Sarah Lunham: Episode 884

Transcript

[0:00:39] BB: For attorney Andrew Finkelstein, every day is an opportunity to fight for redemption. He battles on behalf of his clients, families that are facing the devastating aftermath of preventable catastrophes. When a loved one is killed on the job, Andrew helps the family pick up the pieces. When a construction worker is paralyzed to inadequate fall protection, he helps them regain control, focus on recovery, and discover optimism in the darkest of times. I Hope We Never Meet is an inspirational resource for anyone searching for ways to turn their pain into purpose and make the world a better, safer place. Welcome into The Author Hour, I’m your host Benji Block and today, we’re honored to be joined by Andrew Finkelstein and Sarah Lunham who have just come out with a new book titled, I Hope We Never Meet: Client Stories of Tragedy, Recovery, and Accountability From a Life in Deterrence Law. Glad to have both of you here on Author Hour today.

[0:01:45] AF: Thanks for having us.

[0:01:46] Sarah Lunham: Thank you.

[0:01:48] BB: To start here, help us understand just the scope of deterrence law a little bit, what exactly does the day-to-day look like, Andrew, in the work you're doing?

[0:01:57] AF: Deterrence law is centered around holding people, reckless corporations, or any other entity, sometimes it’s governmental entities, accountable when they make bad choices and by so doing, the goal is twofold. One is to help the person who suffered the consequences of those bad choices but equally as important is to by holding them accountable, hopefully, it will not happen again, and therein lies the deterrence. When people know that if there is a perfect example on a broad sense, if you’re driving down the road and exceeding the speed limit but you know that there is a police car around the corner, everybody slows down. That police car serves as a deterrence.

[0:02:54] BB: Yeah.

[0:02:56] AF: Well, knowing that I’m around the corner, hopefully will deter corporations and reckless individuals from taking actions that ultimately harm people in our community.

[0:03:07] BB: Great explanation there. With the work you’re doing, why was now the right time to write this book, and what sort of prompted this project?

[0:03:16] AF: I would say, twofold. One is, the pandemic and I had some time and sitting and thinking like many people were isolated for a period of time, it allowed me to unwind a little bit and think globally as to what it is that I’ve been doing with the people I work with and then, secondly, I wanted to have a manuscript, a body of work that I could help other people see the light when they are faced with something they never thought they would ever be faced with because the people that I help are individuals who never thought that they would be my client. I wanted to have the opportunity for not just the people I directly communicate with but everybody that is faced with the situation to understand that as soon as that event happens, it’s often the worst of times and in thinking it through, I would just say that my, or one of my secret weapons is my co-author, Sarah Lunham, who helps me craft the stories that the people that I represent are facing and she has met with so many of my clients, I wanted to bring her on board and maybe she can give some insight as to what that experience is like.

[0:04:47] Sarah Lunham: Yeah, absolutely. When Andrew asked me to co-write this book with him, I was a little nervous but also just really excited to kind of share some of these stories and reflect on some of the different types of obstacles and challenges that people face in the wake of an unexpected injury or even the death of a loved one. These are life-changing stories, they’re tragic but within them, there is a theme and it’s resilience and hope and I think that both of those things are a part of the message that we’re trying to send in this book.

[0:05:38] BB: Yeah, tragic but necessary to share, right? Because this book really is for a very specific audience going through a very specific time. Give us a little bit of your thinking, Andrew, as to who should pick up this book and the situation that they may be in when they encounter it.

[0:05:58] AF: Not just people who are suddenly faced with a tragedy but their family, so that it gives a little bit of an insight as to what the loved one that they’re caring for is also going through because when somebody is tragically injured and if they survive and they’re suffering horrible pain, it’s quite obvious what they’re going through, even though we can never feel what they’re feeling. The other people who are also injured are their family, their spouse, their children, their parents, and then, even extending beyond that, their coworkers and people that know them in their community because chronic pain or catastrophic injuries transition somebody from who they were into a new person and a lot of people don’t recognize that or necessarily understand it and hopefully, people will read this book and get a little greater insight and help them in whatever capacity they may be in, whether the injured person themselves, family member or a friend, a colleague kind of what it’s all about.

[0:07:17] BB: Right, Andrew, I wonder if you’d rewind for us to what originally got you into this line of work. There’s a lot of people that would be empathetic to those that wind up in a situation where they’re needing assistance from deterrence law but what originally got you interested in this line of work and where you’re at today?

[0:07:36] AF: It actually flows from my dad. My dad was also a deterrence lawyer and watching him do what he did and the impact that he had on so many families and going and spending time with him wherever we would go, it was rare that people did not know him because he represented them or somebody in their family and I just saw the positive impact that he had and went to the same law school as my dad and then joined him in practice, straight out of law school and I was very lucky to be able to practice with him for 10 years or so and that’s really what drove me to it, it’s kind of ingrained in my system, in my DNA.

[0:08:25] BB: Yeah, Sarah, how about you? What has kept you in this line of work and interested in the work?

[0:08:32] Sarah Lunham: I got into this line of work because I’m a journalist. I’m really passionate about sharing stories and this job specifically kind of takes my two passions, which is people and writing. The kind of writing is very different than the kind of writing that I did when I worked for a newspaper. The challenge is, painting a picture of someone’s life using words and then showing how pain or loss of mobility, isolation, how those things change a person’s life.

[0:09:18] BB: We never think that something like this is going to happen to us or our family members. I’m assuming many are reaching out to you very unsure of how to press forward for steps, maybe there are some common questions and themes. What are some of those things that you guys are often encountering right up front in that process as people are navigating pain and frustration and a lot of, probably, emotion, right?

[0:09:42] AF: A lot of emotion often is anger because somebody did or a corporation did something that was reckless or negligent and now, their loved one is suffering the consequences. Oftentimes, it’s anger and they want to hold somebody accountable and it’s not too long into the process do they realize the benefit to the community by doing it because the motivation really is to make sure somebody else doesn’t suffer the same consequences and they often say, “What happened was so stupid, I can’t believe it happened” and they feel an obligation and commitment to do everything they can to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That motivation, people don’t recognize but they act out that way and then over time, when they realize what’s going on and the importance of their case and the outcome of it, the impact that it will have on framing future course of action, then there’s a tremendous amount of pride that they take on so that was kind of not an exact answer to your question but the type of questions that they present are, “What do I do now?” right? “How do I handle the day-to-day?” and it all depends on the particular situation but, “Who is going to pay my medical bills, what about my lost wages” or “I have to be out of school to care for my child?” I’m sorry, out of work to care for my child who can’t go to school or a whole host of scenarios. That’s usually the first pressing and then, it is, what’s the process like, “What do I have to go through?” people are intimidated by the process and part of this book, I give antidotes related to the process so as I could demystify it a bit because it really isn’t a scary situation. I’ve tried many cases and I’ve never had a client who said, “Oh I can’t wait to have a trial.” After the trial is over, every single one of them have said to me, “You know what? That wasn’t as nearly as bad” because it’s not like television and if you are prepared and simply tell the truth, it’s not a difficult undertaking. I try to explain all of that in this book too.

[0:12:29] BB: Yeah, give a little bit of breakdown there because I think intimidated by the process would be a very common feeling and I’m sure there’s plenty of misconceptions, maybe dispel some of those here for us now and get the process maybe a little bit more in front of us as to some clarity there?

[0:12:46] AF: Sure, one question that people are always curious about but sometimes they’re reluctant to ask is, “What about fees?” The type of work that I do in this field is, it’s called contingency, that clients never write a check to lawyers in the field that I’m in, our fee is based on a percentage of what we collect, so we’re on the same side as our clients and we’re not limited by hours and why do I say limited by hours, because insurance companies often limit their lawyers because they pay them hourly and that’s who we go against most times is insurance companies. They’re limited by hours because they’re concerned about the bottom line, whereas we put in as many hours as necessary to seek the justice that our clients are entitled to. The first notion I’d like to dispel is, it doesn’t cost anything and I would say, maybe a little bit backwards thinking for the listeners but the bigger our fee, the sadder I feel because the bigger our fee, means that’s – remember we take a percentage, our fee is a percentage of what we collect so if you can imagine somebody’s injury, if my fee is $10,000 versus $100,000, versus a million dollars, versus five million dollars. That means, if my fee is five million dollars, the catastrophic injuries that that person suffered, I’ve recovered 15 million dollars for that person. It is a significant injury, whether it would be a death or a loss of a limb. The bigger the number is, the faster people say, “I’d rather this not have happened to me.” I just explain that to clients right upfront and they should understand that it doesn’t cost anything to retain a lawyer like what I do. The other part of it is, the lawyer takes care of obtaining all of the necessary information to pursue the claim, whether that be getting police reports or incident reports or if it’s a product liability, getting all the information about the product, retaining the appropriate experts, all of those things, the attorney pays for, it will not cost the client anything. Then it’s the litigation process, which is not a complicated process, there are fancy words associated with it but it is not a complicated process. For example, interrogatories, that’s a fancy way of saying, questions, when one side has questions for the other, they interpose interrogatories. I never talk like that with clients, I basically tell them, they can have some questions for you, you’re just the name on a piece of paper, the insurance company has never met you so they want to know a few things like where did you work and it’s just gathering that information. I try to explain all of that in the book and how it interrelates to individual stories.

[0:16:21] BB: I would definitely say, my top two fears in talking to a lawyer would be fees and words, so thank you for distilling both of those and giving us a thought process around it. This book really highlights nine stories of varying cases. What I’d love to do here is probably just have each of you take one of them and break down for us a little of the story and the process of that ensued. Andrew, would you want to go first and just, if there is one of these nine that’s maybe top of mind to you and the lesson that it distills for us?

[0:17:00] AF: Well, I would say, I’m going to be a little more broader and give you the lesson of all of them and then I’ll talk about one particular but the lesson on all of them is that they were all predictable and when something is predictable, it’s preventable.

[0:17:17] BB: Right, yep.

[0:17:18] AF: What we do is ask why, that’s really the three-letter word that drives most litigation, why did the truck driver think it was okay to knowingly get on the road when the breaks weren’t working great? Why did he feel compelled to do that? Why did the general contractor of a construction site send two people for a three-person job? When you frame it this way, when you hear, we get the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I hear after the fact what happened and the family always says, “Well, why did this happen, I find out those answers, okay? Going to a specific question on a particular chapter, I’ll just share with you very broadly a failure to provide security at an apartment complex and an apartment complex had a series of seven buildings in a municipal area and it was known to have a high crime rate and the owner of the seven buildings only had one security guard patrolling all seven areas and there were lights out that exposed what’s going on outside the building. When I said lights, just the illumination and there were complaints and there was, to no surprise, somebody broke in and tragically killed a 72-year-old gentleman and assaulted his wife and it was totally preventable because the exterior lights weren’t in proper order. They didn’t have enough security and the locks weren’t in good working order. I tell that story from the perspective of the widow who came to see me and the negotiation that happened with respect to it. The simple, as I phrase it as a question, why did they allow this to happen, I can also phrase it in another form of another question, “If they had the requisite safety that being the lights and the appropriate security guards and the locks on the building, would this have happened?” and the answer is always no.

[0:20:02] BB: Because in this case too, that building, you ended up doing research, right? That found seven times – the crime rate was seven times higher than the surrounding area.

[0:20:14] AF: Right and that’s what added the predictability part to it, which puts the added duty responsibility on the owner of the property to ensure that there was all the appropriate safety tools and features there and I’ll just – as a caveat, I don’t even know but I put this in the book but one should recognize that the more dangerous it is, the safer we have to make it, right? If they know that there is a high violent crime rate in the area, you have an obligation to make it that much safer.

[0:20:58] BB: What’s interesting in this one and so sad is that actually, she didn’t know that the crime rate was so different between her complex and the surrounding area. What a brave decision to hold the landlord accountable and for you guys to uncover that information is a big deal and you are totally right, the correlation there and the need for safety is so high. Sarah, for you in these other stories, is there one that comes top of mind that you’d want to lay out for us?

[0:21:29] Sarah Lunham: Yes, so chapter three, ‘It’s Never About The Money’. This story really resonates with me because of the age of the person that was involved. Lily was almost five years old when this incident took place. She was a young, free-spirited, happy little girl. She lived at home with her mom and her older sister as well as her grandparents and this is the home that her mother was raised in, so it was a familiar place to everyone. This house was located close to a cul-de-sac in a residential area with signs that were posted warning operators of motor vehicles that there are children that live and play in this area. Lily was struck by a utilities truck that was traveling down this particular road on a Saturday when you wouldn’t expect there to be a lot of traffic like that. Lily died unfortunately, her mother saw this unfold and in speaking with her mother and everyone that kind of witnessed this, there was nothing that could have been done on anyone’s end except for that driver. Now, I want to talk a little bit about motive and fault. Why did the driver hit Lily? What was going on inside of that vehicle that took away his attention? We learned that this particular driver had certain time restrictions that he had to meet. He had so much time to travel to each house call. He was allotted – his performance was based on how many people he could see in a day, so we also recognized too that he was distracted by a large GPS device that he had that was placed in the left-hand corner, which was obstructing his view that day and that’s ultimately how Lily’s life ended. Now, instead of accepting responsibility for what their driver had done, the opposing council, in this case, chose to blame Lily’s mom, and that in itself brings on this huge emotional – it just adds something to the case. This woman has already tragically lost her daughter and now she has someone saying that it was her fault that she could have done something. This family, their lives are forever changed by this and this frivolous claim that it’s her fault, she could have done something. It brings up the subject of guilt, you know, it’s, unfortunately, something that Lily’s mom will have to live with for the rest of her life, and that ultimately hinders her ability to find closure and move on.

[0:24:46] BB: It hits on this other them as well. I mean, what a tragic story and it undermines my trust honestly in some of these institutions and so it is a reoccurring theme in this book that we have to have trust in society but you are working to hold people accountable for broken trust, right? That ultimately – a lot of the work that you guys are doing is work to try to keep trust and restore where there’s man, a lot of broken trust.

[0:25:21] AF: Exactly, our society is rooted in trust. Just look at our highways, if we didn’t believe when we get into our car every day that others will follow the safety rules of the road, we know that some won’t but I am saying if everybody won’t, we would never get into a car. For the few that violate those safety rules and betray every operator’s trust or everybody in a car their trust, they need to be held accountable and they need to be held up to everybody else who in fact violate those safety rules to know that there will be consequences when they do it.

[0:26:06] BB: You address the McDonald’s coffee story and I got to say, I did not realize the context of that case so I fell right into the trap of what you talk about in the book. You say and I will quote you here, you said, “The defense attorney’s biggest triumph in the war for public opinion was the famous McDonald’s coffee case.” Can you just walk through real quickly that case and some of the detail that was missed by the broader public because I think that’s brought far – probably one of the most famous cases that’s brought up?

[0:26:40] AF: Well, you say it’s one of the most, I don’t disagree with you but when you say it’s one of the most famous cases that’s brought up I would say, who is bringing it up?

[0:26:49] BB: Right and it is always partial, right?

[0:26:52] AF: It’s always the corporations and it is always insurance companies and they needed that as a tool to try and justify the terrible things that they do and insulate themselves from their liability, so they would say, “Look at the damage that happens with “runaway juries.” “We need protection from runaway juries”, even though there are tremendous protections in the court system in and of itself. The only reason why there is ever a “runaway verdict” is because the activity and the actions were so egregious, a group of people from the community felt it was appropriate. The last group that ever wants to give a lot of money are jurors but when they hear stories like the McDonalds story and what I remind everybody is that there were 12 people who sat through that trial. I think it was three weeks or so and saw all the evidence and based upon that evidence came up with what they believed was an appropriate decision, which was only the profits from coffee for three days worldwide. If you hear what they actually did, which was McDonald's engaged in a study because they wanted to increase their coffee sales and they learned through studying their consumer that people weren’t buying coffee because they would buy it on the go and by the time they got to wherever they were going, they could – they had it all calculated, I don’t remember the specifics but they had it calculated how long it would take for somebody to either get to the office or back home that the coffee wasn’t hot anymore. They didn’t like it and they’d ended up throwing it out more than they were drinking it so they stopped buying it, so what McDonald’s decided to do was to keep the coffee to such a degree that it was not consumable and would cause significant burns if it ever touches somebody, so they had hundreds and hundreds, I want to say 700 or so complaints of people being burned with the coffee, yet they still chose to heat it as such a level that it would scald you and then ultimately what happened, the actual event was a woman was handed the coffee at a drive-through and somebody tapped them in the rear causing them to spill the coffee on her lap. It burned right through her clothing and she had multiple surgeries, and the verdict was there was a smaller, much smaller part to compensate her for what she went through and then the largest part of the verdict was the punitive nature, which is punitive damages are punishment damages, punishment damages issued by a jury of our peers that say, “What you did is not acceptable and you need to change your ways.” That’s what that verdict was about. It wasn’t about windfall, it was about trying to get a corporation to act responsibly when they are dealing with what ultimately becomes an ultra-hazardous material. Coffee in and of itself isn’t ultra-hazardous unless you knowingly and intentionally overheat it and it can cause the damages that it caused, so that’s the McDonalds story that isn’t told but they manipulate those facts and simply say, “Oh this was just somebody trying to make money” and the way they tell the story it’s as if this person took the coffee and just poured them on themselves knowingly and intentionally trying to generate some type of payday, which never happens.

[0:31:06] BB: Yeah, fascinating and thank you for providing clarity there and in the book because I think that sentiment obviously needs to change and not be there but when that narrative gets pushed and they have PR teams that can push it, it makes sense why it gets out into the public. As we start to wrap up our conversation here, I just wondered if you’d each take a minute and say what you hope the main takeaway from this book would be whether it’s just an emotion of – for the reader or family member, whoever picks this book up or if it is a tangible takeaway, what do you hope that takeaway is? Andrew, you can go first.

[0:31:45] AF: The biggest takeaway I hope people get is a sense of hope that what they are going through they can survive it because of the people who have gone through similar situations. The sense of isolation after an event is tremendous and my ultimate goal is people are not so isolated or at least they don’t feel so isolated and they understand that others have been in similar situations no matter how horrible the situation that they are facing, others have been through it and they’ve survived and you can too and just really encouraging those in that situation to seek help to help them through it.

[0:32:32] BB: Sarah?

[0:32:33] Sarah Lunham: Yes, so I agree. The message is one of hope but it is also one, I want people to walk away after reading this book feeling empowered like there’s something that they can do to bring themselves justice and send that message that we live in a community where we value safety and people’s lives, so yeah, I want people to feel empowered and hopeful.

[0:33:04] BB: Besides checking out the book, where can people find your work online Andrew, and stay connected to what you’re doing?

[0:33:12] AF: I have lots of websites but the main one would be lawampm.com or at finkelsteinlaw.com.

[0:33:23] BB: Fantastic. Well, thank you for both coming on to Author Hour today to discuss the new book. Again, the title is, I Hope We Never Meet: Client Stories of Tragedy, Recovery, and Accountability From a Life in Deterrence Law. Sarah, Andrew, thanks for being on Author Hour today.

[0:33:41] Sarah Lunham: Thanks for having us.

[0:33:42] AF: Thanks for having us.

[0:33:45] BB: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find, I Hope We Never Meet: Client Stories of Tragedy, Recovery, and Accountability From a Life in Deterrence Law, on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as all of our previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.