Show Notes

In this episode of “Celebrating Justice,” we explore the remarkable journey of trial lawyer Michael Stephenson. Michael shares his unconventional path to becoming a lawyer which didn’t start until his final year of college. Although he had no legal influence growing up and was studying music theory in college, Michael decided to take a pre-law course and discovered his passion for law. His interest and natural talent for law helped him excel in law school and eventually fueled his desire to work in the courtroom.

Michael shares how his experiences in the criminal defense clinic and winning “most outstanding trial advocate” while competing on the mock trial team pivoted his focus from pursing environmental law to becoming a trial lawyer. He recounts impactful cases from his time as a public defender and how connecting with his clients and winning his first case, all while still in law school at the University of Oregon, solidified his commitment to personal injury law and emphasizing public service as a crucial aspect of his career.

For his “Closing Argument,” Michael discusses the often-misunderstood role of personal injury lawyers, the profound impact that civil litigation can have in holding corporations accountable, and how powerful it can be for doing good in the world.

Chapters

1:25 – Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
7:10 – What makes you unique?
8:19 – A case that Matters.
11:36 – Michael’s “Closing Argument.”

Key Takeaways:

Inspiration from Unlikely Beginnings: Michael’s journey highlights how a chance course in college can ignite a passion that leads to a rewarding career, despite initial unrelated interests or lack of influence from family or friends.
Value of Early Practical Experience: Participation in mock trials and criminal defense clinics during law school proved pivotal in shaping Michael’s skills and confidence as a trial lawyer.
Connecting with Clients on a Human Level: Michael emphasizes the importance of understanding clients’ personal stories and challenges, which can provide valuable context and motivation in the pursuit of justice.
The Power of Civil Litigation: Michael advocates for the essential role of plaintiff-side litigation in holding powerful corporations accountable and enforcing individual rights, countering negative stereotypes often portrayed in media.
Pivotal Career Moments: Significant career experiences, such as Michael’s first courtroom victories and interactions with inspiring mentors, not only influenced his career path but also his philosophy towards law and justice.

Transcript

[Theme Song Plays]

Michael Stephenson: What I see going on in the world is corporations taking advantage of people. You know, movies where it’s like the hero or the heroine were, they were people in courtrooms trying to stand up for somebody. You know, usually somebody who couldn’t stand up for themselves, right? And it’s one of the most powerful things that you can do for good in the world.

[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: Welcome back to Celebrating Justice, the podcast where top trial lawyers share stories about their career and the cases that matter most. In this episode, we hear from trial lawyer Michael Stevenson, founder and chief legal counsel at Bay Area Bicycle Law. Listen as he shares how his love for movies initially sparked his love for law and how he transitioned from environmental lawyer into criminal defense, even taking on real trials as a 3L student at the University of Oregon. To start, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Michael Stephenson: I didn’t really ever consider being a lawyer until my last year of college, of undergrad. And I think that was in large part because I didn’t know any lawyers. There were no lawyers in any of my family. None of my friends’ parents happened to be lawyers. But it made a lot of sense because when I think back to earlier childhood, all of my favorite movies were about lawyers. And my biggest heroes tended to be lawyers. You know, my favorite movies, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill, A Few Good Men, movies where it was like the hero or the heroine were, they were people in courtrooms trying to stand up for somebody, usually somebody who couldn’t stand up for themselves, right? And I think it just seemed too unattainable when I was a young kid watching these movies. I was like, that’s cool. It was almost like they were superhuman and it wasn’t something like you ever thought, well, I could do that. But then the final year of undergrad, I was actually a music theory major, of all things. I took the one pre -law course that we had at our school. And it was the most interesting class I took in all of college. And it was just kind of like law school. It was like reading cases. We’d read actual legal cases, and then the professor would help guide a discussion about, you know, was this fair? You know, why did the court do this? And I was like, man, like this was even more interesting and fun than all of the music classes, you know, that I actually had intended to do. And so then I just applied to law school and got in and then just really took to it, you know, and it’s funny, I was never a great student until law school. I was like on academic probation and I was like a C student or something for most of college, but my very first semester of law school, I was like number one in my class. And I think I graduated like third in my class. And it was like, okay, this is what I was meant to be doing. So I feel really fortunate that I kind of just fell into it.

Chad Sands: Did you go straight into plaintiff or?

Michael Stephenson: So with my primary motivation when I was entering law school was I wanted to do environmental law actually and I had done some volunteering for an organization in India for a while that was trying to combat climate change and I The one lawyer I knew by the time I was going into law school. What was a pretty high -profile environmental lawyer? And I was like, well, that’s cool. I want to do that. I want to try to help save the world or slow its destruction or whatever I can do. So I went to a law school that kind of had a very good environmental focus, University of Oregon in Eugene. But once I was there, I kind of was thinking, I’m not really connecting with the actual nuts and bolts of environmental law. What I really connected with first there was criminal defense. They had a criminal defense clinic and I also was I competed to get on the mock trial team and I was successful. We even went down to San Francisco and competed in this national mock trial competition that was put on by the National Trial Lawyers Association at the time. And I won an award for most outstanding trial advocate. And I was thinking, okay, like probably what I should be doing is what I always envisioned anyway lawyers doing was being in the courtroom, talking to a judge, talking to a jury. Environmental law seemed like it was more like behind the scenes writing briefs. Maybe once in a blue moon, you argue a brief in front of an appellate court or something, but for the most part, not in a courtroom. So winning that award with the mock trial team really inspired me. And then they had a really fantastic criminal law clinic at our school that once you were a third year student, you were actually able to do real trials. And I think it was because at the time, and I don’t know if it’s still the case, they were actually so short on lawyers. Like they needed more public defenders to defend all the cases that were going on. So the Supreme Court of Oregon had authorized some thing where third year law students could actually defend defendants in court. So I had done a bunch of trials by the time I graduated law school. They were all criminal trials. And so initially I was thinking, well, that’s what I want to do. But one day I went to a CLE, I guess, but I was just a law student sort of crashing it for no credit. And it was a CLE put on by Bill Barton, who you may have heard of. He’s the most famous plaintiff’s lawyer probably in Oregon. And I was so inspired by his presentation. And he was so passionate that even though it was a fictional case, it was like a mock trial, basically. He was actually tearing up talking about the fictional plaintiff and what she’d had to go through and what her daughter had to go through as a result of what had happened. And that was incredibly inspiring and certainly his skills too. He’s written some of the books for trial guides and there’s some trial guides DVDs of Bill Barton speaking and he’s just a fantastic lawyer. So it was hard not to kind of pivot to get kind of interested in plaintiff’s personal injury after that.

Chad Sands: What unique experiences or qualities do you bring to your personal injury law practice that kind of set you apart?

Michael Stephenson: Well, it’s hard to talk about oneself in that way, I guess. But I think I can confidently say that if you ask that same question to the people I work with, they’d say I bring a lot of humor, maybe just sort of a peace and calm to my practice. It’s incredibly stressful work, and we’re helping people whose lives have been destroyed or families who’ve lost, you know, their family member has died. I feel fortunate, you know, my upbringing, my parents were very interested in meditation and mental techniques to take care of oneself and that’s certainly served me well. And, you know, so many of us I know have substance abuse problems. Unfortunately, it’s a huge problem. I feel very fortunate that I don’t, you know, just being able to stay balanced. And I try to help the attorneys I work with and the support staff and everybody do the same thing.

Chad Sands: Can you share a case that has had a significant impact on you as a trial lawyer? I know it’s hard to choose one, right? But for the podcast.

Michael Stephenson: Yeah, you know, when I was a public defender as a third year law student in Oregon and getting to defend, you know, a lot of those cases were DUIs. You know, that’s kind of what they needed people to cover. And that was not something that really resonated with me. I’ve never been a drinker. I’ve had like three beers in my entire life. So, you know, it’s kind of a different experience to be defending people arrested and charged with DUI. But, you know, I started to really connect with my clients in realizing that, you know, everyone’s just doing their best. And often my clients were people who just were having a really tough time in life. And certainly it doesn’t excuse driving under the influence, but it helps us understand what people are going through and why they might make poor decisions. And I remember my very first DUI client, he had been pulled over and was terribly, terribly drunk driving and his father had died that day, which obviously is not a legal excuse, but it made me feel a lot of sympathy for him. And so I did my best, but we lost because he was heavily under the influence. And then, you know, as a public defender, you’re often getting, you know, cases where you’re kind of destined to lose, but you’re doing your best. And so you lose a lot as a public defender, especially in the DUI realm. But I eventually had a client who had had his wife had a medical emergency where he came home from work, had a couple of drinks to relax. And then his wife had this medical emergency and he had to rush to get this very serious medication for her. And then he got pulled over on the way doing that. And so we actually had a justification defense. His wife could not drive herself. She had terrible, terrible health issues and she really needed this medication ASAP. Otherwise it was just like this huge problem if she didn’t take her medication. So we actually won that one and it was the first trial I won and my client was the sole breadwinner for his family and he had a young daughter who had all kinds of health problems and his wife had all these health problems and if we had lost, he was probably gonna be in jail for about a year. And it was so much, it was a lot of pressure on me. I was like 22 or 23 years old. And I felt like this whole family was depending on me for their survival. I was just so thrilled that we won and my clients started crying and I even started crying a little bit. It was this huge thing. But anyway, it was a very inspiring experience.

[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.

Michael Stephenson: One thing I would love to just bring more awareness to is the good that civil litigation and plaintiff side personal injury and plaintiff’s litigation in general does. It’s been so demonized in pop culture for decades, right? Like I remember being a kid and watching The Simpsons and I loved that show. But the only lawyer in that show is like the shadiest personal injury lawyer that I think was like trying to get his clients to injure themselves so then he could represent them and make all this money and another show I loved when I was young was Seinfeld, right? And the lawyer in that is always doing something with Kramer where they’re gonna sue the coffee company and blah blah blah. And I think those are funny, you know, those are funny things to have happen in a show. I think unfortunately it disguises what’s really going on. What I see going on in the world so much in my work is corporations taking advantage of people. And those corporations could be Uber, Lyft, various insurance companies, could be Amazon, Facebook, anybody, really. And the only way that we as individual people have to stand up for ourselves and enforce our rights and force a corporation to ever do the right thing is to sue them typically. I think we’re all frustrated with politics. It feels like our voices don’t matter. And in many ways, our voices don’t really do much when all we can do is vote. But when a corporation does something to you that’s wrong or to a loved one that’s wrong, you actually sometimes have the power to go into a courtroom and talk to 12 people in that jury box that are just like you. If you explain it clearly enough and you might need a lawyer to help explain it, often the right thing will happen. And if the jury and the judge tell, it could be the biggest corporation in the world. If they tell that corporation, you have to pay back so -and -so, or you have to make it right, you have to compensate them for the harm that you caused, then they have to do it. And it’s one of the most powerful things that you can do for good in the world.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Michael Stevenson. Thanks for sharing those stories. To learn more about Michael and his firm, visit his website, bayareabicyclelaw.com. All right, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. 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.