Published in 2024 Indiana Super Lawyers magazine
By Nancy Henderson on February 23, 2024
On a dark winter night in 1978, the driver of a semitruck was backing a flatbed trailer up to the side of a company’s building to deliver an order of sheet metal, blocking both lanes of Indiana State Road 32 in the process. His truck had no sidelights and, though he was expected, the driver had arrived after hours so there was no one to guide him or warn oncoming traffic. Unaware of the danger, a young woman crashed into the trailer, causing the male passenger in her car to suffer brain damage.
A few months later, personal injury attorney Buddy Yosha had already settled with the truck driver on behalf of the injured passenger when he asked his then-law clerk Lance Cline to research the possibility of a legitimate claim against the property owner. After finding enough similar cases and writing, Cline was surprised when Yosha announced that the trial would commence in six months, with Cline, who had just graduated from McKinney School of Law, as lead chair.
“I was nervous as hell,” Cline says today. “I remember my dad [also a personal injury lawyer] talking to Buddy and asking, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ And Buddy said, ‘No, I think he can handle it.’”
Despite facing intimidating attorneys on the other side, the strikes against him—the passenger had a history of drug abuse, the car’s driver didn’t have a license—and an offer of nothing from the defense, Cline won a $400,000 verdict in January 1981. “I just feel so indebted to Buddy that he trusted me with that,” he says. “He trusted me right out of the gate.”
Has the 72-year-old founder of The Cline Law Firm in Carmel, who concentrates on medical malpractice plaintiff work, paid that debt forward? Many times over, but not in the same way.
“I have mentored a few attorneys,” he says. “I just couldn’t give them the green light like Buddy gave me. The malpractice work is so demanding, so labor-intensive, and so knowledge-intensive that I’ve concluded it takes years to mentor an attorney to do med-mal work.”
Mentees like Lindsay Popejoy, Cline’s niece and an associate at his firm, have good things to say about his more meticulous coaching style. “His mentorship has helped me to find my footing as a young attorney and to become confident in my own knowledge and abilities,” Popejoy says. “From the beginning of working with Lance, I have been welcomed into client meetings, defendant depositions, court hearings, and the like. I can now stand on my own two feet and give our clients the guidance and representation that they deserve.”
“I probably spoon-fed too much, but I do try and make the time to have meetings and discuss things and impart whatever wisdom I may have, not only for their betterment as lawyers, but because it’s also the best thing for the clients,” Cline says. “It’s a serious thing, mentoring.”
Cline has secured a number of multimillion-dollar verdicts despite frustrating caps on medical malpractice payouts and medical review panel opinions that, more often than not, lean toward the doctor defendants.
As evidenced by the medical journals on his office bookshelf and the long hours he keeps, Cline doesn’t believe in shortcuts. “I’m not a wonderful orator. There’s nothing fancy about me,” he says. “It’s all preparation, preparation, preparation, preparation, and that makes the trial easier.”
He is anything but overconfident. “I have a little bit of stage fright every trial. I get butterflies,” Cline says. “I’m worried sick about what they’re going to think about my client’s theory and if I’m going to say or do something that harms their case.”
One of four children, all boys, the “sports-crazy” kid from Columbus knew early on that he wanted to follow his father, a former World War II bomber pilot, and go into personal injury law. Surrounded by his wife and children in their assigned seats at the dinner table, the elder Cline often talked about his new clients, their cases and the process of getting ready for trial. In high school, Cline worked in his dad’s office as a file clerk and dreamed of one day helping injury victims himself.
But the Vietnam War, and the protests he witnessed in college, made him question his goals. For a year he backpacked across Europe and the U.S. before earning a few bucks in a bookstore in Michigan and studying anthropology for a graduate degree he never finished. “Semi-amused” by Cline’s ultralong hair and his freewheeling, motorcycle-riding life, his dad wrote him a letter and gently reminded his son of his longtime goal: “You’d make a great lawyer. I think it’s your calling.”
“I knew he was right.”
That led to the job interview with Yosha, who ran a very busy firm in Indianapolis. Walking into Yosha’s office at the end of his first year at McKinney School of Law, Cline found his future boss holding a phone to each ear with a TV babbling on the desk. The first words out of Yosha’s mouth were, “Can you play any sports?”
“That was music to my ears,” Cline says. “We talked about everything but the practice of law. My hair was still a little long even though I’d started law school, and he said, ‘Are you a hippie?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I probably am.’ And he said, ‘When can you start?’
“That’s the only quote-unquote formal job interview I’ve ever had,” Cline concludes with a laugh.
When it was time to return to law school, Yosha announced, “Take as many classes as you can at night because I want you working a lot for me.” With a full course load, a wife and a new baby, the next two years were a whirlwind for Cline, who somehow kept up his grades while helping Yosha prepare for depositions and accompanying his mentor to court. “I didn’t make a lot of my classes because I was busy learning the ropes of the practice of law from a guy out practicing it,” Cline says. “He threw me to the wolves very, very quick.”
Cline’s father died of cancer not long after his son started practicing. His loss left a void, both personally and professionally, that Yosha’s mentoring partially filled.
Other lawyers in the firm had deliberately steered clear of med-mal work because they didn’t want to sue the same doctors who were treating their personal injury patients. Seeing an opportunity, Cline asked Yosha to let him take a stab at it after his success with the truck crash case. “He just let me build that practice from scratch,” Cline says. “The only problem was Buddy’s a great mentor, but he’d never done a malpractice case. So quite honestly, I had to mentor myself. And that’s exactly what I did.”
In his first med mal case he tried, Cline represented the family of a baby who developed a hole in his lung shortly after birth, lost his ability to breathe and suffered a massive brain injury. As with all med-mal cases, the state required a panel of physicians to review the matter before it could be tried. As usual, the opinion was negative. “That’s the bane of my existence,” Cline says. “I describe the whole system as the foxes guarding the henhouse.”
Despite the advisory opinion of the panel, the jury awarded a $500,000 verdict—at the time the maximum amount allowed under the Indiana Medical Malpractice Act. The next morning, Cline was working in his office when one of the jurors arrived unannounced. “I want to talk to you about this cap on damages, and this statute, and how outrageous this is,” the man said. “The jury wanted to give a lot more money and couldn’t.”
That man went on to become a state legislator and was instrumental in pushing through minor changes in the law. “I always thought that one of the reasons he was motivated to run for the legislature was because of this trial,” says Cline. “Even though I’ve had much bigger verdicts, it’s still a very important case to me.” The cap is currently $1.8 million, but it remains another frustration for Cline, who frequently wins much higher verdicts for his clients.
To date, Cline has handled to conclusion about 300 of these slow-moving med-mal lawsuits while developing a reputation for tackling niche cases in which newborns have suffered damage to the brachial plexus nerves of the shoulder when the doctor pulls too hard on the head and neck during the birth.
About a decade ago, Cline won $4.1 million for his clients in one such case—though they received less than a third of that amount due to the statewide cap.
“Every one of these cases breaks my heart,” he says of his med-mal work. “I had new clients in this morning, and I’m an emotional guy and I fought back tears through the entire meeting. It took me a long time—and I still struggle with it—but at the end of every case, when the jury verdict would get read, and it was in my client’s favor, I would burst into tears. You work on the cases long and hard. They’re always tragic stories, and there’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in it. And the dam would just burst at the end of
each trial.”
So what keeps him going when he’s constantly battling restrictive laws and emotional cases? “The intellectual challenge is tremendous, and it drives me,” he says. “I hate bullies. I love the underdog. Since I was a child, I’ve been like that, so it truly just became my calling in life.”
Two or three years into his med-mal focus, Cline realized he couldn’t do it all by himself, so he posted an ad at the law school for a clerk with a medical background. Before long, he was teaching a nurse and first-year law student, Kathy Lee, the intricate process he had taught himself. “Eventually, Kathy was groomed and trained at this enough, and chomping at the bit. And the next thing I knew, I had a partner doing the same thing I did,” Cline says. “And it was one of the smartest decisions I’ve made in my life.”
Lee, who recently retired, worked with Cline on hundreds of cases for 35 years. “Mr. Cline’s style of mentoring was to do so by the example that he set,” she says. “He was available to answer questions and to share his ideas with me. His mother was a teacher, so proper writing was important to him. Many a brief was returned to me covered in red ink.”
Cline’s strength as a mentor explains his success as a trial lawyer, Lee adds. “Always, always out-prepare the other side. He taught me to thoroughly know everything about your cases: the medicine, the law, the facts and the story you are telling before trying a medical malpractice case. … He is a mentor to anyone willing to learn from him. He is a tormentor to the other side when he is advocating for his clients.”
In 1993 he opened a firm with three colleagues, including Lee. In 2020, with two of his partners nearing retirement and his recent move north to Zionsville, he opened The Cline Law Firm, bringing with him Popejoy, who’d been clerking with him since 2013. “I’ve watched her grow up and she’s perfect for the job and getting real close to taking her first solo flight from the nest,” he says.
Watching her uncle during cross-examination and rebuttal of closing arguments, Popejoy says, is magic. “I am often floored by his ability to make a large impact with just a few words,” she says.
During a recent trial involving a woman whose doctor allegedly misused a mechanical compression device to close a groin artery after a cardiac catheterization, resulting in a painful leg clot, a permanent nerve injury, and a foot drop, the defense attorney likened the physician to U.S. Airways Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River after a bird strike in 2009.
Instead of furiously scribbling notes during his opponent’s closing argument—his usual M.O.— Cline simply listened and remembered Lloyd Bentsen’s iconic mic-drop retort during the 1988 vice presidential debate when he put Dan Quayle in his place when Quayle likened himself to John F. Kennedy. Rising to give his rebuttal, Cline explained to the jury that the plane malfunction wasn’t caused by pilot error. Then he turned to the defendant, extended his hand, and said, “I’ve gotten to know the doctor during this case, and he seems like a nice man.” Then he turned back to the jury: “But he was no Sully in his treatment of my client.”
Says Cline, “Lindsay thinks if there was any doubt left in the case, it all withered away at that moment.”
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