Roy T. Willey IV

Roy T. Willey IV: This nuclear verdict thing, I personally think it’s garbage. The most just thing would be, if you take my leg, I take your leg. If you take my child, I take your child. I call it our trial ready process. We want every case to be trial ready. 98% of cases settle before trial. They don’t go to trial, but we want every case trial ready.

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice” presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal at CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at https://www.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 welcome Charleston trial lawyer Roy Willey IV. For Roy, the courtroom is a calling, one rooted in faith, service, and a deep belief that everyone deserves to be heard. He shares how his Christian values guide his work, including helping secure a $700 million verdict for a grieving family.

To get to the stories, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Roy T. Willey IV: Growing up, I was the skinny, freckled-face kid on the playground. I was raised for a large part of my life by a single mom and did not have a strong father figure. So coming up in that adolescent boy age was not particularly athletic early in my life, and I did not really fit in a lot of ways because of that. We were a very athletic-based community. That is what it was. And so for me, I think the core was I never really liked to see people being taken advantage of. And so when people say, well, what’s your why? Where does this all come from? I would say I refuse to allow people to be taken advantage of. I know what that’s like. I’ve experienced it. I’ve seen it.

And I know that knowledge is power. And that is really what we do as trial lawyers. As far as actually becoming a trial lawyer, as I was growing up, adults would always say, you’d be a great lawyer. You’re great at arguing. You don’t really know what that means, right? You don’t really even know what lawyers do. Maybe you saw My Cousin Vinny or whatever. There weren’t these shows like Suits and all this where you had this great exposure to lawyers. I guess at some point way before my time, there was a Matlock show or whatever, but I didn’t watch that, so I didn’t know about lawyers.

It really for me was in college. When I went to college, my vision, what I wanted to do is I wanted to help people and I wanted to help a lot of people. I wanted to help as many people as possible with the time that I have here on earth. So when I went into college, I actually studied government. The idea was politics is the best way to affect the lives of the largest number of people to actually do a positive good. And I still think that’s true. I think that it is true that in politics, you can do a lot of good for a lot of people.

One thing that I realized going through that process is that I probably did not want to spend a career in politics. And so I started looking for other outlets, other avenues that would fill that vision that I had. And it really came my junior year in college. I had a couple of really good mentors, one through my fraternity who was a lawyer—Charlie Ness and his billion-dollar Charlie—he got the first billion-dollar verdict in the US. And another mentor who was at the Divinity School, Reverend Gomes—Peter Gomes—he’s deceased now. But I sort of had this realization that, wow, you could actually do a lot of good helping people with the law, right? There’s these class action cases, there’s these mass tort cases, there’s these individual one-off cases where you can impact the law for a lot of people. And you can actually do a lot of good if you do it the right way through the church, through preaching.

So then I kind of had this fork. I was like, okay, we’re not going to go like politics career because that just kind of feels weird. Career politician is not great. I didn’t feel great about that. I had cross-registered and audited classes at the law school and the divinity school. My university had both. Really was torn, honestly—lawyer or divinity school and become a preacher. I know it’s kind of a strange path, but it was actually one of my professors, a guy called Harvey Cox, old Baptist preacher, taught one of my Divinity School classes, and we were talking one day.

It was like, why are you in this class? Because it was a doctoral level class. You had to do a pretty long paper or a project, a thesis. I did a video on snake-handling churches in Appalachia. So I went down and spent time in Appalachia with these snake-handling churches. Oh yeah, I have a whole video. That’s what I had to do since I didn’t have to produce a thesis because I wasn’t actually getting my doctorate. I could do a video. I think it was a 30-minute video or something like that.

Chad Sands: Did you film video?

Roy T. Willey IV: Documentary on snake handling. So I went down and spent time with these families, really fascinating, faithful people. Anyway, we were sitting around one day like, what are we doing here? And I was explaining to him where I was in my decision-making. And he said something—he said, I think you can always go to Divinity School or Seminary and become a preacher. I don’t know that you’re always going to be able to get a good score on the LSAT. So maybe you should just at least sit for the LSAT and try that first. And so that’s what I did.

Through that process, I ended up obviously applying to law schools and decided that that’s the path that I would take. And that’s what I’ve done. It’s just that simple. I know some people grow up, they say they want to be lawyers their whole life. That was not the case. I didn’t have any lawyers in my family. In fact, I didn’t know a lawyer until I got to college—not even as an acquaintance. That was it. How do we help the most people?

Chad Sands: I hear that a lot—they think they want to be a doctor and end up being a lawyer. But you were maybe, I want to be a preacher or a lawyer, because you have this mission of helping people. Did you have any preachers in the family?

Roy T. Willey IV: No, no preachers in the family, no politicians in the family—just generally blue-collar type folks. Yeah, never wanted to be a doctor. Don’t really like blood and needles and all that. That was too much math, too much science.

Chad Sands: So now that you’ve been a lawyer for a while, do you think there might be a time when you hang up your trial law career and become a preacher?

Roy T. Willey IV: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, something I think about from time to time. And I think the answer is yes. I think at some point there might be a calling to go that way. This is a very demanding career, obviously—time, energy, focus. Not to say that preaching is not, but it certainly requires a little less travel. I think I have cases pending in 35 or 40 states. And so there’s a lot of case-related travel that obviously wouldn’t go into that. Potentially at some point, there might be an avenue there.

Chad Sands: The second question I ask is, what makes you unique as a trial lawyer then? I think you might be able to answer this a couple different ways.

Roy T. Willey IV: I think what makes me unique as a trial lawyer is that I really, truly, every single day come at it from a place of, how can the work that I do help the most people?

And we see that in individual cases, we see that in class action cases, we see that in mass tort cases. But we also just see that in one-off cases where we are doing a new legal theory or we’re using the law to try to get recompense or compensation for somebody where the law previously may not have recognized that claim or recognized that theory of the claim. So for me, that’s where I approach it from.

I have a lot of friends—they were honest with me, because they’re honest with me, obviously as their friend—they became lawyers because they grew up middle class or lower middle class. And they said, well, we want to make a lot of money.

And the belief was that lawyers and doctors make a lot of money, right? So you always hear it: lawyer, doctor, banker. It’s a Willie Nelson song for crying out loud—Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys. Let them be doctors and lawyers and such. That is a driving force for a lot of people. There’s nothing wrong with that. You want to have a comfortable life. You want to have a better life. Fine. It’s never really been a driving force for me. And so I think that that in a lot of ways is unique.

I take on a lot of cases where I know that my time per hour is not going to be compensated like my time per hour could be if I took on a different case or filled that time some other way. But it’s an important case, and it’s important for whatever reason. But that’s why I’m taking it. I’m taking it because it’s important to help those people and to help other people through that case, as opposed to just how do we make the most money with the limited time we have.

Chad Sands: You got your priorities straight. Speaking of the cases that you’re taking on across the country and throughout the years, do you have a story about a case that had a significant impact on you? I know it’s hard to choose one.

Roy T. Willey IV: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to choose one. I could go any number of ways.

Chad Sands: I would like to talk—because you are the $700 million man, so to speak—the big verdict that you got.

Roy T. Willey IV: Okay, yeah, let’s talk about that one.

Chad Sands: I watched your closing on YouTube, but take me back to kind of the intake and how you kind of got the case and what it was about and talk us through it.

Roy T. Willey IV: This was a case—a young girl, 17-year-old girl—goes missing while on spring break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Nobody knows what happens. She’s from upstate New York. Her mother finds out about it from her boyfriend, who she had been talking to on the phone and said she was going back to her hotel room basically to go to bed for the night. They were leaving in the morning. She stopped responding, stopped talking, stopped texting. And everybody that knew her—she always texted. A 17-year-old girl, she was texting like, if you text her, it’s like instantaneous, right?

So he got concerned, called her mom and said, hey, this is what happened. The mom did not know that she was there. She had asked the mom if she could go a couple of weeks prior to that, and the mom had said no. And so the mom thought that she was at the lake with some friends, which is where she gave her permission to go. She had talked to the mom that was supposed to be at the lake and all this sort of thing. But like any teenager, she did what she was going to do, and she went to spring break.

We’ve all been there. Basically, they had no leads. They didn’t know what happened. The girl went missing, and the mom eventually moved down to Myrtle Beach for a couple of years, did marches, did billboards, did this very massive campaign to try to find any information. They got leads. Nothing turned up. Eventually, fast forward years later, they’re still on the case. The mom convinces the FBI to take over the case. They go back through the full file. They identify where her cell phone last pinged, which was south of Myrtle Beach, about an hour south or so.

They basically just did a search in the area, found a registered sex offender that lived near there. They went out and talked to him, gathered some information. Anyway, long story short, after a lot of investigation and a lot of pressure, he ended up confessing that, in fact, he did kidnap, rape, and murder Brittany. The FBI—they don’t take anybody’s word for it. There are a lot of psychopaths out there that take credit for things that they didn’t do just to get the credit, right? They like to see themselves in the paper. So they say, well, if that’s true, in order to not get the death penalty, how about take us to the body?

And so he does. He takes them. They excavate for a period of a couple days and eventually they find her remains. They actually found her nose ring—she had a nose ring—and it was still in the dirt.

What’s the intake look like? Well, the intake looks like this: the mom had gone to multiple other lawyers. Basically, the story was, well, that’s fine, but how do we get money out of this case? So we have a guy who is in prison for life. He’s a registered sex offender. He’s whatever he is—fine. And Dawn, the mom’s point all along was, I want full justice for my daughter. It’s not about the money. The criminal piece is one piece. I want civil justice. I want criminal justice. I want all the justice.

So a lawyer eventually did take it on and filed a case. And I ended up—that he was going to be moving careers and this sort of thing—and he knew of me. So he called me up and he said, hey, I got this case. Here’s what I filed. And I looked at it. He said, will you take it on? And I said, well, let me talk to this lady.

One of my main filters that I filter cases through—whether or not I’m going to take them on candidly—is whether or not I like the person. I don’t want to work with somebody that is going to be a friction in a relationship. There’s enough friction in litigation. We don’t need that on our side.

Chad Sands: Gotta like the client, gotta love the—

Roy T. Willey IV: Relentless, but also compassionate and nice and a good person. She follows up, but not in a way that is mean or annoying. She just wants to make sure things are moving forward. And so we met, I agreed to take it on.

We have filed a myriad of cases, which I can’t talk a lot about because they’re still pending, but we sued the hotel that allowed Brittany to be taken there by adults when she was a minor and checked in—actually wasn’t checked in, but she was going in and out of there. And so they were able to see that.

We were able, through other information, to find out that the reason—because you always wonder like, well, why does this guy confess to this? Like they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. They have no body. They were never going to find this body, by the way, based on where it was. I mean, unless they dug up the whole county, which obviously is impractical. Why do you do this?

And then we find out, well, the reason he was doing this—because he wasn’t the only one involved. And so as we kind of dug in and peeled back the layers, we said, well, there’s this girlfriend, ironically named Angel, who was also involved. She’s a mother, a grandmother, just kind of a bizarre story. But we find out that her level of involvement was such that she was actually probably the one that coaxed Brittany into the car to give her a ride because it was about a mile from where she was walking to her hotel.

Then Ray basically tied her up, according to him, and took her phone and all that. And then Angel got rid of the phone. She was very involved. So then we find out through text messages that Angel actually was the one that texted Ray and said, let’s go hunting for girls. Like this was part of their plan—not Brittany specifically as a target—but let’s go hunting for girls.

Because Ray’s past, his sex offender past, was that he had raped young girls in California. He had raped—I think she was seven or eight at the time. He got 20 years in prison. He had raped other minors, other children, and moved to South Carolina basically to get away from a lot of that. While he was in jail, he had become gay. He actually had a gay partner named Ernie, and that was sort of his ticket out of jail. Ernie had a lesser sentence. He was able to say he was reformed, he was in this committed relationship, he was no longer interested in young girls.

So they moved to this sleepy southern town of Georgetown, South Carolina, together, lived together. Ernie was Angel’s hairdresser. And then basically Ray started cheating on Ernie with Angel. I mean, this whole thing—it was just wow.

Chad Sands: I think I actually saw a Dateline on this.

Roy T. Willey IV: There’s a Dateline on it. There’s a 20/20 on it. There’s all that. So that’s what we did. We undertook the case. Said, look, this mother just wants justice. Let’s go get some justice. And filed a lot of other lawsuits. Ended up—Angel’s now in prison for basically what will probably amount to a life sentence based on her age and condition. And we still got civil cases pending. But we did get the first verdict—we got the $700 million verdict, which we think is the largest verdict. At least that’s what the media said—the largest in South Carolina history for a wrongful death individual claim, which is good. You know, it’s appropriate for that case. And as Dawn says, it doesn’t give closure. There’s never closure in a case like this, but it’s another resolution. It’s another resolution to say she did everything she could for Brittany. It gives her some sense of peace of mind with that resolution as we move forward.

Chad Sands: I mean, is there any way that she’ll be able to recover any of that money?

Roy T. Willey IV: During this period of time, Ray actually inherited some real property. His father died, he inherited real property. So we’ve actually—the appeal period on the verdict has run. So we have started the execution to take those acres, which will be sold, and that money will go to Dawn to fulfill part of that judgment. Will she ever get $700 million? No, of course not. She knows that.

But the hope is that she can get 1% of that or whatever. It would obviously make a meaningful impact in her life. So that’s the objective. But it does turn out that there is some money there. We didn’t know that at the time. It was never about that. But it turns out there is. And then, like I said, we have other cases pending against other defendants.

Chad Sands: Right. I did watch the closing on YouTube. Curious, did you kind of have a dream? Did you come up with that angle the night before? Had you been working on it for weeks in terms of kind of that idea of the billionaire or someone coming into this town? How did that come together and how did you deliver it—how did it feel?

Roy T. Willey IV: It’s a great question and the answer is that really it came about organically. I always try to think of a case when I’m handling a case on the front end—what does this look like at the end? I call it our trial ready process. We want every case to be trial ready. 98% of cases settle before trial. They don’t go to trial, but we want every case trial ready.

So I had thought some about the themes, the impact. How are we going to try an emotional damages case for Dawn against Ray? The community knows of Ray. This was a very well-publicized case. We actually ended up getting 12 jurors that didn’t know a lot about it. That was obviously part of jury selection. But what was obvious—because he was there every day in his prison garb and being transported—he’s in jail. And they knew that he’s in jail for life. He’s not working.

He was a laborer before, so he doesn’t have a lot of money. So how do we communicate to the jury that that’s not what this is about? It’s not actually about how much he has to pay or how much will ever be collected. It’s about justice. What is the number in our system of civil justice that compensates for that level of harm? It’s hard to put a number on it, obviously, an exact number.

One of the things in the weeks leading up, I was hearing a lot about Epstein—about all the people that were allegedly related to Epstein and all this sort of thing. And it occurred to me in that moment, you got people out here that are billionaires doing this kind of stuff, right? The jury would have no problem, I think, if Epstein were coming in and we’re on that side awarding $700 million. They know he has it, number one. They know it can be collected. And they know that the injury is worth it—that the injury in this case is worth it.

So always something leading up to it that I was thinking about. Everything else really happened organically. I spent a lot of time thinking about the number because in our line of work, you can suggest a number to a jury. You can’t say you must award X, but you can suggest a range—here’s how you get to a number. I do that in every case because having dealt with focus groups and having not been a lawyer at one point, I would have no idea walking in what I’m supposed to do.

We spend some time thinking through that, and the number that just kept coming to my mind was this is a billion-dollar case. It’s a billion-dollar damage. You have these billionaires that are out here doing this, and you have these plane logs—I mean, how many times have we heard about the Epstein plane logs and all these other billionaires allegedly that were down there partaking in this type of thing?

I had just been thinking a lot about that. And literally when I got out of the car—I’ve been praying about it. I’m a praying person. And on the ride there, my co-counsel and I, Matt Burgess, attorney in my office, we were talking. And I said, I just really think that that’s where I’m going with this thing. All signs kind of pointed toward too much. It’s a conservative county. It’s not a very well-to-do county. No one even knows how much a billion dollars is—like no one knows what that means.

But I got out of the car that morning, just sat there, said a final prayer before going in, opened the door, got out of the car and—God is my witness—there is a crucifix in the parking lot right there. Like it had fallen off someone’s necklace, like a silver cross. And I was like, well, if there ever was a sign—I mean, this is clearly where we’re meant to go. And so I say it in my closing, I tell the story. It’s a true story.

Chad Sands: Yeah.

Roy T. Willey IV: I take the cross in, and the bailiff was there—a lady. I said, here, I found this in the parking lot. Someone’s going to look for it. And she literally said to me, she said, well, finders keepers. And I said, no, ma’am, I’m not having that. Not having that on my conscience. Not someone who crawls to their grandmother. I gave it to them—who knows? I give it to her.

But when I tell the jury that story about I’ve been praying about this and thinking about this and how do you stand up here and say that—it was true. That’s really how it came to be. And I think that they got that and they understood that and then used their judgment to come to a totally different number. They came to their own number and that’s okay. That’s how the process is supposed to work. I always say in my closing, of course you can award more than this or you can award less than this. What I’ll tell you is I’ve only had one time where they ever awarded more than that. It’s always that number or less. That’s how the process is supposed to work. That’s how we got there.

And I said, if there ever was a case where the damages should have been the largest verdict in state history—it’s this case. I mean, it’s a catastrophic amount of damage. It’s bad enough to lose a child, number one. It’s bad enough to lose a child and not know what happened for a decade. It’s bad enough to lose a child, not know what happened for a decade, and then learn that in her final moments, she was bound, gagged, raped in a tent, in a swamp.

Chad Sands: And she was fighting back though, wasn’t she?

Roy T. Willey IV: Yeah, he had claw marks all over his face the next day. He was actually pulled over by the police on his motorcycle—speeding or something. And they saw the claw marks. Ernie saw the claw marks when he had come to his house, basically to ask for a shovel or something, which Ernie didn’t put two and two together. I mean, how could Ernie know that he was out killing somebody? I mean, you can’t blame him for that. But he saw the claw marks, and he just said, yeah, it was a rough weekend or whatever.

To know that—and then his story is—he strangles her, he puts her in the pond, he drowns her. And then he puts the ice pick through her heart just to make sure she was dead and then drowns her again. So you think about, wow, now you’re learning all that. She didn’t just die—not that that would be bad enough—but like there was a suffering. You can’t imagine what was going through her head in those final moments.

And Dawn—obviously it impacted her life. I mean, she changed her entire life. And she talked about it in her testimony very courageously. She had other kids.

And this impacted her relationship with those kids because she put so much of who she was during those years into finding Brittany and trying to figure out what happened to her daughter. She lost a part of that too. They’re very supportive. They have a very close relationship. But she was courageous in acknowledging that—that she wasn’t the mother she wanted to be for them because she was so focused on trying to find Brittany.

Chad Sands: So even though the jury came to their own conclusion in amount, right? What do you say to people who—well, what’s the cost of a life? And this is just a nuclear verdict, and this is what plaintiff attorneys are doing all over the country. What do you kind of say to that?

Roy T. Willey IV: This nuclear verdict thing—I know Tyson wrote his book or whatever—I personally think it’s garbage. The jurors are people off the street. And the truth of the matter is, it’s very difficult to put a monetary figure on a human life. It’s very difficult to put a monetary figure on someone who loses an arm or loses a leg.

And you can’t make this argument—the kind of rational argument is, well, how much would I have to pay you to lose your leg? You’re going to sell it to me for 10 million bucks? I’m not. I’m not selling mine for 10 million bucks—I can tell you right now. Am I selling it to you for 100 million bucks? You’re getting closer. I’d think about it.

That’s actually what we’re talking about. Like someone lost a leg because of what your corporate defendant or your client or whatever did. And we have to put a monetary value on that. And the reason we put a monetary value on that is because we don’t do eye-for-an-eye justice. The most just thing would be, if you take my leg, I take your leg. If you take my child, I take your child.

But that’s barbaric. We don’t do that. What we do is not perfect, but it’s the best system that imperfect people—us—have been able to come up with, which is to say, we will take money and we will assign a certain amount of money for that loss, for that harm.

And it’s a situation where I don’t think people appreciate that because they say, the harm’s already happened, so it’s not gonna make it better. It’s not as if the child’s coming back. But that’s really not the point. The point is, that’s our system. That’s what we have to work within. It’s an imperfect system made of imperfect people, and the results are imperfect, but they’re as good as we have figured out how to get.

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

Roy T. Willey IV: Truth is, we don’t get to pick the easy fights. We get to pick the worthy ones.

And that’s a sacred responsibility. Because when you’re a trial lawyer, people don’t come to you when life is going well. They come when the bottom has fallen out, when the system has failed them, when they’ve been injured, ignored, or pushed aside. And in that moment, what they need isn’t a superhero. They need a human being who will stand with them when everyone else steps back. That’s what this profession is about. We’re not in the justice business just to win cases.

We’re here to do something bigger. We’re here to restore dignity, to tell the truth—loudly, clearly, unapologetically—on behalf of those who can’t tell it for themselves. And to remind every insurance company and every corporate wrongdoer in this country that people still matter. I do this work for the underdogs, for the folks who’ve been told, “You don’t have a case.”

Whose lives have been flipped upside down and whose stories are being buried under paperwork and policies designed to make them disappear. People who are being taken advantage of by the system. This profession gives us a choice. We can play it safe, or we can do something meaningful with our time here. I choose the latter.

Because I’ve got four kids in there. And one day they’ll ask me what I did with my life. What I stood for. Who I showed up for. And I want to be able to look them in the eyes and say, “I stood up. I showed up. I gave a damn for people that mattered.”

Roy T. Willey IV: I want them to know that I didn’t flinch when it got hard. That I wasn’t afraid to take on giants. That I used the gifts I was given to fight for people who had no one else in their corner. We talk a lot about justice. But justice isn’t a slogan. It’s a decision made every single day. It’s choosing to care when it’s easier not to. To prepare like it’s life or death.

Because for someone, it is. To tell your client, “Believe you,” and then back that belief with relentless action. It’s knowing the names, visiting the homes, understanding not just the injuries, but the impact—the fear, the grief, the stolen sense of security. And then it’s walking into that courtroom and telling that story like it’s your own.

I believe our greatest asset in this work isn’t our legal knowledge, it’s our humanity.

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