To Take or Not to Take A Case

Episode 10: To Take or Not to Take A Case

How do lawyers decide which cases to take and which ones they have to turn away?

In this episode of The Velvet Hammer™ Podcast, Karen Koehler and Mo Hamoudi discuss case selection inside a plaintiff law firm. Every week, people call after catastrophic injuries, medical mistakes, or the loss of a loved one. Most believe they have a case. The difficult reality is that many cannot be pursued.

Karen explains the economics of contingency litigation and why complex cases can require hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars to investigate and try. Mo walks through how lawyers evaluate credibility, evidence, and whether a claim can actually be proven in court.

And then there is the hardest part of the job. Saying no.

If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with someone interested in how these decisions are made, and leave a review telling us what surprised you most.

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Hosted by Karen Koehler and Mo Hamoudi, trial lawyers at Stritmatter Law, a nationally recognized plaintiff personal injury and civil rights law firm based in Washington State. 

Produced by Mike Todd, Audio & Video Engineer, and Kassie Slugić, Executive Producer. 

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Transcript

To Take Or Not To Take

Karen Koehler 0:05

I'm gonna start.

Mo Hamoudi 0:07

Okay, then start.

Karen Koehler 0:08

Because I'll do it correctly. To take or not to take. That is the question. That is the question that we are gonna talk about today.

Mo Hamoudi 0:21

To take or not to take.

Karen Koehler 0:23

Case selection. People calling us. How do we decide whether we're gonna take a case? What's the process for that? What does it look like in a law firm procedurally and then individually?

Mike Todd 0:36

How do you guys get cases?

Billboards, Mills, And Advertising

Karen Koehler 0:37

Yeah. Well, that's a whole nother topic. But we'll start with that one and then kind of move along. So unlike some attorneys, we do not have our name and likeness plastered on every single bus or billboard in the city.

Mike Todd 0:52

No, we do not. Why not?

Karen Koehler 0:54

Well, because we thought that was kind of tacky. It is kind of tacky.

Mike Todd 1:02

It feeds into the more than kind of tacky. It's extremely tacky.

Karen Koehler 1:05

Okay.

Mo Hamoudi 1:06

But if it's done with taste, it's never done with taste.

Mike Todd 1:10

It's never done with taste and elegance. I have never heard a attorney ad on the radio or a billboard or a bus poster that has been anything but blatant advertising.

Karen Koehler 1:23

Yeah. And there's some, you know, Seattle's a little slower than some jurisdictions where if you go, you are just bombarded with advertising that like every billboard will be another person. In the case of Maui, where I do live sometimes, after the fires, oh yeah. Morgan and Morgan had the entire thing wallpapered in their ads, the entire airplane terminal when you got off, the size that that entire wall. So it was like the size of a semi-truck advertisements were in the airport. Well, we don't do that. And by the way, that costs millions of dollars.

Mike Todd 1:59

Oh, yeah.

Karen Koehler 2:00

So in order to have that kind of business, you basically will take every case, make whatever money you can off of it, whether or not it's a good or not good. You just are taking most everything.

Mike Todd 2:13

And they don't spend that much time on a lot of things.

Karen Koehler 2:15

High volume.

Mike Todd 2:15

They just blow through them.

Karen Koehler 2:17

They have a lot of quote unquote case managers who are normally not attorneys. They will they will definitely be using AI more, uh, even more than they already do. Um and uh you know they say the good ones for the you know the higher-up people in the law firm, but it's called we call the mill. It's a mill firm.

Mike Todd 2:36

Mill like what? Like a like a mill.

Karen Koehler 2:38

You're churning it.

Mike Todd 2:39

You're churning up the case.

Karen Koehler 2:40

You don't really know the names of your clients, their digits, um or widgets, one after the other after the other.

Mike Todd 2:49

Would you say that they like say I had a car accident and I went to a firm like that?

Karen Koehler 2:53

Yeah.

Mike Todd 2:54

Would I get w the best result, possibly? For my case. Well, it's not a good thing.

Karen Koehler 3:00

Like if I had a car accident If you were hit by someone that was uninsured driver or uninsured, you would probably get as much as you would have gotten without a lawyer.

Mike Todd 3:07

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 3:08

You probably would have gotten without a law.

Mike Todd 3:09

And you lose money again because you went to a lawyer. Okay, okay.

Karen Koehler 3:13

But I don't want to say all bad things about it. I'm just trying to point out that stuff that can happen.

Mo Hamoudi 3:19

I got re-arended, and there was no like there was like it was like I was driving my truck over to Ballard Bridge, going to the gym, and a woman re-arended me and I got bumped, and my back tightened up. And then so I said, we pulled over, and I was like, Do you have insurance? And she's like, Yeah. I was like, you should call your insurance and open a claim. And she went ahead and did. And then I was like, you should have the claims adjuster just call me right now. And so literally an hour later, the insurance company called me and is like, Are you okay? I was like, my back's a little stiff. I'll probably go get a massage and I'm fine. And then so, oh, about six months later, I forgot about it. She called me back, and I was she was like, Remember to claim, and I was like, Yeah. And then she was like, uh, oh, uh, how's your how's your back? I was like, I just went and got a massage, I'm fine. She's like, How much was the massage? I was like, 100 bucks. She's like, okay, well, I'll give you 500 bucks. Okay. She gave me the 500 bucks.

Karen Koehler 4:19

Yeah, but you got to sign off.

Mo Hamoudi 4:20

I had to sign off on it. But what I'm saying is that that's four times the cost of the massage, or five times the cost of the massage. And that was just me having a conversation with a claims adjuster. What would a lawyer have gotten me?

Karen Koehler 4:34

Well, you would have had to go to more than one massage.

Mo Hamoudi 4:38

What if I didn't want to?

Karen Koehler 4:39

Well, then a lawyer probably wouldn't take the case.

Mo Hamoudi 4:42

Okay. All right. So tell me about what cases people take and what cases people don't have.

Karen Koehler 4:47

Okay, well, first of all, I want to make sure that there's a clear line here. We cannot take small cases like that.

Mo Hamoudi 4:54

Why not?

Karen Koehler 4:56

Well, let me talk. Are you gonna interview me? Yes. Okay, you're gonna try to open me. So the difference between a billboard firm, not all, there's like there's some people that are similar to us that now are using the billboards because I think, you know, they're like, well, let's why not. Everybody's kind of getting a little loose with it. Yeah, let's all get into it. But um, we're too okay. Here's why not? We're too stuck up. We are too stuck. We are an elite law firm. We are too stuck up for it. We don't need that. That's not what that's not how people come to us.

Mo Hamoudi 5:28

I don't like stuck up.

Karen Koehler 5:29

It is stuck up.

Mo Hamoudi 5:30

That means like you're too I don't like the word stuck up. We're not stuck up.

Karen Koehler 5:33

Oh, yeah, we are. Are you stuck up, Mike? We're when we are to be put on a bus or an Uber or taxi cab, we are. We are too stuck up.

Mo Hamoudi 5:41

But that suggests like we're like elitists.

Karen Koehler 5:43

I'm sorry, we are. Yeah, I mean You gotta be honest.

Mike Todd 5:49

You hold I would say you hold yourself to a higher standard than some of those other firms. And if you call that stuck up because you are more picky with what cases you take. I I I don't know that that's stuck up. Stuck up would be like, we only take these cases because we're the best firm. Just don't talk like that. Yeah, yeah.

Karen Koehler 6:10

No, but we are we are not gonna put ourselves on a bus or technical.

Mike Todd 6:14

No, you choose to do what the old business was of this of this industry, the same way that it was with doctors. My dad would never have had his face on a billboard. Doctors didn't do that back then.

Karen Koehler 6:26

Of course, you know, we do social media and stuff like that. Yes. And a lot and a lot of people are very critical of us because we do that. That like that that is also just as that that's the new billboard. Yeah, the new billboard. Okay. Whatever you want to call it, whatever you want to pretend that we're not, this is an elite law firm.

Mo Hamoudi 6:45

Yes. Okay.

Karen Koehler 6:46

And and if we took in everybody that's that asked us to take them in, we would not be able to function as an elite law firm. We would have to hire more paralegals or more robotic people. Um we would have to we would have to have the infrastructure to handle people and not mind that we didn't know their names or who they're who is in their family. We would have to change the whole architecture of what we do.

Mo Hamoudi 7:16

And so the way I describe it to people who are not lawyers, I don't call a stuck up. I say I use the restaurant model. I say that we're fine dining. And we just don't do fast food. And we're not a diner, and we're not like, you know, chipotle or anything like that. We're just fine dining. So we make a decision to use our resources to do very unique things. Yeah. And so that limits our ability to do other things, which I like better. Fine dining.

Karen Koehler 7:43

We are stuck up. I mean, you can call it political. You're gonna call yourself stuck up. Whatever it is, but there's a reason for it. It's self-preservation.

Mike Todd 7:52

Well, like I was gonna say, you guys couldn't do as good of a job for your clients if you had, you know, the the five attorneys working on car crashes and and lower level cases, it w you wouldn't be able to do the work that you do.

Mo Hamoudi 8:10

But you could, Karen, expand a firm to do what Mike is saying, bring in the five people and the robots and whatever, and do all that, but there is an intentional decision not to do that.

Small Crashes And When Lawyers Help

Karen Koehler 8:23

Okay. It's self-preservation. Here's why. If we took every time we take a case like that, we lose money. We can't afford to take the cases because our business model is what I was very, very, very high intensity. So it's not push a button and the settlement demand gets pushed out. So now this is a big thing in AI right now. They're they're running to all these solo practitioners or mill firms and saying, look, if you put everything into the system and you push a button, it'll send out the settlement mediation letter or mediation letter to the adjuster. Look at it all the time, you don't even need paralegals anymore. Like that's the whole new thing. Well, we do in our firm because we are so human being intensive. We're on the phone, we're meeting with them all the time. Like there's just so much touching of the client involved in every little piece. So I have a case that we had resolved a couple years ago, and he was in a he was he was a pedestrian, he was hit. We handled that issue, and he was rear-ended. Okay, he came to us. Could we say no to him? No.

Mo Hamoudi 9:35

No.

Karen Koehler 9:36

So we took it, right? Okay. So we took it, and then we submitted, we some we submitted this letter to the his uh insurance company, and they sent a number back that was so small, I was like, I was like, I don't even know that I know what to do with a settlement offer that that's that small. Like I've not seen that in years. Yeah. And I was kind of flabbergasted and then also challenged, like, wow, this is so small. Can you make it we can't even charge them a free fee for this? Like, we're we how can we charge a client a fee for something that is that small? Like, we wouldn't morally be able to do that. Like we could we we are very conscious and make sure that's the same.

Mike Todd 10:20

The percentage you would have to take would make the number that they got absurd.

Karen Koehler 10:23

So I mean, if you look at my time, maybe Moe's time, but primarily my time, and you think, okay, probably on average, my time, if you were to actually value it correctly as a plaintiff lawyer, probably somewhere between three to five thousand dollars an hour, we don't charge that. We can't charge that, right? Because no one would be able to afford going after the bad guy. The little guy couldn't do that. But if you looked at it, that's what it'd be. So basically, if I'm $3,000, $5,000 an hour, and the offer is like less than your hourly fee. Then you start to see what I'm talking about.

Mike Todd 11:06

Yes.

Karen Koehler 11:07

So you don't and you don't just become a firm like this. This firm has been around for 80 years and has a huge reputation. And so you have the then you have to maintain the reputation and advance the reputation. It doesn't just sit there on its own. So that's how we get the clients is our reputation, people hearing about us. I heard about you. A lot of lawyers know about us. They tell other lawyers from other states or here. But the masses typically don't know about us. And that's the sad thing, is like there's really no way for someone that's been horribly injured to know how to get to a firm like ours. They'll often go to, well, I heard that so-and-so, you know, down the street was a good lawyer, and then that lawyer will get the case and then contact someone that actually knows how to do that kind of law because they don't know how to do it. And so that's we all we got a lot of cases from other some lawyers that do know how to practice the area or just not here, others that don't know how to practice in the area and need help. But it's a whole different area that we reach, and we get as much people as we can to help. And that is the important thing for the elite, you know, the five or so law firms in the state that are truly, you know, elite practitioners is you can only do a public service if the public knows that they can come to you. And they don't, and it's hard for them to know when there's this cacophony of sound and noise from the non-elite lawyers. Um, come to us, we're in your neighborhood, you know, you come, we'll help you. And it's a mill.

Mike Todd 12:45

Well, and don't forget, there's the internet where most people would go these days and just put I need a lawyer for my car crash or something similar to that into a search engine.

Karen Koehler 12:57

Yeah.

Mike Todd 12:58

And they're gonna come out with, you know, lawyers.com.

Karen Koehler 13:02

We have cases we have cases right now against Amazon where the lawyers from totally different states in the Midwest or wherever have just advertised really well and people clicked on them and then they came to us to help because we're here, they're over there. But that's a whole, you know, this whole thing is really anyway. So getting through the so somehow people find us, right? Through one of these ways, since we don't advertise on the buses. Um, and they come and they get into our system. Now, most firms, all firms are gonna have an intake system. Um, and the intake system used to be that we used to pick up the phone and talk to people.

Mike Todd 13:42

Yeah, I did that plenty of times. I I did I used to take a lot of the intakes myself.

Why Elite Firms Stay Low Volume

Karen Koehler 13:46

All of us would pitch in and help, the from the lawyers to everybody would pitch in and help. And our firm has gotten a little bit more, we've gotten more intakes. So um so now we have kind of a system of who takes in the intakes and then who other helps and and all of that. And unfortunately, most cases, most people that have a case at call or write us do not have a case that we can take. And so we're gonna start off by talking about those cases, not specifics. Um, some of it is extremely sad. Uh, we uh I've always done a lot of wrongful death cases. I've got a lot of wrongful death cases. I used to have a thing of I would always talk to someone who lost somebody in person, have them come in, spend an hour with them. Physically cannot do that anymore. Like there's just too many people who've died due to the negligence of others, and sometimes not negligence, we can't really prove it. So let me give you examples of some of the decisions we have to make and how hard how hard they are. So someone is called, they've had a loved one, let's say their elderly parent or parent just died in in the hospital. They're sure something went wrong, they had some pre-existing conditions, but um they know that something went wrong, and they have maybe, you know, so-and-so wasn't nice, and so-and-so did something, and I'm not sure about these medical records. I think that we have a case. Okay. We get this call often. Okay, what are we gonna do? Well, first we're gonna say we need the medical chart. And we normally have the client get that because they can get it almost instantly for free. Versus if we get it, it's gonna cost hundreds, if not a thousand or more dollars. And take a while. And take and take a while. So we can get those charts nice and easy. So get the medical. But then we normally will we used to have to send it out to and we used to have uh uh physicians assistants on staff, we've had uh you know medical legal nurses um that we send stuff out to take months before we get answers back. Well, now with AI, we use an AI software called impractice, and we can get that done very quickly. Now, it's not to the second like we do it if we're gonna take a case, but it gives us an enough of an overview that we can see and go to where we need to see and look to see if there's a case. We're gonna do that before we even meet with the people because we want to be respectful and not lead people on and also to have answers or something. When we're satisfied, and there's more of a team here that does more medical than other network others. When we're satisfied that we have a read on the case, then we start meeting with the client. But that is gonna be one out of like 30 people that we're probably not gonna meet with the most, and they're not even clients yet, we're just gonna meet with them. But the other people, we're going to have to decline the case, and we're gonna have to do it really nicely and gently, and that's hard. Um but it if you lead people on and they think that they have a case and become more invested, it'd be it's even harder. So, rule number one for most attorneys is when you have a case and you know that it's not a case, decline the case as soon as possible. Don't sit there hoping it's just gonna miraculously turn into a case. The second issue is how are you gonna prove it? Okay, normally, and I may be in the minority, if there's not an autopsy, I don't know that I want the case. Um Why is that? Because how am I gonna prove causation? Okay, sometimes people will take them without an autopsy, but I learned that from Paul Whalen a long time ago. If there are no ops no autopsy, no autopsy for me, it's almost never gonna be a case. Now there were some there were some exceptions. We had some exceptions in the Seattle children's case, cases where there was astrogillus. Uh but even that most of those had autopsies and confirmed what the cause of death was. Um so I'm very hesitant to do to do that. Um at what point do we pick an expert? We used to hire an expert before way, way early on. Now we have different expert services that we work with. We can get looksies by different, you know, if we need a infectious disease expert or neuroradiology expert, we can get them to give us looksies earlier and then decide if we're gonna take a case before we actually have to hire an official expert and go from there. But there's a lot of money involved in the cases that a firm like our ours does. So in Mo's case, there's no money that you have to pay. Like he was re-rended, clear liability, he had one massage, nothing else. Even if I took that case and it was a male firm, I'm just sending it through my AI program and asking a demand letter and trying to get some.

Mike Todd 18:53

You're getting the same result that he would have got if he just talked to the adjuster himself.

Karen Koehler 18:57

But for us, medical negligence case, three to five hundred thousand dollars. We're investing in these cases, costs, um product liability, some of them really, really big. Um, our highway design cases, they can be up to a million dollars in fees. Like so we have to be really careful of the cases that we take because we have to invest in them and we have to know that we're gonna win them or believe that we're gonna win them.

Mike Todd 19:22

How much was it for Ride the Ducks?

Karen Koehler 19:25

Ride the Ducks was several million. Yeah. Yeah. That was several million dollars. And so the firm is basically investing this into these cases. So when people talk about frivolous lawsuits, right, that's when we're like, really? Because we're not gonna invest in a friv. We may lose a case, but we're not gonna knowingly ever invest in a frivolous lawsuit. So those are some of the things, uh the big things. But there's other things like the plaintiff. Why don't you talk a little bit about when we are suspicious of a plaintiff?

Mo Hamoudi 19:59

Well, you gotta see if the person that wants you to take their case is credible. Like what are they telling you? So one of the one of the things I do is is that before I meet with people generally is I ask them to show up to a meeting. I always meet with whoever I'm gonna say no to on a Zoom call. And I give them the dignity and time, I set aside 30 minutes to 45 minutes to do that to produce documents. I want you to see what, like, you know, because if someone is experiencing a loss, sometimes it's like a catastrophic sudden loss that is happening in real time. Um, and then sometimes you can tell time has lapsed and then they're looking for a lawyer, and I want to see what they have done prior to wanting to talk to a lawyer, because sometimes people, unless they have no understanding of how to get things, have done some things. So that's also a way to test whether or not this person has got a credible claim. So they have no documents or anything. You know, I ask questions like, tell me what happened. You know, and you start with the tell me what happened question. You know, they start to talk, and then you just have to listen, and then when you're listening to them, you have to see if this is a consistent and coherent narrative. And sometimes you'll pick up on stuff where they're not telling you facts that are important. And I don't like to confront a person with that. Um uh, you know, if I feel like they're like hedging, like their own responsibility. Like I'll tell you like a civil rights case, for example, somebody calls and says that there was excessive force used, and they tend to not tell you the fact that, oh, by the way, I had a weapon. Or the person or I resisted. Or I resisted.

Mike Todd 21:43

Yeah.

Mo Hamoudi 21:44

So like uh one of the one of the like the uh what I call probing question is is that w was a criminal action instituted? Yeah. Can you just tell me in general nature of the charges? And because I know that those things are available, and two, the person would receive copies of them in their initial. Appearance and have copies, their public defender would be appointed and they would provide them with information. They would have police reports. And then so if they have not provided me those informations in advance, and they're telling me that they have had their civil rights violated, at that point I start to go, there are some issues here, and then I and then I ask for the documents. So that's one way of like screening is their willingness to engage their own case and motivation to engage their own case. But there are instances where people are suffering catastrophic loss in real time. There's been an instance where I was where I where someone's where someone is calling me where there is a medical emergency in a medical procedure actively happening. They don't need a lawyer at that time. They need to just focus on their loved one and just pay attention and take notes. So like there are times like it's context-specific. You say, take notes, just you know, um, call me if you have any questions. Um this is not time. There's this is an active situation. And when you're out and an outcome's been determined, then give me a call. Does that make sense?

Karen Koehler 23:16

Yeah, I would I would not even take that call. I'm you know. But this is a friend. Okay, friends, you gotta take the friends.

Mo Hamoudi 23:23

Yeah, you gotta take the friend's call.

Karen Koehler 23:24

So so the reality is is that over half the time the person involved is not the person you're talking to.

Mike Todd 23:33

Yeah. If it's wrongful death or something like that, you're you're yeah, they're dead. And if they've been catastrophic, they're probably in the hospital.

Reputation Over Ads: How Clients Find Us

Karen Koehler 23:42

They're normally not contacting us. We're normally talking to the surviving spouse, the surviving children, or the yeah, parents or whoever a guardian. So we're talking to a bunch of other people who often don't even know. I mean, we have one case here where we are having to figure out who the student was really, you know, taking kind of on our own. We're having really hard time um doing that. And the things that we have to do to figure it all out, it's kind of remarkable. I'm not gonna go into this because it would be attorney client. But um so we don't we don't have like a hard, fast rule of well, we didn't like that person, so we're not taking the case. I believe even if a person's unlikable, if they have a case, you should represent them. But the case has to be worthy. And um we've had I have artificial cutoffs. Um so it was, you know, when I joined the firm, my artificial cutoff was like $50,000. Of course, that was in 2004. Um then it was like a hundred thousand, then it was like three hundred thousand, then it was five hundred thousand. Now it's it's probably more than a million because and here's why, because we're so busy. How can and here I then of course I have one that you know I could have that was basically worth one of my hourly rates. I have that one too, but that's an exception. I haven't had one of those in a long time. We'll always make exceptions. It is a business, but it's a human business. Yeah. And we this firm prides itself in being a human business. So so there is no this is yeah, you know, this amount, or you know, it's not like that. It's not a tiered system. It's very there's it's left up a lot of the discretion is left up to the lawyer who's gonna handle the case. You gotta get approval through our partnership partners because we are the ones right that are investing in these cases. But there's also a huge variety of cases that this firm takes. We take such a huge variety, and that's because people that work here enjoy that variety. They like that variety. It keeps them happy and good functioning and enjoying their job.

Mike Todd 26:05

Well, and some of them, I mean, some of you guys sort of at times specialize in certain areas, and then you'll start to take other cases. Yeah. You know, you just sort of move back and forth. It's what you want to do.

Karen Koehler 26:18

Yeah, we wind around. So, but it is like the for the average person, and it's you know, Mo told us a story at the very beginning of this podcast when he started about being 16 years old and his mom dying. Or being and going not died yet, but very sick and going to the attorney's office to see if she had a case and being completely just snubbed out and rejected. Yeah. It is it is it takes a lot of it takes a lot for people to have to to get a lawyer. Um and um let me tell you some of the things that don't help your cause if you're looking for a lawyer. I'll tell you the number one worst thing.

Mo Hamoudi 27:03

Wearing basketball shorts.

Karen Koehler 27:05

No, that's what I wore. I don't think that'll help you for you. Well, being 16 years old and not being awesome.

Mike Todd 27:10

Yeah, that doesn't count. Okay.

Karen Koehler 27:12

I mean, it's it's it's I can just that picture is so sad. Okay, the number one thing that's the worst thing, in my opinion, is sending an email that you've sent to a thousand other lawyers that is 15 pages long. Absolutely do not do that. Like we just delete it. We'll we'll nicely tell you no. We'll just send you to Janine who handles our form intake uh denials. And well we know it's not personal and it's incoherent, and that there is and a lot of times people, because they've thought about it so much, they've they've done a lot of research and they try to put it together like a lawyer would put it together, and we're we're just we're not impressed. We we're that's what you want a lawyer for is to tell you how to put it together. All that the lawyer wants are the actual facts. What happened? We don't want you to do analysis, we don't want you to prove the case. We want what happened and do you have evidence? Those are the only things that we really want. Plus, like, are you okay or how are you? Right? That's what we want to know. So those form emails that probably take a long time, the conspiracy ones Well, yeah, I was gonna I mean there we had a lot of conspiracy ones too, and those do have their uses, but you know, not for what you're intending. But those math emails do not do that. I mean that that would be nice like tip number one. Tip number two is when you talk to the lawyer, um wait for the lawyer to ask you questions. Um tip number three is do not have everything put together. Do not say, do not do in person what you did in email. Do not just go on a rambling 30-minute theory about everything that happened and how it's all connected and and and this is what and so and so, and you think this and that. Really dial down. Get to what is the actual issue, keep away all the side stuff because the lawyer will look at that and just go, oh no, that's that's a client you don't want to have. That that person's never gonna be happy. That person's gonna want to direct the litigation. Lawyers do not want clients who are never gonna be happy for a good reason.

Mike Todd 29:32

Because they're too difficult to work with.

Karen Koehler 29:35

Correct.

Mike Todd 29:35

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 29:37

Um, and then the other thing is um just for for things that you you know really shouldn't do, don't be on drugs when you're interviewing the lawyer, you know. Be sober.

Mike Todd 29:51

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 29:52

I mean, I hate to say it, but yeah.

Mike Todd 29:55

No, I've seen clients fall asleep while they were.

Karen Koehler 29:57

Yeah, like maybe and it could be anxiety that they took some medicine so they get through the interview, but but don't do it. Resist the urge.

Mike Todd 30:06

Yeah, you don't want to come high to the attorney meeting.

Karen Koehler 30:11

Yeah. And then and then um Moe's got a funny look on his face.

Mike Todd 30:15

Yeah. Do you not agree?

Karen Koehler 30:17

It's sad. I mean You want people to come and be high?

Mo Hamoudi 30:22

No, I don't want people to come and be high. No. Okay, well no, but when I think about people in crisis, and I think about they don't have necessarily the skill set to be, you know, in the form in which to make their best case. On the first, on the first contact. Right. And so I sort of like, you know, um, you know, and and this is to a fault because I mean Kristen and Jamie tell me this all the time. No, no, because a lot of people write me directly, want me to talk to them, and they go, no, that's a waste of your time.

Karen Koehler 30:59

You're gonna you're gonna learn this uh the longer you're flooding.

Mo Hamoudi 31:02

But like, you know, I think it I think that like, you know, I my heart uh makes me pause when I see someone's um anguish spilled out even in incoherent. It is sad.

Karen Koehler 31:18

But but the thing is when you get when you get three to five of those or more a day, I know. So if you add if it was if I used to give an hour uh for wrongful death, if if if three to five a day, even if it was half an hour a day, yeah, like you can't do that.

Mo Hamoudi 31:35

Yeah, yeah.

Karen Koehler 31:36

And and because you're taking away time from your other clients.

Intake Systems And Early Screening

Mo Hamoudi 31:38

That I agree. That decision is important. Your responsibility is to be. It is. It's your responsibility is to your caseload. You know, for younger lawyers, like these are business models, really. Like what kind of what kind of if you're a young lawyer, you want to do plaintiff's practice, you have to decide what kind of practice you want to do. And you're not gonna be able to jump right in and do the type of law we're doing, which is the type of cases we're doing. So you are likely, if you want to go open up your own shop, hang your shingle, you gotta start with these smaller cases, right? And then and then your business model can build, or you can do fine just doing 10 or you know, 10, 5 or 10 small cases a month, or five small cases a month, if you keep your overhead low, you can make an honest living doing that work. And you don't have to be a mill. So, like, part of what I wanted to think was like, what are we saying to younger lawyers? Because our practice, and you are right, the elite practice that you describe is really inaccessible to the lawyer right out of law school. And so for those lawyers, I really want them not to feel discouraged that there's a pathway to this type of practice that they themselves can design and work on and invest in and get there. So I think it's there. Because there's a ton of car collisions. And each car collision is an opportunity to learn about the insurance industry, to learn about the dynamics of a car crash, and to do the work. I just think that it's good.

Karen Koehler 33:04

I know you're getting bored because Mr. Political today.

Mo Hamoudi 33:07

Like No, I'm not being political.

Karen Koehler 33:08

I'm talking about because everybody feels happy. And that's a the the here it is. You cannot make everyone feel happy through this process. It is a it is sad to tell people like you, we can't take your case. Like, that is brutal.

Mike Todd 33:21

It's not just that. I'll tell you, you talked about the conspiracy ones. The calls that we get that are, you know, people that are might have mental problems who think they have a case against the government for them spying on their email and stuff like that. We get a lot of those calls. And you know, just I treat those people exactly the same as I would treat someone who called in who said that they had researched the entire case and they definitely had a case against Amazon because of whatever happened to them. Yeah, and they have all of the facts. They have a huge box full of documents ready to bring in. Yeah, yeah. They want to send it in right now. I treat, I I treated all of those people the same way. I I would I would usually try what I try to do was get as the first line would be like, let's not, you don't need to give me the whole story. I need to get this much so that I can forward that on to the attorneys and then they can make the decision from there. And when they make that decision, that's when we'll take all of those documents that you have and stuff like that. That doesn't mean we were gonna take their case, like you said.

Mo Hamoudi 34:39

No, no.

Mike Todd 34:40

But we treat them like we're gonna take their case at first, and we and we do all the work that we need to do.

Karen Koehler 34:47

Yeah.

Mike Todd 34:47

Or we tell them right away. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's that's not the type of case that we're taking, or we can't take that case for you.

Mo Hamoudi 34:54

Okay, so let's kind of close this out and tell us how you say no. Like, what's the proper process of saying no?

Karen Koehler 35:00

Um no.

Mo Hamoudi 35:01

Okay, but like do you refer them out if you think because it doesn't fit our criteria, but it's a case, you know, like it's too small. Like what do you think?

Karen Koehler 35:10

Okay, so for cases that we that there is no case, we do not refer them out because what would other lawyers think of us? We're giving them cases that there we don't think that there's a case. They would not be happy with us. Then they would have to feel that person's call. Yeah. Um, so we don't refer cases out that we don't think that there's a case. For small cases, different people have different young lawyers, new lawyers that we're feeding, and we just send them out. Send them out. We are um not a referral law firm. So a lot of a referral law firm, of which there are many, uh huge ones, they have the mill, you call them, they and they refer you out, and they want a percentage of the fee.

Mo Hamoudi 35:54

How much usually?

Karen Koehler 35:55

25 to 30.

Mike Todd 35:56

For just referring to 25 to 30 percent of what you get or what comes from the client.

Karen Koehler 36:02

What the attorney gets. And you have to either, in the state of Washington, you either have to do substantial work or make a substantial investment or something in the case. So I don't know what really what the bottom line is when we refer cases out, we do not we do not do that. Man, missed economic opportunity. But we're trying to help the people that are coming to us, and we're trying to help the newer lawyers that can easily handle these kind of you know more simple cases. Um, we don't do simple cases, we do complex cases. So uh we want people to we want to try to feed that system of getting you to a lawyer that's gonna, you know, spend some time with you and help you out. So that's what we do. But saying no, and let me make make this very clear. Whether we refer you to someone else or just say no, that's devastating for people.

Mo Hamoudi 36:51

Yeah.

Karen Koehler 36:52

It's hard for us to do it. I always thank Janine for doing it because she has to do it most often. It is hard. A lot of times we have to write a letter because we have to tell them, look, your statute of limitation is gonna expire on such and such a day, so you need to get another lawyer. But it's like it's like firing someone. Like you don't want to do it, and but you have to do it, and we we have to do it frequently. Yeah. Um so and and what's even worse, okay, it's one thing to to fire someone or to say no to someone that you just met on the phone. But it's really hard when you thought there was a case, there could be a case, and then you started doing some investigation, and maybe you hired that doctor or an expert to look at it, and you know, you didn't invest a hundred thousand, but you invested five, fifteen, twenty thousand. Because sometimes you it takes that much to look into a case, and those people are thinking, I have a case, and six months to a year later we have to say, We are so sorry, we cannot we cannot represent you. There's we don't believe that there's a case. That is super devastating for people. And and I think it's one of the hardest things that we do is to tell people no, yeah. You don't have a case.

Mo Hamoudi 38:03

Okay. All right.

Karen Koehler 38:04

Sadly.

Mo Hamoudi 38:05

Sadly.

Karen Koehler 38:07

Okay.