Joe Fried

[Theme Song Plays]

Joe Fried: I am fascinated. I’m in awe of the human being… Whether it’s the van or the big 18 wheeler case, it becomes about exposing the facade of independence… Despite the most challenging and painful of things, a Phoenix can rise from the ashes. 

Narrator: Welcome to Celebrating Justice, presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the Nex-tGen 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.triallawyers. 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 the season two premier, we’re joined by renowned trial lawyer Joe Freed of Freed Goldberg, one of the youngest police officers in Georgia’s history, a former judge and a pioneer and truck wreck litigation. Joe has spent more than three decades transforming highway safety and advocating for accountability.

From understanding the complexities of the human animal to exposing the myth of independence, companies like Amazon often hide behind. Joe is committed to revealing the truth and driving meaningful change. To get to the stories I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer? 

Joe Fried: Growing up, I was always the kid who didn’t like bullies, and I always wanted to try to be the guy to.

I take the bully down to equalize things. I always had a heart for the underdog. And so I think from a personality perspective, that’s what went on with me. And then when I was in high school, I lost some friends in DUI related crashes and I ended up doing an internship with the local police department.

And you know, law enforcement is a subculture onto itself, so I found myself surrounded with friends. Who were police officers. I went off to college, but I very quickly started applying for police jobs and I became a police officer, and I, I spent about five, five or six years doing that. And while I was doing that, I spent a lot of time in courtrooms and I recognized early on that important things happened in courtrooms.

I also recognized early on that the quality of the lawyer made a big difference in terms of not only their. Their quality of how they handled cases, but also what their reputation was and, and you know, those kind of things. So I guess what I’m saying is I, I recognize that justice really isn’t blind. Mm.

I ended up, uh, getting called into a judge’s chambers. I thought I was in trouble. Uh huh And this, this is in the jurisdiction where I was policing, and he asked me kind of what I was doing with my life. I thought, again, I was in trouble. And he befriended me and started steering me toward gonna law school.

And so I have, I have, uh, a debt of gratitude to him for that. And so that was kind of the way it all started. I ended up then going to law school. I came out of law school. I became a federal law clerk for a year, moved back to Atlanta, and very quickly I was appointed in the same jurisdiction where I used to police.

I was appointed to be a part-time judge. And so that same judge who had pushed me toward law school was then very involved in getting me appointed as a judge. So, so I’ve, very early on, I was kind of being a lawyer and a judge at the same time, which was kind of interesting. Yes. And um, so again, I got to very early experience the courtroom.

Then from another perspective, the, the perspective of the person sitting on the bench and realized, you know, how eyes open to the process. And then the, the final piece that I would throw in is I’ve also always been from the time I was very young. Sort of a student of the human animal and how we work and how we make decisions and how we hold human psychology of interacting with each other and ourselves.

And there’s no better place to do that than as a trial lawyer because the practice allows you this amazing laboratory to really see people at their best and not at their best and to, and to try to become a practitioner who takes all of that into consideration. Has been kind of my life’s journey. 

Chad Sands: When you were younger, you were bullied a lot as as a kid, 

Joe Fried: no, I was not bullied as much.

I was the guy who got an opportunity and sometimes took it to try to protect those who were being bullied. I mean, there’s a story that’s told, I don’t remember it when I was like, you know, not much older than a toddler where, you know, somebody was bullying my bigger sister and I apparently waited at the school bus.

Stop, wait for her to get off. And this person who was bullying her, and I, apparently I got into a fight with him. You know, I, I’m, I didn’t, don’t remember any of this. You know, I’ve always been somebody who was a protector of other people carried through in my law enforcement career also. But from the time I was young, I did have a, an upbringing that had a fair amount of violence in it.

It’s just maybe a story for another day, but from early in my childhood, I, I kind of felt like I had to become a protector, and then that just sort of became who I am and I still am that person. So all of those things happened for a reason I. 

Chad Sands: You weren’t necessarily the guy getting bullied, but you were the the guy who would step in and stand up for somebody who was getting bullied.

Joe Fried: I think that’s largely true. I’m sure there, there are times when I was probably bullied also, but that’s not really my story. My story is the things that I, I’m haunted from in that time of my life, or the times when I didn’t step to the plate when I had an opportunity, or I felt like I had a duty and responsibility.

To protect and I wasn’t, I didn’t feel like I was enough to do that. We’re going back to some early childhood stuff, but I think that carries me forward even till today. The reason I work so hard to be the best that I can be is because I wanna bring the best me to the table that I can in furtherance of whatever the cause is that I’m, that I’m representing.

Chad Sands: Yeah. So 

Joe Fried: that’s kind of who I am. 

Chad Sands: I believe you were the youngest police officer in Georgia. You’ve been a judge, you’re a lawyer, you know what makes you unique? How do you separate yourself from all the other guys and girls out there? 

Joe Fried: Well, I mean, I do. I do have a unique background. All those things that we’ve already talked about come into play.

So I’ve seen the world from lots of different perspectives, and I’m always looking for the. The perspective. I’m the guy who’s always saying, come to me and show me a different way. Show me a different way to look at this. Show me a different way to handle this. Show me a different way to understand this.

And I always want to be that guy. So I, I surround myself with people who are willing to tell me that I don’t really have much use for yes people in my life. I want people who are gonna shake me up and make me look at things differently. Mm-hmm. Um, and so I think, I think some of the things that make me different is that approach, that willingness to say, I’m not going to follow the well-worn path.

Right? I’m gonna look for new paths that, not just for the sake of it being a new path, but there’s gotta be a better way. And so, as a result of that, a lot of this stuff is mindset. I talk about things like with my people and preparing cases. I, I say things like. How can the other side be a hundred percent right?

And I still win. So it’s a way of looking at what if I choose to not fight on things that most people are gonna fight about? Does the world open up to me to where I can make that all part of my story and win maybe even better? So I look at things differently and I think that that’s really, at this point, what I’m known for.

Bring me odd thing or a challenging thing to look at and. And oftentimes I’m able to see a path through it that addresses the challenges or that finds the liability where other people haven’t been able to find that. And those are the cases. Uh, that I’m proud of. There’s a lot of people who can take a clear liability, big damages case and go get a big number.

I, I’m not saying I don’t want those cases, that’s what I, I like those cases because even that, there’s challenges that come up. But I, I enjoy this process and I enjoy, again, I look at things very differently, so I don’t believe it’s a coincidence when a case lands in a particular lawyer’s lap. I think that there’s.

There’s something about that case that the universe has put it in, in that lawyer’s lap for, and the magic happens when the lawyer’s open to finding what that is. Why is this case the case that they are the unique lawyer who ought to be handling Yes. That’s when the magic happens. 

Chad Sands: Yeah. You mentioned the human animal. Can you talk a little bit about that and, and what that means to you? 

Joe Fried: Yeah, sure. I mean, that’s my little way of saying we, the human being, you can look at us a lot of different ways. You can also study us like you would study a lion in a zoo or out in, you know, the safari. We look at ourselves and we see all the differences.

I see you have, you have facial hair that I don’t have. You we’re doing slightly different glasses. We have different upbringings. We have different. Whatever the reality is, we’re at 99.999% the same. 

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: Right. So I like to focus on the sameness of us instead of the differences. And so to do that, I need to become a student of what those things are.

How do we process information? How do we make decisions? What are the stories we like to tell ourselves to make us feel better or to justify things like decisions? 

Chad Sands: Mm-hmm.  

Joe Fried: Or verdicts or actions. What makes us lie and when do we lie? And when do we think lying is okay? And when do we think lying is the worst thing in the world?

I’m fascinated. I’m in awe of the human being and all of the ways we operate. What makes us believe something? What makes us disbelief something, 

Chad Sands: Right? 

Joe Fried: How can, how can I be the best influencer of people? And then what are my duties and obligations before I’m influencing somebody? Toward whatever my concept of the truth is and and ethics and all these things that all play around in my mind.

But once you start looking at life this way and say, okay, so now you’re gonna take a deposition in a case, or you’re gonna talk to a client for the first time who’s lost somebody, or you’re gonna talk to a jury about what that means. It takes on a very different connotation. It’s less lawyer and it’s more human.

And in this case, I’m not talking about human. As necessarily being humane and kindness. I’m talking more human as. I mean, being true to what the human animal is and understanding that. And then, I hate to say it this way ’cause it sounds manipulative, but using that to try to shape the world in the, in the way that you want the world to be.

Chad Sands: Or tell your story how you want to tell your story. 

Joe Fried: Yeah, exactly. 

Chad Sands: You have a unique background, but let’s face it, you’re also. Arguably the best trucking lawyer out there, and that’s pretty unique. Can you talk, talk to me and tell me the story a little bit about how that kind of started and why you decided to go down this path years ago?

Joe Fried: Sure. I, I appreciate the, the shout out, you know, and, and once upon a time I would’ve agreed wholeheartedly. There’s now a lot of really good truck crash lawyers, but I like to claim some responsibility for that, uh, being true in the world because I’ve done an awful lot of teaching in this area, as you know.

Um, it started because, uh, you know, so one other thing that makes me different than other folks is early on in my career, I recognized that for me, the idea of being the best for something 

Chad Sands: Mm-hmm. 

Joe Fried: Required me to make decisions to limit the lane that I was gonna be in. And, uh, somebody came to me when I was a baby lawyer and I remember feeling so insignificant.

So. Like looking around and I remember seriously looking around a room and seeing this like sea of lawyers and just suddenly feeling like I was two feet tall and, and looking at these giants and saying, how can I ever be anything when I compare myself to that guy who’s a fourth generation lawyer and that person who’s related to the governor and that person who has a billion dollar verdict, and that person who.

He’s been doing this for 30 years. I mean, why should anybody hire me? I wouldn’t hire me. I’d go hire that dude over there. 

Chad Sands: Right.

Joe Fried: And so about that same time, somebody came to me and asked me the question or posed the question to me, he said, what does it take to be an expert in something? And I said, A PhD in 20 years of work.

And he chuckled and said, yeah, I, that’s one way, but another way is to really become a student of something enough to where you could write something authoritative. And if you put that out and the people in your world ask you to present on those things, then they’re looking at you as an expert. And that made sense to my young lawyer brain.

I went down to the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association office and said, who’s running all the CLE programs? And I plugged myself in with that person and became a worker bee, which I was a worker bee of one in the committee ’cause nobody else was doing anything. The next year I ran that committee and I learned this game of the CLE world Uhhuh.

Um, and um, and then eventually I started getting asked to speak. Uh, instead of me being asking to speak 

Chad Sands: mm-hmm. 

Joe Fried: Last year I did over a hundred presentations around the country as a lawyer and still had a busy trial practice. So that’s more than two a week when you put it together. Wow. And so it’s a huge part of my life even now.

But all of that is the background against which I started to zeroed in on. And I was a kind of, I was a med mal lawyer, but even within med mal. I was a birth trauma lawyer. I handled birth trauma cases and then happened into a case that involved a car getting hit from behind and catching fire and a person burning and then dying 40 days later.

I started focusing on, and that happened to be a Mustang, so think the Pinto case. Yeah. Involving the Ford Mustang. Yeah. And that took me literally on a decade long. A path where I specialized in fuel system. Now I was, and people said, you’re an automotive product lawyer. And I’m like, that’s way broader than what I am. Because that would imply that I know about seat belts and seatbacks and bumpers. Right. And you know, all kinds of, you know, seat crashworthiness, rollovers and tires. And I know about fuel systems, And the protection of fuel systems. And I spent a decade. Trying to convince Ford Motor Company to change the design of the Ford Mustang, and ultimately they did.

And so after that, I resolved all my cases with Ford after they made the design change and I had to focus on something floundered around for a little bit, trying all kinds of things for a few weeks leading up to a particular day. It seemed like everything I saw involved a truck crashed, even getting on an airplane and somebody leaving a.

Trucking industry magazine in the seat pocket in front of me, open to a safety problem, you know, discussion, 

So I, I made a decision one night, one, three o’clock one morning to focus on truck crash cases. And at the time, the thing that people who are listening to this may not appreciate is that time, which was, you know, almost 20 years ago now,  there were no such thing as Truck Lawyer.

There wasn’t a single billboard out there, a single advertisement for truck cases, nothing. So much so that when I started telling the world I was a truck crash lawyer, they thought I was bat, you know what crazy, I mean they were like, what the hell? That’s just an auto wreck case. And I would start the dialogue of truck crash cases are not the same as car crash cases.

Yes. Which became my moniker and it still is today. I started to become a student of truck driving, a student of truck driving safety, a student of the industry. I did truck driving school. I did, I did all kinds of things to try to really understand that world and then apply myself as a lawyer to that world and true to what I’ve al what I’ve always done as I would learn, I would teach.

Mm-hmm. And so I would come up with new processes and ways of doing things and then I would, I would turn around and teach them and, and you know, it’s always interesting for me now, all these years later, I go. And I hear somebody who I don’t even know talking about some concept, and they’ll say, well, of course you do this and you do this and you use this, and you go there.

And I’m like, yeah, of course.

Chad Sands:  Of course you do. 

Joe Fried: And they don’t even know where that all started from. And I also knew that if I really was gonna put my money where my mouth is, which was my, what my mouth was saying is I wanted a safer highway system for all of us. I wanted to affect highway safety.

Chad Sands: Yeah.  

Joe Fried: And I knew that there was no way, I mean, there was no way that I could single handedly affect highway safety in a major, major way alone by handling just one case at a time. The number that of cases that I could handle, right? So, so the decision was if I teach an army of people how to do this better, that we can affect the world, and I think we have at this point, I think highway safety.

When it comes to trucking, safety is obviously much more in focus and problems are addressed better than they were. There’s still a lot of room. For improvement, but it’s moving in the right direction in a big way. 

Chad Sands: And so you even went to truck through trucking school. Did you get like kind of basically get your trucking license or you just wanted to, you just wanted to experience it and get the knowledge and get the expertise of what? 

Joe Fried: I didn’t do it in the traditional way. I ended up mm-hmm. Hiring people to teach me. Uh, so I didn’t go through the regular process, but yeah, I wanted to really understand, you know, I wanted to. Know what it’s like to look out sitting higher than everybody else on the roadway.

And I, I had a cousin, um, who was, had been a truck driver, he’s passed away now, but he was one of my favorite cousins. And, uh, we used to talk about all of his trucking escapades. And every now and then I would get to go out with him a little bit, you know, in his truck and, you know, as a kid. And I felt like if I’m gonna be able to really understand, I.

These cases at a deep level, I needed to be able to, it’s back to that perspective thing we talked about. I want the pers, I wanted as much as I could, the perspective of a truck driver. I wanted the perspective of a safety person who works at a trucking company. So I spent time with a instructor who instructs for, uh, an entity called N-A-T-M-I, which is the North American Transportation Management Institute.

They certify safety directors for, for the trucking industry. I hired one of them to privately take me through the, the course. I’m not qualified to be a safety director of a company by virtue of experience working for a trucking company. But in terms of knowledge, I would hold my knowledge base up to any of them, uh, including any of their instructors at this point.

You know, I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve made a pretty deep study of this. I put myself back in. Um, the law enforcement community and, and, and in the part of the law enforcement community that had been trained by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration so that I could see what that’s like. Um, I, I didn’t, I didn’t become a police officer again at that point.

I, I’ve actually been sworn back in now for another reason, but I went and spent time with the officers who do roadside inspections and, and those types of things. ’cause I, I want as many perspectives as I can get. 

Chad Sands: Let’s chat about Amazon real quick. Could you just share two pieces of advice or two stories around talking about just Amazon and how they operate and kind of a message for other trial lawyers, and then also maybe a message for consumers or you know, plaintiffs out there about what Amazon is doing. 

Joe Fried: Yeah. That’s a broad topic. I spend literally, I, I did an almost day long presentation on Amazon recently, so there’s a lot of information, but here’s some takeaways. First is for lawyers. Yeah. You, you have to understand that Amazon. Has changed the world, just like in some ways Uber changed the world and Uber and Lyft, I mean, this is a gig economy type of a situation.

And what’s happened is, big picture is Amazon became the largest retailer in the world without any stores. Mm-hmm. And one of the ways they did that is by promising all of us that they could deliver to us pretty quickly. And Prime became Prime and everybody, I mean. You know, they show up at my house three or four times a day, I think, at this point.

Right? Yeah. So everything started to be bought that way. And some people might remember that in 2019, Christmas was late Uhhuh because UPS and FedEx together couldn’t deal with the Amazon online Christmas orders. Yeah. And so people got their deliveries on the 27th and 28th, and I believe that. At that point, Amazon knew.

I know they were working on it well before this, but they knew they had reached the limits of their bandwidth on how their system could work, and if they were gonna continue working, they had to really do something to make sure that they controlled this process so that they could continue to deliver what they had promised.

And so if you think about it, they, they want to be able to control the process, but they don’t wanna really have any responsibility for the process, right? Mm-hmm. Because responsibility costs money when wrecks happen. So what they did is they put this amazing logistics brain back to work again. They looked at the trucking industry and they said, is there a way the delivery system?

And, and so we have three areas we have. The over the road 18 wheelers, you, and then you’ve got the vans that everybody sees the ones, most of the time they’re that prime blue. Yeah, the gray. Yeah. Gray color. And they say prime on ’em. And then you also have the people who kind of show up in the middle of your night in their car.

I. You know, and you’re like, what are they? The Instacart is it? But it’s almost like that, right? Yes. And so the feature of Amazon is that what they’ve done is they’re trying to fulfill their promises, 

Chad Sands: Right? Two day delivery. 

Joe Fried: Yeah. The, the, the quick delivery process. And so what makes it challenging is, and this is a first takeaway for the lawyer, when you look at.

A rec report and it’s just a van that hits somebody. It’s not gonna say Amazon on it, even if it was a prime Amazon van. It’s not gonna say that. It’s gonna say whatever, a b, c logistics company or a BC van lines, or a b, c and company, and it’s just gonna, you’re gonna think you’re dealing with an independent company.

That has a couple of drivers. So if you look at the rec report, you’ll see no evidence of Amazon anywhere on there. 

Chad Sands: Mm-hmm. 

Joe Fried: Um, and so what Amazon has done is they’ve created this, this what I’m gonna call facade of independence. Because what they do is they create these businesses all, all around the United States and the world, but let’s just focus on the US for now.

Uh, they create these delivery companies that they claim to be independent. They sell the owner of that on the idea of you’re gonna have the American dream, you’re gonna own your own business, and you’re gonna be, you know, your independent businessman and whatever else. But then they exercise incredible amounts of control over those businesses.

So the takeaway is if you have a major injury case and that exceeds the insurance coverage of the entity, that it’s, that’s listed on the police report, if it’s a van. You ought to look and see if it’s, you ought to figure out. You gotta do some digging to find out if it’s an Amazon delivery service partner.

And if it is and the case warrants it, then there’s a long challenging road ahead of you in terms of fighting to get to this point. But you can unequivocally, in my mind, you can hold Amazon accountable on a couple of potential theories. The most important one is a control theory because, uh, what people are watching this probably know, but just to state, uh, state it anyway.

The way the law’s written just about everywhere with some differences from state to state is if you exercise sufficient control over somebody else’s employee, then you can be deemed responsible for that employee’s actions as well as their other employee, if you will. Mm-hmm. 

Chad Sands: It’s 

Joe Fried: an agency theory, sort of a master servant agency theory.

It’s based on control. And so these cases largely become, whether it’s the ban or the big 18 Wheeler case, it becomes about exposing the facade of independence and showing that there really isn’t independence. So takeaways are, look for the cases. They’re not gonna be obvious even in the 18 wheeler cases.

Sometimes it’s a big Amazon 18 wheeler. That’s marked, but you look at the police report and you’ll be surprised that Amazon’s name is not even on those cases. It’s a BC trucking company. You’ll look at a picture and you’ll say, well, hell, that’s a big old Amazon van on there. You look at the A report and it says, star Leasing.

You have to be willing to do the dig into it, and at this point. You know, we have a lot of lawyers around the country who are focused on Amazon. So we, we have a lot of the information that’s necessary is now in the world, but Amazon has done a really good job at protecting that from general exposure.

Right. So, um, you know, my partner Michael Goldberg and I tried a case the end of last year that ended up being the second case in the United States around this issue having to do with the vans. And we were, we were very successful in that case. There’s never yet to this day been any case that’s gone to trial with the 18 wheelers yet.

I’m working on hope to get one to trial this year. I’m scheduled both in November and December this year for a trial on what we call the relay cases. But the, the takeaway for consumers is that Amazon has built a system that we all have come to rely upon in one sense, and there’s a love ignorance relationship here because we love getting the package.

When we want the package, but the system that’s allowing that to happen is quite unsafe. 

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: And people who are drivers are victims also. You know, in the last case we had this 21-year-old, wonderfully nice guy who was trying the best he could with the experience that he had at 21 years old was required to make 188 or 187 deliveries in a single day.

Hmm. Think about that. Yeah. And you’re supposed to do that safely. And meanwhile, Amazon’s got you under their thumb. There’s stories out there of people not having enough time to stop to go to the bathroom. So they literally pee in a, in a, a cup. Yeah. In because they don’t wanna take the time to take a break.

Uh, so that, that system, something has gotta give. And that’s really kind of my current, I’ve told you I’m about safety at the end of the day. And my current focus is on Amazon and bring them to a point where they see that safety is good business and to make it increasingly expensive for them to the degree that they want to continue to fight that because there are ways that they could address this and bring a, a, a more safety focus in line much easier.

And, but part of it, the first part of it is to accept responsibility and accountability for the system that they built and they created. Which at this point they still wanna bury their head in the sand on 

Chad Sands: love. What did you, what did you call it? Love ignorance. Is that what it was? That 

Joe Fried: love? Yes. I didn’t know what to call it.

’cause usually what it’s saying is love hate. Well we don’t, we don’t hate anything, but we don’t, we’re ignorant. The public is ignorant of the facade of independence. They’re, you know, you see Amazon delivery van coming through your neighborhood and you make the assumption. That that’s a van that’s probably owned by Amazon, that that’s a driver who’s an Amazon employee.

They jump out, they’ve got an Amazon clothes on vest. Yeah, they’ve got an Amazon vest on. They got an Amazon hat on, they got an Amazon shorts on and you know everything in the world. You say, oh, that guy works for Amazon. And then you find out, no, no, no. He’s totally in, completely independent of Amazon.

Come on, he’s not. It’s obvious until you need to know, nobody’s gonna take the time to peel the curtain back. So Amazon wants the facade of all of this. They want to keep us ignorant of the fact that they’ve created this. System. They want it to be seamless. And you know, thankfully, most of the time it is.

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: But then when there’s a problem, they wanna go, oh, not us. Look at the independent guy over there. He works for that independent company. It’s not fair to the consumer, it’s also not fair to that driver of the Amazon band because they’re, they’re getting screwed too. That was a big, a big focus of our, of our trial was to say, we don’t want you to only be fair to our client.

We want you to also be fair to this company and this driver, the Amazon created this whole system, and now they’re saying not on us. Yeah. But they’re profiting from it. But on us, you know, it’s, you know, when, when it, when it happens. And that was what we were trying to expose in that case. And it did get exposed and the the verdict board that out.

Chad Sands: Yeah, I mean, I wonder if America really understood if everyone could look behind the curtain and actually understand what Amazon is doing and how they’re operating. And as you said, the system that they’ve built and created so that they can be the number one retailer. And I think I saw yesterday they passed Walmart, but they’re not gonna change anything because that’s gonna cost them money.

And so you really gotta try and hold ’em accountable and fight for it. 

Joe Fried: Well, I mean, when you were saying if they really knew then what? Yeah, right. I think the bottom line is. I don’t think if they really knew, I don’t think they would want Amazon to disappear. I think what they would want is Amazon to clean their act up.

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: And so, and, and I am not against Amazon and I, and people, people will quote me sometimes saying, I think Amazon’s brilliant. I mean, the logistics brilliance of what they’ve created for the world in terms of being able to do what they’ve done is unbelievably brilliant. To me, what I’m against is facades.

That don’t serve safety. I, I’m, I’m against people pretending like they were trying to create a system where they, they try to avoid responsibility for things that they created and they, and, and they, they trained on and they built, I mean, it’s even brilliant if you wanna look at it as kind of a law, a lawyer puzzle and say, look how they look how they did this.

You look at it and you go, damn, there’s some smart fricking people doing this stuff. You know? But then you look at the consequences of it and you say, wait a minute, you know what they’re gonna do is. They’re gonna make all the money out of this and have no responsibility. And of course, you know, to some degree that’s not a foreign concept because look at every person that incorporates a business.

One of the reasons they’re incorporating the business is to try to protect their own civil response liabilities. Right. From a corporate responsibilities. Yeah. Keep it, keep it distance. So, right. So what Amazon has done is they’ve taken. Parts and pieces of things, and they’ve put ’em together in unique ways, and that’s why they are what they are.

They’re ridiculously successful. They’ve disrupted forever the retail industry. 

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: And now they’re disrupting forever. The, the transportation industry, they’re not only number one retailer, they’re now the number one transportation, global transportation company in the world. And to show you how fast it went in 2022, if you look at the list of top 100.

Transportation companies in the world. Yeah. They were not listed in 20, they were not on the list in 2022. Even in 2023. In 2022, in 2023, 

Chad Sands: they’re number one in a year. They built it. They, they built it all out. 

Joe Fried: Now they’ve been building it for a while, but the hit critical mass, enough of the things fell into line to where they literally went from not listed to number one and not, and number one by a margin.

And we’re talking about number one over UPS. Number one over FedEx, number one over over DHL, number one over the United States Postal Service. I mean, they, they, they deliver more packages than the United States Postal Service. They deliver more packages than UPS who’s been doing it for decades, which that it’s crazy to think about.

It’s nuts. And, and, and, and, and, and keep in mind that, by the way, keep in mind that. That FedEx and U-P-S-U-P-S until very recently was still doing deliveries for them at a huge rate. So anyway, they get the point. Yeah. They’ve grown and they’re not shrinking. And so even with all of this, I mean, I look at this and all I want them to do is clean up their safety act and it might cost a little bit of money, but in the long run, I need it to be more expensive for them to not be safe than it is for them to be safe.

That’s what I tried to do with the Ford stuff. That’s what I’ve tried to do my whole life is, is you know, what if, if the incentives, I look at what the incentives are in the world, when I started in trucking, general trucking. The incentives were all built the wrong way, even down to where everything that might happen out in the world, the responsibility for it would be pushed to the person who could least afford it, namely the driver.

Mm-hmm. Right. All the, all the incentives were built that way, and they still are to a significant degree, but I’m always looking for the incent where, how are people incentivized to act, and I want the incentive to be towards safety. So the way you do that in a corporate world, because the, what corporations understand are profits and losses.

You know, and so if, if, if you look at a line item and there’s a safety line item and that line item is small or big, right? The beam counters want that to be as small as it can be because it’s a, a ding to profit. Mm-hmm. Right? It’s a cost of doing business, so it’s a ding to profit. What I need them to see is that the aftermath of not paying that bigger line item is devastation in the world.

And we have to put some kind of price tag on that devastation because if it’s just lives lost, bean counters don’t really know how to do the math. 

Chad Sands: Yeah, 

Joe Fried: right. Okay. So wait, you’re telling me that if I don’t, if I, if I spend $200,000, statistically I will save five lives. Well, I can’t put five lives on my balance sheet, so.

Uh, as crazy as it sounds, that gets not accounted for until you have constructs built around the idea of, okay, a value of a life is X. So you ought to factor that into your math, which is offensive when you think about it at to human beings. I mean, that it’s, it’s offensive, but it’s the only way we have to work within the system that is the corporate environment.

And what did corporations understand? I mean, corporations only have the ethics that the people who. Drive that corporation have, they operate through people, right? And otherwise they’re a shell that is used to protect against liability. So there you go. 

Chad Sands: Yeah, I talked to Brian Chase, who’s out in California, and he talked about the Pinto, you know, that’s how he kind of got involved in auto defects, where Ford was just kind of, it’s gonna be cheaper to just pay the people who get hurt than it is to fix the right the problem.

Joe Fried: Profits over safety is the way a lot of times it’s talked about. And the biggest places where that was first shown is in the Pinto case, it was the, I think it was the first time that a corporation was actually held responsible, you know, from an ethics like type of a perspective. 

Chad Sands: Do you think you’ll get that from Amazon?

Joe Fried: No, I, I think that eventually, uh, you know, and I’m actually surprised it hasn’t already started to happen, and maybe it has in the back rooms and not yet. You know, pushed out. What will eventually happen in my, in my view is Amazon will own the system that they’ve created because up to this point in time, they’ve been making so much money that the occasional thing that they have to go pay something that happened, they just do it quietly and just keep plugging away.

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: But now that the sort of like the gig is up, they can’t really hide and they, there’s no way they can successfully try one of these cases. So if more and more better and better lawyers are being trained up on what to do in these cases and we’re getting significant premiums for the results of cases above what the case would be worth if you took that premium away, right?

If you judge the injury. And so eventually there’s gonna be a crossover and somebody smarter than me is a beam counter looking at that and saying, okay, you know, we’re, we’re, we need to do something. So what I think eventually will happen is. They may still have the facade of independence to some degree, but Amazon will own the fact that they also have responsibility and they’ll either cause those smaller companies to, they’ll adjust the way the money works so that they can better ensure.

Chad Sands: Mm-hmm. Those, 

Joe Fried: like if, if, if they insure right now, the, the right, right now there’s a, a minimum insurance that. That Amazon requires, and nobody is gonna go after Amazon if the case is worth within that limit, okay? 

Chad Sands: Right. 

Joe Fried: If, if that limit were raised high enough, you, there would be almost never a reason to go after Amazon.

Right? So like, if that. If that limit was, pick a number outta the air, say $10 million, you’d have to have a case that was worth more than $10 million to, to even start to think about going after Amazon. So this thing that we’re talking about shrinks way down. So that’s what I think will eventually happen.

I think they’ll own the system that they are instead of trying to hide from it, and then they’ll ensure it one way or the other. Right, either at the quote independent level, or they’ll own it as a corporation and ensure. Against it as a corporation and just not, not, you know, kind of break the facade, admit that this is, that they have the responsibility.

Chad Sands: Yes. And adopt the motto of safety is good business, which I love. 

Joe Fried: That’s only part of the problem is the acceptance of responsibility piece. The second part of it is they need to start treating their own delivery people with more respect. Right. And when I say respect, I mean the kind of respect that will allow them.

To not have to be so overwhelmed in the performance of their job that they’re asking for trouble. And so that generally means slowing down a little bit. Maybe it’s not 187 packages a day, maybe it’s only 160. 

Chad Sands: Yeah. 

Joe Fried: You know, and, and that means we gotta have more drivers, which is gonna cut into profits, but at least the person has the time to not.

You know, to exhale and to go pee and to get a snack when they need to get a snack. And that is a process that I actually trust that if Amazon used its brilliance that it has to and focus that. Logistics, brain of it, of it on this, they could probably come up with things that I can’t even conceive of.

Yeah. That would help. Safety, you know, tremendously. I don’t know if this all happens before we end up just having drones, delivering stuff to our house there every day. Right. Like the Jetsons, that may happen too. I’m not, I’m not sure which, which happens first. Do we go people lists or do we fix the issue?

Chad Sands: You know, I know over these years it’s, it’s hard to choose one, but could you share a story, trucking or Nont Trucking about a case that you had that had a significant impact on you in terms of how you work with clients or how you operate as a lawyer? 

Joe Fried: Well, you know, I’ve been doing this for 30 plus years at this point, and there have been several cases that would stand out to me, depending on how I heard your question.

You know, when I think about cases that have had dramatic impacts on me personally. In how I’m, how I am as a lawyer. 

Chad Sands: Mm-hmm. 

Joe Fried: The forward litigation case was that to a very significant degree because it was kind of like I, I see that case as my coming of age case because mm-hmm. I felt like I was against overwhelming odds with unlimited resources.

And I didn’t wimp out and I stood in the breach and I went to trial and three month long trial away from my family. It was actually two, two months long. And then there was a long process to, to strike a jury and then a long deliberation process. And it was just me and a very small group of people on my side against this army on the other side.

And so it felt like David versus Goliath. And as a result of that, some. Really neat things, I think started happening in the world that made things safer. I think there are people alive today who would not be alive and who would’ve burned to death, had that case not gone forward. So I’m, I’m proud of the result.

I’m proud of the work that went into it. I also, I credit Ford Motor Company and all of these people on the other side for improving my skillset, making me better than I had been before that, and teaching me a lot of hard lessons. But they were important lessons for me to learn as a lawyer. I also never have to do that again in order to prove that I’m a good guy or a good lawyer or whatever.

But then, you know, beyond that, there’s many people who are popping into my head who have been amazing teachers to me by virtue of being my clients, where they’ve taught me about the amazing resilience of the human being. They’ve taught me. How, despite the most challenging and painful of things, a phoenix can rise from the ashes.

I’m sort of getting a little emotional talking about and thinking about different ones who went through some of the most horrific things that you could, you couldn’t, yeah. You’d have to be some kind of a terrorist to envision these things worse. The amazing human resilience. I mean, it’s just unbelievable what has come out on the other side.

So there’s the cases that I look at that have made me a better lawyer, and then there’s the cases that I’ve had that have made me a better human, more understanding, more compassionate, less judgmental, more impartial, trying to live my life with much more grace. I don’t look at the person on the other side of a case and just presume to make them into bad human beings.

I try to really remember that, but for the grace of God, so go I, that’s kind of a. Big part of the transformation of, you know, sort of the journey that I’ve, I’ve been on. I’m really wrestling now with stopping looking at litigation as a war and starting to look at it in other ways than that. I know a lot of people would disagree with that and say it is war, and of course it is to a certain degree.

But what if we could start looking at it differently? 

Chad Sands: Maybe not focusing on the differences between us, but the similarities. 

Joe Fried: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, and most of these cases end up coming down to you, some monetary result, and everybody’s fighting around this monetary result. Again, my system’s thinking that comes into play and changing all the perspectives is, is there a better way?

When I’d done what I felt like I could in terms of teaching about trucking, I turned my attention to try to. Teach what I’ve learned so far about trials and how to shorten them and make them more succinct and trying to break the paradigm of what we’ve all been stuck in when it comes to how cases get tried.

And I’ve been doing that with a lot of success in, in the last number of years. And so now to go even one step beyond that and to say, okay, what the hell are we even doing? I mean, like, what’s really going on? What needs are we trying to really address with litigation? Is there another way to look at the whole thing?

Like, can we step outta the whole thing for long enough to look at this hamster wheel right, and see if there’s a, if there’s another way to proceed through it. That makes sense. It makes more sense. What, what’s that old, old saying? Something like, you can’t fix the problem with the same thinking that created the problem.

So you have to kind of get outside of the ecosphere that we live in. So to look at that ecosphere and see if there’s another way. 

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Now, here is this episode’s closing argument.

Joe Fried: This journey of being a trial lawyer is really the journey of becoming the best person that you’re capable of becoming. Pay a lot of attention to how you show up, and what I mean by that is you’re gonna be the best you as a lawyer if you’re the best, you as a human being. If you’re like me, and I bet you are, you struggle with fears, you struggle with anxieties, you struggle with concerns over how other people will see you and react to you, and whether you’ll be rejected from them or you’ll be looked at as being smart or not smart.

All of those kind of worthiness kind of things that if you’re like me, you struggle with. Number one about that, know that you’re not the only one struggling. And number two, embrace that. Embrace that struggle instead of trying to banish it from your life. Because those things that you’re feeling are all pointing to things inside that allow you to A, understand other people better.

And B, through the work that you do, make the world a better place. I charge you lawyers with the obligation to leaving this earth, this place, this country, your community, your courtroom, your home a better place than it was before you got there. If we can just do that, if we can just leave this place a little better than we found it.

Or maybe a lot better than we found it, than we will have lived a successful life. What I’ve learned so far in this thing called life and law is that it’s a journey. It’s a bumpy road, but so much of it depends on what I tell myself between my ears and how I show up day to day. And so I’m working every day.

And try to show up as the best me that I can and when I fail, not if, but when I fail, I wanna own it as quickly as I can. I want to own it as fully as I can. I wanna make full and complete apologies where those are appropriate and I wanna move on because that’s what I believe it takes to be the best me.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Joe. Free to learn more about Joe, how to hold corporations like Amazon accountable and promote safety. In the trucking industry, visit his firm’s website, F-R-I-E-D-G-O-L-D-B-E-R g.com. 

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

Remember the stories don’t end here. Visit trial lawyers journal.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 cloudlex.com/tj to learn more.