Tips for Your First PI Hearing

00:00 Speaker 1 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. 00:23 Speaker 2 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer podcast. My name is Kevin Tully. I'm the Chief marketing officer at Zynda Law Group, and with me, as always, is our founder and lead trial lawyer, Jack Zinda. Jack, today we're talking about attending your first hearing. Where do we start? 00:38 Speaker 1 All right, well, I guess we start you just got out of law school, or you just switched to becoming a litigator and you got assigned a hearing. Or maybe you got a case and you have a really important hearing on your docket and you're trying to think, where do I even start? How do I get ready for this event? And as with most things at our firm, we have a system or a process to help junior attorneys or attorneys without a lot of experience achieve great things at these hearings. We've had attorneys this year that in their first year have gotten awarded attorneys fees on motions for sanctions, have won motions to compel, have won Dalbert motions for summary judgment. 01:19 Speaker 1 And it's one, they're great lawyers, but two, it's the system that we use to make sure they're prepped and well read and know what to do. So. So talking through the system, let's talk about the first thing you want to do. Number one, read the local rules. This is something I see attorneys overlook all the time. We had a really amazing litigator join our firm, and he'd been an attorney for about six years in another state and had worked on really big cases, products, liability cases, death cases, all sorts of stuff. And he had moved to Texas, and so he'd taken the Texas bar, got licensed, and he had his first hearing on a motion to compel a shoot. And he came back and asked what happened. He's like, yeah, that hearing did not go well. 02:08 Speaker 1 You know, the judge really got mad at me, and were supposed to go, and he made me wait till the end of the day. So I sat there from 9am till 4pm to go. I was like, well, what happened? He's like, I didn't announce ready. He's like, what does announcing ready mean? I was like, well, in this county, you have to go online and fill out a form that says you're ready for the hearing, and if you don't, they automatically put you at the bottom of the docket. And I said, well, let's talk through the prep for this hearing. Like, did you go through the prep checklist and I looked at it and it was blank. And number one said, read the local rules. And in the local rules, he would have seen that he has to announce ready. 02:45 Speaker 1 And I bring that up because that attorney was really sharp and really good, and they overlooked a small thing that had a major impact. If you go to the same court all the time, obviously you don't have to read the local rules every time. But a new court, you want to make sure you've reviewed it, especially if you haven't been in than a couple years. The next tip is you want to understand the nuances of the judge you're going to be in front of. Know what are their quirks, what do they like, what do they not like? And that's pretty easy just to ask other people who've been in front of the judge or go watch a hearing before yours, you know, does this person want you to verbally say everything? Do they just read the pleadings? 03:27 Speaker 1 How much time do they give for motions? You know, what are the ins and outs that you need to understand? 03:36 Speaker 3 This podcast is presented by Zynda Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at ZLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases. With over 30 attorneys, Zynda Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zynda Law Group, please email us@re referralsindalaw.com we'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zynda or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case. 04:15 Speaker 1 The third is understand what your objective is from the hearing. I see attorneys a lot of times get so caught up in, like, the minutiae of winning or civil procedure issue or discovery battle that they don't think, what am I really trying to achieve by winning this? And they look petty in front of the judge. So I try to ask the question, why? Three times. Okay, why do I need this piece of discovery? Well, without it, I cannot prove that the defendant, you know, was negligent in training this truck driver. Well, why do. Why does that matter? Well, training a truck driver is what led to the collision. Okay. And going back to like, this is why I need this piece of evidence. And then I try to narrow the focus. 04:58 Speaker 1 So I'm not trying to argue for everything under the book and really thinking through that. The next is be reasonable. So you want to set up the opposing party or opposing counsel by making sure you're the reasonable one. And you're not being a jerk. So every time I write a letter, let's say a defense lawyer, you know, has blown me off eight times in depositions. Maybe we had a deposition shut and they canceled it the minute before or didn't even show up. I'm not going to shoot angry letter. I'm going to shoot a very calm, reasoned letter and explain why that was a problem. Hey, we had to spend $1,000 on a court reporter. It was four hours out of my time. You know, I still don't know why your client didn't show up. 05:37 Speaker 1 Please provide an explanation or I'll be forced to file a hearing with the court. And then I attach these exhibit as exhibits, and that shows the judge I'm the reasonable one, not the defense. And that gets me to my next point is you want to make sure you're documenting your point with opposing counsel in writing. So you're setting them up so the judge doesn't think you're there for a petty reason. Next, when you go to court, make sure you've brought an order for the judge to sign or attach it to your pleading itself. So if you do win, the judge doesn't have to draft an order and they can just write what it is and attach it. And finally, I always have a fallback position if I don't think I'm going to get everything I want. 06:22 Speaker 1 So then I can make a compromise move that will seem reasonable before the judge. If you follow all those steps, you're going to win most of the hearings you're at. You know, a couple other things you might want to keep in mind are, one, be succinct in your arguments. Don't go down rabbit trails. I like to draft my motions in pleading practice in a way that puts the most important things at the front and then has more details after you say what you want the outcome to be. So, you know, here's the issue in this case. Here's why I should win. Here's what the outcome should be. Now, here's all the legal reasoning. If you have time to read that, you, Honor, because judges are busy and they're going to have to do eight or 10 of these in a day. 07:04 Speaker 2 How much variance do you see in the judges themselves? So point number two, understanding the judge. I mean, how dramatic of a difference might you get? 07:15 Speaker 1 I find it's really dramatic sometimes, the different rulings you get from judges. You know, what I tried to do is give every judge the benefit of the doubt. Some attorneys get caught up in thinking that it's not fair that they're not being impartial. But I look at, hey, they're busy. They're trying to do the best they can. What are the things they care about? How can I appeal to that and be very respectful and, you know, take my best shot at it? But it is kind of crazy. You go to one court, you would get one ruling. Go to another court, you would get 180 degree different ruling. That also affects my the type of issues I'm going to bring up. 07:49 Speaker 1 Like if I know this judge just absolutely hates, you know, discovery disputes, I'm going to make sure that I've got a really documented well and I'm on good footing if I want to do that. We had a case recently where the defense was trying to get a motion for continuance and it was their third shot at it. And we fought it and won. And the judge said, you know what, I'm going to be prepared to be here for a hearing this Saturday. So we make sure we get everything done before trial because opposing counsel said they weren't available for any time but the weekends. So, you know, they kind of got what they asked for in that case. Sounds good. 08:32 Speaker 2 Anything else on this topic before we wrap? 08:34 Speaker 1 No. And you know, you might one last thing I would think about is practice with another attorney. If you're new at this, you know, there's no shame in that. Walk through your arguments. I find if I practice something like this once, I'm much more calm and prepared when I go in and do it. And it's natural to feel nervous. Like if you don't feel nervous as a trial lawyer, you're not doing something right, you know, because it's nervous to put yourself out there. Sounds good. 08:57 Speaker 3 Well, how can people contact you if. 08:59 Speaker 2 They have more questions about hearings? 09:01 Speaker 1 Yeah, as always, you can reach out to me at my email@jackindalaw.com or you can give me a shout at 512-246-2224. Thanks, Jack. All right. Thanks, Ke. 09:19 Speaker 3 Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. 09:31 Speaker 1 Thanks.