Show Notes

In this episode of “Celebrating Justice,” we hear the compelling story of trial lawyer Adam Shapiro, founder of Shapiro Law Firm.

Starting in criminal defense but repelled by the immorality present in the field, Adam switched to insurance litigation. However, he eventually found his calling in fighting for the plaintiff’s side instead, making a “leap of faith” into personal injury law.

Listen as he recounts one of his most significant cases involving a girl who was severely injured at an intersection in Jackson Heights, New York, which resulted in the installation of traffic lights and an increase in public safety in the area. With this being just one example, his genuine care for clients and his diligent efforts have led to several successes throughout his career. In his “Closing Argument,” Adam emphasizes the crucial role personal injury lawyers play in people’s lives, acting as essential advocates during times of crisis. He stresses the importance of treating clients with the care and empathy they deserve, as if they were family members.

Chapters

1:22 – Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
6:07 – What makes you unique?
7:12 – A case that matters.
14:05 – Adam’s “Closing Argument”

Takeaways

Working from a place of honesty, empathy, and humanity is key to understanding clients and maintaining long-term success and referrals.
Successful litigation can lead to real-world changes and broader societal benefits that make an impact on public safety.
Sustained success as a trial lawyer isn’t immediate; it often involves extensive groundwork.
Be prepared to work extremely hard, especially during career transitions.
Selflessness and kindness are important traits that are often overlooked in personal injury law
Caring about clients beyond a financial perspective will take you a long way

Transcript

Chad Sands: Welcome back to Celebrating Justice, the podcast where we hear true stories from trial lawyers about their careers and their most memorable cases. In this episode, we hear from New York-based injury attorney Adam Shapiro, and man, does he have some stories to tell. After starting on the defense side in Florida, then transferring to New York, and finally “making the leap of faith” to the plaintiff’s side, he’s never looked back. From suing Shaun “Puff Daddy” Combs, to taking on the city of New York to make communities safer, to his more absurd cases that made the pages of The Post, I asked him: why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Adam Shapiro: So I’m in high school in Queens and I took an elective senior year. It was a mock trial class. And the midterm was that I had to try a case by myself and I won. But then the final was to try the same case on the other side and I won. So my teacher comes over and he goes, you should be a lawyer. And I’m like, okay. But I was way too early in my life to decide what I wanted to do. I was a senior in high school. It gets even weirder. I go to college, I study psychology at SUNY Albany and now it’s senior year. And I’m thinking, “I don’t want to go work yet. I want to go to more school. What should I do?” And that was it. I didn’t think of it as a challenge. I just looked at it as more school. So I applied to law schools. I got into Miami after freezing my butt off at Albany, and I happily went down there. At the time I went, it was ranked in the top 25 % of the 200 accredited law schools in the United States by US News and World Report. It’s like 37 out of 200. So I was proud to say at the time it was the top 25%. So now I get into Miami and I go there. I graduate and I’m thinking lawyers are supposed to defend criminals in court. As a child, that’s all I ever saw on television. It’s rare except for maybe Erin Brockovich, but I was older. It’s about money in the movies. So I just pictured a lawyer, criminal defense attorney, and that’s what I did. I graduated, worked as a public defender, worked in a private law practice. And then after a few years, I’m thinking to myself, “This is not what I want to do.” I was in prisons and jail on a daily basis, dealing with the not nicest, best people morally on the earth. And after a few years, I got disgusted by it and I decided to find something else and end up doing insurance litigation. But that was the first part of my law career.

Chad Sands: Tell me about how you went from insurance litigation over to the plaintiff side.

Adam Shapiro: Some people don’t even understand the depth of that and how important that is, but it’s the opposite of your career. You’re doing the opposite.

Chad Sands: Right. And especially because you won a mock trial on both sides.

Adam Shapiro: Right. I was like, I never forgot that. I didn’t really run around telling people.

Chad Sands: Well, it was interesting that it was both sides though, and now you’ve also kind of done both sides as a career.

Adam Shapiro: That’s another good point. I do mention that on my website. I know what the defense is going to think and what they’re going to do and how they’re going to react before I even shoot the missile across the bow. It helps. It helps a lot. I know the buttons to push to get them to settle. I know what I would have needed in my report to write to the carrier for the money. So I give them what they need and it makes it easier for everybody. The original question was when I made the transition from insurance to plaintiff and that’s another great question. I came to New York. Fortunately, some of the carriers I was with in Miami all that time – we just talked about how I was in Florida – came back in ‘97. And I did a good job with some of the carriers in Miami, like Lloyds of London and it was Ford Motor Credit. So they gave me work in New York. So now I’m in New York working in Midtown, also doing some of the same work, but my friends are up my butt. They’re like, “You got to make the leap of faith. You got to quit your job,” I just got here from Florida, “and work with us and do plaintiff’s work.” They called it the “leap of faith” to switch sides. They warned me, well, they didn’t warn me, they tried to entice me with that disguise limit with the money, because there’s only so many hours you can bill in a day. And most defense attorneys bill by the hour, and there’s only so many hours you could bill. There’s a glass ceiling you’ll hit eventually. But with plaintiff’s PI, there’s no limit. It’s just whatever the case is about. After about six months of them writing to me to quit my job, and I just had a baby, that’s not a thing most people would do. I did. I made that leap. I switched. And I worked seven days a week for a year. had to get my income. I had no paycheck. And in the end, it was totally worth it, but extremely stressful.

Chad Sands: Talk to me about those stressful early years on the plaintiff’s side after making the leap. How did you fight through the struggle and find success?

Adam Shapiro: I think paranoia, insecurity, and just fear in general of living under a highway with my wife and my baby motivated me to do what? What did it motivate me to do? To work seven days a week for a year. I woke up, I went to work. And why? Because plaintiffs get paid at the end of the case. And when you just start a practice, you’re not getting paid from ends of cases because you don’t have any ends of cases. You have beginnings of cases. The money I take in today, say, is from last year’s work, because of all the work we did litigating discovery, they’ll call tomorrow and we’ll mediate and settle the case. It takes years of work in advance. I didn’t have that. So I was worried like, “What’s going to be my income?” So I kept a little bit of the hourly stuff and wasn’t getting a paycheck on Fridays, but I survived. I don’t know how I did it, to be honest with you. It was a long time ago. And I just know passion, fear, motivation, and hard work will get anybody through that leap of faith. But don’t do that leap and not be prepared to work your butt off. And someone also said, very important that they got me to quit my job, they said, “Can’t get rich working for someone else.” And there’s some truth to that.

Chad Sands: So I know you’re based out of New York. What do you think makes you unique about being a trial lawyer?

Adam Shapiro: Most people would just assume, “This lawyer is full of shit.” But that’s the thing. I’m not full of shit. I actually care about people and the clients could tell that I care about people and I’m very empathetic. I feel people’s pain. It’s not about the money, it’s about the people. They might be my friends and family. And when the case is settled and I do a good job and I return their calls, maybe that makes me exceptional too, which is shocking. That’s all they want. And when it’s all over, years later, they’re like “He did a good job and he called me back.” And I realized that if I do those things, I’ll survive and grow. That’s what I did. I just did a good job and called people back. And that’s not easy either. Like when you graduate law school, I always said to myself, you know, I don’t know if I’m a good lawyer, a bad lawyer, a decent lawyer, I don’t know. I haven’t competed. So I said to myself, if I don’t win at least 50% of the cases I work on over the next five years, I have no business doing this for a living. I think there’s people that still do anyway, but obviously I did it right. Here we are.

Chad Sands: I know it’s hard to choose one. You’ve been doing this for a long time, and again on the defense and the plaintiff side, but can you share a story about a case that had an impact on you and maybe how you practice law or work with clients?

Adam Shapiro: There was a dangerous intersection in Jackson Heights. It was near a school and it was between two highways. And people were constantly getting off one highway and flying down. I think it was Jackson or Roosevelt Avenue, flying down the street to get to the other highway a few blocks away. But there were two schools and a community center on those four blocks. So people were getting hit by these cars, severely injured for years. And then I get a phone call from a father whose daughter was ran over by one of these cars, was in the hospital unconscious, broke her hip, and he wanted me to represent her. And he told me it’s a dangerous intersection. It’s very dangerous and he wouldn’t give me the case unless I also promised to sue the city of New York. And I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t even know if there’s a case against the city, but sure, I want the case.” So I took the case. It turns out there was a very, very good case for a dangerous intersection against the city there. And it’s very, very hard to prove those cases. And the elements to prove them are extremely difficult. One of which is that they were on notice that it was a dangerous intersection. Element number one: that someone told them and they ignored it. So it turns out I did a FOIA request to the city and got about seven letters from seven people, certified mail sent over the past five years prior to the accident, complaining it’s a dangerous intersection. Two of them were councilmen helping the community. Right? The councilmen are almost employed by the city. I would say they’re on notice. We’re making complaints. So I get this file and I’m looking at all these complaints. I think, “This is great, it’s dangerous.” So I started getting into that. And in the end, just to cut to the chase, we won the case and they put a traffic light at that intersection, which is really all everybody ever wanted. And I made the neighborhood safer and I put up a big sign in the corner at a bodega. You know, I don’t want to put the light up. It’s not there anymore. But that was something that made me feel good, you know, because a lot of what we do and people don’t think about, is we make the world safer. Because they make fun of us, but if we didn’t bring claims, property owners, restaurants, nobody, airplanes, boats, ships, they wouldn’t make nothing safe. They don’t want to spend money to make it safe for you. They want to maximize their profits. And they’ll put in that traffic light up in the city. How many more people would have gotten ran over if that light wasn’t there? But it’s there now because someone brought a claim and said, “This is dangerous.” And just like tripping by a pool, there’s like slippery paint. You shouldn’t have slippery paint by a pool. You should have paint that’s not slippery. So now they’re using paint with sand in it around pools. Here’s another one that’s just happened. Chipotle down the block from here. One of my clients who lives in the neighborhood, she slipped and fell in a leaking black garbage bag in front of Chipotle at night and broke her ankle. Well, now they changed the law in Queens in the past six months that all the containers in front of the restaurants must be in plastic garbage bins, no more black bags. So I feel good about that. You know, that made me feel good. Didn’t really change me, but it kind of helped reinforce the perspective of the good we do.

Chad Sands: How about telling me a crazy story about a case?

Adam Shapiro: I had a client who was a very large obese person, and he lived in a four -story walk-up in the city. And once a month, he would call 911 because he had diabetes and he couldn’t walk down the stairs. He would get testiculitis, or an enlargement of his testicles, like extreme basketball size because of a fluid buildup. And he had to go to the hospital to simply have it drained. And this went on for years, no big deal, but he’s obese. One month comes along, he calls 911, and a different crew than who normally shows up, because he knows them, shows up and they don’t have a gurney to take him down the stairs. They have a piece of plywood and some rope. So they decide to put him on the plywood and a piece of rope to lower him down the stairs. And what do you think happened? They dropped him. He slid off the plywood, it’s not a gurney, and he landed on his face and his knees, and he got a hefty sum. Post always puts like little twists and stuff. So the headline was, “Fall Guy Sues for Hefty Sum,” but he’s gigantic. And I sued Sean Combs a few times, from a restaurant where the bouncer beat up my client. They settled that one. There’s a case against the Bronx Zoo. Many years ago, there was a sky ride in the Bronx Zoo. I don’t know if you’ve been on it. It was over the park, like a cable car. And it was built a long time ago. It was very, very high. So I had two clients who were in there one day who were pregnant and engaged. This ride broke and they’re stuck and it’s not moving. And she starts to panic and she’s pregnant, like eight months, and they can’t rescue them because it’s too high. Like they built this too high. They have to get a cherry picker ladder company from Westchester to come down to rescue them. It’s taking a while. So while they’re waiting, a thunderstorm comes and the people were trying to help them but they had to stop helping them. They had to go away. And now there’s lightning and there’s thunder, literally, and they’re up in a metal box. And I’m not joking, you read the article. They were over like the tiger area. So now the Post wrote that there were tigers circling underneath the cable car. I didn’t see that. I don’t remember hearing that. But she added that part. But there was a storm and there was lightning going on. They were stuck there. Finally, they got them out of there. And they each got six figures. Nothing was wrong with them other than psychological problems. The baby was fine. That was interesting stuff.

Chad Sands: Now, I know you probably can’t comment on it, but I’m going to ask you to share your thoughts. What about P. Diddy’s recent legal troubles? Any thoughts there?

Adam Shapiro: Yeah, he’s guilty. Next question. First of all, have you seen P. Diddy since this happened? The bottom line is, was this smoke, this fire number one? Number two is if you notice, there’s been a lot of evil people on this earth and over the past couple of years, all of a sudden they’re getting their up and comings. You can’t do these things. You can’t hurt other people and think you’re just going to be fine the rest of your life. Karma’s a bitch, number one. God is good, number two. He catches up to you. And to think what he did and continues to do, or Epstein or anybody else, that it wasn’t gonna catch up to them eventually is absurd. But that shows the depravity of their morals. They didn’t even care. Maybe they knew, but they didn’t care. Or their motivation. They knew there was a risk, but it meant that much to them. Either way, it’s sickening, it’s disgusting. Sean Combs has had a litany of problems. His company’s called Bad Boy Records. And when I sued him a couple of times, I asked him about that at the depot. Like, you aim to live up to your name. Like, he didn’t wanna answer that. And then this happens. He’s like Epstein. He’s got an island with girls somewhere. It’s crazy.

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 www.cloudlex.com.

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

Adam Shapiro: A lot of people have a very negative connotation of personal injury lawyers. But the bottom line is, you’re all a joke until you actually need one. God forbid something happens to you personally, or someone you care about. And then all of a sudden you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, how am I going to pay my bills? My dad’s not working. He doesn’t have a job and he’s crying in pain all day in the living room and he’s crying. What am I going to do?” And all of a sudden, we become important to people. But they’re still weary when they walk in the door because of the reputation. The bottom line is, I’m not like that and none of us should be like that. If somebody’s hurt, act like it’s your family member. Act like it’s someone you care about because you do. These people may be in your life the rest of your life. And if you do a good job and you do care about them, they see that. They see that you care about the way you speak and the way you act. It’s sincere and they can tell if it’s bullshit or not. And when you do that, they appreciate it and they deserve it. And they will call you back years later or send you their family and friends because of these reasons. It’s not so hard to care about people, but in today’s day and age, it goes way beyond law. Everyone seems to be selfish and concerned about what’s best for themselves. Where few people left on this earth get happiness from helping others, we need to spread that kindness around a little bit more. It’s not easy. And people who are kind often get beat up all the time. That comes with the territory. You know, it’s just keep your nose up, keep your chin up, and never stop till you get to the goal. And then you start again. That was me. I just think caring about people matters. A lot of lawyers will short sell the case. It’s worth a hundred. They’ll take 50 to run home and they’ll have to work and they’ll tell the client they did a great job. Besides being disgusting, that catches up to you after a while. They’ll talk to their friends, they might have another case, and they’ll find out who you were as a person. I don’t ever want that happening to me. It’s not going to.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Adam Shapiro, based out of Queens, New York. Thanks for sharing those stories Adam. To learn more about Adam and his firm, visit his website: shapirolawoffice.com Alright, I’m Chad Sands, thanks for listening, see ya 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 www.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 www.cloudlex.com/tlj to learn more.