What happens when a kid from Austin grows up as best friends with someone who goes on to front one of the biggest indie bands to come out of the city, plays in bands with him all the way through high school and college, gives himself a hard three-year deadline at graduation to land a recording contract or walk away from music entirely, watches the only real offer on the table fail to materialize, says sorry guys and drives off to law school, starts as a temporary law clerk at a Houston personal injury firm in 1994 with no room for advancement and no plan to stay, ends up staying for thirty years, makes managing partner in 2020 under circumstances nobody planned for, and three in the morning and hanging up before the beep, and launches a podcast he had been sitting on for thirty years that profiles Houston-area mission organizations for free — and never once regrets leaving the band?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Paul Cannon of Simmons and Fletcher, P.C. in Houston, Texas, about what it actually takes to fight for injured people against trucking companies with unlimited resources, federal regulations,

Paul runs through the myths that cost people their cases before they ever dial a lawyer — that a police report blaming you ends your recovery, that being partly at fault in Texas means zero, that only the driver can be held liable and not the company that trained him, and that a truck wreck is just a bigger version of a car accident when in reality it carries federal regulations, black box data, pre-trip and post-trip inspection logs, driver fatigue records, how the Werner trucking case — a $90 million verdict that got reversed on appeal — changed the way you can argue damages for a severely injured child, why the anchoring technique that trial lawyers used for decades to put a dollar value on pain and suffering has been restricted in a way that makes quantifying the unquantifiable harder than it has ever been, and what he wants Texas lawmakers to understand before Senate Bills 30 and 39 come back in 2027.

They also discuss how Paul caught a radio advertising company faking phone volume by running calls between midnight and three in the morning from California to a Texas tracking number and hanging up before the recording could capture evidence of the fraud, why Google's AI may be generating lawyer ads that call you the best attorney in Texas without anyone at your firm ever approving the language — which is a Texas bar complaint waiting to happen — and why billing a contingency fee client for an AI tool that saves you time but saves them nothing is as close to double billing as he ever wants to get. Paul also explains why the database of over a thousand fake AI citations in court filings keeps growing even after the sanctions started, shares the case where an accident reconstructionist proved the wind tunnel created between two vehicles traveling in opposite directions on a farm-to-market road actually pulled the client's car into the truck rather than the other way around and reversed a police report to a $1.26 million recovery, and tells the story of the $11.9 million settlement for a man electrocuted when a bucket truck lifted him into a power line — and what those funds actually meant for someone who needed long-term care just to survive.

Paul Cannon is a managing partner, shareholder, trial lawyer, and online marketing manager at Simmons and Fletcher, P.C. He is also the host of Meet Houston Missions and the Simmons and Fletcher Local Missions Podcast.

Connect with Paul Cannon:

simmonsandfletcher.com

Phone: 713-932-0777 / Toll-Free: 1-800-298-0111

9821 Katy Freeway, Suite 590, Houston, TX 77024

Meet Houston Missions: simmonsandfletcher.com/meet-houston-missions

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Paul Cannon

00:11 Third grade with the future singer of Spoon, bands through college, and the three-year deadline that ended at law school

01:37 Turning down appellate work to be the one who does the arguing — why he chose trials from day one

01:50 Supposed to be a temporary law clerk at Simmons and Fletcher in 1994 — and then thirty years happened

02:39 From clerk to associate to partner to managing partner — and the 2020 circumstances nobody planned for

03:52 Three partners only — why your case at Simmons and Fletcher will never go to a baby associate

04:27 Rapid fire myth or fact: truck wrecks, police reports blaming you, Texas comparative fault, trucking company liability, dog bite homeowners coverage

06:46 Just got hit by an eighteen-wheeler on I-45 — what to do first and the one mistake that costs everyone

07:50 What evidence disappears the fastest after a truck crash and how fast is fast

#PaulCannon #SimmonsAndFletcher #TrustcastShow #HoustonPersonalInjuryLawyer #TexasTruckAccidentLawyer #BoardCertifiedTexasTrialLaw #TexasHB19 #MeetHoustonMissions #TruckWreckMyths #ChristianTrialLawyers

What happens when a girl who majored in psychology and sociology because she was drawn to children and how family interactions shape everything they become starts her career as a foster care caseworker in New York at twenty years old, watches families without resources pass through a system that will permanently alter their children's lives and thinks she will do this work forever, applies to a master's in social work program, gets guided by someone to take the LSAT instead, spends the next twenty years building a personal injury practice — first as a paralegal, then as an attorney — while the original pull never fully lets go, loses her mother and needs to refill her purpose,

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Ana Milena Goncalves of AMG Law in Paramus, New Jersey, about building a bilingual English and Spanish family law practice in Bergen County from nothing — and what it meant to finally be doing the work she had been working toward since she was twenty years old watching biological parents lock eyes with their children during supervised visits and seeing the love there even when everything else had fallen apart.

Ana explains why the moment divorce papers land on your doorstep is not the moment to figure out what you want — it is the moment to contact an attorney, know your deadlines, and write your goals and non-negotiables on paper before you say another word to anyone. She walks through the critical difference between a temporary and final restraining order in New Jersey — where a final restraining order carries no sunset clause, no automatic expiration, fingerprinting, a fine, and a permanent registry entry that can only be lifted by filing a motion back to court — why the two-prong Silver v. Silver standard means that a domestic violence victim who answers the judge's question with "no, I'm not afraid right now" because they feel safe in a courtroom full of officers has just lost their final restraining order hearing with that single word, and what a self-represented litigant who walks into that hearing without knowing that standard is up against before the first question is asked. She also covers what each family court docket in Bergen County actually handles — FV for domestic violence, FO for contempt of a TRO, FD for unmarried parents navigating custody and child support, FM for divorce — what the Case Information Statement is and why it functions as the financial Bible in any alimony or equitable distribution case and terrifies nearly every client who has to fill it out, and why the $499 divorce attorney is the single biggest myth about how divorce works in New Jersey.

They also discuss the father who had not had a single overnight with his three-year-old son and walked out of court with overnights and the ability to travel, why Ana will represent both domestic violence victims and people accused of it but reserves the right as the founder of her own firm to interview a potential client and decline the representation on moral grounds — a decision that was never hers to make when a file landed on her desk at someone else's firm — what fostering taught her that law school never touched and she says the word with emphasis: empathy, bolded and underlined,

Ana Milena Goncalves is the founder of AMG Law, LLC in Paramus, New Jersey, a bilingual English and Spanish family law attorney serving Bergen and Passaic counties, a certified mediator for economic aspects of family law cases through the New Jersey Courts, a graduate of Touro University Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, a member of the Statewide Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, and a former personal injury attorney with nearly twenty years of legal experience who finally came home to the work she always intended to do.

Connect with Ana Milena Goncalves:

amglawllc.com

Email: [email protected]

Phone / Text: 201-474-5454

140 East Ridgewood Avenue, Suite 415, S. Tower #477, Paramus, NJ 07652

Se habla español.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Ana Milena Goncalves

00:12 Double major in psychology and sociology, foster care caseworker at twenty, and the person who said take the LSAT instead

00:41 Personal injury paralegal, night school, twenty years of practice, and the pull that never went away

02:03 AMG Law is born — three years ago, a goal, and a lot of passion

03:24 Exclusively family law in New Jersey with occasional assist to her personal injury family in New York

03:58 Starting with zero clients and zero New Jersey contacts

04:10 The first year — volunteering with Volunteer Lawyers for Justice to learn the system from the inside

05:01 Jumping into the deep end with mentors — what volunteering as a new attorney in an unfamiliar area actually looks like

#AnaMilenaGoncalves #AMGLaw #TrustcastShow #BilingualFamilyLawNJ #BergenCountyFamilyLaw #NewJerseyDivorce #NJRestrainingOrder #HispanicFamilyLaw

What happens when a trial lawyer picks up the phone in his living room on a December evening in 2016 and hears a father sobbing on the other end, who has just learned that his twenty-one-year-old daughter was brought to a Utah jail while withdrawing from opioids, began vomiting the same night a guard saw her, spent five days deteriorating without receiving medical care, and died of dehydration in her cell — and the lawyer immediately says yes, formalizes the relationship the next morning, and then spends nearly nine years fighting through summary judgment rulings that wiped out the county and every jail guard in the case, an interlocutory government immunity appeal to the 10th Circuit specifically designed to buy two years of delay and take the wind out of his sails, a circuit court ruling that let the doctor out but sent the nurse back, the retirement of the original judge mid-appeal and the assignment of a new one who agreed on reconsideration that the county should never have been dismissed, a cert petition all the way to the United States Supreme Court over qualified immunity, and finally in April of 2025 stands before ten jurors who deliberate for six hours and return a verdict of more than fifteen million dollars for the family of Madison Jensen?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Ryan Hancey, a shareholder and trial lawyer at Kesler & Rust in Salt Lake City, Utah, about a case he took on a phone call from a grieving father in his living room and did not let go of for the better part of a decade — and what it took in legal strategy, case law research, judicial persuasion, and sheer stubbornness to see it through to a verdict.

Ryan explains the government defendant's unique right to file an interlocutory appeal before any final judgment has been entered — a procedural tool no private defendant has, that can pause a case for years, that the government uses specifically because it knows it will drain the momentum and resources of the other side — and how the motion for reconsideration that brought Duchesne County back into the case on the eve of trial changed everything, including what a jury would feel when they looked across the courtroom. He also walks through the Tenth Circuit case law he found that established the systemic failure standard — that liability in a civil rights case does not require pointing to a single bad actor, that a collective environment so obviously broken that harm was virtually inevitable can be enough — and how Judge Barlow's willingness to apply that standard reset the entire trajectory of the case.

They also discuss the breach of franchise agreement defendant who claimed to be a mind reader and what the jury did with that answer, the 2018 case Ryan lost because his clients were a dumpster fire on the witness stand despite a dozen rounds of preparation in his conference room — and the juror who called afterward to say they would have hired him personally but couldn't stand his clients — why he refuses to give anyone a percentage chance of winning because no honest lawyer can know that, and why a bottom line number that is not actually your bottom line number destroys the credibility and the leverage you need when the case goes sideways. Ryan also covers why his expertise is in litigation itself and not in any subject matter area, how a strong litigation system is essentially plug and play across construction, products liability, civil rights, and franchising disputes, and why by the time he took a mink ranching products liability case to a federal jury he could have opened his own mink ranch from everything he had to learn in preparation.

Ryan Hancey is a shareholder and trial lawyer at Kesler & Rust in Salt Lake City, a firm established in 1980, admitted to the Utah Bar in 2001 and to the U.S. District Court District of Utah, the 10th Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a graduate of Utah State University and the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, has litigated cases in Utah, Delaware, Idaho, Colorado, Wisconsin, and other states, and has built his entire client base on referrals without a single billboard.

Connect with Ryan Hancey:

keslerrust.com

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 801-532-8000

McIntyre Building, 2nd Floor, 68 South Main Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84101

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Ryan Hancey

00:23 December 2016 — a father sobbing on the phone and the case that would take nearly nine years

01:24 How a twenty-one-year-old dies of dehydration in a jail cell over five days

02:40 From 2016 to a 2025 verdict — the full arc of the Madison Jensen case

03:28 Three defendant groups: Duchesne County and the sheriff, the medical staff, and the jail guards

#RyanHancey #KeslerRust #TrustcastShow #MadisonJensen #UtahTrialLawyer #CivilRightsLawyer #JailDeathLawsuit #QualifiedImmunity #SaltLakeCityAttorney #TrialLawyer

What happens when a Navy helicopter pilot who spent his early career hauling people out of impossible situations — stroke victims on cruise ships, lost families at sea, a person with a heart attack on a mountainside with nowhere else to turn — decides to go to night school and get his law degree, walks into his first plaintiffs job announcing he wants to be a plane crash lawyer or a maritime disaster attorney, gets force-fed insurance policy after insurance policy every single evening by a boss who docks his pay if he doesn't come in the next morning with the right answer, and slowly — against every instinct he had — discovers that the thing he was being made to learn against his will was actually the rarest and most valuable specialty in the entire plaintiffs bar, that very few lawyers who fight for people actually understand insurance law from the inside out, and ends up building a forty-four-year career doing exactly what he did in the helicopter — getting to people who have nowhere else to turn and bringing them to safety?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Jeffrey Liggio of Liggio Law in West Palm Beach, Florida, a decorated retired U.S. Air Force Major, a Board Certified Civil Trial Lawyer, a Super Lawyers selectee, and a recipient of the Florida Justice Association's Al J. Cone Lifetime Achievement Award, about what it actually takes to fight an insurance company that has unlimited lawyers, unlimited money, and institutional muscle behind every single denial.

Jeffrey explains why the very first question after a health insurance denial is not what happened but where the insurance came from — because ERISA law, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, state government plans, and individual policies each carry a completely different set of rights, procedures, and traps, and confusing them before the appeal is filed can cost you your case permanently. He walks through the ERISA trap in detail — the federal law that applies when insurance is a benefit of private employment, that requires you to exhaust every internal administrative remedy before you can set foot in a courthouse, that limits your venue to federal court with no jury trial, and that restricts the judge to reviewing only the internal appeal record you created — which means the paperwork you file on your own, without a lawyer, may be the only evidence a judge ever sees. He also covers why a quick settlement check at your front door the day after an accident is almost always a sign that someone on the other side found something you have not found yet, and why the answer to a fast offer is almost always slow down and call someone first.

They also discuss what Florida's gutted attorney's fee law actually left intact — the declaratory action statute, the HMO statute, the group health statute — and the proposal-for-settlement maneuver Jeffrey has used to generate court-awarded fees even where the statute no longer reaches, including a thirty-year story involving the same judge, the same opposing counsel, a $125,000 case, and a fee that ended up above $300,000. Jeffrey explains step therapy — the practice of forcing patients to try cheaper drugs that their doctors already know won't work before approving the medication actually prescribed — and why there is a Florida statute that most insurance companies simply ignore, the watchman device case where a man's insurer called an FDA-approved and Medicare-approved cardiac device experimental, which by federal law it legally cannot be, and the sixteen-year-old girl who now has a five-million-dollar judgment hanging over her entire adult life because her insurance company refused for two and a half years to pay the policy limits on a medium rear-end collision that her own insurer controlled the litigation on. He also covers what third-party administrators claiming no responsibility actually mean under agency law, what independent review doctors moonlighting for a couple hundred dollars and fed a conclusion actually produce, and why institutional fraud is not too strong a phrase for what happens when those reports get altered before they go back to the insurance company.

Jeffrey Liggio is the founding partner of Liggio Law in West Palm Beach, Florida, a Board Certified Civil Trial Lawyer by both the Florida Bar and the National Board of Trial Advocacy, a decorated retired U.S. Air Force Major and former Naval Aviator, a Super Lawyers selectee from 2006 through 2023, and the recipient of the Florida Justice Association's Al J. Cone Lifetime Achievement Award. He has practiced for forty-four years, works exclusively in Florida state and federal courts, and is supported by a team that has been with him collectively for over fifty years.

#JeffreyLiggio #LiggioLaw #TrustcastShow #FloridaInsuranceLawyer #HealthInsuranceDenial #BadFaithInsurance #ERISALaw #InsuranceLitigation #WestPalmBeachAttorney #MilitaryVeteranLawyer

What happens when a girl who grew up in Atlanta goes to MIT planning to be an architect, takes an office job doing technology transfer to fund her way through school and discovers for the first time what it feels like to sit at the intersection of law and business, builds a career in Boston for fifteen years, takes a detour to live in Madrid and work entirely in Spanish at a European law firm, returns to the United States and joins Nelson Mullins as a specialist, raises her hand for a document management system conversion that nobody else wanted and turns that visibility into a regional management role, spends years traveling office to office building teams and trust and structure inside a growing intellectual property practice — watching law firm founders grind through 70 and 80 hour weeks because they were the only person they trusted to do anything right — eventually walks away from all of it, and starts telling managing partners that the answer to their problem is not to take whoever has been loyal the longest and push them past what they are actually capable of, not to hire a mediocre COO on a limited budget and hope it works out, but to rent a great one — and realizes that twenty years of watching it go wrong from the inside was exactly the preparation she needed to finally fix it?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Melissa Hansel of Outlook Advisory Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, about helping law firms grow and scale by delivering the kind of executive-level operational guidance that most small-to-midsize firms cannot afford to keep in a full-time seat — and what it costs them when they try anyway with the wrong person or the wrong budget.

Melissa explains why the first instinct every founder has when they hit their capacity ceiling — go hire somebody — is often precisely the wrong move, how a fractional COO gets firms farther faster at a price point that actually makes sense for where they are, and why the staff member who has been with the firm the longest and is most deeply trusted is almost never the right person to drop into a COO role even when they want to be. She also walks through what the Peter Principle looks like inside a growing law firm, how leadership development is part of the fractional engagement and not separate from it, and what it actually takes to overcome the "who is this interloper" resistance that surfaces in every firm when someone new arrives with seniority — the short answer being that titles and credentials do not do it, early wins do.

They also discuss what Melissa does in the first 90 days of an engagement to lift the COO burden off the founder so they can be visionary again rather than operational by default, why firms trying to run 47 initiatives simultaneously never finish any of them and how prioritization alone can feel like a breakthrough to a team that has been stalled for years, why the question "when is the last time you truly took a vacation and actually unplugged" is one of the most revealing diagnostics she runs on any managing partner, and why the discovery audit she conducts at the start of every engagement — diving deep into accounting systems, intake flow, processes, and team dynamics and mapping all of it into a written plan — almost always changes what a founder thinks they need before they have spent a dollar implementing anything. Melissa also walks through the 40-hours-of-work test she uses to help firms figure out whether they genuinely need a full-time COO or a fractional one or simply a better-structured office manager, and why the biggest mistake she sees growing firms make is getting so reactive to week-to-week cash flow that they lose the thousand-foot view entirely and start making hiring and investment decisions off a single signal instead of the full picture.

Melissa Hansel is the founder of Outlook Advisory Group in Charlotte, North Carolina, an MIT Sloan School of Management alumna, Lean Six Sigma and Legal Project Management certified, bilingual in Spanish and English, and a former regional operations leader at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough. She runs a monthly roundtable for law firm owners and managing partners and serves clients virtually nationwide.

Connect with Melissa Hansel:

outlookadvisorygroup.com

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/melissahansel

Instagram: @outlookadvisorygroup

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Melissa Hansel

00:12 Growing Nelson Mullins' IP practice from 13 offices to 27 and into the top 70 highest-grossing firms — and why she walked away to go fractional

01:15 The diluted COO problem — why small and midsize law firms keep getting this hire wrong

#MelissaHansel #OutlookAdvisoryGroup #TrustcastShow #FractionalCOO #LawFirmGrowth #LawFirmOperations #LegalManagement #LawFirmConsultant #MITSloan #LawFirmLeadership

What happens when a lawyer who spent nearly twenty years sitting in claims management meetings for the world's largest insurance companies — watching how reserves get set, how excess layers get triggered, how a VP of claims and a room full of supervisors actually decide what a human injury is worth — finally has a friend look him across a table and say, well why don't you just do it, then spent about a year saving enough to give himself an eighteen-month runway, walked away from every institutional client he had ever built, started with zero files and zero clients on day one, got a call within a couple of weeks from a former adversary whose colleague needed help after her mother died falling down a staircase at a short-term rental, resolved that case in nine months, watched what that result did for that family, and realized that the thing he had been doing all along on the wrong side was exactly the training he needed to make the biggest possible difference on the right one?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Emanuel Galimidi of Galimidi Law in Miami, about the two decades he spent defending insurance companies that gave him something most plaintiff attorneys will never have — not just a working knowledge of how adjusters think, but a front-row seat at the table when the very best plaintiff firms in the country were litigating against him, letting him see exactly how the ones who win handle a case and exactly how the ones who don't fall short.

Emanuel explains why a settlement check arriving the morning after your accident is one of the most alarming things that can happen to you and almost always means someone on the other side spotted something significant you have not found yet, why one in four drivers in Florida is operating a vehicle with either zero bodily injury coverage or the bare minimum of ten thousand dollars, and why the adrenaline still moving through your body at the scene of a crash is actively working against you — masking soft tissue soreness, suppressing neck and back pain, and concealing the mild traumatic brain injury symptoms that people mistake for stress and leave unreported for weeks. He also covers why what you say to the police officer in the first minutes after a crash is permanent in a way your memory of that day will never be, why the friendliest opposing attorney in a deposition room is almost always the most dangerous one, and what it actually looks like inside a claims hierarchy — from the frontline adjuster to the supervisor to the director to the VP of claims — when a case is large enough to require the full escalation.

They also discuss the trial moment where a more experienced opposing counsel asked his expert witness if he wanted to tell a story, got exactly the story he did not want, and handed the case to the other side — and what that moment taught him about the one rule you cannot break at trial, the terminally ill parent whose injuries were compounded by a crash a carrier refused to take seriously until the right demand package changed everything, the coverage gap that swallows Uber and Lyft drivers who are simply waiting for a ping and get into an at-fault accident without a rideshare endorsement on their personal policy, and why he believes the coming wave of self-driving car crashes will be product liability cases rather than negligence cases — and why the early lobbying by companies like Uber to reduce minimum coverage for passengers already has him worried about what consumers will have left when those crashes come.

Emanuel Galimidi is the founding partner of Galimidi Law in Miami, Florida, a Super Lawyers selectee from 2023 through 2025, a member of the Miami-Dade County Bar Association and the Miami Foundation's Professional Advisors Network, and a former head of the Product Liability Practice Group at one of the fastest-growing defense firms in the United States, where he handled catastrophic injury, wrongful death, sexual assault, and class action defense before bringing everything he learned across the aisle to the people who need it most.

Connect with Emanuel Galimidi:

galimidilaw.com

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 786-442-2873

66 W Flagler St Suite 1001, Miami, FL 33130

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Emanuel Galimidi

00:11 Nearly twenty years defending insurance companies — and the friend who finally said why don't you just do it

01:57 Starting with zero files and zero clients — and the first case that came from a former adversary

03:08 The financial reality of plaintiff work nobody warns you about — advancing costs with no guarantee at the end

04:51 First case resolved in nine months — what a strong result actually does for a family

#EmanuelGalimidi #GalimidiLaw #TrustcastShow #MiamiPersonalInjuryLawyer #FloridaPersonalInjuryLawyer #InsuranceDefenseToPlaintiff #FloridaCarAccidentLawyer #RideshareAccidentLawyer #SelfDrivingCarLiability #TrialLawyer

What happens when a lawyer who spent nearly twenty years sitting in claims management meetings for the world's largest insurance companies — watching how reserves get set, how excess layers get triggered, how a VP of claims and a room full of supervisors actually decide what a human injury is worth — finally has a friend look him across a table and say, well why don't you just do it, then spent about a year saving enough to give himself an eighteen-month runway, walked away from every institutional client he had ever built, started with zero files and zero clients on day one, got a call within a couple of weeks from a former adversary whose colleague needed help after her mother died falling down a staircase at a short-term rental, resolved that case in nine months, watched what that result did for that family, and realized that the thing he had been doing all along on the wrong side was exactly the training he needed to make the biggest possible difference on the right one?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Emanuel Galimidi of Galimidi Law in Miami, about the two decades he spent defending insurance companies that gave him something most plaintiff attorneys will never have — not just a working knowledge of how adjusters think, but a front-row seat at the table when the very best plaintiff firms in the country were litigating against him, letting him see exactly how the ones who win handle a case and exactly how the ones who don't fall short.

Emanuel explains why a settlement check arriving the morning after your accident is one of the most alarming things that can happen to you and almost always means someone on the other side spotted something significant you have not found yet, why one in four drivers in Florida is operating a vehicle with either zero bodily injury coverage or the bare minimum of ten thousand dollars, and why the adrenaline still moving through your body at the scene of a crash is actively working against you — masking soft tissue soreness, suppressing neck and back pain, and concealing the mild traumatic brain injury symptoms that people mistake for stress and leave unreported for weeks. He also covers why what you say to the police officer in the first minutes after a crash is permanent in a way your memory of that day will never be, why the friendliest opposing attorney in a deposition room is almost always the most dangerous one, and what it actually looks like inside a claims hierarchy — from the frontline adjuster to the supervisor to the director to the VP of claims — when a case is large enough to require the full escalation.

They also discuss the trial moment where a more experienced opposing counsel asked his expert witness if he wanted to tell a story, got exactly the story he did not want, and handed the case to the other side — and what that moment taught him about the one rule you cannot break at trial, the terminally ill parent whose injuries were compounded by a crash a carrier refused to take seriously until the right demand package changed everything, the coverage gap that swallows Uber and Lyft drivers who are simply waiting for a ping and get into an at-fault accident without a rideshare endorsement on their personal policy, and why he believes the coming wave of self-driving car crashes will be product liability cases rather than negligence cases — and why the early lobbying by companies like Uber to reduce minimum coverage for passengers already has him worried about what consumers will have left when those crashes come.

Emanuel Galimidi is the founding partner of Galimidi Law in Miami, Florida, a Super Lawyers selectee from 2023 through 2025, a member of the Miami-Dade County Bar Association and the Miami Foundation's Professional Advisors Network, and a former head of the Product Liability Practice Group at one of the fastest-growing defense firms in the United States, where he handled catastrophic injury, wrongful death, sexual assault, and class action defense before bringing everything he learned across the aisle to the people who need it most.

Connect with Emanuel Galimidi:

galimidilaw.com

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 786-442-2873

66 W Flagler St Suite 1001, Miami, FL 33130

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Emanuel Galimidi

00:11 Nearly twenty years defending insurance companies — and the friend who finally said why don't you just do it

01:57 Starting with zero files and zero clients — and the first case that came from a former adversary

03:08 The financial reality of plaintiff work nobody warns you about — advancing costs with no guarantee at the end

04:51 First case resolved in nine months — what a strong result actually does for a family

#EmanuelGalimidi #GalimidiLaw #TrustcastShow #MiamiPersonalInjuryLawyer #FloridaPersonalInjuryLawyer #InsuranceDefenseToPlaintiff #FloridaCarAccidentLawyer #RideshareAccidentLawyer #SelfDrivingCarLiability #TrialLawyer

What happens when a kid who grew up watching his father leave before dawn and come home just before dinner, decided there had to be an easier way to make a living, went to college planning to be an English teacher, figured out that wasn't going to work financially, went to law school because what else does a philosophy and English major do, fell completely in love with it, and then found himself carrying a check to create a trial advocacy chair at his law school — and realized on that walk over that one case had touched a family, changed Alabama law about how commercial vehicles operate on public roads, and given something lasting back to the community — and thought, that is exactly what I want to do?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Erik Heninger of HGD Law Firm, about the day the firm secured the $110 million settlement that remains the largest personal injury recovery in Alabama history — a knife fight in a phone booth involving multiple law firms, new technology, and an insurance company that got tight when there was real money on the table — and what it actually takes to build a career that generates more than three billion dollars in client recoveries. Erik explains why the insurance company for the truck that hit you already has a team working on your case that night, why the answer to the insurance adjuster who calls is yes but not right now, and why Alabama's contributory negligence law — which technically bars recovery if you are even one percent at fault — sounds devastating but almost never plays out that way because juries will not hold that someone sitting still at a red light contributed to their own accident.

They also discuss the sexual abuse case where no money changed hands at all but the client and her parents still refer friends to the firm years later, the cheerleading coach who was caught at the border with recordings of minors on his laptop and now has a $1.5 million default judgment sitting against whatever he ever earns, the open heart surgery malpractice case where two doctors pointed fingers at each other the entire trial and the jury got so confused they ruled for neither — and what Erik would do differently now — why depositions are far more critical than closing arguments even though closing arguments are more enjoyable, and what his firm's private AI focus group tool is doing for jury research in Alabama.

Erik Heninger is a partner at HGD Law Firm in Birmingham, Alabama, three-time Medical Malpractice Lawyer of the Year, and one half of a rare father-son pair who have each won Alabama's Lawyer of the Year Award.

Connect with Erik Heninger:

hgdlawfirm.com

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 205-326-3336

Social: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok @hgdlawfirm

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Erik Heninger

00:38 Growing up watching his father work before dawn and after dark — and why that was intimidating not inspiring

01:44 English teacher to law school — and the moment something clicked

02:41 Carrying a check to the law school to create a trial advocacy chair and having the lightbulb moment

04:12 About five cases in a career that really fill you up

05:00 Smaller cases that matter just as much — the sexual abuse case where no money changed hands but the family still refers friends

07:09 Just got hit by a semi — the first thing to do and why the lawyer can wait but not too long

08:00 Why you should never wave off the ambulance even when adrenaline says you are fine

08:45 The insurance company for the truck already has a team out that night preparing their defense

09:38 Does the insurance company ever lead with their best offer — no, never, bolded and italicized

10:30 Do not talk to the insurance company because those conversations are always recorded

11:24 Your own insurance company — a different risk, same principle — yes but not right now

13:14 Alabama's contributory negligence law — one percent at fault means zero recovery — and why it almost never actually works that way

14:39 The woman sitting still at a red light that the insurance company tried to say contributed by leaving home that day

15:45 How do you prove fault when it is his word versus mine — technology, black boxes, in-cab cameras, apps

17:53 How do you figure out what my case is worth — the million-dollar question answered five times a day

18:45 Severity of conduct, severity of injuries, available insurance, identity of defendant, and venue all factor in

20:12 Rapid fire — soccer dad turning volleyball dad, clean desk, depositions versus closing arguments, jury consultants

21:43 The private AI focus group tool built specifically for Alabama and their case types

22:26 One word that makes a great trial lawyer — authenticity

#ErikHeninger #HGDLawFirm #TrustcastShow #AlabamaTruckAccidentLawyer #MedicalMalpracticeAlabama #PersonalInjuryAlabama #TrialLawyer #LawyerOfTheYear #AlabamaCivilRights #SexualAbuseLawsuit

What happens when the person on the other end of the phone is frantic, emotional, angry, and hurt all at once — because somebody died on their watch — and the attorney they are calling has personally investigated over 400 workplace deaths, refinery explosions, pipeline blasts, and construction collapses, and has learned from every single one of them that the first 24 hours will either protect the company or haunt it for the next two and a half years of litigation?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with John Surma, partner at Fisher Phillips, about what a company needs to do in the first hour before a lawyer even arrives — call 911, preserve the scene, document everything, and get grief counselors moving before anyone starts talking — and why the three biggest mistakes in the first 24 hours are failing to preserve the scene, failing to notify the right authorities, and releasing a hastily drafted press statement that becomes the plaintiff attorney's roadmap. John explains the difference between a serious citation, a willful citation, and a criminal referral, why the criminal path almost never happens unless you lie to OSHA or destroy evidence, and why invoking your Fifth Amendment right is available but has to be used sparingly because doing it excessively looks like obstruction.

They also discuss the case where a press release about process instability handed plaintiff attorneys a two-and-a-half-year lawsuit against a company that didn't need to be there, how John got six heat-related citations thrown out against a security company by challenging the multi-employer citation policy and drilling the opposing OSHA attorney until he agreed to vacate them, the maritime case where OSHA cited the wrong standard entirely and vacated once the error was pointed out to the solicitor of labor, the constitutional challenge to OSHA's in-house judges using the logic from the Jarkesy Supreme Court decision — and why OSHA keeps withdrawing citations rather than risk losing in district court — the $4.95 million recovery from an EPC firm that delivered a boiler project that failed to achieve its promised efficiencies or emissions controls, and why cooperating fully with OSHA is one of the most dangerous myths in workplace safety law.

John Surma is a partner at Fisher Phillips, representing employers in OSHA investigations, workplace fatalities, regulatory compliance, and related litigation nationwide.

Connect with John Surma:

Email: [email protected]

Phone/Text: 409-351-5824

fisherphillips.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to John Surma

00:44 What the person on the other end of the phone sounds like when someone just died at their facility

01:44 How companies find John — word of mouth in the worst moments

02:49 Nine years as a trial lawyer in Beaumont and the slow shift to 100% workplace safety

03:41 How do you stay emotionally grounded when you are around death five hundred times

05:16 How you grieve differently after that much exposure to other people's loss

06:09 Counseling CEOs through survivor guilt while also protecting shareholder interests

07:05 Why John advocates strongly for grief counselors even at the highest levels of management

07:16 What to do in the first hour before you have even called a lawyer

08:46 How fast does OSHA usually show up after a fatality — and what that Sunday afternoon call looked like

09:48 Do employees have to allow OSHA interviews without representation — the nuance

10:56 The single biggest mistake a company makes in the first 24 hours — actually it is the big three

12:19 How to handle the press when you are also trying to preserve a legal position

12:53 Why you need a crisis management firm before anything ever goes wrong

13:54 The case where a press release provided the roadmap for plaintiff attorneys for two and a half years

15:53 The difference between a serious citation, a willful citation, and a criminal case

18:40 Can you just shut up with OSHA the way you can with police — the Fifth Amendment answer

19:54 Why cooperating fully with OSHA is a myth that gets companies in trouble

20:50 What OSHA is really looking for when they ask for your safety records

22:27 If you get cited is fighting it realistic or are you just negotiating the penalty

23:30 Everything is negotiable — the alleged violation description, the classification, the penalty, the abatement, and the payment plan

24:03 Does the playbook change by industry — and what is actually the same across all of them

25:54 General counsel hat versus pure litigator — how that changes the emotional and strategic relationship

27:29 Six heat-related citations thrown out at a tire manufacturing plant — what happened

29:36 Did throwing out the citations affect the personal injury liability — yes and how

#JohnSurma #FisherPhillips #TrustcastShow #OSHADefense #WorkplaceSafety #WorkplaceFatality #OSHACitation #EmployerDefense #WorkplaceSafetyLaw #OSHAInvestigation

What happens when an attorney who minored in computer science, started her career in traditional commercial litigation watching founders bleed money in disputes that should never have reached a courtroom, jumped to a legal tech startup where she helped build AI-powered contract review tools, reviewed over 40 legal AI products and kept finding the same problem — brilliant engineers building things that didn't solve the actual problem practitioners face — and then decided to build an AI-first law firm from scratch specifically for the founders who know they need a lawyer but can't justify the hourly meter every time they pick up the phone?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Charein Faraj, founder of Innovation Attorney, about why growth-stage startups consistently make the same contract mistakes — using boilerplate warranties and limitation of liability clauses that don't match the actual transaction, sending non-attorneys to execute agreements, skipping data processing addendums because they assume the privacy policy covers everything — and why those decisions tend to show up years later as the exact litigation she used to handle on the commercial side. Charein explains the difference between a privacy policy and a data processing agreement, why SaaS agreements need to be customized depending on whether you're using a large language model, what third parties are touching your data, and what kind of information is being processed, and why Delaware incorporation is almost always the right call if you're planning to go through funding rounds.

They also discuss the physician client who was about to sign a non-compete that would have blocked her from practicing within fifty miles of any location of a startup with practices everywhere — and how Charein negotiated her out of it and built in termination protections that held up when the client inevitably needed to leave — what she found when she reviewed 40-plus legal AI tools and kept telling the same founders their ICP did not match their product, how she builds custom AI agents for contract review and motion drafting that output fully formatted Word documents with captions and signature blocks rather than just text, and why she believes the flat fee model for transactional work and the monthly subscription for ongoing work are both better for clients than hourly billing that creates friction every time someone considers picking up the phone.

Charein Faraj is the founder of Innovation Attorney, an AI-first law firm for technology startups and growth-stage companies, based in Michigan and serving clients nationwide for transactional work.

Connect with Charein Faraj:

innovation-attorney.com

LinkedIn: Charein Faraj

Free 15-minute consultation available on the website

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Charein Faraj

00:52 Starting in commercial litigation, watching outdated processes, and making the jump to legal tech

01:30 Working at LexCheck — building AI contract review tools and seeing firsthand what startups skip

02:00 Founders who avoid calling their attorney until they are already in litigation

02:56 The AI objection — how she addresses concerns about quality and hallucination

03:42 What the firm actually is — not a product, a law firm that uses custom AI agents for contract review and drafting

04:12 Why SaaS agreements, NDAs, and MSAs are all different depending on the product and what data is being processed

04:54 Early stage startup counseling — Delaware incorporation, shareholder agreements, governing documents, privacy policy, terms of service

06:55 Growth stage mistakes — salespeople executing agreements, promises being made that fall apart, slow hourly turnaround killing deals

08:30 What clean documentation means for due diligence when you want to get acquired or raise a round

09:17 What kinds of tech companies she works with in Michigan — cybersecurity services, custom software, MSAs and IP protection

10:20 The difference between a privacy policy and a data processing agreement — and when you need both

11:10 What happens when founders think the privacy policy covers everything and skip the DPA

12:26 The trap founders fall into with data processing — they do not even know they need it

13:18 If you are a SaaS founder what should be in your contracts that most templates leave out

13:42 Warranties and limitations of liability that make no sense to the actual transaction — why boilerplate does not exist

14:55 The firm uses AI more extensively than traditional firms — custom agents built for specific transaction types

15:33 How building her own agents with no overhead translates to lower cost for clients

16:09 A deal where she helped a client walk away before it became a disaster

#ChareinFaraj #InnovationAttorney #TrustcastShow #StartupLawyer #AIFirstLawFirm #ContractReviewAI #TechStartupLegal #FractionalGC #SaaSContracts #LegalTechFounder