Daniel Horowitz

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Daniel Horowitz: So what does that have to do with being a lawyer? Well, I’ll tell you a story about that. The California Medical Board and the California Department of Public Health have descended on this hospital. To be a lawyer who’s successful and does good in the world, just remember that you have to have money. You know that you save lives, so that means a lot.

Narrator: Welcome to Celebrating Justice, presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers, and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at TrialLawyersJournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of Marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Hello friends and welcome to another episode of Celebrating Justice, where we hear from the minds reshaping the legal landscape through innovation, advocacy, and remarkable trial work. Today, we’re privileged to introduce Daniel Horowitz, lead counsel at Lawyers in Lafayette. Boasting an impressive resume with over 200 jury trials and countless high-profile cases, Daniel’s expertise has not only secured multi-million dollar judgments and navigated complex international courts, but he’s also deeply vested in his community and using the law for good. But before we get to the stories, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

 

Chad Sands: So you didn’t grow up saying you wanted to be an attorney or your parents weren’t in law?

Daniel Horowitz: My parents grew up in the streets of New York. My mom grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. My dad was literally a war hero and came home and married my mom. They were lucky to make money when he sold bags from store to store getting paid by mafia-owned delicatessens. We were happy to put food on the table.

Chad Sands: How did you eventually decide to go to law school? And then tell me a little bit about your early years as an attorney.

Daniel Horowitz: Law school was an easy school to go to, of course. It’s being a lawyer that’s difficult. So I graduated college. That was not the issue. I ran a business when I was in college and I considered just going with that. We sold high end audio equipment. It was a lot of fun. But I really did think that being a lawyer would allow me to sort of defend the people I grew up with, help them, help their families. I was “one of the smart kids,” so I was able to achieve well. So when I became a lawyer, I looked around and I said, wow, I’m out here in California and the entire legal practice is basically dominated by all the big names who will let you work for them. They’ll exploit you for 10 years. And if you’re a good boy, they’ll pat you on the head and let you be a partner. And I said the heck with it. And I ran the first controversial yellow page ad in California history at the time that I started advertising. And remember, I came from a business background.

Chad Sands: Right.

Daniel Horowitz: The only ads you could run in the yellow pages or anywhere for a lawyer was your name and what you practiced and your phone number and address. That was it. And I said, well, I’m going to put a dancing cash register in the yellow pages. It’s going to throw money in the air and it’s going to say, “Injured? Accident? They pay, you collect. Call Dan Horowitz.” And that ad took off like wildfire. I was getting people just cracking up on the phone, calling me saying, you’re the only lawyer I can talk to. And I know just from your ad, that we’ll be great. And I was, um, I was signing up, you know, case a day for a while in personal injury.

Chad Sands: Amazing.

Daniel Horowitz: And that was the start. That was the start of it.

Chad Sands: From a yellow page ad.

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah.

Chad Sands: So I’m curious to learn about what unique experiences or elements of your journey enrich your practice and set you apart from other attorneys?

Chad Sands: Certainly. For many trial lawyers, there’s often one case that profoundly impacts them. I know it’s impossible to choose one, but because this is the format of the podcast, I have to ask you to share a story of one case and its lasting effect on you.

Chad Sands: Wow. So I saw this on your website, but I’ll ask you here. Tell me more about what it was like to be in court against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Daniel Horowitz: Well, you know, first of all, you don’t have to agree with her politics. That’s a good basis to fight with her. But as a human being, I felt that she was honest. She was very well prepared and she was dedicated to her task. Mostly she was representing children, injured children, abused children. She took a view as to what she thought was right and honestly and ethically pursued it. So I hope I don’t see personal attacks on her, but of course you will. I hope I don’t see her demeaned as a human being in this next campaign, but of course that’s all that happens in politics. I disagree with her politically on many things, but as a human, believe me, she’s not crazy. She’s not going to set off a nuclear war when she becomes president a day or two after Biden takes office and she’ll do the best she can.

Chad Sands: And then how did you get tied up and involved with the prime minister of Ukraine?

Daniel Horowitz: Oh, that was interesting. Pavel Lazarenko was in prison in the United States facing charges for things that he did in Ukraine, which was crazy by itself because we normally don’t prosecute foreign leaders for things they did in their own country. But the United States government had made a deal with the president of Ukraine whose name was Kuchma, that if you give up the nuclear weapons of Ukraine, if you support US policies in certain ways, we’ll take out any of your political competition that you want. And we have a right to make deals like that. And part of the deal was to prosecute Pavel Lazarenko. So after he fled Ukraine, because they kept trying to kill him, the government tried to murder him. We took him in and said, welcome to America. Here’s a nice jail. We’re going to prosecute you for money laundering and for honest services fraud. But the good news is I won every single count that I took under my wing. I went to Cyprus, Israel, Ukraine, the Netherlands, and I appeared in courtrooms. Israel, I was in court with the judge. Netherlands, in court with the judge. And the rules of evidence are very similar in all civilized countries. When we presented the case in the US District Court, Judge Jenkins, who’s now on our Supreme Court, threw out all the charges against Lazarenko that I worked on. Unfortunately, a small part of the case having to do with a former co-defendant I did not work on and he was convicted of that and served some significant prison time for that. But still it was a meaningful case and I really learned, I saw the underbelly of politics or real politic as they call it. The United States had to do certain things in the interests of the world or its self-interest, but individually took a pro-Western politician and slammed him for things that everyone in Ukraine did, many of whom were actually pro-Russian. So I learned a lot about that. I’ve also, by the way, litigated against presidential candidate Newsom.

Chad Sands: Tell me about that.

Daniel Horowitz: Well, I represented Andrew Cohen, who was a police officer who was very angry at Kamala Harris. She was district attorney of San Francisco. One of the police officers there was murdered. And Kamala Harris said, I’m not going to charge the death penalty. And the police officers felt abandoned. So they got together one Christmas. They had a party and they just basically let off steam by making a video where they insulted each other and themselves. So the women played anti-feminist roles. Chinese people played stereotype Chinese. Everybody played a role that stereotyped themselves. When Gavin Newsom, who was mayor, found out about it, he said, “This is not acceptable. I’m going to call this out.” And he made a public issue of this, put 25 officers on leave, including Cohen and 25 officers just before Christmas. And I went to battle with him. It was a battle of the press. And I believe I beat him. I believe that I got better press coverage than Gavin Newsom. But I’ll tell you this, the man was, he was tough and he was like steel. When he gave a press conference, and I stood in the front row and we locked eyes, he did not flinch. And I’ve gotten to talk to Gavin and joke with him about it afterward. And he’s a hell of a guy. He’s quite something, I’ll tell you.

Chad Sands: I gotta ask you about Fleetwood Mac though, because you booked Fleetwood Mac for your high school, is that right?

Daniel Horowitz: Let’s see, how much of this story can I tell with an American?

Chad Sands: You can tell all of it.

Daniel Horowitz: This was years ago, years ago. And we were hanging around Fairleigh Dickinson University, but I was still in high school. We were organizing protests against the war in Vietnam. I was talking to Jackson Brown’s manager about having him perform at protests. So it was really easy at that point to reach out to performers. And I forget what event we were doing at Fairleigh Dickinson University, but I wanted Fleetwood Mac to perform, and I reached out to them and they were not very expensive. And the hard part was actually they had all these demands about what was in their dressing room.

Chad Sands: The rider, the rider demands.

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah. I mean, I forget exactly what it was like some sort of champagne. They need some sort of food. I don’t know if they wanted marijuana, anything weird, you know, that I was too young to be supplying and it was illegal. I don’t know about that. So I’m not implying that, but I think what got me was the food demands were so crazy. And this was when it was Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green, and it was a different Fleetwood Mac. I forget what we had to pay them. I remember Bonnie Raitt at that time was like $7,500 for a performance. I mean, it couldn’t have been more than $10,000 and we were able to cover that. So that was fun.

Narrator: At CloudLex, we understand the challenges personal injury law firms face every day. That’s why we’ve built the Legal Cloud Platform to help you stay productive and keep your cases moving forward. CloudLex provides a comprehensive suite of applications and features to support every stage of intake, pre-litigation, trial, and more. From innovative case management to insightful analytics and HIPAA secure client communication. CloudLex empowers your firm with the technology to thrive. Build your firm of the future and see for yourself at CloudLex.com. Now here is this episode’s closing argument.

When I wanted to be a lawyer, my mom said, look, you know your cousin Marty Garbus. You know, Marty is probably the most famous First Amendment lawyer in the country. He’s represented President Reagan, the Nazis who wanted to march in Skokie, Lenny Bruce, the comedian. He’s had four civil rights cases in the Supreme Court that got people voting rights. I want you to talk to him about your goals because I support you in your goal to be a lawyer to help the working people and make things right. But I want you to talk to Marty. So we all went to lunch. My mom had actually raised Marty after his mom died. They were very close. And Marty said, look, to be a lawyer who’s successful and does good in the world, just remember that you have to have money behind you. You have to have financial strength.

And he said, let me give you an example. And he went through all the famous lawyers of the sixties. You remember William Kunstler, Dan, you know him? I go, yeah, I know William Kunstler. He’s famous. Well, did you know that his girlfriend inherited millions of dollars and she supports him? No, I didn’t know that. I just thought he got his money from his cases. All right, now you know. And he went through the list of all of these sixties radical icons and told me their source of money. He said, how are you going to do a case if you can’t pay for an investigator, if you can’t pay for paralegals? They’re not going to work for free. So he said, you’ve got to balance making money with doing good. And he said, then you will have achieved your true goals, but don’t be embarrassed to ask to be paid from people who can afford it. So if you look at a personal injury practice, for example, does that support your civil rights work?

The case that I’m doing that I talked about earlier, I talked about this child who was killed by John Muir Hospital and how we are fighting to improve John Muir Hospital. If I didn’t have financial strength, could I have laid out the money to handle that case? So never be embarrassed to make money, and never be embarrassed to have heart, because they go together and they don’t contradict. So remember what my mom did with her career, helping people, what my dad did helping people, not just with that young man, but his whole career was helping the working people save money and buy houses. And remember young lawyers that use something like CloudLex, use the tools, go to bar meetings, ask people for help, and contribute to your community, but always take care of yourself and your family. They go together and they bind together, they’ll make you strong, and they’ll make it a better world too.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Daniel Horowitz from his firm Lawyers in Lafayette. Those were some great stories, Daniel. Thanks for sharing. To learn more about Daniel, visit his website, LawyersInLafayette.com. All right, that’s a wrap. See you next time.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to Celebrating Justice presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit TrialLawyersJournal.com to become part of our community and keep the conversation going. And for a deeper dive into the tools that empower personal injury law firms, visit CloudLex.com/TLJ to learn more.