Chris Blackburn

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Chris Blackburn: Trial is ultimately is where you are going to find good and bad… “Why would you take that case?” And our mindset is, “Well, that’s not the question.” The question is, “Do they need help?” … And she was in nursing school, then she basically became a nurse and at that point I said, “Hey, I think I want to go back to school.” And she looked at me and said — “You better not ______ mess that up.”

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice” presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal at 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 https://www.triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Welcome back, friends, to Celebrating Justice. In this episode, we welcome trial lawyer Chris Blackburn. After years in finance and farming, he came back to his roots with the mission — help people, no matter the size of the case. He talks about driving semis, trying cases fast, and building a law firm grounded in humility, teamwork, and purpose. To get to the stories, I asked him:

Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Chris Blackburn: I grew up in it. I wouldn’t say I necessarily showed a real big interest, but for me personally, it was — you want to be what your dad does. And so when you’re going through school, I wasn’t great in school by any means until I got to law school. But I knew I wanted to be an attorney until I graduated college. And then at college, I thought to myself, I’m done with school. The last thing I want to do is go to law school and do more school. So I took a little bit of time off and worked out there in the real world — did finance, did sales. I mean, pretty much everything.

It was enjoyable, it was a good experience, but there was just something that was missing, for sure. For me, it was the ability to work with family, work with Dad, but then also really help people at the end of the day. Because what we do — like what anybody else does in this industry — I mean, we’re essentially helping people. Big case, small case. We have a lot of small cases and a lot of people — that’s kind of our niche, for sure. People ask, “Why would you take that case?” And our mindset is, well, that’s not the question. The question is, do they need help?

Yes, they do? All right, well, I can help you in that regard. I think I was three, four, five years out. And funny story — I mean, I love my wife, she’s fantastic. When I said I wanted to go back to school, she looked at me, and it wasn’t one of those, “Oh gee, that’s great! Okay, I’m so proud of you.” It was — she looked at me dead in the eyes, and when I was working and she was in nursing school, then she basically became a nurse — and at that point I said, “Hey, I think I want to go back to school.” She looked at me and said, “You better not blank mess that up.”

That was by far my biggest motivation going through law school — I’ve got to make her happy. I can’t mess this up.

Chad Sands: Right, you’re going back to party for another four years after your banking career.

Chris Blackburn: Yeah. I really wanted to get back to the family setting. My sisters work within our firm too. My brother-in-law works with us as well. So, just the opportunity to help people, but also work together as a family. There’s a lot of good there — but obviously, when you work with family too, you have your ups and your downs.

Chad Sands: Your dad drag you into the office, you know, when you were a kid on Saturdays or anything?

Chris Blackburn: No — like, when I say I grew up in it, I mean, I was in it. There was a period of time where my parents had sold their house here — we live here in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that’s where our offices are located. They had a lake cottage about an hour north, just south of Coldwater, Michigan. Well, they had sold their house here in Fort Wayne, so there was one year where my sister, my mom, and I lived up at the lake.

Every single day, my dad would bring us in to school. We’d go to breakfast a lot, and then there would be a lot of times where we’d be at the office — we’d get picked up there. But we did a lot of home visits. Post-COVID, we don’t do as many of those as we used to, but I’ve been all over the place with my dad going to get new clients. And it’s fun — you appreciate every walk of life. You’ve been in so many different homes. And when you’re a young kid and you see those things too, that was kind of…

I think instrumental for me — Saturday morning, going and visiting a client or Saturday morning, you’re going to pick up and meet a new client or come into the office. But I was always involved. Even in high school, I kind of worked in the office a little bit — mostly just knickknack, task-oriented stuff. But it’s funny, we have a team lead here who’s been with us 20 years, and she trained me, so she gives me crap all the time.

Chris Blackburn: What makes me personally unique would be — I farm a little bit. I have a passion for the ag industry. I love farmers. I don’t farm anymore in terms of row crops, but we have cattle. We’re pretty heavily invested in that. But I know how to drive a semi. At a period of time when I was farming, I would drive a semi with a 45-foot trailer, 40-foot trailer. And there’s a lot of semi accidents out there, and you have a new understanding and appreciation for how big they are, how heavy they are, how they maneuver, how they can’t stop.

And in terms of some of these semi cases — when you start going through discovery — I don’t want to say it gives me an edge, it just gives me an understanding of maybe a little bit more of what the defendant might be claiming or not claiming and whether that has some validity to it.

Chad Sands: Yeah, I talked to trial lawyer Joe Fried out of Georgia who does a lot of trucking stuff, and he went to trucking school. But, you know, it takes exactly what you’re talking about to get that perspective — of what the other side knows, and what they think they know.

Chris Blackburn: Joe’s great. He wouldn’t know me, but I have tried to model my trial practice — and when I mean trial practice, I mean how we’re going to try cases — after what he kind of minimizes. And I think if you could try a case in a day or two, rather than drag the thing out for five days, I think the jury respects that. And then they’re going to be more captivated.

The last — I mean, pretty much all of my trials have been that way. And it works good for me too, because I tell you what — my brain gets pretty beat up after the first day.

Chris Blackburn: One was a slip and fall type case. This was probably one of the first or better verdicts I had. Indiana is a very conservative state — very conservative — and it’s just hard getting jurors to have any sort of sympathy for our clients. What we hear a lot — and a lot of states elsewhere too — but you hear things like, “Well, they paid the bills,” or, “Pay the bills and call it good.” So it’s hard for them to kind of get past that mindset.

I’ll use his nickname — his name was Willie. Willie was older, and he lived in an apartment complex specifically for the elderly generation. It wasn’t a retirement home by any means, but just a small, simple apartment designed for people 65 and up. And one day, Willie leaves and he slips and falls on ice immediately after exiting. I mean, Willie was the nicest client, and he was about 84 years old. He ended up having a spiral fracture of his hip and had significant injuries.

He was so nonchalant about his injuries. When he was on trial and I was trying to get him to elaborate about the excruciating pain he went through and how it affected him, he just couldn’t do it. He was like — I asked, “Will, can you tell me how your activities of daily living were affected?” And he said, “It just took me a little bit longer to put on my socks.”

But I think when you couple someone who is just so wholesome like that, along with — we had great evidence from the defense — there was evidence that they were kind of putting cost and savings ahead of the safety of their tenants. It was almost hysterical. Imagine one big, long apartment complex and you’ve got a snow event, and there was one guy to do it. And everyone there is 65 and older and they’re single, they’ve got nothing else to do.

So one day it snows and they start at this end, then the next snow event, they start on the other end. I remember deposing a corporate rep about that. I said, “Why did you guys do that?” He said, “Well, basically if I started down here, then Ethel down on this end will complain because we weren’t starting there. But if I go down to Ethel’s, then June over here is complaining.”

But it was almost comical in the sense that the higher-ups had no understanding of really what their business was. And when they talked, it was just unfortunate. They just didn’t really care about snow and ice removal or their tenants or trying to do it in a fast, efficient manner. There was evidence that the low guy on the totem pole — the maintenance guy…

Chad Sands: The one guy who has to do all this.

Chris Blackburn: Yeah, he was complaining and made complaints to management — “I can’t keep up with this. There’s a lot of things I can do, like mowing the grass and other stuff. But when the snow comes, if we could get some more help for these events, I’d really appreciate it.” I think the jury appreciated that, and my client got rewarded.

The other one was a guy who was in a very big accident with a semi. He ended up having a halo put on, and he was in a hospital and nursing home for the better part of six months. We did a day-in-the-life video and it was just so depressing, because he basically lived six months of his life in this halo, in a nursing home — over Thanksgiving, over Christmas, over New Year’s. And it was a collision that was completely avoidable. He was, again, the nicest individual — wholesome, sweet. That day-in-the-life video, that’s the reason that case got settled at mediation. I don’t think it would have settled for what it did had that video not happened. And it was to the client’s credit — it was all him. It wasn’t anything I did. He’s just a wholesome individual.

Chad Sands: You talked about how you are a farmer. Talk to me about farming and cattle and any comparisons or parallels to the trial lawyer world.

Chris Blackburn: The big one — I think from a business perspective — they’re absolutely very, very, very similar. Strictly from a business perspective: if you’re a trial lawyer — and our firm advertises a lot — you’ve got markets here, there, billboards, TV, and you’re trying to figure out your advertising matrix. And that’s not my department. That would be my dad and my brother-in-law — that’s them.

You look at your budget, you just kind of cast it out there. You have no idea. You can estimate and use your data to give you an idea of what’s coming in the next year, but you have no idea. So you really just depend on your staff and just the continued movement of your cases and your clients. And so it’s like farming too — where you go out, you spend all this money on fertilizer, spraying, fuel, repairs, all these things — and then you just sit back and you wait and you go, “Okay, Lord, bless me — or don’t.” But what’s done is done at this point.

And the nice thing about my dad from that perspective is — he’s the most aggressive advertiser. I mean, he will advertise, and he believes in it. I mean, he’ll bank on it — and he just will be just fine.

Chad Sands: Like, you look at the leads generated last year, right? And the amount of money we spent, and how much crops we got, and how much money we spent last year. And so let’s rinse and repeat, and we can just do it this year and maybe do it a little bit more — but it always doesn’t really go as planned.

Chris Blackburn: Oh, absolutely. There’s a ton of similarities. And getting — I mean, obviously, CloudLex is a big component here — but we’re slowly getting ourselves situated for more of the future. To look at things from more of a business perspective, looking at a lot of those things. And it’s provided an opportunity to just kind of build and grow too.

Chad Sands: Favorite time of day on the farm? Are you like a sunrise guy? Are you a sunset guy? Are you a high noon guy?

Chris Blackburn: I’ll tell you what — I used to be a morning guy, and I still am. It’s just — the older I get — I’m 44. And I don’t know what study I saw. It was a Stanford study — I literally saw it today — that said there are two pivotal aging events.

Chad Sands: Yes. Yes, I’ve seen this study.

Chris Blackburn: 44 and 60. And I was like, well, there you go — that explains it. That explains why my back and my knees hurt.

I just — I love the morning. Getting up in the morning and having, even if it’s just five minutes of quiet time. You put your full day in, you come back, and at that point — I’ve got three kids, one’s in college — but our house is go, go, go. It’s chaotic. It’s great chaos though.

Narrator: At CloudLex, we understand the unique demands and opportunities that personal injury law firms face every day. That’s why we’ve built a comprehensive platform designed exclusively for personal injury law.

Chris Blackburn: Important in any business landscape — before you can really kind of distinguish yourself and help other people — you really have to kind of look at yourself internally and do a self-analysis. Our firm did that a couple years ago, and I think when we looked at ourselves, we told ourselves we need to come up with who we are. Not what we do differently, not how we may do things for our staff, but things that are the culture of the firm.

All our lawyers here, our staff — are incredibly humble people. That’s a characteristic we look for. If you’re humble, and you’ve got a little bit of vulnerability, and you embrace working together as a team, we’re going to be able to do more.

It started with a conversation I had with my sister. And what we set out to do was to find out exactly who we are. And with that, we talked to our staff, we did a pretty big survey, we got their feedback. And this year, what we found out was — we were able to put some things into place and come up with and establish our core values and who we are. Our mission statement, our vision — it was a great project. The collaboration there was tremendous because it encompassed all of our staff, it encompassed the attorneys, and a shared belief and a shared commitment to who we are.

We’re unique because the lawyers at our firm have been here — I think the shortest tenure is eight years. I’m going on 15. We have my brother-in-law, Chad — he’s been with us for 16, 17 years. Another one who’s been with us for the same timeframe. But we all believe in these things.

We focus on our clients. We have client-centered service. We put a big emphasis on integrity and accountability, team collaboration, and overcoming — innovation and adaptability. So these are things that we worked on.

Injury attorneys, I think, separate themselves — at least they try to — because they’re helping people. I think attorneys should be putting a big emphasis on not being afraid to take their cases to trial. Trial ultimately is where you are going to find good and bad. You’re going to find justice. And as people look for attorneys, it’s not just, “Do you try a case?” It’s not just, “How many cases do you settle?” or “What are you like?” I think people should be looking at the attorneys and who they are, what their firm believes in — but also, at the same time, whether they do try those cases.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Chris Blackburn. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Chris and his firm, visit their website: blackburnromey.com. Alright, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to Celebrating Justice presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit https://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 https://www.cloudlex.com/tlj to learn more.