't know, I kind of started working in the law. I worked in real estate, and I did contracts. And then I thought that was interesting. And then I, I ended up actually taking a position at Kodak Trofim, Throckmorton as a paralegal, and then I kind of said, well, I can do this. I may as well just go to law school.
Well, that there's certainly a great group of lawyers there to learn under and we know them all, well, tremendous, tremendous firm. So. So that's where the start goes, then you go to UNM. And then you and I have one common Lincoln that just a couple of years before you I won the Thomas Seewald Scholar Award, ah, which is, which is a nice little gesture, I still have the trophy somewhere the Montblanc pen, which was a nice award. And then obviously, we both had the opportunity to teach in the litigation Skills Program. And now we sort of segue. You've got a thriving practice, you and your husband have been doing personal injury law Jonathan. But this year, you shifted gears a little bit. And you're now the acting director for the litigation skills department. So let's talk about how that came about.
You know, I've been intimately involved in litigation skills since I took the program. My favorite thing about law school was litigation. Always super passionate about it. And you know, with all that was going on with the pandemic, I kind of, you know, helped out a lot more than I ordinarily do.You know, so they were looking for someone to kind of step in at least interim while we have our interim dean. So they brought me in to help out for the next couple of years. Let's talk about the litigation skills program. Because, like you, that was clearly the most enjoyable thing I did in law school, clearly the most practical thing I did in law school. In that, it, all of these things started to make sense to some degree, you know, you learned rules, and you learned this, and you learn that but was in a vacuum. And then all of a sudden, you went, Oh, wait, that's how this works. So talk a little bit about the litigation skills program and what that takes students through.
So at the heart of it, I mean, you know, the lit Skills Program is an advocacy program. So we've tried to teach students how to how to really figure out how to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, kind of like, as you said, and they learn in kind of three different forums. So the main litigation skills class, and there's a lot more to litigation skills than just the main class, but for purposes of our time here, so we have a lecture component, and then we have a pre-trial and a trial class. So a trial class, they're learning the skills that every trial lawyer needs, you know, how to do an opening, how to do a direct examination, how to do a cross-examination, you know, how to enter evidence, and to know how to put documents and things into evidence. And then, and then in their pre-trial class, they're learning like the nuts and bolts of how to take a case from beginning to end. And they work a case file the entire semester, in pre-trial while they're doing these exercises in their trial class. And the culmination is and you've done this a bunch of times yourself, is we go down, together, and we have final trials at the courthouse. And so that's a really exciting part of you know, the program is to have these final trials where we have real juries come in, that we bring in and they try a case which you know, who gets to try a Christ with no downside.
What and it's funny because that's what I tell all the students, you know when they get up, do Their final trial and it is I mean, that exercise, and so much credit, I mean, goes to Lonnie, and then Lydia who runs that program. So, so well, but what they do to bring in, and we've seen it evolve over the years, you know, we'd have two or three jurors, and then we, you know, now you've got eight 910 Jurors sometimes that show up, and to be able to get into a courtroom, oftentimes with a real judge presiding, because we've cut many of them that are part, you know, of the faculty, and put on witnesses. And then, and this is where I learned each time, they get to listen to the jury deliberate, which we don't get to do in the real world, you know, you get to hear them talk in the feedback. And I just think it's a tremendous, tremendous exercise for them. But yeah, I always commend them. And I go, look, it's good news is no risk of being sued for malpractice at the end of this trial.
Right? Yeah. And I mean, that's the extraordinary thing about it, as they actually get to hear what the jurors have to say, and get some fruitful, you know, feedback, which, you know, in the real world, you never, you never know what they do behind closed doors, which is also really interesting to see, you know, the things that jurors see on that, you know, when we're putting on a case, like there are very often little things that jurors pick up, when you see this in these deliberations that didn't even occur to you or wasn't even something you were trying to impart, you know, like, it wasn't something you were necessarily arguing. It's just something they pick up on. And they're like, Well, what about this, and you're like, we didn't even talk about that. But so that's kind of an interesting part, I have to say, you mentioned Lydia Sanchez, and I have to say, the lid Skills Program wouldn't be with what it is right now, especially without, without Lydia Sanchez, our Senior Program Manager, and we also have our paint, paint Penya. And not daily noon, noon, yes, we have a great team. And that's really we all work together as a team. And it's really an extraordinary program, and it wouldn't be able to be done so seamlessly without you know, our team,
no question they are, they are the continuity that sort of drives that train and keeps it on the tracks and the standing job of, of hurting the adjunct faculty. And to me, that's one of the things I think that's appealing as, as a teacher, one, the interactions that we get with the other faculty members, but as students, when you look at it, just talk a little bit about the faculty. I mean, there are federal judges, there are state court judges, there are prosecutors, there are high profile lawyers. I mean, it's, you know, it's one of those, I look around and go, How do I get into this little club? Because it's a pretty special club.
It's funny, because my husband, former partner used to say, you know, how do you get to be part of the lit skills club? So yeah, it really is. It's a, it's a who's who of Miami and really the whole pogrom program, you know, centers around our adjunct faculty, obviously, they teach the pretrial classes, the trial classes, there anybody in everybody you could possibly imagine this, who's who in Miami, but more importantly, you know, these students get to interact with, you know, federal judges, federal magistrate judges, state court judges, appellate court judges, you know, local attorneys, former US attorneys, you know, just an amazing faculty that, you know, provide guidance, you know, information, potential, you know, career, you know, opportunities, and, and mentorship, which is really great, because they constantly, you know, have this interaction with these folks. And in very many times, and I don't know about you, but myself, I have had ongoing relationships with some of my students, I'm still friends with my adjunct faculty members from a million years ago. So it's really, you know, an amazing opportunity for a young and upcoming lawyers.
Well as, as am I, and it is funny, I mean, David Diehl taught me pre-trial, Judge Hawk was one of my trial teachers, you know, and he still teaches in the program. And so to see that and, and it was funny, it was nice to judge Huck was teaching some other programs called me want to know if I had some certain materials on things and everything else. And, and so yeah, the connections you make on that, and again, students, although and I stole this from somebody else, I won't take credit for it. But what I tell my students last class of the year is I said, Look, you know, you're going to go out now and you're going to become practicing lawyers. And, you know, there's a chance we may see each other and if we cross paths, always remember this. I taught you everything, you know, but I didn't teach you everything I know. Okay. You know, I worry about that when you see them out there, because you're like, well, they're a lot smarter, and I was at the time. And so it is a lot of fun. And it's a great program. And I think you've seen it and I'm sure now as acting director, you get it. The feedback in the community of looking to hire law students who in fact took litigation skills and took that trial program bec
First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan, I've been practicing personal injury law here in Miami and South Florida for nearly three decades. The goal behind this broadcast is to bring in other lawyers in varying fields and experiences to kind of maybe one by one start to take them off that kill list. And, and we can prove Shakespeare wasn't right in the 15th century, when he said it and everybody laughed about it. But my guest this morning, the only difficulty might be I think we can get him off the list. But he's a guy I know who oftentimes wanted to kill many lawyers, generally opposing counsel, but this morning, I'm really happy to introduce a very close friend of mine. Excellent, excellent lawyer. Andy Haffa.
Thanks for having me on.
So yeah, we're not going to ask you to take any lawyers off the list. Because I know, given you're passionate about your practice, and I will get into that. There's been times I've might have heard you out or a few things about killing other lawyers. So, we're going to try to table that and keep this more on the civil side of things.
You and I've had many conversations about going back to trial by combat and how much better I would feel. And as badly as I would like to avoid being on anybody's hit list. I unfortunately, I found my way too many. And so as hard as you're going to work today, I don't know how successful you're going to be brother.
All right. Well, I'm up for the test. So, let's see what we can do to get Andy off this list. Let's go back first and just talk about so you're a Miami native, correct?
Well, basically, I we I've been here ever since I'm two I was born. My dad was in medical school in Richmond. And he when he moved down here for training, that's when I became a Florida native.
Got it. Okay. So now though, tell me because your dad comes down here, very, very prominent surgeon knows me. Well, he's seen my insides. So, I got to give him credit for that as he took my appendix out, but Chief of Staff at Baptist I mean, many, many accolades, and just a top notch, top notch surgeon, great guy, and you go to law school. So where was where was that shift? And was there ever an interest in medical school?
There still is. I was I was teaching at the middle school Medical School last night, believe it or not, okay. I ended up going to law school because my dad, who as you said, as a surgeon told me, he wouldn't do it again. And I took the L SATs and the MCAT. That's the test to get into medical school within a month of each other. And still, to this day, I entertained dreams of being a doctor. That's what I was always wanted to do. And I know I would have been a hell of a surgeon, that's for sure.
No, no doubt about it. And but it's interesting because you go into law, and then followed by both of your brothers, Sam and Greg go into law who both have thriving careers. And we might have to get them on here. It might be easier to get off the list and you but we'll work on it. On those two so you get into the practice law. The other interesting thing about you so you and I go back three decades, because graduate, I always know how long you've been practicing. Because I got to figure out how long I have came out together, law clerk to different places together. But you're a little bit of a rarity in that. You went to a firm right out of law school. Grossman, a Roth at the time now Grossman Roth, yeah, often Cohen. But you've stayed there, the duration, you know, lawyers tend to start here, get a little experience here, kind of move and move around. So talk about that journey, because I think it's pretty fascinating that you've stayed there the whole time. And obviously, tremendous, tremendous firm. You know, nothing but great things to say about Stuart and Neil and everybody in that firm. And so you're a great, great fit and a great asset to that firm. But how is it that you wound up staying in the same place for 30 years?
So I was blessed to have found Stuart and Neal, and they took a shot on me how and why I don't know. But my goal when I started with them was to learn how the best firm I could find thought so I could go back and defend physicians. I lived through a couple of lawsuits that I felt were unjustified. And so I figured if I could learn from the best plaintiffs firms, I could then jump back to the defense and defend these dogs. And when I saw the cases that Stuart Neal had, it was mind blowing. And I would bring this stuff home and talk to my dad. And he was shocked at the horrific care that existed then and unfortunately continues to exist in South Florida. And so I found my niche and I think we're able to make Florida a better place by hopefully forcing physicians to practice better and safer medicine. And so that's really sort of overshadowed my entire journey at Grossman Roth, and I feel as though I've, you know, sacrificed blood, sweat and tears there for 30 years. And when I started, we were for lawyers, we're now up to 12. And it's amazing the cases we've seen, the people we've touched and the lives that we hopefully have changed for the better. Well, let's
talk about that a little bit too, because I know and it had to be difficult for you, given that your dad was a physician and a prominent physician, there seems to be sort of, sometimes almost a public image that, well, they're doctors, and they can't make mistakes. And I talk to people all the time. And I say, well, listen, they're professionals. Lawyers are professionals, contractors are professionals. You know, if you if you hire a guy to build your house, and half of it collapses, nobody ever has a hesitation, oh, I'm going to sue that guy. He did it wrong. But when doctors do that, everybody seems a little hesitant to venture into that. And so how was that sort of going back and forth with your dad. And obviously, I mean, I've fished with you many times with your dad and lots of other physician friends. And those were the circle friends. So how well was that sort of taken when you first started suing doctors as opposed to defending.
So I think I brought a bit of fresh air to these physicians that felt that way, because they knew, given my background, given my history, given my father, that I was not going to simply throw a cast net, no pun intended, over everybody that had contact with that patient. If you're going to get sued, it's because you deserve to get sued. And it was a breach of the standard of care. And they knew that I understood that not every mistake was medical malpractice that was actionable. Not every bad outcome was medical malpractice that was actionable. And so I truly believe then, and I know, I continue that now I bring, I bring an extra level of screening to these cases, and I make sure if I'm going to do it, they should be brought. And these cases are just and righteous. And these doctors deserve to get sued. If they don't, I don't want to be part of.
So, let's talk about that a little bit. Because we both been doing medical malpractice for a long time, the screening process because again, you know, you tell people, if you got hit by a car, we could file a lawsuit today, you know, and be litigating this case, when it is a medical malpractice case, talk about the extent of that screening process and what it has to go through to ensure that it is a meritorious case, first off on your standards, and then the legal standards of what has to be done before you can file a suit.
So, there's a movie out there, the girl next door that I use this line all the time, you got to make sure that the juice is worth the squeeze. Medical malpractice cases, obviously, are extremely expensive to be brought, you have to have them reviewed by experts in every specialty of the folks that you're going to sue. So, it's not uncommon. Before I even know that I have a case that I've spent 5060 $100,000 on these cases. So, you've got to be very selective in the case of your brand. Obviously, you got to make sure that the damages on the back end, okay, justify spending those kinds of monies on the front, because I will tell you, at the end of the year, firms like yours and mine, we end up spending hundreds of 1000s, if not more dollars, on cases you've evaluated, you've investigated, and then you determine that there was no breach of the standard of care. And then unfortunately, something bad happened to this patient. But these doctors and health care providers did everything they could to care for these patients and bad things happen. And they do happen in the absence of malpractice. This is this is what we bring to the practice that understanding. And a lot of patients/clients don't understand just because something bad happened, why they don't have a case. So I hope I answered your question there, Dave.
No, you did. You did. And I think that's one of the hardest things sometimes because it does have to be viewed as a business and at times, you have to look at the extent of the damages and what it would cost to bring that forward because it became it can become cost prohibitive for case. And that's a hard thing to explain to clients at times. But again, even harder sometimes because there is a bad outcome. That doesn't mean anybody was at fault. Okay, and that's not an easy decision to get to, nor a cheap one. So let's shift gears a little bit because I know that's one component of what you started. And I think really, back when you started Stuart Neil really emphasized in med mal, but that practice is really expanded. Now. While you still do med mal, there's a lot of other things you've gotten into from products liability to other significant cases. So, let's talk a little bit about what the overall practice had Grossman Roth, you and Cohen consists of now.
So, when people ask me what we do, I tell them that we will handle any significant case there is any type of significant catastrophic plane train automobile construction litigation, we're involved in the surf side collapse.
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan, and I've been practicing personal injury law here for 30 years in South Florida goal behind this show, and we named it after the Shakespeare quote, although a lot of people argued that that was a compliment to lawyers, people still chuckled pretty loudly when it was. And when you talk to people today, they still think maybe not a bad idea to kill all the lawyers. So, the goal here today is to bring in other South Florida lawyers, different areas of law, kind of educate some people on it, maybe one by one, we can kind of take some people off the kill list. So, my guest this morning is a great, great friend been for the last 30 years. And a truly fantastic lawyer who does a lot of things that I know nothing about. So, this is definitely going to be entertaining, because I'm going to get to learn along but let me bring in Dan Newman, a partner Nelson Mullins. Dan, how are you?
Great today, and hopefully I'm going to get off that kill list by the end of this show.
Slowly, why did we get oh, yeah, the majority at least I don't know, we get everybody off that list with you. But we can get the majority of so. So, Danny, let's go back and talk. You went to George Washington, you studied finance? What was the path and why go to law school? Was that something that was always going to be done or had that come about?
So, when I went to college, I thought I was going to go into the investment field investment banking or something investment-related. I was a finance major you said, Bachelor of Business Administration, I took a business law class and in my business, curriculum and undergrad, and that really gave me a passion for the law. I had a great, great teacher and, and he taught us about contracts and about business deals and about litigation and how disputes arise and how there are different arguments, and how to be an advocate. And that was fascinating to me. And so, after my junior year in college, I decided that I wanted to go to law school. And I wanted to be able to combine those two passions, the finance end, and the legal end, I knew I wanted to be a litigator, I knew that that was probably the best fit for my personality. And so that's, that's how it came about.
Alright, so that now at least gives me an explanation as to how you know about contracts, because you and I had the same contracts teacher at University of Miami law school. And I don't think we learned a whole lot about contracts in that class. But we'll leave that alone for now. We had a lot of laughs, though. So, we become friends in law school, you get out of law school, you take a job with the SEC, and I think oh my god, that's fantastic. He's working for college football. Wasn't that sec. So, you go to New York for the Securities Exchange Commission. Let's talk about that. Because I think that's kind of fascinating.
It was a great opportunity. It came about unexpectedly, there was the opportunity there. It was a bad time during that period of time, it was there was a banking crisis going on. And there was there was a little downturn in the economy. And someone told me there was an opportunity to go work at the SEC. That was a passion of mine. It was financed, it was securities, I took securities law in college, and learned about the securities laws learned about business and finance and tried to take courses fit for that, in law school. And as well as the securities class of law school, went up to the SEC interviewed, extremely passionate about what they did, what they do and continue to do. There they are, you know, they essentially are the overseer of our financial markets in many different ways. And I went up and I worked for what's called the enforcement division of the SEC. And our job was to enforce the securities laws. So, we would investigate potential violations and enforce those through legal actions, many cases settled or they go to trial. And, you know, in the process of that, I learned a tremendous amount, fascinating cases, everything from insider trading, which everyone hears a lot about financial filing fraud, where companies may file inaccurate information about what their numbers really look like, and people rely upon that and broker-dealer, misconduct to I mean, anything that could be a fraud in connection with securities markets, we went out we would, that would be an aim of ours to investigate and potentially prosecute, enforce the laws.
Which, which again, I think is fascinating, because it's something that we all sort of know a little about, you know, we hear the Bernie made offs and things like that, and the scams, but But little things like you're talking about where information might intentionally be wrong, and that misleads investors and things like that. So I mean, just the scope of that enforcement, How broad is the SEC and how much, I guess, d a catch. I mean, you know, everybody is it's sort of like the IRS, you know, how everybody cheats on their taxes. You know, but a lot of these companies do and how broad is that enforcement?
So, the enforcement is and I should say it's civil enforcement, the the Department of Justice enforces criminally prosecutes, and a lot of times there are, they work together because the facts are the same. But it is, as you said, there's a lot going on out there and the agency can't go after everyone can catch everything that's going on. So it tries to essentially go after cases that are going to have an impact on others. And they show the areas that are there, areas that they really want to make sure that people aren't engaging in misconduct aren't defrauding people. And that actually changes by each chairman of the SEC, you'll see different areas where their focus may be. So, when I was there, because of the banking crisis, I go back to that a lot of the enforcement was directed to bank holding companies, they were public companies that held these banks, and all these banks held real estate on their books at levels that just wasn't accurate. They were way overinflated. So, their financials look great, but it wasn't really the case. And so that was a big, big pet peeve of the chairman of the SEC at that time. And also, insider trading was always big, you just come off of hearing about cases of Michael Milken and others like that there were a lot of insider trading cases out there. So those were big, and there was, you know, a lot of the enforcement, the enforcement division is not, it's not huge, but it's pretty substantial. And they're enforcement attorneys throughout the country in different offices. And you see those big cases, and they're meant to tell people to look, the SEC is out there, they're looking to enforce, don't go sideways, you know, with the law don't even try and go up to the edge.
I mean, look, you know, they can even ultimately, and I know it's DOJ but you know, take down Martha Stewart. So, you know, I mean, you could do insider trading and Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart gets interesting.
Yeah, it's an insider trading, those are tough cases, the fascinating things about those from when no matter what side you're on, but if you're in the SEC, it's like a puzzle, you try and put pieces of the puzzle together, you may see that there was a lot of trading before a big announcement and the stock rose as a result of the announcement or the event, whatever it may have been, maybe there was the announcement of a merger with another company. And then you take a look at okay, who you know, what was going on with the trading? Why was there all this trading the day before the announcement, and then you try and look at who is trading and then try and figure out how they may or may not have known something, you know, look at phone records, calendars, relationships. And so they are fascinating cases. And there, there are so many of them that just have amazing facts. I mean, fascinating fact patterns, really on how people may have gotten the information. I mean, the bottom line now is today, two things are so sophisticated. There are so many ways to determine how information flowed and where money's flowed that and communications, that, that there are a lot of ways to catch folks.
So a little unrelated to that. But I mean, and I just read another article this morning. So you go back and, and Gamestop basically seems to get manipulated through social media and goes through the roof. And now apparently Bed Bath and Beyond as something similar that's going on? How does that tie into things? And I mean, you know, without getting into a legal opinion, but that effect of social media sort of playing with the market? What are your thoughts on that?
It is, and it was actually in the SES study that just came out recently on that. And, you know, the, what, what the SEC and others were looking for is Was this some type of, you know, group effort, some type of mass manipulation that was spearheaded and the group move. But you know, they're what you have now, as you have a lot more retail investors in the market, because of, because of broker-dealers like Robin Hood and others, you have people who never traded before in the market. And they're also out there on these blogs talking about things and talking about concepts and they're moving, they are moving the stocks. And but it's not necessarily illegal, it could be if it's an organized effort to do that, to manipulate the stock, but it's difficult, it's difficult to know whether that's the case, but if it was, and if there were people that were at spearheading that, that would be illegal if that could be shown that it was happening. The other concept you have you're not to get too technical is you have what's called a lot of short-sellers out there on these stocks. And what happens is, if a stock price starts going up, there's a short squeeze, which means that the short sell was the people who sold the stock and don't own it are saying and their goal is to b
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. That phrase Shakespeare wrote back in the 15th century that was uttered by Dick the butcher to raucous laughter and applause, which today still people kind of go…. not a bad idea. Although one of the things I love about it now this show is getting a little bit of traction, I get all these calls from lawyers saying “you know, that was actually a flattering thing”. I think today, they still might laugh and think killing all lawyers is a good start. I'm David Heffernan and I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for the past 30 years now, which is scary to think about.
The goal behind these shows is to bring in lawyers from varying walks of life and fields of practice, and talk about different areas of law, get to know some of these lawyers a little bit, and maybe one by one, we'll just start checking a few of these people off of the kill list. And my guest this morning, and I'm just absolutely thrilled to have because we had dinner with a lot of our classmates last night from 1991, graduating class at UVM Law School, which is where I met this gentleman. We've been friends for 30 years, one of my best friends, and one of the top maritime and Admiralty lawyers in the country. Chip Birthisel.
Thanks, Dave, that's awfully nice stuff to say. And I wouldn't come on before because I didn't want to be killed.
Well, the goal here today is maybe we get you moved off that list, one at a time. So, one of the things that I think is fascinating about you, and I want to get into what maritime and Admiralty law is, and everything else, and again, that's, we could spend a week talking about it. But one of the things I think is amazing about you is your story. And I and I want to go back, I want to go way back to a 17-year-old kid that wasn't quite sure where he was going in life. Was he going to be a dropout surfer? What was he going to do and, and made a pretty critical decision? So, talk about the decision you made at 17. And then I want to talk about the benefits that came out of that.
Well, it's kind of funny, I at 17, I was dropped out of high school. I didn't see myself really going anywhere. My parents, I was fifth-generation Floridian my parents made the mistake to move me to Fort Worth, Texas, which was a long way from the coast that was a young surfer kid who lived up in Cocoa Beach, Florida. So, we went out to Texas, I didn't like it a whole lot, I figured the best way to get out of there would be to join the service. So, I joined the Coast Guard, which actually got me a wide goal to go to California and surf and get around the country. Every place there was a coast and surf. And so that's how I've gotten
out now at least we know the motivation was I'll join somewhere where I can go surf. That was
part of it. The other part of it was that the drummer for my band that I had back then in Texas, we broke up, he went back to Florida because he had some family issues. And so, the band broke up and I had to go and get a real job.
All right, well, we're going to look at a long-storied career with the Coast Guard. But one of the things I think is amazing is the way you took advantage of the opportunities. So, you're a near high school dropout. But while you're in the Coast Guard, you're afforded the opportunity to get an undergraduate degree.
Yeah, you know, I got to tell you back then it was a, I joined I wanted to boot I went to boot camp in January of 1975. It's a different world back then entirely. The military was a was a land of opportunity. I went in as a high school dropout made rate as fast as I possibly could move up, you know, enlisted ranks as fast as I possibly could. So, I started out as an E one. And then I retired 21 years later, as a lieutenant commander with a law degree. So, during that time that I was in, I was able to finish high school number one. Number two, went to University of San Francisco and got an undergraduate degree at night on the VA, then went to Johns Hopkins and got a master's degree at night on the VA when I was stationed in Washington. And then the Coast Guard selected me for the law program, after I served on a fast patrol boat out of Miami. And, and I went to Miami and that's where we met.
That's where we met, and I can't believe it's 30 years ago. But was nice to have dinner with a bunch of the boys last night we are blessed to have a core of friends that go back that long. And I mean, we do it, you're nice enough to come in from Tampa. But we have dinners every three months or so. And it's just it's amazing to see those guys.
It really is. It's hard to believe it's probably harder for you guys to believe 3030 years have passed than it is for me. I'm a bit I was the oldest guy out of the bunch. And so, I feel it a little more every morning. You guys do, but no, it is outstanding.
Alright, so let's talk about that. So, the Coast Guard gives you an opportunity to get an incredible education. When you finish law school, what was your commitment then? Because then you go to naval justice, right?
I did the commitment out of law school was five years. In fact, I had some people kind of fight me when I went in, that I didn't have more time than that coming out of law school to serve in the Coast Guard. Because I only served the five-year commitment before I retired because I decided I wanted to retire at 38. So, I served in a capacity, as you knew, litigating and basically defending kids that were Why say kids, Coast Guard people, I was stationed with a Navy, I've defended Coast Guard, Navy, and Marine Corps officers and then listed people at courts-martial, a whole bunch of them, like hundreds over the years. I also prosecuted some of those. Then I went and I was the Coast Guard's designated lawyer at justice at the Admiralty and aviation litigation section in Washington, which traveled around the country basically, on the east coast. There's one on the West Coast as well, but traveling on the east coast and the Gulf Coast doing cases for the United States, typically, oil spill cases and defending the United States where they're being sued for personal injury, wrongful death, that sort of thing. Usually, the Coast Guard would, you know, if somebody died in a rescue or whatever, they would sue us, right? So, you know, I did that for a couple of years, and it was a perfect opportunity to go ahead and, and head out. So, I retired back in 19. I've been retired for 25 years now.
More importantly, during that time of prosecuting and defending Did you ever get a general on the stand and say, I want the truth? It's not quite glamorous.
So tremendous opportunities, you retire a full commission Lieutenant Commander at the ripe old age of 38. And now set up and run your firm which you're one of the founding partners of Hamilton-Miller and Bertha so let's talk about now transitioning from a sort of the military into now the real world and as I said in the intro, it's maritime and Admiralty. So, what does that mean?
Admiralty is a body of law that deals with ships and shipping. Primarily, maritime is a broader concept it can also involve environmental and, and a variety of other things that just have to do with the water. So, by the time I retired from the Coast Guard between one of the things I didn't mention in there is that when I was operational in the Coast Guard, you can't just typically go be a lawyer, at least you couldn't back then you can kind of now. But you had to transfer in and out of operational commands, which meant, in my day, since I wasn't an aviator, that you had to drive ships, which is fun. I mean, so I got to drive ships for years. big ships, little ships, not aircraft carrier writings, but you know, the Atari 200 foot 200 plus and 373 178 foot destroyer, escort class vessels, and that sort of thing. So, so I got to really, I grew up on boats as a kid. And then I did the Coast Guard thing for 21 years. So, it was almost like I was training my whole life to become if I was going to be a lawyer to become a maritime lawyer, right? And that's kind of where I ended up. And it really has helped most of the people that I have associated within my firm that I have had responsibility for hiring have had prior experience my friend, Jules Massey, who's my partner over in Tampa, he was a fort Schuyler graduate at the maritime Academy in New York. Sail professionally for years. We've got you to know, various licensed captains that work for us on pleasure craft, we got various my partner, Jennifer Siebold, has been on boats our whole life over in Cortez. So it kind of enabled me to form my own world of people that really knew the point in from the square into the round and if you will and practice the law with a firm understanding in the Admiralty and the maritime realm of what is going on the water.
Well and in your practice, I mean, you do lots of consulting work and everything else. With shipping companies and you and I were kinds of chatting coming over here. You know, other than then sort of the advancement of ships getting bigger and maybe faster and everything else, the world still relies on shipping to move everything around the world. We're now in a position where the supply chain has now become a household word, because people go, What can't get anything? Oh, its supply chain, you know, what does that mean? Well, it means there are 100 cargo ships, and we can't get them unloaded, and everything's jammed. So, talk about the kind of just what that encompasses when you start working in that because it's, you're talking about countries around the world. I mean, you know, international trade back and forth with everything. So, what's the type of work you do? And who are your clients?
Well, that's funny, because I have a real general maritime practice, meaning I do a lot of work, defense work for marine insurers who assigned me to defend people, if you have an incident here on in Biscayne Bay, for
Welcome back to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan, I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for nearly three decades. And the thought behind this show is that quoted Shakespeare line from the 15th century, which drew a lot of chuckles when it was issued, still rubs true today, sometimes you bring it up, and people have got their images of lawyers and whatnot. And so, the goal here is to talk to Donald has been local lawyers, we're going to have a little fun today we're branching out beyond South Florida. But to bring you a fantastic lawyer, a very good friend of mine, and probably just a better human being. But clearly, one we're going to be able to take off the kill list was all when all is said and done. Let me bring in Martin Rubenstein, who is the managing partner of Levy, Balldante Finney & Rubenstein in Philadelphia.
Good morning, great catching up with you, brother, you know that it's, it's always fun. So, if this is an excuse to catch up, we're going to do it. So, let's talk a little bit about first just out of curiosity, you going to law school? What was behind that? Was this a family thing? Was this something you always wanted to do? What drew you into the law?
So, I actually had always thought about the law. I think that my father who passed away last year had a gift of subtly delivering messages to his kids. And he did that with me. So, I'll give him a lot of credit for that. And then when I was in high school, I was at best a mediocre student, mainly, I just had an interest in other things. I think we all know about that stage of life. You know, on the preset. I was a senior, and I had a homeroom teacher, which means that's the person who just makes sure you're showing up, right? She was cut truthfully, she was kind of a floozy, everybody knew it, that that's the way she was. She came up to me one day in class and said, hey, guess what? You're on my speech and debate team. I said, really, like since when she said, since right now I just looked at your grades, you need it. So, she immediately you know, guilted and intimidated me. And the first thing that she asked me to do was to write a persuasive paper. This is 1974, okay. And it was about the Arab-Israeli conflict. She gave me a book, and she and this is on the heels of the Six-Day War from that lady. She gives me a book and she says, and by the way, you know, I'm Jewish, she says, you'll take the Arab side. And, you know, I really, like what are you kidding me, and she said, in her comment was the other side's too easy, you're going to take the Arab side, so kind of forced me to be an advocate for something, maybe I didn't believe it. And I really felt that was like a major moment for me, like, going through that. And I stayed with her. And I was not a particularly good speaker at that point in my life and she had me going to these speech tournaments, we'd have to speak for 15 minutes in front of these judges. So it was a wonderful experience, and coupled with my, you know, my father's not so subtle, you know, suggestions to me, that's kind of what led to it, I always want to, unlike you, Dave, and I know this about you, because you and I've done this together for 17 years, you and I always have tried to help those who need it. Usually, it's the end, it's always the individuals, it's the little guys, and, and taking on the bigger people has always just made it more fun,
hotter percent, and we're going to leave into that. So. So you've been doing that taking on the big guy and representing that individual for close to 40 years in Philadelphia, and Mass Torts and nationwide. So, let's talk a little bit about your practice. Because I'd like to talk today about mass torts. And I know that's been a big emphasis, your practice is what draw it got you and I connected. And, and the beauty of that is, you know, you make these relationships through litigation, and then you look at, you know, 17 years or whatever it's been, you know, still very close friends. As a result of that, so, so let's go back a little bit, um, mass torts. A lot of people, you know, they think, Oh, well, it's class action. Well, it's a separate animal. So what is a mass tort?
So basically, there are many situations that occur, where there's one particular problem or one particular defect or one particular type of behavior that injures 1000s and 1000s of people. I mean, just for current examples, a medication or a medical device that was just recalled two months ago, made by Philips called the C pap machines. Well, they recalled all these machines dating back 2009 particularly Models because they contain a certain plastic that can be carcinogenic. So, all these people who've been using it now we're now looking at their medical histories and realizing Well, I have some of that is that related? Well, there are 1000s and 1000s of people who purchased it. So, two things will happen. One is, many of those people will come and hire you or me or lawyers like us. And we represent those people individually. We are part of a mass tort, meaning there may be hundreds of lawyers around the country who represent these people. But each of these people has an individual lawyer. The class action, which is also taking place with Phillips is that a group of lawyers will try to take the lead and say, well, there's a lot of issues that will come up and every single one of these cases, we're going to take the lead and file a class action and ask the court to say that we can represent everybody in the country. So, there's somewhat of a conflict there, do these few lawyers get to represent everybody? Or do these other guys like Dave Heffernan and Marty Rubenstein get to represent everybody. And as it works out, there's usually a combination, we work together, there's benefits to the class action, and there's bet and there's the need for people to be represented individually attained at the supreme court does not like class action settlements, where people have been injured, because they worried that if they approve a class action settlement, and people continue to be injured, or the money will be gone, and later victims whenever we get, you know, never get compensated.
Well, and that's, that's one of the criticisms I think that you hear, particularly with class actions. Because so many times there's class actions that are really lawyer driven. And at the end of the day, what you see is lawyers making a whole bunch of money, and the relief that goes to the quote unquote victims is a coupon or something here. So, you know, one of the things with mass torts and and you're, you're generally dealing with pretty significant injuries, okay. And, and you and I went back, and that's how we met. And there's a lot that goes on in Philadelphia, because you got a lot of pharmaceutical companies there. So, you got to you got to reach out and connect with a Philadelphia lawyer, which, which we did back then. And so let's just kind of talk about how that works from the pharmaceutical and how would a mass tort start? And how does that work out where, you know, again, lawyers can level the playing field because of one on one, if we want to take on, you know, a major pharmaceutical company, it's nearly impossible?
Well, I think you have to start with two pieces. One is financial, the cost of litigating against pharmaceutical companies. And then second are that along with that are the resources to people. So just as an example, the last case that was tried, and I'll say round up, the legal cost of trying that case was not in the hundreds of 1000s of dollars, it was over a million dollars, right. And, as we both know, personal injury litigation, we represent people who've been injured, if it's a serious case, they're not working, they may have no income, they may have no assets. You know, though, when people are injured, it can be anybody from any walk of life. So lawyers like you and I, and our firms, we need to we need to finance those cases, we literally need to underwrite the substantial costs of it. Well, no matter how successful you know we are, we're not going to quite match up with the trillion dollar pharmaceutical company like not we're on our way but when hundreds of firms around the country a lie together, we share that common expense of putting the case together. And there's two levels to it. One is fake, you know, when there's a product that's been recalled off the market, we still have to prove what's wrong with that product, the laws in each state are a little different, we have to prove it's defective either and the way it's made, the way it's designed or the warnings about it, so that you know the doctors can't necessarily prescribe it safely. And then there's of course, the individuals, each individual has his own his or her own story about how they've been injured, what they've gone through, and they need individual attention. So, when we combine together, all of a sudden it's not David and Goliath. You know, it's the pharmaceutical companies would like you to believe that groups like us are bigger than that, which is a miracle. But um, but it does level it. It we have, we certainly have enough resources and talent around the country. And we work together so that we can put together a very strong case where it where it needs to be, needs to be advanced for these people. And we do it all the time.
And then and that resource. I mean, it's also not just the financial. But again, the resources because what you're talking about in pharmaceutical litigation is millions upon millions of pages of documents. And so to be able to create depositories to share paralegals that are reviewing and collating all of that, so that it's workable for the lawyers is critical as well. I mean, firms have to be able to work together to do this. No
question. One of the interesting things for me, and it's kind of a good segue for how you and I met, is that in these ma
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan. I've been practicing personal injury law here in Miami in South Florida for nearly three decades. The phrase, first off, let's kill all the lawyers is from 15th century Shakespeare play, drew a lot of laughs at the time, it's debatable on what it was actually supposed to mean. But the thought behind this show was, maybe let's not kill all of them. Let's take some South Florida lawyers, let's shine some spotlights on them. Let's talk about some trending topics in law. And maybe one by one, we can take them off the list. My guest this morning should be very easy to get off the list. When I say new member of the Florida Bar, we're talking about in the last 72 hours.
Yeah, as of Monday at 11:30am. Alright, but who'skeeping score? What happened on Monday is this young man, who is my law partners son, passed the Florida Bar and got those results just 72 hours ago. We're going to talk about that, because it's no small feat. But first off, congratulations, and welcome to the bar.
No, thank you. I really appreciate it. And thank you for having me on here today, of course,
And you're going to realize now you get into the practice of law that Yeah, most people do want to kill all the lawyers. So, we're going to see what we can do to dispel some of that, but, but let's talk about passing the bar, we'll talk about present and then we'll work backwards and kind of go forward, passing the bar, because it's pretty surprising. Of 3343 people that sat for the bar back in July 27 2014 - 183, passed a 44% pass rate. So, no small feat in in in passing the bar, How's that feel?
It feels great. It was a culmination of a lot of hard work, a rough summer, but after everything's, you know, fell through it all worked out in the end.
Excellent, excellent. So, while it's a gruesome rate, I will put this out there that the University of Miami School of Law, the Dean went and I'm an adjunct faculty did have an 82% pass rate, which actually was up significantly. So, talk a little bit about Dean, we're going to talk about what you did in law school, but this was now totally online. I mean, it's a thing, you know, annually, people hit the convention center in Tampa, big thing, what were the thoughts of, of taking it online.
So, my initial concerns, and I think a lot of my peers also had that same concern of when you're taking it in the Tampa test center, from what you hear, there's not a lot of things that are outside of your own control. So, if you're in the Tampa test center, and someone's rattling their pen, or clicking their pen or pencil, you're hearing all of that, but so is everybody else in the room. Now, when you're taking it online, depending on where you take it, you could be taken up by a busy intersection with fire trucks coming back and forth. Your fire alarm in your building can go off. And I know that's what actually happened at the NYU School of Law. They rented out rooms, right? Yeah, they rented out rooms to all their test takers who didn't have a place to take it, and they had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the exam. So, I feel like taking it online, that was a lot of nervous. nerve racking for a lot of different people just because there were so many factors that were probably outside of your own control.
Yeah, it's interesting and I think they'll probably delve into that. And hopefully we're, we're moving past things that we get back to take it into person, but I talked briefly to my daughter about this because she's working on her master's. And she goes, the odd thing is you're sitting taking the test and you've got yourself in the screen up there. You know, somebody is watching you the whole time, right? It's not like a teacher just wandering up and down the hallway. So she goes, it's kind of an odd feeling. But let's go back a little bit. Okay. Obviously, your dad's a lawyer. Yeah, we'll say nice things about him. Your dad and I are law partners. I love practicing with your dad. I think he's a phenomenal, phenomenal lawyer. What is it, that got you into thinking about going to law school?
So, like every kid growing up, loved sports, and wanted to find a way to be involved in sports. So, growing up, I was like, I'm definitely not good enough to play any sports. So let me try to find the next best thing, which was a sports agent. So that was my dream, kind of when I initially started on this path, that's obviously changed later on. But when I started this path, my whole dream was to be a sports agent. So, I went to the University of Texas, I got my degree in sport management. And then I realized probably after my first year at Texas that going down this path is not really one that is all as glamorous as it turns out to be. Obviously there are a ton of successful people in the industry and in that specific field, but I realized that wasn't really where I wanted to dedicate myself and go down this path. So I knew at that point, that I still wanted to be a lawyer and go to law school and get my law degree but find a different path and it wasn't really until I started working in law school figuring out where that path exactly was going to take me. That's interesting and it was funny because you know when I got out of you I'm and then I bounced around the NFL went to law school people like, oh, you're going to be an agent, this and that. And, and I think, and we'll get off on a tangent just quickly. The whole concept of agent makes no sense to me. Why everything structured in the NFL, right? Why are you automatically getting a percentage of money of something that that guy could walk in and say, look, I'm the fourth pick the fifth round, I want what the fourth peg in the fifth round got last year, and they would go here. So I've never figured out and you know, to me, athletes should just go hire a lawyer and negotiate that first contract, hire a PR person hire somebody else that aren't all related to each other but that's a whole different issue on agents. So you get shifted and what shifts in law school what all of a sudden piqued your interest.
I actually clerked with you guys for a few months prior to the pandemic. And that's when I kind of got into working more plaintiffs work for personal injury and medical malpractice with you guys and I really just enjoyed that field more than a lot of the other ones I had done some insurance defense work prior to that and I thought just being on the plaintiff side was a lot more engaging, a lot more rewarding and being able to communicate with your clients a lot more and one on one and really going out of your way to try to help people so to me that's what made that that shift to want to stay on the plaintiff side and continue working plaintiffs side
Alright, excellent. We're going to talk about that but let's talk about law school because you go from UT in one of my favorite cities, and you come to Miami and when you start in law school, the world still normal, right? Right. So when did you start and then just talk a little bit about that shift and kind of how you other students schools had to adapt I mean it's a whole different universe, you know, your university setting you're going in, you're with colleagues, you know, there's always brainstorming before and after classes and now all of a sudden, you guys are in your bedroom somewhere in your kitchen, going to school.
Right? Absolutely. So fortunately I was able to be there for a year and a half before the pandemic hit so that first year and a year and a half I guess was really beneficial because as we'll get into a little bit later learning and trying to do law school online is pretty difficult and fortunately my first year I was able to have that in person experience and that first year is so huge on trying to learn all the concepts and figuring out your best way to study and collaborative efforts like you said so I was lucky enough to have that my first year and then right we were on spring break in the middle of my two year and we start seeing all this COVID stuff start to pop up and my friends and I are talking being like there's no way we're going to you know go back to school u M was one of the later schools to announce it a lot of other schools in the country have already said you know, two weeks off don't come back from spring break and then all of a sudden with two or three days left on spring break we get an email saying you know we're going to delay coming back two more weeks until this COVID stuff dies down. So we'll be online for two weeks and then be prepared to come back in person and obviously as we all know that didn't end up happening at all we're getting right so we were forced to be online that remaining semester and then it was just a completely different experience you really don't get that same feel for being in an environment I think a lot of the professor's were also you know, understanding of the circumstances so you lose the whole element of being cold called and you know, having to make sure all your cases were read to a tee before class so you don't get embarrassed and you went from being in the classroom and speaking every day and being cold call to now you could just as easily have your camera off in a lecture and you know, be walking around your house doing nothing with the camera playing in the background, and then just two weeks before the final cram and, and do what needs to be done.
So how did how did you and others if you've talked others, sort of find the way to be able to kind of refocus, because you're right. I mean, you know, if you may not want to go to class, but you stumble into an 830 class or lecture or whatnot. You know, you better be ready. I mean, that's part of the whole Socratic method of being able to do that. And I mean, we went you know, in litigation skills went to online and it's just it's different. I mean, it's a little easier for me because I only had eight students at a time,
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. That phrase was written by Shakespeare back in the 15th century that drew raucous applause and laughter when it was uttered. And even today still does. As people contemplate, it's not a bad idea to kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan, I've been practicing law here in South Florida for about three decades. The goal behind these broadcasts is quite simple. Bring in local lawyers in varying aspects of law, get to know a little bit about them, why they got into law, what they did, and maybe just maybe, by the end of the show, we can take one off the list to save that lawyer. This morning, I have the pleasure of having not only a really good lawyer, but a good friend and possibly one of the nicest human beings I've ever known. Jeff Rubin joins me and, Jeff, you've been doing this a long time local guy, we got a lot to talk about. But let's just start off with how did you wind up becoming a lawyer?
It's probably a family thing. The name of the law firm is Talianoff Rubin and Rubin. Talianoff is my maternal grandfather. And my maternal grandfather and my father actually practice law together back in the 60s and 70s. Having the family aspect of it, and then, you know, so sort of predestined that I would become a lawyer, enjoyed law school and went to Miami, loved it back in the back in the 80s, and graduated in 89. And then soon after that, my grandfather was thinking about retiring, so it was an opportunity to join the firm. And then eventually, the firm name became Talianoff, Rubin and Rubin. So, it's a family tradition. For about three years, we actually had three generations walking in the office.
Let's talk about what they founded and then what type of law were they doing when they first started?
My grandfather was really in the collection business, he did a lot of retail and commercial collection was very involved in local community organizations and collection agencies throughout the country. And he started something called the commercial law League of America. And that was the aspects of his types of law, he did lead to some probate and some wills and things like that. And then my father was a worker's compensation lawyer. So needless to say, I learned a lot from them, and, and became a collection lawyer and also a workers compensation lawyer, as well as some general practice.
All right, and we're going to delve into that sort of pressure that that's the family lineage, was there ever a thought of doing something else?
Gosh, I guess I look back, I would have probably been like a sailing coach or doing another passion or, or something like that. But, you know, when we went to law school, we went to undergraduate school, David, you know, it was you go to undergraduate school, and then you go right into a profession, but that is, are you going to get your masters you get a professional degree? And that really is not the way it works? I think today, right? I'm finding at least with my son, he went, got an undergraduate degree, worked for a while, and then realize what he needed to get a master's. So I think, for me, it was just something that I thought was a good thing to do. I wasn't interested in the other professions, there were really no business aspects in my family of things that I got turned on to. So it was sort of a natural fit. Well, and you're right, I do see that now. My daughter, for example, has been out in the workforce for a while graduated from Florida State is now going back to get her master's. Yeah. And I think it actually makes more sense unless you really know what you want to do. I think having some real-world experience, and then going back and go, Okay, how will this benefit me? Because I think a lot of times you got to analyze now, okay, does this further education, and I'm very pro-education. But sometimes I think, you know, people would go from undergrad to some sort of graduate program, just because to continue to become a student. Yeah, that's not necessary. Okay. This MBA may not help me in what I'm ultimately going to do.
My son and I had the same conversation. He's now worked for four years now to get his master's in securities and technology and securities up at Georgetown. And he did not he would have never gone into that program without the four years of experience that he has, right working. Well, I had a gap in there. I did. I got drafted in the NFL. Yeah, I bounced around and played hard knocks before they actually videoed it. You know, I got a lot of hate coach once you bring your playbook multiple times as I bounced around and actually my undergraduate degree was in communications. And so I came back and I was going to, it's going to work and television and radio and all that until the reality sort of set in that to stay in a TV market. And I'd spent the last four and a half years packing my cart moving from NFL city to NFL city. And I said, Yeah, I don't want to do it. And so I wasn't sure what I was going to do when I went to law school. And then much like you, I actually enjoyed law school and have been out of school for a while, and now really applying myself found it fascinating and then got into litigation, and there are so many parallels, right, you know, between athletics and history. That's right. So, well, let's talk about worker's compensation because it's a thing that happens so much, but I don't think people really understand it. And so, you know, it's a legislative scheme. That's sort of a tradeoff to say, Alright, you can't sue your employer for negligence unless literally, they damn near murder you. Right, because it's a hard exception to get by. But talk about what workers comp means when somebody gets hurt. Are they entitled to and how does that work?
Well, I tell clients, it comes down to two different parts, and you break it up into two aspects. You're right if you are hurt while working. And even if your employer or a co-employee was negligent, causing your injury, you cannot sue your employer, right? That's the exception. And that's for the for your ability to receive Workers Compensation benefits. So, it's a no-fault law. So even if you're a chef, and you cut off your own finger, while cutting some potatoes, you're going to receive Workers Compensation benefits. So it's two aspects, you have the medical aspect, you have the right to receive medical care, while you're, you know, treating and recovering and trying to get better. And as long as the doctor is treating you when you have not reached what we call maximum medical improvement, you're getting better, right? You would get that treatment, but you'd also have a right to receive Workers Compensation benefits, workers compensation benefits would pay you roughly two thirds, or let's say, 60% of your average weekly earnings, while you're recovering, while you're getting better, so that you have a chance to get better get treatment, and at the same time receive payments, at least some income coming in. So because you're not able to work during that time period. All right, and how long can that go on? Great question, you know, you know, in a perfect world, I would not have a job and workers compensation insurance company would be doing everything right.
Where you're telling the insurance company, don't do the right thing. There's a shocking revelation here today that sometimes the insurance companies don't do the right. That's why he called me on the show because you wanted me to teach you something I did. Because, frankly, you know, in all my personal injury cases, yeah, the insurance companies are always fair. And you know, they just do the right thing. It's not like we ever have to file suit and take them to the courthouse or anything like that.
No, not at all. So you know, they're obviously, very adjusters are very overwhelmed, and things get missed, but they take certain positions. And so in that case, I have a job because my responsibility is to make sure that those medical benefits come in, make sure that they're paying them the right amount of money, and they're receiving all of the other benefits under the worker's compensation, law, mileage, transportation, medication, a wheelchair, whatever, they may need anything from any medical the aspect that they would need. And then, of course, that those benefits last, in most cases, until the employee reaches maximum medical improvement, that's a medical legal term, when there's no reasonable chance that you're going to get any better you sort of plateau in your care, right? At that point, the medical bent, I'm sorry, the medical benefits would continue on a PRN or as the needed basis, but the workers comp benefits for that, you know, not so catastrophic injury would stop. Now, if you have a catastrophic injury, then benefits perhaps could continue beyond that, if you prove what the employees what they call permanently and totally disabled.
And that's what I was going to ask so you get to MMI maximum medical improvement. Yep. But what if you can't go back to do what you were doing? In other words, MMI, as you just point out, doesn't mean you're back to where you were, it just means you're kind of as good as you're going to get based on that injury. And oftentimes, that leaves people in a lesser position with lesser ability. And so what do they do, then? Well,
you know, there's a, there's a tough line, you have to draw, and when somebody is personally totally disabled, they have to be pretty catastrophic, because that's, you know, basically, I can't work for the rest of my life. And shorts, companies have a very, employees actually have a very strict standard they would have to prove, you'd have to prove you have the inability to get a job within a 50 mile radius of your, of your, of where you live. And you have to have a, you know, job search, unsuccessful job search for a very significant amount of time. And you have to really be able to show to the judge, that you would no
Welcome to another episode of First off, Let's kill all the lawyers. That 15th century Shakespeare phrase that drew raucous laughter at the time and, and even today, when you bring it up, people think it's not a bad idea, maybe we can start wiping them all out one by one. I'm David Heffernan, and I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for the last three decades. My goal behind this show is just simply to bring in friends of mine, other local lawyers, South Florida lawyers in varying aspects of the law, and to talk about different aspects of the law that have an impact on all of us. And this morning, I've got the great pleasure of bringing in not only real, good lawyer, but a very, very good friend of mine, a classmate of mine. So, I've known him for a long, long time. And, by the way, one of the smartest guys I happen to know, this morning, let me introduce you to J. Will Morris. There you go. See? Hey, that's how you are just looking around. Play right now. Oh, that's what I tell you to say. Exactly. But I wanted to make sure I read it right. So, Will and I go way back to graduating from law school. What meaning 1991? So, let's talk a little bit about you, and why did you go to law school? And then I want to kind of go through your journey, because it's been interesting because you've gone huge firm, right to what you do now and covered all that basement. But what was the interest in law for you?
Well, I was I tell people all the time, I never really had a choice. I mean, ever since I was four and five years old. That's what I was always told I was going to be. So, we'll be what it is. For example, I was born in South America place called Ghana. And I was born as a British subject, so to speak. And you know, and I spent some time in London, and not only doing some studying, but also working as a lawyer. When I went back home, when people asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was more nobody was impressed. Everybody was like, okay. Give me $100. So, yeah, I mean, now, it was not a choice for me. And, yeah, we went to law school because we started in 88. Yeah, I got out of 91. And I went to, from law school, when I went to New York, and practice this large firm called Baker McKenzie.
So let's, let's talk about that. Because, obviously, you had decisions to make coming out and you went, I had a big firm, I remember about as big as you can go. You went to New York world at the time. Yeah. You went to New York GOT licensed in New York. And tell me about the practice in the in a firm, and how big was Baker McKenzie at that time?
Well, if I remember correctly, at the time, it had I think about 1700 lawyers close to 2000 rolls around 50 something different countries in the world. And so, it was humongous in the typical, it was a matter of it wasn't a typical big firm experience for me, because I was the only person it was the last person, they hired in the litigation department. And so, I can't wait. As soon as I got bored. I was arguing cases. And my first case is in the bankruptcy court within a year, you know? Yeah, I was doing depositions and all kinds of cool stuff, which my, you know, the other lawyers in big firms in New York. I mean, young lawyers didn't get that opportunity. I got a great story for you guys out this is how full of it I was. I mean, everyone has one time we go to this hearing in federal court in New York. And you know, how those big firms Go to hearings, they go five and six, do you have the right? The partner, the senior partner, you have me all the way at the end, and we're sitting there at the table and they're arguing and they're going forward. And the other side of me was waiting for cases, I'm with some other big firm like that. And they have the same sort of setup. And, and the judge asked the question, everybody's stumbling around the answer. Just turns out that I was wanting to research that issue and wrote that part of the memo. And I spoke up I spoke up in the middle of this, you can see all the heads are swivel all at once. Who is that person? Is he with us? I got my butt chewed for that. But I said Look, I knew the answer. What do you want me to do?
I was loving with big firms like that though, because I did some pharmaceutical litigation in the past and they would hire great local counsel but then there'd be a hearing and they'd come in and again Yeah, it's like lining up against Family Feud. You know, there's the guy and by the way, the local guy knows more than any of them you have flown in for a hearing. And I love it because it offline from New York and you know, we get a nice favorable rolling be okay, you guys have a nice flight back tomorrow Do you do big pharma and then and then what draws you back to Miami?
Um, I was sort of a personal family thing. My son who was born when I was still in law school, took him to New York and, and he could not take the winner, the first one and he spent weeks in the hospital the second winner, he spent a couple of days in the hospital and before the third when I got there, his mom said, Nope, not happening, run back to Florida. He was born here in Florida. And I stayed in New York for another year. And then I after a while, I said, You know what, I need to be around my son. So, I left no plans to continue practicing law. It's just like, I knocked around for almost a year not doing anything. And great job karate, you know him another friend, I was working with Tom to the time and, and said this, this, you know, this lawyer from New York, where I went to school with this is not going around
doing anything once you come to bring him in for an interview. I go into an interview because you know, john requested I do that. And I said, I don't care. I mean, hire me. You don't i don't care. Or pressure-free interview. If you want. I was bartending, do all kinds of stupid, fun stuff. And then they were like, okay, fine, we'll hire you. And like they say the rest is history. I went from that town to firm to another boutique, litigation firm. And I'm not going to get into the story why I left them but I just left it one day, so they don't I quit and I got up the next day started my own firm that was in 1999.
And been doing it since then. It's more illegal
for me doing it since Well, it was there were some mutations or that it started off with William J. Morris, Pa. And then went to Morris department with Morris DuPont and I went to Morris barrel now it's just Morris legal. Practice with people you like now, right? Yesterday, yesterday, I lost the hearing that I felt I should have won. And I you know how debilitating that can be at times. And I sat there for about half an hour. And then I realized 10 o'clock and I quit. I got up and left. So, I call my buddy David Howard. I said You know what? I got fired. Did you get fired? Yeah, I got fired. I quit because my bosses real 801 didn't curse him out. I just decided to quit. I took the rest of the day off. And it was refreshing. And here I am. Right. Good. You have to lick your wounds to come back. You know,
it is a profession where Yeah, you certainly can't win them all. And yeah, the most devastating, I think is those that, you know, you think absolutely should have. And I mean, its what appellate courts are for and you know, just try to do the right thing, but can't say that we always agree with them.
I know. They can't just come at me from left field didn't see that coming? That Wow. Okay. All right, let's
let's talk about your practice. Because it sort of evolved and you focused a lot on consumer law. Yeah, I think I think with that, there's a lot of things, the effect of the pandemic and everything else. So, let's talk a little bit about that. You know, what happens,
I was fortunate enough that I saw the handwriting on the wall back in 2008, what was happening at the advent of the foreclosure, boom, and I got in love with that. And they started doing foreclosure defense had a huge amount of employees and a huge amount of clients. And when that dried up, and that sort of like led to mutations of the firm that dried up and, and here I am back to where essentially almost where I started before but liked it better. So I think at the beginning of the pandemic when things started shutting down, and I started thinking, Wait a minute, this might be again, only a lawyer can say this, I mean, there's going to be another boom of foreclosures, right. Then now and back in 2008 was, even though the banks were being bailed out, they weren't necessary for 2008. And given money from the federal government, they weren't necessarily passing that down on to the homeowners and homeowners are still out of jobs, and homeowners are still not being able to afford their rent. I mean, the mortgages and so foreclosures are, you know, were the thing of the day, the pandemic was a little bit different because I don't see that same sort of a boom to the foreclosure market. Because I think because not only was everybody getting bailed out by the banks, by the by the government but everybody was put in a holding pattern. I don't know what's going to happen in the next year or so. But I don't. I mean, there's a lot of people who've gotten different mortgage payments and people haven't paid their mortgages since the beginning of the pandemic. I don't necessarily know what's going to happen once those deferments stop. I mean, certainly, the economy looks as though it's not as bad as it was in 2000. It certainly was always bouncing back. And certainly, there's a whole bunch of jobs available, and dependently listened to argue for those jobs. But so, it's not really an economic crisis. Now, it's not going to be just a crisis, whether or not the banks are going to say, you know, what, for the year or change in which we deferred your mortgage payment, we're just going to tack it on to the end. And that's a deal, you know, you need to come up with a 50 $60,000 to bring your mortgage, more current, I
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. It's that 15 century phrase that Shakespeare wrote and was uttered by Dick the butcher, and drew raucous laughs even though there's a debate as to what the line meant. And line, it still makes people laugh today, when we say first off, let's kill all the lawyers. So, I'm David Heffernan. I've been a personal injury lawyer here in Miami for nearly three decades. And the goal behind this is to introduce you to other local lawyers and talk about various aspects of the law and maybe one by one, start to take a few lawyers off of that kill list. My guest this morning is a good friend, an avid cyclist, who I rarely see in clothes like this. And an excellent lawyer, Karen Jordan, and Karen. Welcome. Good morning, David. Good morning. Alright, so let's talk about you because when we talk about local lawyers, you're about as local as it gets, okay. You grew up down here. And then you go to Miami Dade, and then to F IU and then to St. Thomas. That is correct. But there's a gap in there. So let's talk about that. Because before you were a lawyer, you had another life.
I did. Before I was an attorney. I was a practicing sports, my massage therapist for about 1112 years, and I worked on athletes such as yourself.
Alright, so how does somebody then go from, from being a sports massage therapist, and everything else to going to law school seems to be not a natural transgression, maybe a little, you know, sort of a 180 jump.
That is true. When I was younger, I had intended to go to law school. And then I went out west and I got married. And I spent a few years living that life and traveling. And then I ended that. And I came back to Miami and I decided, you know, I need to get myself back on track to where I want it to be in my life. And I went back to school, and I continued the education. And that's where it led me today. All right. So, what drew you to law school, I had always been interested in something that used my mind. I was very happy doing what I was doing. But I didn't feel like it really used my intellectual assets, so to speak. So, I really wanted to do that. And I did like the fact that you were able to be involved with people, you were able to help people. And at that point, I just really wanted to become a lawyer to go out there and make my own business doing that.
And you did because you didn't come out and start with a firm or anything else you started your own firm. So, did you go to law school, right?
I did. I'd always worked for myself, I had the joke that if if I worked for anybody, I would probably get fired anyway. So, I might as well just make my business. And I have a business degree. So, my degree from NYU was in business marketing. So, I already had that under my belt, I knew what I needed to do. The marketing is in complete aspect, because you can be a great lawyer, but running a business is a completely separate endeavor.
It's funny, that's a conversation I have with a lot of friends. And I think it's a deficiency in law school. Because I think yes, they train you to become a lawyer. And there are a lot of great lawyers. But a lot of lawyers don't know how to run a law firm. They don't know the business end of it.
True. A lot of lawyers that come into law school, they don't necessarily want to run their own business. They do like, you know, for different reasons. They want to, you know, work where somebody can go in and out and then not have the responsibility of running the business. But for me, I love business. I love running a business. So, I knew what to do. And I can tell you yes, I was working maybe 100 hours a week, the first couple years, you know, moving my own desks, you know, setting up my own accounting. I can't tell you how many Sundays and Saturdays I spent knowing that learning the law because you do not have a mentor you are learning as you go. It really teaches you the hard lessons that you never forget, especially the first time you go before a court, and you don't have somebody telling you what to do. And so you learn. It makes you a better lawyer.
No question. No question. I mean, it's trial by fire. You know? Yes. So, alright, so you open your own firm? And have you always dealt with domestic and divorce and immigration? Is that where the focus started?
No, actually, interestingly enough, in law school, I was more interested in intellectual property law. I had always been involved in music during my younger life. And so, I was geared towards that. And I actually did an internship with Mr. Wolf, who's a very well renowned intellectual property attorney and I did an internship there. And I found that I would have had to have joined a law firm to do that. And I wasn't inclined to do that. I actually rented some office space in another attorney's office who was retiring and it kind of just fell in my lap Believe it or not, Were his older clients moving out were Family Law clients and some immigration clients. And I just took them on. And I learned as I went, and I was involved, and it was a good business, and I delved into it, and I found out that I was very good at it.
Alright, so let's delve into it. Okay, because this is one i think that's always an interesting topic, just because it's either affected everybody personally, or affected someone they know. divorce. I mean, it's, it's, you know, we're over the 50%. Mark, I think, and most marriages are sort of almost set up to fail. It's a begins now. So, let's talk about divorce law and sort of trends that you see in that, and I want to talk about the pandemic as well, and how that's affected. But what was the appeal of doing domestic work,
or domestic work is very personal, I find that I am a very personal attorney. When my clients come to me, I am not afraid to ask them the hard questions. I know what they're going through. I mean, I've been divorced. I've also my parents were divorced. I know what that's like. And so I really personalize it. And I think that people coming in understand that, that they can tell me what is going on. I'm also a very strong person, when a person comes in, and they're not quite sure I'm able to guide them and let them know that it's okay to tell me those personal things that I've heard them before, and that I can help them. And I think that puts them at ease. And it makes me feel good to be able to do that.
Right? Do you tend to represent more husbands more wives, or it's whoever comes in, because I know some lawyers sort of, I don't know that they gear it that way? But it just winds up there. Oh, that's view if your wife, you should go see this lawyer, you know, if your husband, you need to go see this lawyer.
Interestingly enough, I have a pretty 50/50 ratio. Some of the trends that I've noticed over the years is that the fathers have been having, getting more time sharing, you know, right now we started equal time sharing. Before many years ago, the presumption was that the mother would get them majority time sharing, the father would have to fight for that. Good thing is that now the premises that it starts at equal. And interestingly enough, I have a lot of fathers who actually majority time sharing now. So I've noticed that switch, and I'm not sure if it's because of the economics and more women are taking charge and going out there and doing, you know, businesses and work, or I don't know, but I've noticed that shift where the fathers are actually having majority time sharing, but I do represent equally both mothers, fathers, husbands and wives and do not have a majority of one or the other.
You're in that delicate balance, you know, there's a thin line between love and hate, you know, for a reason, because things are very passionate, either way. And so, you see a lot of times in divorce, how do you deal with the aspect of, you know, I want to hurt this person? Now, you know, in other words, I mean, I want a pound of flesh I want? And how do you sort of get that separated to say, really, it's a business transaction, we've got to get it boiled down to that.
I think a lot of times, it depends on if the representation on the other side is as equally level headed. Because Don't forget, there's a lot of moving parts in a divorce, you have your client, you may or may not have children, you have extended family members, if it's a post modification, after divorce, you might have a new spouse involved. You have opposing counsel, and then you have the judge. So there's a lot of moving parts in a divorce. And you also see people at their very worst, you don't see them at their best. And in order to get them to how do I say talk them off the ledge A lot of times, right, you really have to take them aside when they get emotional. And they get over the top. And you have to look at them and say, if I were to go into court with this, this would not work, this would not fly, you would lose and I don't want that to happen to you. So, take a step back. take three deep breaths, right, and let's do it together. And I've actually done that with my clients. And let's think about what you're saying. So I think that helps. And I think having the background that I have in doing even the therapy, you know, allowing people to just take their moment, and then move on from there is really helpful in divorce because it's so emotional and it feels like the bottom is dropping out. And I have to tell them, the bottom is not dropping out. It may feel like that but it will come back.
Right. Okay. How do you deal with the delicacy of when you have kids involved? I mean, that's, I think, the most difficult and we often see it portrayed the kids sort of become pawns, you know, and they're used as weapons toward the other spouse. So how do you how do you kind of try to neutralize that and try to protect particularly young children in what's an extraordinarily stressful situation?
Yes, that is an extraordinarily stressful situation for both parents, I think the m
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers.
Uttered in a Shakespeare line back in the 15th century, which kind of drew raucous applause. Still today sort of holds out when you bring that line-up, people kind of smirk or chuckle and think it's not a bad idea. I'm David Heffernan. I've been practicing personal injury law in Miami for almost three decades, and I'm an adjunct faculty at the University of Miami School of Law and their trial program. My goal behind putting this program together was to bring in other local South Florida lawyers.
And maybe one by one, we can take a few of them off the list. My guest this morning, a guy that checks a lot of boxes for me. He's a good friend. He's a great lawyer. He is a Columbus High School grad. He's a University of Miami law school grad. He's an avid cyclist, we ride quite a bit together. So pretty good guy who gets a lot of things done. Welcome Domingo Rodriguez. Thank you, David. It's good to be here. Good. Good. All right. Well, let's talk because there's a lot of things that interest me about you.
Your background is interesting. You came were born in Cuba, right? came over here. But you're true, you know, sort of Miami kid, right? That's true. Greg, I grew up literally blocks from where we're sitting today, and still live blocks where we're sitting today. So, you've kept your world small when it comes to Miami. Fair enough.
But I was interested in looking so my family background is in the marine industry. And yet at the same time, you were doing things at South Miami hospital. So, we've sort of got healthcare provision and Marine, and you go to law school Why?
Well, that's a good question. And it
I made friends with a guy that I sold a boat to who was a very good lawyer that most people, at least in our world know a gentleman by the name of Stuart Grossman. And Stuart's very good friend of mine, right? So, Stuart,
I had always I was always interested in law. But during the process of selling Stuart a boat, he mentioned, he said to me one day, Domingo, you know, you would be a good lawyer because you're a good salesman. And that's what we do as lawyers, we sell our case to a jury. So, Stuart, is he gave him, I was sort of leaning in that direction. But he kind of gave me the final push. Stuart can be very persuasive when he wants Oh, for sure. Oh, great guy, good firm Andy off is one of my closest friends been with him for forever. So I think very fondly of them. So it gets you into law school. And then I know, you come out of law school. You actually start in with a friend of mine, your former partner, john Aronson in the maritime field. Well, actually, I want to go back, this is what I wanted to talk to you about. You actually started with Stanley Rosenblatt. True. Okay. So I got to spend a few minutes on this just because I'm fascinated because I think, you know, again, anybody that's been around Miami, or in the legal community anywhere, know, Stanley Rosenblatt and what was it $145 billion verdict, you know, a first on behalf of the Air Flight attendants, and then Floridians and everything else. And of course, form the basis he took on tobacco companies and formed the basis of the whole angle progeny now that all of these tobacco cases go forward with that premise.
But a little bit of a fascinating guy because a mom and pop shop, and the guy took it on big tobacco. Right. So tell me how you start with Stanley Rosenblatt? Well, it comes back to
my tenure, if you will, as a law clerk with the firm that was formerly known as Spence, Payne, matching, and Grossman when I was in law school. And truth be told, when I was in law school, I wanted very badly to stay with that firm when I graduated, but the stars just didn't line up.
In one day, JB Spence who's a senior guy at that firm is also very well known and recognized down the street from him. I'm very close friends with his son, John, I used to vacation with him all the time down at Ocean reef. There you go. JB was a fascinating, fascinating man. JB walks into the law clerks' room that the Old Firm one day and he says Domingo, I just had lunch with Stanley Rosenblatt and he's looking for an associate. So I told him about you. If you're anyone you know who he is? And I was, of course, I know who Stanley is. So he said he, I told him that if you were here, I'd send you over for an interview. So I went across the street, met with
with Stanley and his then partner, Neil Roth, who ironically is now partners with Stuart Grossman, right, and they interviewed and hired me on the spot. And then I started working with them the next one day and I ended up about a year and a half working with Stanley and from there I his way
My maritime career really started after I left Stanley, I went to work for a firm that doesn't exist anymore. But it was at the time it was called Hayden and Milliken and Coral Gables a very well known firm that focused on maritime law. And the reason I was attracted to maritime law is what you alluded to earlier, as I grew up, my family growing up had a boatyard in North Miami, so I grew up around the water and around boats, and I was always interested in the I went to law school wanting to be a maritime lawyer. Okay, so I, which is probably not common, I think, you know, most people that go to law school end up in a field where they get a job. Yeah, well, the problem is, and I've handled, you know, death and accident cases out there, the problem is, then you get into maritime law, and you take a lawyer like me, who understands sort of the civil law and everything else, and you get into the weeds of the maritime law, and you're like, whoa, wait a minute, like, this is a little more complicated. We had a horrible case in the keys, but we had to measure just exactly how far off land was and if this mangrove is sticking up at low tide does that count versus this and gets a little complicated maritime law can be a quagmire for non-maritime attorneys. And I would not recommend an attorney who's not really versed in maritime law to take on a maritime case, because it's just a recipe for disaster. The maritime law community in Miami is pretty small. Everybody knows everybody, right? But so when we see somebody, I can tell you that during the years, I was practicing, almost exclusively maritime law, when I would see an attorney and attorney on the other side of the case, if I didn't know him, he wasn't really a maritime lawyer. Right. And it was,
it often didn't turn out well for them. Alright, so let's segue. And again, one of the things I like to do on this program is talking about things that are our current in law. And this is actually, you know, we're going go back and talk to civil rights because that's sort of where your career has evolved to, so doing a maritime but evolved into civil rights. And I say, current and trending, although, it goes back to the 1800s when it was first enacted. Correct, you know, but then since dormant but so let's talk about civil rights, and let's tread into excessive force by police and claims against police officers and, and kind of tell me how your career shifted into that. And then I want to talk about that type of law.
So I got involved in civil rights litigation, about 12 years ago, and it was almost accidental. And a very good friend that started with one case, a very good friend of mine, who's a criminal defense attorney had a client who had a problem,
excessive use of force interaction with a police officer, and he asked me what I thought about it, he was a criminal defense attorney, he'd come out of the public defender's office and was then and still is in private practice. We started talking about the case. And at that point in time, I had never done a civil rights case, but I was interested in it. And so anyway, we, after I got a handle on what needed to be done, we filed that lawsuit in federal court, and federal court because of my Admiralty background was is a place where I'm comfortable. Right. And there's, you know, most nonlawyer, people don't appreciate the difference between federal court and state court litigation, it's two different worlds. And many lawyers, as you probably know, don't want to have anything to do with the federal court because it is so different. The rules are different. It's perhaps more formal, much more formal. Well, I think, much more fun, because I do both but predominantly state court, but I do my fair share of federal court. But I think again, you know, federal court, sort of all the ducks need to be lined up ahead of time. It's a lot more writing and briefing right than state court, which is a lot more, I think, oral argument and pushing your cases in different ways. So
you're right. I think people tend to shy away because they're like, wait, I got an issue with you. I got an issue. We can stay in court, I call the judge, we kind of get before the judge and we hash it out. I got an issue in federal court. Well, I got to brief it, you got to respond, I got to reply. And then oftentimes, we wait a long time, while you move forward with the litigation. So it's a whole different animal, correct. That's true. So
that case led that case got some publicity in the local media. And that reporter from the Herald wrote about the case a couple of times, it was on a couple of the local TV stations reported on it. And so from that, just by word of mouth, evolved from there, the next thing I know, I'm getting calls from other lawyers, from former clients. And
today, I would say that a good 40% of my practice, maybe a little more even
his civil rights litigation, and I still do some of the maritime stuff, but not as much as I used to at one point in time. It was almost my entire practice, right?
Well, let's focus on because again, you know if we paint with a broad brush of civil rights litigation, we can do you know, yeah, and we could do a 40-hour podcast and talk about all of that
let's isolate now because again, I t
First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I'm David Heffernan and I'm a practicing lawyer in South Florida for about the last 30 years or so. And we put this together just because it's one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes and often gets misconstrued going back to the 1500s. But the one thing about that line is it got a lot of laughs when when it was uttered back in the 1500s. And even today, people kind of go, it's not a bad idea to get rid of some of those lawyers. So go here, bring other lawyers in bring other people to work with lawyers in kind of talk about the business end of things, and personalized some of it, and maybe one by one, take a few lawyers off the kill list. But I made it easy this morning, because I didn't bring a lawyer in. I'm very privileged. Only because I've known this guy is a very, very close personal friend for the vast majority of my life, but also been an integral part of my law practice, as I'd like to introduce Dave watcher of the watcher agency, one of I think, one of the top private investigators, not only in town, I mean, nationally, you've done a lot and everything else. But I've had a lot of fun. Getting to know you over the years, but more importantly in the practice of things, you know, really working hand in hand with you on a lot of cases. So first off, welcome. Well, thank you. nice introduction. Well, thank you. Well, you know, the thing is, and I was thinking about this as we came over. I actually go back with you so far that this was before I was in law school, and I was actually working for you. When I made the decision to go to law school, undercover I was I was doing some undercover work for some paper company. We were I was up in singer Island and we you hired me and and I rented a car and we got the route. So these paper trucks, and they would periodically follow these guys to find out who was you know, going home during during lunch hours or who wasn't dropping things off here and literally running on the beach one night, I wasn't sure what I was going to do. You know, I bounced around the NFL for a little bit. And that's when I came to the decision to go to law school. So yeah, you You make me do grunt work like that forced me to go to law school and get a real job. It was it was all good. But let's talk a little bit. Okay, you started out years ago in the public defender's office. So how does that evolve from what you did the public defender's office, what makes you go out and become a private investigator?
Well, money was a big motivation. I worked for the state, I actually learned so much at the public defender's office, worked with tremendous attorneys. Guys, that taught me a lot about how to do my job. And as time went on, I realized there was a bigger fish out there to deal with and more challenges. And I wanted to start my own business. And it ended up in evolution. It took a lot of risk. I think a lot of lawyers, young lawyers go through that when they decide to go out on their own. And I had that same risk. And I was very fortunate that things worked out. Growing up here in Miami, I knew a lot of people. And so it was a natural fit. And here I am today and I'm almost ready to retire. I have my my son who's my partner. Now, Travis Wasser. And technology technology has changed. So he has really boosted up our agency through the technology side. And he's learned, learned a lot. And he's, he's out there doing going full time.
Good stuff, good stuff. So let's let's talk about what is it? What does it mean to be a private investigator? Okay. I mean, because I think the scope of services you offer is going to shock some people as to just how broad that goes. I mean, you know, you can think of the easy things, okay, you know, we go out and it's a divorce case, and we do surveillance, and, you know, we get some videos that, you know, kind of make people uncomfortable and resolve issues, but but talk a little bit about the whole practice.
Well, we really are a service industry that helps attorneys in their case in their cases, and we have multifunctions, you know, we work for all kinds of attorneys from divorce and marital situations, civil attorneys, which is plaintiff and defense and, and criminal attorneys. So our function is to assist the attorneys in their cases and try to help them bring the case forward, so that they can be prepared when they go to trial.
Well, and I know because I personally, I mean, we bring you in on a case and it's it's just a tremendous asset, you become part of our litigation team. And and, you know, insurance companies, they often have their in house people, you know, they've got that ability to get these things. Done. But but for a small firm like Mark and I, to be able to bring somebody like you on a case and say, okay, from the onset, you know, hey, this, this just happened, this accident occurred or this incident occurred somewhere and immediately, we've sort of got eyes and ears on the ground, you know, we're able to get somebody like you and other investigators that work for you out there to kind of develop what was going on in the scene and who the potential witnesses are and develop all of that. So how do you see your role when when lawyers bring you in? Early in a case?
Well, as time has changed, and in recent time, now, it's important for us to get out there as soon as possible after an incident occurs. Sometimes people look at it is like almost ambulance chasing, but it's not ambulance chasing, once we're hired by the attorney, it's important for us to get out there and talk to witnesses while it's fresh. And we have a system where we go to our databases and our investigative research and we find these people and before they get lost people move away Miami's got a lot of transient people that come and go. And so it's important to, to talk to these witnesses, because a lot of times the police, they don't concern themselves with keeping people around at scenes. And, and so a lot of those people get lost. So we have to get out there quick and and do our job. And that certainly helps the cases move forward.
Let's say it's also a situation I think now, having somebody get out to an area, there's so much video cameras, on businesses and everything else to be able to get a lot of those businesses. It's great. They've got surveillance one now nowadays,
I mean, bring cameras, me there's more stuff being caught on ring cameras of what's going on in the street. But you know, those businesses have systems and they rewrite and everything else. So if you don't get somebody out there quickly, you may lose that opportunity. And that can be that can be a game changer. In a case. While it's it's extremely important. That's one of the first things we do when we go and canvass an area. When I say Canvas, I mean, we go knock on doors, in a radius around where the incident occurred. And we're looking everywhere for cameras. And it's amazing how many cases we've solved through cameras. And a lot of times again, the police miss it because they're not so interested in cameras for a lot of reasons. We need those cameras, because every camera could pick up something different. That may be helpful in our case.
Yeah, it's it's it's critical. And, and and the services go beyond that. And I'm gonna ask you to share a story just because it's my favorite story, because because I think it shows a couple of things shows the creativity of a guy like you, but even his things, civil as Service of Process. Sometimes, you know, lawyers have to get somebody served with papers. And sometimes people are trying to avoid that. So they may hire a private investigator, so So tell us about maybe one of your more interesting Service of Process cases. Well,
there was a case that went back a few years, a very wealthy developer on Miami Beach, lived on a private island. And we were trying to serve Him because this father in law, wanted him served papers. He was trying to collect on some money that was owed. And I had tried to go in the front door, but they had a gate there, and bodyguards. And so that wasn't working out. So I put one of my guys, I told the client, I said, Hey, listen, he's out of the country. Right now I've got an informant that's told me that. He said, I don't care. I want you to be out there. 24 hours a day, seven days a week till we get up. said okay. That's good with me. So, I put one of my guys out on the causeway, and all of a sudden I get a call from him one day, and he goes, he's here. I go, What do you mean? He goes, I'm looking through my binoculars. And I see him and he's with several women and their nude sunbathing behind his beautiful mansion on this island. And I said, I'll be right there. So I go to sunbathing. You're actually planning on working. It's one of my better case. Okay. So I get on over to club nautico. I ran a boat from Miami Beach Marina, where the captain and we pull up to the the man's residence from the water and the planet was to fake engine trouble and roll up to his dock and asked to use his phone. So that worked like a dream. The guy came down, he actually put a towel around himself as he approached us and he said, What's going on? I said, Well, we have some engine trouble. And he he, I said, Can Can I use your phone to call for help. And as we were getting close to him, he, I reach out and I pull the, the summons out of my back pocket, and I hand it to him. And he goes, What's this? And I go, Well, you've been served
a summons. And
he said, Can I have your card? I said, Why didn't you come in the front gate? I go, not too easy. Yeah.
That's exactly why I didn't come to the front gate. But again, the creativity and sort of persistence on getting something done. I mean, you know, if can't get it done one way, try another way.
Well, you try to, you know, most of the time, and, and this has been the way I work, I try to do it, the, the easy way, just go out and talk to people straight up and, and do our job, you know, the w
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers. I am extraordinarily excited this morning with the guests that I have on and, you know, we open the show with Let's kill all the lawyers because it's a 15 century phrase from Shakespeare, that often gets misquoted. But the problem is a lot of people still today quoted and think that's not a bad idea. You know, we could wipe these guys out. But I can tell you this, this is a lawyer, that I guarantee is not on anybody's kill list. My only concern this morning with my guest is that I've only got about 30 minutes and if I read all of the accolades about this man, my friend, it may take more than 30 minutes. My guest this morning, and I'm gonna tell you a little bit about him and let's bring him in is is Stan Blake, who was a circuit court judge here in Miami for 22 years, was in private practice in Miami was a public defender in Miami. But I have to touch on something Stan before we start because I do have to give you some props. Go ahead. He honors his man when he served for 22 years. Judge William hold Hudler Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dade County Bar outstanding jurists award American academy of matrimonial lawyers, the Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice award for judicial excellence. The Florida conference of circuit judges chair award, Justice Gerald Cogan, judicial distinction award judge Allen Schwartz, judicial Excellence Award, Judge Steve Levine award for fairness, integrity, and professionalism. The list goes on and on and on, including, which I don't think I've ever seen. He had a rating of 99% of exceptional or qualified by the Florida Bar or by the Dade County Bar in a rating. I mean, in Stan, I can tell you, I've never had a great of a 99% on the three years together you did. Well, that's true. Stan, how are you? I'm doing great, David, how you doing? I am wonderful. I'm not as wonderful as you because I'm here in beautiful South Florida, but it's summertime. And it's sticky and it's hot. And I know you're in beach mountain North Carolina, do a little bit of work, but getting a lot of golf.
Yeah, I mean, that's nice. Zoom has been a terrific thing. I mean, you know, with my mediation practice, after I left the bench, you only wouldn't be in person. But now with zoom. We have people I had someone the other day who was in Madrid and someone was in and Argentina on the same mediation, so no one's falling around. And it's great.
Now you've got international we're gonna get to mediation because I want to talk about it. But let's go back a little bit with you. What drew you into the practice of law and I know you started at the public defender's office, but what was the appeal? And how'd you wind up getting into law?
Well, it's funny, I started off with excuse because I went from Miami last going on McCain fan to but I went to the University of Florida. I started off in pre-dentistry. And after my third chemistry course, I said this is not going to work. So actually, I went through the College of Journalism major and advertising minor in political science and took a lot of law related courses. And while I had offers to go to New York, in the advertising industry, I didn't want the insecurity of that profession where you're on top of the world, you lose some big account, you're taking your portfolio and you're you're looking for a new job. So I said, You know, I loved everything with law. I went to law school and loved it from the beginning. And then when I took a course as a law student to work with the public defender's office, it's just a such a rush you being a trial attorney, you know what it is? Sure. And then when you can see how you can help people and the difference you can really make in the world and people's lives then gave me an opportunity to do something that most professions don't realize it and that's fantastic. But I got to diverge a little bit because there was also a family business that I I want to know how you couldn't have gotten into that because it was my favorite stomping ground forever. But I know your family had ties to tobacco road.
Right. My father wrote it, it was called the Chantoclair at the time. He owned it from 1950 a year after it came down from Detroit sold in 1975. Now it was a blue-collar neighborhood, however, was the only five o'clock liquor license in Miami. So when they built the four bachelors if you want to enter three and have the Pressman from the Miami Herald, who'd walked across the river to get a shot of beer, it had people with tuxedos and boy gallons are looking for a martini So it's really the place now when he saw that I was probably making some public defender 15 to 16,000 year, they sold it from what I understand five years ago, like $11 million. If I had known it was gonna be valuable. I probably wouldn't be here right now with you, David, but I haven't any regrets.
Well, I don't know, you'd still be here because I would have known you because I'd have been hanging out a tobacco road. True. It's, it's funny because they've actually opened a place right down the street to tobacco road by Cush. And my son was telling me Actually, they've done a nice job of sort of honoring the history of what tobacco road was like, and trying to keep it as that type of establishment. So yeah, that's what I heard. I haven't had a chance to be there is the old riverway store right in the corner. Yes.
Yep. right on the corner. So. So you work as a public defender. For five or six years, you go into private practice, and I'm assuming your private practice was criminal defense work,
mostly was I mean, you know, I had other things from time to time, but actually, I bought a person who had been a judge who was appointed as a judge Maui tandridge, you may have remembered from I bought his practice along with Jeffers, they could be my teacher gables high. And, and he was a civil practice. So I tried some civil cases. Right off the bat. And then I said, Listen, my criminal practice took off. Jeff, you do the civil stuff on to the criminal, but I would get into both arenas.
Excellent, excellent. we transitioned from private practice to the bench where you have a long 22-year stint right now, how is it? Did you run for election? Were you appointed? How'd you wind up getting on the bench?
You know, when you sit there in court, and David being active trial attorneys sit there you watch. As you're waiting for your case to be caught, you watch some judges, some who treat people with respect and some of the things that were anointed and come down from Mount Sinai. So I knew one day I wanted to do it. But then we had something in the early 90s called a courtroom in Miami where there were some judges who are taking bribes and giving Volans and granting motions for money. And when that broke, I haven't gone to college in the 60s, we were all idealists. So I sat down with my wife and kids. I said, You know, I think when I move up my timetable, I know I want to go on the bench one day, I had one, one child who was getting ready to start college to have I said, the good news about news, good news. If I get on the bench, we'll have more efficient vacation time, bad news, we can never afford to go anywhere. Again. I did not know how prophetic that was going to be or how pathetic the salary was in practice, but I back then if you were up for an employment, and you were appointed, you had to run the next time. I was up for an appointment, I knew is between myself and another person was already a county court judge. And so I there was a new secret. So I follow for that only in May before was not like they do now for two or three years. And I got a call from the governor's general counsel that the other person got the appointment, I get the next one they know as roiling if I didn't get I get appointed? Well, fortunately, I won with like 69% of the vote, and then never had opposition after that.
And I know that because it was a sort of an untethered run, because who in their right mind would run against you? Because you were truly and we read the accolades. But But you were respected for every aspect of it. I mean, from the judges you worked with, to the lawyers that were before you to haven't even read stories of, you know, people you were sentencing, that were still respectful and grateful to you for being fair and impartial even though they were going to jail.
Yeah, that probably. I think pry was as good as it gets. I mean, one of the quick stories like that there's a gentleman who was in his early 40s, he had been convicted of, I'll remember what there was minimum mandatories. And I, the guidelines call me the seven center, like, I think, 2530 years, whatever it was, and it was, you know, something I had to do. So he said at the end, he says, Well, well, thank you judge. I So, Mr. Sun, so I just sent you what I have to do. And with your age, you're probably not going to get out of jail until you're close to 80 years of age. He says, No, no, thank you for that. He says, you know, from my record, I've been around a lot. And he says in trawl every day, when I came in from the court from jail, you asked how my nine was, you treated me the same as you treated the lawyers, the jurors, the first time I've ever been respected in the courtroom. So I'm thanking you for respecting me. I hope I get you out. Reverse on the pill. We all laughed. And he didn't get my ass reversed on appeal. But, you know, that's, you know, that's how we should live as people. I mean, it really is a really hard. I didn't have to go to law school to be respectful and be nice.
Right. Right. So let's talk a little bit about because I think one of the things that people don't understand, and I and I know it, because and, Stan, you've taught us for a long time as I have, but I know from students because they don't quite understand when you hear about a circuit court judge, and people automatically think, Okay, well, a civil judge or criminal judge. But
Welcome to the first episode of The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers. And it's an often misquoted Shakespeare quote, but it's funny, you know, lawyers, it's fun that to try to say, no, it's actually a positive thing about lawyers. Well, it wasn't if you look at it when Shakespeare wrote it in 1598, he was taking shots at lawyers. And, and that's something that has gone on since. So that's one of the reasons I figured I'd start this broadcast. I'm David Heffernan. I've been practicing personal injury law here in South Florida for close to 30 years. I'm also an adjunct faculty over at the University of Miami, and I practice with a good friend of mine and, and my partner from law school, under the firm of Kaire & Heffernan. And the goal behind putting this whole broadcast together was
to bring other lawyers in. So figure out maybe we shouldn't kill all of them. But maybe just a few, because there are some out there still, most of them, but there's a few that haven't and to bring other lawyers in talk about different aspects of law, types of law, all across the board, various types, maybe some trending topics in law to get into what's going on, and maybe educate the people that listen about when they might need a lawyer when they want some things they might be able to do on their own.
And my first guest is was an easy choice. He's a good friend. He's a great lawyer. I've had cases against him. I've had cases with him. I've consulted on cases with him. And he's also one of the few lawyers that I actually see eye to eye with, and that's not philosophic or anything else. It's just because he's about six, five. So
my good friend Jim Nosich, founding partner of the law firm knows that Jim Ganz Jim, how are you? Great, Dave. Good morning. Good morning. Everything's fantastic. All right. So you and I have a lot of similarities, because I know you've also been practicing in South Florida for just about 30 years. But you're not a South Florida guy. So tell me how a kid from Chicago winds up at the University of Miami. Very easy. 1978 and 79 were the major blizzards in Chicago. So I came to the University of Miami. suntan you that time, I picked up two majors, one in geology and one in marine science. And eventually, that developed into going to law school
and studying more in terms of the medicine because I was pretty good at science and ended up in medical malpractice for the last 30 years. So we got to talk about that because we do share some things. So you took geology, I took a course called rocks for jocks, I think it was similar, very similar. But I also it's funny because I started out I wanted to go into Marine Science and I got recruited and went there to play football, obviously. And one of the things I rapidly learned that studying marine science, and trying to practice and play football under Coach elenberger was a little difficult to do. So I was about one semester into Marine Science when I decided to switch to communications. While it was way more difficult than I thought it would ever be. Everybody likes marine biology think you're going to be doing a lot of stuff in the ocean. But there's a lot of math and science behind it. And a lot of work behind it and some good field camps and steel studies, but mostly a lot of hard work, which eventually I had to do a field camp I picked
in terms of geology and went to the mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains. And they told me how to climb this giant mountain to go click on a rock with a hammer and I go near this isn't for me. So I pulled out of that and ended up at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company in their safety consultant.
department and went to law school at night at the University of Miami and then developed into personal injury, mostly medical malpractice. So you climb mountains, you went into the ocean, and that drove you into the practice of law and drove into the practice of law does doesn't sound that miserable. But it apparently was that miserable might be it might be if it got into the practice of law. 100% agree 100% agree. All right. Well, let's talk about your practice. Because Because you did really and you have over over the last 30 years, carved out a niche of being somebody who really understands the nuances and the technicalities, medical malpractice is a is a whole different animal in and of itself. So what was the appeal there and kind of how did that how did that whole practice develop? Sure. And as you know, because you're in that small little clinic of medical Malpractice Lawyers, it's a highly specialized area. There's a small group of highly specialized lawyers doing it.
I think what happened was I started with the firm we started doing medical malpractice was on the defense side. And my partner and I or my boss at the time broke off and
was almost 27 years ago. And we've had our own law firm, since that time doing representing doctors and hospitals.
My current partner Mark ganz joined us about 20 years ago, and the older partner retired and Mark, and I kept the thing going. But about two years ago, we decided to move over to representing the patients, we think we're a benefit to the patient, since we know everything on the defense side. And we try to take only those cases that have a lot, a lot of marriages, you know, they're very tough to prosecute. And in case selection, you want to make sure you have a
client that has been wrongly injured and
has significant damages, and try to resolve those cases for them. So we throw the the phrase back and forth Medical Malpractice and everything else, but but put it in layman's terms, what is what does it mean? You know, because we get calls a lot of times, and and I always try to distinguish two people because there's bad medicine. And that happens. And sometimes sometimes people are just angry. It's a lack of communication or other things. But what rises to the level of of a medical malpractice case? Well, first, I think it's interesting, because I think a lot of lack of communication is what causes a lot of the problems with patients and their frustration. On the defense side, I've been involved in probably representing 1000s 1000s of doctors have been in 1000 conferences on it, and they, everybody tries to preach communication. And there's examples where, you know, patients would understand better that bad things can happen without anybody doing anything wrong if there was better communication. But there's a lot of bad communication. So the way I like to explain it is sort of like an auto accident, or running a stop sign. So if a doctor runs a stop sign in the middle of the night and doesn't hit anybody in the intersection, there's no damage to anything. There's no harm, there's no causation. And therefore there's no case if you run a stop sign, and you hit a car, and you cause damages, and it's your fault. And there's a medical malpractice case. And what we need to do is have the case looked at very thoroughly by
medical experts to determine if the doctor acted inappropriately, and that action caused the damage and that damage is related to that inappropriate action. So it's kind of complicated, but maybe not so complicated, but it's hard to get all three elements in a medical malpractice case. And I often explain that to clients is that difference, because because there's a whole legal scheme in medical malpractice cases, if you come to my office, and you've been in a car accident, I can find a lawsuit today, you know, but when it happens there, you've got to obtain records, you've got to get an expert affidavit, all Well, before you ever can even be in a position to file a lawsuit. Sure. I read probably minimum and my partner separately about 1000 pages of medical records a week, probably up to 5000 pages of medical records a week, going through each page, looking for the issues, before even sending it out to a medical expert. So that takes a lot of experience, to know what to look for, before wasting anybody's time or looking for the appropriate expert to review the case. And as we all know, the term expert probably over the last 2025 years is kind of, to me at least wishy washy. I mean, only 40 years ago, doctors were recommending that women smoke camels versus cool. And they were called a medical expert. So you have to find the right expert, the expert that's smart and it's not going to tell you what you want to hear because the relationship with the client if you take the case, you're talking 234 years, and like I always say sometimes to my clients I say you know, you might I might be one of your kids in the futures godfather because you're going to know me so much. We're going to talk so much we're going to have a lot of communication and we're going to build a good relationship. Alright, let's let's shift a little bit because we've we've been through a year like no other and are continuing through that year. And I will point out since we are close together in studios, we have both been vaccinated double down so it's, it's it's all good as we're heading in that direction. But But let's talk about it because obviously every business everywhere has been impacted in one way or the other as a result of the pandemic. Yeah. The legal
Field clearly impacted courthouses shut down, they're gradually starting to reopen. I know you were part of a, I guess a task force that was put together here in Miami Dade County. Tell me a little bit about that. Let's talk about how the courts have tried to adjust and where we're going with this. Sure.
I was involved with the task force, dealing with Dade County, big county courthouse and judicial system on the criminal and civil side. A good friend of mine, Stuart robertson is a well known lawyer in Miami was selected mate of mine, former classmate of yours that's right was selected because of his perseverance, and his ability to manage up selected by the Chief Judge to put this taskforce together, and it
contained medical experts, specialists from the
Welcome to another episode of First off, let's kill all the lawyers that often miss quoted phrase from Shakespeare in the 1500s. And unfortunately, a lot of people still hear it and go, that's not a bad idea. I'm David Heffernan, and I've been practicing personal injury law in Miami for almost 30 years. And I've been teaching at u m, law school, in the litigation skills trial program for almost that long as well.
And what I do is I represent individuals, and for example, maybe it's an auto accident, and we can't resolve it, we go back and forth with the insurance company, ultimately, a couple years down the road, get to a jury trial, and then either get a nice jury results or badger result. And you would think that might be the end of it. But it's not. That's when I call in guys like Phil Parrish, my first guest here today. Phil is an appellate lawyer. And Phil, let me just welcome you to the program first. And let's talk a little bit about and I not only call you after the fact because because I'm smart enough to call you ahead of time for the litigation support as well. But But let's talk about what appeals mean, what an appellate lawyer does. So first off, let's talk about you, Phil, welcome to the show.
Alright,
let's, let's try that again. All right, minor technical difficulties, that we've all it's
so funny, you go back a year ago, and nobody knew what the hell zoom was, and people didn't freeze here and there. The good news, Phil, is you're not a cat. And so we can move from that premise on. But Phil is an appellate lawyer. He's a Board Certified appellate lawyer. And let's talk about that. So first off, how did you first off, let's talk about why you went to law school.
Well, I, I didn't want to go to med school.
And I, I had always enjoyed reading and writing
more than arithmetic or science. So and I just
thought that being a lawyer would be a rewarding career, try to help people out. I wasn't certain when I went to law school, what type of law I would practice. So I kind of went in to it. A little bit open ended. But I then then clerked with the old Fowler, white law firm in Tampa, back when they had, you know, big clerking programs, and I got the opportunity to work with an attorney named Chris Alden Byrne, who was later elevated to the second district court of appeal. After I worked with him, I got an offer there and started working there.
And that's how I got into the appellate field. I saw what the trial attorneys were doing day in day out, I wasn't certain that that's what I wanted to do, or that was my best. Sometimes I can tell you that. Right.
It seemed to be that
the reading and writing aspect of it,
you know, appealed to me, and to my skill set better than, you know, going out and knocking heads every day taking depositions. So that's how I trended over to the appellate side. Right. And, and I've been, I've been lucky to work with film, going back a long time now on on a lot of different cases. And, and I want to kind of break this down into a couple areas. So let's, let's talk first just about appellate work, and then I want to get into trial support, because I think those two certainly go hand in hand. But But I think a lot of people understand and you know, right? Wrong or different through TV, you know, okay, we know what a jury trial is, okay, you go in there and jury comes back with a verdict. But that generally never ends it. So. So how does the whole appeal process work? And let's just talk on the state court level at first. Sure. So I when people ask me, you know what I do I say that I complained to three judges about what one judge did. Or conversely, conversely, I explained to three judges why that one judge did the right thing. So what what you're typically doing within an appeal is after the proceedings are done in the trial level, and it depends on on what stage of proceedings, the case is done in the trial court. Sometimes there's a motion to dismiss, saying you have a state of claim that can occasionally be granted with prejudice, you can immediately appeal that and it's you're just gonna be talking about the law with the appellate court. Then there's the next stage, which is the summary judgment stage. After all the facts have been discovered. One side, usually the defense can say, we think even if you take everything the plaintiff has brought here, they still cannot prevail. They have no claim to go to a jury. And if summary judgment is entered, that can be immediately appealed. There's denied it cannot be appealed
except in rare circumstances.
With when the issues of qualified immunity, that type of thing. But for most personal injury cases that we're talking about here, the denial of a motion for summary judgment can't be appealed. And then of course, you have cases that have gone to verdict. And, you know, whichever side has lost, assuming they have exhausted their post trial motions can then appeal. That, and that's a it's a fairly long process, because the clerk has to get the record together, there is going to be three briefs, the party that's appealing the party that lost the trial, is going to do an initial reply brief. And the party that one below is going to do just an answer brief, there may or may not be an oral argument, all these things take time there are extensions granted. So people often ask me, how long is the appellate process, and it's typically one to two years. Sometimes it can be done in under a year.
But a year to a year and a half is,
is not unusual. Some of the more complicated cases can take over longer. Well, and that's, and that's one of the things I explain to clients when they come in is, is look, and we'll we'll put the pandemic aside for a minute, because it's going to take a while for us to finally kind of get to normal on both the trial and the appellate level. But you know, it may take, you know, case can settle early on, but it might take a year or two, it might take three years. And then after that there's no guarantee of anything, it might go up on appeal. So let's let's break down again, I think people understand the trial process, we go in there, there's a judge, there's a jury, we put witnesses on there, we present evidence to them. And then a jury, in most cases, ultimately decides what that question is, when somebody's at fault, not at fault. Who's owed money, who's not? You've talked about the appeal. So that comes out and somebody disagrees with it one way or the other.
But what's the process in the appeal court? Now, I know you said early on, you argue with with three judges. But but so how does that work? You take my case, we've either won or we've lost. And it's going up on appeal, what's going to happen from here on out?
Well, first thing is that, as I mentioned, the clerk has got to put the record together, which means all of the pleadings from below all the evidence that was entered if there's a trial and the trial transcript is necessary, because if you want to argue that there's an error, you're going to have to let the appellate court read the entire record. And that can be you know, anywhere from a couple 100 pages to 1000s and 1000s of pages, depending upon how long the case was litigated how long the trial took.
So that takes, you know, the initial brief is due 70 days after the notice of appeal. Well, that's just you know, the initial rule of thumb, sometimes the clerk doesn't get the record ready on time, and you get extension for that. And you're talking about a brief a brief is now your written version. Yes, whatever the argument is saying
the trial judge was right or wrong. Here's why. Right, and you have to, you know, you have to take all of it could be again, it could be 1000s of pages, and you want to
raise issues that will, in essence, jump off the page at the to the appellate judges, the appellate judges have a tremendous workload. And these briefs, the initial brief can be, you know, as long as 50 pages now they're doing it by word, not by page, but under the old rules, it was 50 pages, they might want to read, you know,
dozens of cases weak that they have to prepare for. And you have to hit them right up front with, in plain language, what it is that would make them go Oh, wow, that seems wrong. If you're the appellant, you're the one who's appealing, you want to be able to put in essentially, the first paragraph were to grab their attention and say, Okay, I want to read more about this, because that seems wrong, what occurred below. And and so it's a matter of, you know, telling the story. It's obviously nonfiction because it's based on the facts record. And again,
we as appellate lawyers are either benefited by or stuck with the record as this, we cannot add to it at the appellate level,
which we'll get back into the lit support issue in a minute as to why that may be important to bring someone like myself on for let's support but you are
pulling it all together in a in a story that like if you were going to read a novel that they said the first few lines are, are very important to the first sentence draw people into the characters. It's the same except it's in fiction. I mean, it's in nonfiction, it's factual and but you you want to make it a readable brief. So you want to write it in plain language.
And and yet still tell a compelling narrative as to why, if you're the appellant why the case must reversed, if you're the appellee. It's why the trial court and the jury were, you know, absolutely right. They did everything right. Or if they didn't do everything, right, the small things they did wrong, you know, don't matter. They there's the concept of harmless or there could be arable, though, but unless it really affected the outcome, and it's clear to the appellate court that affected the outcome, they're going to say, look, we you're not entitled to a perfect trial, you're just entitled to a fair trial.
All right. So this thing gets fully briefed. Everybody presents their story. And then I think y
Ghosts of the Orange Bowl with Jay Rao and David Heffernan
Welcome to the ghosts the Orange Bowl I'm Jay Rao for Miami's community newspapers. Our guest today spent many Saturdays at the Orange Bowl as an offensive lineman for the University of Miami Hurricanes and during that time, he protected quarterbacks like Bernie Cozaar and Vinny Testaverde as a member of the 1983 National Championship team. Today, he's protecting the rights of of accident victims. As a personal injury attorney. Please welcome to our show David Heffernan. Thanks very much. My pleasure. My pleasure, Dave, and you grew up in Miami. Tell me tell me what the Orange Bowl meant to you as a kid growing up?
Well, it was it was funny, because it really didn't mean that much. If you look back at the University of Miami, you know, there was nobody their high school game for drawing bigger, bigger crowds, or I think Jackson played there and a few other people, you know, be a Friday night and Burger King and have a two for one, you know, Miami, you know, hurricane, you know, get a whopper and get a ticket to the game. But really, and you know, we've talked a lot about this year because because of the passing of Howard schnellenberger. But really, I think when Howard started to create the sort of magic city of Miami and the aura of the Orange Bowl is when a lot of that really started. I mean, at least from a college football, obviously the dolphins going there as a kid and watching the 72 dolphins, you know, that's as special as it gets.
Do you remember the first time you went to the Orange Bowl?
Probably around that 72 season. I don't know that I've been there before. But I got to a game or two during that 72 season and you know, look, growing up in Miami at that point. They were the only show in town, right? I mean, there wasn't basketball. There wasn't baseball, there wasn't hockey and again, the University of Miami was not anything really in college football yet. So the dolphins were very special to this time right
now. Now when you were growing up in Miami, you went to Columbus High School. And Columbus had a you started a long pipeline of Columbus players that went to u m like your your teammates. Julio Cortez, john McVeigh, Kevin McCutcheon Alonzo Highsmith, the crystal ball brothers, Carlos Swartz, the list goes on. What was it about Columbus high and the University of Miami what drew all you guys there to Coral Gables?
Well, I can I can say for me, and it took a little longer for Julio and chandi McVeigh to figure it out. Because because they went elsewhere and came back. But but it was simple. I wanted to get out of town I wanted to get out of Miami. But again, it goes back to coach ellenberger, who recruited you and basically said, Listen, online, unlike other schools, he never bashed any of the schools, I was talking about going to all fine schools, all fine schools, but he said, Look, if you want to be part of something special, this is where you need to be. And it resonated with me. And it resonated with pretty much everybody he recruited. And obviously, you know, like a prophet, his word came true.
It's interesting, you mentioned that because schnellenberger when you look at his older interviews, he wasn't talking about, you know, just being able to compete. He was talking about winning national championships when the program was on his deathbed, almost, how did he How was he able to sell you on that dream?
Well, you know, he had a big Super Bowl ring on taking the dolphins THROUGH THROUGH THE ONLY perfect season even today in the NFL. And and he was a visionary. He believed in it. And, you know, you're read all of this now and how you have to buy in the program? Well, it starts with the head coach, I mean, whatever that head coach that philosophy is, if the team doesn't buy into that, and well, he doesn't buy into it, you're never gonna get your team to buy into. So Howard believed it. And then you saw it by the actions, because they were Miami was independent of time. So he wouldn't, he wasn't worried about home on away with Notre Dame or Bama. It's like, fine, we'll go play him on the road. We'll go play this. He said you got to play the best. And so if you look at those early schedules, that's who we were playing, right, you know, and then you start negotiating homeaway but it didn't matter at that point. It's
like fine, we'll go play on the road. Hey, you mentioned that because at that time, they didn't believe you guys didn't belong to a conference. You want an independent team so you played teams from anywhere at any time. You can play a big big eight team or what's the big 12 now sec team like Florida Sure. Or Notre Dame which was also an independent so you guys, you guys played like a very What? A very, very schedule at that time.
Well, that was that was his philosophy man who's gonna put Miami on the map. Yeah, you got to go play the best I mean, you know, and it's harder sometimes now with conferences and I get that but but yeah, line up with the best if you want to show me You're the best
right now. When you were in high school, I noticed that you won the silver night. Now for those who don't know, the silver night is is like one of the most prestigious awards a student a student can achieve in Dade County. It's, it's, it's some of the past winners include Ted Hendricks. Neil cosy. I even noticed that Jeff Bezos of Amazon was a silver night award winner. How did you? How did you get involved in that? And what's what's involved in winning a silver night?
Well, I like to think I could have done what basis did but but I would have worked out well, I didn't know you could take a silver night and launch it into Amazon. But But I could probably get it delivered to you overnight. No, it's it's the Miami Herald has run that for years. And you get nominated your school nominate you. And then there's an application process and interview process. And, frankly, I mean, I still watch to this day, the students that win and I kind of pinch myself a little bit and go, Okay, how did I win that? Because it's just an impressive array of what these students are doing. And, you know, we all think we've got time constraints and whatnot, but you look at what they donate and dedicate time to, to charities and organizations and they start organizations and they found organizations when they're 1617 years old,
right now, because you were such a great student. You were an all county defensive lineman, we'll get to that later. But you are a defensive lineman all county defensive lineman, great student, you obviously had your choice of just about any college. Right? I mean, who were some of the schools that offered you a scholarship?
Well, I mean, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, I was this close to going to wake forest, just because I love the school, and they had actually gone eight and three, my senior year, and it's a beautiful campus. And john McAfee was the head coach there at the time. And I remember sitting in his office and asking, you know, sort of what is he see is the future whatnot, and whatever was a hesitation in his voice, whatever. I was worried he wasn't gonna be there long. He left the following year, that program never really went anywhere. And again, it just it simply was coach number.
So you get to Miami, you get to the University of Miami, you use your you were a defensive lineman in high school, all of a sudden, schnellenberger comes up to you and says, I want you to play offense. What was your reaction?
Well, other than, oh my God, I've made the biggest mistake of my life. I mean, he's starting training camp and you know, you got both playbooks and everything else and next thing you know, they hand me a football and take my defensive playbook and said, you're gonna play center. Well, I was sick for I weighed 208 pounds. Never snapped the ball before my life. And then the varsity came in. Starting nose tackle was a guy by the name of Jim Burton. Okay. New York Giants. Yeah, yeah, Super Bowl winner, New York Giants. A man that terrifies me to this day, and and beat me silly every day. Really where it was, you know, we would question what we're doing. But what Howard did, then, and it's really a change in high school now. But he took and created an offensive line. Ian Sinclair, who ultimately wound up being our starting center was a tight end. One common Darrow, who played South Miami High School was a defensive end, Paul Berta, Sally came over was a defensive tackle. Alvin Ward was the only one on the starting line when we won the national championship that actually played offensive line in high school. And I think what Howard saw, and you saw it in his philosophy with defense and Jimmy really then incorporated that you know, was was recruiter safety and make them bigger and let him play linebacker, and then get a linebacker and make him bigger, and, and so that you keep speed and everything else. And so he did that with an offensive line. And so, you know, for two, three years, we got beat by guys like Jim Burton, Tony chicle. Oh, and Lester Williams and fuzzy Nelson. So by the time we really got to take the field on our own, we'd been season we played against the best.
So to touch on what you just said. They were they were basically recruiting offensive linemen to be more at more athletic.
Yeah, I think I think Howard, I mean, one of the key things and they told me after you know, the, in the recruiting process was they watched me play basketball, in a Christmas tournament over killing in high school, you know, and again, they were looking at sides, they were looking at feet and everything else and just kind of projecting where things could go. I think it's a little different now because you look at some of the high school you know, these kids come out of high school and they're six five and 300 pounds and they're athletic, offensive lineman, so they're gonna play offensive line, but, but Howard was just finding the right pieces.
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