Ep. 42 - Truck Wreck Lawyers | After the Crash

Kevin Swenson:
The knowledge, the experience, and the ability to do it – having those three things in place, handling the case right from the beginning, taking the right depositions, being prepared for those depositions, getting the information you need, then you need to put it together so it makes sense to a jury.

David Craig – Host:
I’m attorney Dave Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of the law firm of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. I’ve represented people who have been seriously injured or who have had a family member killed in a semi or other big-truck wreck for over 30 years. Following the wreck, their lives are chaos. Often, they don’t even know enough about the process to ask the right questions. It is my goal to empower you by providing you with the information you need to protect yourself and your family. In each and every episode, I will interview top experts and professionals that are involved in truck-wreck cases.
This is After the Crash.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of After the Crash. Today we have Kevin Swenson as our guest, and Kevin is an attorney out in Utah. Well, his office is headquartered in Utah, but I also believe they’re in Arizona and they handle cases all over, especially trucking cases. They handle serious injury and wrongful death cases. The firm is Swenson & Shelley. Kevin is a truck-wreck lawyer. He’s board-certified in truck accident law. He’s a member of the Board of Regents of the premier trucking group, ATAA. He is part of the Multimillion-Dollar Forum. He is the highest ranking you can get with Martindale-Hubbell, which is one of the oldest ranking services that rank attorneys. He’s been honored to as a Super Lawyer in the state of Utah, and he’s been doing this for about as long as I have. So, it’s really great to have you as a guest on our podcast, Kevin.

Kevin Swenson:
I’m excited to be here. Thanks, David.

David Craig – Host:
The thing that I find the most interesting about you, Kevin, is I know you have a CDL now, right?

Kevin Swenson:
I do have a CDL.

David Craig – Host:
I mean, this guy’s invested. You don’t find too many lawyers that take their jobs so seriously going after bad negligent truck drivers and trucking companies that not only do they get board certified, but then they go out and get their CDL. So, tell us a little bit about that. What was that like?

Kevin Swenson:
That was a fun experience, but it was also pretty scary. Actually, being out on the road driving that 18-wheeler was a lot of pressure. I had a commercial driver’s license when I was 21. That was so long ago, they didn’t even call it a CDL. Then, it was a chauffeur’s license, back when I was working at the fire department. I drove fire engines around, and I had to get that license. I kept it for a long time and then I let it lapse. So, it was good to get that back.

David Craig – Host:
I would imagine that is very helpful when you’re taking the depositions of truck drivers in particular, to have that base of knowledge and to know that, “Hey, I’ve taken the same test that these guys and these ladies have.” So, tell me about that. Do you feel like it’s helpful?

Kevin Swenson:
I feel like it’s extremely helpful when you’re talking to a truck driver. When they’re telling you about how difficult it is to do certain things, and you’ve done those and you have a feel for it, you know what they can see and what they can’t see, and where they should be looking and if they were looking there, they wouldn’t have got in the crash they were in. So, a lot about the distractions, a lot about the difficulty of it, and that’s a tough job. That’s a tough job to be out there every day doing that.

David Craig – Host:
Absolutely. I remember we were out with you at one of the truck driving schools, at Legacy, and the first time I rode in a semi-tractor on the highway, and it is a whole different experience. It’s amazing. It really is different.

Kevin Swenson:
Yeah, it is. Everything about it’s different. You’re sitting in a different spot. Your view is different.

David Craig – Host:
Well, the other thing that I think that’s intriguing to me and probably some of the listeners is that you didn’t start off as a plaintiff lawyer. You came out of law school and went straight into the defense side, right?

Kevin Swenson:
I did. Yeah, that’s right. So actually, when I was in law school, I had accepted a job with a commercial litigation firm. Then, in my last semester of law school, that firm broke up and everybody went their own way looking for a job, and I ended up going to an insurance defense firm.

David Craig – Host:
I can’t imagine because I’ve always done the plaintiff side, but I think that it certainly would give you some insight to handle how insurance companies handle these cases. So, I want to make sure I pick your brain.
This audience here is mainly non-lawyers, it’s ordinary folks who find themselves in a horrible situation and they don’t understand the insurance companies or how it works as well. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what it’s like. How many years, first of all, were you on the defense side and can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Kevin Swenson:
I did defense work for almost 20 years and in that time, there were cases that I did that were plaintiff’s cases, but for the most part, it was insurance defense work. So, the insurance company -the way you’re hired is very different because if you’re a trucking company that was involved in a crash, the insurance company would hire me and I would represent the trucking company, but I’d also have to report to the insurance company and get permission in that, and it wasn’t something that the trucking company had come to me directly to hire me because they knew me or anything. I was just kind of told, “I’m your lawyer.”
So it’s a different dynamic right from the beginning. Then the insurance companies are the ones who get to call the shots on what you do and don’t do, and what they’ll pay for and won’t pay for to resolve a case. So you learn quite a bit about how an insurance company works and it’s different.
Also, it changed a lot in the time I was there, and over the 20 years, they’re very cyclical. They’ll go from lots of offices to cover small areas. They’ll put an office in every state, and then they’ll consolidate, and all of a sudden, you’re dealing with companies that are handling 20 states and they get a bad verdict against them, and then they want to settle all their cases. Then they go to trial and they get a really good verdict, and then they want to try all their cases. So, it’s moving a little bit and it’s always changing, but it’s an interesting approach, for sure.

David Craig – Host:
So one of the things that I’ve always thought was that on the defense side, you had an advantage in that you knew about the wreck sooner than the attorney for the plaintiff’s side. The plaintiff’s side is the injured family or the victims, but oftentimes, especially on a catastrophic event, they’re dealing with a loss and these horrible injuries and maybe even death, and the last thing they’re thinking about typically is, “I need a lawyer.” But the trucking companies, the insurance side, they don’t have that, right?

Kevin Swenson:
No, they don’t. If there’s a crash, the truck driver is almost always required to call dispatch. Dispatch calls their risk management. They’re in touch with their insurance company. Most of the time, if it was something catastrophic in my area, I’d be on the road in less than an hour. I’d go to the scene and the officers were still there, witnesses were still there. So you could walk around, you could figure out who the players were, see what’s happening. You could look at all the different evidence that we now want to see that we get to see much later.
But yeah, very, very different being there within the first little bit. I mean, you talk to different tow truck companies and, “Oh, did you take any pictures of this? Anything that you saw on this?” And the tow truck drivers would be pretty helpful. They’d tell you a lot about what they had heard, and what the drivers had said, and what was going on.
You’d have a chance frequently to talk to at least some of the police officers. It would always depend on the scene, how many they’d let you talk to, or what they’d tell you, but you’d get some information. If there were witnesses there, that was always incredibly helpful to be the first one to talk to them and figure out what they saw and what they knew, what they could tell you later, and they became very valuable.
So yeah, on our side now, we still get to do a lot of that, but we do it later, and sometimes after they’ve picked through it.

David Craig – Host:
I’ve seen cases, and I’ve spoke at numerous seminars where the defense lawyers were there as well, and a lot of them have in their contract that they have to be, or somebody from their office, has to be at the scene of a catastrophic event within so many hours, which is just like what you just said.
And I think that it’s a part of it, they’re there to do some investigation, but I’ve had cases, and I’m sure you have as well, on both sides where the truck driver calls dispatch, and then all of a sudden, the law firm and their claims person are on their way. And oftentimes, the claims person from the trucking company and possibly even someone from the law firm is there before my client’s bodies have even been removed from the vehicles. And that’s rather shocking to the family because again, the family’s not thinking about those type of things. And it’d be one thing if we knew every lawyer and every claims person was just sitting there observing, but in fact, some of them are being very proactive.

Kevin Swenson:
Some of them. Yeah, some of them are very proactive and cause a lot of problems. You’ve probably seen that as you’ve taken a deposition and you ask somebody about a dash cam and they say, “Oh, yeah. I had one, but when they came and inspected the truck, they took it.” Or we had an engine control module that was missing. We’ve had dash cams, we’ve had other types of technology that you could see were on the window, but when you get there, they’ve been taken off. There are cords that are left there that they’ve unplugged things with. So, it can be a real problem.
And obviously, not every defense attorney or every claims adjuster is bad and would do that, but there are some out there that have.

David Craig – Host:
And the problem is you don’t know which ones, when your family is in a wreck, you don’t know. I always tell people, “You have to assume the worst, hope for the best.” Like you, I deal with a lot of the same lawyers and same insurance companies on a regular basis, so there’s a trust factor built up with a lot of them. So I know I don’t have to worry about that. But there are others who I can say, quite honestly, if I know that they’re going to be involved, then that’s a problem. Because I’ve had cases where the truck drivers’ attorneys have gotten to the scene and taken the truck drivers off to the side and talk to them and help prepare what they were going to tell the police.
Then, I’ve also had them involved, actively involved in the witnesses to the point where the witnesses’ stories were really a little shaded, a little different than they would’ve been had those people not talked to them. It took me a lot of depositions, a lot of work to dig down. I was like, “Why are these people telling me the same thing?” And it turned out, the defense lawyer had talked with them and had told them, “Well, this person, it was just an accident. They didn’t mean to hit this pedestrian. You don’t want this person to have criminal charges against them.” And they scared them to think it was all criminal.
By the time our people started talking to them, it was watered down, when in fact, it wasn’t intentional, but it was certainly negligence, and the bus driver clearly did something wrong. So, it can have a major effect on your case.

Kevin Swenson:
It can. I just recently talked to a witness, and this was a crash that came to me from another attorney, so it was a little bit older, but when I called him, he called me back and he said, “I’m nervous to call you back.” And I said, “Oh, why is that? I just want to find out what you knew.” And he said, “Well, the other people, the night of this crash, told me that if I talked to anybody, I could be in real trouble. Maybe they’ll try to blame me for it.”

David Craig – Host:
Oh, my.

Kevin Swenson:
And he was an extremely helpful witness, both at the time of the crash, he helped the clients and he went down the highway with flashlights waving, trying to slow down other cars and they’re telling him, “You might be in trouble. They may come after you.”

David Craig – Host:
Yes. Hopefully people listen, if you’ve been in a catastrophic wreck and had serious injuries or wrongful death, that you reach out to somebody soon as quick as possible. Because, like we’re saying, the defense is already there already, and they’re not looking for the grand search of the truth. They’re looking at their job is, “How do I protect my insured? How do I protect the trucking company, the truck driver?” They’re looking from that perspective, not, “Oh, guys, let’s gather all this truthful information and hand it to everybody.”

Kevin Swenson:
Exactly. Well, and one of the other things, when I was driving to a crash, I was also trying to line up expert witnesses already. Who am I going to need in this case? What are we going to need them to do right away? What kind of inspection do they need to do and how quickly do they need to get on that? So it would be lining up everything right from day one.

David Craig – Host:
Yeah. Well, and it is obviously so much easier when you get it fresh and the sooner you’re there, the better, the more the evidence is still available. That makes a huge difference.

Kevin Swenson:
Right. Then, when you have access to the truck, you can go in and look at it 10 times. And if you forget something, you go back an 11th time and see if it’s there and see what’s going on. So yeah, it is definitely an advantage.

David Craig – Host:
There’s a couple books that were written. One is From the Good Hands to Boxing Gloves, and there’s another one that’s called Delay, Deny, and Defend. Both those books are about the insurance industry and how they changed over the years from assessing claims and just paying what they thought the fair value of a claim was, to actually becoming more aggressive at delaying it, and then denying it, and then fighting it.
In your years as defense counsel, did you see that change? Did you see that shift in the practice?

Kevin Swenson:
I did. In the first five to 10 years, I saw a lot of that change. One of the big changes was they listened to their attorneys early on. It changed a lot. The adjusters ended up having a lot more control.
I was talking to a State Farm attorney just a couple of weeks ago, and he said now that’s the biggest frustration he has is they don’t listen to him at all. He’s a 30-year attorney who’s been doing this for a long time, and he tells them what the case is worth and they say, “No, that’s not what our computer says it’s worth. So this is the model, this is what you can offer, and you can’t offer anything else.”
Wesaw the start of that coming on when I was starting, but yeah, it was much more, “Get rid of a case fairly, but quickly,” to, “let’s fight these more or let’s be more aggressive in them. Let’s take more time. We’re not hurt by the delays. Go ahead and stretch it out.” So, we did see a lot of that. But yeah, it feels like the claims center didn’t use to be a profit center, and now they’ve all figured out that that can be a big profit center, as well.

David Craig – Host:
Yeah, because you think about how many claims there are all over this country and you hold that money and you’re drawing interest off of it or investing it, it makes a huge difference.
And I do think I’ve had the same conversation with defense counsel. I had tried a case that, quite frankly, was a really challenging case. The defense lawyer against me was a really good lawyer, but the insurance company would not follow his advice and would not try the case the way he said to try it. He ended up having to try the case based upon what they told him, which was the wrong way to do it. So I ended up winning and we ended up winning big. And they then came in and took all of his files.
I saw him at a party long after that and he came to me and he said, “Well, thank you, Dave, because you beating me then caused me to lose all my cases, all my files with this insurance company. But quite frankly, my life is so much better now,” because, like you said, this guy said when he first started practicing, they would listen to him, take his advice, and now there are non-lawyers telling lawyers what to do.

Kevin Swenson:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s changed a lot. When I came out of law school, I had so little idea about the kind of projects there were for attorneys or what attorneys did. I knew there was criminal law and I knew there was civil law, but the number of attorneys and specialties and stuff, I had no idea, and so just get into the insurance defense side of it, and I thought that’s what everybody was doing.
But it was good training as well. I mean, I learned a lot about trucking regulations. I learned a lot about how insurance companies work. I learned a lot about insurance coverage. I learned about risk management and how they handle that and the timing, like you say, holding onto the money the right amount of time. That can make a big difference. I learned a little bit of accident reconstruction. You learn civil litigation skills that you use on either side. So, there was a lot of stuff that was helpful.

David Craig – Host:
So, what was it that caused you finally to, after 20 years, decide, “I don’t want to do the defense work. I don’t want to defend insurance companies and trucking companies,” and switch sides?

Kevin Swenson:
The big thing was they really that they treat their attorneys like they treat the public and like they treat the claimants. And just like the defense attorney you were talking about saying, “It’s a good thing when I finally got rid of them,” I tried a case for an insurance company and we did very well. We defensed them, and then, I couldn’t get my bills paid. They would look at it and during trial you’re working 10, 12, 13, 14 hours a day, but they had a cap of 10 hours. So then I wrote it down to the 10 hours and then they’d say, “Well, we can’t tell if this includes travel time.” “Well, it doesn’t. That’s part of the four hours I wrote off every day.” “Well, we don’t know that.” So I had to send them affidavits saying it’s not included in there.
And just the fights that I had to make to get paid, you could see how they were treating other people, and we were getting treated the same way. I just decided I really had enough of that. I didn’t want to keep practicing that way. It wasn’t fun spending a bunch of time in their legal audits. You’d send them a bill and they’d say, “Oh, this took 2/10 of an hour. We think it should have taken 1/10 of an hour,” or “You talked to this person on the phone. We think your paralegal should have done that, not you.”
They had those kinds of things that were small enough that you didn’t want to fight over them, but they ended up being a big chunk of your bill as well. It was just the way they treated people, it was just too much.

David Craig – Host:
Well, now you’ve made that switch and you’ve been very successful as a personal injury plaintiff attorney, and I know you do a lot of trucking cases, and that’s a big focus of your practice and your law firm’s practice. I guess, let’s start off by saying someone’s out there that’s been in a bad wreck – they’re in Utah or wherever they’re at all over the country, in Indiana or wherever – and they’re trying to figure out, “How in the world do I pick a lawyer?” Because, you look out, there’s lawyers advertising everywhere.
So, how in the world would you recommend someone figure out what lawyer to represent them in a serious truck-car accident involving a semi or other big truck?

Kevin Swenson:
Well, I think it’s one of the things that you talked about earlier, being board-certified. That takes a commitment to study, make sure you know the rules. I mean, that’s not a simple test. Even to be able to take the test you’ve got to fill out a questionnaire that you have to have done a lot of different things in the trucking area already. Look at who’s board-certified in your area and look at who’s done a lot of that. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good attorneys that aren’t board-certified, but that’s a good measure to start with.
It’s interesting because you see the firms that advertise a lot, they’ve gone to putting up a lot of billboards about trucking cases, whether they do them, or they don’t. So, you do have to be careful in who you’re getting.
But I think one of the other things, is to ask the questions. I mean, how many of these cases have you handled? How many of them have you taken to trial? How do you deal with them? If it’s just, “Hey, this is a big car crash case and we can get a lot of money on it,” that’s not particularly helpful because they’re difficult cases. Because they’re big-dollar cases, frequently, they usually do have the best defense attorneys on them. So, you’re going to get aggressive representation from the trucking company and if you’re just trying to do it like you would do a red car versus blue car, it’s going to be a tough case. You’re going to miss a lot of stuff.
So, start with the board-certification, I think, is a great way to go and find out who’s qualified in the area. Ask other attorneys, ask people who would they go to, who do they know, because I get a lot of my cases from other attorneys. I like that because while they want to do trucking, they also know what they don’t know, and they are willing to work with us and spend the time learning it. That’s an important thing too.

David Craig – Host:
Like you said, the board certification is a great vetting process. Someone else is doing the vetting for you. This is a group that knows what it takes to be a good truck accident lawyer, so part of their vetting process is figuring that out, giving it a test, and looking at the credentials. Certainly, I agree with you, that’s a great place to start.
One of the things is I always say that I think to be a good truck accident attorney, you need to have experience in this area, you need to have the knowledge, and then you have to have the resources to hire the right people. So, let’s maybe break that down. First of all, knowledge. I mean, knowledge in a truck wreck case is different than a car wreck case, right?

Kevin Swenson:
Absolutely.

David Craig – Host:
Tell us a little bit about that.

Kevin Swenson:
Well, let me grab my book. This is the book that we spend a lot of time talking about and looking at the regulations and what they violated. That’s an extensive book. There are a lot of regulations in there. I’m not saying you have to have somebody who’s memorized that thing, but you have to have a good working knowledge of what’s in there, what’s okay, what’s not okay, and what they can do, and what they can’t do. So, that’s a great start.
And that’s one of the things that the board certification tests on. How well do you know some of the things out of the manual? What do you know about drug testing? What do you know about things that come up regularly in these cases? So yeah, the knowledge is a lot tougher than just who turned left at the wrong time. Not that that’s always easy, but there are just so many more things that go into it in a commercial motor vehicle case.

David Craig – Host:
And you could be a personal injury attorney and never have touched that book you just showed us.

Kevin Swenson:
That’s right.

David Craig – Host:
Because you would not know those unless you have handled a commercial motor vehicle case. So, the knowledge is definitely different in a semi crash than it is a car crash.

Kevin Swenson:
That’s right.

David Craig – Host:
Then, not only that, I’m sure too, part of the knowledge is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, but then every state has a CDL manual, and every company has their own internal policies. There are standards of care in the industry. There’s state laws that may apply. So, there’s a lot of knowledge that you have. And I don’t know about you but I’ve been doing it for over 30, I’ve been doing it a little longer than you have, but I’m still learning stuff. I’ve been handling Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations for over 30 years, and I still learn stuff. I don’t know how, if you’ve never touched one of these cases, how in the world you’d have the knowledge sufficient to properly handle them.

Kevin Swenson:
Yeah, you just wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have the time to do it. By the time you figured it out, you’re past that stage. Yeah. Like you said, that’s just one of the books, but there are so many other things that play into it.

David Craig – Host:
Well, and the next thing I think is important is experience. So you could have the knowledge, you could sit there, and you could spend a lot of time studying, and learn the trucking regulations. But then, because you’ve been doing it for so many years, I would assume you think that actually having experience, having taken depositions of the safety directors, of the truck drivers, of the dispatch folks, I would imagine that experience plays a role.

Kevin Swenson:
That plays a huge role. I mean, the more drivers you get to depose, you start to see the patterns. You learn, well, what didn’t I ask about the federal regulations in the last one that I need to in the next one?
It’s funny because people think, “Well, you’ve done this long enough and you’ve taken enough drivers, you must just sit down and do those.” I prepare more for a deposition now than I did doing defense work 20 years ago when it was new. So, you spend a lot of time preparing and just figuring out what’s out there and looking carefully at all of the different documents that are in the case. There’s a lot of paperwork and a lot of information that’s generated on the trucks and from the companies. You’ve got to go through it all. You’ve got to be ready for it all. So, it’s tough to prepare for it and get that experience.

David Craig – Host:
I think the last thing is the resources. You and I both get cases that are referred to us from other law firms. One of the sad things is when some law firm holds onto a case for a while, and they may not have the resources, the money to invest in the experts, because you can easily sink tens of thousands of dollars in one of these type of cases. Not everybody has, if they’re not dedicated to this type of work, they may not have the resources, and so they may delay. “Well, maybe I just won’t hire this expert for a little while,” and then it gets to be too late.
So how important is it to have the money to handle these cases?

Kevin Swenson:
Well, it’s obviously incredibly important because that’s the way you keep your case moving, and that’s the way the insurance companies know that you’re preparing a case. You’re presenting them with new information and what you’re coming up with and what you’re doing, and you’re keeping them updated as you go. If you try to just wait till the end and then hire a bunch of experts, it’s still going to be really expensive and you’re not going to be able to do it probably, but you’re also going to be too late in it.
What happens is instead of getting the fair settlement, you end up settling for pennies on the dollar because that’s just the way you can get it done. You just don’t have the right testimony in place and the right people in place to handle the case the way it needs to be handled for the injured person or their family.

David Craig – Host:
Yes. So many of these cases are so tricky because you may need a shipper expert or a broker expert. You may need a construction zone expert, a reconstructionist, a download, a mechanic.

Kevin Swenson:
Hours of service, yeah. You may need a weather expert. You need somebody who’s done the mechanical side of it and can tell you what the records mean. More and more, you need experts dealing with the telematics on the trucks, everything that’s being tracked on those trucks. I don’t think people realize how many things a trucking company knows about their trucks that are on the road, until you really dig into some of these.

David Craig – Host:
So, if somebody’s listening to this and their family has been in a horrible wreck, what makes a difference between a successful outcome and a less successful outcome?

Kevin Swenson:
Well, the three things you talked about are huge: the knowledge, the experience, and the ability to do it. Having those three things in place, handling the case right from the beginning, taking the right depositions, being prepared for those depositions, getting the information you need, and then being able to put it all together. And I guess the other part of that is then simplify it. You’ve got so much information from all of those depositions and all of the documents and all of the truck downloads. Then, you need to put it together so it makes sense to a jury that’s going to hear that case, and that needs to be able to understand it without understanding all of the details of the federal regulations or everything about accident reconstruction.

David Craig – Host:
Is there ever a time where you regret switching sides and coming over to the victim’s side?

Kevin Swenson:
There isn’t. There’s not a day that I regret that. I regret that I didn’t do it sooner, but it’s so much more rewarding to be able to talk to people that need your help and be able to work for them and help them. And you get to pick your clients. You don’t have to take everybody that walks in the door, but you get to make a real difference in their lives. Whereas dealing with the insurance companies, like I said, I had a good win for them right at the end, but you’re still fighting with them to get paid. You’re protecting their billions and billions of dollars. It’s not something that makes a big difference to them, where dealing with those that are injured, I mean, that’s their one chance to do it and do it right. It makes a big difference.

David Craig – Host:
Is there anything else that you think that folks should know or you’d like to share about yourself, about your law firm, about handling these type of cases?

Kevin Swenson:
I think you’ve covered it well. I think you’ve laid it out there pretty well. Get somebody who’s got the experience and knows what they’re doing. Because of the associations that we’re in and stuff, if people call me and have a crash that was in any state, we know people that can handle those cases and take them. So, ask for help. I’m happy to put people in touch with somebody who is qualified and would do a great job for them and treat them right.

David Craig – Host:
And I think you touched on it earlier, was ask the right questions, go in, and ask people questions. It’s a big decision. It could have an impact. It’s going to have an impact on the rest of their lives. Like any important decision, surround yourself with somebody that can help you make that decision, somebody you trust, and then go interview people. And do exactly what you said, which was ask them, “Have you handled these kinds of cases? How many of these kinds of cases?” You shouldn’t be afraid.
That’s the whole reason I do the podcast because I just want people to have information so they’re not afraid to talk to people because I’m currently working on a new book and it’s never been easier to pick the wrong attorney. You know?

Kevin Swenson:
The marketing drives people to attorneys that may or may not be qualified. I mean, we talked to one law firm that gets a lot of cases from all their social media, talked about handling their trucking cases for them, and their response was, “We would rather get $1 million now than wait two years and get $5 million.” It’s just like, “Wow, that’s just so heartbreaking for those families.” I mean, yeah, one piece of it’s your fee, and I know that you need to keep that moving, but how tragic for those families to have the attitude, “We want it quick. We don’t care about the right number.”

David Craig – Host:
Yeah. And without even knowing that, you know? I mean, that’s the thing that when people hire somebody like a firm like that, they don’t even know. That’s the sad part. It’d be one thing if somebody came in and said, “Yeah, I would rather have $1 million today than $5 million 10 years from today,” but that’s not a conversation they have. They think they’re getting taken care of and they trust these people, and unfortunately, they don’t always get what they thought they were purchasing.

Kevin Swenson:
Yeah. So yeah, I’m excited to see your new book.

David Craig – Host:
Well, thanks.

Kevin Swenson:
That’s an area that’s really crazy right now. I practice both in Utah and Arizona, and both of those states have now allowed non-lawyers to handle cases, as well, in creating some other things. You’ve got a lot of marketing companies opening law firms, just to generate cases, and then try to get attorneys to handle them for them. It just adds another layer to what you’re talking about, on top of an already really difficult marketing situation, and trying to figure out who would be good for handling your case. You throw in the non-attorneys and it’s even that much more difficult.

David Craig – Host:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being on here, and I’m sure I’ll see you at one of the next conferences.

Kevin Swenson:
Sounds great. Thank you so much.

David Craig – Host:
Take care.
This is David Craig and you’ve been listening to After the Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website, CKFLAW.com. Or, if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-Ask-David. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families, which is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, CKFLAW.com.f