TrustCast Show

What happens when an attorney who failed the bar exam by one point, appealed the result, won, and liked to say her first client was herself — then spent four years managing over a hundred active files at a workers' compensation and motor vehicle accident firm before the pivot that her father still occasionally questions — discovers that she can have more impact on injured people's lives by helping the attorneys who represent them understand what AI can actually do than she ever could trying cases herself?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Angela Ventro, account executive at Supio covering New England and upstate New York, about why PI firms that say they tried AI and it did not work were almost always burned by bad implementation rather than bad technology, what actually happens when an attorney sits with two thousand pages of records the night before a deposition looking for treatment gaps and undiagnosed injuries, and why a scattered trail of complaints about photophobia, fatigue, and migraines across three different providers over several months is exactly the kind of connection no single human reviewer would make but that AI flags immediately — which is how a $25,000 soft tissue case became a $250,000 TBI settlement. Angela also explains how Supio's integration with Westlaw is the only one of its kind in the personal injury AI market, putting medical record analysis and legal research in the same place rather than across two screens.

They also discuss how Supio helped Tor Hormon Law secure a $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs by processing over 43,000 pages of records and 80-plus depositions — and why the managing partner specifically called out paralegal mental health as one of the benefits, because reading about injured babies all day in gross detail wears on a person in ways that are hard to quantify but very real — how defense firms and insurance companies are already using AI to bury smaller plaintiff firms in discovery and why Supio can answer a non-standard interrogatory in under a minute, why your conversations inside a closed enterprise AI system are likely protected as attorney work product while your client chatting with ChatGPT about their own case probably is not, and why paralegals using Supio are now comfortably handling ten more cases each without the firm hiring additional staff.

Angela Ventro is an account executive at Supio, the AI platform purpose-built for plaintiff's personal injury firms, covering New England and upstate New York.

Connect with Angela Ventro:

Email: [email protected]

supio.com

LinkedIn: Supio

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Angela Ventro

00:51 Failing the bar by one point, winning the appeal, and her first client being herself

01:59 Four years managing over a hundred active files at a workers' comp and motor vehicle firm

03:12 The pivot from practicing law to selling AI to law firms — and what her dad said about it

04:22 Why the human element and client relationship side always felt more natural than the practice

05:19 When a PI firm says we tried AI and it did not work — what actually happened

06:15 Implementation and support on day 40 versus day one — the real barrier to adoption

07:14 What a PI attorney loses every time they personally review 400 pages of records instead of using AI

08:00 Treatment gaps, undiagnosed injuries, and the ten PM deposition prep experience

09:00 How Supio finds TBI complaints scattered across three providers that no single reviewer connects

09:56 Client stickiness and the referral network — why catching an undiagnosed TBI changes the relationship

10:42 The objection — I am better than the AI and I will find the pearls myself

11:15 Force multiplying yourself — 10 pearls in 10 cases instead of one pearl in 10 hours

11:45 Five years of training Supio specifically on plaintiff's personal injury law — doctor lawyer on your staff

12:33 How a trial actually works — NDA first, then upload, then regular checkpoints and success criteria

13:55 The aha moment — Supio finding something on a lawyer's own client file they were not aware of

15:14 Is Supio doing legal thinking or something else — firm level, case level, and document level intelligence

16:07 The Westlaw integration — why nobody else in the PI AI market has a research partner of this size

17:46 Putting case law and medical records in the same place — drafting a response to a summary judgment motion

18:49 The hallucination objection — the lawyer who got cited from the bench and had his license threatened

19:45 Courts are not saying don't use AI — they are saying use it irresponsibly and we will come for your license

20:42 Implementation — does the firm have to stop taking cases to set it up

21:45 Onboarding team, customer success, and training as new staff and new features arrive

#AngelaVentro #Supio #TrustcastShow #LegalAI #PersonalInjuryAI #PIFirmTechnology #LegalTech #TBISettlement #WestlawIntegration #PlaintiffsAttorneyAI

What happens when an attorney who failed the bar exam by one point, appealed the result, won, and liked to say her first client was herself — then spent four years managing over a hundred active files at a workers' compensation and motor vehicle accident firm before the pivot that her father still occasionally questions — discovers that she can have more impact on injured people's lives by helping the attorneys who represent them understand what AI can actually do than she ever could trying cases herself?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Angela Ventro, account executive at Supio covering New England and upstate New York, about why PI firms that say they tried AI and it did not work were almost always burned by bad implementation rather than bad technology, what actually happens when an attorney sits with two thousand pages of records the night before a deposition looking for treatment gaps and undiagnosed injuries, and why a scattered trail of complaints about photophobia, fatigue, and migraines across three different providers over several months is exactly the kind of connection no single human reviewer would make but that AI flags immediately — which is how a $25,000 soft tissue case became a $250,000 TBI settlement. Angela also explains how Supio's integration with Westlaw is the only one of its kind in the personal injury AI market, putting medical record analysis and legal research in the same place rather than across two screens.

They also discuss how Supio helped Tor Hormon Law secure a $495 million verdict against Abbott Labs by processing over 43,000 pages of records and 80-plus depositions — and why the managing partner specifically called out paralegal mental health as one of the benefits, because reading about injured babies all day in gross detail wears on a person in ways that are hard to quantify but very real — how defense firms and insurance companies are already using AI to bury smaller plaintiff firms in discovery and why Supio can answer a non-standard interrogatory in under a minute, why your conversations inside a closed enterprise AI system are likely protected as attorney work product while your client chatting with ChatGPT about their own case probably is not, and why paralegals using Supio are now comfortably handling ten more cases each without the firm hiring additional staff.

Angela Ventro is an account executive at Supio, the AI platform purpose-built for plaintiff's personal injury firms, covering New England and upstate New York.

Connect with Angela Ventro:

Email: [email protected]

supio.com

LinkedIn: Supio

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Angela Ventro

00:51 Failing the bar by one point, winning the appeal, and her first client being herself

01:59 Four years managing over a hundred active files at a workers' comp and motor vehicle firm

03:12 The pivot from practicing law to selling AI to law firms — and what her dad said about it

04:22 Why the human element and client relationship side always felt more natural than the practice

05:19 When a PI firm says we tried AI and it did not work — what actually happened

06:15 Implementation and support on day 40 versus day one — the real barrier to adoption

07:14 What a PI attorney loses every time they personally review 400 pages of records instead of using AI

08:00 Treatment gaps, undiagnosed injuries, and the ten PM deposition prep experience

09:00 How Supio finds TBI complaints scattered across three providers that no single reviewer connects

09:56 Client stickiness and the referral network — why catching an undiagnosed TBI changes the relationship

10:42 The objection — I am better than the AI and I will find the pearls myself

11:15 Force multiplying yourself — 10 pearls in 10 cases instead of one pearl in 10 hours

11:45 Five years of training Supio specifically on plaintiff's personal injury law — doctor lawyer on your staff

12:33 How a trial actually works — NDA first, then upload, then regular checkpoints and success criteria

13:55 The aha moment — Supio finding something on a lawyer's own client file they were not aware of

15:14 Is Supio doing legal thinking or something else — firm level, case level, and document level intelligence

16:07 The Westlaw integration — why nobody else in the PI AI market has a research partner of this size

17:46 Putting case law and medical records in the same place — drafting a response to a summary judgment motion

18:49 The hallucination objection — the lawyer who got cited from the bench and had his license threatened

19:45 Courts are not saying don't use AI — they are saying use it irresponsibly and we will come for your license

20:42 Implementation — does the firm have to stop taking cases to set it up

21:45 Onboarding team, customer success, and training as new staff and new features arrive

#AngelaVentro #Supio #TrustcastShow #LegalAI #PersonalInjuryAI #PIFirmTechnology #LegalTech #TBISettlement #WestlawIntegration #PlaintiffsAttorneyAI

What happens when a girl who grew up in poverty in Indiana, watched her grandfather walk into a rehab facility after his second stroke and get wheeled out in a wheelchair with a bag of clothes soaked in urine and feces because they kept passing him by at meals while he dozed in his room, becomes the first person in her family to attend graduate school, spends years as a prosecutor in South Florida learning how to try cases before she ever touches civil work, and then builds her own Milwaukee firm in 2025 dedicated entirely to one mission — holding nursing home corporations accountable when something goes horribly wrong?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Kristen Lojewski, founder of Lojewski Abuse and Injury Law, about how to know something is wrong at a nursing home before it is too late — ask for the care plan, visit at unpredictable times, attend the interdisciplinary team meetings — and why families almost always do see the warning signs but get talked out of them by the facility until it is too late to undo the damage. Kristen explains why Wisconsin caps wrongful death damages for adults at $350,000 and pain and suffering at $750,000, why that makes a million-dollar total exposure feel like a rounding error to a chain corporation, and why the legislature is essentially telling families that an elderly person's life is worth less than if the same thing happened across the border in Illinois.

They also discuss how nursing homes are increasingly burying binding arbitration agreements deep inside admission paperwork given to families during the most emotionally pressured moments of their lives — and why signing one strips your right to a jury trial and public record — what sexual assault inside memory care facilities actually looks like and why residents with dementia are specifically targeted because perpetrators believe nobody will believe them, how facilities use the phrases just aging and unavoidable injuries as standard defenses even when they have not implemented a single reasonable safety measure, why the defense firm on the other side gets paid every time they answer an email and has every incentive to run out the clock on a surviving elderly spouse, and why Kristen's firm will never recover more than what the family recovers.

Kristen Lojewski is the founder of Lojewski Abuse and Injury Law in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, serving families whose loved ones were harmed or killed by nursing home neglect or abuse.

Connect with Kristen Lojewski:

protectwi.com or loyeskilaw.com

Phone: 414-999-3771

Instagram: @attorneykristen

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Kristen Lojewski

00:44 Big buddy and little buddy — watching her grandfather deteriorate in a rehab facility and passing away in September 2020

02:35 From South Florida prosecutor to nursing home plaintiff lawyer — what the criminal courtroom taught her that civil lawyers miss

04:15 Something feels off about my mom's nursing home but I can't point to anything — where do I start

05:30 Request the care plan, visit at unpredictable times, attend the interdisciplinary team meetings

06:59 What are the warning signs families miss until it is too late

07:30 Families usually do see the warning signs — the problem is the facility reassures them out of acting

08:24 When the nursing home says everything is fine — how to push back and when to escalate

10:44 The nursing home says those injuries are just part of aging — is that ever actually true

11:24 Send your loved one to an independent hospital if you are concerned — what independent providers actually document

13:12 If your loved one has dementia and can barely communicate — does that make it harder to pursue a case

14:18 Sexual assault in nursing homes and memory care facilities — why residents with dementia are specifically targeted

15:52 How often is this actually happening — and how much goes unreported

17:11 Who is legally allowed to file a claim in Wisconsin

17:20 Adult children, spouses, parents — and why extended family do not have a wrongful death claim

18:14 Wisconsin caps wrongful death at $350,000 for adults — the hardest conversation she has with families

19:29 Total exposure for a nursing home wrongful death case — $1.1 million and why that is nothing to a chain corporation

20:01 The $750,000 pain and suffering cap and why the legislature undervalues elderly lives

21:23 What the first phone call with a family actually looks like — holding space before gathering facts

22:30 Honest conversations about damages caps, medical record review, and whether to try pre-suit resolution

23:15 Contingency fee — the firm advances all costs and never recovers more than what the family recovers

#KristenLojewski #LojewskiAbuseLaw #TrustcastShow #NursingHomeAbuse #NursingHomeNeglect #ElderAbuseLaw #WisconsinNursingHomeLaw #WrongfulDeathWisconsin #ArbitrationNursingHome #ElderLaw

What happens when an ER physician who fled Iran during the revolution as a child, survived Scud missiles and bombings across multiple cities, made it through medical school in Belize, delivered babies as the only doctor in a 25-mile radius in a tiny Minnesota town called Olivia, switched into emergency medicine, and spent years getting lectured by his billing partners about every critical care encounter he was under-documenting — finally picks up a Python programming hobby he had since high school, calls his AI friend at AMD, and spends three to four months building a tool that is not a medical scribe, not a transcription app, and not a copy of anything else on the market?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh, ER physician and founder of Teb IQ, about why emergency room doctors are interrupted every 30 seconds, why their notes end up as skeletons of what they should be, and why an experienced physician who just saved someone's life after 20 minutes of CPR ends up billing at the same level as a strep throat visit. Dr. C explains medical decision making — MDM — and why the 2023 Medicare billing change made the thought process the driver of revenue rather than the length of the note, why thinking about stroke and then ruling it out without ordering a CAT scan is a billable event if you document it, and how his app increased his personal critical care billing rate from 8-9% to 22% and pushed his users from level three and four billing to four and five across the board.

They also discuss the app's live evolving patient story that gets reanalyzed with every addendum and changes the final assessment as the diagnosis shifts, the HIPAA architecture that redacts the 18 protected variables before the story ever touches an LLM, the clinical scoring module that auto-calculates HEART score and other tools without the physician leaving the screen, the AI critique feature that reviews your entire patient encounter and tells you what you missed — the shoulder X-ray that was ordered but never mentioned, the tetanus shot with no follow-up — and why Dr. C refused to let surgical residents use the full version of the app because cognitive development in residency is too important to hand over to a machine. He also shares why getting into Epic costs over $100,000 before a single hospital ever sees your app, and what his path to scale actually looks like.

Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh is an emergency medicine physician and founder of Teb IQ, an AI-powered clinical documentation and billing optimization platform being piloted across hospitals in Connecticut.

Connect with Dr. Chelehmalzadeh:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 610-945-8337

tabscribe.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh

00:46 The billing conversation that started everything — Dr. C's notes were billing at strep throat level after saving a life

02:30 Learning to code again with ChatGPT and writing Python billing cheat files that spread across the department

03:10 The AMD AI friend who said this is a perfect use case — three months of nightly iteration

04:10 The first web version took five minutes per note — then ten seconds

04:56 The director noticed critical care billing jump from 8% to 22% — and looked the other way

05:10 Becoming a company because the hospital group needed liability separation

05:45 Over 40,000 notes processed and users billing five to six percent more in critical care

06:20 Why this is not a scribe — it is a Swiss Army knife that keeps the chaos organized and timestamped

07:04 What it is like to be interrupted every 30 seconds in the ER and why notes become skeletons

08:00 The live evolving patient story — the AI reanalyzes the whole encounter with each addendum

09:30 The sign-out note feature — dictating an entire shift handoff with one record button

10:00 The supervisory note for PAs and NPs — the right blurb every time

11:38 The shift handoff as an analogy for losing tokens between Claude conversations

12:03 HIPAA compliance — redacting all 18 protected variables before anything touches the LLM

15:25 How the encounter stays linked to the right patient without PHI — diagnosis, age, sex, room number

16:30 End to end encryption, business associate agreements, and why no recordings are stored

17:58 The legal question — how do you protect yourself when data clears after 30 days

19:02 The gray zone around PHI data retention and physician responsibility for what they paste into the chart

20:21 Teb IQ — the name comes from the Persian word for medicine and Ibn Sina the father of modern medicine

21:02 Fleeing Iran during the revolution, surviving the Iran Iraq war, escaping through Australia to Canada and eventually Belize

#DrMohammadChelehmalzadeh #TebIQ #TrustcastShow #EmergencyMedicineAI #ClinicalDocumentationAI #MedicalBillingAI #AIHealthcare #EMRDocumentation #CriticalCareBilling #PhysicianAITool

What happens when an ER physician who fled Iran during the revolution as a child, survived Scud missiles and bombings across multiple cities, made it through medical school in Belize, delivered babies as the only doctor in a 25-mile radius in a tiny Minnesota town called Olivia, switched into emergency medicine, and spent years getting lectured by his billing partners about every critical care encounter he was under-documenting — finally picks up a Python programming hobby he had since high school, calls his AI friend at AMD, and spends three to four months building a tool that is not a medical scribe, not a transcription app, and not a copy of anything else on the market?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh, ER physician and founder of Teb IQ, about why emergency room doctors are interrupted every 30 seconds, why their notes end up as skeletons of what they should be, and why an experienced physician who just saved someone's life after 20 minutes of CPR ends up billing at the same level as a strep throat visit. Dr. C explains medical decision making — MDM — and why the 2023 Medicare billing change made the thought process the driver of revenue rather than the length of the note, why thinking about stroke and then ruling it out without ordering a CAT scan is a billable event if you document it, and how his app increased his personal critical care billing rate from 8-9% to 22% and pushed his users from level three and four billing to four and five across the board.

They also discuss the app's live evolving patient story that gets reanalyzed with every addendum and changes the final assessment as the diagnosis shifts, the HIPAA architecture that redacts the 18 protected variables before the story ever touches an LLM, the clinical scoring module that auto-calculates HEART score and other tools without the physician leaving the screen, the AI critique feature that reviews your entire patient encounter and tells you what you missed — the shoulder X-ray that was ordered but never mentioned, the tetanus shot with no follow-up — and why Dr. C refused to let surgical residents use the full version of the app because cognitive development in residency is too important to hand over to a machine. He also shares why getting into Epic costs over $100,000 before a single hospital ever sees your app, and what his path to scale actually looks like.

Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh is an emergency medicine physician and founder of Teb IQ, an AI-powered clinical documentation and billing optimization platform being piloted across hospitals in Connecticut.

Connect with Dr. Chelehmalzadeh:

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 610-945-8337

tabscribe.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dr. Mohammad Chelehmalzadeh

00:46 The billing conversation that started everything — Dr. C's notes were billing at strep throat level after saving a life

02:30 Learning to code again with ChatGPT and writing Python billing cheat files that spread across the department

03:10 The AMD AI friend who said this is a perfect use case — three months of nightly iteration

04:10 The first web version took five minutes per note — then ten seconds

04:56 The director noticed critical care billing jump from 8% to 22% — and looked the other way

05:10 Becoming a company because the hospital group needed liability separation

05:45 Over 40,000 notes processed and users billing five to six percent more in critical care

06:20 Why this is not a scribe — it is a Swiss Army knife that keeps the chaos organized and timestamped

07:04 What it is like to be interrupted every 30 seconds in the ER and why notes become skeletons

08:00 The live evolving patient story — the AI reanalyzes the whole encounter with each addendum

09:30 The sign-out note feature — dictating an entire shift handoff with one record button

10:00 The supervisory note for PAs and NPs — the right blurb every time

11:38 The shift handoff as an analogy for losing tokens between Claude conversations

12:03 HIPAA compliance — redacting all 18 protected variables before anything touches the LLM

15:25 How the encounter stays linked to the right patient without PHI — diagnosis, age, sex, room number

16:30 End to end encryption, business associate agreements, and why no recordings are stored

17:58 The legal question — how do you protect yourself when data clears after 30 days

19:02 The gray zone around PHI data retention and physician responsibility for what they paste into the chart

20:21 Teb IQ — the name comes from the Persian word for medicine and Ibn Sina the father of modern medicine

21:02 Fleeing Iran during the revolution, surviving the Iran Iraq war, escaping through Australia to Canada and eventually Belize

#DrMohammadChelehmalzadeh #TebIQ #TrustcastShow #EmergencyMedicineAI #ClinicalDocumentationAI #MedicalBillingAI #AIHealthcare #EMRDocumentation #CriticalCareBilling #PhysicianAITool

What happens when a competitive MMA fighter and classical pianist who studied peace and conflict studies at UC Berkeley decides that defending people is her deepest calling, goes to law school, starts in family law, discovers her true home is toxic tort litigation, and ends up as a partner at Foley defending cosmetic manufacturers in some of the most complex talcum powder lawsuits in the country — while also raising her first child and preparing to walk into a conference room full of personal care product executives who have never seen the inside of a courtroom?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Laila Rahimi-Keshari, toxic tort litigation partner at Foley, about the single most important misunderstanding in talc litigation — that talc is not asbestos — and why every case she handles turns on proving that distinction to a judge who may or may not have litigated in this space before. Laila explains how mesothelioma develops as a cumulative dose exposure disease over decades, why most of her plaintiffs were born in the 1940s and 1950s, and why cases where the plaintiff is in their twenties require a completely different approach to alternative causation — including the BAP1 genetic mutation, fathers who came home from pipe fitting jobs with asbestos on their coveralls, and exposure through construction and abatement in older homes. She walks through what it takes to win a summary judgment motion in Los Angeles on a talc case — show the court that the plaintiff's discovery is devoid of any evidence that the product was contaminated with asbestos — and why she did it in a jurisdiction that had not granted that relief to talc defendants in recent memory.

They also discuss what it means to practice in California when both the $966 million verdict and the $1.5 billion verdict landed in the same state and how those numbers change the risk conversation with every client, why a case with 45 co-defendants is standard and how she positions her client among them, what the first 48 hours look like when a manufacturer gets served, why the cage taught her more about staying calm under pressure than the piano ever did, and why she will not stop fighting — a lesson she learned long before she ever walked into a courtroom.

Laila Rahimi-Keshari is a toxic tort litigation partner at Foley, based in California, defending cosmetic manufacturers in talcum powder and asbestos litigation.

Connect with Laila Rahimi-Keshari:

LinkedIn: Laila Rahimi-Keshari

foley.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Laila Rahimi-Keshari

00:46 MMA competitor and classical pianist — what fighting in competition taught her about defending people

01:24 From UC Berkeley peace and conflict studies to toxic tort litigation partner — the turning point

02:33 Defense only — never plaintiff side, always manufacturers

03:08 A claim just got filed against a manufacturer client in California — what happens in the first 48 hours

03:30 Mesothelioma cases get preferential trial dates — a four-month case lifecycle and what that demands

04:25 The practice specialty — cosmetic manufacturers and talcum powder litigation

04:51 California as a plaintiff-friendly state — what that means day to day for a manufacturer

05:29 Talc is not asbestos — the most important distinction in the entire litigation

06:45 Where the asbestos contamination allegation actually comes from — mine deposits and the purification process

08:26 The purification process post-1970s and why modern products go through increasingly strict testing

09:35 First major strategic decision when a company gets named in a mass tort — assessing the complaint and setting up for summary judgment

10:52 General counsel calls and says do we fight or settle — how Laila thinks through that question

12:00 The Los Angeles summary judgment motion no one expected to win — and how they won it

13:12 Over 67,000 pending talc claims in federal MDL — why these lawsuits keep coming decades later

14:45 Mesothelioma as a cumulative dose exposure disease — why plaintiffs are typically 70 and older

15:30 Younger plaintiffs in their 20s and 50s — what that means for the case

16:03 How to defend a manufacturer when the plaintiff says your product caused their cancer

17:20 Forty-five co-defendants in a typical case — how exposure gets distributed across multiple products

19:43 What deposing a plaintiff's expert actually looks like when you are on your game

21:17 What you are looking for when you depose the plaintiff's expert — locking in opinions before trial

21:31 Walking through the Los Angeles summary judgment win in detail — burden shifting, lack of evidence, and the right judge

24:02 How burden shifting works in a summary judgment motion and what plaintiff has to do to survive it

#LailaRahimiKeshari #Foley #TrustcastShow #TalcLitigation #ToxicTort #MesotheliomaDefense #ProductLiabilityDefense #CosmeticManufacturerLaw #CaliforniaToxicTort #AsbestosLitigation

What happens when a young female attorney who worked as a paralegal before law school, spent time on the defense side, and then crossed to the plaintiff's side realizes that the women calling her from Wall Street banks and hedge funds are not just victims of harassment but are trapped in situations where the very person controlling their promotions, their performance reviews, and their entire career trajectory is the same person who assaulted them — and that the most powerful tools she has are not always the lawsuit but the non-disparagement clause, the neutral reference, and the non-disclosure agreement that follows the harasser for the rest of his professional life?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Christine Hintze of Phillips and Associates about what grooming actually looks like before the harassment becomes undeniable — wine subscriptions, comments about skin, offers to buy a pied-à-terre in the city — and why clients almost never recognize it while they are inside it. Christine explains why quid pro quo sexual harassment is not invalidated by a moment of apparent consent when the person with the power over your career is the one initiating, why the gray area around one night that felt consensual and then a cold shoulder and a reassignment is actually where most of these cases live, and what New York City's strict liability standard for supervisor harassment means in practice compared to the rest of the country.

They also discuss the hedge fund associate who stayed at her job for months after being sexually assaulted by her supervising partner because she sent money home to her parents and helped her sisters — and who ended up in an outpatient treatment facility before Christine stepped in, negotiated continued pay through administrative leave, and eventually settled for $3 million — the C-suite executive fired after reporting quid pro quo harassment by the CEO whose company's entire defense was a performance complaint, the Kanye West Gender Motivated Violence Act case involving their client Jen Ann and a 2010 strangulation on a music video set in front of an entire production crew who said nothing, why the EEOC rescinding its 2024 harassment guidance changed the law not at all, and why contingency fee representation at a 60-40 split means nobody needs money to start a case.

Christine Hintze is an attorney at Phillips and Associates in New York City, focusing on sexual harassment and employment discrimination in finance and high-stakes professional environments.

Connect with Christine Hintze:

phillipsandassociates.com

New York, New York

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Christine Hintze

00:38 What happens the moment a client first calls — fear, shame, and the courage it takes to pick up the phone

02:21 These situations almost always involve someone in a position of authority — and it can start subtly

03:00 Grooming on Wall Street — wine subscriptions, skin care products, and offers to buy an apartment

04:00 Evidence clients think they don't have — Google Maps location data, subscription confirmations, and text threads

05:14 A client who thought she had no case — what creative evidence gathering actually looks like

05:37 The gray area of consent when your boss controls your promotions, your reviews, and your future

07:00 Quid pro quo sexual harassment explained — and why a relationship that felt consensual at one point does not close the case

08:00 New York City strict liability — if a supervisor did it, the company is liable, full stop

09:12 Protecting the career more than the lump sum — what really matters to women who have spent decades getting where they are

09:28 Non-disparagement clauses, neutral references, and positive references as the most powerful settlement terms

10:15 I reported internally and HR said they'd investigate — did I make a mistake

11:50 I still have to go to work every day and sit across from this person — what are my options

12:01 The case where Christine stepped in immediately and negotiated a resignation with a settlement

13:00 Living month to month in Manhattan — how to advise a client who cannot afford to lose income

15:44 Should I stay at work a few more weeks to gather evidence or leave immediately

17:30 Client mental health always comes first — when staying is not worth it

18:24 What the first few weeks look like after someone hires Christine — information gathering without re-traumatizing

20:27 The $3 million hedge fund settlement — a client on FMLA leave in an outpatient facility after months of reporting to her attacker

22:10 Negotiating continued pay through administrative leave while the case resolved

23:26 Is it hard to stay dispassionate — and why the trusting relationship is actually a strength not a liability

#ChristineHintze #PhillipsAndAssociates #TrustcastShow #SexualHarassmentLaw #WallStreetHarassment #WorkplaceDiscrimination #NewYorkEmploymentLaw #QuidProQuo #KanyeWestCase #GenderMotivatedViolenceAct

What happens when a young attorney who started his career as a guardian ad litem — the volunteer voice for children placed in the system with no one fighting for them — takes $25,000 of his own money, teams up with his business partner Victor, opens a personal injury firm three months before a global pandemic, outgrows his first office by mid-year, moves into 10,000 square feet by October, and builds a staff of 75 people across South Florida, Tampa, and Chicago while also opening six restaurants, a 501(c)3 animal shelter, and a sports agency representing bare knuckle fighters and NFL players — all while learning that hiring on personality beats hiring on resume every single time?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Jeremy Dover, managing partner of Demesmin and Dover, about what to do in the first 24 hours after an accident — call the police, get checked out, and do not talk to any insurance company including your own — and why Florida's no-fault system means you have exactly 14 days to unlock $10,000 in personal injury protection before the other side can offset it against whatever they owe you. Jeremy explains why the insurance company sending you a check right after an accident is not a favor but a strategy to get you to sign away your right to everything you are actually owed, what bad faith actually means in practice and why it is more often laziness than malice, and what happens when you reject a written proposal for settlement and then recover less than 75% of that offer at trial.

They also discuss why soft tissue injuries without broken bones have reached seven-figure verdicts, how Florida's 2023 House Bill 837 changed the comparative fault framework so that being more than 50% at fault now means recovering nothing, the casino analogy a mediator used to explain trial risk — you can take the money on the table or throw it on black and spin the wheel — why litigation fatigue is one of the most deliberate tactics insurance companies use to grind down claimants until they accept less, what it means to build a culture where people are happy to come to work rather than a machine that just churns out money, and why hire slow and fire fast is the lesson that cost the most to learn.

Jeremy Dover is the managing partner of Demesmin and Dover, a full-service personal injury and multi-practice law firm based in South Florida with offices in Tampa and Chicago.

Connect with Jeremy Dover:

demesmindover.com

South Florida, Tampa, and Chicago

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Jeremy Dover

00:42 Starting the firm with $25,000 each during the pandemic — burn the ships and never look back

02:09 From guardian ad litem to personal injury — how fighting for kids shaped how he fights for accident victims

03:30 Settlement versus trial — weighing finality against risk and making sure clients understand both

05:18 An accident just happened — what to do in the first 24 hours

06:00 Florida personal injury protection — the 14-day window to unlock $10,000 and why missing it costs you

06:56 The other driver's insurance company is already calling — should I talk to them

07:59 I feel fine after the accident — do I still need to go to the doctor

08:45 Why Jeremy steers clients away from the hospital unless absolutely necessary

09:11 What mandatory bodily injury coverage means — and why Florida does not require it

10:52 The other driver has no insurance but may have assets — how do you investigate and is it worth it

11:45 Florida's homestead protection — why you cannot take someone's home even with a judgment

12:28 Wage garnishment — the math on why it often costs more than you recover

13:55 The insurance company sends a check right away and says just sign it — should you

15:10 Why early settlement offers exist — minimizing risk before you know what you are actually owed

15:59 Can you ever exceed the policy limits of the other driver's insurance

17:17 What bad faith actually means — clear liability, clear damages, no response, and a failure to act in good faith

19:28 What possible justification does an insurance company have for acting in bad faith

20:52 How do you decide whether to settle or go to trial — and whose decision is it ultimately

22:30 The Hard Rock Casino analogy — take the money on the table or spin the wheel one time

23:43 How long do personal injury cases actually take from start to finish

25:08 The most common tactics insurance adjusters use to lowball accident victims

26:10 Litigation fatigue — deliberately drawing out cases until clients accept less

26:50 Florida's proposal for settlement statute 768.79 — what rejecting a written offer can cost you

29:28 Is a lowball written offer from the insurance company bad faith — why it is a one-way street

#JeremyDover #DemesminAndDover #TrustcastShow #PersonalInjuryFlorida #FloridaCarAccident #InsuranceBadFaith #PIProtection #SoftTissueInjury #ProposalForSettlement #FloridaPersonalInjuryLaw

What happens when a seventh grader buries a time capsule in 1993 saying he wants to play football as long as his body allows, join the army, and become an attorney — and then 25 years later his teacher digs it up and sends him a note saying he did exactly that — after commanding troops in combat as a field artillery officer in Iraq, redesigning a cavalry troop from scratch, deploying to Europe, writing the military criminal jurisdiction playbook for the entire European theater at V Corps, and then building a solo firm in Kentucky where his children asked to stay because they had never met people as kind anywhere else in the world?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Joey Comley, founder of The Soldier's Advocate, about the single most dangerous thing running through a soldier's head the moment CID shows up or a command pulls them aside — the belief that the truth will set them free — and why every attorney who has ever represented someone in a criminal context would agree that it is dramatically harder to help a client who has already made a statement. Joey explains what an Article 15 actually is and why getting one does not automatically mean getting busted down in rank, when a soldier should use their free appointed military counsel and when they need to pick up the phone and call private counsel, and how military police have exactly the same legal authority to lie to a suspect that civilian police do.

They also discuss the SHARP case where the alleged victim had told witnesses she knew how to get any leader removed from her supervision by filing a complaint — a case that had to be unwound through a board proceeding, a reconsidered 15-6 investigation in Mississippi, the Department of the Army Suitability Evaluation Board, and the desk of the Chief of the National Guard Bureau — how security clearance investigations interact with criminal cases and why losing a clearance can cost a transitioning soldier 20 to 30% of their annual earning potential, the joint terrorism task force interview where Joey had to physically stop his client from talking on no less than four or five occasions, the bench trial where the judge started packing up his things before the verdict and Joey's response from the podium that prompted an immediate not guilty on all charges, and why the most experienced NCOs in any formation almost always had at least one Article 15.

Joey Comley is the founder of The Soldier's Advocate, a military criminal defense and federal investigation firm based in Kentucky, practicing worldwide under the UCMJ.

Connect with Joey Comley:

thesoldiersadvocate.com

Phone: 270-360-0142

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Joey Comley

00:55 The first thing running through a soldier's head when CID knocks — and why it gets them in the most trouble

01:45 The truth will not set you free — what the investigator's version of events actually is

02:36 The joint terrorism task force interview — physically stopping a client from talking four or five times

03:54 From field artilleryman to judge advocate — what a seventh grade time capsule predicted

05:22 ROTC scholarship, freedom from dad, and a first duty station in Schweinfurt Germany

06:28 Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom 2, and redesigning a cavalry troop from scratch

07:20 The funded legal education packet — why his boss said he had no shot and why he was wrong

08:46 What a typical client looks like and how they find him — zero advertising budget

11:10 The firm is intentionally one of one — why he does everything himself

12:23 Military criminal defense is about 80% of the practice

13:25 Does being willing to go to trial change how opposing counsel treats you

14:24 How attorneys poke at each other and why rising above it brings the managing partner to the table

15:59 A soldier finds out they're under investigation — the two or three moves that determine everything

17:20 Free military legal counsel — what it covers and what it cannot do

19:44 Are military prosecutors actually after the truth — and does it differ from civilian practice

21:37 A prosecutor who called after the preliminary hearing to say he no longer had probable cause

22:45 The bench trial — the judge packing up his things, the statement from the podium, and a not guilty from the bench

24:33 Can military police lie to a suspect the same way civilian police can

24:52 Article 15 — what it actually is, what it means, and why rank loss is not automatic

27:22 When should a soldier use appointed counsel and when should they call private counsel

#JoeyComley #TheSoldiersAdvocate #TrustcastShow #MilitaryCriminalDefense #UCMJ #ArticleFifteen #SecurityClearance #SHARPcase #MilitaryLaw #JudgeAdvocate

What happens when a serial entrepreneur who wore a suit to elementary school at age eight, built a successful software company, invested his time and network into an early stage idea before anyone else believed in it, and then walked away from his own exit to go all in on a platform built around one simple but radical premise — that the most powerful thing you can do for someone who is struggling is connect them with another human being who has already been through exactly the same thing and come out the other side?

In this episode of the Trustcast Show, Zane Myers speaks with Derek Lundsten, President and CEO of LifeGuides, about why Employee Assistance Programs were well-intentioned 25 years ago and are now compliance tools with a 3% utilization rate that leave 97% of the workforce without any meaningful support, why the pandemic didn't just reveal the gap in mental health services but blew it wide open in a way that has driven healthcare premiums up 20% annually and created a provider shortage that clinical care alone cannot solve, and what peer support actually looks like when it is built on lived experience, HIPAA compliance, and a marketplace that lets you filter by age, demographics, religion, career path, and language — including Haitian Creole for a distribution center workforce that no EAP had ever been able to reach.

They also discuss how LifeGuides recruits guides — targeting Facebook groups of people who have been through a specific experience and finding that the desire to help others is always far greater than expected — what a first session actually looks like from login to video call, why employers never see individual conversations but do receive blinded utilization data, how one large publicly traded education company quantified a 3% improvement in employee retention from LifeGuides and used that to anchor an ROI calculation, and why the math on $100 per year for unlimited family access versus $150 per therapy session changes the conversation with every CFO who asks why they need it.

Derek Lundsten is the President and CEO of LifeGuides, a peer-to-peer support platform serving employers, health plans, and associations across the country.

Connect with Derek Lundsten:

lifeguides.com

Social: @LifeGuides across all platforms

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Derek Lundsten

00:40 Meeting LifeGuides founder Mark at an entrepreneur's group and deciding to invest time and network before money

01:20 Exiting his last software company to go all in on commercializing LifeGuides

01:49 What LifeGuides actually is — a peer-to-peer matching marketplace for lived experience in any life challenge

03:43 Most clients are companies — why LifeGuides went B2B instead of direct to consumer

04:30 The stigma and access problem that existed before COVID and the demand explosion that followed

05:59 When an employer says we already have an EAP — the real answer

07:21 What EAP stands for, why it was created, and how it became a compliance tool instead of a support tool

08:42 COVID demand skyrocketed, EAPs couldn't keep up, medical coverage absorbed the overflow — and premiums followed

09:42 Crisis versus proactive support — and why the system has swung too far toward clinical care

10:24 Stigma as the reason EAP utilization sits at 3% nationwide

11:53 How LifeGuides recruited its first guides — Facebook groups, Alzheimer's Association ads, and the discovery that people want to help

13:10 How Dr. David Hester's team vets guides — credentials, HIPAA training, active listening curriculum, and financial incentives

14:44 What happens when an HR leader reads that only 21% of employees feel their company actually cares about them

16:13 Why doing well while doing good is not a contradiction — stakeholders versus shareholders

17:00 ROI for the CFO — $100 per year per family versus $150 per therapy session times ten sessions

18:30 Retention data — one client quantified a 3% improvement in employee retention directly attributable to LifeGuides

19:40 How capping healthcare premium increases translates to millions in financial value

20:14 What changes first when a company adds LifeGuides to its benefit stack — and what takes longer

21:38 Walk me through what actually happens from login to the end of a first session

23:01 Can employees return to the same guide — unlimited access and ongoing accountability

24:04 Can a guide on one topic refer to a guide on a different topic — the multi-guide model for complex lives

25:05 Employer confidentiality — individual conversations are never seen, only blinded utilization rates

25:54 How attribution works — quarterly client success reviews and business outcome alignment

26:25 Someone dealing with a sick parent, struggling kid, and demanding job all at once — three guides simultaneously

#DerekLundsten #LifeGuides #TrustcastShow #EmployeeWellbeing #PeerSupport #MentalHealthAtWork #EAP #EmployeeBenefits #WorkplaceWellness #HRLeadership