Turned Down by Other Lawyers? How Rejected Cases Become Million-Dollar Recoveries

Stan Gipe: Welcome to another episode of the David versus Goliath podcast. Today we’re taking a little bit of a different turn. I’m Stan, and I think I’m interviewing you. And what we’re going to discuss is kind of like your niche practice within your practice, which is you love to take on cases other lawyers have turned down and then turn that into gold. Where a lawyer’s turned the case down, saying to the client that it just doesn’t look like there’s any prospect for recovery — on four occasions in the past year, you’ve turned zero dollar cases, not even offers, just cases where they were told there’s nothing here to do — and they hired you and you turned them into multi-million dollar settlements.

Matt Dolman: Yeah. And thanks. It’s going to be an interesting topic because I find this stuff eminently fascinating, because it’s really not about someone had a crappy attorney or their attorney sucked and then they came to us and we’re this great attorney. What it’s about is different, right? We’re different. We’re a second set of eyes. All of us as attorneys — we spend, after 20 years of doing this, 25 years, you start to get creative. You start to look a little deeper and pull on different threads. So what’ll happen is over time you sort of develop a different problem-solving approach to it where you don’t necessarily see it the same way another attorney would see it. So I know every case you’re talking about — I know each and every one of them like an encyclopedia because I worked them. But in each and every one of these, a prior attorney turned down the case for what I would consider a valid reason. And it’s not like they looked at it and they made a mistake. We looked at these things, saw them differently, and were able to make successful recoveries for a client. I’m going to say there are probably clients that at some point in time we would have gotten out of that another attorney may have found something on. So I’m not here to throw dirt or throw stones or anything like that.

Stan Gipe: No. And I don’t — it’s not an indictment of other lawyers.

Matt Dolman: I do think that happens less with us turning cases down that other people find to be fruitful. I think we kick that tire and we kick that tire and we kick that tire over and over again and look for any possibility of a fruitful recovery. With that said, I think any lawyer can miss something. I think it happens more often with certain law firms that really focus on volume, because when you have tons of volume coming in, you don’t have necessarily the right people always looking at those cases. And a snapshot look at a case with what looks on the surface like a very difficult fact pattern — that’s not going to be the path of least resistance or easy recovery. Some firms tend to turn those cases down. Then you look at it and you see many different angles where we can actually have a fruitful recovery. And okay, this is not to toot my own horn, but there’s really no other way to do this. I’m a board-certified civil trial attorney. I’ve been in trials. I’ve won trials. I’ve had seven-figure verdicts. I’ve lost stuff. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve seen it. So when you go to a lot of firms, you don’t always have the case being evaluated by an attorney with that level of experience. And a lot of times what you’ll have is an attorney with that level of experience evaluating the case based on the summary of a lesser attorney, someone with less experience.

What we do is — and these are claims, look, if it’s just a simple whiplash claim where two attorneys have turned it down and there’s not a lot of damages, it’s rare that we’re able to turn those things into something. When you have the more catastrophic type of injuries — amputations, brain injuries, stuff like that — those are the claims that really warrant that second level of effort. So what we’ll do is even when a case has been turned down by another firm, I’ll start at the very beginning. We re-interview the client. We look at the potential for recovery, for insurance policies. We make everyone send them to us and work it from the ground up, not pick up what someone else has done.

Stan Gipe: We do not like to fly the planes that others built themselves. We like to build our own planes.

Matt Dolman: Yes. And what happens is occasionally as we do that, we uncover other things. I can tell you one we’re signing up right now — and there’s nothing confidential about this because it isn’t one that’s already settled. We’ve got a case where it involves someone who’s injured in an explosion, right? Significant injuries. And this is a case that was turned down by another firm because they couldn’t find a viable defendant, someone with any money to go after. We brought this in — I think you sent me an email. You said, “Hey, this could be a good case. Look at this.” And I was like, “All right, let me pick this up.” Because she had come to us from the internet after being discharged by her prior firm. Picked it up. I said, “Wow, she’s got some significant damages.” When we spoke to her, within 20 to 30 minutes I already had an idea of four different claims that I thought we were going to pursue as a result of this explosion. Doesn’t mean that the prior attorney was doing it wrong. It’s just the obvious claim wasn’t the easy one. There were some other things out there to pull on. So now we’ve brought this claim in and within two months we’re getting demands out for about $4 million. Now it doesn’t mean we’re going to collect that, but we’ve found viable sources of recovery to start sending those out. So when she came to us it was, “Hey, I’ve got nothing, but can you look at this?” Right now we’ve told her, “Hey, I can’t promise you anything, but here are the four paths we’re going to go down, and we’re not going to stop until we lose.” This is not going to be — we’re taking the defense’s word for it that there’s no money. No. A court is going to have to tell us there’s no money. And that’s — you know, it’s really rewarding. And I tell you, I kind of smile — you can probably tell I get a little excited about this. When someone comes in and it’s like the poor little kid’s been paralyzed by a Coke truck, something like that, that’s obvious. It’s horrible. But the only thing you can do is screw that up — you’re supposed to hit a home run. You’re supposed to get millions and millions of dollars for that person. When someone comes in and they’ve got a tenuous claim and significant injuries, your ability to make a recovery for them is a much more rewarding experience. You’ve given them something they weren’t expecting.

Stan Gipe: 100%. You know, I draw the analogy — you talked about the path of least resistance that many like to take. It’s like when you were younger and you’re interested in meeting the opposite sex, you go to a bar, you always had that friend that played last man standing. No matter what you did, when you were ready to pack it up for the night, your buddy would still sit there and he would hope — and he was the one that, if somebody was showing any interest, he would actually meet that woman that night because he would not hang it up. He would give every last effort possible. You are that type. And this is not to take away from your quality and your legal acumen — I mean, you’re a quality trial lawyer — but you never take the path of least resistance. You stay until the last ounce is soaked out of that sponge, like the last droplet is out of that thing. You go after every possibility. And I’ve seen it on every case you’re on — you treat every case as if you have no other cases in your office. Well, and I can tell you one just recently — it was turned down by four other firms in Florida. It was someone we work with up in Illinois, referred down a case. Facts of the case were our client rear-ended someone going about 70 miles an hour. So on its surface, everybody turned that down. You rear-ended someone — it’s your fault, right? Well, when you took time to speak to this guy, our client was actually a very experienced driver, been driving his whole life. He’s like, “Look, the reason I hit this thing is because it was poorly lit and it wasn’t moving fast enough.” So hey, well, I can run with that. If you’re driving a vehicle on the road, it’s got to be roadworthy. So we took a roadworthiness angle on that. We made a recovery for this guy. This guy put seven figures in his pocket after everyone else is paid — his bills are paid, we’re paid. This guy put seven figures in his pocket after four firms turned the case down. He had real significant injuries. But the best part about it was they had given up hope. Him and his wife had given up any hope of making a recovery on this case. And to see them almost tear up when they start seeing you get traction — that’s really rewarding. Now, do I like the check? The check is fantastic. We get a piece of every dollar we get and I like money as much as anyone. But the money is out there on every case. There’s a certain level of reward — warm fuzzies, whatever you call it — that’s sort of an extra kick when you pull a rabbit out of a hat or you really get someone life-changing money when they’ve had life-changing injuries and they’ve got no hope. It’s a high. I don’t know what other way to say it.

Matt Dolman: No, I mean, these folks have had the door proverbially shut on them — not just once, some of these two, three, four turndowns — we get involved and we turn these cases around. What are you looking for? Is there something specific? I know these cases run the gamut of all types of fact patterns, but is there something specific that you’re looking for?

Stan Gipe: Yeah. Essentially these cases usually get turned down for one of three things. Someone looked at liability and said, “Hey, I can’t build a case where we’re blaming anyone else for these injuries.” So they turn it down. We look at it and maybe find someone else we look at as a responsible party or take a different approach to it. So liability is one of the big ones. The one we just talked about — our client rear-ending a defendant — that was a liability turndown by four other firms. Some other things you get — hey, we’ve got liability. The one we just signed up last week, there’s liability there, but the other firm that looked at it couldn’t find a viable avenue of recovery. They couldn’t find any money or insurance to go after as a result.

Matt Dolman: Going back a second — the liability argument, right? On the surface, just because it’s not the path of least resistance, it’s not an easy lift — they’re going to have to hire experts and really come up with a good legal theory to get around the liability argument. That would — tell me if I’m wrong — that’s where you’re seeing most of those cases.

Stan Gipe: Well, it’s not even that. It’s like a lot of these attorneys just go, “No, you rear-ended somebody,” and they don’t get much further. Because, as you kind of said, I don’t want to disparage larger firms, but larger firms have a more rigid protocol. The person who sets these protocols and makes the rules is so far above the person enforcing them that no one can change them. We’ve kind of got our parameters, but it’s you and I who set them, you and I who are looking at these cases. If a case doesn’t quite fit the parameters, we can bend. We can say yes, we’re taking this even though it’s not our ideal case. When you end up with the firm where someone at the top sets these rigid requirements, the person evaluating the case doesn’t have the authority or the ability to alter those. They might go, “Yeah, I’d like that, but I can’t do that.”

Another thing — we get cases, one that we got $2 million for — it was in Florida. This is one where it was a causation issue. Liability looked clear. The prior firm had worked up our client’s case to the point of litigation and then they said, “Look, we don’t want to spend the money to litigate this because we don’t think the injury could have been caused by the incident.” So the client called us and he’s like, “Look, they said it couldn’t have been caused by the incident.” He called me and said, “It was — I’m there, I’m telling you, it wasn’t caused by anything else. I know, I was there.” This is a client that had a history of drug and alcohol problems as well. So his credibility may have been somewhat suspect. When we picked up that file, I want to say the first offer we had on it was $15,000. The ultimate settlement on that file was $2 million. And what it did — it just took us listening to the guy and going, “Okay, if he says this is true, let’s look at it. Let’s get the experts. Let’s hire someone to say what kind of force would have been put on this guy’s spine as a result of the incident.”

Matt Dolman: Oh, I remember this. I know what case you’re talking about.

Stan Gipe: Well, you know, I can only say so much because a lot of these are covered by confidentiality. So I can’t say anything specific.

Matt Dolman: I said that in the beginning — you’ve got to thread the needle on that one. I’m leaving that to you.

Stan Gipe: Yes. So that’s what happened. They didn’t really see the causation issue. We saw it. We worked it up. We hired two different engineers actually, to work up the causation, to talk about the forces expended on the spine. Came up with a $2 million recovery. If I remember correctly, the defense was taking it so unseriously that they didn’t bother investing in an expert.

Matt Dolman: No, they didn’t. And I can still remember the smug look on the defense attorney’s face during the first mediation after we first got involved. Just dismissive. Now, that guy got fired by the time we went through the second mediation, so he wasn’t there. But I told them — and you could see the letter I wrote to him — “Here’s what’s going to happen.” And I hate to say it like this, but I told them: I’m coming to kick your ass in three separate steps. One, two, and three. Here’s exactly how it’s going to happen. And we did it exactly like we said we would. And when they came to settle, the judge that was involved in this settlement walked over to me and said, “You know when you screwed this up? It’s when you didn’t listen to that letter. That’s when you screwed up. When you didn’t listen to what he said in that letter — now what are you going to do?”

Stan Gipe: What did the lawyer say?

Matt Dolman: He said, “Let me give you a check.” Because it was the guy who was handling it. And this happens a lot — the person handling it will look at it and go, “Oh crap, this needs to get done.” But the person with the checkbook is so far above them and so removed, they’re like, “No, no, you can’t. Just defend it. That’s crazy. We’re not going to pay that. Just defend it.” So that’s what happens. The guy who’s on the ground is going, “No, no, but they say it’s not causation. We’ve got a great causation defense.” It happens.

We got one other. It was settled between $2 and $3 million. This got discharged by a local firm — not because of the incident, not because of the liability — because our client had a drug problem. He had a significant drug problem that made him a very difficult client to control. You’ve got someone who’s on and off drugs, emotional, taking out loans, spending money, doing all this stuff. And he was truly a pain in the ass for a long time, until he cleaned up.

Stan Gipe: Until he cleaned up. But beyond that —

Matt Dolman: It doesn’t change — and this is something I hate — people come wherever they’re coming from. You may be a drug addict, you may be a prostitute, you may be a preacher, you may be a father, you may be a mother. No matter where you are, you’ve got the right to not be run over and injured. So we take our clients as we find them. And I hate it — nothing makes me mad like when the defense is, “Well, your guy’s a piece of —” you know. He just deserved this to happen to him. The code word, right? You don’t say that. They say “verdict-worthy.” “He’s got a colorful history. Never going to want this guy in a courtroom.” I’ve heard that a thousand times. The key — verdict-worthy. This guy’s not verdict-worthy. Meaning, hey, we don’t think a jury’s going to like him and give him any money. Well, you know what you’ve got to do? You’ve got to see that the jury is awarding someone based on their injuries, not based on their personality. Now, you can’t have the jury thinking they’re an idiot. But to the extent that someone is injured and no matter what happened to them, no matter what their attitude, they’re entitled to compensation for that.

This guy ultimately cleaned up. He became a great guy. We got him life-changing money. I mean, this guy sends me texts telling me he loves me. And he’s big in the recovery field now. He’s big into helping people. And he just looks around at where he was at when he came to us, what his life was at, and then where his life is now. I’ll get texts from him at times, but I can tell you every time I get one, it’s super rewarding.

So I say that not to toot our horn, but look — if you’ve got a claim and you’ve got significant injuries, I don’t care what the claim is. If two attorneys, if five attorneys have told you no — talk to the sixth. Give us a call, give anyone a call. Just keep looking. If the injuries are bad enough, if your life has been changed, if this is something you’re grappling with on a day-to-day basis, do not stop looking till the statute of limitations runs. Keep looking until you can’t look anymore. Anyone who wants to call us — I don’t care if you’ve been turned down by 10 other people, we’re not going to say we won’t look at it. If you’ve got the injuries, we’re going to dig deep enough to see if we can pull a string and find something.

Stan Gipe: 100%. I mean, we could beat this subject to death. I just want — I always like to keep these videos somewhat short and sweet and digestible. What closing points would you like to leave the viewers or listeners with? If they’ve been turned down, speaking to the wider audience out there — their case has been rejected by a law firm — what’s the next step? What does that really mean?

Matt Dolman: Okay. People have to realize — for most people, I’m going to know a lot more about the law than they do. A lot more. When they come to us, I don’t know more about the claim than they do. They know why they’ve brought a claim. They know why they contacted an attorney. They know why they thought someone else was at fault. So if the arrogance that you’ve got because you know the law overrides your ability to listen to someone who understands their claim, you’re going to miss the theories of liability — because they’re the ones who understand all the little nuance stuff.

Stan Gipe: Well said.

Matt Dolman: Don’t let your arrogance and your knowledge override the client’s understanding of what happened to them. That’s your lesson to the lawyers out there. What’s your lesson to the clients — the individuals who’ve been rejected by a law firm?

Stan Gipe: Real easy. That attorney that told you you don’t have a claim will never ever ever ever be the one that decides what you would get in court. Because he would never sit on a jury. The person who could sit on a jury is you — that person making the claim. You’re the one who would decide if someone else got money, not that attorney, because the attorney would never make it to the jury. If I can sell this to a jury, if it resonates with the normal person with a theory of liability — and you are the normal person, you’re the person that could sit on the jury — if it resonates with you, I might be able to get a jury. It might resonate with them. So don’t just defer and think that because your attorney told you something, this is the be-all end-all and it’s game over. Keep looking. I can’t tell you how many stories like the three we’ve just told you are out there. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. Keep looking. Keep calling. Don’t give up — because these are the most rewarding cases we get to do in our office.

Matt Dolman: Understood. You’re a phenomenal guest, Mr. Gipe. Normally we don’t interview each other, but I thought this was definitely an episode-worthy topic, being that there are so many clients out there who come to us for a second or third opinion. I can’t imagine how many just become discouraged and lose hope and never pursue their claim because they took whatever the first attorney told them.

Stan Gipe: Yeah. Anyone with a catastrophic injury from an incident should get it looked at. Sometimes things are your fault and that just happens. But often there are other contributing causes that you may or may not realize. There may be safety standards for things you use that you don’t realize. So always have people look at it. Even though you may blame yourself — fault is not an on-off switch. It’s a percentage. You can be 60% at fault, someone could be 40. You could have 40-40-20. You could have five 20s. It just has to add up to 100. So it’s not an on-off switch. We would love to talk to you if you find yourself in a situation where you’ve got a catastrophic injury and someone has told you they can’t help you make a recovery.

Matt Dolman: Well, I appreciate having you as my guest today, Stan Gipe. Great partner. Normally I don’t interview you, but I thought this was great subject matter to cover. Thanks, Stan. And I appreciate everybody listening to our podcast. This wraps up another episode of the David versus Goliath podcast. I’m Matt Dolman. This is my business partner, Stan Gipe. Have a great day.