The Real Suits: Champions for the Injured – Ep. 8 Aidan Carickhoff

In this conversation, Larry Bendesky interviews his law partner, Aidan Carickhoff, not only the newest partner but the youngest partner in the history of SMB, about his background, career, and practice. They discussed his time at Temple University and Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, how he met his wife, who is also a lawyer, and raising two young boys while balancing his medical malpractice cases. Aidan shares some of the cases he’s worked on and how mentorship has shaped his career.

 

 

Larry Bendesky
Welcome to the Real Suits, Champions for the Injured. Using our platform here at Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky to tell you about the interesting cases that we handle and the very interesting people that work here at our firm. I am so pleased today to have my law partner, Aidan Karakoff, who is the newest partner at the firm and the youngest partner in the history of Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky, and a rising star in the legal field. Aidan, it is such a pleasure to have you with us today.

Aidan Carickhoff
Thanks so much, Larry. I appreciate you having me on.

Larry Bendesky
So, Aidan, let’s start at the beginning. How’d you end up at SMB?

Aidan Carickhoff
It’s a good story, actually. It’s a story about how I met Bob Mongeluzzi, your co-founding partner of the firm. I was about 20 years old. I had dropped out of college. I was kind of down on my luck and was trying to get my life back together. And I actually met Bob on a golf course. I didn’t golf well or at all. That was the first time I’d ever been on a golf course. And I met Bob, and he asked what I was planning to do with my life.

My friends all worked construction. I worked construction during the day and delivered pizza at night. And I was planning on joining the labor union with them to be a steam fitter, actually. And Bob said, listen, that’s amazing. I’ve represented construction workers for 40 years, but why don’t you consider something else? I’m a trial lawyer. I think it’s the best job in the world. And it seems like something that might fit for you. This was a guy who had never met before. I didn’t know, but he seemed to take an interest. So he said, listen, I am on trial right now in City Hall in Philadelphia. It’s a massive case. It was the Salvation Army building collapse case where seven people lost their lives. Dozens of people were injured. He said, I’ve got this huge expert witness examination next week. Come on Monday. I actually have off on Tuesday. Come by the office on Tuesday and let me know what you thought. So seemed worth my time. Check something out. Someone offered something to me, and was just pure luck that I had met him that day. So I took him up on it.

I did not own a suit at the time. I had a pair of jeans, and I went and bought a little blazer, came to City Hall, and watched for about seven and a half hours while he directed this expert witness through OSHA rules and all of these things that went wrong to cause this catastrophe. And it was incredible. It was like watching a competition at the highest level. And it was just like playing sports, and I knew it was that way to him because he told me that later.

So the next day I went to the office. Obviously, we have a great office. I was blown away. I came to his office and he said, listen, what’d you think? I told him it was amazing. I’m glad that he invited me, and thanks so much for the opportunity. And if I could do anything to help him ever, I’d be happy to. And he said, well, let me tell you why this is the best job in the world. And he, for the next 20, 30 minutes, pitched me on why I should be a trial lawyer, get to be the director, the producer, the actor, the editor in your movie. And it’s an incredibly rewarding job. You get to help people. So by the end of his pitch, I was pretty much sold. And I said, OK, this sounds great. Where do I sign up, and what do I need to do? So he kind of gave me a list of things I needed to do. And he said, if you do these, you come work for us.

Larry Bendesky
So he literally transformed your life.

Aidan Carickhoff
Transform my life. Had I not met him that day, I would be a steam fitter. And I would have been totally happy with that, but this was a remarkable turn.

Larry Bendesky
I mean, look, as you said, we’ve represented many, many steam fitters, construction workers. It is vitally important in our society to have people doing that work, but this seems to suit you.

Aidan Carickhoff
I think so, and I like it a lot. And I wake up excited to go to work, and I come home happy every day. I think my wife would tell you that too.

Larry Bendesky
So you meet Bob, you said you had dropped out of college, you go and finish your degree.

Aidan Carickhoff
So I decided to go back to college. went back to Temple University here in the city. I got a degree in psychology. Did all sorts of interesting things there. And Bob said, listen, you have to get into trial as soon as you possibly can. So if they’ve got a trial team, a trial competition, like mock trial, do that. So I did that for two years.

Larry Bendesky
On the undergraduate level?

Aidan Carickhoff
Correct, yep, at Temple. Went to competitions all over the country. Had a great time doing it, but I wanted more, so he said, all right, now you need to go to law school. And at that point, I’d actually started working as a law clerk at the firm, printing stuff, putting stuff in binders, whatever anybody needed.

Larry Bendesky
Starting at the bottom.

Aidan Carickhoff
Yea, starting at the bottom. Carrying people’s bags to court, carrying his bags to mediation, your bags to focus groups and trials. And then I went to law school at Drexel, also in the city.

Larry Bendesky
And you also were involved in trial team and getting as much experience as you could.

Aidan Carickhoff
Exactly, yep. I went to Drexel, joined their trial team, got a scholarship to do that, did moot court as well, kept working here during the day, probably spent more time here than at school frankly, and in law school I actually got to try my first real case, which was awesome.

Larry Bendesky
So we have had many law clerks who have many have been outstanding. I will tell you, you were the best law clerk in the history of our firm. It says a lot.

Aidan Carickhoff
Appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Larry Bendesky
So after you graduate from Drexel, then you start to work at the firm. You had mentioned your wife. Tell us about your family.

Aidan Carickhoff
Yeah, my wife is also from Philadelphia. Her dad’s a plaintiff’s lawyer, represents injured people. She also went to law school. met, she clerked here for a little while. We met, we met through school. We got married a couple of years ago. She is a medical malpractice lawyer too. And we have two little boys who are three and one, and we live right outside of Philadelphia.

Larry Bendesky
I don’t know if you even remember this, but we had a lunch at the end of the clerkships, and I said, you and Brooke seem like a good match and you said we’re already dating.

Aidan Carickhoff
I do it was the Mexican place that clsoed that was on like Locust Street.

Larry Bendesky
Yeah, tequilas, it’s back, by the way.

Aidan Carickhoff
Tequila’s that was it, I remember where we were sitting, remember what she was wearing. Yeah, I very distinctly remember that so yes I I will give you credit, though had it been had it not been for this job, we would not have met

Larry Bendesky
And you mentioned you have two young kids.

Aidan Carickhoff
Yeah, we have a three-year-old son and a one-year-old son, which is an absolute blast.

Larry Bendesky
So how are you able to balance all of it?

Aidan Carickhoff
It’s definitely challenging. My wife tries a lot of cases too. You know, medical malpractice lawyers are constantly in trial. I think she tried eight cases at the beginning for six months of this year. So we just make it work. We work a lot late at night. We get up early in the morning and work. We try and spend as much time as we possibly can with them. And when they’re asleep, we try and spend some time together, which is a lot of time spent talking about our cases, talking about work, sitting on the couch with laptops next to each other.

Larry Bendesky
Well, it’s good that you can share your love of what you’re doing and your common interests. Tell us about the cases that you’re handling here at the firm.

Aidan Carickhoff
Sure. So obviously, we represent injured workers like we talked about. That makes up a bulk of our practice, and I represent injured workers who have been hurt on construction sites. I represent folks who have been injured by defective or dangerous products. We have a lot of explosion, gas, propane explosion cases. And probably the bulk of my time is spent working on medical malpractice cases and specifically birth injury cases for children who have been injured.

Larry Bendesky
How’d you get interested in medical malpractice cases?

Aidan Carickhoff
Like a lot of things, actually, goes back to my wife. I didn’t really have a lot of science background. I wasn’t a science or math person. She was. And she was handling, I remember exactly, a medical malpractice case involving a little girl who had suffered a brain injury at birth. And she would come home at the end of the day and talk to me about it. And this was before we had kids. And seemed super interesting. The little girl was extremely deserving. And it was a four-week trial outside of Philadelphia. And I remember saying, hey, did you get the daily trial transcripts? Said, yeah, I did. And I’ve been reading trial transcripts since I started working at the firm. So I said, do you mind if I read them? So I ended up getting the trial transcripts from this four-week trial. And it was like a book. I couldn’t put it down. So I read it front to back four times. I still have it. I still read it if I have some spare time because it’s super educational. It’s excellent. And I was just totally enthralled.

I decided that this was something I wanted to spend my time doing. So I went and found every trial transcript, deposition transcript from a birth injury case that I could find. I called lawyers across the country and asked for them to send me their trial transcripts. I watched medical lectures, read medical literature, everything I could. I was just super, super interested in this area and felt like there would be no more deserving plaintiff than a child who’s been injured. No more righteous cause than that. And that became my focus and remains my focus.

Larry Bendesky
Birth injury cases. So, can you tell us about those cases a little bit?

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. So birth injury cases take all kinds of different forms. And it’s kind of a generic term we use. But anytime someone has a child who has suffered an injury around the time of their birth, most often they are brain injuries. At birth, immediately following in the weeks or months following birth, there may be a potential case, and that injury may be the result of medical malpractice. And so what I’ll tell families who may be interested in talking to us is,

You should always be asking why. If my child now has some kind of brain injury, if they’ve been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, you deserve some answers about why exactly that happened. And they can happen in all kinds of different ways. Most commonly, we see situations where mom goes in for labor, she gets an induction, and the baby’s heart rate on the monitor is going down. That means the baby’s not getting enough oxygen, and perhaps the doctor’s delayed, took too long in performing a C-section to get the baby out. The baby has a brain injury from a lack of oxygen, and they’re diagnosed with cerebral palsy. We’ve handled cases for babies who have been prematurely, who shouldn’t have, who have a brain injury from that. Babies who have brain injuries from things that happen in the NICU, the baby ICU. So they take all kinds of different forms, and we review cases every single week.

Larry Bendesky
And you aren’t handling these cases just to get back at doctors or hospitals. There is a lifetime of medical care that’s going to be needed for these children, correct?

Aidan Carickhoff
That’s exactly right. And medical malpractice cases are rarely about someone intending to hurt somebody. They’re about mistakes, honest mistakes that happen that even good doctors make. Sometimes they’re about systemic failures at health systems. We just handled a case just like that that had to do more with corporatized health care. So that does happen. But ultimately, the purpose is to provide, like you said, for the lifetime of medical needs that this child will have.

Anybody who has a child who has a disability knows that caring for them is incredibly rewarding, but it’s also a tremendous burden financially, emotionally, everything in between. So these children will need skilled care. They may need a new home that’s wheelchair accessible. They may need a van that’s wheelchair accessible. And the goal of that case is to provide the resources that that child needs to have the best possible outcome and best possible life, considering the substantial difficulties they’re going to face.

Larry Bendesky
And how do you, you mentioned, and I was impressed, I’ve always been impressed by how much you dig and how much you are committed to what you’re doing. What do you do to prepare for handling these cases?

Aidan Carickhoff
Like you said, it takes a lot of preparation, and I think you know and have taught me that that’s really the key to success is to be the most prepared. So I think that you see a lot of lawyers who advertise; we handle birth injury cases. I think there are very few lawyers really in the country who understand it, and you cannot go toe to toe against well-funded hospitals and health systems and very experienced doctors unless you know the medicine about as close to them as you possibly can.

I didn’t go to medical school, certainly I don’t plan to, but it is my business to know every single thing about every medical aspect of pregnancy, about labor and delivery, about caring for a newborn. So it involves medical textbooks. I have an 800-page medical textbook about neurological injuries to babies on my desk right now that I’ve read. It involves going to lectures, to hearing about doctors talk about those issues, not just lawyers. And it involves reading expert reports and talking with best medical experts in the country, who are really educators and who have really educated me to help put these cases together.

Larry Bendesky
As well as reading hundreds, thousands of records to find things that make up why this happened to this child.

Aidan Carickhoff
That’s exactly right. And most families call us and have no idea what happened. And the unfortunate reality is that their child might have something catastrophic that happens to them at birth. And they do the same thing you or I would do if something happened to our kid. Ask the doctors what happened? Why did this happen? And the answer they get is usually not satisfactory. They usually don’t answer exactly why it happened. So they come to us and they ask the most fundamental question, which is why. And it’s our job to get that answer for them.

So, you’re exactly right, we’ll order tens of thousands of pages of medical records. I review them myself, I know what I’m looking for, I know what to look for, and the case might be made based on one entry on one page of 6,000 pages of medical records. And you have to get into that level of depth and actually understand what you’re looking at to know whether there’s a case. And it happens all the time that another lawyer may have looked at a case who perhaps didn’t have experience handling birth injury cases, told the family that they couldn’t help them, and they come to us and we see that key piece of evidence in the records that really transforms it and makes it into a very successful case.

Larry Bendesky
And after talking to your experts and reviewing all the records, do you then have the opportunity to take the deposition, put somebody under oath to again find out what happened on behalf of a family?

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. So the depositions of the doctors, the nurses, and all the other providers involved in this particular patient’s medical care is the most important part of the case, really. And cross-examination is the vehicle to getting to the truth. We have an advantage that the doctors don’t have. Our patients have had one horrible thing happen to them, and they remember it like it was yesterday. So we get to hear their story, and part of our job is to tell their story.

And the doctors don’t have that advantage. Oftentimes, they don’t even remember the patient. But I know exactly from my client’s perspective what happened, and that kind of gives us the ammunition going in. Preparing for the depositions of those doctors is crucial. I think that what we practice here and what you preach here is that we should take depositions like we’re in trial, like it’s a cross-examination. I want to find out exactly what happened, but I want to go after the doctor in the areas where I know they made a mistake, and that requires, like we talked about earlier, a tremendous amount of preparation.

So I’ll give you an example. We had a case that Bob and I settled a couple of weeks ago, a birth injury case, and the whole case came down to one article that the defendant doctor had written. He had a CV, a resume that was 45 pages long. He had 453 articles that he had written, and in one article he wrote 15 years ago, he set out exactly what you’re supposed to do and exactly the situation this patient had, and we presented it to him at his deposition. We went through all 453 articles, and it made the case, and they had no defense anymore. So that level of preparation is what it takes to win.

Larry Bendesky
Hard for him to argue that it’s something that shouldn’t have been done when he actually wrote an article saying it had to be done.

Aidan Carickhoff
Pretty tough. Believe it or not. He said I’m not sure I remember writing it and then we went through that that was in fact the spelling of his name on the article. It was his article, but magically he had forgotten that.

Larry Bendesky
Not a good answer.

Aidan Carickhoff
Never a good answer

Larry Bendesky
All right. And you were able to take care of the family in that case.

Aidan Carickhoff
Yeah, we were able to take care of the family. And it’s incredibly gratifying. We ended up resolving the case shortly before trial. And I think what happened at the end of that case goes to why these cases are so gratifying for me. We have a mom who has a son who’s a couple years old. He’s eight years old. He’s quadriplegic, he’s partially blind, he can’t communicate, he communicates through an adaptive device like an iPad. And she’s his sole caretaker. So she carries him up the stairs every night in their row home to his bed. She barely sleeps because he wakes up throughout the night. And she’s his whole world. And so she’s constantly terrified that she could not afford to take care of him. And what would happen to him when she’s no longer there?

That’s a very real concern that every parent who has an injured child has. And at the end of the case, we resolved it, and she hugged us. She was crying, and she said, I can sleep again. That’s exactly what she said. I can sleep again, because I’m not worried now about what’s going to happen to him in the future. And regardless of the amount of money we got them, that was like a life-changing thing that she said to me. It kind of reaffirmed how important this is.

Larry Bendesky
Congratulations on your hard work and that result. You mentioned parents and families wanting to know what happened. Is it a common theme that’s what they want to know?

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. I think when parents come to us, that’s the number one question they have. Sometimes they’re upset about the treatment that they got, but more often they’re just shocked that they went into the hospital with, for instance, mom’s preparing to have a baby and everyone’s telling her baby’s healthy, and then the child’s born, they’re on a ventilator, they’re in the ICU, and they want to know what happens, and they’re not getting the answers. And I think, you know, it’s not funny, but our three-year-old, we were talking about our kids, has trained my wife and I to be a much better lawyer because he has one thing that he likes to ask every single day.

Larry Bendesky
Why?

Aidan Carickhoff
Why. And he asks it over and over again until he gets the answer. And even then, he asks why. And that is really what these cases are about. The families come and I say, should be asking why. My job is to answer why for you. He has trained me well to answer the why. But that’s what they’re looking for. And we see in these cases all the time that unfortunately, even during the medical care, these families are not getting the information they need, and moms are not getting the information they need to make educated choices about what’s going on with their health and their baby’s health.

Larry Bendesky
And by going through the records and taking depositions and forcing people to answer under oath, you’re getting the answer as to why.

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. You’ll be shocked that in the medical records, know, mom wasn’t told during her whole labor that anything was going wrong at all. You’ll see in the medical records that the doctors think they’ve got a three-alarm fire going on, that the baby’s without oxygen inside, that the baby’s medical term would be hypoxic. And you’ll ask the doctor, OK, what did you tell mom? I know, because I talked to my clients that they didn’t tell her anything. Talk to, ask the doctor.

What did you tell mom? Well, I told her that the baby wasn’t so happy. Do you think that the mom would have made a different choice if she knew that her baby was without oxygen as opposed to wasn’t happy? And I always ask, why didn’t you tell her? Why didn’t you tell her what was going on? Don’t you think she would have opted for a different choice had she known that something horrible was going on with her child? And often they don’t have an explanation. So I think it’s a good lesson that people should be asking why when they’re getting medical care. Unfortunately, you really have to be your own advocate. And if you’re not asking why and what is the step you’re taking, why are you doing it, what’s the result gonna be, are there risks, you may not get that information.

Larry Bendesky
That doesn’t just apply for people who are pregnant or might have a problem with their babies. That applies for all of us when we’re seeking medical care and medical treatment.

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. We handle all kinds of different medical malpractice cases. do. I have cases involving people who have died during routine medical procedures, stroke cases, delayed diagnosis of cancer, pulmonary embolisms, and oftentimes, they’re not getting the information they need. So it’s essential that you ask why people are doing certain things, what treatment you’re getting, what the different things the doctor is considering, their differential diagnosis for you.

And it’s always in the records, but it’s rarely things that are actually told to the patients. I mean, I’ve looked at my own records after medical visits just out of curiosity, and oftentimes things we talk about aren’t always in the records. That’s why it’s so important for us to, as you know, talk to our clients and get their story, because our job is to tell their story for them at the end of the day. And the story doesn’t just live in the medical records.

Larry Bendesky
And in all of these medical malpractice cases, beyond the birth injury cases, it’s still people searching for the question as to why, and you as the lawyer finding those answers, going through the records, talking to the experts, taking the depositions.

Aidan Carickhoff
And that’s one of the advantages that we have here, is that we have the size of our firm and the resources that we have allows us to get really the best experts in the country. Those folks won’t just work with anyone. It requires developing a relationship with them, knowing these kind of best-in-class doctors who are OBGYNs or neonatologists, all these dozens of specialties, right? We may have a dozen experts in a particular case. And so talking with them, learning the medicine, and asking them, if you had to ask this doctor under oath, what would you ask them? What’s the information you need? What is the why, and how can we get that? So we really have the resources to be able to get these incredible experts to help us out in these cases.

Larry Bendesky
You mentioned the medical malpractice cases. You mentioned, obviously you talked about the birth injury cases. Are there other cases that you’re handling in the office?

Aidan Carickhoff
Yeah, like I said, medical cases make up a bulk of my time, but I still continue to represent injured workers. Our partner Jeff and I just got a significant 19 million dollar settlement last year for a worker who was wheelchair-bound as a result of a really bad scaffolding accident. Bob,  Drew Duffy, and I are lead counsel in the West Reading chocolate factory explosion. It’s basically a factory that exploded, killed seven people and injuring about 50 people as a result of a natural gas leak out in Reading. So that’s a case that we’re handling right now. Hopefully, we’re going to try that case next year.

Larry Bendesky
What should, do the bulk of the cases that you and others in the office get, are they from other lawyers who don’t have the resources or don’t specialize in what we specialize in?

Aidan Carickhoff
Absolutely. Almost all my cases are referrals from other lawyers, and I’ll tell you a funny story in a second, but they come from other plaintiff lawyers who may handle other kinds of cases, who don’t know what a birth injury case is. All they know is that a client who they’ve represented before comes to them and says, my child has cerebral palsy, or I had a terrible birth experience, or my mom’s in the hospital with a stroke and took them too long to diagnose, so what do we do? And because we have that experience and track record, they’ll come to us and ask us to get us involved.

One of the biggest compliments that we can get is when a lawyer who we have on the other side of a case from us, a defense lawyer who we’ve gone toe to toe with, who we’ve fought with on a case, actually refers a client to us who thinks, I’ve gone against this person. They would be best suited to represent someone I care about if they’ve been injured.

So I got a call two days ago. I was out getting coffee. A guy called me and he said, hey, listen, I think I have a potential medical malpractice case. My wife died of cancer. I think there was a delay. And I asked the same question I always do. How did you get my number? And he said, well, the guy didn’t want me to share his name, but he’s actually a doctor at Jefferson. And he knows that you handled a case against his colleagues that was settled. And they thought that you knew what you were talking about, but you were a gentleman to them. And that if something happened to my loved one, that’s exactly who I should call. So that doctor managed to send this client over our way, and we’re preparing to file that case on their behalf.

Larry Bendesky
That’s a great compliment.

Aidan Carickhoff
Yeah, all kinds of different people come to us with cases that we’re experienced in.

Larry Bendesky
So what should the lawyers, referral lawyers, the people that are sending you cases, or people that aren’t lawyers, what should they know about sending cases to you?

Aidan Carickhoff
So they should understand that, number one, we’re incredibly responsive, and that it’s not just me who handles these cases, right? We have a whole team of people, paralegals, other lawyers, legal assistants, nurses, in-house doctor, who all review these cases together. So we do it incredibly efficiently. That’s kind of the name of our game. We’re responsive. I have a group text with every single one of my clients who can reach me at any time. Other than bedtime and bath time with my kids, I’m always available.

And for the referral lawyers, they should know that we’re going to get an answer about whether it’s a case quickly, and we’re going to put the case in suit and get it to trial aggressively. And you know that there’s no limit on the amount of resources we’ll spend on a meritorious case in our office. We will do jury focus groups. And the whole goal is that the defendants, the health system, the hospital, knows that we’re extremely serious about trying the case. We want to try these cases to tell our client’s story.

So those are the things that we bring to the table. That breadth of experience, the expert relationships, the resources to prepare for trial, all of that is in our corner and can be in your client’s corner too.

Larry Bendesky
So we have 54 lawyers at the firm. Have you found that there has been mentorship to you? As exceptional as you are, have you been helped by other people? You talked about Mongeluzzi, other people within the firm.

Aidan Carickhoff
You, yeah, everybody. Basically, we have an incredible wealth of trial lawyers who are really experienced here and who are incredibly generous with their time. Everyone has an open door here. And, you know, we’re like a family here. We have a great collegial environment. So I’ve got tremendous mentorship from you, from Bob, from Drew Duffy, from our partner Adam, Steve Wigrizer, all these people who have so many war stories that you like to hear who there’s no situation that I’m going to come across as a younger lawyer that one of you all has not handled before. Not another lawyer, not a judge, not a legal question, not a case type.

The things that I’m able to do today are only the result of things that I’ve borrowed, stolen, or heard from other people, and we really have that here. And I think we all take great pride in mentoring younger lawyers. We have a ton of younger lawyers that work here, and we really spend the time with them to train them to be the next generation of great trial lawyers.

Larry Bendesky
So, are you glad you met Bob Mongeluzzi that one day?

Aidan Carickhoff
Yes, a lot of my life has been the result of a couple of lucky experiences. You could take 250 left turns and 250 right turns, and if I made 249 left turns, things might have ended up differently. So I’m glad I made the right turn when I did.

Larry Bendesky
Well, we’re glad you did too. You are an exceptional person, an exceptional lawyer, and we’re so glad you’re with us.

Aidan Carickhoff
Thanks so much.

Larry Bendesky
Thanks for being with us today.

Aidan Carickhoff
Thanks, Larry.

Larry Bendesky
Thank you for being with us today at the Real Suits Champions for the Injured here at Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky. If you enjoyed listening to today’s episode, please feel free to click the subscribe button and share with your family and friends. Give us your feedback so we can present the best possible podcast to you. Thanks very much for being with us today.