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Jason DeSouza’s “Closing Argument”
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I’ll be brutally honest. A lot of times, when I hear lawyers answer the question of why you do what you do, they’ll say that one of the reasons—a big reason—is we make good money doing it. And in order to make good money doing anything, you’ve certainly got to love doing what you do. But if you love doing what you do, but you can’t really pay your bills, and you don’t come from money, it’s very difficult for you to love doing what you do because eventually, you’re going to hate doing it because you’re not making any money. So it’s very nice being able to treat your family to nice stuff and to have nice things.
But I always thought, I think initially when I went to law school, that I was going to return to Toronto and work on the Canadian Wall Street, Bay Street, because I thought, you can take a JD, you can go work on Wall Street, do like financial wizardry, and you can make a ton of money. You can make a bunch of money, more than, you know, some of the richest lawyers. Apart from the money, the reason that I do what I do, and what motivates me to come to the office and work every day, is because there are people who are mistreated, and they’re not treated well.
They might be mistreated by a manufacturer because the manufacturer just doesn’t care enough about the quality of its products or the type of people using its product. Or, you know, maybe it’s a vehicle manufacturer that cut corners on safety and seat back safety and rollover safety and microchips and that type of thing. Maybe it’s the company who is an oil field company, and they’ve put into place policies where if they go a certain number of days without a safety violation or an accident or an injury, everybody on the site gets bonused. So they decide that they’re going to put literal profits over safety.
Or maybe you’re a mother of three, and you’re trying your best to go job to job, and you get rear-ended by a guy who is also just trying his best. The difference is, he drives a pickup truck, and you drive a Toyota Corolla. And he totals your Corolla. The insurance company says, “Hey, we’ll give you two grand for your Corolla.” What are you going to buy with $2,000? Nothing. You can’t buy anything. You can’t get anywhere. You can’t do anything. You can’t work anymore, right?
The reason that I do this is that there’s so much mistreatment in the world of people who big business and government and insurance have decided their lives don’t really matter. These people don’t really matter. They’re disposable. They’re just consumers to us. Sell them whatever, build whatever, you know, meet the minimum regulations. That’s what gets me. And what pushes me along the way is the ability to hammer these companies and hammer them and expose them for who they are. The people who walk in my door—their lives are important to them. Their lives are important to their families. Their lives are important to me. Their lives matter, and their injuries matter, and the money that they receive matters.
Click here to view Jason’s Profile.
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