Justin Hill asked Josh Fogelman to team up and help with the trial of a UM/UIM car crash cases in Williamson County, Texas. Our client was wrongfully denied her policy benefits that she had paid for over many years. The jury in Williamson County sided with our client and made sure she was awarded every single dollar of his UM/UIM benefits under her Allstate policy. This verdict was one of the top 100 verdicts in the State of Texas for 2019.

Transcript:

Justin: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis.

[music]

Justin: On today's episode of Hill Law Firm Cases, I've got a good friend of mine and previous co-counsel and classmate and friend and all of those wonderful things, Josh Fogelman, who's a really established and accomplished personal injury lawyer in Austin in the firm of Fogelman & Von Flatern, FVF Law, and he's sitting here with a really cute hat with a bird FVF on it. Josh and I had the pleasure and benefit and honor of trying a case, I guess it would be a little past a year ago now.

Josh: That's right. Last spring.

Justin: In Williamson County, so Georgetown. In our industry, there's always good places to file a lawsuit and try a lawsuit. Then historically, there's bad places to file and try a lawsuit. Georgetown's always been considered maybe one of the worst places in the state of Texas because the understanding is juries don't think cases are worth much money is generally the idea, right?

Josh: Yes, it's just Williamson County north of Austin is a really conservative, historically Republican county. You've got at least the reputation of having very conservative jurors there. Personal Injury Law conservative jurors tend to have a little bit of a more conservative viewpoint of valuation on personal injury cases.

Justin: While it shouldn't be political, this idea of tort reform and runaway juries has permeated parties. The Republican Party has been the party carrying the mantle of we need to do stuff to rein in jury verdicts. Right or wrong, that sort of has permeated politics. It's become part of the discussion and that's bled over into some venues. What we realized in Williamson County is maybe that isn't true or maybe the demographics are changing. We ended up with a diverse jury in that case. Our foreperson was a 19-year-old woman with a nose ring if I recall.

Josh: Yes. What was interesting about our Williamson County jury is it reminded me a lot of our Travis County juries. I think that that's a lot to do with the growth of Austin and a lot of the Austin mentality being pushed outside of the city and county limits up into neighboring jurisdictions, neighboring counties like Williamson County.

Justin: What we didn't even see in the jury selection is we didn't really see a whole lot of far-right or anti-lawyer or anti-tort thinking either. We had a pretty fair jury. If I recall in our panel, we had a whole lot of people who had been screwed over by insurance companies before.

Josh: Yes, that's true. Beyond that, we also had a really fair judge. I was really impressed and surprised with the judges leaning up there. As far as the Republican judiciary is concerned, I thought that we got some pretty...