TrustCast Show

What happens when a vocal music education major who spent four years teaching school in Pryor, Oklahoma moves back to her parents' house in Del City to attend the University of Oklahoma College of Law, falls in love with the courtroom and with arguing things about the law, spends the next seventeen years doing insurance bad faith

And then that call with her father — who says no big deal, when are you gonna pay me back — forces her to stop beating herself up and start looking at the firm as its own separate entity, not herself and not her team but a baby that needs to be nurtured across five specific pillars, and over the next eleven years the firm's revenue grows more than thirteen times, the firm recovers more than one billion dollars for injury victims, she writes a book called The Setup that law firm owners across the country say was written specifically for them, and she spends more time coaching than lawyering because she finally outmaneuvered herself out of the job she had been doing since 1996?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Simone Fulmer Gaus, co-founder of Fulmer Sill in Oklahoma City and author of The Setup, about what it actually takes to build a law firm that works — not just to be a great lawyer inside one — and why those two things have almost nothing to do with each other.

Simone explains the feast-or-famine reality that almost nobody in complex personal injury work talks about honestly — that big cases require fronting money for case expenses across two, three, or four years while the fee that looks enormous on paper may be nowhere near the bank, that some years she took nothing home, that leaders eat last and if they do not they will not be in business long, and why the arrival of a seven-figure check is almost beside the point if you have not mapped the pipeline in a way that shows you exactly how long it needs to last until the next one arrives. She walks through all five pillars of the Setup framework — people, pipeline, process, product, and profitability — why the pipeline pillar relieves chaos the fastest because it immediately eliminates the constant reaction mode that the traditional law firm hierarchy creates for everyone below the top of the org chart, why chaos in a firm is almost never a people problem and almost always a process or pipeline problem, and why the second thing to look at after the process is always yourself.

They also discuss the cross-country teenage cycling tour that came through a dangerous construction zone highway south of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the young man who died in over-100-degree heat when his bicycle wheel caught the ungraded road surface and he veered into the path of a car

Simone Fulmer Gaus is the co-founder of Fulmer Sill in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a firm that has recovered more than one billion dollars for injury victims, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, a five-time LawDragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers honoree, a former president of the Oklahoma Association for Justice,

Connect with Simone Fulmer Gaus:

fulmersill.com

Phone: 405-510-0077

The Setup: available on Amazon — search "The Setup Fulmer Gaus"

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Simone Fulmer Gaus

00:12 Built one of Oklahoma's most recognized plaintiff firms — and nearly lost it

00:44 The call to dad at 48 to borrow money to make payroll — and what that conversation actually looked like

01:44 Seventeen years at another firm, leaving to start something different, and underestimating what rebuilding really required

03:32 Why a personal injury firm can be doing great on paper and still not make payroll

04:10 Complex cases versus high volume — and why big-case firms live in feast or famine

05:10 Anticipating the pipeline — knowing when each case will resolve and what it will bring in

06:21 Leaders eat last — and the years she took nothing home

06:36 If there is a bottleneck in your firm, start by looking in the mirror

07:09 The five pillars: people, pipeline, process, product, and profitability

08:51 The pipeline pillar — flattening the hierarchy and mapping the full client journey

10:37 Profit First, tweaked for a contingency fee firm, and knowing where money is going before it arrives

11:37 What to do when a client with a strong case cannot financially survive the wait

12:20 Building psychological safety and trust from day one — and why clients will wait when you do

14:31 More than a billion dollars recovered — and why the willingness to go to trial elevates every case

14:56 Ninety-seven percent resolve before the verdict — but a large portion of those resolve on the courthouse steps

16:23 High-volume firms almost never go to trial — and why that matters for case value

#SimoneFulmerGaus #FulmerSill #TrustcastShow #OklahomaPersonalInjuryLawyer #TheSetupBook #LawFirmOperations #LawFirmGrowth #ContingencyFeeReality #PlaintiffTrialLawyer #LawFirmLeadership

What happens when a vocal music education major who spent four years teaching school in Pryor, Oklahoma moves back to her parents' house in Del City to attend the University of Oklahoma College of Law, falls in love with the courtroom and with arguing things about the law, spends the next seventeen years doing insurance bad faith

And then that call with her father — who says no big deal, when are you gonna pay me back — forces her to stop beating herself up and start looking at the firm as its own separate entity, not herself and not her team but a baby that needs to be nurtured across five specific pillars, and over the next eleven years the firm's revenue grows more than thirteen times, the firm recovers more than one billion dollars for injury victims, she writes a book called The Setup that law firm owners across the country say was written specifically for them, and she spends more time coaching than lawyering because she finally outmaneuvered herself out of the job she had been doing since 1996?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Simone Fulmer Gaus, co-founder of Fulmer Sill in Oklahoma City and author of The Setup, about what it actually takes to build a law firm that works — not just to be a great lawyer inside one — and why those two things have almost nothing to do with each other.

Simone explains the feast-or-famine reality that almost nobody in complex personal injury work talks about honestly — that big cases require fronting money for case expenses across two, three, or four years while the fee that looks enormous on paper may be nowhere near the bank, that some years she took nothing home, that leaders eat last and if they do not they will not be in business long, and why the arrival of a seven-figure check is almost beside the point if you have not mapped the pipeline in a way that shows you exactly how long it needs to last until the next one arrives. She walks through all five pillars of the Setup framework — people, pipeline, process, product, and profitability — why the pipeline pillar relieves chaos the fastest because it immediately eliminates the constant reaction mode that the traditional law firm hierarchy creates for everyone below the top of the org chart, why chaos in a firm is almost never a people problem and almost always a process or pipeline problem, and why the second thing to look at after the process is always yourself.

They also discuss the cross-country teenage cycling tour that came through a dangerous construction zone highway south of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, the young man who died in over-100-degree heat when his bicycle wheel caught the ungraded road surface and he veered into the path of a car

Simone Fulmer Gaus is the co-founder of Fulmer Sill in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, a firm that has recovered more than one billion dollars for injury victims, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma College of Law, a five-time LawDragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers honoree, a former president of the Oklahoma Association for Justice,

Connect with Simone Fulmer Gaus:

fulmersill.com

Phone: 405-510-0077

The Setup: available on Amazon — search "The Setup Fulmer Gaus"

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Simone Fulmer Gaus

00:12 Built one of Oklahoma's most recognized plaintiff firms — and nearly lost it

00:44 The call to dad at 48 to borrow money to make payroll — and what that conversation actually looked like

01:44 Seventeen years at another firm, leaving to start something different, and underestimating what rebuilding really required

03:32 Why a personal injury firm can be doing great on paper and still not make payroll

04:10 Complex cases versus high volume — and why big-case firms live in feast or famine

05:10 Anticipating the pipeline — knowing when each case will resolve and what it will bring in

06:21 Leaders eat last — and the years she took nothing home

06:36 If there is a bottleneck in your firm, start by looking in the mirror

07:09 The five pillars: people, pipeline, process, product, and profitability

08:51 The pipeline pillar — flattening the hierarchy and mapping the full client journey

10:37 Profit First, tweaked for a contingency fee firm, and knowing where money is going before it arrives

11:37 What to do when a client with a strong case cannot financially survive the wait

12:20 Building psychological safety and trust from day one — and why clients will wait when you do

14:31 More than a billion dollars recovered — and why the willingness to go to trial elevates every case

14:56 Ninety-seven percent resolve before the verdict — but a large portion of those resolve on the courthouse steps

16:23 High-volume firms almost never go to trial — and why that matters for case value

#SimoneFulmerGaus #FulmerSill #TrustcastShow #OklahomaPersonalInjuryLawyer #TheSetupBook #LawFirmOperations #LawFirmGrowth #ContingencyFeeReality #PlaintiffTrialLawyer #LawFirmLeadership

What happens when a trial lawyer loses his first jury trial, stands outside that courthouse going through every moment of what just happened, and realizes the problem is not that he lacks knowledge of the law but that nowhere in the entire plaintiff's bar is there a place to actually practice trial mechanics on your feet before the biggest case of your client's life — that every seminar is just someone presenting their greatest wins to a room full of people who take notes and go home still unable to introduce evidence without freezing, that defense attorneys are in court every single week doing the reps while plaintiff lawyers may go six months or a year between trials, that practicing skills exclusively during the Super Bowl is not preparation it is gambling with someone else's life — decides to build the thing that should have already existed, calls it Practice Trial San Diego with an acronym he chose deliberately,

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Rich Mackie of Mackie Injury Lawyers in San Diego and Virginia Beach, about what a lost first trial can teach you if you are willing to build from it, and what the personal injury system does to injured people who try to navigate it without someone running point for them.

Rich explains why plaintiff attorneys face a structural disadvantage that almost nobody talks about — defense lawyers try cases every week and stay sharp while plaintiff lawyers may go a year between trials and only practice the mechanics of cross-examination and evidence introduction during the actual Super Bowl, and why the free monthly practice group he built exists specifically to let attorneys mess up safely in front of their colleagues so they do not do it in front of their jury. He also walks through why a clear rear-end collision where the other driver was one hundred percent at fault does not mean the case is over — it means the defense is simply going to spend the entire fight on causation and damages instead — and why the property damage trap, the gap-in-treatment trap, and the too-many-doctor-visits trap are actually opposite ends of the same weapon the defense deploys no matter what the injured person does, and why the only strategy that survives both of them is the same one every time: tell the truth and make sure the person telling it is prepared to be consistent.

They also discuss why the recorded statement your own insurance company wants within days of your crash is not the routine administrative call it sounds like — it is a time-stamped document under oath that will be used to challenge every injury you report later that was not named on that call, why a quick settlement offer while you are still actively treating is the insurance company trying to close your file before they find out what they actually owe you, how that two thousand dollar check that feels reasonable in the moment can leave you sitting with tens of thousands in medical bills and no recourse, what happens when a naive injured person is deliberately preyed upon in that window and whether it can rise to the level of bad faith, and how to identify a settlement mill with two simple questions you can ask before you ever sign anything.

Rich Mackie is the founder of Mackie Injury Lawyers in San Diego and Virginia Beach, licensed to practice in California, New York, Washington D.C., and Virginia, recognized by Best Lawyers in 2026 for Personal Injury Litigation — Plaintiffs, a graduate of the Jerry Spence Trial Lawyers College, and the creator of Practice Trial San Diego — now Working Group Wednesday — a free monthly trial mechanics training group for plaintiff attorneys held on the last Wednesday of every month in San Diego.

Connect with Rich Mackie:

mackieinjurylawyers.com

Phone: 838-GET-RICH (838-438-7424)

San Diego: 1245 Island Ave., San Diego, CA 92101

Virginia Beach: Virginia Beach, VA 23454

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Rich Mackie

00:20 Losing the first jury trial and what it left behind

00:38 Standing up in front of a jury and going deer in the headlights despite reading every book and going to every seminar

01:37 You cannot learn to ride a bike at a seminar — creating Practice Trial San Diego with the acronym PTSD

02:40 Working Group Wednesday — how it runs today in partnership with Consumer Attorneys of San Diego

03:22 The structural disadvantage nobody talks about — defense attorneys do the reps every week while plaintiff attorneys practice during the Super Bowl

05:00 The group is always free and always will be — why that matters

06:13 Jerry Spence, the Trial Lawyers College, and a three-week intensive in West Virginia that was unexplainable and life-changing

#RichMackie #MackieInjuryLawyers #TrustcastShow #SanDiegoPersonalInjuryLawyer #VirginiaBeachPersonalInjuryLawyer #WorkingGroupWednesday #PracticeTrialSanDiego #TrialLawyerTraining #SettlementMill #PersonalInjuryMyths

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