From “Drinking on the Job” to a Million-Dollar Truck Wreck Case: What Depositions Revealed

There's two sides to the coin, okay? Think of the case, like I'm having the million dollar coin. How do you, how do you cast that? And there's two sides to it. One side is what I'm doing on the defendant, okay? With the piss off factors that I'm building up on the defendant. And the other side of that coin is what we're doing with you, the client. In other words, building the value of the case through medical bills, through treatment, through projecting future care and needs that you're going to have. So I want to talk in this video about the two sides of the coin to make a case worth a million dollars. And so we're going to start with the piss off factors. I just had a case and I'm going to post some of the depo on YouTube. Okay. I'm going to post some depo clips on YouTube so people can see it. I've got a case pending right now and it's worth more than a million dollars. And part of the way it's developed into that is all the depositions I've taken. And so it's a standard on its face. It's a standard rear end collision case in Midland. It's all it is. This is the rear end collision case in Midland. And my client has had one surgery. He's probably going to need another surgery. That's the case. You see that case. There's a thousand of those cases in Texas right now. Shoot. There's probably a thousand of them in Midland right now. Okay. There's a bunch of those cases. Now, what's the difference between that case and a case that's worth a million plus, how do you make it into that? And part of that is you take a bunch of depositions of company people. Now, here's what I mean by that. In this particular case, I'm thinking of, I've taken five depositions so far. And it starts with at a corporate rep on a bunch of topics. So you send a list of topics to the defense lawyer and say, I want somebody to testify on these 35 topics. And I'm telling you what they do almost every time is they have a guy who doesn't know jack squat about any of those topics. And so what do I do? I spend an hour embarrassing him on that topic list. So topic one, this, and I'm not going to say the guy's name who was the at fault driver, but let's just say his name is John Doe. So John Doe rear ends my client. And topic one is the, you know, the process of hiring John Doe. So, Hey, listen, topic one's process of hiring John Doe. Did you take any part of that? No. Did you, did you review any documents about how he was hired? Well, no. Okay. Did you do anything to prepare for your deposition on topic one? Well, no, I really didn't. And so I said to this guy, I said, Hey, write NP for not prepared, right beside that, and on this particular depot, there are 35 topics and he wrote NP, I think on 28 or 29 of those topics because he wasn't prepared for it, he thought he would just roll in and just talk about the wreck when that's not what I wanted to talk about, I wanted to talk about everything that led to the wreck. Why did y'all hire some derelict who didn't know what he was doing? So that's, that's what we did. And you embarrass him. And what it does among other things is it puts that defense lawyer on their heels and it puts the witness on his heels. And so just imagine you're in, you're in a deposition, you're under oath and you're being questioned by a bulldog plaintiff lawyer, and all of a sudden you're at, you're not, you're being exposed as not prepared in your case. Well, the value of that isn't that first hour of showing you're not prepared. It's hour four and five. When I'm asking you really poignant questions about dumb things your company did, and now you're so tired that you're going to give me some candor. You're going to be more honest, really. Maybe the best way to put it is less guarded than you were at the beginning. So in this particular case, one of their defenses was, and it's not even a defense that would work. I don't know what wizard came up with this, but they were trying to say that they weren't responsible for the guy re-earning my client because he was a 1099 contractor instead of a W-2 employee. Okay. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. He's still driving your truck. He's still doing something for your company. You're still responsible. Nevertheless, that was their argument. By the end of the first deposition I took, it was very clear that that driver met the statutory definition of an employee. And what that meant was every witness after that witness knew that I was exposing what I believe to be a tax and overtime scam that that company was doing to save money. And it turns out that if you're in the business of just saving money on taxes and overtime payment, you're probably a little shoddy. One could probably think of another word, but you're probably a little shoddy in how you're handling onboarding new hires. And so it turns out after depo two and three, we find out that this driver had actually been terminated three weeks before this wreck because he'd been drinking on the job. Okay. And at the end of the third depo, I find out that not only had he been terminated for drinking on the job, when they bring him back, there was a requirement that he not drive. So then he's driving a vehicle. He shouldn't be driving. Then I take the fourth deposition. The fourth deposition was the president of the company. That guy tells me under oath. Oh, you know, I don't remember saying he couldn't drive. I don't remember. He's the guy that said everything. He's the guy that said he couldn't drive. He's the guy that overrode the safety man's recommendation. The guy be terminated or stay terminated, rehires him. Okay. So now I've taken the president's depo. He's like all trying to crawfish his way out of it and say, oh, you know, I didn't do any of this. Then I take the safety man's depo, the fifth deposition. And the safety man's like, Hey, Mr. McGuire, not only had he been terminated for drinking three weeks before this wreck, he had been terminated for some bad attitude issue a couple of months before that, this guy had been fired twice in the two months before our wreck. Okay. Had no business driving. As a matter of fact, safety guy says, um, Hey, I had told him when I saw the email from president of the company, who now denies knowing anything about it. When I saw the email from the president of the company saying we're rehiring. I mean, he's like a field tech. You can find a field tech in West Texas. I mean, it's findable, laudable work, but you can find that guy. Hey, they rehire him. And you know what? Safety guy calls him and says, listen, this is foolishness. Don't rehire. This guy's a safety hazard. Sure enough, three weeks later causes a wreck. And when safety guy calls him and says, Hey, I need you to take a post post-accident drug test. The, um, the driver said, you can go fillet yourself. You can go do things that are not great to yourself. They're anatomically very, very difficult. So that's it. That's look, look, if you knew nothing else, I ain't told you the injury yet. But if all you knew was those piss off facts, you'd be like, that's a pretty damn good, that's a pretty dadgum good case. Right now, flip side on the injury. If you are really hurt in a major truck wreck case, this is an 18 wheeler, it's an oil field services truck, this story I'm telling you. But if you're really hurting, your lawyer needs to be able to get you into treatment. This guy didn't have health insurance. You know, not everybody has health insurance. And if you do have health insurance, there's a lot of doctors that don't want to get involved in litigation. They don't want to give a deposition. They have this natural aversion to lawyers. And so we had to get this guy into treatment. And so he has, you know, um, we had to help, we had to connect him. We had to, we had to make sure that he had access to a doctor who would wait to get paid when the case resolves. And so sure enough, he was able to get the healthcare treatment he needed. That was a shoulder surgery. And I think I owe on that one. That was a shoulder surgery and a neck surgery. Okay. And so that case that's going to resolve for multiple millions of dollars. It just is because we have built that case up such that they don't have a choice, but to pay us. There's no, but you're going to have both sides of that coin. You have to have the side of the coin that's developed the piss off factors. And you have to have the side of the coin that's developing the medical and get a life care plan for future care and needs so that when you try the case, because you're gearing it up for every case, you're prepping it like it's going to trial. The first three days of that trial is witness after witness, after witness from the company showing how bad the company is, you prime the jury. So they're pissed off at these people and they know how bad these people are. And then on Thursday, you try, start trying the case on Monday on Thursday. They're like, okay, these are bad people. What else do we need to know? And then I put my client up there and he's a nice guy. I'm like, Oh my gosh, this guy's flipping hurt. As a result of this wreck, let's take care of this guy. I can't believe these bad actors hurt him this bad. And then we'll put the doctor on to say, this is what he needs in the future. And then you'll get paid on it. I mean, that's just how it is. But the way you make the case worth a million dollars or more is you have to both sides of that million dollar coin. And for more advice on how to maximize the value of your truck wreck case, follow us at McGuire firm.