Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to share with you my overarching philosophy with trying to get my clients' cases settled. And I'll be honest with you, it's not like what you see on TV. Welcome to Law Venture. My name's Jarrett Stone. I'm the owner of Stone Firm PLOC, and I literally just recorded a video before this video. I'm wearing the same thing just recorded. In particular, a law school professor reached out to me after seeing one of my Instagram posts with a little bit of a story on how I was able to get a quick six-figure settlement for my client. And she wants the overarching philosophy and strategy that I implement in my negotiation process. And so I recorded the video so she could show her students. And I figure, why not just share it with y'all as well? And so before I air this little video for you to see as well, be sure to hit the like button, be sure to subscribe to see future content, and be sure to leave any comments, if you have any comments, thoughts, or concerns, down below. With all that being said, I hope you enjoy the video. The quick background for me is that I graduated, I passed the bar, I worked at a small law firm, two lawyers. I was immediately the number two lawyer or the bottom rung lawyer, however you want to look at it. Ended up getting great experience and then taking that experience and ultimately going solo, starting Stone Firm PLLC. And then I've now been solo for, ooh, time's been flying by. I want to say like a year and a half, maybe more. So clients have been coming in, been reaching resolutions and settlements for the client, or clients, plural clients. There hasn't just been one client. And then during that process, ended up reaching a six-figure settlement for one particular client. I thought that was an interesting story. So I went to the old IG, Instagram, and posted the story. I say story. I posted a post with the story in the caption. If you're on Instagram, you know exactly what I just said. If you're not on Instagram, that's just right over you. So Professor Gossett ended up seeing the Instagram post and the caption, thought the story overall was interesting, reached out to me via DM to be able to kind of present to you what my negotiation philosophy, strategy, and actual taking that abstract and putting it down to the concrete story experience was. And so that's what I'm here to do. I want to start with the moral of the story, which is probably a little bit backwards, but I feel like if I go through the story itself, then there's going to be this huge buildup for a very basic moral of the story, a very basic message that you're going to be like, really? That's what we were building up for. But I can't stress to you the importance of what I'm about to say. Moral of the story, whenever you're practicing law, be kind. It is so much easier said than done. I promise you, and we'll go through examples, but here's kind of like my big foundation that I'm about to lay to lead up to this story. My philosophy in general is that a negotiation in any type of settlement, any type of case that you have, is supposed to be adversarial on paper. At the end of the day, every single case is basically a problem that needs to be solved. And fortunately, you kind of have two sides that can work on that problem. And the way I view it is that whenever you're trying to settle a case, there are two solutions. Solution number one, other side agrees to settling based on terms that work for everyone. Solution number two, if that doesn't work, the jury's going to get it solved for you, or maybe the judge, depending on the situation. The point is, whenever you start looking at this problem solving process as like, look, either the person on the other side is going to provide the solution, or the jury's going to provide the solution. Either way, we're going to get to the solution. That process really makes it a whole lot easier to where it allows you to kind of ease up a little bit and makes things just really, really more natural instead of like, hey, I'm going to beat you over the head with all these amazing facts from my client, and I need you to agree that all my client's facts are amazing. Never going to happen. And so the story that we're talking about today involves the fact that I signed up a client, it was a slip and fall case. She had pretty significant injuries from the slip and fall case. But I also know that in the state of Texas, slip and fall plaintiffs are kind of, they have their backs against the wall based on how Texas law breaks out. It's really favorable to the defense. And most situations that whenever you have a slip and fall case, there's typically going to need a lawsuit's going to need to be filed. And that brings me a little bit of hesitation knowing that not taking the case, but being able to handle the case appropriately. And this is something that I learned through actually going solo, which is that whenever I sign up clients, my demographic has actually been really fantastic. They've been really easy going. And I don't know just because of my funneling process, or if that's because of the people who are referring cases, but I can tell you, I want to say 99% of the time. And the reason why I say that is I'm being a typical lawyer who wants to have the 1% cop out. 99% of the time, clients, whenever they are potential clients at this phase, whenever I'm on the phone talking about their case, trying to get them to sign up, basically, they explain to me that they don't want to have to go to a jury trial. They don't want to have to go through the litigation process. That's going to be way too much of an inconvenience. That's going to really burden them and their lives. They just want the lawyer to take care of it kind of behind the scenes, pre-litigation. So everything's resolved, puts a bow on it, and they can walk away. And I think we have an ethical and legal obligation to try and settle a case before a lawsuit is filed. And here's why, because not only do people want to avoid the expenses and delays, but you kind of, as the lawyer, benefit from that, at least in my situation. And so from a plaintiff standpoint, in my situation, I charge for attorney's fees, the routine one-third of the overall settlement. If I end up filing suit, then my attorney's fees go up to the routine 40%, because at that point, I'm having to pull out more of the big guns, the legal guns. And there's also going to be expenses that are going into litigation. Even if I file suit and then immediately settle a case, what's going to end up happening is the client's expenses are going to go up at least 500 or $700 because filing suit costs money, getting the person served costs money. And so that's 700 bucks that the client may have wanted. That's also, I don't know, seven-ish percent of attorney's fees that the client also probably wanted. I'll go ahead and tell you that a lot of law firms, like big law firms, are pretty trigger happy with filing suit, but that's just a little bit of a disclaimer. So in my situation, I'm talking to this client. She says, look, I don't really want to file suit. And I said, look, it is my goal to try and have a productive conversation with the adjuster, ultimately, hopefully get it settled without filing suit. But you have a slip and fall case. And I explained, I will do anything and everything I can to try and get this case settled at a good value for you that you're going to be happy with pre-suit. But at this point, all you need to do is go treat, go get better. We'll handle the negotiations once you're done treating. During that time, I reach out to the insurance adjuster to introduce myself. She introduced herself and I was very upfront with her. I said, look, client has some pre-existing injuries. We're going to have to get that resolved. I'm sure you're going to see that in the medical records. But the client also suffered this, this, and that from the slip and fall. And as a result, had to do X, Y, and Z. And it's also being treated as well. And I was up front. I was also, I'm sure I was cracking corny jokes at some point during it that she probably, you know, I don't know, laughed in pity at me. But I immediately, whenever I called her, I got the sense of like, hey, there's tension here. And so I need to diffuse the tension by being kind, by being personable, and was able to do that. And on that first phone call with her, she was very upfront with me. She said, which law firm do you work at? And I told her, and I was like, this is my law firm, Stone Firm PLC. She goes, oh, okay. If you worked at this law firm, this law firm, or this law firm, she went down that entire list off the top of her head. She goes, I'm going to be honest with you. I've had terrible experiences with them and their lawyers. I would just say, hey, we're not going to get this settled. Go ahead and file suit. Let's just move forward with it. But she said, I really appreciate you being upfront about the preexisting and, you know, having this, you know, open conversation with me. So let's see what we can do. Let's see, you know, exactly how things are going to progress. I said, perfect. I appreciate it. In doing so, she said, hey, can you maybe give me like a ballpark number of what you think this case may end up settling at? And in doing so, keep in mind that I would prefer to get this case settled before the end of the year. And this was all happening, I think, maybe around October time. And she said, the reason for that is, you know, taxes and we have to allocate money, yada, yada, yada. I said, okay, sure. And so in that moment, I recognized, okay, she has a problem that goes beyond this case. Maybe I can solve this problem for her in a way that allows the case to have an extra premium, extra value to the case. And that way we're, again, problem solvers and trying to reach a resolution. The problem that we had on our end was you never really want to settle a case without the client being, you know, basically completely healed up or they're at a new baseline. Because the last thing you want to do is settle a case prematurely. Turns out there's like a setback or there's an issue that pops up that they weren't aware of. And that requires more treatments and more treatments mean more medical bills and more medical bills means they need more money. And so if you're already, you know, if you've already settled a case, signed the release, then the other insurance, the other side, the other insurance company, they're going to wipe their hands clean and say, look, there's no more money. You only get one bite at the Apple. So that's a wrinkle in the equation from my end and a problem that we're going to have to address with the other side. So the following week ended up kind of getting a sense a little bit of what the, what value would basically be enough for my client to kind of walk away prematurely. And that meant that there was going to need to be a premium added to it. I explained that to the adjuster. The adjuster said, okay, that's fair. So let's kind of ballpark and shoot from the hip on these medical bills and what we think the treatment's going to be. Ended up getting some reports from other doctors saying, here's kind of what the future plan would be for this particular patient. My client sent that all to the adjuster and had this like, okay, let's, here's our problem. It's presented. Let's figure out the solution. Let's figure out the monetary value. And so this was like a weekly check-in process of us going back and forth, trying to get certain documents and updating one another on where we could go. And during this entire time, I wasn't all business. And you know, if you're a billable lawyer and I'm not a billable lawyer, if you're a billable lawyer, then this is going to be like nails on a chalkboard to you. But whenever I would call this adjuster up, I would also try and be personable. I would try and be kind. And I would try and like incorporate information that I learned about her from previous phone calls to where it's like, hey, you know, I, I remember you. You're not just some, you know, name or person I'm trying to check off when it comes to my phone call list today. And in doing so, she definitely appreciated it. I specifically remember the fact that in her neighborhood, I think a kid went missing for like 48 hours. And when she, you know, was on the phone with me, she's like, sorry, I haven't been able to really look at anything. This, you know, neighborhood kid went missing for 48 hours. So we were looking for the kid. I go, hey, look, you don't have to like look at this case for as long as you don't need to look at this case, basically within reason, obviously. But come back to me when, you know, everything's together and you're caught up. No rush. And I'm sorry about the situation. Let me know if I can be of any assistance or anything like that. And she really appreciated that. It wasn't me like, no, we got to do this. No, you didn't do that. You told me last week, you're going to do X, Y, and Z. I need this now. It wasn't like that. I was being an actual kind human. And again, she appreciated that. And then that ended up actually leading to her reaching out and saying, hey, before you go, like I have this other case and this case is crazy. This case is like worth many, many millions. And can you kind of give me your perspective from the plaintiff's side, the strengths and weaknesses so I can better evaluate maybe this one particular case? And I was like, sure. Okay. And then that led to another case and led to another case. And the sense I got was the case, even though it's settled for eventually six figures, it's kind of like the baby case in the situation compared to these other cases that she had. And so I knew that she probably wanted this one to kind of go away and go away within this little timeframe she wanted. And so that's more information that I'm kind of collecting passively through this process and realizing, okay, she hasn't specifically told me this, but this is another subtle problem that she's having. And a quick resolution with a premium is going to be that solution to the problem. Long story short, we ended up getting the case settled for a premium to where my client was extremely happy. I walked through the pros and cons of prematurely settling with the client. She saw the premium and was like, yeah, we got to pull the trigger on this one. So we pulled the trigger. Client was ecstatic. We were able to get this good settlement within a very short amount of time. And keep in mind, I was trying to be a kind human. I was not trying to manipulate the situation by any means. I was actually very genuine in everything that I said and how I interacted with the adjuster. So just a quick tidbit, don't just be like, okay, well, Jarrett said, be kind. So now I'm a lawyer and I'm going to be fake kind because that's not going to work. People are going to see right through that. This particular example has actually done me really well throughout my practice. I've actually had adjusters at some point, we settled the case and they're just like, you know, you're really good at this, right? And honestly, there is no secret sauce to it. I'm just like really kind. And then that motivates them, or maybe they feel bad about not being able to get to a certain number that I need them to get up to. And a lot of adjusters end up saying, well, let me go talk to my manager and see if I can get a little bit more money put on the case. Literally just happened two days ago. It's a weekend right now. So yeah, two or three days ago to where I was like, look, I'm going to need a couple, you know, more, I'll say like $3,000 more. And the guy's like, okay, I appreciate it. Let me go talk to my manager. Within 24 hours, you know, the top limit became not the top limit. They added more money to it. And so the client ended up being ecstatic about that. Again, it's all about connection, but here's probably the most important part. And if you're, you know, tuned out to this, to this video, I would tune back in right now. It is so hard, so, so hard to always be kind during, you know, this process, this, this adversarial process, because there are going to be so many situations where you want to just absolutely obliterate, demolish the other side, because they're just not handling things appropriately or fairly. I have a case right now where there was, or there is an umbrella policy of a million dollars. And this is a situation where I have a biker client and he ended up getting severely injured based on a driver's negligence. And in this situation, and you'll, for those that have like interned for a plaintiff's law firm, or maybe even the defense side, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. There's RFDs, you know, your disclosures, and those are statutory requirements on what you need to provide. And one of those requirements is any and all applicable insurance policies. Well, they sent the liability policy. They didn't send the $1 million umbrella policy until I specifically asked for it in an interrogatory. So my concern in that situation was, well, had you settled for the entire policy limits of liability insurance, then I would have been assuming that your disclosure responses were accurate and, you know, honest, and I would have settled it, told the client, Hey, we got the max amount of money that we could have gotten. This is fantastic. But then it turns out once I ask for that additional information, it's like, okay, now there's this insurance policy that just happens to pop up. In that situation, I could have very easily raised hell with that lawyer. I presented the concern with the lawyer. I expressed the fact that I didn't like it. And at that point in time, I left it alone because there was no actual damage that I could like present to the judge. And I also have to potentially settle the case with the client or with the other side. And in doing so, I can't have the negotiation deteriorate based on me trying to, you know, hit the other person with the club. You can be kind while also being firm. There's this association with like, Oh, he's kind and he's nice. So as a result, he's also a pushover. That's really not the case. Earlier, I was telling you that there's a problem that needs to be solved. There's two solutions. The other side either reaches that solution, balances the scales, or the jury is going to basically provide the solution. And in that situation, I'm being kind, but I'm also being firm like, Hey, if you don't get to this point, based on how we're evaluating the case, we're just going to go to trial. We're just going to have the judge or jury figure out what the value of this case is and take it out of both of our hands. In that situation, I'm not bluffing. I will happily go to trial because that value I'm looking at is from what I'm seeing is a fair value. So don't associate kindness with weakness because you can still be very firm in the way you're practicing. There was also that one time where right before Christmas, like two days before Christmas, the suggester gave me a call. He introduced himself. He's like, Hey, I'm so-and-so. I'm here to talk about this case. And my response was, well, Mr. So-and-so, before we start talking about this case, I first want to get started by saying happy holidays and Merry Christmas. And his response was, that's neither here nor there, counselor, which isn't the biggest ray of sunshine moment. I mean, talk about a little bit of a Grinch. I very easily could have reciprocated that, I don't know, animosity. I don't know the word to describe that, but I didn't. I decided to honestly just shake it off and try and be a little bit more personable, maybe kind of chip away at this dude's weirdness. I don't know how to describe it. I don't know who responds that way. And in doing so, we were eventually able to get the case settled. Had I reciprocated the anger or the weirdness that this guy had, then the conversation, the negotiation, the potential settlement could have gone south very quickly. That would have led to a lawsuit that would have slowed things down tremendously. Okay, so that's kind of the message. Be kind. Don't be a jerk. Don't overdo it with the adversarial process. I hope this puts things in perspective. I don't want to just like peace out on you without giving you the option to reach out to me because we don't have the option to do Q&A right now. So I'll put my contact information at the bottom of this video right here. That way you can reach out if you do have additional questions, you have concerns, thoughts, or if you just want to say hi.