Show Notes

In this episode of “Celebrating Justice,” trial lawyer Craig Murphy of Murphy & Murphy Law Offices shares his inspiring journey to becoming a successful trial lawyer despite having no initial connections to the legal world.

He recounts how his determination and strong underdog mentality set him on a path to law. Initially practicing family law and then insurance defense (working as the Major Case Unit Trial Attorney for the State of Nevada for the Travelers Insurance), Craig’s diverse experience on the opposing end gave him a comprehensive understanding on how to build a personal injury case. Craig recalls two of his most memorable cases, including a slip and fall case against Walmart, where meticulous, persistent documentation earned him the nickname “Mr. Supplement.” His other case involves a chef whose serious injuries from an accident nearly left him homeless, and Craig shares how he leveraged a chance incident on the defensive to win a substantial settlement for his client.

In his “Closing Argument,” Craig reflects on his firm’s motto: “Winning is no accident.” He believes that the key to success is putting in hard work and being willing to take time to build a solid foundation for a case, practicing relentless dedication to the client’s cause.

Chapters

1:18 – Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
5:28 – What makes you unique?
8:50 – A case that matters.
12:38 – Craig’s “Closing Argument”

Takeaways

Winning is no accident: Winning cases requires dedication, hard work, and a determination to do what is necessary.
Having an underdog mentality and putting in the necessary practice can help overcome limitations and achieve success.
Making the decision to pursue a career in law and taking the necessary steps to achieve that goal is important to avoid future regrets.
Working on the defense side can provide valuable insights and knowledge about the personal injury practice.
Building a strong foundation for each case and being willing to fight and put in the necessary hard work for the underdog is crucial in personal injury law.

Transcript

[Theme Song Plays]

Craig Murphy: This part is, at least for me, kind of interesting because for some reason when I was very young, I just decided that I would be an attorney. And I have no idea how I decided that I was going to be an attorney, especially at a young age. No one in my family was an attorney. I didn’t know any attorneys. Didn’t have any relatives or friends that were attorneys. My dad was an electrician, but I just decided that for some reason I would be an attorney. One of the other things that kind of led me, at least I believe, to become an attorney is that I had sort of this underdog mentality that I was always for the underdog because when I grew up, I was always this little skinny puny kid. I didn’t have any talent. I was very uncoordinated. But back in the day, if you wanted to have friends and do things, you had to play sports. Being uncoordinated and a puny little kid really didn’t get me into being in the sport. So what I did is I practiced. I practiced for hours and hours and hours, not to be good, but just to be able to get out there on the field and hang with everybody. People would say, “He’s an overachiever” because I did things that they didn’t expect. But they didn’t know the hours and hours of practice that I did just to get out there. But that kind of was my mentality and it built my work ethic. After graduating from college, I went to work and I worked for almost 10 years. And I just finally got to the point where I sort of said to myself, “If I don’t go to law school and try to be an attorney, I don’t want to get into my adult life and face either myself or my kids and say, you know, ‘I always wanted to be an attorney, but I never tried to do it,’” and to have that disappointment. So I just decided if I went to law school and I didn’t like being an attorney, I could do anything. You know, back then we didn’t have Uber or Lyft. I could be a taxi driver, I could dig ditches, or I could be a lawyer. But if I was digging ditches or being a taxi driver and all of a sudden I decided I wanted to be a lawyer, there’d be no way to do it. Back then, I was either very naive or just really stupid because I just signed up for the LSAT and I took it. I didn’t do any prep course. I didn’t do any studying. I just went and took it. Today, I would know that if I was going to do that again, I would be taking courses and doing all this prep. But my grades were good enough that I got accepted into numerous law schools and eventually went to law school and became an attorney because really I just didn’t want to give up and have to admit someday that I didn’t do what was necessary to do what I thought I wanted to do.

Chad Sands: It wasn’t until like your early 30s that you decided, “I’m doing this and I’m going to law school.”

Craig Murphy: Yeah, I got out and went from college and I went and worked in various businesses. Back then, you’re young, you’re kind of working in menial jobs. It wasn’t making a lot of money, but I was, you know, making enough to get by. I finally just decided, look, you know, it’s time to get serious. And like I said, I just didn’t want to have that in the back of my mind to get to the point where I would have to admit that I never really did anything to find out if I could be a lawyer. As I said, it was always in the back of my mind. I just decided that it was time to grow up and get serious with life.

Chad Sands: Do you ever think back to those years or that moment where you made the jump into becoming a trial lawyer and in some alternate universe, what if you didn’t? And what if you stayed what you were doing, where you’d be at?

Craig Murphy: I haven’t thought that much because I really didn’t have any direction when I was working when I was young. But I’ll tell you, there was one instance that I think back on and I tell people about it all of the time is that the best job I ever had in my life was the worst job that I ever had. When I first went to college, my dad, again, an electrician, he told me, “You got to go into business. You got to study economics. You know, those are the people that make the money.” I went to college and I was taking accounting and calculus and economics, and I was horrible at math. That was not my thing. And I was basically flunking out of college and it was no big deal. And I got a job that first summer working in a bus factory as a United Auto Worker building school buses. I worked what was called the “third trick.” Basically, I went in at six or seven o ‘clock at night and got off at three o ‘clock in the morning. I was making really good money. I was making as much money back then just being a 19 year old kid as adults were making as a UAW worker. And I hated that job so bad that I decided I was going to go back to college and I wasn’t going to quit. And my dad was so thrilled. He was like, “Take whatever courses you want. I don’t care if it’s business. You just take whatever you want. You just gotta get that sheepskin.” That’s what he called it. And so I went back and I kind of took a liberal arts major, you know, I at least graduated from college. But the thing that I look back on is that that job, just, it wasn’t suited for me. And I found that going to college and getting out and working and eventually going to law school was much more suited to my temperament than being a manual laborer.

Chad Sands: You first got into law school and were an attorney, you worked on the defense side. Tell me a little bit about that.

Craig Murphy: I started off in Las Vegas. I went to work with a firm. You start off, you go in and you meet all of the partners and they say, “What do want to do?” I said, “I want to be a trial lawyer. I want to be in court.” That’s what I always thought a lawyer did, is they were in court. And they said, “That’s great. We got the perfect position for you. We’ve got two partners. And if you want to get into court, we will get you into court.” And so these two partners did primarily family law. So all of a sudden I was a family law lawyer and it was interesting. I was sworn in to the bar on a Friday. They had a swearing in ceremony. The next Monday morning, they sent me to court. So I got into court all of the time. It just was that family law after a while was not what I really wanted to do. The biggest problem that I ever had in my life back then, because I was single and I had three dogs, was I would get home and they had dug up all my sprinkler system in the backyard and built this big mud pool. So I’d have to wash them all off every day. And then, you know, I would get in and have all of these people’s marital problems and family problems. And just after a while, I was like, it was wearing me down. And I told the partners and they kind of gave me some other cases to do, but I’d built up my practice in that regard. So they either needed me to help them with their cases or I was getting cases coming in on my own. And finally, I thought that the only way to get out of it was I basically jumped ship and I went to work for an insurance defense firm and I worked with them for a number of years and kind of learned really the personal injury side of the practice from the insurance defense side. I really got a good insight of how they evaluate the cases, what they do to build them, just the whole practice. And eventually I went to work for the Travelers, was appointed as the major case unit trial attorney for the state of Nevada.

Chad Sands: So a lot of personal injury attorneys in Las Vegas and a lot of glamour and a lot of dazzle, right? I love Vegas to stand out. How do you stand out in Vegas? What makes you unique in that town?

Craig Murphy: There’s a number of things that, as you said, it’s kind of glitzy and showy and flashy. And anybody that goes to Vegas who’s not from there, or if you live there for that matter of fact, in Vegas, anywhere you drive, you’re going to see a million billboards for lawyers all over the place. You’re going to get bombarded with television commercials for lawyers 24 -7 all of the time. The thing with those firms is, you know, they’re working on volume. You’ll call and you get with an intake person and then you get with a caseworker and then you get shuffled around to various people. My practice is much smaller. I’m a solo practitioner. When you call my office, you’re going to talk to my assistant. You’re going to talk to me. When you call, we recognize your voice. We know exactly what’s going on in your case. You’re going to have a personal relationship with us. And again, it’s not a high volume practice, but it’s a serious practice. And our practice is a practice where if the case needs to go to trial, we’ll prepare it for trial. We’ll take it to trial if we have to. I always tell my clients from the beginning, what you have to do is you have to build the foundation for the case. Again, I learned early on from the defense side what a lot of plaintiffs’ attorneys failed to do to build their case that weakened them. I kind of built my practice around going out and doing the daily things that are necessary to build a case and doing kind of the grunt work, the hard work and the non-glamorous, glitzy type of things that are necessary to build a case because you can’t get a good resolution, a good settlement of a case on your knees. You can’t be in a defensive posture. The way that you’re going to get a good settlement is you’ve prepared your case and that the insurance company knows that you’re ready, willing and able to go to trial. And then they’ll come to the bargaining table and you’ll get a full and fair settlement for your case. And if not, then you take it to trial and see what the jury says. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re wrong. The defense doesn’t always get it right. And I certainly don’t. But after almost 35 years of practice, you get a pretty good idea of how things are going to turn out. And again, as long as you’ve done the work, usually you can get a fair settlement of the majority of cases.

Chad Sands: After those 35 years, Could you share a story about a case that really had an impact on you?

Craig Murphy: Yeah, there’s a couple of cases that I would say have had an impact on me. First one was a slip and fall case against Walmart. When you have a case against Walmart, I’ll tell you, they fight those things tooth and nail. You are in for a battle. The first thing that they do is they remove it to federal court. Then they stonewall you. If you want to get discovery, if you want to get the documents or the video of the event or their policies and procedures or whatever you need to build the foundation of the case, they’re going to fight you. And you have to be willing to write the letters, document the file, show every attempt that you’ve made to be reasonable to get it. Then you have to file a motion and take it in front of the federal magistrate and if necessary, then in front of the federal judge and get an order for them to produce it. It’s just what you have to do. And in this particular case, I decided that I wanted this case because my client was seriously injured at Walmart. I wanted this case to be front and center in front of the defense attorneys. Every week, I did something on that case. I called the lawyers. I sent them a letter. I sent them an email. I sent a discovery request. But mostly what I did is I supplemented the evidence. If my client went out and got a prescription and had a $5 copay, bam, I supplemented it. I supplemented the record with evidence all of the time. And the Walmart attorneys started making fun of me. They called me Mr. Supplement. It wasn’t because I was in good shape and I was taking, you know, the muscle milk and the supplements. No, it was because every two weeks, I was supplementing the record. And so they thought it was hilarious. Mr. Supplement. Here’s Mr. Supplement again. But I went about and I supplemented the records. I built the evidence. I took depositions. I did everything that I needed to do. And it eventually went into a mediation. We’re going back and forth for hours. And finally, the mediator comes in and says that the Vice President of risk management, or whatever they called their department, who had flown in from Bentonville on the private jet, wanted to meet with me personally. And the mediator wanted to know if that was okay. And I’m like, sure, you know, I’ll talk to them, whatever they want to do. And so I go and I’m talking to this VP and she says, “I want to know why you haven’t accepted our last offer.” She said, “This is more money than we have ever offered anybody in a slip and fall case that has not gone to a jury verdict. And I want to know why you will not take it.” And I said, “Well, I can tell you why. It’s because that amount is not enough to fairly compensate my client for the injuries that she has.” And she kind of huffed and puffed. And I said, “It’s just not fair.” So the mediator separates us and sends us back to our respective rooms. And we negotiate for a couple more hours. And we got to a full and fair resolution of that case. And I can tell you those lawyers were not making fun of me anymore.

Chad Sands: Mr. Supplement.

Craig Murphy: Yeah, they can still call me Mr. Supplement all they want. But when you get the last laugh, justice was served for my client in that case. There’s one other that stands out and I represented this really nice guy. He had a very significant injury. The defense had offered $200,000 to him, and we rejected it because his medical bills were well over $300,000. If he were to accept that, he would be in the hole. Like I said, the guy was a super nice guy. He was a cook and a chef. He eventually got his dream job in this restaurant as the head chef, but his injuries were so bad that he ended up not being able to do the job and they terminated him. And he was basically homeless at the time that we went to trial. The defense attorney was convinced that they were gonna win this case in trial. He would tell me every time there would be a break, “You’re going down, you know, it’s like, it’s not going well for you.” One point he comes over and my client and I are sitting at the table during the break and he comes up and he says, “I want you to know that the carrier has said that they are still willing to pay that $200,000.” And he goes, “You know, you wanna take it.” And my client, I told him that at some point in time, they would probably come and offer us more money. I thought it would be more than the $200,000, but we decided if it wasn’t at a certain amount, we would tell him no. And this was clearly well below what we had said. So we turn it down. And so he turns to my client and he says, “I want you to know when we win this trial, we are going to garnish your wages and we’re going to get an award of our attorney’s fees and costs and we will go after you and blah, blah.” And I finally said, “Look, dude, don’t you ever talk to my client again. You have anything to say, you say it to me in private and we’ll say it out in the hall, but don’t ever talk to him again.” And one of the main things that they did is they tried to basically paint my client as the serial litigator. You know, they never come out and say it, but there’s all this innuendo that’s going on. During my client’s career as a cook and a chef, he had had three workers comp claims. One time he slipped and fell inside of a walk-in freezer. One time he had cut his finger or his hand and needed to get five stitches. And the other time he cut his finger. Each time he had to report it and they filled out a form and it was basically a work comp thing. Well, during the closing argument, the defense attorney had this big chart, this big fancy pants chart and he had this plastic cover over it that he had to put these clips on. And one of the clips, when he was putting it on, slipped somehow and it snipped his finger and he started bleeding. So he goes over to his trial bag and he puts a bandaid on it and comes back and he makes all this argument that basically my client shouldn’t be awarded anything and goes and has a seat. So my rebuttal, the first thing I got up, I was like, “Did you see that? Did you see that right there? He just went and put a bandaid on his finger. If my client, if he would have done that at his job, his job required him to report that. And that would have been another work comp claim. And they’re trying to make it right. You saw a work comp claim there right in front of you. And that’s just as serious as my client’s claims were.” So it was one of those perfect things that somehow, you know, I could defuse the whole thing. And the jury was sort of laughing about that. So I believe they were on our side and they came back with a verdict that was way more than the $200,000 that they offered. And the defense attorney was just shocked that he didn’t win. But the interesting thing was after the verdict was read, my client looks at me and he says, “What happened? What did they say?” He said, “My heart was beating so loud I couldn’t hear anything.” He goes, “Did we win?” Those are two that just kind of stand out in my mind because they were just interesting how different the defense looked at the case than the way that I did.

Chad Sands: It’s almost a scene from a movie. You couldn’t script it better where this defense attorney is on your ass all the time. And then in this moment where he thinks he’s going to get the win, you know, cuts himself and actually gives an opening. What a scene.

Craig Murphy: Well, one of the other things that he did is he thought that the jury wasn’t going to award anything. First, he said they shouldn’t award anything at all, but if they did, it should be around $16,000. First, I was talking about him cutting myself and I said, “And look at this chart.” I went up and I ripped it off of this board and I wound it up into this ball and I threw it into the trash can. And I basically said, “Look at what they’ve done.” It was basically, if you believe what they’ve told you in this case, then yes, just kick it like a soccer ball. You know, just give them the $16,000. But I said, “If you believe and the evidence absolutely proves what the injuries were and what the damages are, you have to award 100% of this because you can’t let them come in here and say all these things about this man and not compensate him fully and fairly.” They basically came back with almost exactly what we asked. Once it was over, the next couple of days were like, man, I wish I would have gotten that chart out and brought it home instead of throwing it away. I would have loved to have framed it and given it to my client. But what I did is I framed the jury verdict for it, and that was even better.

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Now here is this episode’s closing argument.

Craig Murphy: One of the things that’s very important to me and sort of practical is my firm’s motto is “Winning is no accident.” Winning is the result of being willing and the unending fight on behalf of the underdog. Because the people that are injured through no fault of their own typically are just normal working class people. And they’re up against these insurance companies and corporations and hotels and casinos that are the largest, richest, most profitable companies in the world. And their goal is to either pay nothing or as little as possible. They don’t want to pay what’s fair. Their job for their adjusters is to keep as much money as possible. If they can get away with paying nothing, they’re going to pay nothing. If they can get away with paying pennies on the dollar, they’re going to pay pennies on the dollar. And they’re going to grind people to a nub. They’re going to try and steamroll them. And they need an advocate. They need someone to stand up for them. Because if they don’t, those companies have absolutely no hesitation to pull the rug out from under them and give them nothing. And a lot of times what their tactic is, is to deny the claim and then delay it, put it into litigation and defend it and stretch it out until those people get so desperate that they have to take the pennies on the dollar. They don’t have somebody fighting for them. They are going to get steamrolled every time. And so when I say winning is no accident, it is the result of really, the dedication to the cause. You got to believe in your client. You got to know that their lives are important. What has happened to them is important. They need to know someone’s got their back and that someone really cares. The other thing that is really important, you have to have somebody that’s willing to get into the fight and do what’s necessary to get the evidence, hold the defendant’s feet to the fire, to make them produce the videotapes that they don’t want to produce, produce their policies and procedures that they violated that they don’t want to voluntarily give to you. You have to just be willing to grind it out. You have to do the day in, day out, hard work – the stuff you don’t see on TV – to build the case. And every day you got to do something. You put one brick in the foundation at a time. And if you don’t know how to do it or you’re unwilling to do it, you’re going to have that weak foundation. But if you build a strong foundation, you’re going to be able to do it. And it’s through skill and experience and just that determination to do what is necessary. We know that our cases are very important to our clients and we want to make a difference in their lives. It is something that again, you just have to be willing to go out there knowing that what happens makes a huge difference in your client’s life and that winning cases, winning is not an accident.

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.