Damond Garza has been a defense and a plaintiffs attorney in San Antonio for almost 20 years. He has tried over 40 cases to juries and leads San Antonio's trial lawyer association. He is a good friend and offices next to us at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis. All right.

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Justin: All right. Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases podcast. Today, I've got Damond Garza with me. Damond is a lawyer in San Antonio, a friend, and he's also a lawyer that we work with on some cases. He is the current president of the San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association and his reign ends tomorrow, right?

Damond Garza: I think officially on the 21st, actually.

Justin: He's also a stickler for technicalities as you will learn. I asked Damond to come on and talk about practicing law. Really, the point of these has been younger lawyers. That's been the thought process and that's been the response from people. When I tell you who will respond about you being on here, then you'll understand. You'll be like, "Oh, okay. I understand your audience now." You're not the first SATLA president I've had on there.

Damond: That makes me a little-

Justin: Second.

Damond: -less special feeling, but that's okay.

Justin: First [unintelligible 00:01:22], I mean. I think that's what they say in that one show. Javier was on. I think he's the only one that would have been SATLA president. Bill Marler was on. There's been books written about him. Mikal Watts was on. He's been indicted and has a book and movie coming.

Damond: No books or movies based on me yet, unfortunately-

Justin: Indictments?

Damond: -or fortunately. No indictments that I'm currently aware of.

Justin: I think you would know. What is SATLA?

Damond: SATLA a local trial lawyers association that is comprised of a little bit over 400 members these days. Primarily lawyers here in the Bexar County area, but we have a good contingency out of South Texas and we have members really spread as far as Alaska, even because it's a group of lawyers who represent folks, who represent people against companies, organizations, insurance companies who tend to have a lot more power and influence in the courts. We represent those folks against those powerful folks whenever they suffered a loss, injury, death, economic loss, something like that.

We put our minds together to share information, to help each of us better represent our clients. The folks who usually defend injury cases have large organizations, they share information to help strengthen their defenses. We try to pool our resources to better combat against those forces who would otherwise deny the availability of the courts to regular people who have suffered a loss.

Justin: San Antonio Trial Lawyers Association is not limited to San Antonio lawyers. I think there used to even be in Alaska person.

Damond: We still have a very active member from the State of Alaska, we've got people from the East Coast, the Midwest, the Southeast, and everywhere far-flung in between.

Justin: A very robust idea and document sharing through our Listserv, but the rules are just lawyer and do not regularly represent insurance companies. Is that basically the...