Denis Delja

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Denis Delja: This is the most amount of money that I’ve ever seen but didn’t want… I mean, one of the things that was the greatest thing from leaving the defense work that I’ll never do again is bill time… It was the first time that I ever felt ghoulish about the job that I was doing….

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice,” presented by the Trial Lawyer’s 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 www.triallawyersjournal.com. Now, here’s your host, Editor of TLJ and VP of Marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: And take me back to the beginning and tell me the story about why you wanted to become a trial lawyer.

Denis Delja: Well, when I was little, really little, what I wanted to be was a cowboy. Okay. And and live on the plains. But when I started to become old enough to want a real job, had always wanted to be a lawyer. But I I grew up on a steady diet of the classic westerns, the fifties and sixties, classic westerns like the “Magnificent Seven,” the original version with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen. Steve —

Chad Sands: Steve McQueen.

Denis Delja: McQueen, absolutely, classic Steve McQueen. So so my my dad kind of really got me into that. So I grew up watching the classic Westerns and I and I liked the idea of the gunslinger and the the idea of the guy who’s the man with no name living by his own moral code, but always ends up fighting for the the weaker guy against the the bully or the land baron. And and so that was s sort of the the ethos that I wanted to to live as a kid. And then it turns out, you know, when I get to law school, we’re learning about the history of trial lawyers. And it stems back from the days when people used to settle legal disputes by fighting trial by combat. And eventually they started to hire fighters champions who would fight against somebody else’s higher champion. And so it just tied back to that original idea that I had as a kid of wanting to. To fight on behalf of somebody for a cause. And for me, being a trial lawyer is the epitome of what it is to be a a lawyer. My brother is a transactional attorney, and I know he’d probably take offense at me saying that, but for for me, being a trial lawyer is really what it meant to be a lawyer. And so I had always wanted to be a lawyer, really, since I was a kid and grew out of my cowboy stage.

Chad Sands: Did you grow up on a ranch or like —

Denis Delja: No, I grew up in Southern California, the suburbs. I’m I’m not a real cowboy, I just like the Westerns and and the idea of them. The the story of the Westerns and going back to you know the ideas of the knight errant and the person who fights pursues their their personal life’s journey and mission and in the course of that helps other people along the way.

Chad Sands: Yes, the magnificent — “Magnificent Seven,” as you said, and also I always reference the “Seven Samurai” —

Denis Delja: Right. Yeah, the original.

Chad Sands: who who kind of come into the village, right, and get to know the villagers and then stand and fight for them. So that’s very much kind of part of what you believed in growing up and and why you really wanted to become a lawyer. So did you know in law school that yeah, it was gonna be plaintiff or did you know that you just wanted to be in a courtroom and that maybe he was gonna be on the defense side too?

Denis Delja: I just knew that I wanted to be in the courtroom. And I ended up following the track in law school that a lot of people do, which is to go to a big corporate law firm. They make it really easy. They come to campus, they interview you, they fly you out to whatever city you want to be in, they you in a nice hotel, they wind you and dine you and offer you a nice back in those days, really really big salary. And so I started out at a big corporate law firm doing litigation. But representing companies like Monsanto and Visa and big, big corporations that really were going after the little guy. And I wasn’t really doing any trial work for actual clients. You know, I was writing memos, pushing paper, wasn’t even taking depositions. So I got the opportunity to do some pro bono criminal defense work at the law firm. And I was actually able to co-chair a murder trial. And after that experience, it was really impossible to be able to go back to doing what I was doing for the big corporate clients where I was managing document reviews. And I decided I needed to I needed to follow follow what I really wanted to do all my life and be a be a trial lawyer. So I decided that. The plaintiff’s side was probably going to give me the best opportunity to do that. And what also was appealing to me about plaintiff’s work was the idea of representing a person, an individual, and not a corporation, to have an actual client, somebody that I could know and learn about and form a relationship with. So I I quit the w without a job. And I remember I had to go talk to the the head of litigation. And he was, you know, asking me what my plans were. And I said, I I don’t have a job yet. And he said, “That’s that’s really risky.” And you know, I was young and dumb and and I you know knew that it was, but I figured it would all work out and it did. And ended up working at a a plaintiff’s law firm in DC, where I’d started out my legal career. And I was working there until I decided that it was no I want to come back to California.

Chad Sands: So you started out in DC and you’re originally from Southern California, but I also see you went to Yale and I think you’re the first Ivy Leaguer I’ve had on the podcast over 60 episodes. What was Yale law school like? And were you kind of like that you wanted to go to Ivy League in terms of law school and you got in and it was everything you dreamed of? Or tell me a little bit about the Yale law school experience?

Denis Delja: In terms of going to law school, I knew I wanted to go. And I so I applied to try to apply to all the best schools, the top top ranked schools, just because, you know, why not? And I naturally was a competitive person and thought, you know, let’s let’s just go for it. So I got into my undergraduate where I went to s undergraduate school is Loyola Marymount University. They have a law school. I got into Loyola, they offered me a full scholarship. And I also got into Yale. There was another student from Loyola who had gone to Yale, the first student from Loyola who had gotten into Yale Law School. Met with him. My political science advisor connected us and said, you know, why don’t you talk to him? He ended up writing a letter of recommendation for me. And I got in, met with my political science professor, and I Look, I’ve got a full scholarship here to Loyola. And he’s he told me a story, his personal experience was that he always regretted going to the college that for political science, his his master’s degree, to the school that offered him the best deal instead of the school that was the best school. And so he discouraged me from doing that. And so I took took on the adventure, drove across country. I had never been to New Haven or to Yale. I hadn’t visited it. First time. There in the city when I was when I moved in. It was an interesting experience. There’s a lot of interesting, very different people there that have gr gone on to do everything from I had a classmate who was national security advisor to Biden. And I had a classmate who was charged with seditious conspiracy as part of the J6 riots and just had his sentence commuted by President Trump and everything in between. Mayors. judges and I ended up being a broken body lawyer. And there’s times in my life where I’ve c you know fallen into the trap of comparison and and looking at what other people did with their law school degree and, you know, could could I have done something different, could I have done something, you know, more. Yeah. But I have really, especially in the last 10 years or so of my my career, really come to appreciate that I’ve of living a life of my own direction. And now ultimately culminating with starting my own law firm with my wife, who I met at the personal injury law firm that we were at before. And to now have the freedom to choose the cases that I want to work on, to live my life with the being my own boss. Yeah. So it’s been I I wouldn’t make any different life choices.

Chad Sands: Yeah, in some parallel universe, right? Where maybe you played the Yale law book a little bit more true to the book and didn’t go, you know, into plaintiff’s work in DC and went into politics or something else, you might have some other career, but not have met your wife or as you mentioned, started your own firm or living the life you’re living right now. And so so you did start your career in DC though. So you graduated Yale and stayed on the East Coast, worked on some civil did some civil litigation for corporations and then jumped to the plaintiff’s side and then ultimately decided, “Hey, I wanna go back west” and you set up your own shop in Monterey.

Denis Delja: Decided I want to go back to California. So I moved, quit the job I had in DC at a plaintiff’s firm, moved to California without a job, and was just interviewing with plaintiffs law firms, boogie boarding by day, was living in Manhattan Beach. Okay. Boogie boarding by day, and then hoping that something would work out. Eventually it did. I found a a job with a personal injury law firm, did a combination of personal injury and plaintiffs class action, but all plaintiffs work. Eventually, unfortunately, that firm, the had some financial troubles and they collapsed. So I found another plaintiffs personal injury firm. And one of the things I was learning about plaintiffs the plaintiff side is that it’s a lot more wild west and on your own in terms of being having to be self-sufficient, self-reliant. It’s not like the corporate side where you have institutions and a whole system in place to make sure that that you’re financially taken care of, but at a cost. I ended up finding another plaintiff’s law firm in LA where I was, you know, doing the plaintiff’s work, but it was the commute was really killing me. And —

Chad Sands: Hadn’t beat.

Denis Delja: I was going, I was driving from Manhattan Beach to the west side past Santa Monica, and it would take me an hour at least in the morning, sometimes an hour and a half to two hours at at in the evenings to get home. Yeah. And so on top of the work, it was just the grind was was just too much of the commute. The work was great. Then I found Monterey. there was a law firm in Monterey that was hiring. I applied, got in to the firm, moved up here, and I was with this firm for about eight years. And then the original founder of the firm stepped back, he retired, his his kids son and daughter took over the firm and it just went in a different direction than I really wanted to be a part of. So my wife and I said, you know, we can do this on our own. We know how to handle cases, handle cases really well. We don’t know the business side of it. We don’t know how to bring in cases, but we’ll learn. And so two about two years ago, we we broke off, started our own firm after taking a little bit of a sabbatical just to recharge our batteries. And I’ll tell you that there is a big element of emotional work that comes with this job that you probably have heard about. And so we took some time to recharge our batteries and then started up and things have been going better than we could have could have hoped.

Chad Sands: Do you think part of that not only the emotional toll of you know being a plaintiff’s lawyer and and working in a law firm with injured people coming in every day, do you think maybe just the grind of the four five or LA and that whole world maybe took a toll too in Monterey and the pace of life might have been, you know, also something that you were looking for?

Denis Delja: Yeah, definitely. LA is where I grew up. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Okay. But it it definitely was the life was a grind on top of the work. Just the commute. You know, living living near the beach is great. And so I lived for my weekends, but the toll of the commute and the work during the day of the week, during the days of the week, it was just it wasn’t worth it. And so Monterey has been a nice quality of life in terms of access to nature, to Big Sur, to we’re cl we’re close enough to Yosemite that we we traveled to Yosemite a lot. In fact my paralegal painted that you can’t don’t know if you can see it, that that thing of El Capitan, the painting of El Capitan. my wife and I, we got married in Yosemite. So Monterey, we we really like it. It was the decision to start our own firm was really mostly to do with the how the firm that we were at had changed. And the focus wasn’t really as much about the individual clients. It was leading to, I think, just a system that that wasn’t serving the clients in the way that I wanted to. And it was it wasn’t giving me the freedom that I was looking for when I started doing plaintiffs’ personal injury work. I mean, one of the things that was the greatest thing from leaving the defense work, and then I’ll never do again, is bill time. I mean, the idea of doing work and then having it on top after you’re done with your work, go back and record what it is you did down to the tenth of an hour. I’ll I’ll never do that again. Yeah. So I really liked the idea of the the alignment of the interest with the the attorney and the the plaintiff and working as hard as you can to get them the best result, but not doing frivolous, non necessary things to build time.

Chad Sands: And in terms of when it comes to the profession and work of being a trial lawyer, what makes you unique?

Denis Delja: What really makes me unique is the fact that my wife and I are both attorneys. We have this law firm together. So we live, breathe, eat, sleep our cases. We talk about our cases all the time. When we’re going for a walk, we’re talking about the clients, the strategy. what what needs to be done on cases when we’re cooking dinner, having a glass of wine, we’re we’re talking about our cases. I mean, we are literally thinking about our cases all the time. And so it’s and it’s and it’s not work. It’s not it’s a it’s fun. It’s it’s a joy to be able to have that that that banter and that engagement. And so it it really translates to a in really having depth of understanding of the client, the issues, and the strategy on how we’re gonna get the result that we want and the client wants.

Chad Sands: Speaking of results, you know, you’ve been doing this for a while on the you know, on both sides and different forms of litigation, even some criminal defense sprinkled in, I guess, right? Can you share a story about a case or two that really had a significant impact on you that you really are always kind of finding yourself thinking back to?

Denis Delja: I want to talk about a case. This is a recent case. In fact, it’s and it’s a case that we didn’t actually have to go to trial. We settled five days before trial. And this is the first seven figure settlement that we’ve had with our new law firm. And it’s a case that I I violated the rule of three that I learned long ago in taking this case. And that’s don’t ever take a case where you’re the third attorney. Don’t ever take a case that’s more than three years old. And don’t ever take a case that’s got a file that’s more than three inches thick. And this case had all of those.

Chad Sands: Okay. So you you had to take it right away then.

Denis Delja: We when the when the client called us, he was five months from trial. He had just gotten out of a mediation with the the second attorneys that he had hired, and they were trying to fire sell his case because they they weren’t ready to actually go the distance and try it. So the first attorneys that he had, he got, you know, some attorneys that people will see on freeway billboards, but he never talked to an attorney. He was managed by a non-attorney case manager. Yeah. Had him get expensive surgeries on liens. he went to the second set of attorneys and they they really didn’t do anything on the case. So when he called, when the client called, I felt really bad for him because I didn’t know what he was gonna do. Because I could tell. I mean the the attorneys that he had when he called us were sending all of the signals that they you possibly could send to an insurance company to signal to that insurance company, “We’re not gonna try this case.” So he was really out of luck if he didn’t find somebody who was ready to jump in, drop everything, and do all the work that was necessary to actually get the case ready for trial in five months. And so anybody who has gone the trial, understands the tremendous amount of work that that involves to basically go from zero, zero work done to that point. But he was really compelling as a client. I really believed. This is a premises case, too. This was a case where he was as an apartment complex moving out and he stepped on a rotted board in a landing on the staircase and his leg went through the board. He injured his knee, but he had just had a knee surgery a few months before. So he he was genuinely hurt and I felt so bad for the position that he was in. And I was angry too at the way he had been treated by the lawyers that had represented him beforehand and by the lawyers in the defense. I mean, this guy was getting screwed. And so I said, you know what? We my wife and I talked about it. It’s a local case. We went over to the apartment building, checked out the stairs that had been repaired, but we got a general sense of the how the building had been maintained. We called him back and we said, “All right, well, you know, we’ll take the case.” And it was a lot of work, but it was so exciting. What I was used to before we started our own firm was being in litigation. Good chance you’re going to trial. You’re definitely getting very close to trial if you don’t actually try it. And the amount of energy and enthusiasm that that involves, I was, I was missing it. Because when we started out, we, you know, we had cases, but they were settling pre-litigation. So to have this case that was with a trial date five months away, it was actually pretty exciting to be able to jump into it and really feel like I was back in the zone. You know, I feel like a a boxer coming out of retirement.

Chad Sands: Right. Or like a a backup quarterback who just has been watching on the sidelines and now you get called in to the game. Yeah.

Denis Delja: It was exciting. So we had well, when we came into the case, the insurance company position was the client didn’t actually fall through the deck, that he he broke the deck out of anger to the landlord because of landlord tenant disputes they were having. And they didn’t actually hurt his knee, that his knee was hurt from the the surgery he had had just a few months before. So they denied liability, they denied causation, and his attorney that he had has said, you know, “You’ve got all these problems, you know, you gotta settle your case.” The client, he was a combat veteran from the Gulf War. He was a fighter. He wasn’t just gonna settle, but he didn’t know what to do. He needed somebody, he needed an attorney who was gonna fight with him. And luckily he found us. Luckily for him, luckily for us, because we really needed his case. I needed his case and to represent him as much as he needed us to take it on. So we deposed the landlord, we deposed the witnesses who repaired the deck, we talked to other tenants who had fallen through the deck, that same deck before the the landlord denied that it ever happened. We lined up the experts, the medical experts that we needed to prove that actually you could see in the MRI before and after he fell through the deck, because he had just had that knee surgery. Right. We talked to the we deposed the doctor who did the surgery and confirmed that the part of his knee that the doctor operated on in the surgery before he fell was an entirely different part of the knee that was injured after the fact. We really turned the heat on the insurance company and the insurance company lawyers. One of the things that we had in our advantage was that we were able to come in, move quickly before the insurance company was able to turn around its valuation and assessment of the case. So they had been dealing with a case for five years, practically five years, with a certain valuation or assumption about what the facts were. Right. And that all changed so quickly that the insurance company wasn’t able to reassess it. So we were heading up to trial. We were ready to go because the client, he had said he wanted a million dollars. He would never settle for less than a million dollars. And the insurance company had offered less than the medical bills before we got into the case. I think that’s a big ask, but you know what? The offer on the table is certainly not what the case is worth. We’re gonna try the case if they won’t pay it. In California, you can serve a settlement demand that comes with certain penalties if the defense doesn’t accept it and you beat the number at trial. So we served one of those demands and we timed it to expire the day before the judge was going to rule on motions in limine. And we did a ton of motions in limine because I having tried cases, lost cases in ways that I never thought I would lose them, I was paranoid about every possible thing the defense was going to try to do to sink this case. So we hit him with 15 different motions in limine and we timed them. They were gonna the judge wasn’t gonna rule on them the day after the settlement offer was gonna expire. So the day before the settlement offer expired, the lawyer for the insurance company is calling me up and trying to see if he, you know, making another offer. He’s like, “Okay, well, how about, you know, maybe five thousand five hundred thousand?” We said, no. And he calls back and says, “Okay, the insurance company’s wondering if maybe you’d take 750.” And we said no. But now I’m thinking, okay, we’re getting to a point where they’re offering real money that if you’re looking at this case.

Chad Sands: You really gonna walk away? You gonna walk away from —

Denis Delja: Right. So I taught you know and but I talked to the client and he was committed to trying the case. I was committed to trying the case for him, and we said no. They ultimately accepted our demand that they pay a million dollars plus the client’s costs. And it was only because they knew that we were ready and willing to actually go to trial and that they had a real chance of getting hit big. The attorney that they brought in to ultimately try the case saw what the evidence is actually going to be. And he told me, you know, candidly that he didn’t want to try that case. And it was because we knew what we needed to do to actually try a case, him having tried cases, from having won some, lost some, had mediocre results in others. But the knowledge of what you need to do is a world apart from somebody who’s never actually tried a case. And for for anybody who really wants to do this job, if you want to go out on your own, if you want to start your own firm, if you want to have the freedom like that that you can have as a plaintiff’s attorney, the experience of actually trying cases, of getting beat, of winning, but of knowing what to do, to actually get a case in front of a jury, the rules of evidence, how knowing that and having the other side know that you know how to try a case and are willing to do it is going to result in so many more beneficial settlements for your clients. You’re going to be able to settle cases that you might otherwise have to try. It was only because we had that experience and that the client came to us at the time that he did that we were able to monopolize the situation and get the client the result that he had wanted all along. It was a real game changer for us, my wife and I, to really realize: you know, this firm that we started that seem just kind of like an idea because we work from home, we don’t we don’t rent any office space, that it’s a real thing. We really do have our own law firm. And we really are getting good results for clients. And we’re doing the litigation, spending the money, funding the cases, putting the experts together, doing all the things that a real law firm does and getting real law firm results. And so it was just helped shake off that you know, the imposter syndrome that you hear people talking about. So to realize that, yeah, you know what? We really are Delja and Delja.

Chad Sands: And that you stepped in where two previous attorneys probably sent the wrong signals or, you know, the signals to the defense that they weren’t willing to go to trial and the defense knew that and that as you kind of mentioned that the table was reset when you guys stepped in and the defense had to bring in a real trial lawyer at that point who kind of saw the cards and knew that you guys unlike the other attorneys weren’t gonna kind of just try and dance around and settle this and move on to the next one. You

Denis Delja: Yeah.

Chad Sands: mentioned it a little bit about the previous plaintiff firm that you were at and you moved on from and just kind of in the world of PI, there’s different business models and how firms operate and how they advertise. And I’m just kind of curious where do you

Denis Delja: You

Chad Sands: see the industry and the business in terms of non-lawyers and the billboard wars and private equity coming in and I think what you may have been touching on where some of these firms take more of a business finance perspective to the firm operations versus actually a client first approach.

Denis Delja: Yeah, I think that it’s unfortunately going more and more towards the consolidation in the private equity large firms, the marketing, the non lawyer marketing, and the clients are suffering as a result because the I’ve seen the amount of infrastructure that’s needed to spend the money that it takes to advertise at that level requires, well for one, it requires increasingly higher fees, an increasingly higher share of the the client settlement. It creates incentives for guaranteed settlement instead of actually going to trial. It creates incentives to have the client believe they’re hiring the lawyer they see on the billboard when in fact they’re getting sometimes I’ve actually seen non-attorneys, not even, you know, outsourced attorneys outside the United States. There may be attorneys, but they’re not licensed in California or the United States. K non-attorney case managers handling cases. And so the desire for maximizing efficiency and profits is a real concern. And it’s what ultimately my my wife and I said, you know, we c we can do this the way that we believe it should be done where we have the personal relationship with the client. But it’s it’s a dying, I think it’s a dying breed of lawyer, a dying type of practice, because the only way so we get cases through mainly word of mouth. I’ve had former defense attorneys who have called when friends or family members have been hurt. I’ve got other attorneys friends who bring us cases, refer to us cases. But it’s to really compete you need to spend millions of dollars for TV, for billboards, and the amount of non ator attorney work that needs to be done in order to maintain that that structure is just something that I don’t want to be part of.

Chad Sands: It feels like driving back on the four five or something.

Denis Delja: It does. It’s it’s the you know, in fact, firm I was at referred to their their process as a donut machine. And basically there was a a memo to all the attorneys of don’t try to reinvent the donut machine, do it our way. And I’ve heard that about other big firms. It’s just when you don’t have the supervision that you need to have over your cases, if you’re relying on non-attorney case managers, then you have to have those kinds of processes in place just to make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks, that you’re doing the bare minimum to avoid damaging your client’s case. But that’s the client’s not getting the best possible representation that they could get into that system.

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Explore what’s possible at www.cloudlex.com. Now here is this episode’s “Closing Argument.”

Denis Delja: One of the things that I didn’t realize was a factor in representing plaintiffs in personal injury cases was the emotional toll that it can take. I will always remember, never forget, one case in particular where it really hit me. It was a young man who was killed by his best friend. Best friend was driving and young man as a passenger. They were racing some other guys. They’re part of a racing club. Best friend drove off the road, killed my client’s son. And what was really, I think, disturbing to me about that case was I really saw the way that human life can just be exchanged for for dollars. The insurance company for the the kid who killed my client’s son was an insurance company I dealt with before, got the trial against them on an open policy case, and was able to make him pay over seven figures within 30 days of the injury. And from the law firm’s perspective, the law firm I was working at, their big takeaway was wow, how quickly did we turn the time from the the client calling us to the disbursement of the fees. We were able to do that in under 30 days and what a great turnaround that was. But for me, it was the first time that I ever felt ghoulish about the job that I was doing. I went to the funeral, saw the client’s son in the open casket in the front row was the best friend who’d killed him on crutches because he had broken his leg. And afterwards, a few days later, when we got the settlement funds, and the client came in, father of the dead son, I handed him a seven-figure check, and he said, “This is the most amount of money that I’ve ever seen, but didn’t want to.” I think about that client. Think about that. It’s dead son in the casket. And I felt … I felt dirty making a living off of that. And it took a long time to to really shake that feeling. I don’t know how everybody individually deals with that or if they even experience that. I think that it’s important to not close yourself off to those emotions. It’s a a profession that people who refer to plaintiff’s injury attorneys as ambulance chasers, they just don’t really understand the depths of what we do. I imagine it could be easier to turn off the emotions to create that distance with the client with their loss, but I think that we owe a duty to the clients that we represent to share in some degree of that grief and that suffering and to not close ourselves off to it. But how to cope with that I think is a real challenge that everyone’s got to figure out how they deal with it. For me, luckily, I have my wife who is an attorney. And I can share that with her. I cried about it with her. And everyone’s gotta find their own way to deal with it. But I would say that it’s something that needs to be embraced. And not protected and guarded against, because that’s I think the slippery slope into seeing this kind of work as clients as commodities, as paydays, and becoming that that stereotype of the ambulance chaser that that really isn’t what good lawyers are about.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to Celebrating Justice presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyer’s 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.