Guest Justin Starin and His Take on Focus Groups
Have you ever wondered how the best trial lawyers prepare for court? Join me as I sit down with Justin Starin of McKenna & Starin, to pull back the curtain on the strategic deployment of focus groups in personal injury law. Together, we venture beyond the traditional mock trial format, navigating the nuances of targeted sessions that dissect specific issues like causation and case framing. Justin’s expertise shines as we dissect how focus groups can not only unveil potential juror biases but also refine witness preparation and bolster plaintiff credibility—essential tools for any legal arsenal.
We also delve into the art of simplifying complex legal arguments for the lay jury. From revising opening statements to rendering technical evidence understandable, we expose the trials of countering preconceived notions and managing inflated expectations set by the likes of CSI. For legal professionals aiming to cut through legal jargon and connect with a jury, this episode is an invaluable masterclass in strategic case management.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Using focus groups for causation
- Responsibility of testing security systems
- Challenges in investigating a death case
- Expert testimony for defense against blame
- Focus groups in legal cases benefits (90 seconds)
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Supporting Resources:
Justin Starin
McKenna & Starin
Episode Credits:
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Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, Elizabeth here. I just wanted to pop in very quickly to tell you a little bit about my guest that we’re going to have on today, Justin Starin.
He is a partner in McKenna and Starin personal injury law firm out of Missoula, Montana. Justin and I met many moons [00:01:00] ago while doing a deposition preparation for some clients of his. Which we’ll actually talk about in the episode. Justin is a total nature lover, as you will also hear. Loves to go rafting, spend time outdoors with his family.
All of his contact will be in the show notes if you have questions for him or need to reach out to him about a case in Montana. Okay, let’s jump in. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I am your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and we have a brand new shiny episode today with a guest. I will say, Justin Starrin is joining our trial lawyer prep podcast to talk about focus groups and causation.
But before we totally jump in with Justin and just say hello for everybody here, Justin.
Justin Starin: Hello.
Elizabeth Larrick: Perfect. Justin’s up in Missoula and I met Justin and his partner, Sid. Several years ago, I want to say we met through the edge back in the day. It was called the [00:02:00] reptile and worked with these two folks. And we have been fast friends ever since.
And they’re so awesome that they get me a speaker spot at the Montana trial lawyers speaking pretty much every other year, which I’m grateful because I love going to Missoula. So Justin, thank you for getting me the speaker spots and welcome to the podcast.
Justin Starin: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yes, and so focus groups.
Plaintiffs personal injury work, workers comp stuff. Why do you run focus groups? I
Justin Starin: think we’ve evolved in our focus group stuff over time, but mainly we do it to find out the viability of our cases from a juror’s perspective. We do it to learn what is the most compelling case frame for any particular case.
We do it to find out problems with our case or problems with our plaintiff. And sometimes we use it in all kinds of ways that, in fact, I’m always fascinated that there’s [00:03:00] always some new angle that we develop that comes out of focus groups. Witness prep would be a good example. You can find out what the defense is going to say by the focus group.
So yeah, there’s lots and lots of uses for them, but those are the main ones.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I. So I’ve been talking, I did an episode on it, and so let’s just be really clear for anybody listening, maybe if you’re a new listener, hello, we’re glad that you’re here, maybe you’ve been with us for a while, and yay, welcome back, but we’re not talking about mock trials, okay, so Justin, when you are talking about focus group, in your mind, what are you thinking of?
Justin Starin: We did back in the day, a full mock trial focus group, and it was very time consuming, very expensive. And it led us astray a little bit. It’s too much to do in one big show. Anyway, so the ones that we’ve, been doing lately and some of them with you. We’ve been doing just like [00:04:00] an hour, maybe two hours with a smaller group of people and more focused on a particular issue.
Maybe it’s causation. Maybe it’s case framing. Maybe it’s finding out what jurors think of your client. So usually Oh, an hour, two hours at the most.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Okay. So you said something that I want to follow up on. You said it led you astray. Can you elaborate a little bit?
Justin Starin: Just to be blunt about it, we asked them for a number.
Elizabeth Larrick: Oh.
Justin Starin: And so at the end of the trial, after the closing argument, we asked them what they thought a reasonable number was and then they gave it to us and it was higher than we ended up getting in the trial.
Elizabeth Larrick: Oh.
Justin Starin: So there might’ve been an opportunity to settle the case, but we were emboldened by the focus group number, and I think it was our first focus group, so we just didn’t have enough experience to really understand that.
And it’s possible we would do [00:05:00] another focus group that big, but I can’t imagine it in most of our cases.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, yeah, that’s exactly what I talk about is there’s such a big difference. And sometimes people think we’re talking about the same thing when we say focus groups, meaning it’s a mock trial.
It’s not because exactly for the reason you said, it’s really involved. It takes a lot of work. And most of the time you’re not going to do it until you were on the doorstep of trial when like things are set in stone and you’re just rolling the dice at that point. Do another thing to worry about is what comes in and what doesn’t and what people say on the stand.
Which no one can predict in a mock trial. Awesome. And you mentioned way in the back. So you guys had done in person before.
Justin Starin: Yes, we did it with our friend, David Paley, who he played the role of the defense counsel. And I think we had experts. We had cross examination of the experts. We had an opening and a closing.
We might’ve had a direct examination of our client. I can’t remember. [00:06:00] It’s been about. 15 years ago. And I mean, it was fun, but it was a ton of work and probably not really that efficient in terms of getting what we wanted out of it.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. It can be really challenging and there’s a lot of data that comes out and it’s very hard to wade through it.
When you’ve just done it, cause you’re exhausted. And I know that you and Sid though have before the pandemic, you guys ran some focus groups in your office, right?
Justin Starin: Yeah, we did. The biggest problem we had with them is getting the people. I never did develop a very good system for getting people to come to the focus groups.
We mainly used employment service. And I suppose there’s probably some problems with that. For me, it was fun to get on your feet and have interactions with mock jurors about cases, but then the pandemic hit and after that changed everything.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yep, I feel you on that. So let’s talk about just overall, what [00:07:00] kind of cases are you using focus groups in?
Justin Starin: We use them in a variety of cases, med mal cases, we’ve used them in products liability cases, we’ve used them in car crash cases, we’ve used them in premise liability cases, maybe even an employment case. Yeah, I think we used one in an employment case once too. I would say mostly our bigger cases, we don’t use them in every case, but some of the mid sized ones too.
I’ll give you a good example. We had a case that was in a parking lot at a box store, and the person was assaulted, the plaintiff was assaulted by some bad guys in the neighborhood. And we focus grouped it and we just couldn’t ever get the focus group to. side with us. They just thought that it wasn’t the box store’s responsibility to police the parking lot.
And so we turned down the case, even though the guy was blinded by the assault. So right off the bat, we were doing a focus [00:08:00] group. And in retrospect, I’m glad we did, because we could have spent a lot of time and energy working that case up and have it. Either lose at trial or get beat into a low settlement.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think that’s such, I try to tell people that. Cause that could be a case you spend a lot of money on. You’d have to have a securities expert. You’d have to probably have just quite a bit of case expenses and depositions. And there’d be a lot of money that’s sunk in before you realize, Oh no, a jurors.
They’re never going to get with this. It’s always going to be like stuff happens. And this brings us to our topic today of coming to using focus groups for causation. And you may be thinking in your mind, listener, like medical causation, which is good, which we can. But I think what Justin and I are going to talk about is more about the mechanism of the event being the actual causation.
And one of the examples, which I think you guys, we did together virtually, Was a case that you weren’t really sure whether the focus group was ever going to put any blame. And so talk [00:09:00] about our 4th of July, tell me about your 4th of July case and what brought that to the focus group.
Justin Starin: Okay. It was a tragic case.
There was a apartment complex and there was four, a small complex. There was only four units in, and there was two units in each side. And on the 4th of July, an arsonist had come to one of the upstairs apartments and had He used gasoline to light a fire at the door of one of the apartments, and the fire burned out, and there was a cursory investigation by the landlord, and then two days later, the arsonist came back, used more gasoline this time, and burned the entire place to the ground in record time, in a matter of hours.
The whole place was just, Completely burnt it to the ground and our client was in one of the upstairs apartments and she had to jump out of the window to escape the fire. And so the question really was, who’s at fault for [00:10:00] this? Who’s responsible for causing the harm? And is the jury going to put all of it on the arsonist?
Are they going to put some of it on the landlord? Are they going to put some of it on her? How do we work this out? And so that’s what we reached out to you to come in and. Do a focus group and try to walk us through that.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Cause again, at any point that could have been, well, who could ever predict an arsonist?
Like why would a landlord ever be able to predict that? And I think the other thing that was so crazy about sticking out of my mind. And again, just so everyone knows this is something that’s been long is long gone. And we’re not worried about any confidentiality here. We’re not going to mention any names or anything.
What amazed me was like the pictures of the fire. There were, it was one. Entryway one set of stairs up to the second floor and the arsonist first go around. He said just a little fire and they got out the second go around. He burnt, he put so much gasoline at burn the stairs. So the people in the upstairs units could not get out.
And then there was all this [00:11:00] whole other, maybe there’s a conspiracy and the people upstairs. And Justin was very good about creating some visuals for us and using some pictures. But yeah, I think we ran it more than once, I want to say, just to secure and get all the questions and everything, but tell me if you can, what you remember about what kind of feedback did you, did we get about what happened there?
Justin Starin: I think it was a mixed bag at first, and it really focused our attention on how we were going to frame the case as a systems failure instead of. A one off and the more that we were able to learn from the focus group, the more we were able to build this idea or this frame that a landlord does have responsibility and.
We’re trying to get around some of these causation heuristics, where a focus group juror might just focus on one piece of bad conduct by the arsonist, and that would be the end of the analysis. And we tried to move it back in time [00:12:00] to what was their security system like? What did they do to prevent it?
arsons or other crimes on their premises. That’s where they fell down. And that’s where the end of the focus of the case shifted after the focus groups that it really helped us learn how to figure out what was the root cause of the problem from a focus groups perspective.
Elizabeth Larrick: And I think one of the things that stood out to me that Kind of became a little bit very helpful, which was the expectation that the renters should have about being notified about things going on.
And I think that was one of the biggest facts that you guys found had a lot of draw to it, which was that nobody told anybody it was all this gossip between the renters. That’s how the rest of them found out.
Justin Starin: Yeah, they didn’t. First, they didn’t have a very good system set up. In the first place. And then they really didn’t have a plan for when something bad happened.
How are they going to notify people? How are they going to fix the problem? So it didn’t happen again. [00:13:00] And yes, that ended up being the focus of the litigation that then led up to the resolution of the case.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Anyone that’s it’s super easy. Yeah. How could you ever predict an arsonist? But it came once.
They definitely. Could have come again. And I think also, like you said, a cursory investigation, I think that was also something that kind of stuck out to them about what they would have expected somebody in the landlord capacity or the management company to do something other than what they did, which I think was pretty much nothing.
Justin Starin: Yeah, they didn’t do very much for sure. And I think the fact that The fact that the facts were egregious in the sense that the arsonist came and poured gallons and gallons of gas on a wooden exterior staircase, that then it happened so fast once the fire started. And we did go down and hire a fire expert to explain to us how the fire worked through the building and stuff.
And just a [00:14:00] wood structure exposed to gasoline is extraordinarily dangerous. Thank you very much.
Elizabeth Larrick: And that was something I mean, regular people wouldn’t know as far as the, uh, how fast and what that really means and could it have been something else? And. I think also one of the things, maybe it was just my worry or my thought or my question, was like the fact that the arsonist was still out there, no one had really even tried very hard, I would say, to go do a second investigation or anything and just never got caught.
No punishment, no nothing. Once you’re able to get that feedback about the notice and oh, this happened, oh, this, they found it through gossip, then that kind of, that definitely helped. And I want to say for the second one, we changed things up a little bit to try and make sure we’re dialing in on the right parts.
Justin Starin: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what I’ve learned over time is that sometimes you need to do more than one focus group because you need to learn from the first one so that then you can reframe the case and then [00:15:00] present it in the second one. And when we first got the case, we thought it was going to be more of an analysis, not of the security system, but of the fire suppression system that, you know, but it turns out that because it was a relatively small facility, they were up to code in terms of their, their Fire suppression and fire alarms and all that kind of stuff.
So
Elizabeth Larrick: yeah, it didn’t even have to have a suppression system, right. They didn’t even have to. Yeah. Yeah. And I always find that super interesting where we have an idea in our minds, like what makes sense sometimes legally. And then it’s, Oh, what’s the simplest thing that could have stopped him? Get fricking ring doorbell.
That’s what a lot of them were just like, wait a second. This is easy. Right. You can go get a camera for 5 or something and put it up there. Even if it’s fake. And that’s. Still deters people. Like they had so many good ideas and I was like, Oh yeah, okay. This is way easier than trying to have a sprinkler system in a pretty low rent apartment complex.
Justin Starin: Your lawyer brain goes down that rabbit hole and it’s nice to have a focus group that kind of brings you back to reality. [00:16:00] Make your case simple, which is important because as we know complexity confusion and ambiguity are your enemy So
Elizabeth Larrick: yeah, and my gosh, we love details lawyers love the details I’m always like let’s not overwhelm people with the details.
Let’s just see what they do with these facts Because yeah, there’s so much detail that we get into that we have to write We’ve got to dig through all the fluff and all the stuff to then put everything together But at the end of the day when you go to trial It’s really simple. You really want to try to avoid all the extra confusion and You got to plant your flag.
You got to pick your path. And if you try to have two paths, it becomes way too confusing because there’s always going to be extra evidence with almost for both ways. And it’s hard. Although I can hear people think listening, go, well, what if there is contrib and what if they do have to take some responsibility, that’s a little different than, you know, Like Justin is saying, was it a security system [00:17:00] situation or a fire suppressant?
You tried to go both avenues and you didn’t test out which was stronger. You could just be spinning your wheels and just confuse everybody to begin with. Which leads me to our second example, which was an even more challenging causation with our gun manufacturer case. So I know that one’s got a hairy lot of details, but why were we so hounded by doing focus groups?
Justin Starin: It was a very complex kind of factual scenario and there was no witnesses to the incident where a young person had a firearm and ended up shooting himself with it. And the question was, did he do it intentionally or was it as a result of a defective product? And there was so much emotion and there was so many factors that we felt like we had to do focus groups to try to.
Understand it. And it was a very challenging case for a lot of reasons, [00:18:00] but just even the simple scene was challenging to try to figure out.
Elizabeth Larrick: And I think the causation of why it malfunctioned was difficult because there were. So many pieces like that part alone. Let me just tell you people, they sent me, how old was this video of the inside of a gun and how it works?
I don’t know, but I took it and I slowed it down so I could understand. And we could try and watch it together with a focus group. So they would be able to understand like, why this was something that could happen without the gun could go off for any, you accidentally drop it. You literally touch it. You don’t have to do anything to it.
And it’ll just go off all on its own. And it was just like, okay. And then add in this whole other complication of a very young person who the whole defense was this, this is really sad. This is just a case of suicide. And the amount of work they had done to basically put so many facts on that side of that defense and then us, you [00:19:00] guys trying to figure out like, okay, we’ve got to be able to really pinpoint this causation of how it malfunctioned and then put it into the set of facts of what happened that day.
That morning and it was just really, I’m complicating it just by saying it sounds complicated just by me saying it.
Justin Starin: I think I drafted that part of the opening statement, maybe 15 or more times and I would get done with it. And then I would bring it back to the team and I would say, okay, here’s my latest attempt.
And then they would shoot it down and say, oh, it’s too complicated. It’s too confusing. You got to make it simple. Why do you have to pretend like you’re an engineer, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just, it was, It’s probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done as a lawyer was to try to figure out a way to simplify that level of complexity and not sure we ever really got there.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. At the end of the day, they were the focus group and we, I think we did two or three, I want to [00:20:00] say, and the focus group was still just came down with a lot of confusion. And unfortunately it was just like, what’s the simple, instead of trying to understand or learn or. They, the simplest thing was for them just to blame him, which was of course not what we wanted.
And another thing, of course, which is so frustrating as lawyers, sometimes as you have, there were mountains and mountains of evidence and proof of all of this stuff. And it was going to probably come in. And that was like, the other hard thing was like, okay, how do we synthesize, how do you guys like siphon all this, like really good, hard proof.
It was a really, it was a huge challenge.
Justin Starin: Yeah. It really was. That, that one would be just tough.
Elizabeth Larrick: I know. And I’m glad we, again, this is another one that has been closed out, but just another one of those ones where it’s holy mackerel, like having to try that case. Cause you guys were coming up on the doorstep.
This is, wasn’t one where we, it [00:21:00] came and this was the beginning part. No, this was at the end of trial prep. Let’s run this opening. Let’s put these pictures out there. And I think the hard part was because again, coming at the tail end and getting ready to try it, there were so many pieces of things that just weren’t even available because at the time that that all happened, no investigation was done at all.
Justin Starin: Certainly not at the level that I think you would expect for a death. And I think there was just some assumptions made by the law enforcement. Officials that investigated the incident of what it was and they really didn’t take a deep enough dive into the cause of the incident and that ended up making it very difficult to try to reconstruct.
So yeah, it was a challenging case all the way around.
Elizabeth Larrick: Because you’re going against what the police report says, and you’re going against what the manufacturer says, and you’re going against what [00:22:00] would be looked at as, oh, this seems like the simplest explanation, and respectfully, I don’t think suicide is ever a simple explanation.
I think that’s probably the more complicated one out of any of them, but it was a lot. And you guys were It’s getting ready to go to trial. So it definitely answered some questions for us, but I think this was a focus group that kept leaving us with more questions about, and also how to answer their questions.
Because just like you said, they had an expectation about where’s the ballistics, why didn’t do the powder thing they do on CSI for the gun residue,
Justin Starin: right? That always seems to be the case. There’s always seems to be like a juror’s expectation that there’s going to be a lot of. Kind of CSI type evidence.
And as everyone that’s probably listening to this podcast knows that rarely if ever happens.
Elizabeth Larrick: No. And you guys had tried that. Okay. We have pictures and it was still was not enough because it was just going to be, it [00:23:00] was just so close, you know, as far as like the distance and all the stuff that was just, they all of course expect that it’s like, whenever we do a focus group now, any, I don’t care what kind of focus group it is.
Like, where’s the video footage? I’m like. So everyone just expect your car is going to have some kind of video camera, the front door, the convenience store, which I think we get used to that. But at the same time, nobody’s, do you have video in your car? No. Why would you expect? Anybody to be at the video, but that’s just one of those things.
Well, where’s the ballistics? Where’s their gun residue and where’s the, whoa, you didn’t do the whole like recreation thing. Oh man. So yeah, there’s a lot of expectations people have out there. And especially in that particular case. And it was just like, how do you get around that? Because you were going to have to like have a little side.
Like a side tussle with the police while you’re in the middle of having this other case again with the gun manufacturer. So yeah, there were lots of issues for sure in that case. But do you feel like the focus groups helped the case resolve?
Justin Starin: Yeah, [00:24:00] definitely. I think that’s definitely true. It certainly showed us.
What we were up against in terms of trying to persuade people’s preconceived notions of what the case was about or what a manufacturer’s responsibilities are. Some of the more preconceived notions that people have about these kinds of scenarios were just clarified for us to the point where we could then take a more direct approach.
honest look at our case and value it in a different way than if we hadn’t done those and we would have maybe got overconfident. And yeah, definitely. It always, I’ve never had a focus group that I didn’t think helped. Everyone that we’ve ever done helped in some way, some more than others, but I’ve learned something from every one of them.
Elizabeth Larrick: And he means some more than others. He means the first one we ever did together because Sid and Justin were my Guinea pigs. They were my very first. virtual [00:25:00] focus group in May of 2020. I was like, y’all, I’m going to try this out. Let’s see how this works. I think we had four people there. Do you remember we had four participants?
Justin Starin: Yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: What we ran, I have no idea what case we did, what we ran at all, but I think it was just, Is this possible? Is this going to work? Thank you for being the guest. Yeah,
Justin Starin: absolutely.
Elizabeth Larrick: I’m not even sure what we got out of that other than, okay, it’s totally possible. There are a ton of things we need to fix before we go forward with any more.
But, but yeah, I think folks groups of course are useful because they tell you just like you got clarity that, Ooh, maybe this is not one that needs to go to trial. And sometimes. A lot of times that’s what I feel like sometimes, like it, that’s what it helps you do decide, Oh, we can try this case. Totally fine.
Like the arsonist case. Yep. We can try this case. We know how to try this case. We’re going to get past those little things that they think. And then other times it’s, this is more than we can bit, bit off more than we can chew for sure.
Justin Starin: I was thinking [00:26:00] about that one case that you helped us with the misdiagnosis of the cancer tumor.
After we did a focus group in that case, we learned that, and I’m going to give you the brief facts, so there was a young girl who had a growth on her arm, and the surgeon removed it, sent it to the pathologist, and the pathologist put it under a microscope and looked at it and said there’s no cancer. A few months later, the tumor came back, the surgeon removed it again, sent it back to the pathologist, this time, oh, yep, there’s cancer.
Oh, and by the way, that first specimen you sent us also had cancer. was also cancerous. So we got a problem. And what we learned in the focus group that really helped us in the preparation of the case was that they were going to blame the mom for not getting a second opinion. So mom, you should have taken your child to get a second opinion.
And So what we did when we started taking depositions is we [00:27:00] chose not to sue the surgeon, even though some of our experts thought that he may have been somewhat culpable, but we decided we’re not going to sue him and we’re going to use him to get around this. And so in the depositions, we went and said to him, do you rely on the pathologist?
When you make medical decisions about your patients, yes, and have you ever got a second opinion from one of your pathologists? No. Do you think it’s reasonable for you to rely on a pathologist? Yes. Do you think it was reasonable for this family to rely on the pathologist? Yes. And that really helped, knowing that, helped insulate our clients from the defense, which was that the mom was somewhat culpable.
Elizabeth Larrick: Mm hmm. And then it was like her deposition, like they couldn’t get her to do anything. She absolutely positively would not budge one inch and just gave them a run for their money, hardcore, [00:28:00] the epitome of a mama bear for sure. And terribly sad case. It’s so sad, but. You guys fought that thing all the way to the end.
I remember you were like, we’re going to have to go to trial. I was like, all right, let me come back. I’ll come back and help. Cause yeah, it was just like, you guys had been really with them for so long. And there were so many other extraneous things that were happening that were just like, Oh my gosh, we have to get this finished.
Like there’s a time constraint here. This girl, this woman is basically going to succumb to this cancer before we’re finished. Like Her whole, she was such a fighter, her whole goal was to hold, hold them accountable. But yeah, such a good way to use focus groups in the beginning, because you guys, that’s a pretty big case strategy thing to do, to not sue somebody.
Right. Most people would have said, oh no, you sue everybody and then they’ll pay you to get out, which can cause a [00:29:00] lot more problems than it does put extra dollars in your pocket.
Justin Starin: And I think he was grateful to us for not suing him and it made it easier for him, I think he would have done it anyway but it made it easier for him to go to the deposition with less stress in terms of his testimony at the deposition and.
It really worked out very well because he was kind of a charming, you know, it’s, he was an orthopedic surgeon. They typically are people, persons, unlike a pathologist who’s behind the scenes. And they’re the nerds.
Elizabeth Larrick: They’re one of the smartest people that come out of med school because they got to look at microscopes and do what that’s just all there is to it.
And you guys also had the primary care and doctor in there too, which had his own flavor of interesting issues, which. We’re not ever going to come into evidence, unfortunately, in any form or fashion. But yeah, those were good focus groups. Good example. I forgot about using that particular case. Let me ask you, because we got people who, from all over who listened to the podcast, what would you say to somebody who maybe is on the fence [00:30:00] about doing a focus group?
Justin Starin: I would say, do it and see how it goes. Like I said, I’ve learned something from every one of And they’re just not that much money. Compared to what you could spend just spinning your wheels about what the case is about or fretting over some fact that you don’t understand how it fits in the context of the frame that you’ve developed, or sometimes I’ve even thought that maybe they help with the briefing, you can understand that this is what’s compelling to people, and judges are people too, and if you got the first part of your brief and you’re trying to persuade the judge, Having some compelling facts help.
And if you know what facts are compelling and what aren’t, yeah, I think I would absolutely. Recommend doing them for sure.
Elizabeth Larrick: And like I said, you guys literally bought a camera, used the room in the basement, and had some people come in. That’s how it, that’s how we all get started. That’s [00:31:00] exactly how I got started.
I borrowed somebody’s conference room. I bought a camera. We started advertising on Craigslist and people showed up and like you said, you’re going to learn something from every single one of these. And it’s only natural that we are stuck in our lawyer brains because that’s how we. Went through school.
That’s how we progress. We hang out with lawyers when we have questions, we ask other lawyers. That’s what listservs are for. But I always find that that then naturally creates blind spots that we’re just not going to see everything. And sometimes it takes an outside person for 75 bucks. A hundred bucks to tell us something, you know what?
And guess what? It’s worth every single stinking penny. That 75 opinion right there could go and save you a hundred thousand dollars or 50, 000 on that expert who you don’t really need. Or what I always tell people is we get really obsessed with experts and that’s such a good other place where it’s like, go learn what they need to know from the expert.
And then. Have the expert testify to [00:32:00] that, but don’t feel like you automatically understand what a juror needs to hear from an expert. And I got to tell you, experts don’t really like that because they’re like, I want to tell my whole blah blah. Okay, you need to get it for an expert because they clearly don’t get trial.
Like, you know, there are experts that you take to trial and there are experts that you take to get it settled. Right. And there are, I can think of a really good example in Texas right now where it’s, oh yeah, if I’m going to trial, that’s the guy I’m picking. If I just, I know I need one, but I’ll go over here to this pile of people.
There’s just a huge difference because they get that the jurors involved is not just about them and, you know, pontificating their opinion, total soapbox and sidebar. Sorry about that. All right, Justin, you’re in Missoula and folks, if you want to learn more about Justin and Sid, then I’m going to put all the contact information in the show notes.
Justin is also a river rat. So if you have any interest in. River stuff, and I’m going to say river stuff because if you live in Texas, you get it. We don’t have [00:33:00] rivers. We damn them up to make lakes. But anytime I’ve been up to hang out with Sid and Justin, I get to go on the river and I’m always grateful.
So thank you for my river trips.
Justin Starin: Yeah. We’re going to, we’re going to turn you into a dirt bag by the end of this, for sure.
Elizabeth Larrick: So the funny thing is another sidebar here. When we float down the river in Texas, we get a tube and a cold beer and we put our butt in the tube and you just float down the river.
Not so much in Montana. You’re going to get swept away, uh, got to get a whole boat thing, which is not even a boat. I’m not probably not even saying it right with the Justin gets out there. How many boats do you have? It’s not a boat. It’s a raft.
Justin Starin: I have a couple rafts, some kayaks. Yeah. Lots of boats.
Elizabeth Larrick: Lots of boats.
He even took the whole fam down for a couple, how many, was it a week?
Justin Starin: A week. Yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: 10 days down the snake river.
Justin Starin: The salmon and the snake. Yeah. Yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: Nice. See, I remember it. All right. If anybody wants to know about rivers or personal injury cases, and they still have workers comp in Montana too, by the way, we had Matt Murphy [00:34:00] on and he talked about workers comp, which doesn’t really exist in Texas anymore.
And other places too. Justin, thank you so much for joining us.
Justin Starin: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Elizabeth Larrick: Until next time, thank you so much. And everybody, if you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you haven’t done so go and follow and connect with me on LinkedIn. That link will be in the show notes if you weren’t already doing it.
All right. Thank you.