The Case of the Russian Ph.D.

The two lawyers in our firm personally intake clients. Either myself or my partner intakes every single case. Because you never know.

Years ago, I got a phone call from a young man with a thick Russian accent. He told me that he and his dog were walking in a crosswalk when they were hit by a drunk driver. His dog was killed and the man’s leg was completely mangled as a result of the crash. He’d talked to three other lawyers, and each one said he just needed to do this by himself.

The longer I spoke with the young man, the more I realized he was in a terrible plight. He claimed that he was a Ph.D., an Ivy League Ph.D., who was here in Dallas working on his postdoctoral fellowship, that he knew no one here, that he had a second-story apartment, and that he was literally starving because he had nothing to eat and no way to go get anything to eat because he couldn’t drive. He couldn’t do anything.

I felt like this might be a setup. So when I went and saw the guy, I told my paralegal to call me every 15 minutes. But sure enough, it was 100% true.

Any personal injury lawyer will be looking at a case, big or small, like they would a three-legged stool. The first leg of that stool is always going to be whether or not there is liability, culpability, negligence on the part of a third party against your client. Leg number two is injuries or damages. The third leg is equally as important as the first two, and that is a funding source for the recovery of the damage. Most of the time, we’re thinking about insurance coverage.

“Any personal injury lawyer will be looking at a case, big or small, like they would a three-legged stool.” — Todd Clement

The minimum amount of insurance that you’re required to have to be on the roads in Texas is $30,000. If someone has a clear liability—a DWI case with a head injury, or a paraplegic, a horrible case worth millions of dollars, but the funding source is limited to $30,000—then the recovery is limited to $30,000. That means nobody really benefits, the client or the lawyer, because most of the time either medical providers or health insurers have first claim on that money.

Well, the defendant [in this case] was driving a 13-year-old Honda Accord. That’s why the other lawyers turned the case down. They looked at an old car and assumed that, because the car was incredibly old, there wouldn’t be much insurance; this was more trouble than it was worth. He could just make a call [to the insurance company] and handle it himself.

I realized that this young man was not likely to survive if we didn’t help. So I got him some mental health help. The first thing we did, of course, was to go to the grocery store and stock him up with a month’s worth of food. We did little things. I’m not Mother Teresa, I just saw an incredible need and felt so sorry for him.

I called the insurance company a couple of days later, after I signed him up to handle it, and said, “Why haven’t you settled this case?” And they said, “Well, because we don’t just have $30,000 [worth of insurance].”

Come to find out, the at-fault driver was the boyfriend who had taken over from a young girl who was out celebrating her birthday, and he got incredibly drunk. So he was driving drunk, under the influence of ecstasy as well, and the car was insured under this girl’s father’s policy. And in the end, there was $2.3 million worth of insurance.

We ultimately recovered that $2.3 million within about 18 months after this crash and completely changed the young man’s life. We got him the mental health help he needed. He is now a professor at a college in a university in Florida, he has two children, his wife is also a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school, and we speak every few months.

He has managed to do a little better with some of his injuries. There was an injury to his leg that will never be right; he will limp the rest of his life.

Because I listened long enough, and was willing to help, we changed his life and, quite honestly, made a significant fee for my firm as well. That’s a good example of listening and having faith in someone, of going the extra mile—and in this case, everybody won.

You hear something horrible has happened to somebody, you always want to say, “What can I do to help?” And the beauty of our business is, we get to go help.