Patrick OHara

[Theme Music Plays]

Patrick O’Hara: The Golden Rule is really one of the foundations of my beliefs. Mark Lanier took me to lunch and celebrated. And I didn’t even have 24 hours to celebrate. He goes, by the way, you’re going to take the California bar exam in February. And we had settled with all the defendant companies except one. And this one company had a policy that it would never settle.

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice” presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at www.triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Welcome friends to “Celebrating Justice.” In this episode, we welcome trial lawyer Patrick O’Hara. Patrick started his career in personal injury law working at the Lanier Law Firm directly out of law school. In this episode, Patrick talks about how the Golden Rule is one of the foundations of his firm and how an early loss as a second chair helped shape his view of always putting clients first. To get to the stories, I asked him, “Why did you want to become a trial lawyer?”

Patrick O’Hara: So my father is an attorney. I grew up around his practice. He owned a collection agency. That’s not something I wanted to do, but I was used to being in the courtroom with him and seeing clerks and him dealing with opposing people and things of that nature. I always wanted to be a lawyer since I was in high school. I did mock trial. I did debate. I loved arguing my position to a judge and trying to convince others.

I also loved the idea of justice. I loved the book To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved the movie Mississippi Burning and those things excited me. So I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. Then when I was in college, I got good grades. I did well in the LSAT. So I got a scholarship to go to Pepperdine Law School. So it was a no brainer to go where it’s sunny and beautiful temperature and weather and not pay.

Chad Sands: Right on the PCH right there.

Patrick O’Hara: That’s right, yeah. Overlooking the ocean on the side of a mountain with, you know, the temperature vary between 65 and 75 degrees. The hard part was leaving. But I knew that I wanted to do advocacy. So, when I was in law school, I did mock trial every semester I could. I knew that I would either be a prosecutor or I would be a personal injury attorney. So, I ended up becoming personal injury attorney. I applied for a clerkship to work at the Lanier Law Firm.

When I heard Mark Lanier speak at our school. He’s one of the best trial attorneys in the country, in the world. And he decided with a phone interview to let me clerk there. And then I was the first law student they ever hired directly out of law school.

Chad Sands: Wow. Okay.

Patrick O’Hara: And so that began my journey in the personal injury world.

Chad Sands: Was there one kind of reason or another that you didn’t go down the prosecutor route?

Patrick O’Hara: I thought that personal injury was more interesting and that it’s a wider spectrum of things. You can deal with car accidents, dog bites, medical products, pharmaceuticals. There’s just this wide area. And with prosecutorial work, I would know I would just do, I’d start out with misdemeanors and then I’d work my way up to murders. I didn’t think there’d be as much variety and you’re told what to do unless you’re the head district attorney, right?

If you want to do your own thing, personal injury is the way to go. And I love John Grisham and lots of books about litigation. So that’s something I knew I wanted to do. But I did think about it in law school. I debated between the two.

Chad Sands: And then, so you landed at Mark Lanier’s firm out of law school, out of sunny Pepperdine. I had another guest on season two who went to Pepperdine. I drove past Pepperdine many times from LA to Santa Barbara. Great campus, great law school. What was it like working at the Lanier firm?

Patrick O’Hara: I started working there before I took the bar exam. They gave me two weeks off to study for the bar exam and then took it and then went right back to work.

Chad Sands: That’s kind of like a Grisham plot point.

Patrick O’Hara: Yeah. The best funny thing is, so I get the results in November and they’re already having me practice law before I get the bar results. I mean, can’t be in front of a judge, right? But that’s normal. You do petitions and stuff. So, as soon as the results came out, Mark Lanier took me to lunch and celebrated and I didn’t even have 24 hours to celebrate. He goes, by the way, you’re going to take the California bar exam in February because I want to open up an office in California and I need lawyers licensed there. So, start sitting for that.

Thought I was done and that was in 2008 and then four years later he said, you know, I want to do more work in Louisiana. I need you licensed there. So, I took another two weeks off of work and studied for the Louisiana bar exam and took that one. So, now I’m licensed in three states.

Chad Sands: And then what happened after, you know, post Lanier?

Patrick O’Hara: So eventually I decided to go out on my own. Lanier is a great place to work, great place to learn, but there is no one else’s name for a reason. It is his firm. There are no partners. And at that point in time, we had a lot of kids in my household and my wife’s a lawyer as well. It was difficult with the traveling for both of us to work full time and raise our children the way we wanted to raise them. And so I decided to just work part time and take a leave of absence. And I did that for about a year. And then my wife said I was happier working full time. That yes, it’s nice to be a dad, but you’re better at being a lawyer and you’re happier. I’m being a stay-at-home dad, I should say. And so I went back and went on my own and then joined two lawyers. I was their trial counsel and they really liked it. And they said, why don’t you just become part of our firm? So did that for two years. And then I eventually just went completely on my own. That was my journey.

Chad Sands: What makes you unique then as a trial lawyer?

Patrick O’Hara: Well, you know, I graduated second in my class at law school and I was trained by one of the best lawyers in the country, but that’s probably not what makes me unique because there’s a lot of law schools and a lot of people who graduated near the top of their class. I think what really makes me unique is that I truly love people and I really want this world to be a better place because I was in it. The golden rule, treat others as you’d want to be treated, is really one of the foundations of my beliefs. You know, it’s in wisdom literature. So, because of that, the client always comes first.

I’ve represented lots of kids who’ve been injured severely. And when there’s not enough insurance to pay the true value of their claims or even come close, I’ve often just waived my fee because the money is going to be more impactful to these children than it is to me. You know, that’s how I live my life. You know, when I was at the Lanier Law Firm, I had a legal assistant that worked with me. She was a single mom and she had four kids, ages 22 to 11 at the time.

And she was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she was going to separate her children. She was going to have one go with the grandma, one go out of state and live with the uncle. The youngest, she wanted to actually be with me because she is really intelligent and she wanted a family that valued education. And I was only 29 years old at the time. And I told her, you cannot separate your children.

And so we took all of them in. So at age 29, I had a 22-year-old living with us, a 16-year-old, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old.

Chad Sands: No way.

Patrick O’Hara: Right, yes. And one of my wife’s cousins said that we should have gone on reality TV and they would have named it Audrey Patt and all that. That’s our name. But you know, I don’t think reality TV is really good for the people who are in it. You know, when you look at the people who are in reality TV, I don’t really want to follow their lifestyles or how they view the world. So, it’s probably good that we kept our kids out of it. I’m sure it would have been interesting. You know, my wife and I are both white Caucasians and my kids are black, which makes it more interesting. So, we had fun with that at times when people couldn’t match us. Then when we were at church and we were picking up our biologicals, we’d send our 6’4″—I’m 5’9″—6’4″ black son, he’s 16, 17 at the time, to go pick up his one-year-old sister who’s white and blonde haired, blue eyed.

And they would—you know, he’d have the slip that’s got the right number that matches—and they’re like, are you sure?

Chad Sands: Gotta check this, just give us a sec…

Patrick O’Hara: But we had a lot of fun with that. But you know, it also exposed us to things that we wouldn’t see that we now see because we have children who are minorities and we see sometimes that they are treated differently. That’s something we wouldn’t get exposed to if all of our children were white.

Chad Sands: I’m sure you also bring that perspective kind of to your clients at your firm and the cases you work. And so could you tell me a little bit about a case that had a significant impact on you?

Patrick O’Hara: Sure. So you never forget the first trial that you do as lead counsel. And so my first trial was when I was 28 and I represented a man who’s dying from mesothelioma, which for those who don’t know, it’s a rare cancer that’s caused by asbestos. You typically sue a lot of companies because the people who are exposed to asbestos aren’t usually exposed to just one source. It’s typically a lot of different products. And so you end with a lot of different defendants.

And this case was in West Virginia and we had settled with all the defendant companies except one. And this one company had a policy that it would never settle. And it was smart because they saved a lot of money. One of their competitors was bankrupt and they still were doing great. And the logic was this—if you just do scorched earth, in the end, most of the plaintiffs will give up.

Because they have all these other defendants that are settling with them, they’ll get a decent amount of money typically and they’re not gonna go try a case with just one remaining defendant. They wanna go on their way and live their life—what’s left of it—because when you’re diagnosed with mesothelioma, you usually have less than 18 months to live. And so by the time you get to trial, you have even less time. A lot of them don’t make it to trial. So this client though had the viewpoint that anyone who caused me cancer that we know about should have to pay.

And I’m not going to let them out. And so, we had this old cranky 70-something year old judge—he might have been 80, I don’t know, he was old, he’s got to be dead by now. And he sat the client down on day two of trial and said, why are you trying this case? You have millions of dollars, you are a wealthy man, you are going to pass away prematurely, enjoy your money and move on. And that man stood up to that judge and he said, no.

He said, they’re partially responsible for my disease and they’re going to be held responsible. They will not leave this courtroom until the jury has rendered their verdict. Everyone in the room was like teary-eyed. So, we went on and we finished that trial. Took about a week and a half and we won. We got a verdict for him. Sadly, the client did pass away the following year. But it was nice to know that he got his day in court. He got to take a stand and he was victorious and he wasn’t going to back down to the judge or to the defense lawyer or anyone else. And so that one resonates with me.

One of my more recent trials also resonates with me. It’s an interesting story and still actually ongoing. So, I was brought in to help with a family law case. I don’t really do family law, but I was brought in to help because it was an unusual case and you view it more like a murder trial or a wrongful death case. And so, what happened was this young woman, she had three kids, the youngest was a month old, two months old—I think it was two months old at the time—and then a four-year-old and two-year-old, I believe, at the time. And unbeknownst to this woman, her house was in foreclosure. Her husband had kept it secret from her. And when she finally found out, she calls her parents and asks for help and they say, well, you know, it must be a mistake.

And her father and mother asked her husband at the time, the son-in-law, did you make all the payments? He’s like, yeah, we’re up to date on the payments. Like, well, go to the DA or something. You’ll figure it out. We’ll go watch the kids. So this is the evening. The next morning, she’s shot. She’s dead. And her husband says that she committed suicide. But she’s found face down in the bed. No suicide note. Her kids are at home. It’s 6:30 in the morning.

And she had to have shot herself—if she did it—with a .357 Magnum on the left side of her head and she’s right-handed.

Chad Sands: And she fell face down into the bed.

Patrick O’Hara: She’s face down in the bed and she would have had to been face down and shot herself with her left hand and she’s right hand dominant. The gun was moved. With the .357 Magnum, right? And it went straight through too. And when the police arrived, the gun’s been moved, the husband admits to moving it, he admits to washing his hands, there’s no GSR. And it’s just not right.

Chad Sands: A .357 Magnum.

Patrick O’Hara: But it turns out the police officer sees the husband cry and says, okay, must be a suicide. He said it was a suicide. And the parents of the deceased, the grandparents of the three remaining kids, they asked their son-in-law at the funeral around that time, so what happened with the foreclosure? And he says, she missed the last three payments, which was a lie. He was responsible for making all the payments.

And so, they hired an investigator who figured that out among other things. But the police ruled it a suicide. So, they did the only thing they could do and they filed a family law case and said, we want custody of the kids because we don’t want the man who murdered our daughter to raise them. And you got to prove that by not just preponderance of the evidence, but by clear and convincing evidence, which is a standard in between beyond a reasonable doubt and the normal preponderance of the evidence standard. So, it’s a high standard to meet.

And so we tried that case and I helped work it up. We hired one of the leaders in the FBI who investigated the Oklahoma City bombing. We hired a forensic psychologist. We hired a ballistics expert who proved that the gun never even touched her head. So what person with their non-dominant hand puts a gun to shoot themselves in the head and doesn’t even put the barrel to your head, right? Prove that. And their defense was, well, the police said it was a suicide. So they brought in the police officer.

They brought in a Texas Ranger and we had to basically prove the police were wrong and we were right and to a high degree of proof. It was a very hard uphill battle, but we won. We won and they appealed it and the appellate court has upheld it. And now they’re trying to get the Texas Supreme Court to take the case. And that’s where it’s at right now. But those children right now are safe and living with their grandparents. The DA still hasn’t brought charges. I wish he would, but it’s kind of hard, you know, I guess when the police officers said he thought it was a suicide. But we pointed out all the flaws in the investigation. So they may one day charge him still, we’ll see. But that was a case that was two years ago.

Chad Sands: And so the jury basically convicted him, you know what I mean? Or like, was this guy’s dangerous enough to have probably shot his wife and those kids should not be around him.

Patrick O’Hara: That’s right. We basically had to prove a murder, but to a lower degree—right below a beyond a reasonable doubt. Yes, they basically had. And our only argument of why they should take him away is if he murdered their mom. Like that, we said there’s no other reason to take him away unless he murdered the mom. If you believe he murdered the mom—and we got the dad to admit, well, yeah, you know, if you murdered the mom, you shouldn’t raise the kids. Like he admitted that because he’s denying it. Then the jury made their decision pretty quickly too. They deliberated for only about three hours.

Chad Sands: But the DA won’t charge him with murder. Not yet.

Patrick O’Hara: Not yet, not yet. Hold out hope that they will.

Chad Sands: So like in our John Grisham book that we’re writing so far, like you’re the lawyer who had four adopted Black kids at 29, you take this case about this wife who was murdered by the husband and you fought for these three kids to get custody with their grandparents.

Patrick O’Hara: Yeah. And the interesting thing is I wasn’t the lead counsel. I want to make that clear. The family law lawyer was the lead counsel, but I was helping because we had a simultaneous wrongful death case to try and get more evidence to prove it, because then we had two ways to attack, two ways to get evidence. And so, it was the left hand, he was the right hand, and then I was there for trial to, of course, help prepare.

Chad Sands: Was there any life insurance money on her, do you know?

Patrick O’Hara: We believe there was a small policy. I don’t think he killed her to get the small policy. We believe the reason he killed her is that everything was unraveling in his life. He was a liar and he was going to get exposed. And she probably figured it out that night or that morning. And we think she threatened divorce. And then he just came unglued. And he may have even thought about murder-suicide. He might’ve planned to kill her and then shoot himself and then chickened out. Not sure.

But that’s our theory. That’s the hardest part of the case is the motive. Because the physical evidence just shows she didn’t do it. Like what person’s going to put some big gun to their head they’ve never used before with their non-dominant hand and not even make sure it’s lined up correctly by putting the end of the barrel to your head. You’re not going to do that. And you—with your kids at home and no suicide note—it just doesn’t make sense.

Chad Sands: And was she even showing any signs of depression or suicidal thoughts?

Patrick O’Hara: So, his defense was that she had postpartum depression but she’d gone to her doctor and he hadn’t prescribed her any medication and she basically said that her symptoms weren’t really any worse than what she had with her other two kids. Like there was no—it was nothing serious. She was still living her life and being functional.

Chad Sands: In the John Grisham book, in the second act, we’ll see if the DA follows through.

Patrick O’Hara: That’s right. That’s right.

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

Patrick O’Hara: I think that there are a lot of firms that they base the decisions on the overall profitability of the firm. They don’t base it on what’s necessarily best for that individual client.

The other case that really had an impact on me was another mesothelioma case, actually. I was helping another lawyer. I was the second chair. I did about half the witnesses, but I was the second chair. We represented another man, you know, dying from asbestos cancer. And this guy had been exposed to a lot of different sources. And so we had sued a lot of companies. The lawyer I was helping, this was his first lawsuit in this new jurisdiction. And so the lawyer wanted to make a good precedent. Because the way it works is defense lawyers will look at your past settlements and they’ll hold you to it, especially in asbestos. Well, you settled this case for a hundred thousand last time with our client. You know, you should settle this one for a hundred thousand. So if this is your first time in that jurisdiction, you want to make sure that the settlements are high.

You know, we had pre-trial for a month and we had settled with dozens of defendants and for good settlement values. Like this lawyer had done a really good job and we had only three remaining defendants by the time we did opening statements at trial. And the three remaining defendants—the case wasn’t that great against them. That’s part of the reason we didn’t settle. And the other reason is because they really hadn’t made good offers. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t good. Thing is that we’d already obtained over $5 million in settlement from the other companies. And so,

This trial with these other three defendants took well over a month. Our client, at the direction of the lead trial lawyer and our jury consultant, sat in the courtroom. Because the idea was, well, if the jurors have to sit in the courtroom, you should too. I don’t have that same view anymore, actually, for mesothelioma clients. At the time, that was the thought. And so this man and his wife and his son sat in this courtroom for well over a month during the trial. The defendants didn’t offer a lot of money because the case was initially not great against them. And after we went to closing and the jury deliberated, we lost. We lost that trial.

And so we’re back in the war room and we’re explaining to the clients what’s happening and what’s next. And they’re depressed. I mean, who wouldn’t be? You’re dying of cancer or your loved one is. And you went through this long trial and the jury said these three defendants are not responsible. And so to cheer them up, I say, well, you know, at least you’re a millionaire. You know, you can go enjoy your money and what time you have left. And all of them gave me a blank stare.

And the wife asked me to explain—she’s like, what do you mean? And I realized for the first time, and I’d spent several months with them, that no one had told them about the settlements.

No one explained to this dying man and his family how much money they’d already recovered because I believe they wanted him to go to trial because the guy wanted to make a point—the lead trial lawyer. And I think he realized that if he told them you’ve already got five million dollars in settlement, that they’d been like, well, what are we doing? Let’s pack up, you know, take whatever they’re offering. Let’s go. Why wouldn’t you? Right? You’ve got probably less than a year to live—why would you spend the time in a dark courtroom, fighting over money you’re probably not even gonna spend? And that man did end up dying a year later from cancer.

What I think that lawyer was doing was he was using that as the first case in that area to create a good precedent and to create good values for future settlements, which would make him and his employer more money.

But the problem is you’re putting the firm and future clients’ financial gain over this man’s chance of enjoying the few remaining months of life that he has. And so instead of spending time with his loved ones, doing hobbies, going on vacation—whatever he may do—he’s sitting in this room for a month and not enjoying himself.

And it’s because no one explained to him what he already had. And I decided that day that I would never do that to a client. That I would never put my financial gain over the best interests of my client. If I have to settle, I’ll settle. If it’s best to settle, that’s what I’ll do for the client. If it’s best to go to trial, I’ll go to trial for the client. Even though it may not be best for me or my firm, I’m gonna do what’s best for the client. And I’m gonna fully inform my client about the ramifications of settling or going to trial and letting them know where they’re at.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Patrick O’Hara. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Patrick and his firm, visit their website, OHARAAttorney.com. All right, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to “Celebrating Justice” presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit www.triallawyersjournal.com to become part of our community and keep the conversation going. And for a deeper dive into the tools that empower personal injury law firms, visit www.cloudlex.com/tlj to learn more.