James Vickaryous

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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 the Trial Lawyer’s Journal.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 the inspiring journey of Florida-based trial lawyer Jim Vickaryous.

Jim Vickaryous: It started off with my parents. I’ve got a mom who’s a Navy nurse. Years ago she was in the Navy and she was a nurse, and my father’s a Navy pilot. They both met on Coronado Island — same place as Top Gun, that bar where everybody’s having fun. Yes, my dad met my mom there. That’s how they met.

So they both have very different ways of looking at the world. I’ll never forget my dad. When I was asking him as a kid, “What do you think, Dad? What should I do in my life?” I thought he was going to give me just this great, specific advice, like, “Okay, you need to do this.”

And he used to be a naval aviator. He used to be a farmer in Alaska. Before he retired, he was an accountant. Here’s a guy who’s done many things in his life. So I figured he’d give me the magic answer: “Okay, son, this is what you need to do.”

He didn’t tell me to be a lawyer. All he said was, “Son, do something that’s going to help people. Because if you do something that’s going to help people, you’re going to be happy, they’re going to be happy, and you’re always going to have a job.”

And it really stuck with me. I’m like, huh. I think that’s good advice.

My mother’s the one who told me, “Jimmy, you should be a lawyer.” It was kind of funny — not because I think that she thought I was going to be a great lawyer or had the aptitude for it. As a nurse, she wanted all her sons to be doctors. There’s four boys in my family. I’m the oldest, and she wanted doctors.

My mom was one of those focused moms. She made us all get up in the morning, go to school — we all went to college, all that stuff. Very strict when it came to that. So she wanted me to be a doctor. But the problem with me — and she saw this early — is I’m terrified of needles. I really hate them. I don’t like looking at blood. Those are two kind of key things, yes?

Chad Sands: Yes, those are must-haves.

Jim Vickaryous: Son Number One — he is not cut out to be a doctor. So she started putting it in my ear that I should be a lawyer.

It’s kind of interesting. If I’m honest with myself, my parents had a lot to do with it.

Side note: two of my other three brothers — they’re doctors.

Chad Sands: I was wondering if some — two, three, or four — made it to the hospital?

Jim Vickaryous: She convinced them, and they’re great doctors. One’s an orthopedic surgeon, another is a family care practitioner. So they’re great doctors. But I’m the one of the four sons that went into the law — and I’m very happy I did, because I really enjoy helping people. It’s fun. It makes you sleep well at night, too.

Chad Sands: Did you know you wanted to be a plaintiff attorney out of law school? And is that where you started, or how did you get to where you’re at with your firm today?

Jim Vickaryous: I started off practicing law by basically getting the only job I could get. I graduated in ’93 from Stetson University College of Law — that’s in St. Petersburg, Gulfport, Florida. In ’93, it was a really tight legal market.

Now, if you have a heartbeat and a bar license, you can get a job. There’s a real shortage of lawyers right now. But back then — not the case. It was pretty tough.

I remember looking for a job, and my law school roommate called me up one morning. He was like, “Jimmy, whatcha doing right now?”

I’m laughing — “What do I do every day? I’m looking for a job.”

He goes, “Okay, be here at my law firm at noon. My senior partner wants to talk to you.”

And I’m like, “How does he know me?”

He goes, “Oh, he doesn’t know you.”

I walked into the office, and he said, “First call you’re gonna make is to whoever you know that has a bar license and doesn’t have a job, because we need a lawyer this afternoon.” They had just gotten hired on a bunch of different cases, so they just needed a body.

Chad Sands: And your buddy was the lifeline call to you?

Jim Vickaryous: He gave me the lifeline call. I was there with my only suit at noon, and we had lunch. This was the ’90s, so younger lawyers may not understand how un-PC these interviews were.

Chad Sands: It’s like the Wolf of Wall Street era, kind of, I imagine?

Jim Vickaryous: It was exactly like that. He wasn’t beating his chest like Matthew McConaughey did, but anyway, he said some things I can’t repeat here. I’ll just give the gist — it was one of these crazy interviews. I remember just sitting there, and I wanted the job, so I answered all the questions.

Later I learned they just needed somebody that day — and they hired me.

That’s how I started. It was a litigation firm, but it wasn’t personal injury. It was a Sarasota–Bradenton kind of high-end commercial litigation firm. So I learned a lot there.

Then I started my own law firm with another law school buddy of mine in Pasco County, just north of Tampa. We did general practice — everything. That’s when I started doing personal injury.

It was kind of interesting. People would come in and they’d say, “I got these problems. I can’t pay my bills.”

This was before the big advertising campaigns. I’d ask them, “Why can’t you pay your bills?”

They’d say, “Oh, I got hit by a big truck and I can’t work anymore. I had a surgery.”

And I’d ask, “Did you make a claim?”

“No.”

Nice people — they’re not lawyers. They don’t know the law. They’re just trying to get better. To them, it’s just, “I can’t pay my bills because I can’t work.”

You make the next connection. And it’s kind of surprising sometimes that people wouldn’t make the full connection. But yeah — they’re not lawyers either. So that’s where I come in to help.

That’s where I started. Now I’m doing it 100% full-time. All we do is help people with injuries. But I just started off as a country lawyer trying to help people, and it led me to here.

Jim Vickaryous: A couple things make us unique. One thing is I personally — and therefore my law firm — have a very high risk tolerance. Meaning we’re willing to take on a lot of risk to help people.

At the end of the day, it’s for the client. A lot of people have cases that — if you don’t push them as far as you can within the law and be firm with the insurance companies and make sure that in the end they’re forced to do the right thing — you’re not going to get the best benefit, the best resolution for your client.

So we take on some hard cases, and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve done well over the years. Not only do we take on the risky cases — we win ’em.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had my paralegals come in and say, “Jim, what are we doing here?” I’ll tell them, “Hey look, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is a case I can win. I know I can do it.”

Kind of makes me laugh sometimes because everybody has a risk tolerance. Some people are very risk intolerant — they don’t want to take risks, and that’s most people. I get that. I’m on the other end of the spectrum.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve tempered it with understanding that not every case can be won. But that’s one of the things that’s kept people knocking on our doors over the years — and helped us do well. I’m real happy about that.

Chad Sands: Were you a little bit more risky earlier on in your career than you are now? Or do you think you’re more risky now that you’re more established and have maybe the freedom to take on some of those cases — because you’re not just risking the verdict or the outcome for your client, you’re risking the financial backing of the case and potentially taking it to trial and all of this time and energy?

Jim Vickaryous: I’d say I have about the same risk tolerance. I’m still very open to risk. I think it has less to do with my experience and more to do with just who I am.

I look at something. I see what I see. And in my opinion, I’m just not going to be talked out of or persuaded against what I see.

I’m very diplomatic with my opposing counsel and the companies we’re working against. They’ll tell me, “Jim, your client’s just not right. We don’t see it your way.”

I’m like, “Okay, that’s fine. You can see it your way. We’ll see it our way — and we’ll let the jury tell us how they see it.”

A lot of lawyers don’t practice law that way. That’s the way I look at it, and it’s worked out well.

Jim Vickaryous: It is hard. You’ve been talking to trial attorneys now for a while, and you know — when you start asking for stories, it can go on for days, right? My wife and my family and my friends laugh at me when I start telling stories, and then I tell another one, and it’s more shocking than the first.

It was about 10 years ago. I represented a family who had just experienced a very horrible accident. There was a billionaire who was driving a customized Chevy Silverado 2500 truck down the road. Beautiful truck. Big tires. It’s jacked up, he’s got the rack on top, the lights — everything you could think of that you could spend money on for a truck, this guy had it — including a tech company that installed a TV screen into his dashboard.

He had one of these mobile TV racks on top, and he was watching TV as he was driving down the road.

Now in Florida — and in most states — that’s illegal, for obvious reasons. A driver needs to keep their eyes on the road. They have a duty to others to keep them safe and be on the lookout. But he was watching TV. So he goes through a stop sign and hits my client’s minivan.

In the minivan were my client’s wife and his two children. He hit the minivan so hard that it popped up into the air — imagine a soda can being burst open. The little boy was ejected about 50 feet. The mom was injured quite badly. Fortunately, the little girl that was in there — she was injured just a little bit, but she survived and was okay.

Immediately after this happens, my client — the husband and father — is driving by and sees a wreck. The minivan is so wrecked, he has no idea that it’s his minivan. He pulls over — he’s one of these good Samaritans. He would’ve done it for anybody. He’s just a wonderful person who likes to help people.

So he pulls over, runs out, gets to the minivan — and sees his wife in it. She’s still conscious and says, “Find our son. He’s missing. I don’t know where he is.”

So he finds the son. The son is in the moments of his death.

Both the wife and the son go to the hospital. A member of the family called me and asked me to meet them, because the father wanted to talk to me.

We get to the hospital, and it was just very sad. The wife passed. The son passed. By the time I was talking to this poor man, the organ harvesting team had come in and was asking for permission to make a donation of his wife and son’s organs.

Just the generosity of spirit that this man had — in that moment of horrible grief — he agreed. And it helped many people.

The organ donation company was so impressed with his generosity that they invited him, about a year later, to a get-together with every single person who had received a life-giving organ from his son and his wife. It was a room full of people.

I was just so impressed with my client. I’m like — wow. This horrible tragedy, and his generosity helped so many other people. I’ve remained very good friends with him.

I won’t go into how it was resolved, but it was a very generous father and daughter who had survived. The billionaire — not only did we sue him for the wrongful death of these two people — the State came after him. The State of Florida prosecuted him for two criminal counts: vehicular manslaughter.

It was interesting. The father wanted him to go to jail — with good reason. He was just in seeking that.

The daughter — it was interesting — the daughter wrote a little note. I showed this to the billionaire and his lawyers. The daughter wrote:

“I know you have children. I know that their mother’s dead (he was a single dad). “Now that I don’t have a mom and I only have one parent, I don’t want your children to be orphans if you go to jail. I’m making the choice of forgiving you. I wish you a good life.”

This was a 13-year-old girl.

The father read this, and he’s like, “Okay. We’re done.”

Heartbreaking story. But the forgiveness and the generosity of these people make you really appreciate the goodness in this world.

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Jim Vickaryous: In the early to mid-1990s, I was an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves and became a military police officer — so I was a platoon leader. I had about 40 troops assigned to me in the 351st Military Police Reserve.

As a lawyer, the extra income from being in the Army Reserves was actually very helpful to me. I had an eight-year commitment in the reserves. In the seventh year of my commitment — so 1997 — we were flown out as a unit for two weeks of annual training to Fort Bliss, Texas.

I think when the Army named the base over a hundred years ago, they were joking. There is no bliss in Fort Bliss.

At the end of our training, we were called up one morning to get into a company formation — about 200 troops. A helicopter comes flying in. A three-star general walks out. The rotor blades don’t stop — meaning he intended to get back in pretty quickly.

He walks up to us and gives a quick speech. He says, “The President of the United States has signed an order activating your unit. In 30 days, you will be sent to Bosnia on a NATO peacekeeping mission. Good luck, gentlemen. Godspeed.”

He salutes us, turns around, gets in the helicopter, and flies away. All of us are looking at each other — we’re somewhat terrified.

Bosnia at that time was just coming out of a horrible war — civil war, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. We flew back to Florida, and we were basically told: “You have 30 days to get your affairs in order. You’ll be gone for about a year.”

I went back to my little law firm — a country law firm in New Port Richey, Florida, Pasco County. I sat down with my partner and staff and told them, “Hey, I’m going to be gone for the next year. Say a prayer for me.”

We flew to southern Hungary — base called Tatar. Then we went in convoy with all our battle rattle from Hungary into Bosnia. We got to our base there.

For the next year or so, we patrolled something called the “Zone of Separation.” The Muslim part of Bosnia was separated under a peace agreement — the Dayton Peace Accords — from the Serbian Orthodox Christian part of Bosnia. And then another portion was occupied by ethnic Croatian Catholics.

So there were Catholics, Orthodox Serbians, and Muslims — the ethnicities that had been fighting each other.

It was interesting from my perspective — and my troops’ perspective — because we had what you would call today a very diverse unit. Everybody had different skin colors, different eye colors.

It was interesting when we would go to former war zones and talk to the local people. You’d see European Muslims arguing with European Serbian Orthodox Christians, and European Croatian Catholics. They all spoke the same language — Serbo-Croatian. They all looked the same ethnically — to an American eye.

We’d come back to the chow hall at night and kind of laugh to each other: “We have more to fight about, ethnically, in this unit than these guys do — and yet they can’t get along. Somehow we all get along fine. We watch each other’s backs, no matter what we look like.”

Because at the end of the day, we all wear Army Green. We’re all United States citizens. And we’re here to help.

It was fascinating — and chilling. Sickening, even. You’d drive through one valley with your convoy and see beautiful villages. Beautiful homes. Rosy-cheeked children playing outside. Lots of cows, animals — prosperous places.

You’d go to the next valley — and there was nothing. It was almost biblical, like you were driving through the Valley of Death. No birds. No animals. All the trees were burned down. You could see where villages used to be — but only the foundations remained. These places had been razed.

At first, we were confused. We’re not Bosnians. We didn’t understand why one valley was thriving and the next was desolate. It turned out that when Yugoslavia fell apart — and it happened quickly — the former communist government had kept ethnic violence suppressed. People didn’t have freedom, but they had protection from genocide.

When Yugoslavia fell, many of the ethnic groups started getting paranoid: “What if we can’t get justice in the legal system?” If you’re a Muslim and the judge is a Serbian Orthodox Christian — or vice versa — they lost faith.

And the war started. One ethnicity would cross the valley and wipe out another. All because they had lost faith in their legal system — in their government’s ability to maintain order.

I’ve always remembered that. Coming back to America — having been a civilian lawyer before I deployed — I realized how much our legal system provides peace and prosperity.

You see the detriment of not having it. People just killed each other — in very vicious ways — because they lost faith in their legal system and government.

It’s something that has stayed with me. It gives me a deep respect for our system. Nothing is perfect — certainly not American justice. But after seeing the world, I like our system a lot more than any other.

We’ve got a lot to be thankful for here. We really do.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Jim Vickaryous. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Jim and his firm, visit his website: yourfloridainjurylawyer.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.