The Real Suits: Champions for the Injured – Ep. 1 David Kwass

Larry Bendesky sits down with fellow Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky partner, David Kwass, to talk about impactful cases, advocating for higher safety standards, and David’s unusual resume. Some of his not-so-typical credentials include a Masters Degree in English Lit from Georgetown, a summer job at the FBI Academy, and bartender in Charlottesville, Virginia. Oh, and a brief stint as a member of an early version of the Dave Matthews Band (before they hit it big).

 

Larry: Welcome to “The Real Suits – Champions for the Injured.” I’m Larry Bendesky, your host. We are using our platform here to talk about the cases that we handle, the tragic and catastrophic cases involving our clients, and to highlight our lawyers and the people that work at our firm. I am pleased to present today my friend, my law partner, Dave Kwass. Dave, welcome.

Dave: Larry, thank you so much for having me. I’m very, very delighted to be here.

Larry: Dave, I’d like to hear a little bit about your background, where you grew up, and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dave: I traveled as a young person. My dad was in the Navy because the Navy had paid for medical school. So he did his residency and fellowship in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we were there for a number of years. And then, once he had to do his naval service, we were at a Marine base in North Carolina and then up in the D.C. suburbs. Once he made full commander, promoted to full commander, then we were transferred…

Larry: Commander Kwass.

Dave: Yeah, Commander Kwass. Transferred up to Bethesda Naval. And then, out of the Navy, he was recruited by the CIA to do psychological profiles of foreign leaders. And I wound up going to the end of elementary school, junior high school, high school in Bethesda, Maryland, Bethesda-Rockville area. And then came to Philadelphia in ’83 to go to college, and after law school, wanted to come back to Philadelphia. And here I’ve been since then.

Larry: Let me go back to the psychological profiles your dad did on foreign leaders. So, where were these? They didn’t come to your house for dinner, did they?

Dave: No, no, miraculously, they did not. I don’t even remember, Larry, if I had any particular specific sense about that at the time, but when my dad passed away 14 years ago, I was a co-executor of his estate. And so part of my job was going through his papers, and I found in his desk a series of letters between the CIA and the American Psychological Association. The concern was this, in the early ’70s, as the CIA was developing this program, it wanted to have a group of psychiatrists who would be working at Langley who would be using psychological technique in order to gain insights about various foreign leaders. And in the exchange of communications with the American Psychological Association, the CIA says, “Hey, this is what we’re planning to do. We realize we are potentially running afoul of the rule that psychological technique should not be used without patient consent. Obviously, foreign leaders,” like Baby Doc in Haiti at the time, “are not going to be giving consent. Is that a problem?”

So the American Psychological Association in the second letter writes back. They’ve got some questions. In the third letter, the CIA answers the questions. And the American Psychological Association ultimately approves the program. It wound up being vastly more about what my dad did at the CIA all those years than I ever knew at the time. The documents were not stamped confidential. I made some inquiries to try to find out what I was supposed to do with them. I never really got any satisfactory answers. So they still sit in a lock box in a vault at Riggs Bank in Chevy Chase, Maryland to today.

Larry: Okay. And so we talked a little bit about your dad. So tell me about the things you were interested in growing up.

Dave: The things I was interested in while I was growing up. Well, I primarily played soccer. That was my passion. So I played soccer all the way through high school. Played soccer a couple of seasons in college.

Larry: You were a musician as well.

Dave: And I was a musician. I wrestled in high school. I wrestled at 138, which was kind of a crazy thing in its way to do. And then I was a…

Larry: Your ears look good.

Dave: Thank you for that. Yeah, I wasn’t a good wrestler. I think that’s probably why. And then, what else? I did music, and I did theater as well.

Larry: So tell me about your musicianship. Did you play with bands?

Dave: I did. I did. I played with bands. I played rock and roll and various types of music around rock and roll for many, many years. I first performed a song called “Hello, Central, Give Me Dr. Jazz” when I was in kindergarten. And I played with Fat Cat’s Potomac jazz club. My dad was sitting in with them at the time. He was a clarinet and saxophone player himself. And so I sat in with Fat Cat, and I sang “Hello, Central, Give Me Dr. Jazz” at some small bars in Northern Virginia and the D.C. suburbs.

Larry: And later on, I know… Why don’t you tell our listeners about your progression as a musician and who you played with later on?

Dave: Well, my progression as a musician…

Larry: What did you play?

Dave: I played keyboards. I played sax. I played guitar. I played bass. You know, sort of, if there was a band that I wanted to be in, I would kind of try to accommodate whatever they needed and try to cover that.

Larry: You were the utility player.

Dave: I really, really was. I really, really was. And so my next comment won’t surprise you. My musical career was much like, I should say, my soccer career. I was just good enough to play with really good people but not necessarily be a really good person myself in those ways.

Larry: Who did you play with?

Dave: But I did. I had some decent opening gigs in college. And then, when I was in law school, so this is 1989, I started playing open mic nights in downtown Charlottesville.

Larry: You went to the University of Virginia?

Dave: I did. Wah-hoo-wa. And I would play open mic nights at a bar called Eastern Standard, which was on the downtown mall in the historic area of Charlottesville, up the mall two blocks. It still exists. It’s Miller’s. And at Miller’s, there was this fabulous bartender with hair down to his shoulders and an exotic South African accent. His name was Dave Matthews, and he was my very, very favorite bartender ever in the history of bars, outstanding. Remembered everybody’s name, knew everybody’s face, knew what everybody drank, he was absolutely incredible.

And it turned out that Dave Matthews also had an interest in music, and so he began to play these open mic nights at Eastern Standard as well. And eventually, we would come to collaborate and play some duets, do some things together. Dave Matthews, he could sing like an angel, and he had a very charismatic presence. And we would play to Eastern Standard on a Monday night. Twenty-three people might be in the audience. It was always my sneaking suspicion that if there were one musician in Charlottesville who was going to get out, make it regionally or nationally, it would probably be Dave. The problem was he couldn’t play guitar to save his life.

So for those of you, perhaps you, your family, who might be familiar, Dave continues most summers when he tours to play “All Along the Watchtower.” There’s a reason for that. The reason is, initially, Dave only knew three barre chords, A minor, F, and G. And if you can play those three chords, you can play a lot of rock and roll. But specifically, you can play “All Along the Watchtower.” So Dave and I would play. Eventually, Dave began his own band, the Dave Matthews Band. A buddy of mine from law school and I began our band, Cactus Pie. The bands played together all around Virginia. And there would be times when I would actually sit in with the Dave Matthews Band in those days and play some keyboards or play guitar or sing backups or that sort of thing.

Larry: So Dave Matthews, the long-haired bartender who couldn’t play guitar lick, became Dave Matthews the international rock and roll superstar.

Dave: And I like to credit myself, Larry, actually, as being one of the people who said this guy is going to go places, seriously. Just really, really charismatic, great on stage, and truly just sang like an angel.

Larry: All right. And have you seen Dave Matthews in the years since 1989 when you guys were playing open mic night?

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mongo was kind enough…our partner Bob Mongeluzzi was kind enough, gosh, I don’t know, 10 years ago or something to get us tickets for a Dave Matthews show in Camden across the river. And we went backstage and had a chance to meet Dave and shook his hand. I reminded him who I was, that I’d been the bass player for Cactus Pie. And he, at least, seemed to remember me.

Larry: Well, you said he remembered everybody.

Dave: When he was a bartender, he did. As an international rock star, it might be a little bit different. But I don’t know. He certainly behaved as though he remembered me, which is very nice.

Larry: All right, that’s cool. And Cactus Pie, how’d you come up with that name?

Dave: I didn’t. That was my…and I can’t…I should ask James how he came up with that. But yes, it was Cactus Pie.

Larry: Okay. And so tell us a little bit about more about, you know, what you did in college, some of the other things that you do, some of your other interests.

Dave: Other things I did in college, well, for a while, I wanted to try something new. And so I swam in college. And I think that I was probably the last person taken on the Haverford College swim club. Definitely not one of those people who was going to be shaving any body part because shaving a body part and then coming in, like, 25 seconds behind everybody else would have looked preposterous. But I guess the highlight of college, in addition to playing rock and roll, I played in a ska band called The Cards. I played keyboards and saxophone. And we did a good bit of touring. And then I sang in a male a cappella group for four years called Skip Doo-Wop [SP] and the Hum Tones. And in my last couple of years, I was the musical director. So I was Skip Doo-Wop.

Larry: All right. And you never thought about following your dad’s career with the CIA or FBI or anything like that?

Dave: In high school, Larry, it turns out that in my senior year, I was second in the voting to Heather Kumanoff [SP] for most likely to succeed. What I won, however, was most likely to become a government agent. I still wonder how my classmates came up with that. Something else I did while I was in Charlottesville, in law school, was that I went through the FBI Academy one summer to kind of get a sense for what that was like, and I sort of was thinking about the possibility of having a career as a special agent and a lawyer in the FBI. And that was…shortly after that experience, I had some experiences with the FBI that kind of turned me off to going in that direction.

Larry: It’s classified.

Dave: No, it’s not. It’s a longer story, not at all classified.

Larry: Why did you want to become a lawyer?

Dave: I wanted to become a lawyer because my father’s first cousin, Herb Lewis, was a lawyer. He was first an assistant district attorney in Rochester, New York, and then he was a criminal defense lawyer. And when he visited, he and my dad would play clarinet duets, and then he would talk. Herb would tell us stories about all of his crazy criminal cases and all of the extraordinary things that some of his clients had allegedly done and how one time he represented a fellow called Jimmy the Bug, not kidding, who was unable to pay him in cash but paid him with a box truck full of blue suede jackets. And I was like, “Okay, I’m going to be a trial lawyer.”

Larry: And so, why didn’t you go? Well, how did you decide to do handling catastrophic personal injury cases as opposed to going into criminal law?

Dave: Well, I know that you’re asking that question, but you had a very, very large role in that yourself. I had been working as a medical malpractice defense lawyer in this building, downstairs at Duane Morris, and I was very happy, and things were going pretty well. I had a case with Steve Saltz. I had a case with Michael Barrett. And there was a point at which Michael Barrett talked to me and said, you know, “Bob Daniels is no longer with the firm and Larry Bendesky is kind of being elevated in his role and his status at the firm. And Bob Mongeluzzi would be interested in talking with you about whether you might have any interest in coming to the plaintiff’s side and actually trying to do some good as opposed to just protecting doctors who had committed malpractice.” And so I came.

I can see, you know, kind of thinking about the office that we were on 34 at the time. So I came in, talked with you and Bob, and I was completely intrigued. The way that you guys talked about being young and energetic and entrepreneurial, and it really fit with how I saw myself, and it fit with how I saw the part of me that I wanted to be and how I wanted to get away from this kind of huge institutional rule-bound sort of a focus with my former employer. And I was completely, completely sold. So what got me to this side was really you and Mongo. And I remember, at one point, saying to you guys, “I’m going to be required by one of my clients, or pressured I should say, to sign an agreement not to sue them in the next five years.”

And I remember talking with you and Mongo about it and Mongo saying, “Yeah, don’t worry about that. You’re not going to be doing any medical malpractice. You’re going to be doing something completely different. We’re going to do catastrophic injury cases. We’re going to do cases in which we’re helping workers who have been catastrophically injured at the job site often because of a design defect or malfunction in a piece of construction equipment. And you won’t even look back.” And when the five-year period… So I signed the agreement, and when the five-year period ended, I was already completely down the road of doing what we do in terms of construction accident and product liability cases.

Larry: You’ve told us generally what you do. What kind of cases do you handle, and what kind of satisfaction do you get from handling these cases?

Dave: The legal world in which I inhabit now is primarily accidents that involve cranes and aerial lifts. There’s other construction equipment I’m doing as well, telehandlers or excavators when they’re being used as cranes, and at some of the old steel factories, the overhead cranes as well. And cranes have a tendency to tip over, to hit power lines, to drop loads, all of which can be incredibly serious, incredibly devastating. So that has really become the focus of what I do and what our team is doing. And it has been just extraordinarily rewarding for a number of reasons. But one of the things that I truly love about it is when we have the chance to actually make change.

So we’re always working on making change for our clients. Our clients only come to us because there was a workplace catastrophe. They only come to us because of an almost unparalleled amount of unsafety on a job site at a given time. But there are times in the course of litigation that not only are we able to be of real help to a family that’s struggling, suffering, but in addition to that, we’re sometimes able to make changes in the industry. And we have made changes in the industry. One of the case types that Mongo trained me to do was the scissor lift tip-over. And at the time, I remember my first day here, I checked in with you. And then I went into Mongo’s office and he said, “Do you know what a scissor lift is?” And I said, “No.”

Larry: And you had only handled medical malpractice cases.

Dave: Yeah. And he took two red-wells of scissor lift cases, and he kind of pushed them across his desk, and he said, “Here you go. Here are two scissor lift cases. I’ll help you figure it out.” And it turns out that on the inside scissor lifts, the narrow aisle scissor lifts that are designed with hard wheels and 36-inch wheelbases intended to be operated only on concrete slab, that because there can be cutouts in the concrete slab, that if one scissor lift wheel gets stuck in a cutout, the whole thing can come toppling over. And it happens with remarkable frequency. So a device was created called a pothole protection device that reduced the ground clearance between the front and the right wheels on both sides of the scissor lift so that in the event one wheel goes into some kind of a cutout, it does not cause…it acts like a ski or a skid, doesn’t allow the scissor lift to tip over. I remember learning about this from Mongo.

Larry: And let me just interrupt you. While this is happening, while this tire or wheel is going into these cutouts, the employee is up in a basket, 20, 30 feet above ground.

Dave: Yeah. Exactly, the worker is elevated, yeah, 18, 25, 30 feet in the air. And when someone has his feet on a platform that’s elevated 30 feet above concrete slab, when the scissor lift tips over and comes down, nothing good is going to happen to the worker. And we have seen many deaths from that. And in a way, what’s worse is where the workers don’t die and instead everything is broken.

So today, and boy, I’m trying to think about how far back this goes, but since the 2000s now, pothole protection devices have become an industry standard and are now required by published industry standards, and that was a safety device that was pushed on the industry by our cases, by the plaintiff’s bar, by lawyers like Mongo, like you, me. And that’s one of the ways in which we’ve literally helped to make the workplace safer. And who even knows at this point, literally, how many thousands of lives have probably been saved because pothole protection devices are now standard on these pieces of equipment.

Larry: All right. Kudos to you.

Dave: Thank you, thank you.

Larry: I know you’re not just keeping this information a secret. You are a head of a national group that shares this information with lawyers all over the country so people can be protected as a result of lawsuits all over the country, right?

Dave: So in 2003, Mongo took me out to lunch at park, and we sat outside on the sidewalk. And he said, “So, Dave, what’s your personal marketing plan?” And I said, “My what?” And Mongo said, “Listen, I founded and I’ve been supporting a couple of litigation groups,” what was then the American Trial Lawyers Association before it became the American Association for Justice. He said, “Why don’t you come with me to a couple of conferences or conventions, see what the groups are about.” And so I did that, and down the road, Mongo made me into a co-chair with him on those groups. And it gave me a platform for publishing about scissor lift and boom lift and crane safety and gave me an opportunity to help just hundreds and hundreds of other lawyers around the country who would call and say, “Hey, here’s the make and model of the aerial lift that my client was working on at the time of the accident. Here’s what happened. Do you have suggestions for experts I might hire? Do you have some pleadings that you could offer? Can you recommend any good experts I should talk to in order to help the litigation move forward?”

And so American Association for Justice, the groups that Mongo had allowed me to become part of and begin to run myself, has provided a platform where I can publish and I can speak and I can teach others privately about aerial lift safety and about, in the event that unsafety happens, how to work on prosecuting those cases, how to hold manufacturers and dealers responsible when not all the safety devices or training that should be there are in fact there, and helping families who’ve often been just devastated by the loss of a loved one.

Larry: So you’re not just handling these cases, you’re teaching other lawyers around the country how to handle these cases so they can better represent people that are seriously injured in accidents.

Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We have many, many great lawyers here. But you know, you and Mongo and some of our other partners have the Philadelphia market very much covered. So I have been working very hard to make myself available to lawyers all over the country who are handling aerial lift cases. And I don’t know, one out of four, one out of five calls, somebody might call back a week later, a month letter, a year later, and say, “Hey, you know what, you seemed really knowledgeable about this machinery and these accident types. Would you be willing to come out to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and do the case with me? Would you be willing to come down to Searcy, Georgia, and do the case with me?”

And so that’s what I’ve been doing. I was traveling. I was on the road, normally, two, three nights a week, I would say, before the pandemic. Slowed down during the pandemic. But I’m probably back up to that same kind of travel schedule. So I spend an appalling amount of time at the Philadelphia International Airport now.

Larry: And we talked about teaching. Do you like to teach?

Dave: No, I do not. I absolutely love to teach. I know that that is one of your passions also. That’s something from which we get a great deal of satisfaction. I mean, there’s something just wonderful about trying to help a young lawyer or a law student conceptualize certain things about what the law is actually like in practice as opposed to just in the published cases that they read. And, you know, sometimes when you actually see the light go on with the student, it’s just an irreplaceable experience. And going back to where we started in our conversation, my dad in the Navy, he said that, within the medical corps in the Navy, their motto was “See one, do one, teach one.”

So one of the things that I took from that motto of the Naval Medical Corps was that you really don’t ever fully understand or master a concept until you can teach it effectively also. It’s one thing to understand it. It’s another thing to be able to do it. But then to teach someone else how to do it is a different level of mastery. And when I’m able to communicate something along those lines to a student, I feel, as I’m sure that you do also, just a great sense of gratification and a sense that, you know, it’s great to be here in the office and to help our current clients. We also want to be involved in training the next generation of lawyers to represent effectively the next generation of those who will need our services.

Larry: So you’re not just teaching at AAJ, as you talked about other lawyers around the country, you’re teaching here to practicing lawyers at Temple, right?

Dave: Teaching here to practicing lawyers at Temple, both at the law school level and then also in the master’s program that you and I went through together. Was it 24 years ago?

Larry: 2001.

Dave: Twenty-three years ago now. Yeah, but who’s counting?

Larry: Yeah.

Dave: Yeah, yeah. So we both get the privilege of both teaching, you know, the sort of undergrad law students, if you will, but then also the master’s candidates, the LL.M. candidates. And both are different, but both are wonderful.

Larry: So you told us about the scissor lift tip-over cases that you’ve handled and frankly helped lawyers all over the country handle. What other types of cases have you handled that are particularly memorable or noteworthy to you?

Dave: Well, there are two other places in which I feel as though I have helped to make a difference in terms of helping to make certain injuries a bit safer. We were talking, you and I, earlier today about boom lift operator entrapment cases where, you know, boom lifts are kind of a curious machine because, on the one hand, you need to look where you’re traveling to, on the other hand, you need to look at your control panel. And it would be very easy if you had two sets of eyes, one in the front of your head and one in the back of your head, but most human beings I know only have the one set. And so, instead, you wind up kind of swiveling back and forth between the operator’s panel and between whatever obstruction may potentially be in your way as you’re operating.

So Mongo and I represented a client who was injured in 2004. As he was attempting to position the basket of his boom lift, he became caught on one of the actuator joysticks on the control panel, and it wound up that his torso was on the control panel actuating the joystick while his back was up against a joist, an overhead obstruction. And he was terribly, terribly crushed, very, very, very, very bad abdominal injuries. During that case, Mongo and I, working with engineers at ARCCA up in Penns Park, came up with a guard design which would prevent this entrapment hazard from occurring on boom lifts. And I remember how skeptical, we’ll say, the other parties in the case were. The manufacturer and the dealer did not think much of our idea.

Well, that case resolved during trial. Later that year, there was a product in Europe called SiOPS, which essentially was a guard bar very much along the lines of the one that we had suggested as an alternative design in our case. And it was the European product of the year. And then, within two years, the same manufacturer that we had sued, the same manufacturer that had scoffed at our suggestion about putting a bar on the control panel, came out with its own version of exactly that design. And so I’ve continued to handle cases to this day. I was in a deposition for hours today on one of these cases where there was a boom lift operator entrapment that caused death. And since 2021, the industry standard has required that there be an anti-entrapment device, and I would like to think that Mongo and I contributed to that change in an industry that can be very, very difficult to get change from.

The other thing that I did that I worked on that seemed to move an industry in the right direction was with guardrail cases. So there was…

Larry: Guardrails that you see on the side of highways.

Dave: Guardrails that you see on the side of highways. And if you ever look at the near end of a run of guardrail, as you’re approaching it, it has something called an end terminal. And it does happen that cars will, for whatever reason, run into the near end of a run of guardrail. And when that happens, it better be that that end cap does something protective to allow a controlled deceleration of the car as opposed to a situation where the guardrail distorts and bends and becomes a spear that literally impales the occupant cabin and cuts off legs of drivers and front seat passengers. And so I was involved in a group that handled those cases around the country.

And the particular end terminal that was responsible for more than 55 very, very similar accidents, drivers and passengers having their legs traumatically amputated by malfunctioning guardrail, those end terminals are…you don’t see them at all in Pennsylvania anymore, and they’re getting rarer and rarer along the country. We worked with engineers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who had an alternative design. Their alternative design has now come to market and become the standard end terminal in the industry. And thank goodness, we, as a result, see many, many, many, many, many times fewer of these types of accidents these days.

Larry: I mean, it is a shame that sometimes manufacturers of products only change those products and only implement safety devices, frankly, because we file lawsuits and force people to testify under oath and have the threat of or a lawsuit where they are forced to make those changes. You’d like to think that they do it voluntarily, but it just doesn’t happen in the real world.

Dave: No, they don’t do it voluntarily, and it’s true that it only seems to happen once there is a significant amount of pressure brought to bear, which is a kind of pressure that we’re able to bring to bear through the civil justice system. One of the things that we talk about frequently is that often juries will, in one way or another, hope that the federal government is looking out for them and, if there were something that were really so faulty or defective about a particular product that it would injure people and that there could be a relatively minor change made to make the product much, much safer, that, of course, the government would require that. And newsflash, it just does not work that way.

Our government doesn’t have that job, doesn’t have the resources, for the most part, doesn’t have the expertise. The way in which industry in our country is held accountable and forced to improve itself and forced to think first and foremost about safety is by the lawsuits that you and Mongo and our partners and I bring. And I have come to believe, over 30+ years of doing this, that it is the best way for that to occur. And frankly, it’s the only way for that to occur. I don’t trust the corporations to do it. I don’t trust the government to do it. We have to do it.

Larry: Yeah. I mean, for our listeners, you know, in addition to all the things that you’ve done to make work sites safer, seatbelts wouldn’t be in cars if it weren’t for lawsuits filed, airbags wouldn’t be in cars if it weren’t for lawsuits filed, and frankly, hospitals would be a lot less safe if it weren’t for lawsuits filed. That’s just the reality of the world.

Dave: And each time, with each of those innovations, you think about airbags, you think about seatbelts, the reality is that each time with that, Lar, each time industry claimed, “Well, here’s the problem, folks. If we put seatbelts and airbags into the cars, then people will feel immune to injury, and people will drive even more recklessly and even faster and even crazier. They will have a false sense of security.” And the reason that I know that that is nonsense as an argument is because industry meets each new challenge that they innovate and get safer with those same sets of arguments. “Oh, it’s actually going to make things less safe because the operator will have a false sense of security.” Nonsense.

If we can inexpensively give people more effective safety, then we can avoid the number of calls at night where firefighters, EMS crews have to be out. We can avoid all of the harm that some of those accidents do, and we can avoid all of the social costs associated with having to take care publicly of those accidents. So I am a big, big, big fan of the civil justice system and of the ability of lawyers like ourselves to make a difference and to make things safer in the workplace and on our highways.

Larry: You’ve told us you’ve been practicing for about 30 years. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the practice of law?

Dave: Well, the biggest change, without question, and I guess I don’t know if we’ve talked about this, but I’m sure you’d agree with me, is it used to be that no accidents were captured on video. Now, everything’s captured on video. Even podcasts are videoed. Who knew? So I remember when Mongo and I represented a West Point cadet who was injured in the fourth quarter of the Army-Navy game at Veterans Stadium in December 1999.

Larry: Kevin Galligan.

Dave: Kevin, yeah, that’s exactly right. Lieutenant Kevin Galligan. Because his classmate, Ty Amey, had just run 73 yards from scrimmage out of the wishbone, scored a touchdown. And there was a CBS cameraman in the end zone who had a camera on his shoulder that he was holding up to the cadets as they went to commercial break. And the cadets were kind of leaning forward and saying, “Hey, mom, we’re number one.” And all of a sudden, the guardrail collapsed, and Kevin fell 12.5 feet onto his head. And when we finally got all of the video footage from CBS in New York, we were able to see what never was shown on national television, which is Kevin Galligan having a seizure in the end zone as people scrambled to figure out how to get him medical treatment.

So that was the first time for me that I had ever seen an accident that we were working on litigation captured on video. Now, it seems to be much, much more routine, no matter what the case is that we’re doing. Somebody has ring footage of it or passersby notice something looking funny and they’re holding their cell phones up to capture a tower crane in New York City toppling over, whatever it may be. It’s now much, much, much, much, much more common that we have video, if not of the accident taking place, at least of the immediate aftermath of the accident.

Larry: And tell us how technology has changed the practice of law and your practice, in particular.

Dave: Well, technology has changed in a way that I think kind of makes practice a mixed blessing. I’m going to spare you getting on my soapbox about one of my pet peeves, but no question that, as a result of the pandemic, lawyers who do what we do became very experienced with, facile with, and accustomed to taking depositions by Zoom. And because we are doing so much in terms of using Zoom for depositions, using Zoom for various types of meetings, it means that we, under some circumstances, have an ability to do more, to help more of our clients, if we’re not losing as much time flying all over the country to take the statements of witnesses and such.

Larry: Going to the airport, waiting in the airport, catching a flight, maybe it’s late, spending a night in a hotel room, all that.

Dave: Right, right. And so there are some significant advantages to what we’re able to do by using Zoom. And I think that there are also some limitations. It may just be that I’m getting old in the tooth here, but I do feel strongly that there can be a particular value to being in the same room with the witness and interacting with the witness at that immediate present kind of level that, without it, it just wouldn’t capture the experience in quite the same way. It’s no different that we’re sitting across from each other for this hour as opposed to doing this by Zoom or something like that. And this makes the experience better.

Larry: Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I agree with you. And frankly, I think sizing up the witness, getting a sense of their body language, getting a sense of maybe they want to avoid a subject, and I can see it in their eyes or the way they kind of look at me, I know that’s something I got to hone in on. I don’t know if you get that over Zoom the way you get it in person.

Dave: I think that’s absolutely right. And specifically, because with Zoom, basically, we’re just seeing disembodied heads, maybe get a little torso. But the phenomenon that you’re talking about, and I’m sure it has some fancy psychological name, but what you’re talking about…

Larry: You and I would know better.

Dave: Well, we probably would have. But words may communicate one thing, but body language, tics, nervousness, being able to see the whole body of the person that you’re questioning, can be a very, very important piece of getting a sense for whether the witness believes what it is he’s saying at that moment. And I like to tell our law students, you know, that one of the things that unites us as trial lawyers, whether we’re men, women, regardless of age, color, creed, religious orientation, political beliefs, one of the things that you need to be a trial lawyer, one of the things that we share is, you know, the ability, like certain sharks, to be able to smell just a few drops of blood in 100,000 gallons of seawater. I need to be with a witness to know if a witness is being fully candid and truthful with me. And that’s something I can’t replace by Zoom. So I think, in terms of technology changes, I think that that’s a big one.

The other thing that’s changed greatly for us is in the courtroom and the way in which we present information exhibits, especially to jurors. When you and I started, Larry, the standard was foam boards, you know, and we would put even fairly complex documents with tons and tons of writing on to, you know, foam poster boards and then march around the courtroom with them. And sometimes they’d actually go back with the jury at the end of a case when they were going to deliberate. I think that we do much, much better these days to understand more about how to simplify our visual presentations, whether they’re PowerPoint slides or what portions of documents we’re calling out and highlighting. But I think being able to do that electronically and creating one big visual field where all the jurors are seeing the same thing at the same time, I think, is immensely powerful in the courtroom and a huge innovation for us.

Larry: I agree with you. David, we’re almost out of time. Is there anything else that you want to talk about, anything else that you think that we missed that’s significant in your career or in your life?

Dave: My goodness, I think that you have really hit all of the high points. I know there’s anything that I particularly wanted to mention that we haven’t covered, but I would be remiss if I did not thank you for being my friend, being part of my life, and being a big, big part of the reason that I’m here doing what I’m doing. Because all those years ago, as I was preparing to leave the defense firm I had been working with there, I was pretty sure about what I wanted to do, and I was very, very certain that I really thought the world of you and Mongo. But there was a day when I was having a couple of doubts, and I came and I visited you, and you let me spend time in your office. And we talked, and you helped me to feel fully supported and to make just a monumental change in my career path. And I’m very, very grateful, Larry. Thank you.

Larry: Thank you. Thanks for all you’ve done for me as your friend, to our firm, and most importantly, to our clients. Thank you for cluing in to “The Real Suits – Champions for the Injured.” We welcome any feedback you have, any questions, any comments. And if you enjoyed listening to the episode, please feel free to click the subscribe button and share with your family and friends. Thanks very much.