Celebrating Justice

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Aug 2026

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Welcome to "Celebrating Justice," the podcast that shines a spotlight on top trial lawyers, their career and the cases that matter most. Each episode goes beyond the courtroom drama to gain insights into the personal journeys of each guest. From early inspirations and pivotal moments that steered them toward becoming trial lawyers, to the hurdles they've overcome in pursuit of justice, the podcast offers a unique glimpse into the dedication and perseverance required in the legal profession. Our episodes cover a wide range of topics, including personal injury, civil rights, medical malpractice, and much more. "Celebrating Justice" is produced not just for legal professionals but for anyone intrigued by the complexities of law and its impact on society. Whether you're drawn to the strategic gamesmanship of trial work or moved by stories of advocacy and reform, "Celebrating Justice" promises rich, informative, and truly inspiring content.

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August 14, 2026Episode 6425 min

Kate Feroleto

For years, the defense insisted the case was worth $10,000. Kate Feroleto believed her client — and the truth — were worth far more, and she spent four years proving it.Kate Feroleto did not have a single aha moment. She grew up inside the practice of law in Buffalo, New York — her father a plaintiff’s trial lawyer raised on the city’s West Side, her mother a defense attorney who later became a judge. She heard both sides of the coin at the dinner table, but what stuck with her was watching how deeply her father cared about his cases, and how he kept friendships with clients long after the matters had settled.Determined to build her own path, Feroleto started on the defense side rather than joining her father straight out of law school. It was deliberate: learn how insurers evaluate, deny, and minimize claims, then carry that knowledge to the plaintiff’s side — which is exactly what she does today at Feroleto Law PLLC, the Buffalo firm she now leads.What sets her apart is not a billboard (her face is on any), and she likes it that way. She calls herself an “extroverted introvert,” and for a long time she wasn’t sure you could be kind and also be a trial lawyer. Experience taught her the opposite: warmth with a client builds the trust that wins cases. She traces her analytical streak to childhood, when she was the one who wanted to know why the sink was leaking — the same instinct she brings to trucking and catastrophic-injury litigation, stepping back to trace where a system broke down months or even years before a crash.The case that captures all of it involved a 77-year-old client whose landlord repeatedly failed to fix a broken lock on her kitchen window. An intruder climbed through it and brutally attacked her. For years the defense valued the case at $10,000 and built a theory that blamed the victim’s own kindness toward her neighbors. Feroleto spent four years earning the trust of a woman from a generation that does not speak about trauma — until, sitting in her client’s living room, she heard the words that changed everything: “I trust you. I’ll testify.” One week before trial, the defense paid the full available policy.In her “Closing Argument,” Feroleto returns to that case to make a larger point for every trial lawyer listening — that kindness was never the weakness she once feared, but the very thing that built the trust to hold the line when it would have been easier to accept less.Key TakeawaysStarting on the defense side can teach a plaintiff's lawyer exactly how insurers evaluate, deny, and minimize claims.Kindness and warmth toward a client aren't a weakness in the courtroom — they build the trust that lets you hold the line.In trucking and catastrophic-injury cases, the real cause often traces back months or years before the crash itself.Preparing every case as if it will go to trial changes what the other side is ultimately willing to pay.A genuine personal relationship with a client can be the turning point that decides whether a case is winnable.Being human with your client and relentless with your opponent are not in tension — paired with preparation, they are a force multiplier.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

August 7, 2026Episode 6327 min

Boris Grushko

He was seventeen when a torn meniscus ended a professional soccer career in Ukraine — and put him on a plane to a country whose language he did not yet speak. Boris Grushko has been building on that improbable start ever since.Boris Grushko, a Brooklyn-based personal injury trial lawyer whose road to the courtroom ran through two arenas most attorneys never see: a professional soccer pitch and a Marine Corps boot camp. Grushko arrived in the United States at seventeen with little English, worked weekends as a busboy, and slowly found his footing before enlisting in the Marines out of a search for discipline and direction. Nearly four years of service, he says, gave him the perseverance, the organization, and the leadership that now shape how he prepares a case.The law itself came later, and largely through his sister — an accomplished tax attorney who became mentor, role model, and something like family after his parents stayed behind in Ukraine. Every decision she made with him, he says, was a positive one. Grushko tried on criminal prosecution and criminal defense, enjoying the latter for a full year, before a veteran solo practitioner named Robert Marcus showed him the craft of plaintiff-side injury work.What emerges across the conversation is a through line of care. Grushko is an extrovert by his own description, someone who can walk into a room and find common ground with almost anyone — a judge, a colleague, a client. He ties that ease partly to his own nature and partly to the perseverance the Marine Corps drilled into him: the strength to stand up, introduce yourself, and keep going whether or not it lands. That same discipline shows up in the small habits of his practice — clearing his desk and writing tomorrow’s notes before he leaves each night — and, he argues, in how he treats the people he represents. As he puts it, “you tend to represent people better with care.”He is candid, too, about the losses. Grushko walks through a bruising small claims matter where the law, as he read it, was on his side and the outcome still went the other way — a case where he put in hours of preparation, presented his evidence, and watched the court sympathize with the other party anyway. It taught him to adjust his approach, to sometimes absorb a setback, and to carry on with the plan of his day. Now practicing at Karasik Law Group, P.C., he treats each proceeding as a place to learn as much from difficult results as from favorable ones.Perhaps what stays with the listener most is where Grushko lands in his “Closing Argument,” a reflection on gratitude, opportunity, and what his adopted country made possible for a young man who arrived with almost nothing.Key TakeawaysDiscipline built outside the law — in sport, in the military — often becomes the foundation of a trial lawyer’s daily practice.Caring genuinely about clients is not soft; it is a competitive advantage that sharpens attention to their needs and details.The ability to find common ground with anyone in the room — judge, opponent, or client — is a skill worth cultivating deliberately.A loss you believe was wrongly decided can teach more than a win, if you use it to adjust your strategy rather than stew in it.Sometimes the right move is to absorb a setback with composure and carry on with the plan of your day.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

July 31, 2026Episode 6237 min

Denis Delja

As a kid, Denis Delja wanted to be a gunslinger — the man with no name who lives by his own code and always ends up fighting for the weaker guy against the bully or the land baron. He grew out of the cowboy stage, but never out of the ethos. Delja found his way to that fight through the courtroom. Raised in the San Fernando Valley on the classic Westerns of the 1950s and '60s, he was drawn to the figure who takes up someone else's cause — and later learned in law school that trial lawyers trace back to the champions people once hired to settle disputes by combat. He went to Yale Law School, then followed the well-worn track to a big corporate firm, doing litigation for companies like Monsanto and Visa. The salary was large and the actual courtroom work was nonexistent. A pro bono opportunity to co-chair a murder trial changed that; afterward, going back to managing document reviews felt impossible. He quit without another job lined up and crossed over to the plaintiff's side, drawn to the idea of representing a person he could actually know rather than a corporation. As he puts it, "For me, being a trial lawyer is the epitome of what it is to be a lawyer."Today he runs Delja & Delja | Injury Attorneys in Monterey with his wife, Tara — a deliberately small, home-based practice where clients work directly with the attorneys instead of a case manager. What makes the firm unusual is exactly that partnership: two lawyers who live, breathe, eat, and sleep their cases, trading strategy over dinner or on a walk, building a depth of understanding of each client that a volume shop simply can't match.It also produces results. Delja recounts the firm's first seven-figure case — one he took despite breaking his own "rule of three": never be the third attorney, never take a case more than three years old, never one with a file thicker than three inches. This one had all three. The client, a Gulf War combat veteran, had stepped through a rotted board on an apartment stairway and injured his knee, and prior counsel had been signaling to the insurer that they would never try it. With roughly five months to trial, Delja and his wife deposed the landlord and the workers who had repaired the stairway, lined up the medical experts, filed some fifteen motions in limine, and served a statutory settlement demand — moving fast enough that the insurer couldn't reassess a case it had undervalued for years. It settled five days before trial for a million dollars plus the client's costs. The lesson he draws is blunt: being genuinely ready to try a case, and having the other side know it, is what wins.But the segment that lingers is his "Closing Argument," where Delja steps away from strategy to talk about the emotional toll of this work — the case that first made him feel the weight of making a living from someone else's loss, and why he believes sharing in a client's grief, rather than guarding against it, is what keeps a trial lawyer from becoming the very stereotype the profession is accused of.Key Takeaways· Being genuinely ready to try a case — and having the other side know it — produces better settlements than any billboard ever will.· The "rule of three" (never the third attorney, never a case older than three years, never a file thicker than three inches) is worth breaking only when the client and the facts are compelling enough.· Moving quickly on a case can lock in an insurer's stale valuation before it has a chance to reassess the real risk of trial.· A husband-and-wife practice that lives and breathes its cases builds a depth of client understanding a high-volume shop can't replicate.· Aligning the lawyer's incentives with the client's — no billing by the tenth of an hour — changes how the work actually gets done.· Sharing in a client's grief rather than guarding against it is what separates real advocates from the ambulance-chaser stereotype.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

July 24, 2026Episode 6128 min

Jason Green

Jason Green never planned to be a trial lawyer. He grew up watching Perry Mason and LA Law with his father — a former civil rights attorney — and went to law school thinking he would practice law, not try cases. Then a mandatory first-year moot court competition changed everything. He entered because it was required, barely tried, and kept advancing until he reached the round of eight. That was the first inkling. The path, as he puts it, was chartered.What followed was a career built on a single conviction: prepare every case as though it will go to trial. Green spent more than a decade as a prosecutor, trying serious felony and death penalty cases, before crossing into civil law. He learned the defense side first — five years in insurance defense — and it taught him how insurers weigh a claim, where the levers are, and what moves them. But it also convinced him he was on the wrong side. Too many files crossed his desk where, in his words, he felt he wasn’t using his powers for good. He made a hasty exit, and, as he says, "ever since then I’ve been on the side of truth and justice."That prosecutorial bent is what Green believes makes him unique in the courtroom. Criminal trials in Georgia are often tried by ambush, with little of the discovery that governs civil practice, and he learned to think on his feet, to stay fearless, and to build a case from the first day it lands on his desk. Above all, he learned to let one thing guide him: "I’ve learned to let the truth of the matter be my North Star." Sift through the spin and subterfuge, he says, and the truth eventually gets you where you need to go.The episode moves through cases that have stayed with him. A capital arson trial in which five people died in a hotel fire, reconstructed piece by piece alongside the ATF. The Espinoza case — a working mother of three, sole caregiver for a bedridden husband, seriously injured in a T-bone collision and left with far worse deficits after she flatlined during a medical procedure. Green won by refusing to let the case be reduced to medical bills, showing instead the full human toll on a family that could not afford to lose. It is a tension he names honestly: the very facts that devastate a client are the ones a trial lawyer knows how to use. You are happy as an advocate and distraught for them as a human, all at once.Green now serves as Lead PI Attorney at Bader Law Injury Lawyers in Atlanta, representing plaintiffs in complex personal injury and wrongful death cases. In his "Closing Argument," he shares the case of a young professional fighter — struck by an Atlanta police detective while riding a dirt bike — whose career was sidelined for two and a half years, and how a trial-by-human approach turned a nuisance offer into a seven-figure verdict that let his client buy a home and start a nonprofit for troubled young men.· Building every case for trial from the first day it lands on your desk changes how you investigate, prepare, and negotiate.· Time spent on the defense side reveals how insurers evaluate claims — knowledge a plaintiff’s lawyer can turn to a client’s advantage.· Letting the truth of a case serve as your North Star keeps you oriented through subterfuge, spin, and shifting defenses.· The most persuasive cases are told through human toll, not medical bills — the daily, personal cost of an injury on a client and their family.· Fearlessness and quick thinking, forged under pressure, often matter more in the courtroom than any script.· A life-changing verdict can become a force multiplier, giving a client the means to rebuild and to lift others up.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

July 21, 2026Episode 6032 min

Alexis Bale

When Alexis Bale was eleven, her sister told her — not entirely as a compliment — that she was good at arguing and should become a lawyer. She took it as one. In Episode 60 of "Celebrating Justice," the "newer" (or young, how ever you'd like) trial attorney at Breit Biniazan traces a path that started early and kept accelerating: dual-enrollment college classes at sixteen, a bachelor's degree at nineteen, and law school at William & Mary before most of her peers had finished undergrad.Along a legal program advisor sat her down and said she was too young, that no law school would admit a nineteen-year-old, that she lacked life experience. For Bale, that became fuel.“Because you said I can't,” she recalls thinking, “that means it's absolutely gonna happen.” It's a posture that has shaped her career — the conviction that being underestimated is an advantage, not an insult. The episode moves through the turning points that gave her open-ended ambition its shape. During COVID, amid the social reckonings of 2020, she watched "Murder on a Sunday Morning" — the Academy Award-winning documentary about a fifteen-year-old wrongfully charged with murder — and felt a sense of justice consume her. She set out to be a public defender, interned in state and federal defender offices, then discovered plaintiff-side work through mock trial and the mentors who would become her bosses. Two sides of the same coin, she calls it: people who need representation and a voice, whether they sit as a defendant or a plaintiff.Today Bale handles sexual abuse cases at her firm, work she describes as critically important and genuinely exhausting — the vicarious trauma of carrying clients' stories, and the responsibility of telling them well. She is candid about the challenges of being a young woman in the profession, from elevator strangers assuming she's a paralegal to the quiet, persistent underestimation she has learned to laugh off and turn to her advantage. She would rather prove someone wrong, she says, ten times out of ten. “The perseverance you put in can really impact the outcome that you walk away with,” she says. That idea becomes the heart of her "Closing Argument," where she shares the story of a motorcyclist catapulted from his bike on a poorly marked construction road — a case the defense valued at four thousand dollars, right up until a prospective juror's offhand comment during jury selection changed everything, and a $1.3 million agreement materialized on the eve of trial.Key TakeawaysBeing underestimated can be a strategic advantage — it's better to walk into a courtroom and surprise people than to meet their expectations.Relentless follow-through, like repeated motions to compel, can pressure a defendant into a resolution that spares a client the trauma of trial.Criminal defense and plaintiff-side injury work are two sides of the same coin — both rooted in giving people a voice they might not otherwise have.Staying involved with the next generation of advocates, such as coaching mock trial, sharpens a lawyer's own creativity and courtroom storytelling.Trauma-heavy practice areas demand honest support systems and a safe place to process the vicarious weight of clients' stories.Knowing when to stop negotiating — and what it takes to reach the best outcome — matters as much as the willingness to keep fighting.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

July 10, 2026Episode 5923 min

Jason Doucette

Jason Doucette will tell you he doesn’t have a great origin story — no lawyers in the family, a pre-med track abandoned somewhere between organic chemistry and an intro-to-criminal-justice elective that happened to fit his schedule and happened to hold his attention. But origin stories, it turns out, are exactly what he’s built a career on telling.Now a Lead Trial Attorney at The Dominguez Firm in Los Angeles, Doucette has spent sixteen years — going on seventeen — building a practice around a simple, hard-won conviction: most trials are boring, and the lawyer who can make one interesting is the lawyer who wins. “If you can tell your client’s story in a way that is engaging,” he says, “then jurors will return verdicts that recognize the full extent of what they’ve lost.”That conviction didn’t arrive by accident. Doucette grew up in Montana on wrestling mats, then found his way to the Gerry Spence Method at Thunderhead Ranch — three weeks, no phone, no clock, nothing but the discipline of standing up cold and giving an opening statement you didn’t know you’d have to give. He supports The Moth, the storytelling nonprofit whose stage he’s yet to be called up to (he insists it’s just the luck of the draw). And he trains jiu-jitsu — a discipline he says shares DNA with trial work: you need a system that’s comprehensive, and a system that’s actually yours, because a lawyer who’s warm during jury selection and cold on cross reads as exactly what he is. Fake.The proof shows up in the verdicts. In Monterey County, Doucette and two co-counsel spent five weeks trying a case for a client electrocuted on a job site after a general contractor falsely certified that all energy sources had been locked out — a case against the world’s largest solar manufacturer, a company worth $22 billion. The jury came back with $46.8 million for the client and $4.5 million for his wife’s loss of consortium, with zero comparative fault assigned. It was, at the time, more than four times the highest verdict Monterey County had ever returned. A slip-and-fall case tried a couple of months earlier — pre-trial offer: $150,000 — ended in a $2.47 million verdict that grew to $3.7 million once an old settlement offer triggered interest. Between the two, Doucette picked up a nomination for CAALA Trial Lawyer of the Year and won the Gerry Spence Method's 2025 Alumni Civil Trial Warrior of the Year Award.None of it, he’ll tell you, came from racking up trial reps. It came from practice — the unglamorous, everyday kind. Which is exactly what he gets into in this episode’s "Closing Argument."Key TakeawaysThe lawyer who can make an inherently boring trial genuinely engaging is the one whose jurors return verdicts that reflect the full scope of what was lost.A trial system only works if it’s comprehensive enough to handle whatever the other side does, and consistent enough that jurors never catch you switching characters between jury selection and cross-examination.Sometimes the most persuasive move in a courtroom is restraint — moving evidence into the record without publishing it, and trusting jurors to go looking for it themselves.Career strength in trial work isn’t measured by the number of cases tried, but by what a lawyer does, every single day, in between them.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

May 6, 2026Episode 5828 min

Sarah Klein

The most powerful advocates are often born from the most painful experiences. Sarah Klein knows this better than most.A survivor of Larry Nassar’s abuse and a trial lawyer who has dedicated her career exclusively to child sexual abuse civil cases, Sarah brings a perspective to her work that is unlike almost anyone else in the legal profession.Sarah grew up in Lansing, Michigan, in the late 70s and early 80s — a world of unlocked doors and kids playing outside until dark. What started as an invitation to a gymnastics open house became a decade-long ordeal. By age eight, she was competing on a full team, training 40 to 45 hours a week. It was around 1988 that a young volunteer athletic trainer named Larry Nassar entered the gym — and Sarah’s life was never the same.The environment Nassar exploited was, as Sarah describes it, perfect for the scene of a crime. The head coach — who would later lead the gold-medal-winning “Fierce Five” at the 2012 Olympics — ran a culture of fear, aggression, and control. Nassar offered the opposite: warmth, snacks, kindness, and what felt at the time like real care. He was a constant presence for years, attending events and becoming what felt like family. Decades would pass before he was charged, pleaded guilty, and sentenced. The head coach, too, finally faced 24 counts of child abuse — before dying by suicide the day those charges were filed in 2021.Sarah attended Columbia University, spent time living and working in New York City, and ultimately pursued law — shaped in part by her stepfather, a Detroit judge who served on the bench for nearly 30 years. When she stood in court as Victim 125 in the Nassar case, she was already a practicing attorney. Though she couldn’t officially represent survivors in that litigation, she served as a vital intermediary — helping families and young survivors navigate an extraordinarily complex legal process in plain, human language.Today, Sarah is a trial lawyer at Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, a firm that handles nothing but child sexual abuse civil cases. Her experience as a survivor, she says, gives her skills that simply cannot be taught: “Being a survivor, having gone through a civil lawsuit myself brings a very unique set of skills.” She knows what it means to be entrusted with walking a client through arguably the worst thing that’s ever happened to them — and to leave them stronger for it.In this episode, Sarah shares a case that has stayed with her: a pediatrician who abused children under the guise of medical treatment for over 40 years, with parents present in the room, and institutions consistently failing to act. Her point is clear and sobering: “It doesn’t look the way you think it’s going to look.” Abuse isn’t in a dark alley. It’s dressed in a white coat, wrapped in trusted language, and sustained by institutional silence.She draws a striking parallel to other high-profile failures — Nassar, Epstein, Diddy — and makes the case that pedophiles do not operate in a vacuum. Governing bodies, the FBI, medical boards — all failed. Civil lawsuits, she argues, are one of the most powerful tools available to shine a light on those systemic fractures, hold institutions accountable, and return power to survivors who were silenced for years.In her “Closing Argument,” Sarah issues a direct challenge to every adult listening: identify the red flags, understand the recurring themes, and take responsibility. As she says, “It is not the child’s job to protect themselves. Children are not tiny adults. They are children and it is our job to keep them safe.”Key TakeawaysChild sexual abuse rarely looks the way people expect — perpetrators rely on grooming, trust-building, and institutional cover to operate in plain sight, sometimes with parents in the room.Civil lawsuits accomplish what criminal trials cannot: they expose the layers of institutional failure that allowed abuseThe Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

April 15, 2026Episode 5740 min

Robert Bilott

Rob Bilott never planned on any of this. He wanted to be an architect, maybe a city planner. It was his father — a retired Air Force officer who enrolled in law school chasing a dream of being Perry Mason — who nudged him toward the LSAT.He landed at Taft Law in Cincinnati in 1990 and spent eight years defending chemical companies. Then a West Virginia farmer named Wilbur Tennant called about dying cows, and everything changed.What followed was a nearly three-decade fight against DuPont that unearthed millions of pages of internal documents, helped establish the first federal drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS, and produced over $13 billion in settlements. It also became a New York Times Magazine cover story, a Mark Ruffalo film, and a memoir. But maybe the most striking thing about this conversation is how Bilott talks about the work — not as a crusade, but as a series of risks he kept deciding were worth taking. "If people can see these facts," he says, echoing the farmer who started it all, "things will change." He's still at Taft. Still pushing. And perhaps still a little uncomfortable being the one standing at the front of the room.Key TakeawaysA law degree opens doors you didn't know existedTime on the defense side is an advantage, not a contradictionModern discovery rules could bury the next big caseThe courtroom alone isn't enough — storytelling isPFAS is not a political issue — it's a public health oneThe Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

January 30, 2026Episode 5647 min

Mike "Pap" Papantonio

Mike “Pap” Papantonio didn’t set out to be a lawyer. He trained as a journalist, ready to chase revolutions abroad — until a conversation with the legendary Perry Nichols reframed the craft of trial work as storytelling grounded in literature, culture, and human truth. That idea stuck. So did Pap’s upbringing with working-class families across central Florida, people living paycheck to paycheck. It left him with a lifelong instinct to side with the underdog and, later, to build a career holding the most powerful institutions to account.In this wide-ranging conversation, Pap explains the decision that has defined his practice: using the same law license as everyone else, but choosing higher-impact fights — cleaning up ecosystems, taking bad drugs off the market, getting “mom and pop’s money back” when Wall Street steals it. He rejects volume for significance. The goal is scale — of harm, of remedy, of cultural impact.Mentorship runs through the narrative. From Nichols to Fred Levin, Pap learned that technical skill is necessary, but courage is decisive. “What holds lawyers back?” he asks. Too often, it’s fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of stepping outside the safe path shaped by credentials and country-club comfort. He contrasts the lawyer who sells “used cars” with the one who sells jets — harder, rarer, but transformative when it lands.Pap revisits origin moments in mass torts: the first PFAS trials in Ohio, early results that some mocked as too modest — until verdict by verdict the science and momentum became undeniable, catalyzing what is now the largest toxic-tort litigation in the country. He talks candidly about the opioid wars and the $75 billion in settlements that followed disclosure of damning internal documents. He is equally unsparing about institutional failures — especially a Department of Justice that, in his view, too often refused to prosecute white-collar crime.The conversation pivots to his novels — thrillers that read fast but educate quietly — including The Middleman, which indicts pharmacy benefit managers as “gangster” middlemen extracting kickbacks and inflating drug prices while hiding in plain sight. Corporate media won’t tell these stories, Pap argues, so trial lawyers have to.Finally, he shares a communicator’s toolbox — the “Five C’s,” the power of visuals, and the discipline of radical simplicity — illustrated with iconic ads from Coke, Nike, and Apple that moved people without a single wasted word.It all leads to his simple credo, the one that undergirds his firm’s culture at Levin Papantonio" do significant work that changes systems and lives, and the economics will follow. In his Closing Argument, Pap urges lawyers to overcome the fear of rejection and to align ambition with purpose — to “do well by doing good.”Key Takeaways (4–6)· The highest-impact plaintiffs’ work prioritizes cultural change over case volume — choose the bigger fight, not just more files.· Fear of rejection is the invisible limiter of legal careers; courage and teachability unlock growth.· Early, “small” verdicts can be strategic beachheads that build science, narrative, and momentum in mass torts.· Institutions often fail to police corporate wrongdoing — trial lawyers must surface documents, tell the story, and force accountability.· Clear, visual storytelling — distilled to essentials — persuades more effectively than long arguments.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn

December 16, 2025Episode 5532 min

Tanya Ortega

As a middle school track coach, she taught kids to breathe on the back stretch and relax their arms on the far turn. They won. More importantly, they believed in themselves. Years later, a worn-down client sat across from her and, in a quiet handshake, asked a different question: Can I trust you? Ortega heard what wasn’t said and took an oath to care. That moment — that feeling — became her compass.She describes the years spent “living someone else’s expectations,” checking feelings at the door, and chasing success by template. The turn came at Thunderhead Ranch, where the Gerry Spence Method demands lawyers first confront their own pain. Why? As Ortega puts it, "How can we sit in the ashes of someone else’s pain if we’ve never faced our own?" In that work, the scars she once hid became superpowers. Community followed, then craft — trial as an act of human connection, plain language over performance, a conversation with jurors rather than a lecture.Her defining case — the road to Spence’s Civil Trial Warrior of the Year — centered on Mr. Curry, a sheriff’s deputy and pillar of his community who suffered a life-altering brain injury, neck surgeries, and dystonia after a head-on collision. Ortega left her firm, built her own practice, and bet everything on doing the case the right way. Nineteen defense experts. Endless motions. Delays engineered to exhaust a solo shop. Still, she and a small team pressed on, learned the science, found the story, and tried the case. The jury listened. Justice followed.Why fight this hard? Because, Ortega says, settlement mills often leave clients on the “dirt track” even when they can afford the stadium track — and clients live with the pain long after the check clears. “Because when the money runs out, the pain will still be there…” That’s why she treats each client like family and why she insists on real healing — not just diagnoses but specialists, treatment, and dignity.Ortega’s path is personal, too. Her family’s loss informs how she shows up for others. It also fuels her view of what makes a trial firm different: relentless investment of time, spirit, and resources to secure full justice.In her "Closing Argument," Ortega reframes the job entirely: it’s never about the trial lawyer. It’s about listening to the client, then answering the jury’s real questions — the waiting-room questions: How bad is it? Will he be okay? What does this mean for his family? And it’s about honoring the sacrifice of teams and families who make the work possible. The calling, she says, is a life in service of others — lifting chins, pulling back shoulders, helping people believe in themselves again.Learn more about Tanya at The Ortega Firm.Key TakeawaysReal trial craft starts with courageously examining your own pain so you can truly sit with a client’s.Jurors don’t want jargon; they want clear “waiting room” answers that speak to human stakes.Building a case means investing time, spirit, and resources — not defaulting to a settlement template.The right trial team and community are lifelines when the defense tries to delay, overwhelm, and exhaust.Healing matters alongside verdicts: connect clients with specialists and care that improve quality of life.Purpose beats business models — full justice endures long after the money is gone.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai.TLJ InstagramTLJ YouTubeTLJ LinkedIn