Gary Gwilliam

{Theme Song Plays]

Gary Gwiliam: First of all, lemme make this clear. I come from a long line of alcoholics…. I certainly probably could have gotten some grief counseling and I refer grief counseling to everybody nowadays, but there was no such thing in those days. Nothing…. We don’t get anything unless we take it away from somebody. Every one of our cases is. Taking something away that somebody wants to fight with you about. Almost always money.

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 in the premier episode of season two of Celebrating Justice. We welcome Gary William, the author of the book, “Getting a Winning Verdict In my Personal Life: A Trial Lawyer Finds His Soul,” Gary has a lot of stories to share after over 180 jury trials. From opening up about substance abuse to talking about real losses — both inside and outside the courtroom — when it comes to giving back to other lawyers and his clients, Gary holds nothing back.

To get to the answers about dealing with aging, getting sober, and finding your soul, I asked him: why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Gary Gwiliam: Well, lemme tell you how I became a lawyer. I was a hard drinking guy at Pomona College. I was in a, a hard drinking fraternity. As a matter of fact, I had a guy that became very famous.

It was a fraternity brother of mine named Chris Christofferson. And Chris and I were hard drinking guys and, and nobody in my family had gone to college, let alone law school. And I was. Finishing up my year and I was having a lot of fun and I’d done some sales and as a matter of fact, if you read my book, I’d been a gang member.

I’d found my way finally to Pomona College after, uh, getting kicked outta high school for drinking and stealing cars and doing stuff that a lot of lawyers didn’t do. So I, we had a fraternity advisor. It was the philosophy professor. His name is Fred Sontag, very well known guy, and he got to know us all very well.

And he came to me and in my senior year, and it was early in my senior year, and he came to me and he says, Gary, he says, um, have you thought about what you wanna to do when you get out? And I said, ah, you know, Fred, I don’t know. I think I’ll probably get an MBA Master’s in business. I don’t know. I’m just gonna go on.

And I hadn’t really thought about it. Well, you know, he says, um, have you ever thought about being a lawyer? And you know, what came to mind? Nothing. It was like this blank over my head. I’d never known a lawyer. There were no lawyers. This was 1959. I mean this a. Wow. A lawyer. So I blasted off some applications.

I got, uh, Yale dumped me, but I got accepted to Harvard, turned them down, went to Berkeley Law, hated law school for three years. And then when I started my career in, in the DA’s office, I loved it. And I tell you, Chad, I’m one of these guys that found the right career. I could not be anything but a lawyer.

In this life. I can go into reasons for that, that they’re a little esoteric, but it has absolutely been a perfect career for me and from the day I started practicing law till today, all these 60 plus years later, I have loved being a lawyer and a trial lawyer. I need to be a trial lawyer. I didn’t wanna be a business lawyer and I didn’t wanna write contracts.

I want to be out there trying cases and I’ve tried 180 jury trials to a verdict. I’ve tried about, uh, 40 of ’em were criminal cases and the rest were civil cases. I’ve had a wonderful, very interesting career.

Chad Sands: You know, you were drinking beers, probably jamming a little bit with Chris Christofferson back in the frat, but maybe go to law school for three more years to keep the drinking and partying going a little.

Gary Gwiliam: Well, that was part of it a little bit, but I really was kind of floating because I didn’t really have any role models about what, where I was gonna go. The Fred Sontag sent me an. A direction he’s gone now. He was always a mentor of mine and was always very thankful that I was able to find the career I wanted.

And you

Chad Sands: started at the DA’s office though?

Gary Gwiliam: Yeah, I started the Ventura DA’s office. At the time, it was the fastest growing county in California. There was a big spillover from Los Angeles, so I ended up trying a lot of cases. I was there a little less than four years, and I moved up from just being a traveller to the.

Number three guy in the DA’s office. I was the chief trial deputy. Yeah. I got involved in a death penalty case. I was assigning all the felony cases, tried some heavy cases. I thought very seriously about being a career as a prosecutor because I really liked when I did, but my wife wanted to move out. We had lost a set of quadruplets, which was a very sad thing for us.

And, and so she, we kind of wanted to move, she wanted to move back to Berkeley, where I’d got to law school. And so when he came back up here, I was fortunate enough to run into one of my professors at, at Berkeley Law, bold Hall, they called it at the time. And he referred me to what was the biggest and best personal injury firm in Oakland.

And I, I just happened to be at the right time at the right place. And uh, when I went in there, they, I. Offered me a job and they said, well, how much money do you want? And I went and I said, well, you know, probably can’t make this amount of money ’cause I just got a really good raise at the DA’s office. I’m making, uh, 1100 bucks a month, but I wouldn’t expect that much from you.

Probably a thousand. And they said, we’re gonna give you 1200. I said, wow. Wet deal. 1200 bucks a month. I’m a rich man. So I started off and then they just had me a bunch of cases and I started trying a bunch of the chicken, she, little cases rear end accents and every kind of thing. And I, in the DA’s office, I’d won 20 cases in a row and I was hot.

And then when I got there, I had trouble with my first five cases, and the difference was in the DA’s office, I didn’t have a client. I had the people as my client and I had to learn how to deal with. Clients and do something a little different than I could. So once I got through the first five cases, I was on a roll and I started trying cases.

And in those years we were trying cases like once a month. I, I try 10 jury trials in a year and that was just unheard of nowadays. But I was just rolling them and having fun and hard drinking and I loved the mystique of the whole thing. Even at our board meetings, we’d open up the bar at 11 o’clock and we ate Bloody Mary or, or whatever you wanted.

So those are the days, but unfortunately burnout over that kinda lifestyle and that’s what kinda happened to me.

Chad Sands: So you did quickly mentioned it and I did a little bit of research and heard about the loss of your quadruplets.

Gary Gwiliam: There was a time when the sixties, when we were doing this that you just didn’t talk about this.

Nowadays it’s everybody’s talks about fertility issues and they’re very open. But at that time it was embarrassing, although at that time, one in six people, 16% were having problems. Now it’s way up to 25%. And frankly, probably even more, a lot of it is stress issues and other things. There’s a lot of problems with people having, uh, trouble.

So ultimately it was a very difficult time and there were three, three girls and one boy. Ultimately, I ended up with three girls. I never did have another. Boy, he was the only one I ever lost. But when I went into my second marriage, my second wife had also had fertility problems. Interestingly, it was something that kind of held us together.

We said, we’re never gonna go through this, this fertility stuff again. We’re gonna adopt. So we ended up adopting two wonderful girls in the seventies and had had great times with them.

Chad Sands: It seems like such a loss.

Gary Gwiliam: You know, uh, here’s the deal, Chad, at the time I certainly probably could have gotten some grief counseling, and I refer grief counseling to everybody nowadays.

But there was no such thing in those days. Nothing. And, and I’m a trial lawyer, so I, uh, I’ll tell you the story. When we realized this, you had four fetuses. It was too late. ’cause the, the babies were so big in there, they were ready to come out even though they were very small. So when they came out, they were between a pound.

Nine and a little less than that. I think the youngest, the the boy was a pound nine, and there would never been fetuses survive that. Nowadays they have, it was the first set of quadruples born in Ventura County. They never had it set there, and so they didn’t know what to do with ’em. So when she lost them, we knew that we would not be able to do it, and it was very sad.

She was in there and I went in and the little boy was in an isolette. In my book, I talk about the fact that I walked up and I looked in the there and he’s in this little teeny creatures just struggling for breath, and I’m looking at this, this little thing, and I’m saying, you know, that’s my son. And it turns out that that’s the only son I’ll ever have.

And here’s what I did to, to deal with it. I work and I drank. I went home, opened up the scotch bottle, drank it, went to work the next day, drank the next night, drank. And I did just what I’d always done. And that was the way I dealt with it. That’s not the appropriate way. Now, you’d need some counseling, talk about it, but ultimately it broke our, our marriage up.

I mean, uh, marriage was probably on the rocks anyway, but one of those life changing events that happened and, but it turned out for the best because, you know, later on I had to. Two wonderful adopted kids. I was fortunate to get ’em because adoptions were getting very difficult in the early seventies because people were beginning to keep their children.

There was more fertility issues there, the people birth control. So the one time the, there was just a lot of adopted kids out there in the fifties, maybe even in the early sixties. But by the time of the seventies, the adoption market had dried up and people were doing, adopting kids from other countries, from Korea and China, and.

Around the world, you know,

Chad Sands: was the loss, do you think that pushed you into the deep end in terms of your drinking?

Gary Gwiliam: No. No, not exactly. First of all, lemme make this clear. I come from a long line of alcoholics. My father was an alcoholic. My grandfather was an alcoholic. My uncle was an alcoholic, and I knew perfectly well the statistics were that I was 11 times more likely to become an alcoholic than others.

I was aware of that, but I knew that I wouldn’t become an alcoholic because I was smarter than all my parents and my grandparents. They hadn’t even gone to college. Little in law school. They’re a lot smarter than I am. Well. That was arrogant as hell. Of course, that’s just not true. What happened to me is what happened to so many trial lawyers, and it shaped the way that I have dealt with lawyers.

And at some stage I started trying these cases when I moved up to Oakland and it was case after case after case and the stress began to get to me and I’d gotten into my second marriage and, and had new kids and there were stresses of that. And then ultimately I left my old firm and I had to form my own firm.

And that added to the stress. So I know exactly in my life, and I think so many of us do. When do you turn from a social drinker to a problem drinker? And the time for me was this, it was because at the end of the day, I always loved having a drink before dinner, and I’d go out and eat a drink. So I wanted a drink, but there came a time when I needed a drink.

Drink became something that I really had to have, and I’d go into the bar and have a couple of pops before I went home. Then I’d start drinking at home. I was a functional alcoholic. I was still able to work, but I was more and more getting into it, but it was directly related to the stress in my life. So I wasn’t drinking for fun anymore.

I was drinking for stress. I’ve given a talk to, to lawyers once in a while that that says, uh, am I drinking too much? Is a rhetorical question. Well. Rhetorical questions answer themselves. They love it. Well, of course you are. And I think that if people really begin to say, am I reaching the point where I really need to drink as opposed to just want to drink?

That’s when you gotta be careful about whether you’re turning that corner. There’s a whole subject of whether you really go down the drain and how far you really need to get into rehab and Alcoholics anonymous, and maybe even getting into rehab facilities. But I’m interested in that turning point for us because there’s so much abuse of alcoholism in our profession.

We’re probably the worst profession, maybe along with the medical profession, and some of the cops we’re one of the worst professions for alcoholism, depression, suicide. Stress, and here’s what it, here’s what it’s about. If you don’t mind my saying, particularly trial wars, we don’t get anything unless we take it away from somebody.

Every one of our cases is taking something away that somebody wants to fight with you about. Almost always money, big people. And we’re taking on big companies and big insurance companies and look at who, uh, Brian Chase, my friend, has taken on, uh, general Motors, Ford people that do not wanna do that. So we we’re, we’re always in this.

Fight mode. It’s fight and flight, and that leads to a lot of, a lot of stress. I mean, we don’t make our money easily. We can make big money when we get it right, but we can also get crunched if you lose a big case. I’ve known lawyers who’ve seen a really bad case and a loss that’s ruined their career.

They’ve got so wrapped up in trying to win their cases that it’s the stress got to ’em. It’s sad to see that happen, but we have to be aware that we’re, we’re in a very stressful profession. And that’s what what I’ve tried to teach my fellow trial lawyers is be aware of this. Let’s be careful of these because if I can save another trial lawyer, look at all the people I’m saving besides just my own clients.

And I know that I’ve helped other people because they’ve come up and told me that. And I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve helped other lawyers, other trial lawyers who have helped their clients. So everything that you’re doing with the good work you’re doing with all the people you’re interviewing, I would like to think that I’m.

Helping my fellow trial lawyers be able to help their clients. You know,

Chad Sands: you mentioned this idea of a turning point. Right. Can you talk about your turning point and how you recognized it and what you did?

Gary Gwiliam: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you the story. In my second marriage, I, I had adopted these two kids and life was really good for a while, but then I began drinking harder and I began partying a little bit more than I should have, and I was out late when I should have been doing things.

I, I’m gonna be honest with you, I was not as good husband as I should be with all the, the stress and the drinking. And my second marriage began to fall apart. I knew my wife was getting ready to leave. Me and my kids at that time were nine and 11, and I loved my wife and I didn’t want her to leave me, but I knew that I needed to make some changes.

But the problem I had, Chad, at this point in my life, I. Everything I’d ever done that I enjoyed was, was with alcohol. I was a Raiders fan. How the hell could I go to a Dr a Raider game and not drink at Oakland Raiders and drink beer? How, how could I go out and play cards or dominoes with my buddies? How could I go to a party and not drink and, and every fun thing I’d ever done my whole life.

Had been involved with drinking and I was afraid if I stopped drinking, I would not have fun anymore. I wouldn’t do it. And the date was June 11th, 1984. I’ll never forget the name. It was a Saturday night and my wife said to me, Hey, we’re gonna go down and meet the potters who are drinking friends of our, and she says, we’re gonna meet them five 30 and a little girl early.

And I said, it was Saturday night. Okay, well let’s do it. So we walked into the place and I turned her right to go in the bar and she says, no, we’re meeting in the coffee shop. And I said, coffee shop, the. What partnership And she, she guided me in, I walked in, the coffee drop was almost deserted except over in the corner were, uh, four guys and we, and she guided me over there and I said, hell, one of my former partners was there and a guy named Ed Caldwell.

I thought he was a hard drinking guy. And then there was also one guy that I didn’t know, so I’m, I’m getting very suspicious about this. Lou says, these guys want to talk to you about drinking. And I said, Jesus, good. I’d love to talk about drinking. Let’s go in the bar and talk about drinking. You know, but it, it turned out that I had one of the very early interventions, and so they sat me down and with, with Liz and my wife, and they were very honest, and they said, Gary, look, your partners are worried about you.

You’re drinking. We know that you’re passing out sometimes and you’ve gotta stop this. And I sat there for a while, and finally I turned to him and I turned to the guys and I said, are you getting better verdicts than I am? What the hell, right? Do you have to tell me, uh, who the hell I, whether I’m drinking or not?

Go f yourself. And I took Liz and I said, I’m done with this thing. And I walked out and we, we walked out in Stony Kinds and, you know, you know, you, you lied to me. We’re not meeting the potters. And she didn’t say. So we drove home in stony silence. And when I got home, talk about arrogance. I turned to my wife and I said, well, you don’t expect me not to have a drink after that, do you?

You know, I pour, Kerry deserves a drink after my intervention. But I went in and I poured a drink and my wife was crying in the other room, and I knew that my marriage was either over or not. And I finished my scotch and soda and I started to pick another one up and it didn’t taste very good. And I turned around and I said, I’ve gotta make a choice.

And I walked back into her room and I said, Liz, I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never said. Never said, I’m gonna quit drinking. I’ve never gone on the wagon, never did that. But I’m gonna stop right now today because I don’t want you to leave me. And I love you and I love my kids. And I know it was arrogance.

And Chad, I felt, and that whole intervention, like somebody had slapped me right across the face, it had forced me to deal with my own ego and arrogance. And I stopped. I stopped that very day and we, fortunately had a nice trip planned Hawaii, and then we came back. The problem I had after I came back was, I’m the life of the party.

I’m a guy that told jokes. I, I would have a little joke book and I’d get half in the bag and I couldn’t remember my jokes. I’d go into the. John did tell I was taking the leak and I get my little book out and remember my jokes go back out and people love me and I go to the party and I say, well, you know, I’m not gonna be the life of the party anymore.

So I go in there and I say, what are people gonna think? What Gary Williams not. Drinking. And I go in and I order a, a soda and, and you know, with a little lime in it, nobody says anything. And I realized nobody gives a damn what. But I’m, they’re only caring about what they drinking. I care about drinking, but my life dramatically changed, although I slipped a little bit and I, that’s another story.

For the most part. That was the end of my drinking. And then my friend, ed Caldwell, that was in there, that started the other bar, the other bar is in a local offshoot of. Alcoholics Anonymous only for lawyers and, and judges and people in Lake. And he saved so many lives and he saved my life. He’s gone now, but, oh God, I love death.

And Ed saved my life. I mean, if I hadn’t quit drinking and Chad, I was gonna die. My liver was going out, my triglycerides were out. I was 47 years old, and everything changed the day I quit drinking.

Chad Sands: How did you find the ability to still have fun without drinking? That you were so afraid of?

Gary Gwiliam: Well, what, what happened is I, I’d go to these parties and at the end of the day, I can still remember ’em because in the old days when I was half in the bag, I couldn’t remember.

It was a different thing. And I, I realized, you know, you don’t have to be the funny guy in the life of the party. I, I enjoyed more serious conversations. I, you know, I would, I would entertain people in a different kinda way and kind of get to know people and talk about serious stuff. And when I quit drinking, I went on an entirely different spiritual search.

The sometimes in my book. As a trial lawyer finds his soul, I really went into a deep dive to find out not only why I quit drinking, ’cause why was I drinking, and, but I needed to answer a more fundamental question. That is, who am I? What is the purpose of my life? What happens to me when I die? Have I lived other lives?

Questions like this, I found. In the year or two after I quit drinking was a very profound time and I really found my answer. I found that my mother died about the same time that I became president of the trial lawyers and I connected with her soul and did a lot of really deep work in order to find the purpose of my life.

Well, each of us have to find our own way. Chad, you gotta find your way. You’re, you’re a young guy, but I found my way. And I feel very comfortable with it. I feel very comfortable about it. I know when I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die when this, when my time is up, when I’ve completed what I’ve got it done. And it’s not, not today.

Uh, I still have work to do even at this late stage. But quitting drinking was just part of a long journey that took me in an entirely different direction. And I’m a, a very different person than I was when I was back drinking. I, it’s like two separate lives, really

Chad Sands: getting a winning verdict. In my personal life, a trial lawyer finds his soul Is the name of your book.

Correct. Can you tell me a little bit about the journey of what it was like to find your soul?

Gary Gwiliam: Well, you know, it was, like I say, because my biological father and I lived with him when I was outta high school and trying to get my way after I’d become a, become a gang member, I had a falling out with him and he tried to force me into.

Going to Alcoholics Anonymous when I was 19 years old and I wasn’t ready, so I did not want to go into AA myself, and I didn’t. I wanted to find my own way, and so I felt that I needed to go to what? AA people now call it the 12th step. There’s a, a series of steps that you go through in, in the Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12th step is finding your own soul and journey.

And so I just, I, I needed to, to do it and I started looking around for alternative ways and started reading a whole bunch of different literature and I, I looked into Buddhism, I looked into. Do spirituality. I looked into past lives and I found some stuff that was just made sense to me and ultimately I found a hip therapist that was absolutely terrific and she took me into some deep places and I found this channeling and connected with some things that are very interesting to me.

And it was a place for me that made sense for me to realize that each of us has to find our own way. Some people can find it through traditional religion. We’re going to churches. That’s not me. I was, I come from a long line of Mormons, so that’s another weird thing in my life is that I escaped to Mormonism.

’cause I was born in Utah and at that I did not want to go back to Mormonism. I wasn’t going there and I didn’t wanna go into Catholicism. So I just needed to read the books and do the work. And I found, I found what I needed to find. And very fortunate that I. Made that journey. A lot of people have made that same journey.

We each have to make our own journey. Are there? So that’s, we’re getting kinda into deep stuff here, but this is, this is what life’s about. In my view,

Chad Sands: I like to get into deep stuff with deep people, and podcast is for trial lawyers, but on, quite honestly, I don’t really talk about big verdicts that much.

You know, the stories are more interesting, right? One of my favorite books is a book called Henderson The Rain King, which is about this American millionaire who goes to Africa to find his soul. That is how I kind of summarize it. But do you have any advice then maybe for anyone who’s at that turning point or anyone who is still letting their ego take over?

What can they do to try and find their soul?

Gary Gwiliam: I think a lot of, a lot of us who find that way kind have to hit bottom a little bit. You know, when I was in my hard drinking days and having fun and chasing women. Going out to bars and doing all the stuff we did and winning cases, I was kind of a hedonist and I wasn’t ready for that.

I had to kinda get slapped in the face and realize that I needed to make some changes. And there comes a time when you realize that drinking isn’t going good for you. Uh, some people could come to it early, some people don’t. I guess that, but there’s so many different ways that we can find our own way.

But I, I think what you really need is just to ask yourself the same question. Who am I? In my life. I don’t find religion by looking at a human being. I’m not here to dump on people that are Christians and believe in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was a, was a wonderful, a very interesting man that people can revere, but I personally just don’t believe in worshiping command.

It’s, it’s the universe and whatever we’re a part of is way, way bigger than that. Look into near death experiences. And you look at these people that have had these NDEs and they go to the other side. And they have seen something there that is absolutely incredible. There’s a curtain we have in life that we can’t cross to really see what’s out there, and we’re very limited in our consciousness.

And the NDEA experiences are very interesting as to what happens out there. And people don’t want to come back and read about meditation, go into a deep place yourself, do hypnotherapy. There’s so many different ways you can dig into. Finding what’s deep inside of you because the, the answer’s inside of us deeply, inside of us in a very intuitive way, and we can’t just figure it out through our left brain, you know?

Yeah.

Chad Sands: Well, you’ve been doing this a long time and you’ve been through a lot, and the second question I do ask is, you know, what makes you unique then as a trial lawyer?

Gary Gwiliam: Well, as I said, you know, I’ve tried a lot of cases and I’ve tried, uh, a wide variety of cases, my criminal cases, and then, but one of the things that I’ve done is I’m also an employment lawyer and I’ve tried a bunch of employment courses and I done those.

So I think I, my varied different kinds of trials is important. But I want to just come back again. If I ever have a legacy or somebody to look back on my career, it’s not gonna be because of all the verdicts that I got. It’s gonna be because I was, uh, helping other lawyers and talking about ’em. So one of the things that I, we haven’t touched on is I’m one of the few lawyers in the country that’s ever talked about their losses.

Lawyers never talk about their losses. We go to all these. Seminars, how to win at this, how to win a board. Board, how to win an opening argument, how to win in cross-examination, win, win, win, win, win. And nobody ever talks about losses. But I’ll tell you, you talked to the best trial lawyers around. You asked, do you remember the worst case you’ve lost?

Yes. Right in their mind, they’ll always remember that they might might not remember their best wins, but the losses are branded into ’em. And so what happens is because we are in a win-win mentality, when all of a sudden we take a bad loss, it can be very difficult for people. And so I took a very bad loss on a case.

I was the president of the Trial Lawyers Association. It was 1988. And I was in the middle of a lot of things and I had to try a mid mal case with my partner, and it was a five year statute. It was a tough case. It was a shoulder dystocia case of a girl that ended up with a very shriveled arm and I had just beaten a five year statute.

My young partner at the time, Steve Brewer, sitting next to me at trial and I was just gonna examining a witness. Bailiff came in and. Handed him a phone note at that time. So he looked at this phone note and he goes over and he said, uh, Gary, we gotta take a break. And I said, uh, well, you know, I’m just in the middle of, it was at like 10 30 and I said, I’m in the middle.

He says, Gary, take a break right now, please. I said, your Honor, there’s something has come up. I said, we need to take a break. So we walk into chambers and the defense attorney’s there he is. Nice guy, but a tough guy. And Steve walks in with me and the judge has done what it is, and Steve hands me an note and I look a note and says.

Your dad had called your mother died this morning. You know, I was really close to my mother and I’m sitting there in the. And the judge’s chambers, you know, uh, started to get emotional and try, try it up. And so I said, shit, I’m the one son, that guy. I said, I gotta take a break in this. The judge was a nice guy.

He says, all right, well, we’ll, let’s break the case for a week. So I had to go back to Utah and do the whole funeral, and I. I ended up giving, by far the best closing argument I ever did, but it was on my mother’s memorial that it wasn’t as good as their, so I, I had a really, I gave a great talk on my mother and I went back and tried the case and to an ban surprise.

I, I lost the case and there was a tough case. And so I walked back into my office and in the days, it was Saturday morning, I picked up my yellow pad and I said to myself, is there anything good about this damn case that I just tried? And there are some good things about it. I thought about it, so I was completely positive thinker.

So I put a line down the side and I said, on the one side, what are the good things about the loss? What are the bad things? The bad thing is. I lost the case. I didn’t win any money. Good thing was, you know, my client was very happy. As a matter of fact, she’d worked in our office and, and I had a very good relationship with her.

And then I learned a lot about how to try a mid mal case because I had a, a really good lawyer on the other side, and I had to appreciate that. And all of a sudden I said, you know, I gotta appreciate that, you know, you’re gonna lose some cases and gonna win some cases. So I decided after that to write an article about losing because I realized nobody had done that.

And I looked into Vince Lombardi and Coach Win, win Win and everybody. And so I wrote an article called The Art of Losing, and I put it in the Americ Order of Trial Advocates. I and I was published in a lot of places and people had never. Had an article about losing, but I had a whole series of things about how, you know, when you lose, you get humility, you learn some lessons from losing that are, are there, and one of them is that we tend to get kind of arrogant.

Losing is something that we need to do. We need to have the courage to pick it up again. It gives you courage. You gotta get, you gotta get knocked down once on to stand up. If there’s one thing that I’m really proud of. It’s the fact that I had the courage enough to stand up and talk about what happens when they lose cases.

And you’re not gonna have very many trial lawyers that you’ll interview that ever want to talk about that subject.

Chad Sands: Maybe this was another loss or maybe it was a win. Maybe it was a big verdict or maybe it was a little one. I. I know there’s been hundreds over the years for you, but could you share a story about one case that had a significant impact?

Gary Gwiliam: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll go back to a case that I tried in 1986, a long time ago, and it was involved a guy that was, uh, working on a punch press and he was a young guy. He was 19 years old and it was an old press. They were pressing, uh, a cardboard down to. It’s years in wineries and it was a winery company and this old pen press, and what happened is the punch press came down when his hands were in and he had both hands caught and he had extremely serious injury, particularly to one hand.

But both hands were were badly injured and it was a terrible. Terrible accident. The case almost got thrown out on the basis that it was a workers’ comp case. But I finally got the case to trial and we went on the case and I was dealing with one of the big time defense trial lawyers. He’d been trying a lot of cases.

His name was Dan McNamara and he tried 300 jury trials. He was a lot older than I was, but he was a big guy. And so we had been talking about settlement of the case, and we talked for a long time and we talked about sending it for a million dollars and they weren’t gonna pay it. My. We hadn’t talked to settlement for a couple of weeks, and McNamara comes over and says, well, Gary says, um, he says, I got the million for you, so, uh, let’s get the case settled.

And I said, well, wait a minute. I haven’t talked about that. Lemme talk to my client. Uh, I said, no, Dan, I’m sorry. We’re, we’re not gonna take it. Is John dropped open and he says, you’re turning down a million dollars. I mean, this is 1986. I said, we’re gonna take our our chances. So the trial went well and he wasn’t as bear bear as I was, but I ended up getting a $5.5 million verdict, which at the time was the biggest hand injury verdict in the country.

And but much more importantly than the big verdict, which the fact that only they paid it off, and it made a big difference to me because I had just broken up on my firm and I was just starting my new firm where we really needed this money to kind of move into a new suite. But more importantly than that, my client became a friend of mine and years later I stayed in close touch with him.

And when I was into my second marriage, we needed to find a house and we were moving out here. And this was at least 10, 15 years later. And he was, uh, dabbling in real estate and selling it. And it turned out that he had found just the right house for us. So he sold us our house. And, and at that time this house was worth $600,000 and that’s not much money then, but it was the biggest house he’d ever sold and it was the biggest verdict I’d ever had at the time.

And so Scott and I remained friends all these years because I also have another interesting case happened about the same time I had to have Corvette rollover and it was a case of a guy that was. Driving a Corvette coming home from a party at night and a drunk sailor rear ended him. Now on the freeway, he was going about 55 or 60, and this guy came out at about 80, hit him, and the car rolled over and went up in embankment and very slowly rolled over.

And what happened is that crus his head and he ended up being a quadriplegic. So we had a design defect case against the Corvette. On the basis that the roof of a roof crush. Now this was in 1992 and nobody had ever tried a roof crush case. There weren’t very many standards, so the case went very well and I was trying against a hotshot trial lawyer that tried that, went all around the country trying these kinds of cases, and he tried 10 cases with quad quadriplegics and I.

Insisted on having my client, even though he was having a lot of trouble, he was an African American guy, and I, I had him sitting in the court when I could. So the defense certain comes up to me, InTown, and he says, Gary, he says, uh, I feel badly for your client. It’s really not good practice for you to be having your client sit in the courtroom like this, and here, this, it just doesn’t work around.

He says, I’ve tried, uh, 10 quadriplegic cases and I, I’ve never seen anybody do that before. I said, well, how, how’d you do on those? He says, I want ’em all. I says, oh, okay. Well, I, I think I’ll keep my client there. So we ended up with a $6.3 million verdict, which was the biggest verdict against him and ultimately they paid it off.

But uh, they fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. To his day is still a dear friend of mine, and this was 38 years later and he is living in a nice house. He’s married. I went to his, this. His wife’s funeral. So there’s kind of these long-term relationships with people that you’re helping and Yeah, they’re big verdicts, but they’re just like so many of your other people you’ve interviewed.

It’s about the clients, it’s about the relationships. That’s what’s about, it’s not about the money, it’s about the relationships.

Chad Sands: What was the reason I. For you writing a book, did you just get up one day and say, I need to write a book? No, no, no.

Gary Gwiliam: What happened is started getting active in the State Trial Lawyers Association in 1986 and in that year the president was a buddy of mine and we had a big initiative on the ballot.

It was the first initiative of any of the initiatives in any of the State Trial Lawyers Association. There was one of the four at the same time, and what happened is we got our. Clock cleaned. We raised $5 million and we was nowhere in there enough and we lost joint and several liability in 1986. And so there was a lot of concern about what was gonna happen in 88 because that would be the next year that they could bring in a proposition and they were after us big time to go for no fault and a bunch of things like that.

So we had a a north south deal. So. Every year somebody from the south would be president. Then the north, well it turned out the north was always in the even year, which means that we were always in the election years. So they came to me and they said, Gary, we need you to run for presidency. And I wasn’t all that well known, but I said, fine.

So we, I. Had a contested election. All these lawyers from Southern California backed me and I won by about 60 to 40, but it was a contested election. And then by then we knew there was a big horizon of, of bunch of insurance companies coming together to put no fault on the ballot, and then a bunch of other ones.

And then they decided to put contingency fee limitation on the ballot, prop 1 0 6. That would’ve limited our contingency fees to 10%. Now we’re dead meat if we were stuck with a dead percent contingency. But fortunately for me, uh, I started to get to president. It turns out that the guy that I lost said, wait a minute, you’re not eligible president because you have to be an officer for a year, and you were sworn in on December.

Fourth, then now you want to come back in third. So it was like two days off that I’d not been an officer for a year. And so he goes to some judge in Sacramento County and they issued a temporary restraining order and said I couldn’t be present anymore. And so we had to take that thing up in the field.

Fortunately, we got a reverse back. So I’d launch into this year, and that was the year that I told you my mother died and she was in the middle of it. So I go through a very difficult year and there’s just all kinds of stress over this thing, and a lot of people were very angry at me and we had jury consultants.

And so when a 10% contingency for lawyers went on the ballot, how do you think that thing polled? 90%. Everybody. Yeah. Limited. They got worse fees. How are we ever gonna win that? But we used the same consultants and been against us. Prop 86, we pulled it back together, we raised $15 million and by a lot of really smart tactics, we slowly began to bring it down and knew that we had a chance of winning it.

So when the election happened in November of 88, it was the same year that caucus was running for president than George Bush. The first time insurance companies spent $170 million. They spent more money. Beating our initiatives than they did in the entire election across the whole country to try and put us out of business.

And fortunately we won it. It changed my life significantly. But what I’d seen Chad in in the year that I’d been at President was this huge amount of stress. Because it was existential. People were gonna lose their practices and they wanted to do different things and you, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

We need to, they, they were all trial lawyers. They all thought they could run this thing and, and then we had a bunch of advertising lawyers that were not very popular and we eventually, through a really. Smart move, got ’em to all go off the air and quit advertising because they were killing us in the public domain.

But following that to, to get to your point, I sat back the next year and I’d quit drinking. I was in a different path and I’d seen so much stress and anger and frustration in my profession that I said, you know, I’d like to start talking to lawyers about something different. Other than just how to win a case and how to try a case and no closing, I, I’d give him every talk he wanted in terms of all that.

So I decided to have a talk about how we deal with our stress and our life and how we can get balance in our lives and how we can take care of ourselves. And I think part of it was, I wanted to tell my story about alcohol and because, you know, I’d seen a lot of lawyers really go down the drain with alcohol.

So I started doing this and I was going to a psychiatrist who was a pretty good guy and he had a little. Publishing company and he says, you gotta tell you a story. But I really wanted to talk about, not just about my life, but it was about my life as a lawyer and a trial lawyer. And I thought that by telling my story about my intervention, by telling my story about all my experiences, about talking about depression and stuff, that I could help people understand it and help them understand their own lives, help them deal with the stresses and.

So I’ve gotten tremendous feedback from this little book I wrote. I was never in it to make money or to sell a lot of things, but reading it, you could also get a. Your CLE credit in substance abuse. So I felt I wanted to tell my story and in order to see if I could, I don’t know if about the word trying to be a role model, but I felt that my story could help other people because I just came from humble roots and I’m not any better than anybody else.

And a lot lawyers have gotten a lot bigger verdict, I mean a lot more money than I have. But I’ll tell you, very few lawyers have had more fun than I have been a trial lawyer. Very few.

Chad Sands: You still go to trial and you’ve been doing this a long time. Any tips on getting older and dealing with getting older and Well,

Gary Gwiliam: yeah, that’s, that’s, if there’s something we’d like to close with, it’s the subject of aging.

20 years ago, I would never have thought that I should be trying cases at this time in my life. Melvin Bell got involved in the case in his eighties that he made an utter fool of himself. He was suing a well-known trialer Brown Green for legal Mark. Brought this, and he got all mixed up between the legal and the medical and made a fool of himself and lost the case.

And I thought to myself, there’s no fool, like an old fool, like my mother would say, no fool. Like an old fool. And yet, as time went on, I began to realize if you said, Gary, what do you think was the best day of your life? I have no doubt about it. It’s my 60th birthday. We had a big party on my 60th birthday and we had a big bash.

10 years later we had a big party on my 70th birthday and somebody coined the sermon says seventies is the new 50. I love that. Seventies new 50. That’s me. So now 80 is the new 60. And that’s the way I feel about it. Jimmy Carter 90 was still out building houses and doing all that kinda stuff, and so age is a state of mind.

If you say to yourself, Jesus, I really feel old. Guess what? You are old. I listen to my music outta my fifties and my sixties. I think of myself. I remember these times. I still think of myself as a young guy from May 1st, 1966 to today. If you took all the days that I took off work, probably less than a month I.

Probably three weeks. So I’ve been very fortunate. Of course, I think sometimes I went to work when I was sick, but that was another story. But because I wasn’t an athlete, I didn’t get my joints all beat up, and I’m sure I’ve got a bad knee, but my back doesn’t hurt and I, I can walk pretty normally. And so I’ve been fortunate, both physically, mentally, and most importantly spiritually.

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Gary Gwiliam: To be honest with you, I’ve kind of talked about it during this podcast. I am a lawyer’s lawyer. I think the thing that is important about my career is that I have helped other lawyers, and by helping them, they’re helping their clients. I’ve done all that, but I’ve had the fortune to being the in leadership in my career, and I’ve had an opportunity to be able to talk about things like my alcohol abuse and talk about that.

Very honestly. I’ve talked about the stress of our profession, and I’ve talked about, uh, how we have to deal with our losses. I’ve talked about real things, real life. I’ve talked about my spiritual journey. And I’ve laid myself out there, but I’ve also reached out and connected with lawyers and trial lawyers.

I love trial lawyers and I’m a trial lawyer. True and true. So I would have to say it’s about what I can and have done that the trial lawyers. And I feel very fortunate that I’ve written this book beginning a winning verdict in my personal life, A trial. Lord, I finds his soul and it’s my story. That I hoped would find a little help for other people along the lines.

I’m nobody special. Anybody could have been where I am. I didn’t have any background and I’m not the smartest guy in the class. I haven’t gotten the biggest verdicts, but I’ll tell you, is there very few lawyers who’ve enjoyed their career more and had more fun than I am. And so that’s who I am. I’m a trial lawyer and I’m gonna stay a trial lawyer.

As long as I live and breathe.

Chad Sands: That was Trial lawyer Gary William. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Gary, visit his firm’s website, www.giccb.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 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.