REAL DAY IN THE LIFE AS A LAWYER | Personal Injury Lawyer

day in the life vlog number two it's one of our more popular videos so i'm going to do it again except this time we're starting much earlier it's about 6 30 in the morning i'm the first one up in my house which is how i like it it's still dark outside it's still quiet i like to come down get some coffee do some reading before my kids are up and come down before my wife comes down and the day just starts flying because it's a busy one today i'll explain the calendar when we get to the office we've got family events planned tonight so it's going to go all the way from 6 30 all the way to the night time so you can see what a packed wednesday we have for now i'm gonna grab this coffee get on the couch for a little bit and just relax this morning before the craziness starts so reading time quiet time gets interrupted sometimes in the morning it's my daughter's easter chapel today so she needs help buttoning her easter dress there we go ready to go so the day started kids are coming down and we'll talk them about what their day has in for them you guys ready to rock today yeah what do you have uh easter egg hunt easter i cut a craft and something else that disappeared do you have easter chapel yeah okay and are you wearing your special easter dress matt what do you got on i've got a bunny shirt on and soft pants all right you guys ready to rock ready for the day yep cool peace peace out you ready to rock me yeah all right all right take it easy all right love you guys i like to start every day getting the mind body and soul started before i get in for my crazy day of work you saw me get the mind and soul started with my reading meditating on that reading in my quiet time alone where it's quiet now we're gonna get the body started i go to the gym every other day but when i don't go to the gym on days like today i do one of my favorite activities let's check it out so it's about 7 30 and so what i like to do is come hit a bucket of balls for about 30 minutes get my body warmed up get ready to go go take a shower get into the office got mind body and soul all charging and ready to move for a busy day at the office today all right so it's about 8 45 we're in the office i am first couple things i do always are check out the calendar go through my emails um just from what i haven't checked this morning i always am checking my email i always have my phone so i'm always responding my inbox is always at zero i'm one of those people um but i do have nine emails just from my drive in so i'm gonna go through those one there's a couple from my paralegal asking about next steps on a couple cases um and then we signed a case late last night not late like 6 30 last night and they sent us some of their pictures of the damage under the car some info on the case so i just forward that to my paralegal so she can save it to their file we always use email clients love texting so we text some but email's so much easier to save if we do text we forward it to our email so we can save everything to their file document everything so if there are any issues or anything we need to reference back we have it all saved to the file we reach out to our clients talk to them every couple weeks see how treatment's going see how they're feeling see if they have any questions and again we document all this throughout our practice management software which is needles which i talked about in the first vlog all right so this morning at 9 30 i have a case management conference a case management conference is a hearing in court it's kind of deeper into the case we've already done the initial depositions we've filed the complaint we've done some motion practice we've gotten past motions to dismiss um usually motions for summary judgment will come after this but the case management conference basically sets up deadlines for the rest of the case and helps us get the case to trial that's our goal we want to get this case down a trial date on a trial docket the case is about a year and a half old so it's not really old which may surprise some of you because we have some cases that are three or four years old that keep getting continued by the defense especially i'm recording this in april and we had three trials set in april we were ready to go two of them were already set during quarantine in 2020 that got kicked obviously when courts shut down and so we really wanted these to go for our client's sake one of our clients is 70 years old one of our clients the case is four years old we really wanted these cases to go defense continued them for a multitude of reasons one defense attorney scheduled this covet shot during the trial lots of stuff that happened that just pushed these cases which was really unfortunate because we really wanted them to go our clients really wanted them to go to trial so everything's getting pushed back so we do these case management conferences to try to hold the defendant's feet to the fire because our clients want their day in court to prove what their case is worth in front of a jury so i have that on a case this morning we're going to get a trial date but when we get that trial date we kind of work backwards so we say the trial is going to be december 5th of 2021 let's say we say all discovery is closed 60 days before that you can't add any more witnesses x amount of days before that you can't have any dispositive emotions like a motion for summary judgment x amount of days prior to the trial so it forces us to get everything done in the case all the expert depots have deadlines um everything all the lawyers and all the parties have to get done in a case get deadlines at this case management conference which is why it's really important we file it as soon as we don't settle the case at mediation so we do all that initial discovery depose all the clients all the fact witnesses both parties the plaintiff and the defendant then we go to mediation again see if we can settle the case and if we don't we automatically file a motion for a case management conference which is what happened in this case a few months back we mediated it i believe in december we filed the motion this was the hearing date that we got um so we're gonna have that hearing in about you know 45 minutes we'll see how it goes and i'll come give you a reca recap of it after see if we can get that trial date set so that's at 9 30. then at 10 30 i'm opening up a new case with one of my paralegals um we are going through just the initial process make sure the you know we have the client's file open we've sent all the letters to the insurance company see where the client is treating get treatment updates things like that then we're going to have a meeting me and pete's artist one of my partners on a trial that we have coming up in may that was actually scheduled for april and got kicked to may and we're going to go through some stuff we need to get done for that trial we've got to do deposition designations which is like you go through the deposition you highlight it there are certain parts of it that you can actually read out during the trial we have to do that we have to make sure our witness list is still correct this will be the third time we are prepping for this trial we just have to make it's basically a refresh and then we got to get down and get done everything that we need to pete and i going to lunch after that and then this afternoon i have four interviews with stetson law students that applied for our summer internship um so i'm going to interview them um i'll show you the setup and how i do that once we get there and then i have a couple calls throughout the day as well and eventually i will go through my case list because we have a couple checks i always make my to-do list so i'm going to do that now i'm going to put on the to-do list we've got a couple cases we're still waiting on checks which clients don't understand always that just because you settle the case and we call you and we say hey settle the case today for this amount that we discussed they accepted cases settled but they don't understand it takes time now for us to get the documents over to the insurance company insurance company to cut that check send it to us get the releases put together get the client to sign the release sometimes it takes time to get those checks to our office and be able to disperse the case so we always stay on top of the insurance companies to make sure we get the checks if we don't get them a couple days after the case settles we'll follow up and just make sure they send it to the right address just had a check that was sent to the wrong address our old address then when we finally got the check they had the wrong name on it the insurance company wrote the wrong client's name on it so we had to send it back again and they're overnighting it for us to us for a third time so crazy stuff like that happens at the end of cases all the time so i'm gonna prepare for this hearing which i actually prepped for yesterday but i'm just gonna do some last minute preparations for this hearing that i have at 9 30 i'm going to put my to-do list together and then i'll check back in with you guys after this hearing's over so we finished the cmc hearing got the trial date set um we set the cutoff dates for discovery expert witness disclosures we put when the pre-trial is going to be it's going to be a five-day trial we're gonna do it in october um the case is about two years old it's a 2019 case so it's not quite two years old so it's kind of in that good timeline to get it tried judge asked if we wanted to mediate it again we both agreed no because we were so far apart um so we're probably not going to mediate it again because it's not high likelihood to settle so it's probably one that's going to go to trial um there's a dui t-bone crash where one of our clients broke her neck and one of the clients broke a vertebrae in his lower back so that's kind of what we're going to trial on it's going to be an interesting case it was a really bad accident there was a fatality in the crash so we got that one set for trial um now i am actually prepping an offer letter to our first stetson law student that's going to be an intern this summer i did a block of five interviews about two weeks ago and then i've got a block of four interviews this afternoon that i'm going to do we're going to hire two interns one for the first half of the summer one for the second there may be some overlap so i'm getting that offer letter ready now to prep and send out um once i send that out um then i'll be ready to kind of pick the second one from the second group of students that i'm going to interview this afternoon it's always fun we set up this program for interns and we call them interns and not law clerks we have a law clerk and we've had law clerks in the past they kind of grind it out do a lot of research do a lot of memos things like that when we do an internship with these students they're usually one else and we want them to see what it's like to be a lawyer to sit in on depositions and mediations to look through some discovery to help us draft a complaint to help us draft a demand letter go through a medical chronology see what it's like to do an intake and talk to a client for the first time and hear their story and evaluate a case whether or not we want to take it and the viability of it so um that's what we really want out of these internships to be more of an experience to learn and see what's going on um versus you know actually a locker grinding so this is my paralegal call me i'm gonna have to pause the video hello went through the list got everything kind of put together we need to do for that trial um that we were prepping i think i was talking about the interns we'd like to make an experience for them to see as much as possible experience depositions mediations everything like that that you don't get in law school because there's not enough practical application so we try to provide that for the local law school because it's something i really think is missing in law school we did a whole podcast on what we'd change about it and that's one of the main things we would change is more practical applications so we try to do that as a business to serve the local community basically and make these law students better lawyers when they get out so now uh pete's on a call when he's done we'll probably go grab lunch and then get back here and get ready for an afternoon full of interviews all right so we're in the car now let me turn that down a little so we're in the car now and every day when we go to lunch we either go on a lunch with somebody for work lunch or together and every day we sit here we're like where do you want to go and we think of the same three places and it's a 10 minute conversation we're both like i don't care what do you want to eat we don't care we just want to go somewhere decompress for an hour so we're gonna figure out where we're gonna go eat and then we'll be back to do the interviews in the office handle some meetings and get the rest of our day going all right so this uh cmc case management conference that i had this morning on the case that was set for trial called those clients explain to them what's going on they're actually up in new york they're snowbirds down here called them explain to them what's going on they're awesome clients they're the best they're like yeah whatever you say peter but i go through everything with them and then i notate it in our needles file so that we can always keep track everything we do when we talk with the clients um so we can have a running log of it we talk we put here in notes what we talked about so we can track it and reference it especially sometimes these clients and other clients want memos after they talk to me on the phone they're like hey just as a reminder can you dictate a little memo and send it to me which i'll do um so we're doing that now and we've done one of our interviews really awesome kid from stetson um about potentially being our summer intern and in about 30 minutes it's two o'clock now so about 30 minutes i'm going to do another interview and we're going to keep taking calls in between these interviews i have a interview at 2 30 then i'll call it 2 45 and then another one at 3 o'clock so that's just kind of how it goes in the afternoon things speed up and we just try to hold on for dear life as we finish one task at a time also forgot before i start the next interview i was going to show you how i set up for them which is not rocket science but i set up and i have my ipad obviously where i'm doing them by zoom i have their resume out so i can see what their experience is what their grades were anything interesting about any clubs or groups or extracurriculars that they're doing i can ask about then i have my notepad i keep notes about each applicant and each interview some interview really well some have good resumes and don't so it all depends and it's kind of just an overall who i think would be a great fit and who i think would benefit the most from this internship program so i do it all right here in my office behind my desk just got back in because one of the worst things that can happen to me on any day is i go in the fridge to fill up my iced coffee at 3 p.m which is exactly what time it is right now and i'm out of coffee luckily we're on golf today with our new great location so i can just head up the street to publix got my coffee and now i'm good to go for the rest of my uh interviews and meetings that i have this afternoon so hey no harm no foul we're good to go i'm gonna jump back on to the next dinner so at the end of every day i'm interrupting pete because at the end of every day basically it's about 5 15 now pete comes in my office and we basically complain about all the fires that we had to put out today and he comes in just telling me about how every defense lawyer is trying to continue every case using every excuse they can and we literally have to fight about everything we have all these fires to put out every single day because the day comes in and starts with a cmc hearing here a deposition prep there a couple interviews and then it turns out that this guy wants to continue ever or stay everything until a criminal case is over in a pi case where our client was also injured but there's a criminal aspect to it we have a case where none of the expert disclosures were updated so we don't have any of the information we're supposed to have a week before trial so they're going to use that to try to continue the trial because they're not giving us the documents we already asked for and we literally just have motions on top of motions on top of motions that fall on top of each other on a day like this where now what i was going to ask pete when he walked in is we need to sit down and make a list of every motion we need to do on these litigation cases to make sure we can basically get them accomplished which changes minute by minute literally minute by minute changes and it's always something new and it just never stops so this is usually how we end our office day and i'm already late for my sister's birthday dinner that's at my parents house tonight so that's what we're dealing with here at the end of the day all right so it's about 5 45 leaving the office now um definitely late for my sister's birthday dinner heading to my parents house now with my family to celebrate my sister's birthday and then one more stop after that not gonna end till it's way past dark outside so i'll hit you back in a little bit [Applause] [Music] all right one celebration down sister's birthday finished now i'm going to a guy's night celebration for one of my buddies who just got a big promotion he is now i don't even know how to say it to be honest with you but he's basically now king of all paramedics in our county um stud awesome dude happy farm so we're gonna go celebrate him now the celebration continues it's about nine o'clock so it's a big time late night for me not every day is this long or this late but when duty calls we answer all right we're done for the night 11 o'clock it's a late one for me but this was the day in the life it was about as busy as any day i have before sun up to after sundown i think we started at 6 30 till 11 o'clock got a ton done a lot of celebrating tonight was a ton of fun thanks for joining me on the ride until the next time i'm out

Channel: Lawyer You Know

Views: 14,444

Keywords: day in the life, day in my life, day in the life of a lawyer, lawyer, law, law school, law student, a day in the life, lawyer day in the life, attorney, productive day in the life, lawyer life, life as a lawyer, what is it like being a lawyer, law firm, everything a lawyer does in a day, day in the life of an attorney, law students, budding lawyers, future lawyers, florida, personal injury lawyer, car accident lawyer, tragos law, laweyer you know

Id: DPeyoHOvMJE

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021