Adam Rossen

Chad Sands: Did you start in criminal defense from the very beginning though? I mean, I know you said you were the intern. Did you, did you do any other practices?

Adam Rossen: So I did. So I didn’t have good grades in law school because I just did not like it. So it’s not like I could pick and choose where I go. But most of the people that have the best grades, they go into big law anyway. And then they’re making really good money, but they’re working 80 to a hundred hour weeks and they’re miserable. So I interned at the state attorney’s office. I loved it. Not only the trial work, but I really love the criminal law aspect. So yes, that’s where I got, I started working there upon graduation. And from there I was just, I was absolutely hooked. And it’s funny, a lot of my friends who are personal injury lawyers, they’re in trial once or twice a year. If that. Most of them are just handling pre-litigation. So they’re not real trial lawyers to begin with. I mean, there’s some of the big guns and they handle really complex cases. But the vast majority of personal injury lawyers, at least down here in South Florida, they’re not even trial lawyers. They just push paper and demand letters and they’re not really in the courtroom that much. It’s all pre-litigation. So I talked to a lot of personal injury attorneys and a handful of them said they wanted to be doctors before they became trial lawyers. So you’re not the first there.

Chad Sands: And similar to them, you kind of started on the other side, right? On the prosecution. And then you came to the, you know, defense. I talked to a lot of personal injury lawyers who started on defense and then went to the plaintiff’s side. Talk a little bit about that, how you made that transition, kind of why you made the transition and what skills and perspective it brought. There were definitely some positives, some negatives, right?

Adam Rossen: So that’s where I interned and I really liked it. Now a lot of my coworkers had never been in trouble before. They had always lived squeaky clean lives. And that wasn’t me. I’ve been in trouble, never been arrested, but I’ve definitely had my fair share of getting caught for doing stupid things and being in trouble, which I always thought made me a better prosecutor because you know, how can you, it’s much more difficult to prosecute drug crimes if you’ve never done drugs or to prosecute drug dealers if you’ve never bought drugs or sold drugs before. So for me, I was like a young prosecutor and one of my friends, she’s very smart, way smart, way more book smart than me. And she went 0 for 28 on her first trials, first 28 trials. And it was a little bit of a combination of, just don’t think she was personable enough. She’s a little too smart, right? Didn’t have enough street smarts, but also just didn’t understand the way, know, certain things and she couldn’t really relate it.

And I watched a lot of our trials. I’m like, I’d say this differently. I’d say that differently. I would totally win this trial or that trial. So I think, you know, that was one thing, but I really did like being a prosecutor. I liked helping people. I liked helping victims, but I also liked helping defendants when I thought that they needed it. At one point I wanted to be a homicide prosecutor and I had set a goal for myself to be, to get to the homicide unit within 10 years. That was a goal I had. And I was the first one promoted in my class out of about 30 people that they hired in the August 2006 class at the Broward County prosecutor’s office. But about a year and a half in, I decided to leave because I was just a little disillusioned with it. You know, it was a situation where I saw the same police officers being accused by the same defense attorneys about doing the same type of things to different people, different defendants, being rude and nasty and beating people up and just violating the law. And I didn’t know if it was true or not. But when you’re seeing the same thing over and over and over again, and then when I just kind of realized that it was all political and the people in charge really didn’t care about me, I was just a cog in the wheel. I was like, you know, I’m not helping people the way I want to. And I don’t feel appreciated the way that I think I should be when I’m working really hard and I’m really good at what I do. So I said, you know what, I’m just going to start my own criminal defense firm.

So my partner or my, well, my buddy who was my roommate and we were both prosecutors together. Basically in 2008, we said, you know, screw it. We’re to start our own criminal defense firm. And starting off, it was actually, I thought it was actually very hard because it took me about two years, I would say to look at cases from the defense side. Cause I would still read a police report and go, “It doesn’t look like there’s many defense issues.” I still looked at it from a prosecutor’s perspective. It really took me a while to transition. And I also talked to a lot of personal injury lawyers, you know, and everybody’s different, right? But a lot of personal injury lawyers say that they don’t want to be insurance defense lawyers or lawyers from the other side because they’re so ingrained in the defense side. And it’s going to take them too much time, too much money. Too much of a lift in training to retrain their brains to do that. And it took me a good two years. I always had the empathy and compassion for people. That’s really one of the reasons I left. I was able to help people. To be a really good defense lawyer, especially from maybe spotting Fourth Amendment issues and police violations and knowing how to take a deposition from the defense side, it took me a good two years to be good. It really did. So it took me a while.

So I don’t actually think, I mean, it’s great for marketing purposes, former prosecutor, and it was great for knowing how the police act. I know how they think. I know the policies and procedures. It was great from that standpoint. It really was to know the psychology behind your opponent and the way, the intimate way that the prosecutor’s office worked. That was really good. But from just a pure technical standpoint, it took me a while to get good on the defense side. Like I said, everybody’s different, right?

Chad Sands: What makes you unique then as a trial lawyer?

People walk in with preconceived notions about lawyers all the time and think that we’re scummy or especially in trial work, right? I mean, our job is to take a set of facts and spin it in a certain way. And I think that, you know, being able to be, to be genuine and be believable and trustworthy is very important with a jury. And like I said before, just kind of being able to dumb things down and speak on their level.

And the last thing I’ll say is adaptability. So when I was a prosecutor, I won some cases against some really aggressive defense attorneys. And I tend to be pretty aggressive. But this one in particular was, he’s a great lawyer, just ultra aggressive. And I knew the only chance I had was to be the exact opposite of him. Cool, calm, collected, slow, just rational. And I had to change and adapt. Cause I wanted to be theatrical. I wanted to match his energy, but I really thought it through beforehand. And I said, no, I know how he is. If I’m the opposite, I think I can use his, you know, talk about inertia. I can kind of use his inertia against him kind of like, what is it? Aikido, right? I’m not big into martial arts, but I think that’s the one where you use people’s energy and flow against them, right? And they’re balanced and momentum against them. So I did that in that case and I won and he’s an amazing traveler. So really just, being adaptable, I think is another key for me. That’s really helped me with what you guys do when bad things happen to good people. I mean, you guys take on a lot of different trials, white collar, federal criminal. I mean, you must have some stories.

Chad Sands: If you could share at least one story about a trial and a case that really had an impact on you.

I mean, but that was a fun one. But the one I really want to talk about was the one we had recently. And so this was an example of a case. The incident happened in 2018. So I was the primary on this and it took five years to go to trial. And by the time I went to trial, you know, the firm was different. Back then in 2018, it was me and Manny, two lawyers. We had six total people. Actually, back then we had four total people. Now we’ve grown to this 20 person law firm with all these lawyers where I got to watch the trial and just sub our team. I didn’t even participate, but it was amazing because it took five years for this case. Our client was in a dispute with, it was after a hurricane, he had some work done on his house and the person that he hired was really shady and was scamming him. And my client was a former contractor, so he knew it. He was able to call this scam artist out. And they get to the point where it fails inspection. And then somehow miraculously it passed the second inspection. And my client goes, the homeowner, says, look, I’m not paying you the money. I want a third inspection. And by the way, the owner of this company is not allowed to be on my property. Last time he was on my property, he threatened me and I don’t want him there. Okay. and I’m having an independent inspector come tomorrow at four o ‘clock. So the office manager calls him, didn’t tell him that she’s his girlfriend, the owner’s girlfriend and says, “Well, I have to be there.” 

And he goes, you can come, but not the owner because he didn’t know their relationship. And she comes with him at 3:45. They go onto his roof. They’re start banging away. My client kicks out the hit, the back door into the screen porch. And by this time the people are in the screen porch, pulls his gun and starts shooting. And he’s like, get out of my house. You know, his wife is on the phone with 911 yelling shots fired shots fired shots fired. Right. The cops come and they arrest my client. They do a terrible investigation. This is plantation police department. They put on a rookie detective. So he’s a detective. So he’d been a police officer for a little bit. This was his first case. They used it as training. They bungled the entire investigation. They basically arrested my client. It was terrible. And it took us five years. We found the, well, the guy on the contractor sued my client in civil court. My client won that lawsuit and got his attorney’s fees paid. So he won a judgment of $5,000 and got about $80,000 in attorney’s fees on this guy. We had worked this case for so long. We took depositions. We took a deposition of this alleged victim. It’s seven o ‘clock at night and he’s screaming at the prosecutor, the one who’s supposed to be advocating on his behalf. We had to interject and say, listen, you can’t talk to her that way to calm down to the own victim. You know, and she didn’t believe him, but office politics and BS got in the way and he’s yelling and bullying her. we’re there at his civil deposition. We’re there at his civil trial.

We file in Florida, a standard ground, a self -defense motion, and the judge denied it and yelled at my client and thought my client was the bad one. Well, we get a new judge. We go to trial by this time. He, the guy, the alleged victim had moved to West Virginia. We made him drive all the way down. And one of our attorneys, David Terrace did an amazing job was about three hours into what was what he thought was going to be a six hour cross examination of this alleged victim. And it ended with the judge declaring a mistrial. The prosecutors, instead of agreeing to retry it, the prosecutors dismissed everything after the mistrial and the judge threatening to hold this guy in contempt of court basically said, listen, sir, because the prosecutors dropped it, I’m not going to hold you in contempt. I could put you in jail for six months. So want you to drive back home to West Virginia. Basically, I don’t ever want to see you ever again. And so it took five years, but our client was finally vindicated. And I was there for that. It was a lot of drama. You know, here we are. Two hours, two, three hours into a six hour cross examination, had five sworn statements of this guy where he’s just so pissed off and we caught him in so many lies and we got him so ramped, just amped up and frustrated. He was just like, yeah, I have a brain injury, so I don’t remember anything. David was just having a field day because we had five separate statements of his. They were all contradictory. I mean, it was sad that we had to get there, but it, you know, for our client who didn’t do anything, I mean, yeah, you know, look, he didn’t do anything wrong. He was defending his property. He was defending his house. He was, you know, this guy told him that I’m going to make your wife a widow.

That’s why he said, “You’re not allowed on my property.” What’s he supposed to do when he, when he tells them, he says, “You’re not supposed to be in my house.” And then instead of them knocking on the front door and saying, “Hey, how you doing?” They’re up on his roof, banging away. Then there, and then he sees them inside the screened porch. So he kicked open the door, guns blazing, you know, and in Florida, I believe you could do that, but it just never should have got that far. And it was so happy because– and you know, I was really proud of my client because a lot of my clients would have taken lesser charges and said, okay, the exposure or the risk is too much. This is a 65 year old man who had never been arrested before in his life with the threat of going to prison for years. Yeah. and they did try to offer him less reduced charges and put them on probation. He said, no, I’m not even going to take a misdemeanor. And a lot of my clients will accept lesser charges because it’s just, you know, they’re playing the odds. But I was really proud of my client to say, “Adam, I’m not taking anything. I’m innocent and we’re going to go all the way.” And he did that in the civil case and he won. I mean, he won $5,000, right? So this is silly. So it was dispute over a few grand, but he stood up for himself and he really stuck it to the guy getting an $80,000 attorney fee award on that. It was it like a scene in Law and Order then where in the middle of this long cross examination, there was like –

Chad Sands: Did the judge like slam the gavel and everything kind of unspoiled like right there within a few minutes and that in the case and the trial was over, or did it take like in a little bit of a less dramatic way?

Adam Rossen: Yes. So it really was. It’s never going to be as good as it is in, you know, on Law and Order. I mean, I was kind of a little bit like the cross examination from a few good men. A little more slow, little more drawn out. But I mean, yeah, the judge, you know, once basically the judge stopped it and said,” I’m declaring a mistrial for you, cause what happened was the witness was instructed to not mention certain things.” Like a lot of witnesses are there’s pretrial motions where we kind of have to narrow down what’s admissible or not. And he was deliberately violating that order multiple times. He said inappropriate things in front of the jury that he wasn’t supposed to. And so the judge had to keep admonishing him and keep yelling at him and just the tension and the frustration that this guy, he was lying all over the place and he just, he self-destructed, which we knew he would. That was part of our game plan. And our strategy was just to beat him down so much because we needed everybody to see what I saw at seven o ‘clock at that deposition, what our clients saw, because of course he’s coming in at every other court date. I’m so nice and calm and I wasn’t upset, right? You know, basically being full of crap and we had to show everybody what he really is like. So we did.

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Now here is this episode’s “Closing Argument.”