EP 247 – James Wood – Building a Winning Legal Team with a ‘Foxhole Mentality’
The following interview has been transcribed for our readers from rev.com. Please excuse any discrepancies in the transcription.
James Wood:
I think the number one thing for me in hiring people, and you don’t find this out when you’re hiring them, but I think when you get into the situation with them in a case, I think you want people that you can go in a foxhole with. I really believe in that philosophy. I mean, you want people that have your back and that you can trust and that you have their back and they can trust you. I think to me that’s the most important thing is the foxhole mentality.
Speaker 2:
You’re listening to the Legal Mastermind Podcast presented by Market My Market with your hosts, Eric Bersano, Ryan Klein, and Chase Williams. The go-to podcast for learning from the experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firm.
Eric Bersano:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind Podcast. Today I have with me attorney James Wood of the James Wood Law Firm. James, welcome to the podcast.
James Wood:
Thank you, I’m looking forward to visiting with you today.
Eric Bersano:
So if you could give our audience maybe a brief history of you. I mean obviously an attorney, you’re in New Mexico, but I think you were born and raised in Texas, so if you could give a little bit of history about yourself.
James Wood:
Yes, okay. Well, as you mentioned, I was born and raised in Texas. Kind of an interesting part of that is my father was a football coach and he was a very successful football coach in Texas. And as you may know, in Texas, football is a big thing. So it was fun growing up in that environment and I think it had a lot of influence on me as far as being competitive and the expectation of making sure that you do your job and that you do the things that you’re supposed to be doing to get to where you’re supposed to go, and so I think a lot of that happened. And then the law, I became a lawyer and the law changed in Texas. I do all medical negligence work, all medical malpractice, and so the law began to change in Texas to the point of where you really could not prosecute medical negligence cases in Texas because of the caps on damages.
There’s no way to do it, and that’s what I think the intention was, frankly, to eliminate lawsuits against doctors and nurses and hospitals and whatnot. They certainly succeeded. So I came to New Mexico in 2008 and started my practice here. And then again, as I mentioned, we do all medical negligence work, and it’s really a fascinating area of the law because to be successful at that type of work, you have to learn the medicine. You have to know the medicine almost as well as the doctor that you’re prosecuting or something like that, or the hospital you’re prosecuting. You have to know the medicine almost that well, if not that well. And so it puts you in a situation where you’re spending a lot of time learning medicine, and then in addition to that, you have to keep up with the law. So it’s a very interesting practice to have. We’ve grown. When I started here in New Mexico, I had one paralegal and myself, and now we’ve grown to four paralegals and four attorneys. So for a plaintiff’s medical negligence firm, that’s a pretty good-sized practice in New Mexico for sure.
Eric Bersano:
Yeah. Well, before we jump full into the legal and medical malpractice side, I have one question for you. So being the coach’s son, I think that goes one of two ways. Either people think you get favoritism or you get harsher treatment than anybody else on the planet because your dad wants to overcompensate and make sure no one thinks you’re getting favorable treatment.
James Wood:
Well, it definitely was the latter. I mean, it wasn’t probably the most harsh treatment, but he made it very clear, he’d sat me down and he talked to me about it and he said, I think it’s really important for you and for me both to make sure that people don’t perceive of you as being a favorite or favoritism or something of that nature. So he said, I’m going to be hard on you and I’m going to insist that you toe the line. So that’s pretty much what he did, but it wasn’t so onerous or bad that I didn’t enjoy what I did. I mean, he wasn’t like it was an everyday thing, but if I messed up, I certainly heard about it.
Eric Bersano:
Yeah, well, I could tell just from reading through your bio that that probably had a big impact on who you are today, mentioning the type of coach that your dad was and some of the grit I’d say that he instilled in making sure that not just you, but everybody on the team did their job.
James Wood:
Right. And that was the really interesting position he had or motto or theme or whatever you want to call it. I mean, he had an expression all the time was either you’re going to do your job or we’re going to find somebody who can. So we certainly had to live up to that. Either you’re going to do your job or we’re going to find somebody who can. That was a big part of the way he coached. Honestly, you don’t see it much today just because of the world we’re in as far as attitudes and whatnot, but I think for your guests could relate to somebody like Nick Saban at Alabama. Nick is 72, 73, 74, somewhere in that range, and so he’s from that same school where you don’t coddle players, you expect them to really get out there and do their job. There was not a lot of hugging and kissing and all that kind of stuff, but we were very successful. I mean, he won nine state championships in Texas and no one has ever matched that number, so it worked.
Eric Bersano:
That’s amazing. So to now dovetail back into where you’re at today, he was coaching a team and players and had their different positions and duties, running a law firm, you’ve got attorneys, you’ve got other staff. What’s your philosophy on hiring and management to make sure that you’re getting the most out of everybody but still have a good work environment?
James Wood:
Well, the one thing that I try to do as much as possible is I try to be more positive than, say for example, my dad. He was of that generation of where you just were not necessarily positive. That wasn’t the way you coached. He was of the school of, like I said, Nick Saban, Bear Bryant, people like that, and he expected you to do your job. In my situation, my personality is such that I don’t really yell at people. I may yell at a situation. There are definitely times I’ve yelled, but it’s usually not at a person individually.
So I’ve tried to be more positive, but at the same time with an expectation that, not necessarily saying it this way, but expecting it is either you’re going to do your job or we’re going to replace you. And so I still believe in that philosophy because our clients are really counting on us and so you can’t tolerate or allow mistakes and things like this that put the case in jeopardy or the client in jeopardy or something like that, but I just don’t do it, at least I don’t think I do it, in a negative way.
Eric Bersano:
So when you’re looking for a new lawyer or a new staff member, whoever you bring onto the team is going to have an effect on the success of the law firm overall. So for someone who might be in that position now who’s wanting to grow, do you have a philosophy? Are there certain traits that you look for? How do you recruit for either a new lawyer or somebody else who’s going to be part of your team?
James Wood:
Well, I think the one thing that’s real important to do is you want people who I think look at what they’re doing not so much as a job, but as a vocation. You want them to be willing to go that extra mile to get things done. I mean, it’s important if something’s not finished and it needs to be finished, you can’t wait until tomorrow, then you have to have people who are going to finish it that day. And if that means working late, it means working late. If it means coming back after supper, it means coming back after supper. If it means working at night, it means working at night. So I think you have to have those kind of people still.
But I also think you want people that get along. You want a certain good relationships. So like for example today, I thought it was really important today, we had all been apart for Thanksgiving, the firm had been apart for Thanksgiving, everybody was here today, so we had all eight people here today, and so I brought in lunch. We had lunch brought in and the entire firm ate lunch together. So I think little things like that are important just to have a connection.
Then I think the number one thing for me in hiring people, and you don’t find this out when you’re hiring them, but I think when you get into the situation with them in a case, I think you want people that you can go in a foxhole with. And I really believe in that philosophy. I mean, you want people that have your back and that you can trust and that you have their back and they can trust you. I think to me that’s the most important thing is the foxhole mentality.
Eric Bersano:
Do you have a question that you like to ask people or is there a certain characteristic or something on the resume that usually shines out you or is it just individual, each individual person you say, oh, this person played football in college or this person did this? What do you look for?
James Wood:
Well, I don’t think you can find that quality until they’ve been here. And then even when they’ve been here, I don’t think you can find that quality until you have a trial. Until you actually go into a trial situation and you see how they work in that setting of a trial and that you see that they have your back and that they’re going to be there and help take care of you. Another thing, this is something you can more or less find when you’re interviewing people, I think, is you want people that are uplifting as well that you hire in your firm. Because what we do as trial lawyers is very negative. I mean, it’s a very negative world. You’re going against opponents, defense lawyers, and they’re very aggressive and they’re coming at you and they’re going to talk about you’re wrong and you don’t know what you’re talking about and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you come in with judges, and judges, they’re not necessarily the most friendly people either. They’re hardworking and they’ve got a lot going on in their business, their docket, so they’re not particularly friendly when you come in. So you have this atmosphere of people that we work with all the time that are opposite us but that are very negative and it’s a very negative environment. And so when you have a witness on the witness stand and you’re cross-examining that witness, it’s very adversarial. That witness is going to score points. You hope you score points. But you can have constructive criticism from the person that’s helping you, which is good, you always want constructive criticism, but you also need to have some uplifting.
You need to say, “Hey man, you did a good job.” Even if you didn’t. “You did a good job on that and I’ve enjoyed watching that,” or something. Because all that does is help you with your confidence, and I think it’s easier to talk to people and point out the positive things before you talk about the negative things. I mean, typically if I’m going to need to visit with an attorney about an issue, I usually try to bring them in. Hey, let’s talk about some of the positive things they’re doing and then talk about the things they need to be corrected.
Eric Bersano:
Let’s talk a little bit more about the practice area itself of medical negligence, medical malpractice, very complex. You’d mentioned that in the beginning you’re not just talking about legal issues, but medical issues and these can get very complex, whether you’re talking about pharmaceuticals or the type of procedures. Was there something that drew you to that, and what are some of the bigger challenges that you face with this practice area?
James Wood:
Well, number one, the thing that drew me to it as much as anything, or probably as much, is that it’s intellectually challenging. For many years like most of us, I did garden variety personal injury work. That would be an automobile accident, a truck wreck, someone slipped and fell and broke a bone or something of this nature, hit their head. So those are certainly great cases to work on, but there’s only so many types of car wrecks. There’s only so many different types of slip and falls. But in the medical arena, these medical negligence cases, they’re very, very fascinating cases to work on. So for example, I’ve got a case right now that’s coming up for trial and our client had necrotizing fasciitis. I had no idea what necrotizing fasciitis was and I had to learn all about that. That basically it’s a flesh eating bacteria and how it works and how you treat it and that kind of thing. That’s an example of a case that I’m working on right now.
Then there’s a case that I’m spending a lot of time on right now that for lack of better term would be called a birth injury case. Where we have a young boy who is essentially a quadriplegic paraplegic, he’s four years old but his developmental age is one month. So horrible cerebral palsy. But as far as getting into the case, I had to learn stuff that I had no idea, especially being a man, I had no idea about childbirth and labor and delivery and late decelerations and variable decelerations and things like that. So it’s just a very interesting world to work in because it’s very challenging and there’s a lot of [inaudible 00:16:58].
Number two, you’re really going against the best lawyers there are. Most of the time, the defense lawyers who defend medical malpractice cases are very, very good lawyers. There’s at least some of the best lawyers out there. And that’s because these are very high stakes cases, they involve a lot of money, so they’re going to hire the best lawyers available to them and so they’re very challenging. So it just kind of drew me in in a way that I thought, this is fascinating work, and if I had a choice between working on a med mal case or an automobile case, I tended to work on the med mal case. So I thought, well, let’s just go to all medical negligence. Why not? Let’s just focus on that.
Eric Bersano:
And what are some of the things that you need to help tip the scales in your favor? So one of the things that I’ve heard could be very difficult in these cases is doctors are looked at as the good guys a lot of times. So people like their doctors, they have relationship with their doctors, but they can make mistakes and some of those mistakes can be egregious or could have been prevented. So what are some of the techniques or things that you have to do in order to tip the scales in your favor?
James Wood:
Well, that’s a great point. One of the things that I say, to echo what you said, jurors tend to love nurses and they like doctors and they don’t like lawyers. So you’ve got three things that you go into every case with: loving nurses, liking doctors, disliking lawyers. And so you have to deal with those things and overcome those things. And I think the way that you do that or what we’ve had success in overcoming those issues is being very credible. We focus on making sure that the story we’re telling is 100% accurate. It’s completely true. Because jurors have a natural skepticism, as I mentioned, towards lawyers, and so if they catch us not being completely accurate or untrue, then we’re going to lose all credibility with them. We have very little credibility to begin with, but we’re going to lose all credibility with them at that point.
But let’s say you’ve got a trial that lasts two weeks and all they hear from you is the truth. Factually, they hear the truth, the truth, the truth, the truth. That means the other side is not telling the truth. And so all of a sudden, or not all of a sudden, a progression, they start thinking, well, wait a minute. This plaintiff is saying this family, they’re being truthful with me. They have the truth. So that’s one thing I think is real important is credibility and truthfulness throughout. Then number two, I think it’s important as much as you can, focus on the institutional defendant. So if you’ve got a situation where a doctor worked at a hospital and you can show institutional failures of the hospital or that the hospital contributed to the injury or was a cause of the injury, then jurors are much more… They don’t like hospitals. They don’t like institutional medicine either. So while they may love the doctor, they don’t like the institution necessarily.
So those are two ways I think of dealing with it is try to get an emphasis on the institution itself, be totally credible, and then the third thing I think is very important is you want don’t take cases where you don’t have a bad injury because otherwise the jurors just perceive that as you’re wasting everybody’s time. Why are we here for that, for this? So we limit our cases to wrongful death cases where somebody, medical negligence cause of death, or we limit our cases to serious permanent personal injury cases. So the injury would have to be like an amputation, a brain injury, paralysis, things like this where the injured person has a very serious permanent injury. And by doing that, jurors can see that what they’re doing is going to make a difference and that it’s important case to them. It’s not, what we used to call back in the automobile days, it’s not a minor impact soft tissue case. A MIST case is what they would call them, minor impact soft tissue. So you want to avoid those kinds of cases.
Eric Bersano:
And one of the things that I saw in the notes that might’ve even been on your website is the importance of having partnerships with healthcare facilities. Can you explain that a little bit more? How that helps you in developing the case or maybe it’s part of the credibility aspect?
James Wood:
Well, it is, but what we do, we do some pretty cutting edge things I think. I mean, for example, we work with a legal nurse consultant that in my opinion is the best finest legal nurse consultant out there. And I’ve been working with her for 10, 12 years now and she’s just phenomenal. And so that helps us a lot because you’ve got somebody that if you have a question about the medicine, you can pick up the phone and call her and she can help answer that question or point you in the right direction or she can find a way to answer it. So I think that’s a big step.
Then something else that we do is we work a lot with our expert witnesses. So we try to hire the very best expert witnesses available. We want, if you can get somebody from Harvard or Yale or Cal Berkeley or something of that nature to be one of your experts, that really helps you because these are some of the top people in the country in their field. And so we try to do that and then we work really hard with them. We do what’s called a roadshow where I’ll go out on the road and I’ll meet with these experts. Say we’ve got six experts, I may be gone for three weeks, and so I may meet with expert one, expert two the first week, expert three, expert four the second week, and then finish up the third week.
And I’m talking about spending a half day with them. Not 10 minutes or 15 minutes, but spending a half day with them, making sure that I understand the medicine, making sure I understand what happened and I’ve got a real feel for that, and to work with them then on preparing their testimony and things of this nature. So we do some things like that. We also do for our clients, we do, we call them witness workshops. And with witness workshops, what we do is we will spend a lot of times with our clients, with our witnesses and our clients, helping prepare them. And we use techniques. One technique we use is called psychodrama, which is a technique where you really try to walk in the shoes of the client and you try to really understand what they went through so that when you’re telling their story, it’s not just a box of documents. It’s a real human being that you’ve spent a lot of time with, you’ve gotten to know and you’ve been in their home, you’ve eaten with them. We try to do things like that.
Eric Bersano:
And that’s I’ve heard, I saw you were a graduate of the Gerry Spence trial law, those are techniques I think from there, and I’ve read a couple of other books and papers about how can you properly represent somebody if you don’t actually know them, so try to walk in their shoes. So obviously the work that you’ve put into these, the team you’ve built around it, anybody would be lucky to have you. The problem I think with the general public is no one considers how good of an attorney they need until they actually need one. It’s not something like you’ve got a Rolodex of, oh, if I ever need a medical malpractice attorney, here’s who I’m going to call. So how do you use marketing, social media, how do you try to put yourself in the right place at the right time when somebody does need your services somewhere in New Mexico?
James Wood:
Well, the one thing that we really all we do is we are on the internet. We have hired a company, and again, I tend to have these long-term partnerships. My legal nurse consultant and I’ve been together 10 or 12 years. I work with an internet marketing company and I think we’ve been together 10 or 12 years. We get to know them, we work with them, they know us, they know our practice. So that’s the only place we really advertise is on the internet, but it works well for us. And the reason I think it works well for us is we really like having clients that are smart.
I’m not talking about you have to be educated to be smart. You can be very, very smart, not necessarily educated. But if they’re on the internet, they find you on the internet, they read about you on the internet, they’re pretty smart people. As opposed to TV advertising or these, to me, it’s just shameful these ads that we see on TV. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. That’s for another day, but I think it’s pretty sad that we have lawyers out there that do that. So I think that positions us as best we can to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, if somebody’s looking for a lawyer, hopefully our marketing people, if they enter the right search terms, they’re going to come to us. And we have a good track record, a good presence I think on the internet, so it seems to be working. We’re busy, so it’s not a situation where we don’t have anything to do. So we’re very, very busy, so I think what we’re doing is working.
Eric Bersano:
Yeah, no, and that’s great. Obviously you’ve built up a good practice. I think a lot of the attorneys that listen to this podcast, I mean, you can have all the training, go to a great school, open up your practice, but if you can’t prime the pump with clients who are reaching out to you, you’ve got all this talent with not enough clientele. I’m always curious just how social media is working or if it’s something that you find… You know, the internet, your website, I understand that’s probably a really good tool. Have you found social media to be a good tool as well or is that just something that is kind of an afterthought, you want to have a presence there, or do you find people engaging with it?
James Wood:
That’s a great question and I don’t know the answer to that. I have more or less handed off all of our marketing to the company that we work, our marketing people. I’ve just handed it off to them. But the way I monitor it is I just make sure the phone’s ringing. So I get a list every day of prospect calls, and as long as we’ve got calls coming in every day, or at least sufficient calls every week, then we’re going to get the number of cases that we need. I hear about social media, I just, to be candid, I don’t even know if we’re on social media. I mean, I guess we may be, I just don’t know. But I know it seems to be working. I mean, we’re getting calls seems like every day, at least several calls a week.
Eric Bersano:
And you touched on something I think it’s probably one of the most difficult practice areas when it comes to intake. Yeah, I was talking with a law firm that I work with that got a case because one of the neurosurgeons had not gone through all of the certifications before they performed this surgery that ended up going bad and then needing other surgeries and then finally having to go to another neurosurgeon. My point of that is with a medical malpractice case, number one, if it’s something like you talked about necrotizing fasciitis I think, maybe you hear a term that you’ve never heard before or someone went and didn’t get the type of result that they wanted, but they don’t even know what the down road problems are going to be. How does that intake process work in this practice area? Is it you who has to look at everything or do you have people on staff that are looking for certain keywords that they say this could be a case that needs further investigation?
James Wood:
Well, again, another great question. So what we do is we have one of our best, probably our best paralegal, our most senior paralegal for sure, and she is in charge of the intakes. And so she’s been around a long time and she can listen to an intake and very quickly know whether it’s the type of case that we would want to take. And again, the first two things she’s looking for is is it a serious permanent injury case or is it a wrongful death case? And if it doesn’t meet either one of those criteria, then we’re going to reject the case. And the reason is primarily it’s money. I mean, these cases are very, very expensive to prosecute. So it’s not unusual for me if we try a case, if we go all the way to trial, it’s not unusual for me to invest $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 in that case.
Well, what you don’t want to do is get down at the end and the client doesn’t get any money. I mean, you get down to the end, the client spent two or three years of their lives helping you with this case and then all the expenses eat up the recovery in the case, and so the client at the end doesn’t have a recovery, and that’s a tragic situation to be in. Either you lose money or they lose money or both of you lose money. And so it’s a really rough situation. So we are pretty selective then. We either want them to be wrongful death or serious permanent injury.
So the paralegal can screen that first, and then if it meets that criteria, then she will start getting the facts of the case, finding out what happened, the who, what, when, where, why kind of situation, and if it meets all those criteria, then she’ll discuss it with the legal nurse consultant. And then the legal nurse consultant will recommend to me basically either we take the case or we don’t. Our attorneys can weigh in on whether they think we should take the case or not, and then I make the final decision, ultimately.
Eric Bersano:
This is something I always say, that lawyers have somewhat lost or are losing the PR war. You mentioned it. They love nurses, they like doctors, they don’t like attorneys. And the reason is I don’t think the average person understands that when James Woods takes on a case and invests half a million dollars of his own money, it’s at risk. If you don’t win that case, it’s gone. Of course, the other person doesn’t win anything either who may have been harmed, but that’s how if the courts decide or the jury decides it that way. And I think if the average person really understood that you have to risk your business, your financial future on a case, and if you’re willing to take that case, you’ve got to go all in on that. So yeah, I mean, I think it makes perfect sense. I think when the average person says, oh, well, they wouldn’t take my case because there’s no money. And it’s like, there’s no money in it for anybody just because of the way the system is set up.
James Wood:
Right. Well, and you make a good point. From time to time, I like to go to Las Vegas and play Texas hold ’em. And to me it’s a stress reliever, it’s a fun place, and Las Vegas is a fun place. And so to go out there and play, and I’m one of those people, I may play six or eight hours a day. I don’t just sit at the table and go. Or eight hours a day or 10 hours a day, that kind of thing. I’ll take breaks, but I like to play if I’m going to play. But anyway, long story short, I was out there one time and I made a bet of $1,000, and on one hand I bet $1,000. And this gentleman that I was playing there with, he said, man, that’s a lot of money to bet on one hand. And I said, yeah, it is. And then it came into my mind, I said, but you know, I bet $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 on one case. So looking at $1,000 on a poker hand is really not much compared to the wagers that I make in real life.
Eric Bersano:
And I think that’s a good way to look at it. That one hand of poker, if you lose it, it only affects you. Whereas if you lose the case, it affects you, your office, the client, so there’s so much more on the line that $1,000 poker hand didn’t seem to have the same ramifications.
James Wood:
Right.
Eric Bersano:
Well, James, I can’t thank you enough for your time today. Before we close out, is there anything that you’d like to leave the audience with, whether it refers to medical malpractice, the law, or even Texas hold ’em?
James Wood:
Oh, no, I don’t think so. I had a good time. I would say one thing, I like cars. In fact, I’m in racing car school right now, so learning how to drive a race car. And anyway, I was reading this quote from Enzo Ferrari and he said… Let me see if I can do it right. He said, you cannot describe passion, you can only live it. And that to me is one of the most amazing sayings. You cannot describe passion, you can only live it. And so I think that’s what I would encourage anybody to do that’s in the legal profession is be passionate about it, enjoy it, and get after it and have fun.
Eric Bersano:
That’s a great way to close out. And if anybody hasn’t been, go to James Woods’ website. I think every attorney has a favorite quote, so maybe we’ll be seeing that new quote from Enzo Ferrari on your profile soon.
James Wood:
Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Legal Masterminds podcast presented by Market My Market. You can check out additional episodes and recaps at legalmastermindpodcast.com.