Daniel Schneiderman

[Theme Music Plays]

Daniel Schneiderman: I’d say that’s the best way I could explain it: Small, hungry, and we know what we’re doing… Trial attorneys are naturally gamblers to a degree, especially contingency lawyers. We’re putting our own money on the table… In my college years, I think my dad told me, he’s like, “You’re probably not going to be a doctor, man. You’re not going to pilot a plane, but you’d probably be a pretty good lawyer.”

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice” presented by the Trial Lawyers 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: Welcome back friends to “Celebrating Justice.” In this episode we hear from trial lawyer Daniel Schneiderman, the grandson of a NASA engineer who modeled precision and curiosity on the Mariner missions. Daniel shares how an extrovert’s love for presenting became a client-first PI practice. To get to the stories, I asked him: why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Daniel Schneiderman: Something always appealed to me about trial work. I like talking in front of people. I’ve always been pretty extroverted guy. I don’t know if it’s because the red hair and being left-handed or whatever it is, but I’ve never had a lot of shame. Getting up and presenting, I always knew that was going to be in my wheelhouse. I started out with the vision of being a trial lawyer and how do you do that? You work through law school to do the things that will give you some practice edge after law school. Did mock trial, did moot courts. I competed on those things coming up. Always looked for opportunities to talk. I did Toastmasters stuff. And after law school, I jumped into the DA’s office. Loved working at the DA’s office. I think for me, I just, was never going to be a soldier. And at the DA’s office, there’s definitely a hierarchy and format you need to follow as a professional and kind of be a true believer in the system and what you’re doing. And not to say that I wasn’t, but it was just, I always knew I wanted to be in the business world, eventually start my own business. And I found a way to do that while also being a trial attorney. And I think that was turned into my ultimate goal in my career was to be in control of my own domain, working for clients that I had real deep personal relationships with in times of crisis, being a helping hand in those situations. Really venturing to make my dent in the trial world. I had the opportunity to work for some really great firms along the way and start some businesses. And all of that is based around that initial dream to be a trial attorney and presenting in court.

Chad Sands: When did you recognize, “I think being in a courtroom sounds like that might be a lot of fun.”

Daniel Schneiderman: I always find that question a little tricky because I don’t know what it was. My parents are doctors. My dad’s a spine surgeon. My mom’s a pediatrician. My brother’s an orthopedic trauma surgeon. You would think I’d kind of go down that path, but I think early on with just what appealed to me, I loved English class. I loved writing. I still love writing. I did one of these Toastmasters thing as a kid and I got up and told a story and did a presentation. I ended up winning this thing. And I think that was the first time. It really captivated me presenting in front of people and getting an emotional aspect or emotional response from people through presentation. My mom had an incident like when I was a kid. I remember I was sleeping. All of a sudden I woke up to shrieks and what had happened was a blender had basically exploded and that little thing that blends everything came up and Ninja started to weigh at her and she batted it down with her hand and bit. Severed a couple of her distal nerves in her hand. That was something where it was kind of a jump in action, maybe my first experience with personal injury. Throughout that, my mom always said “You were in control, you weren’t panicking, tourniquet the hand, got her to the hospital.” The next questions, for better or worse, were like, “Whose fault was this?” My mom’s storyline, who’s as a dedicated mom and professional at the same time, she was always there taking care of kids. Needed her hands for her job. All those were concerns at the time amd that started getting the clock turning a little bit, getting the wheels turning in terms of what I wanted to do after college. I ended up going out to college, did the poly-sci thing. It’s like, “What’s the next steps?” Well, this has worked for me in the past. Let’s go to law school.

Chad Sands: You went University of California, Santa Barbara, correct?

Daniel Schneiderman: Yeah, UCSB. Gouchos.

Chad Sands: So I’m based in Santa Barbara, go Gauchos. You’re the second Gaucho actually on the podcast. I interviewed Sylvia Gonzalez in season one who’s also a Gaucho. 

Daniel Schneiderman: Right on.

Chad Sands: Who’s also down in Southern California where you are San Diego area kind of sprawls into Orange County up into Los Angeles. It is a massive kind of market with big firms and big names. How do you stand out? What makes you unique down there?

Daniel Schneiderman: I think we’re in the land of business model when it comes to personal injury. There’s so many different ways to approach your career when you’re in a small office or solo. For me, I never wanted to be a volume guy. It’s just not what appealed to me. Business over practice, and I know that doesn’t apply across the board, but for me, it wasn’t always how many clients to get in the door. was how am I taking care of the clients that come in? And what I’ve seen and had the opportunity through working on cases and big cases, you gotta live this stuff with your clients. And when you do, it gives this emotional appeal for me at least, where it gives us output that’s my real drive. Helping people in times of crisis and being that person they can call when people haven’t gone through this stuff before, that’s what activates me. Kind of looking out in terms of what firm and what type of business I wanted to run. 

My business is based around high quality work and capping out my caseload. That’ll probably change over the years, but for me, it’s kind of the crucial thing that I’ve wanted to dial in in terms of my business is I’m there every step of the way for these people. I’m there from the hospital to the courthouse steps in after. I think that’s the reputation I’ve carved out for myself. And that’s what we put out into the world in terms of what business we’re running where your counselor, your therapist, your attorney, where your advisor, your consultant all in one box. And it’s a place where you can find a home. You can find a friend and a colleague to sit there and talk to about how this is impacting your life. It’s kind of like that full service vibe. If I was going, hey, what type of practice am I running? How am I cutting a piece out of the pie of personal injury in the industry? I would say that’s the best way I could explain it. Small, hungry, and we know what we’re doing.

Chad Sands: You’re not running like a lot of PPC ads and trying to put a whole lot of lead gen to increase these?

Daniel Schneiderman: I do a lot of LinkedIn, but that’s kind more of an overall branding type thing. Transparency, presence, depth of thinking. That’s all like stuff I like putting out there in the world. And I’ve found that the more I do that, the more organic referrals I get and the more trust that’s immediately built from the outset on the clients that do come in from those referral sources and it’s relationship building from your referral sources all the way to the clients that come on your doorstep. that’s just the way I’ve built out my niche, so to speak.

Chad Sands: Well, you didn’t make it to med school like your family, but I feel like there’s a little bedside manner or doctoral approach that you maybe take to your clients and how you manage and run your firm —

Daniel Schneiderman:  — those guys are horrible beds. They train people how to do bedside manner at med school. They don’t train attorneys on how to do that. Yeah, you get that through experience, right?

Chad Sands: Very true. Or the paralegals who also see it through the office and clients coming in and kind of that traumatic exposure response that’s actually out there that’s talked about a little bit, but very specific to PI and your guys’s firms and your guys’s clients. One thing that also makes you unique, you are the grandson of a NASA engineer and we actually talked about this in Trial Lawyer’s Journal Vol. I that came out. Speaking of LinkedIn, I saw you post it the other day because we’re coming up on what is it the 60th anniversary of Mariner four. Is that what your grandfather worked on?

Daniel Schneiderman: I think when I originally wrote that post and I showed it to my dad — I had it in there as the 50th anniversary — and he’s like, “Well, we see why you didn’t become an engineer.” But yeah, it’s coming up on the 60th anniversary.

Chad Sands: You’re off by a decade. Do you have like early memories of him tinkering in the garage or watching NASA liftoffs?

Daniel Schneiderman: He was a beast man. I mean, when you’re talking about hyper-technical people, he’s one of those guys. he was really into photography and he had his classic black room area, his house. And that was always crazy to walk into and kind of see that really classic photography lab. We love tying flies. This is the type of fish. This is the type of bugs in the area. And this is how you tie them. You take a book off his wall. It was like a book about applied mathematics to rocket science. And it’s like, I don’t know about you, but if I’m going through this thing, I’ll know how many notes I’m taking and all that, but you look at each page and you see his penciled in handwritten notes. And this is talking about trajectory and all the math associated with it. won’t attempt to like regurgitate it here, but he was a very technical guy. And I don’t think it really occurred to me necessarily early on. I would go in and I’d find like an electrical device. He had like one of the early GPS things. And I’d play around with that and go, dude, I don’t know how to use this thing. This is the old school stuff. This is before internet, the Google earth and all that, just plotting out a path when we’d go hiking or something like that, you’d be using this thing. But I think what really kind of stood out to me with him is when we would go to like Mother’s Day stuff, we would always go to Caltech and that’s where all the JPL and the Pasadena based rocket science folks would all come together and the guy would walk in the room and just everybody would come and talk to him about the ins and outs of what was going on in the technology space, even till his older years. With those types of guys, you could just, you could tell the presence.

Chad Sands: Little bit of a legend walking into the room.

Daniel Schneiderman: And the brilliance that just seems to kind of vibrate off of them. If I’m being honest, there’s like some regret in my life where I’m just like, in another life, could I have gone and been like a NASA legacy or something like that? What would that have looked like? And what are the opportunities that would have been there? But at the same time, I can’t complain. My dad might disagree that he ever said this, but when I was in my college years, I think my dad told me, he’s like, “Look, you’re probably not going to be a doctor, man. You’re not going to pilot a plane, but you’d probably be a pretty good lawyer.”

Chad Sands: Speaking of being a lawyer, let’s get to the cases. And I know you’ve had a lot over the years, but could you share a story about a case that had a significant impact on you?

Daniel Schneiderman: I mean, there’s just been a bunch over the years. If I am looking for one impactful event on my career that I think gives you that real world experience that you can’t read in a book and you can only go through it with a mentor or kind of see it in practice and then go, okay, that’s how I’m in a practice moving forward. My mind always takes me back to this catastrophic injury case that I was working with my mentor, Roger Dreier. It was a case involving some overgrown oleander. trees that for a course of 20 years, Caltrans hadn’t trimmed back. Our client, her car broke down on the freeway and she wasn’t able to pull all the way into what was supposed to be — it was either an eight foot or a 10 foot shoulder space. All the oleanders had kind of grown out into the freeway to camouflage it. So this other guy who was coming back from picking up a Quizno’s for his pregnant wife, couldn’t see her as he was traveling down the freeway goes into her …. Complete catastrophic injuries for this sixty-year-old woman. Life turned upside down. Took it all the way to trial against Caltrans. We’re in trial, Roger was kicking their butt three, four days into the trial. You know, you get that “Ding, ding, ding” from the other side, “Hey, we’re ready to play some ball.” And they put an offer on the table. And I remember out on the courthouse steps and it was a significant offer. We’re talking to our clients about this and going, what’s the risk assessment here in terms of whether to continue on to verdict because we think we’re doing very well or do we settle for guaranteed money and significant value here? And the way he conveyed it to the client at the time has always stuck with me, kind of showed me where the real red line difference is between being a trial attorney. Trial attorneys are naturally gamblers to a degree, especially contingency lawyers. We’re putting our own money on the table. That one had quarter million bucks into it. Once you’re that invested and you’ve put in all the time and energy into getting to that point where you’re like, “Hey, verdicts around the corner, that sure would feel good if I go and I peel off 25 million on this case, right?”

Chad Sands: That risk that you put in funding it all and now you’re at this crossroads.

Daniel Schneiderman: Yeah. And so there’s this natural, I think especially for younger attorneys, where there’s this little bit of a gambling element. And your personal gamble as an attorney, that’s not what matters in these cases, right? It’s what the client wants. We tell them and build it into our retainer agreements that I have an ethical obligation to make sure you know, and I show you throughout my conduct, throughout the case, that this is your case. You’re the shot caller here. So when Roger went and talked about this with the client and it was very much along those lines of, “I’m all about verdicts, I’m all about going to trial, but this is guaranteed money, this is life-changing money. I am not gonna make this decision, I can’t make this decision for you.” Because the client will always, 99 times out of 100, if not 100 times out of 100, ask you, “Well, what do you think we should do? I wanna do what you think we should do.” Seeing Roger deal with that question and go, “This isn’t my choice. I cannot make this choice for you. This has to be your decision.” Seeing that conversation take place was very impactful for me. And I’ve continued to use it, the methodology that he used at that time through the present date, which is a clear separation of what I want to do as the attorney for my career, for my ego, for my fiscal sake, and then what is good for you. You’re the one to make the determination in that case resolved as a result of it. And talking to the jurors after, and maybe this was good or bad for my progression, depending on what angle you take, but you talk to the jurors after and they were all about us. People are saying numbers that are two, three times more than what we ended up potentially resolving for. But no, the case wasn’t done. The defence hadn’t presented. It’s kind of all woulda’, coulda’, shoulda’. But at the end of the day, the client is happy. They did it their way and that’s what mattered. I think if I were looking back and choosing one thing in my career that I still think about constantly through the present day is how my mentor dealt with that situation.

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. Our seamless case management, AI engine, litigation support, and record retrieval solutions empower you at every stage, from intake through settlement and beyond, helping you stay productive, organized, and focused on achieving successful outcomes for your clients. Explore what’s possible at www.cloudlex.com.

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

Daniel Schneiderman: I think for any attorney that is a young attorney and coming up, especially in any industry, it doesn’t just apply to trial work or trial practice, but what you don’t know is always super scary. And I think taking the initial steps to control your own career, control your own life can seem even scarier, especially when somebody’s putting a paycheck in front of you. I would say to anybody who’s looking to start their own business and do legal work at the same time, it’s historically a really tough thing to do, to do both well. There’s more tools and more mentors out there than I think have existed at any point previously in the legal world. Just reach out to somebody. Learn about a new tool. Get that in the process of learning, humbling yourself and fighting against that feeling that you have to constantly be sizing yourself up against other people. There’s a way to do this job and a way to grow your brand, your presence, your business in a way that’s true to you, in a way that you’ve been trained or not trained to do. It’s just a matter of conceptualizing it, seeing what’s going on in the space around you and then taking a jump. If there’s one person that it’s worth taking a risk on, it’s yourself. I think we’re in a time right now in the law where it’s not easiest, it’s not necessarily easier per se, but there’s more tools out there in the world and more people willing to help you than I think ever before. So if it’s something you want to do, jump out on your own, break the mold, get out of big law or change up your industry or career, there’s probably no better time to do it than today.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Daniel Schneiderman. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Daniel and his firm, visit trialteam.com. All right, 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 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.