Jason Doucette

Jason Doucette says it was never the plan. No one in his Montana family was a lawyer, and he started college pre-med until an intro to criminal justice class that happened to fit his schedule caught his interest. When he switched to pre-law, his father told him, “That’s good. You don’t really have bedside manner.” He read Clarence Darrow’s closing arguments, graduated in 2009 into a weak job market and worked at small personal injury firms. Feeling stagnant, the lifelong wrestler wanted a bigger challenge and chose trial work.

Jason focuses on storytelling. “Most trials are incredibly boring,” he says, and the lawyer who makes a client’s story engaging wins verdicts that reflect the full loss. He trained for three weeks with the Gerry Spence Method at Thunderhead Ranch, standing up cold to give unprepared opening statements, and he studies The Moth’s storytelling approach. He also trains jiu-jitsu, which taught him that a trial system must be comprehensive and consistent: a lawyer who is warm in jury selection and a jerk on cross reads as fake.

A five-week Monterey County workplace electrocution trial. A general contractor falsely certified that all energy sources were locked out, and Jason’s client, who had been benching 400 pounds the week before, lost 80% of the use of his arm. The defendant, the world’s largest solar manufacturer, made a top offer of “three and a half million,” he says. Jason admitted the ICU photo of the arm without publishing it, letting jurors seek it out. They returned $46.8 million plus $4.5 million for his wife’s loss of consortium.

Jason rejects the idea that you need 20 trials to be a great trial lawyer; two or three teach you the chaos and stress. What matters is practice. A high school wrestling coach told him to do something every day to get better, and he applies that now: improv to build presence, more than 50 trial advocacy books, books on psychology and decision-making, CVN trials and trial transcripts. “What you need to do is practice,” he says, so a lawyer with 100 trials is not intimidating.

Jason is Partner and Chief Trial Attorney at The Dominguez Firm on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, where he focuses on personal injury litigation. Beyond the $46.8 million Monterey County verdict, his record includes a $7.3 million jury verdict in a trucking case, a $6.4 million car accident settlement, a $2,466,734 slip-and-fall verdict that grew to $3.7 million after a pretrial statutory offer, and a $1 million car accident verdict. The firm’s website is dominguezfirm.com.

Jason earned a B.A. in history-political science with a minor in philosophy from Jamestown College, where he was a national qualifier and academic all-conference wrestler. He earned his J.D. with honors from the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in 2009, serving as a staff writer for the Arizona Law Review, and was licensed in California the same year. He later completed the Gerry Spence Method’s intensive and graduate trial skills programs at Thunderhead Ranch in Wyoming.

Jason received the Gerry Spence Method’s 2025 Alumni Civil Trial Warrior of the Year Award, was selected to Super Lawyers for 2025 and 2026 and was nominated for Trial Attorney of the Year by the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles, a nod he credits mostly to a $2.47 million slip-and-fall verdict against a pretrial offer of $150,000. Multiple verdicts from his practice rank among California’s Top 100 Jury Verdicts, and he has presented on storytelling at Trial Lawyers University in New York.