Bio

It was the spring of 2007, and I was only 38 years old and I was already a named partner in a downtown Houston law firm. I was lead counsel for the injured plaintiff about to start a jury trial against a large heavy-equipment manufacturer in federal court.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this would be the last case I would ever try to a jury.

Things didn’t look good. It was a “no offer” case. That means the defendant didn’t offer a penny to the injured plaintiff to settle the case before trial. The defendant had already spent a significant sum on a team of lawyers to defend the case, and it would spend a lot more on the trial. In a case like this, the defendant could save a lot of the money it would spend on trial by offering the plaintiff a small sum in settlement, but this defendant wouldn’t do that.

The defendant and its lawyers were not only convinced they were going to win, they wanted to send the world a message: Don’t take suing our company lightly. We will not pay a penny if we are confident we will win.

And here’s the crazy thing: it wasn’t even my case.

The case was being handled by a law school classmate who had started his own law firm a few years before. He had put his heart into the case. But he was in a deep hole and decided he needed help. Of all the lawyers he knew, he asked me to parachute in and try the case to the jury. And there was a specific reason he asked me. My skills and experience were a match for his injured client’s case. The type of case, the type of injury and the venue of the trial were all squarely in my wheelhouse.

Looking back, despite the long odds, I felt it was something I needed to do and I said yes.

To make a long story short, I won and won big on this “no offer” case. The jury returned a verdict of $3.6 million plus hundreds of thousands more in interest, judgment was entered, the appeal was successful, the money was collected and I earned a staggering legal fee for about a month’s worth of work. I felt like a hero. But it didn’t last.

I returned to the office and it didn’t feel the same. Most of the other cases I had to work on were not really a match for my experience and skill set. Not like the case I just tried. I was going to do a competent job the cases in my office, but that was all. I felt like a phony. I was depressed.

And then a light bulb went off. I just needed a simple shift in perspective. I realized that I wasn’t the hero on the case I had just tried, my law school classmate was. His injured client, like most injured plaintiffs, wouldn’t have known anything was wrong if my classmate had just continued to represent the client by himself through trial. My classmate happened to be a star student in law school, had his own law firm and was a good, competent lawyer. From the client’s standpoint, the client had a good lawyer but an un-winnable case and that’s why the defendant wasn’t offering anything to settle. But my classmate put his ego aside, brought me in and paid me a generous percentage out of his own fees, and the injured client was the ultimate beneficiary. Almost $4 million collected on a "no offer" case doesn't happen everyday.

Now I do what my law school classmate did, but at scale with a sophisticated data mining operation to determine which lawyers have the right skill set for the injury type, the case type and the venue. We view our work today as zealous advocates for our clients but with a broader mandate that includes doing more than our best as lawyers, it also involves doing our best as consumers of legal talent on behalf of our clients. Often we are able to negotiate overall better fee percentages than if a client were to hire the firms we associate directly. We are relentlessly focused on putting our ego aside and getting the best results for our clients.

Jeffrey Donald Meyer

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