RE: [TLC] Jeff Hill's Trial Report

[Haytham Faraj <haytham@puckettfaraj.com>]

Jeff,
Congratulations on your victory.  I role revered with you and realized that
I probably would have allowed my biases to prevent me from taking on your
case.  Your story taught me an important lesson.

-----Original Message-----
From: Kent Spence [mailto:kspence@spencelawyers.com] 
Sent: Monday, November 08, 2010 6:35 PM
To: TLC Alumni
Cc: Jeffrey Hill
Subject: [TLC] Jeff Hill's Trial Report

 I asked Jeff to write something up to send to the list serve.  Here it is.
Kent

15 Million Dollar Slip and Fall Verdict Against Wal-Mart
 
Fellow warriors:  
 
This slip and fall verdict is proof that you cannot stereotype and
pigeonhole cases.  I tried the case in Greeley, which is one of the most
conservative venues in Colorado.  (In fact, the narrowly defeated Tea-Party
backed Republican Senate candidate, Ken Buck, is the DA in Greeley)
 
My client was a 41 year old female trucker who slipped and fell in white
grease, camouflaged amid ice and snow, as she stepped down off of her truck
to deliver a load to a Wal-Mart Supercenter. She claimed that a 20-something
kid named ³Aaron² refused to take her report.  She sustained a bad C-6
herniation that compressed her spinal cord, as well as lumbar injuries, and
incurred $500,000 in medical bills associated with 4 surgeries.  She was
forced from being a fiercely independent self-employed trucker into poverty.
 
Wal-Mart denied everything.  Admitted she was there, but denied the
existence of the grease, denied her fall on its premises, denied she tried
to report it, etc. 
 
There were many jury bias triggers in the case: she was obese, a pack-a-day
smoker, lower socioeconomic status, made some outlandish sounding statements
to her docs, past history of cocaine dependence, has bad teeth, had a prior
low back injury, etc.  Additionally, she is gay, and has a pretty masculine
appearance.  
 
Wal-Mart never offered a penny.
 
I tried the case with Greg Gold, a Denver lawyer who has attended quite a
few TLC events, but not the full college.    He and I complement one another
well.
 
Wal-Mart lied and tried to cover up the fact that there had been a grease
trap overflow that belched grease and sewage into its parking lot for 6 days
prior to our client¹s fall.  We got many lucky breaks in the case, but by
far the largest was that we obtained a City memo, documenting the grease
trap overflow, AFTER the defense lawyer had already given her opening,
committing to the defense that our client had to be making that story up.
She said things like:  no documents corroborated our client¹s story, there
was never any grease spill, Wal-Mart investigated this like a ³cold case²,
³looking high and low for evidence² to corroborate the Plaintiff¹s
³fantastic story², etc.  It may be the case that the defense lawyer was lied
to by the Wal-Mart employees. That is how it appeared to us.
 
We cross-examined Wal-Mart¹s representative from the City memo, but
ultimately the defense lawyer introduced it herself. In that moment, the
jury must have known how deeply it had been betrayed when it trusted the
defense lawyer¹s opening statement claims that this was all a bogus
shakedown of the largest corporation in America.
 
Rather than graciously make an offer once the lies were there for all to
see, Wal-Mart's lawyer persisted in presenting a defense that was basically
³Gee whiz,  there really was a giant grease spill here, and amazingly no one
from Wal-Mart who was deposed saw it or remembered it!² (despite a $17,000
parking lot haz-mat decontamination effort, and despite the fact that the
employee parking is right near the grease trap)
 
As each Wal-Mart witness persisted in ludicrous lies, we deepened the
betrayal and kept the boot on Wal-Mart¹s throat.
 
Anymore, I can¹t separate ³TLC techniques² from just being myself in the
courtroom.  But, if one must analyze and categorize, I used the following:
 
1.  deep honesty and risk-taking in voir dire
 
2.  role reversal with jurors, witnesses, defense lawyer, judge
 
3.  a tiny bit of re-enactment
 
4. telling a story of betrayal at various different levels
 
5. fully integrating my own belief in my client¹s worth, so that asking for
lots of money felt not just comfortable, but obligatory
 
6. killing witnesses only once it was clear that we had jury permission, but
fully killing them once permission was obtained‹I rubbed their faces in
their own lies. Once it was apparent to all that they were lying, I kept the
pressure on, and deepened the betrayal by showing how far they were willing
to go in their lies.  We did not try to empathize with these witnesses.  We
sought to expose them as deceitful cowards.
 
7. Really trying to deeply understand my client and tell the story of her
basic decency and need for vindication.
 
8. Reversing roles with the jurors who were tired of having their time
wasted with lies‹cutting material from the trial script that we no longer
needed, getting to the heart of the story as fast as possible, and just
generally trusting them and treating them like the mature adults they are,
rather than blathering on like the defense lawyer did at times.
 
9. Using my client¹s vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and imperfections as
strengths‹not running away from them, but showing how the defense was using
potential prejudice against her to try to leverage a frivolous defense.
 
10. Diligent work--beginning to end--to find the people who knew her, and
the stories in her life that revealed who she really was.
 
 
 
With the jury out, the defense lawyer finally sought a demand.  We offered a
3 million to 7 million high low that someone in Bentonville Arkansas was
presumably mulling over when the jury returned its verdict.
 
Our client was quite needy, frustrating to represent at times, and
absolutely dirt poor.  Her rust bucket 1984 Chevy Celebrity broke down on
the way to the mediation.  She didn¹t even have the money to buy food for
herself during the trial.  She was quite dependent on us to take care of
her. She told us months ago that this case was a ³slam-dunk million dollar
case² and we thought, ³YeahŠ suuuure it is.²
 
In the end, she became a symbol for every person who never got a decent
break.  
 
We had a basic belief in her honesty, and knew that we couldn¹t just go away
or take some kind of chump change for these life-altering injuries.  And
because Wal-Mart never stepped up, the jury, thankfully, got to administer
robust justice.  Jeff Hill