Murtaza Sutarwalla

[Theme Music Plays}

Murtaza Sutarwalla: Litigation is the great equalizer and that’s the great thing about this country… It can be the 800-pound gorilla and be going up against another 800-pound gorilla, but you can also be our firm, where seven attorneys, we feel comfortable and we feel confident that we can take on the 800-pound gorillas… We spent, actually, a lot of our work helping governments set up their own laws….

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 triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, Editor of TLJ and VP of Marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Welcome back, friends, to Celebrating Justice. In this episode, we hear from Texas-based trial lawyer Murtaza Sutarwalla. The son of an Indian immigrant, Murtaza shares his journey from the halls of corporate law to landmark litigation against Meta and an ongoing fight to stop human trafficking. To get to the stories, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: Not to be too bombastic, but trial lawyers are sort of superheroes in their own way, right? They come up against some really big corporation wrongdoers and you get a chance to fight for your clients.

So my story was my dad immigrated here from India, and it always comes back—he himself had a dollar in his pocket when he landed here in the seventies. He always reminds me of that, that he started off with a dollar in his pocket at the airport.

I went to law school thinking that I was going to do big law, corporate law. That’s how I started off. For the first seven years of my career, I was representing large corporations and governments around the world. I worked in Washington, DC, and then I worked in the Middle East for a few years and really got to learn what it means to be a good lawyer with the training you get at big law firms.

But I felt like when I set up my own law firm, I saw that my clients were needing not just somebody to be very niche. I was drafting contracts—M&A contracts—for billion-dollar transactions. That’s what I did for my first seven years. I was helping the rich become richer, right? So there was always something in the back of your head and your heart saying, what can I really do with this law degree?

When I got a chance to set up my own law firm, I was representing smaller businesses, smaller clients on their day-to-day matters. Many times the conversation would be like, “Look, we’re in litigation. What can you do?” And I was like, “I’m not a litigator. I’m a corporate lawyer. I can do all your contracts.”

And then I teamed up with my high school buddy—we went to high school together—my partner now, George Edwards, and he was a litigator. So we had a very common way of coming together, and he took me under his wings. I think it’s like Captain America, when he passes the shield off to the new Captain America—we joke about it many times at the office. He trained me, he mentored me, and in litigation, I’ve now been doing it. I say that I’ve been doing it now for 12 years, being a litigator.

And I’ve used the skills that I learned in my early career—tenacity, due diligence, and really understanding how corporate structures are set up. In my personal injury and trial practice, it’s amazing how it comes into play. Like, I know when the other side is telling the truth and when they’re lying. That’s sort of a little bit of the superpower that I have. But that’s really what I’m known for—I know how businesses operate, and we can use that to help our clients, the little guy, get justice from those businesses.

Chad Sands: You mentioned that you worked in big law and even overseas in Dubai. Tell me a little bit about those early years then. And did you always want to go to law school?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: I thought I was going to become a doctor for the longest time, or at least my parents wanted me to be a doctor. When I got to undergrad, I took one class on immigration law, on Asian Americans and immigration, and that just blew my mind, right? I was like, this is all the things that I love.

I know a lot of teachers growing up would tell me, are you going to be a lawyer? I don’t know if they meant that. Now you think of it as a compliment when they tell you. I think now it’s just telling you because you argue a lot. It was a very quick decision in undergrad to go to law school, and I was the first in my family to go to law school here.

So it was a lot of stuff that I learned how to do, but I’ve been blessed with good mentors as I mentioned. And then I keep up on new trends in law and ways that you can be strategic in your litigation.

Chad Sands: Those early years at that big law firm in DC—and then did you kind of ask to go to Dubai, or did they like give you the offer and transfer you over there?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: As a kid, I’d spent a few years, my dad had worked in the Middle East, so I knew what life was like. There’s a lot of opportunities overseas, so I took it, I asked to go, and I was actually the first associate lawyer in our Dubai office then for the firm that I was at.

It was amazing to be there at the ground level because the rule of law is very, very different in different places. We spent, actually, a lot of our work helping governments set up their own law. You don’t get asked as a lawyer in America, hey, write a law for Congress, right? They have their own people to do that. So we were able to do that.

That was really interesting to look at how that aspect was. And I can say that, hey, I helped write two laws in the countries that I was at. At the same time, you get a lot of confidence in your own abilities when you’re dealing. I didn’t go to law school in the Middle East. I went to law school in America. I was an American-trained lawyer.

When you go to a new country, you have to figure out how the laws of that country work. It actually gives you a lot of confidence that you can pretty much figure it out. So it gave me a lot of confidence in learning completely new laws, new language.

Chad Sands: You mentioned this idea of a superpower. The second question I always like to ask you guys is what makes you unique as a trial lawyer? There’s so many personal injury attorneys in law firms. You’re in Texas, super competitive. How do you stand out?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: I was mentioning about his background as a corporate lawyer. One of the things that we’re able to do at our firm, which I think sets us apart, is we do personal injury like the car accident case, but we also do some specialized plaintiff-side cases. So civil rights is one of them and employment law.

Several years ago, we worked on sex abuse cases where children had been abused by their employers or other facets. So we started using that. We’ve now recently started getting involved in labor trafficking cases and sex trafficking cases. So those are really—you’re going up against large employers, corporations.

My personal background, I’m able to look at public filings, all sorts of documents, and piece together what the chain of responsibility is and who needs to take responsibility for what’s happened.

A joke, one of my hobbies is pickleball. It’s fun, and pickleball sort of sums up—you got to be ready for the basic maneuvers, but at the same time, you need to be ready for the fast action. If you’re playing a pickleball game and you’re up at the net in the kitchen, that ball may be coming back at you at 50 miles an hour or you may just get a slow dink and you want to make sure you don’t mess it up.

So I see—I love that—the different things that people can throw at you and just be ready for that. And many times clients will come and be like, how did you respond so quickly? You never know what the day is going to look like.

Chad Sands: Very familiar with pickleball. I actually grew up playing pickleball in Washington state in the eighties.

Murtaza Sutarwalla: That’s great. You’re the original. That’s where it all starts.

Chad Sands: I know, and now obviously in the past couple years it’s totally exploded. But nice analogy with pickleball. I know it’s hard to choose one throughout these years, and I’d actually like to talk about a couple, but can you share a story about a case that had a significant impact on you and kind of how you practice or work with clients?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: One thing that I did in my practice—I took a mini sabbatical about a few years back to go work for our Texas Attorney General’s office. So I was there during COVID. I moved to Austin for a bit and took a break from my private practice. I’d been doing that for, at that point, about 14 years or 15 years.

While I was there, I was in a pretty senior position at the AG’s office. I looked over a lot of the business and financial litigation that the state of Texas had. I had responsibility for all the commercial litigation for the state.

And in that, one of our marquee cases was the state of Texas was sued for violations of our biometrics law and then other sort of related actions, deceptive trade practices and so forth. A lot of interesting litigation around the country—mass torts and stuff against big tech.

The law that was in place, the biometrics law—the state of Texas and Illinois have a similar law—where you can collect biometrics, face recognition, and all that kind of stuff. If you remember on Facebook, you could like tag someone and say, who is this? And then they would store the data. So that was the basic essence of the case.

As a college intern, I had actually worked at the Texas House of Representatives and helped pass the law back in 2001 that prohibited the collection of biometrics in the state of Texas. And then full circle, mentioning about writing laws, I did help write at least that law for the state as a college intern.

And then coming full circle 20 years later or so, it was the first lawsuit that the attorney general had filed against any corporation regarding violations of this law.

I was involved—my responsibilities in addition to helping with the trial strategy and stuff—but also behind the scenes, the work that many times clients don’t see. Like everything the lawyers do in: which experts do you retain, which outside counsel or additional counsel do you need, where do you file, where do you go, what are strategic concerns? Press is a very, very important part of litigating a case, especially against big corporations and so forth.

I was very proud that I handled the strategy and the behind-the-scenes work, but also being a part on the front end in court. I left the attorney general’s office a few months after that, but recently they announced—this is public knowledge—that they settled the largest settlement in Texas history, a billion dollars that Meta is going to pay out to the state of Texas, which is going to go directly to many important projects.

At a macro level, I think that’s one of the cases that I’m the most proud of—that I was able to be involved during my time.

Chad Sands: You mentioned how different countries have different laws, and also different states in the U.S. have different laws. It sounds like Texas and Illinois had similar laws in terms of, hey, companies, you can’t just collect biometric data from people who live in our states. Facebook was actually doing that because if you tag someone on Facebook, Facebook’s going to store that photo and that facial recognition for whatever they may want to do with it in the future.

Murtaza Sutarwalla: And even if you weren’t on Facebook, they’d still be able to store your data as well. So like, you know, if you tag your kids, you know, they keep that too. Or at least that was the allegation, yeah.

Chad Sands: You guys brought litigation against Meta. Talk a little bit about the Meta law team and what it was like going up against them, because I’m sure they’re very nice people, but they’re also very difficult and good lawyers.

Murtaza Sutarwalla: One of the benefits when you litigate — standing and venue are important issues. To be able to file a suit, you ought to have a piece of the thing. At least for the state of Texas, it’s representing the government, but venue is also interesting. Typically, you file where the defendant is based. For many years, Big Tech was basically based out of Northern California, San Fran, Silicon Valley. They get a little bit of a home-field advantage being there in the jury pool.

When you’re representing the state, you get the flexibility of filing in any of our 254 counties, and we’re a big state. So we picked a county. I sort of had a feeling that we had a home-field advantage there in Marshall, Texas. It’s out in Northeast Texas, small. It used to be historically known for a lot of patent litigation back in the day. So they know how to handle these high-tech kinds of cases.

But yeah, we showed up one Monday morning. I recall it was the day after the Super Bowl. Attorney General Paxton was there, and then his team and the lawyers were standing in front of the courthouse in Marshall, Texas. And we’re like, hey, we have sued you for an excess of a billion dollars.

So that was a cool moment. All the newspapers, Wall Street Journal and so forth, were there. So it was a good moment to get that kicked off like that. And that was part of the thing, right? The strategy was like picking a place where we knew they tried taking it to federal court. We had a federal court next door to the state court. That is a small town, but it does have a federal court there. So there were a lot of built-in advantages of going to Marshall.

Chad Sands: Doing some research and picking that home-field advantage. But it sounds like the litigation went on for years and then just recently settled. Is that right?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: I’d left by that time. My sort of stake was helping on the law, first of all, many years ago to get it to a position, and then getting the litigation set up. And it was the first sort of landmark litigation on this law.

Chad Sands: Did you learn anything specific that you can kind of share about Meta and their practices and how nefarious it was?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: One thing that we saw was litigation is the great equalizer. And that’s the great thing about this country, right? That you can be a government entity, you can be the 800-pound gorilla and be going up against another 800-pound gorilla, but you can also be our firm. We’re seven attorneys. We feel comfortable and we feel confident that we could take on the 800-pound gorillas.

That’s part of it for me personally — just the confidence in my own abilities got reassured that we could do it. And that’s the cool thing about litigation and trial law.

Chad Sands: You also talked about what you guys are doing at ESS Law Partners and touched on some labor and human trafficking that you guys are starting to focus on in some of those cases. In Trial Lawyers Journal, Volume 1, there was a story about a nonprofit in Santa Barbara, California that helps victims of sex trafficking. When I spoke with them, I learned that especially in California, Santa Barbara is kind of in between LA and San Francisco.

There’s kind of this corridor that moves up Southern California from San Diego into LA up to San Francisco with sex trafficking. And just curious to hear what kind of cases and stories that you have around those types of cases.

Murtaza Sutarwalla: Human trafficking is unfortunately pervasive in our country. It’s something that I think is gonna be the story of our generation — what do we do to stand up to it? And I think the law is there on the books, both at the state level and the federal level. So there’s a protection, I think it’s called the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which is a federal law, and also our state has its own analogous law against labor trafficking, human trafficking, sex trafficking.

And I think we’re seeing right now in the contours in the political. Legal immigration — you hear that every day, right? Depending on what channel you tune into, one side says it’s wrong and the other side is unfair to the people who are here.

It’s also, unfortunately, undocumented immigrants have been exploited in many ways. So we’re seeing in Texas there are a lot of people who are undocumented — not in every case, but definitely in the ones which stand out. It gets used over their heads, like, hey, if you don’t do X, Y, and Z — and it could be illegal, it could be forced prostitution, unsafe working practices — you have this gun over your head, which is either immigration is going to get involved to deport you and your family, or you’re gonna lose this job.

I mean, really it is the toughest and most vulnerable part of our society.

So many industries depend on undocumented workers to make it work — construction, restaurants, etc., right? It really strikes me, my background being the children of immigrants. My wife, she immigrated from Canada. Seeing it, I’m like, why would we exploit people that we need to run our country? You see the demonization in the news many times, but also, look, the law’s on the books.

What happens is that people, when they come over, there’s a pattern. So that’s one thing that we actually saw at the attorney general’s office. Human trafficking prosecutions were something that we worked on. And we would see that children would come at a certain age. It was a pattern that they fit. They didn’t have family members here who could really take care of them. They would end up in teenage prostitution.

This is not the country that we want, right? And I definitely don’t want it for my children, my grandchildren to have this stuff. So I think the case just stood out both in terms of justice — the law is very clear on top of it — we can really make change.

We had one case that was a labor trafficking case that we were able to resolve last year. We’re gonna be soon announcing another case, which is gonna have pretty gruesome facts. And we’re hoping our client gets their day in court to get justice.

Chad Sands: What do you think the future looks like in terms of the current administration and all this stuff that’s going on? Just if you had a crystal ball, which we don’t, but where do you kind of see this in five years from now?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: With undocumented immigrants, I think it’s going to be tough times. I think a lot of it is a combination of both scaring people to make it less attractive to come here.

Labor trafficking — and then one thing I would add, it’s not always just undocumented workers. It can also be Americans and undocumented. A lot of teenagers who are sort of vulnerable for whatever reasons, they get brought into this stuff.

So I think for sure, as people get to understand what it means to be trafficked and forced into servitude, I think that’s something that definitely will open eyes. I think the law is going to continue, unfortunately or not. I think these issues are going to happen.

You can see in the news — the P. Diddy case, right? The Tate brothers, you know, stuff that they’ve been alleged to have done overseas — that all hits on trafficking. Epstein — I think the Epstein case is still going to, there’s a lot more to be found out about.

Chad Sands: I mean, obviously it’s a very complex issue. What steps should we as the country be taking maybe to help right this ship or end this huge underworld of human trafficking?

Murtaza Sutarwalla: So I think we need to make it as the trafficking basically goes on, hey, you can profit from taking someone, exploit them and take advantage of that for money. That’s really what it comes down to at the end — control and money.

So I think if we make it less profitable or more damaging financially to the people who do it, I think it’s going to send a message, right? Like, I think if a judgment comes in — take the Diddy case, for example — if those allegations are proved to be true and he’s found to be liable, he’s multi, multi-million, if not near a billion dollars. It’s gonna take a sizable judgment to make people realize that they can’t do that.

And again, I know that’s a little bit of an outlier case, but there are massage parlors. It’s in every city — you see those massage parlors and everyone knows the people who are there are not there necessarily voluntarily. They’re forced, for whatever reason, to be doing that.

And I think the government needs to step in and stop those. But at the same time, I think trial lawyers — where we come in is we’re gonna go get that judgment. We’re gonna go get that million-dollar judgment and shut them down.

Narrator: At CloudLex, we understand the unique demands and opportunities that personal injury law firms face every day. That’s why we’ve built a comprehensive platform designed exclusively for personal injury law. Our seamless case management, AI engine, litigation support, and record retrieval solutions empower you at every stage, from intake through settlement and beyond — helping you stay productive, organized, and focused on achieving successful outcomes for your clients. Explore what’s possible at cloudlex.com.

Now here is this episode’s closing argument.

Murtaza Sutarwalla: Why do I do what I do? I’ve been practicing almost 19 years, and I will tell you every day I love it. There’s not a second where I don’t come in at the beginning of the day just proud of what my law firm and I have built up.

Representing clients in the need of justice — you hear that a lot in the legal field, you know, we’re after justice. And what does that mean? To me, a client has faced an unfortunate situation in their life, whether it’s a car accident, hurting themselves on someone else’s property, or being the victim of such nefarious things as human trafficking or worse. And they’re coming into the lawyer’s office and saying, what can you do for me to right this wrong that’s happened in my life?

They are facing medical injuries, psychological injuries, or spiritual injuries. They are hurt. A plaintiff’s lawyer is sitting in front of a person — usually one person, maybe they come in with their spouse, maybe they come in with their children. Many times they’re lost. Many times they have prayed to God and said, who will help me in this tough situation?

Nine times out of ten, they don’t have the money in their pocket to pay an expensive lawyer sitting in a fancy office for their time. As a plaintiff’s attorney, you end up having to help people get justice. But by that, you help them to make them whole and to come out in a better place.

Go to a lawyer’s office, and many times on their wall they’ll have their degree and they’ll have their bar license. And I’m very proud of my bar license. When I look at my bar license, it has two titles. It has attorney and counselor at law.

And what does that mean? An attorney is somebody who you appoint to represent you and make sure they dispose of your affairs. And a counselor at law is somebody who you come to, just like a normal counselor, that you get to speak to, let them hear your problems and what’s happened to you, and give you advice and counsel you on how to fix it — limited to what the law can give you.

But I look at those two titles as my superpower. That’s what I need to excel at. If I do my job as an attorney and a counselor at law, to me, that means that I have done the best job possible for my clients. I have given them a solution within the law that works for them, practically speaking. And I’ve also helped them heal and fix the injustices that they have faced in their life to get to a better place.

One thing that our firm prides itself on is we want to leave our clients in a better position than when they came to us, and even in a better position than before whatever happened to them happened. That’s a really high standard that we set for ourselves.

The next thing that we want to do is make sure that they understand and have a solution for the future — to maybe avoid the same situation, but at least handle it in a different way. And then the third and final thing is we want to be that ear that listens to them and really counsels them through their tough times on how to get to a better place.

Something that I learned early on in my career — I always think it’s a tragedy when we got a great legal result, but the person was suffering so much that we weren’t able to help out because we didn’t know. And so now we make it a point to come in and check in.

And something that I have also in my office, in addition to my bar license — I have on my wall, there’s a verse from the Quran that I hold very, very dear to myself. The verse is, Hasbunallahu wa ni‘mal wakil. And what it means is: trust in the Lord, for He is the best disposer of affairs. He is the best attorney.

I sincerely believe that whenever a client walks in my door, that God has sent that person in some ways to come talk to me and to my colleagues. I believe in that because it puts their case and their problem at a very high level. Because this is not just me trying to make a buck at the end of the day. This is me actually being given this duty by a higher being to make sure that in my power I can help this person.

You don’t hear it many times, but this is a higher calling. Justice is one of the universal principles that every person wants. And if I can do my small part for my clients to get justice, I think that I’ve done a good day. That’s why I come back in the next day with that happiness and that belief that I’m going to be doing something great for them.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Murtaza Sutarwalla. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Murtaza and his firm, visit their website, esslawpartners.com. All right, I’m Chad Sands. 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 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 cloudlex.com/TLJ to learn more.