Why Veterans Need Attorneys Who Truly Understand

John Berry: When you’re in the military, the last thing you want to do is admit to being injured. And when you’re a lawyer and you have clients, you want them to be honest about their injuries, but yet we need to help them. And so sometimes we have to suck up our pride and ask for help. And I think with veterans it’s tough because we don’t like to ask for help.

David Craig – Host: I’m attorney David Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. For over 35 years, I’ve dedicated my career to helping individuals and families who have been seriously injured or lost loved ones in devastating semi truck, large truck, and other commercial motor vehicle accidents. When tragedy strikes, life can feel chaotic, overwhelming, and uncertain. Many people don’t even know where to begin or what questions to ask. That’s why I created After the Crash, a podcast designed to empower you with the knowledge and resources you need to navigate these challenging times. In each episode, I sit down with experts, professionals, victims, and others involved in truck wreck cases to give you insight, guidance, and practical advice. Together, we’ll help you understand your rights, protect your family, and move forward. This is After the Crash.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of After the Crash. Today we have a great guest, one of the top trial lawyers in the country who happens to also be a veteran. John, he was a graduate of the US Army Airborne as well as the Ranger School. He went to Bosnia as a platoon leader. He also served in Iraq as a company commander. Today, he’s a trial lawyer and he runs one of the most successful veteran law firms in this country, the Berry Law firm. They do [the] largest disability, veteran disability, I think if not the biggest, one of the biggest, largest disability law firms in the country for veterans. Berry Law firm has represented veterans with disability appeals in all 50 states, and they’ve recovered almost $500 million in back pay for veterans. So John, welcome to the podcast.

John Berry: Thanks so much for having me, David. Great to see you again.

David Craig – Host: So, John, let’s start off this talk a little bit, because I think it is important. I know veterans. I mean, I’m really proud and appreciate your service, but you’ve gone beyond that. Not only have you served our country back when it was needed in times of war, but you also serve our country today by hiring veterans, representing veterans, fighting for veterans. Tell us a little bit about that.

John Berry: Yeah, well, it all comes back to my father, our firm’s founder. He was in Vietnam and he defended the commander of the 5th Special Forces in murder charges. Basically, the CIA had told the Green Berets to kill a double agent, they did. They put it in their after action report and they were charged with murder. And so my dad represented them, and it got to the point where he had to subpoena sitting President Richard Nixon because he caught the CIA lying on the stand. Now after Vietnam—that was my dad’s first big case—but after Vietnam, he ended up trying cases, I believe in 24 different states and three different countries. But he went back to New York and he practiced for a while ,and then his mother fell ill and he came to Nebraska. And what he found was whether he was representing… back in the day, for the younger lawyers that are hearing this, back in the day, if you were a lawyer in a small town, you did everything.

And so, my father was known as the trial lawyer. And he would try criminal cases, he would try injury cases, sometimes the big firms would hire him to try contract disputes, but that’s what he did. And as he did that, he noticed that there were veterans coming to him, whether it’s because of a divorce or a DUI or sometimes even murder charges, that they had something related to, what they called at the time, shell shock. The DSM didn’t even have post-traumatic stress disorder as a diagnosis. And so my dad started helping them and started doing a lot of pro-bono work representing veterans. And then there were some laws that changed that allow us to charge a fee for representing veterans on appeal. So we set up a contingency basis. It’s very similar to your personal injury practice where you don’t get paid unless the client wins.

It was very similar on the VA side because we didn’t want any veterans to have to pay us out of pocket. So we get paid based on a percentage of the back pay award. And so this helped veterans get legal representation when they couldn’t afford to pay an attorney hourly. The same way a lot of your clients, as a personal injury attorney, they can’t afford to fight these big insurance companies on their own on an hourly basis. They need someone to come in and champion them, but also to take their risk and fight alongside with them. I think as we found out, when we share that risk with our client, there’s a lot better communication, there’s a lot more teamwork. Because it’s one thing if you hire a lawyer and you’re paying the lawyer to do the work, it’s quite another for the lawyer to say, “I’m going to take this risk with you because I believe in you and I believe in your case.”

David Craig – Host: I’m curious, because I came up from a family of, there were no lawyers in my family. My dad was a psychologist. He was the first one to go to college. And so he used to think, “Oh, you’ll be a psychologist.” I took some psychology classes in college. I’m like, “No, I’m not going to be a psychologist.” But when you were growing up and your dad was such an active trial lawyer, was that something you looked at and you thought, “I want to do that. I would like to be a trial lawyer.” Or was this something that you got into gradually?

John Berry: I think initially I wanted to, then I didn’t want to, then I wanted to. My dad was very good at getting me in the courtroom when I was a kid, introducing me to judges. I’d see his arguments. He was hugely all over the press, so I’d get to hear about him. I had people come up to me and say great things about him. But I also, because he traveled so much, I had a paper route since I was 10 years old, I didn’t have a lot of rules as a kid. My parents worked and there were actions and consequences, but my dad was very good about letting me do what I wanted to do. So I became very entrepreneurial and graduated from college. I didn’t know if I wanted to go into business or go to law school. So I thought, “Well, why not become an Airborne Ranger?”

So, I saw this thing, that you can become an infantry officer in the army, they’ll send you to Airborne School and Ranger School. And I thought, “That’s what I need. I need to figure things out.” And so I got into law school when I was a senior at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, but I deferred for three years while I served on active duty. And then I stayed in the Reserve component for, finished a 20 year career there. So I didn’t always want to be a lawyer. I’m the oldest son, so it was expected that I would take over the family business, but I liked what my dad did for other people. I liked how people would come up to me and tell me all these great stories about him and how he won the case, saved their lives. I really liked that hero aspect of it. But I also, I wasn’t ready to go to law school, and so I got to support and defend the Constitution by going overseas, now we do it one client at a time.

And as you know David, you take an oath as a lawyer and it’s very similar to the one you take in the military. You’re going to support and uphold the Constitution of the United States and of your state in which you’re licensed in, or states. And so I think that it’s a very similar thing. But yeah, I was always very entrepreneurial. Like I said, having a paper route when I was young, I really liked that part. And now I’ve been able to do both running Berry Law. I get to be a lawyer, but I also get to grow this organization. I think we have 186 employees now and it’s great. I love team building. I love developing leaders, and I love making myself irrelevant in the leadership space where I hire people that are better leaders than me and watch them grow the firm, watch them grow and develop. And then it allows me to step back and elevate myself and take a higher role in the organization that doesn’t require my day-to-day interaction or at least not as much of it.

David Craig – Host: And I think it’s the same. I mean, I went into business school, I always liked trial lawyers. I mean, when I grew up, the people who I studied, I read books about were famous trial lawyers. And so it was kind of fascinating. You wanted to be that person. But then I also liked business. I think that’s probably why you and I both run our own law firms is that it satisfies both. But one thing I never realized about my dad as a psychologist was that he focused, he worked at the Indiana Boys School. He worked with juvenile delinquents. He never saw good or bad in people, he just saw people and he made a difference in people’s lives.

I think that that stuck with me, probably like your story. I mean, I think it stuck with me that I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help people. And there’s not a better way to do that than as a trial lawyer, I think and running a law firm that cares about people that wants to make a difference. And certainly I would imagine veterans listen to other veterans. I know your firm is full of veterans. So talk a little bit about how that’s significant. I think that’s a huge part of who you guys are.

John Berry: Yeah. Well, I think it goes back to what you said, David. We have to be zealous advocates for our clients. And the great thing about running your own business is you can decide who your heroes are and who you’re going to advocate for. And so for us, it was just a natural fit. We wanted to represent our heroes. And so whether they’re in a car accident, whether they’re fighting an insurance company or they’re fighting the VA, we want to stand shoulder to shoulder with them and help them. And primarily because that’s our origin story, it’s where we come from, we’re veterans. But there’s also just that tight-knit veteran community where we understand chain of command. We understand that if a professional is giving us advice, we are going to take that advice. We understand that there is a chain of command and we follow that chain of command.

And whether it’s a courtroom decorum or the way we speak to other people, veterans have this level of professionalism that you don’t see. It’s unmatched in society. And so people always say, well, the judge will ask me kind of the bench, “Mr. Berry, when did you serve in the military?” And I’ll say, “How’d you know I was a veteran?” “I can tell by the way you carry yourself.” And so we’ve all had, look, you practice law long enough, you’re going to have clients that are hard to get along with, hard to deal with. And certainly you’re always going to have that. But what we’ve found in the veteran community is if you have that level of trust and respect upfront, it’s just a lot easier to have the difficult conversations because we’re not going to win every trial. We’re not going to win every case. And some cases, as you know, you may win the trial and you may get less money than you expected.

And if you’re David Craig, sometimes you win the trial and you get more money than you expected. And people are grateful. But it doesn’t happen every single day. And I think that that’s the real difficult part of all this is that you have to develop that trust. Take the deal, go to trial, what do you do? And you have to be honest. And it’s so hard. I think sometimes to get people to be honest with you, especially veterans who, our whole careers, we’ve been told to hide injuries and to minimize because we don’t want to lose our careers over an injury. Or even a promotion or our jump status because we get paid more to jump out of airplanes or a pilot on flights. It seems backwards, but when you’re in the military, the last thing you want to do is admit to being injured.

And when you’re a lawyer and you have clients, you want them to be honest about their injuries. But yet the toughest thing we deal with in the veteran community is, okay, let’s just be… I think yes, there’s probably some people who exaggerate, but more often than not, it’s the spouse or the child coming to us saying, “My father, my husband, my wife has these problems and we need to help them.” And being the service member, if you ask me how I am, I’m going to tell you I’m fine. And look, I’ve seen it backfire in the military. People lost out on their opportunities to go to a service schools like Ranger School because they were injured and they admitted they were injured. There are people who missed out on deployments and other things because they acknowledged their injury. And then there are other people who hid those injuries and continued their careers. Now, I don’t know, look, what’s the right answer? But-

David Craig – Host: I think that’s the challenge. I mean, I think that’s one of the challenges. I mean, for 38 years I’ve represented veterans, as well as everybody else. And the veterans certainly are a smaller percentage of my clients, but sometimes they’re the most challenging, quite frankly. And I do think that all clients, no matter who you are, you respect somebody who will fight for you, who doesn’t force you to settle, but also doesn’t force you to go to trial. Who respects your opinion and treats you the way that you want to be treated. But veterans sometimes, and I’ll touch what you just mentioned, is that veterans, the one thing I’ve seen consistently is under reporting. That they are less likely to go in and talk to somebody about an injury or they’ll try to tough it out. I mean, do you see that in your practice as well?

John Berry: I mean, every day. But I have to go back to my time in military service where you couldn’t call in sick. If you’re sick, you show up at first formation and then maybe before physical training is done, the first sergeant will let you go to sick call, where you go see a PA or maybe a nurse and they’re going to look at you, and then probably give you some Advil and tell you to get back to work. And I mean, we joked about it, but the reality was if you were injured, the mission still had to get done. And if you left your team hanging, that didn’t sit well with others because it’s like—I played football in college. Well, I sat on the bench, but everybody plays injured. Okay. You know what? In high school you can be 100% all the time. In college, you’re lucky if you’re playing at 80%, everybody’s got injuries.

And it’s the same way in the military. Everybody’s got, especially if you’ve been jumping out of airplanes, doing long ruck marches, carrying 80 pounds on your back, you’re going to have some nagging injuries. You’re not going to be at 100%, but you know what? The mission still has to get done and the American people rely on us to suck it up, drive on, complete the mission, and leave no comrade behind. So yeah, does my leg hurt? Yeah. Do my hips hurt? Yeah. Did I twist my ankle? Yeah. But guess what? I can suck it up. But now look at me. Now I’m 50. All those injuries, let me tell you something, they come back. And so a lot of veterans, it’s like the problem is there’s nothing in their service record. So we have to go back and get buddy statements and substantiate the injury that had happened in service or was caused by military service because they downplayed it.

And then yes, they get out of military service, and they don’t want to file their VA claim. They go to the doctor, they say, “I’m fine.” Why? Because they’ve been conditioned to say that their entire career. And the truth is, we’re not always fine, and it will catch up with you sooner or later. And it’s better just to be honest about it. And we’ve noticed that generally female veterans are a little bit more, I think, forthcoming about injuries and illnesses and stuff than males. And that’s just true I think across society, that women generally are better reporting injuries and talking to doctors. I hate going to doctors. And I can think back to, that’s one of the reasons why we’ve had so many of the female spouses coming to us saying, “Please, convince my husband to do this or to do that.”

In our line of work, David, and as you do a lot of big trucking cases, catastrophic trucking cases, and there are brain injuries. And the thing to know about veterans is, it’s like the thing we learned in law school, the eggshell skull case. A veteran who has a traumatic brain injury who’s in a car crash or a truck accident, that injury is probably going to be a lot worse than someone who did not have a previous traumatic brain injury. And if they have post-traumatic stress, that brain injury is going to make things worse. Because for a lot of veterans, we’ve learned to deal with post-traumatic stress by accepting that we have brothers and sisters who we can share our trauma with. This is what happened and it’s okay to feel this way and all that.

Well, even a veteran who’s getting treatment for PTSD and they’re doing better, and everything is good, now they get in a car wreck. Now there’s a whole new trauma, but there’s not that whole support group to deal with who are your tightest brothers and sisters you can tell anything to and will still love you and take care of you. That doesn’t exist in the accident world. And now they’ve got to find a new way to cope with this new trauma. And so I think representing veterans is rewarding, but there’s also some challenges where you have people who are injured and they get injured again, because what’s the insurance company going to say, David? Pre-existing condition.

David Craig – Host: Well, and that’s one of the challenges that, not only do a lot of veterans have pre-existing condition, but the aggravation is far more severe sometimes with a veteran in the type of wrecks that I do with huge semi wrecks with fatalities and catastrophic injuries. And it takes them back to a place that maybe they’ve been coping and getting by with, and maybe they’ve quit treating, but all of a sudden it takes them back. I had a gentleman who was in the Vietnam era, and he was a machine gunner on a helicopter, and he survived some tough times during his service. But he came home, he got married, he had a family, he lived a normal life, a productive life, and raised kids. But he stayed by himself in the woods in the forest down in southern, western Indiana. And he lived by himself.

The only time he would go into the city would be to go get his dog, his hunting dog, food. He’d go to Walmart, get his dog food, go back, and he would hunt at night, hunt raccoons at night. He’s in a catastrophic accident and he’s physically and mentally injured, and he could no longer hunt and go out at night. And all of a sudden his injury was so much more severe. And I talked to this psychiatrist with the military, and they’re like, “He needed that. That was what he did. That’s how he survived.” And suddenly he became a different person. And so I think sometimes the veteran is carrying a lot, and these traumatic incidents, the defense, the insurance company, all they say, “Well, it’s an aggravation of pre-existing condition.” Well, holy shit. I’m sorry, but this condition that it aggravated was far worse than 99% of my clients.

John Berry: And I think it gets even worse than… Look, you have had some huge verdicts where you’ve got justice for your clients where they were entitled to millions of dollars, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars and beyond. And people look at that large sum of money and they say, “Well, you must be a great lawyer.” And you are, but you’ve seen the circumstances where there isn’t enough money in the world. I saw one where there was a veteran who’d been deployed several times. He missed three anniversaries, he missed his daughter’s birthday twice, and his wife and his daughter were killed by a semi-truck. How do you put a number on that? I mean, this man sacrificed for his country. He missed the anniversaries, missed the birthdays, and that family stayed with him. And that was the only, that’s the family he has now. And he’s dealing with PTSD, he’s dealing with traumatic brain injuries. They were the ones that were taking care of him, and now they’ve been wiped off the face of the earth by someone else’s negligence. How do you put a dollar amount on that?

David Craig – Host: Absolutely. And I think one of the other challenges with veterans is getting treatment. So a lot of them will go to the VA, but the VA is not necessarily the quickest to getting people in. They’re not always the best at getting them healed-

John Berry: Or documenting.

David Craig – Host: Or documenting. And then they’re really hard to get to cooperate with you to make your case. So what I do is when I have a veteran that insists on treating at the VA, they like going to the VA, they have doctors at the VA. I will hire a forensic doctor right in the very beginning and say, “Okay, I don’t have a problem with you going. Do what you want. I’m not going to tell you where to go, what to do if that’s where you’re comfortable with. But do me a favor, let me have you examined by my own doctor and so that you’ll have another opinion, and then we can use that with the VA to try to make sure you’re getting the right treatment and the right care.” But it can be challenging just working with a veteran because you have to deal with the VA.

John Berry: Yeah, and I think you’re right. Some veterans love to go to the VA and there are some phenomenal doctors at the VA and people who really genuinely care about helping our service members. And like I said, it’s more about, hey, having that community of veterans to go to the VA. I have a brother who is an Air Force officer who is now a VA doctor, and so he treats at the VA. But he also realizes that once again, it’s sometimes being understaffed, sometimes being underfunded, sometimes not having the ability to do all the things that you want to do. I mean he’s got a job to do, but his job is to take care of these veterans, make sure that they’re getting better, they’re getting the health—not only the benefits that they need, but more importantly the treatment that they need.

But that’s not the same thing as someone coming in and saying, having somebody who can come in full time and say, “Hey, look, I am here to advocate for you and to make sure you get well. And I want you to go to the VA and I may want you to go some other places.” Look, I have injuries, you probably can’t see, but I had three discs taken out, shaved down, put back in. Too many injuries. And I mean, I went to the VA. I went to… I mean, look, my age, my health is very important to me. And so to get better, if I just listen to one doctor, no, I need specialists. I need all these things to get back to where I am. And I’m not a person who takes no for an answer.

So, of course, I’ll go to many doctors and you got to think, why shouldn’t we give the same respect to our nation’s heroes who want to get better? And we hear from the insurance companies, “Oh, well, you’re not treating, you’re not trying to get better or you’re malingering.” And it’s all this, just the attacks. But that’s why there are people like you and me who fight back. But yeah, absolutely, having somebody else shepherd them through the process. Because you’re right, sometimes the VA healthcare is good, sometimes it could be better, but more importantly, it’s you as a lawyer just want your client to get better, physically get better, and to be made whole. That’s it.

David Craig – Host: Well, you have a duty, I mean, I look at it as say, I don’t know whether they’re going to get good care or they’re going to get bad care. Quite frankly, I hope they get good care, but I’m not going to risk my client’s future based upon an assumption that may or may not be right. I’m going to take control of the situation, get them to good, qualified doctors who can help them, and then also guide them. I’ve had traumatic brain injuries where the VA was slow to help. But I took the resources, got them to the right people, and then they took that information and they got more help than they ever would’ve gotten by sharing the information, because they had neuropsych testing, they had different types of things. But I think that as an advocate, you can’t just sit back and wait and hope. You’ve got to take care of these people.

John Berry: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the misconceptions for younger lawyers that get involved. They say, “Well, I don’t really want to manage the care because I don’t want to make it look like I’m trying to run up the medical bills or whatever.” But it’s like, “Wait a minute, your client was seriously injured. You’re the advocate for them. You’re the one that’s supposed to make them better. They’ve come to you and said, ‘Help me fix the situation.'” And they don’t know whether it’s medical treatment, money, whatever it’s going to do, whatever it’s going to take to make them whole, they don’t know what it’s worth. And I think what I like about your approach is, you’re saying, “Look, I’m going to get you the best care I can get you, because my job is to make sure you’re well, you’re taken care of.” And once again, eventually you’re going to get compensated. But it is more about healing. I mean, anybody who’s lost an arm or a leg, they’d rather have that arm or leg back than any amount of money.

David Craig – Host: Yeah. I went to the jury, I had a jury trial, and the defense said, “Well, you sent this guy to the doctor.” I said, “Hell yeah, I did. And he’s a good doctor, so attack this doctor.” He’s like, “Well, I’m not going to attack the doctor. I’m going to attack you.” And I said, “Well, have at it.” He said, “Well, you ought to settle.” I said, “Full bullshit.” And so we’re going try this case. So I went in and talked to the jury. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the defense thinks it’s a big deal that I refer my client to a doctor. Now, who of you, if I knew that your car was wrecked, and I know a good body shop and I know a shitty body shop, who thinks that there’s anything wrong with me sending my clients to the good body shop? Anybody raise your…” And I talk to them.

“And if I know a bank and somebody comes to me and says, ‘I want to start a business.’ And I happen to know banks that work with small business people, does anybody have a trouble or problem with me referring to a good bank? Is that not my role as a lawyer, as an advocate, as someone in this community?” And I won that case big, and it didn’t matter that I sent them to the doctor because I think if you’re doing it for the right reason and you’re picking the right doctors… Now, if you’re picking somebody who rubber stamps and just says whatever, then I agree. But if you’re picking good doctors, qualified healthcare providers, because then the attack back is, “Well, what evidence do you have that the treatment’s not proper?” They don’t. So I’m willing to take that. And so far, I’ve never had a case in 38 years or have ever come back to bite me because the people I pick are the top in the medical fields.

John Berry: Absolutely. It’s the same thing for lawyer referrals. So can we represent veterans in all 50 states. Under the federal administrative exemption, we can do that. But I’m only licensed in Nebraska and Iowa for injury cases, for truck accidents, car accidents. So if someone’s injured by a truck in Indiana, I’m sending them to David Craig. I could send them to somebody else, but I want to send them to the person who I feel is the best lawyer in the area because they’re my client and I have a duty to them. And yet we may still represent them on their VA claim, or we may have represented them three years ago and they’ve reached out to us, but all of a sudden, it’s a credibility issue. My credibility is being loaned out every time I refer someone to a doctor or a lawyer. And so yes, I am going to not send them to the shitty auto body repair shop. I’m going to send them to the best. Why? Because it’s a reflection of who I am. More importantly, my duty. As you said, your duty to your client.

And I think that, yeah, it’s disgusting that insurance companies will challenge that because it’s clear they just don’t want to pay. Instead of saying, wait a minute. I mean, if somebody else hurt you, do you get the crappy treatment or do you get the best possible treatment? And the answer should be, well, if it’s not your fault, if somebody else’s fault, why wouldn’t you want to do everything to make it right? And especially if you’re on the other end of that, wouldn’t you have the integrity to say, “You know what? I want to make sure you get the best care.” If I hurt somebody, I want them—I take responsibility—if I hurt somebody, I want them to get the best possible care, the best treatment. I want them to be okay, because I don’t want it on my conscious that I ruined somebody else’s life and then prevented them from getting better because I directed them toward a less expensive, less costly, less proficient and less professional person who maybe could have solved the problem or could have helped them.

David Craig – Host: And that defense lawyer, if they need surgery, they’re going to ask lawyers, “Who’s the best doctor to do the surgery?” But yet they fought us for making those recommendations. It is crazy. So what other challenges do you see in representing the veterans in a personal injury? I mean, in a truck accident, car accident, what type of challenge, other challenges do you see?

John Berry: I mean, the under reporting is the biggest, the treating, going to treatment, “Hey, you got to keep going to treatment.” And a lot of it is like, “Well, I went to the doctor. I keep going back, I’m not getting any better.” You’re like, “Well, you got to keep going to physical therapy. You got to keep going to treatment, you’re going to get better.” But it’s having that patience, because once again, I mean, you look at what happens in the military, you get injured, you get patched up, you get sent back, and you don’t want to be sent home. So the goal is to get back into the fight. And so for a lot of veterans, they get injured. As you know, when you get injured, treatment lasts a long, long time. And a lot of them say, “I just want to get back to work. I want to start doing something. I can’t…” And then they stop going to treatment, they stop. And then number one, obviously it reduces the value of their case, but that’s secondary to, then they don’t get better. They don’t fully heal.

And then of course, it’s one of those things where then the insurance company can use that against you. “Well, it wasn’t a serious enough injury for you to keep going to treatment. Why didn’t you keep going treatment?” “Well, I had other things.” And then they try to… But in the veteran’s mind, it’s, “You know what? We don’t stop because we’re injured. We have a mission. We have a family to take care of.” If we have a job, we have a job to do, and we take it seriously. We’re not going to let our employer down, not go to work. We’re not going to take time away from work to go to physical therapy and all these things. We’re loyal. We’re loyal to a fault. We’re loyal to our employers, we’re loyal to our families, and we’re not going to let somebody down.

And I think that the toughest conversations are always like, “Look, you need to take a step back. Think about long-term, if this condition doesn’t get better, how does that affect your ability to take care of your children? How does it affect your ability to take care of your spouse?” And even my dad’s, with Agent Orange. I mean, he’ll tell you his biggest thing was waiting so long to pursue that 100% rating for the… Because I’ll tell you, the great thing now is he has a home health aide who can walk him around the block. It’s not me, it’s not my mom. And so for the things that he’s suffering through right now, he’s glad that he did pursue his VA disability benefits. And the crazy thing was, just like me, he’d been helping veterans do it for decades before he did it for himself. But I do think it’s really important to think about your family and to think long-term, not the short-term. Yes, short-term, yes. People rely on you.

We love, as veterans, we love that the burden of command. We love the pressure pressures of privilege. “Hey, throw more weight on my back. I want to carry the team. If someone needs to carry the ball, I’ll carry the ball or carry the water, I’ll carry the water.” But it’s volunteering. We volunteered by raising our hands and when we want to be loyal, good, productive citizens. But there is a time when I have to explain to veterans, “It is time to take a knee and drink water, get healthy. You’re not helping your family in the long run. You’re creating more problems. And if you can’t work a month or not, are you really helping your employer by showing up every day and working 12-hour days? Or maybe your employer would appreciate…”

And sometimes I’ll call the employer and say, “Look, I know what’s going. I get it. I respect it, but I think knowing this guy’s character, you’re probably going to want him around for a while. I’d like for you to have a conversation with him about maybe slowing it down a little bit so he can get better, because he needs it.” And then usually the employer will say, “Yeah, I’ve tried to have that conversation with him.” I’m like, “Well, I need you… Then let’s both sit down.” But I think that’s the tough thing is being able to tell someone, “Take a knee and drink water. We’re not pulling you out of the game. We just need you to get better so you can play the game for longer.”

David Craig – Host: And I see that on a regular basis. The spouses are usually the ones that tell me the full story. They’re the ones or the children, but they’re the ones that will tell me more about what’s going on with my client than my client. More likely than not, the client tells me, “Hey, I’m doing pretty good. Under the circumstances, I’m doing fine.” But no, I find that exactly what you’re saying, the under reporting. It’s almost like in their mind, it’s failure to step back and take a break and catch the breath when in fact they really need to do that. So I see that as well. One of the challenges also that I’ve run into is on active duty. So I tried case over by Kansas City on a semi case, and it was an Air Force [guy]. His wife was in a semi wreck and had a severe brain injury, lost part of her brain, was in a coma for months, woke up and she came out of it, but she doesn’t recognize.

She only recognizes people the way they looked at the time of the wreck. She doesn’t recognize them as they got older. So she quit recognizing her husband, quit recognizing her kids. But one of the challenges in that case was sometimes these folks live far away from home. And so that support group that I have, if you are in a semi-wreck and you grew up in Indiana and you have whole bunches, a huge support group. Now, the military is very tight, and they came to this family’s aid. But over time, after several years, people started moving on and going to different places. And I found that to be a challenge as well, because sometimes people are isolated at a military base. This one was Whiteman Air Force Base, but they’re isolated and they don’t have that support group day in and day out year after year.

John Berry: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And that’s one of the challenges with active duty is you’re moving about every two to three years, especially if you’re what we would call a fast mover. You’re moving up through the ranks quickly. You’re a fast tracker and you’re getting promoted. With every new promotion, there’s new responsibilities. So we find that, yeah, I mean, we’re taught to jump at opportunities, which means you’re going to travel, you’re going to move around a lot so a lot of those relationships, it’s tough to maintain them. Now, I think that having that veteran community, wherever you land you’re, you’re going to have relationships, but it’s tough moving around all the time and it’s tough on family members as well. And so that support, I think the family support is key. And when you start moving people around and family members can’t be around as much, especially during deployments.

You come back, I mean, there is this loneliness that you have to deal with and the lack of support from those long-term friends that maybe some of your peers who didn’t serve in the military, who lived in Indiana their whole lives, they have that support group there. Whereas in the military, there’s still support groups, but it’s different. And a lot of times it’s not as long-term, at least in the beginning of your career. Now, I can say that I still have relationships with, I served in the ’90s and active duty in the 90’s and early 2000’s, and I still have relationships with those individuals, and they’re strong bonds, but they’re throughout the country. They’re all over the place, they’re scattered.

David Craig – Host: So, if a veteran happens to be listening to this podcast and they feel like they’ve suffered injuries or disabilities as a result of their service, what should they do?

John Berry: Well, first they should file a claim. You can go to va.gov. Every county in the United States has a county service officer who can help them file the claim. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? They’re going to say no. What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Maybe you’ll get an exam and they can look at you and they can say, what they call a C&P exam, compensation and pension examination. That’s where it starts. And look, the sad thing is a lot of veterans are either unfairly rated—the rating scale is zero to 100%—so you may get 0% or 10% or up to 100%, and it’s based on that number. So the difference between a couple hundred dollars and a few thousand dollars is going to be based on that total rating percentage. And so some veterans are not service-connected for all of their disabilities, only some of them.

Some disabilities, well, all disabilities get worse over time as you get older. And so they’re not rated correctly. And some veterans don’t get service-connected. We had one veteran, he came to us extremely upset because they said he never served in Vietnam because his DD214 was messed up. So we had him raid the attic, get all the letters, get the medals, get statements from buddies, and then part of it was the VA just didn’t look at some of his records, but the DD214 was wrong. That’s why in the military we have something called the DD215, which corrects the DD214. But the point is, veterans that are injured, look, you earned it by raising that hand, and especially my generation, the OIF, OEF veterans who deployed multiple times.

It’s not just about you. Suck up your pride and do it for your family. If you’re injured now, get treatment. The story I write about in my book, Veteran Led, about one of the veterans that my father represented, he said, “Hey, I’ve got a who lives under the bridge.” And a lot of homeless veteran population that have mental health disorders and other issues related to combat. Vietnam veteran, infantry guy. He had been living under a bridge for over 10 years. He had filed a claim with the VA in the 1970’s. It was lost. My dad was able to find the claim, ended up getting the guy back pay, and then when they got the back pay, they rated him at 10%. So it took decades to finally get everything done. And then my dad appealed that, eventually got him to 100%, but it was hundreds of thousands of dollars and medical treatment.

This guy went from being homeless; living under a bridge with drug and alcohol issues; secondary and related to his PTSD, to getting treatment; reuniting with his family; getting married; getting a job; having kids and eventually starting a company. And the whole time he’s under the bridge, he had the leadership ability, everything he had, but he just wasn’t getting treatment. So sometimes it’s not just about getting compensation for those injuries, but it’s about getting treatment. And a great example is once you reach different rating levels, it also affects your ability to get free healthcare. So there’s different healthcare. For instance, my dad at 100% gets someone, a health aide to come in and help him. And so these are things that we want to, if you’re a veteran and you have some issues, they’re not going to get better. I think when we were in service and we were young, yeah, you get better over time.

What we found is they don’t get better as you get older. Once you’re out of military service, the odds of that nagging injury you had all through service that would come and go, it’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. So we got a paratrooper that always had a bad left knee. Guess what? He gets service connected to that knee at maybe 20%. Then he’s got a bad ankle because he’s walking on the bad knee, then he’s got a bad hip. And then what happens? Now, his other ankle’s messed up, his other knee, his other hip. And so those injuries long-term create more problems. Now he’s walking with a cane, now he’s in a wheelchair. Now his family has to help him through the house, help him get in the shower, help him get in the toilet. The VA is there to help families take care of their veterans, or to take care of our heroes.

And so, it’s always sad, but it’s like, “Well, the resources are there. There’s a plan to help.” But all the veteran has to do is ask. All you have to do is ask. And so sometimes we have to suck up our pride and ask for help. I mean, that’s any human. We have to ask for help. And I think with veterans it’s tough because we don’t like to ask for help. We see it as a sign of weakness. I think with a lot of the mental health stigma, I think that’s changed to some degree. And so it’s okay to go to counseling. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to not be perfect. Yeah, kind of like law school, right. They don’t teach you like, “Hey, you’re going to fail. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to lose a case that’s going to ruin somebody’s life.”

They don’t tell you that stuff. And that same thing in the military, it’s like, “Hey, you can’t fail. You can’t let the team down.” But you will. And I think as a leader sometimes, if you don’t take a knee and drink water… I do this. I make bad decisions. And when I make bad decisions, it can affect my clients, it can affect my teams and their families. So I think it’s really important that if you have a disability, disease, something related to military service, get help not just for you, but for your family and for everybody around you. Be the leader that leads by example, by saying, “I’m going to take care of my body so that I can take care of everybody else.”

David Craig – Host: So, then they file a claim, and let’s assume that they think either it’s denied, or they think that it underrates their situation. Is that when they reach out to the Berry Law firm or somebody like you?

John Berry: Yeah, that’s when you reach out to Berry Law. It’s after you filed that claim and the VA has denied that claim, and now you’re figuring out, what do I do next? And unfortunately, it’s much like, I think what insurance companies rely on. Most people, they get denied, they don’t fight back. They say, “Okay, well, I filed my claim, it didn’t work out.” But what you have to realize is it may be that you, the veteran, didn’t fill out the paperwork or your service officer didn’t do it right, or you didn’t submit the right type of evidence. You need additional evidence, and maybe you need help with that. Or it could be that you did everything right and the VA just didn’t get it right. But you don’t know. And so, if you’re denied, we don’t charge money to review a case, and we only get paid if we win, just like you, contingency based.

We only get paid if the veteran gets paid and we get paid a percentage of the back pay, nothing going forward. And as one veteran put it, he said, “Well, you get… a third of what I was not going to get is a lot better than 100% of nothing.” So for us, we don’t charge veterans up front. We only get paid a percentage of the back pay, nothing on the forward pay. So for most veterans, there’s no reason not to do it, right? If it doesn’t seem right, yeah, contact us or another accredited law firm that represents veterans and find out what your options are because you don’t want to assume that somebody processed it, got it right the first time. If you know that you have an injury, you have a diagnosed injury, and you know it happened in service, somebody else’s opinion, well, it’s almost like you feel kind of like, the veteran feels cheated.

They feel like, and then it’s like they’re being told they’re being dishonest because they filed a claim. It’s like, no. And sometimes you’ve got to stand your ground and fight back. And look, I get it. Most people don’t want to fight, they just want to win. But that’s why there are lawyers, and veterans have come to us saying, “I’ve been fighting this claim on my own for five years. I’m tired, I don’t want to do this anymore.” I say, “You don’t have to do it anymore. We’re the ones that fight for you.” And so I think that, yeah, if a veteran feels that they have a disability that was caused by service, and the VA is either saying, “No, you don’t have a current disability.” Or, “No, it was not caused by service.” Or, “Yeah, you may have a disability caused by service, but we’re going to rate you at 10%,” when really it’s much more severe than that. Well then that’s the time to appeal it.

I mean, yeah, it’s unfortunate that veterans have to appeal and they have to fight for what they’ve earned. But that is part of dealing with a bureaucracy where, a large bureaucracy where claims are processed. Nobody’s going to get it right the first time because it relies on the veteran to get the right information to them, that the medical records were right coming from service—which they weren’t always and digitization did not help that—and it requires the VA to get it right. So, you’re relying on, you could be wrong, the records could be wrong, the VA might get it wrong, but unless you review it, you’ll never know. So it’s like anything else. If you know in your heart of hearts you were injured in service, you don’t have to take no as an answer. You can say, “Well, let me look into this. Maybe it’s not right.”

David Craig – Host: So, you can represent people in 50 states. How do people reach out to the Berry Law firm?

John Berry: Yeah, so we have berrylaw.com, B-E-R-R-Y-L-A-W.com or ptsdlawyers.com, vetinjury.com, or you can follow me on Veteran Led, any of the social channels, the Veteran Led podcast. If you reach out to me on LinkedIn, John Berry, I will send you, I’m happy to send you a copy of my book, Veteran Led, which is really the next part of the mission. Which is, a veteran gets their VA benefits, but now what’s next? The team, the mission are gone. And we found that for most veterans, having that team and having that mission, having that purpose allows them to give back and feel complete again. So you can imagine coming back from service, you have some disabilities, you got to deal with those, but then what’s next? Now you’re getting compensation, you’re getting medical treatment, your body’s feeling better, you’re financially secure, what do you do? And that’s really what Veteran Led is about.

It’s like now you have this opportunity to give back to your community, hey, participate in a nonprofit, go work for a large company and teach them about leadership or start your own company, but your leadership is needed in the United States now more than ever. We need real leaders, tested leaders, proven leaders, those who volunteered, raised their hand, went overseas and did something about it, who care about serving other Americans. We need those veterans to step up and lead in our country, whether it’s in politics, private industry or the nonprofit world, doesn’t matter. We just need more leaders to develop young men and women. I was just in Chicago this winter, and I heard the mayor had a Director of Veterans Affairs. I thought that was weird for a city. And what I found out, it was the city of Chicago. Less than 19% of the veterans receive any assistance from the VA.

Well, what does that mean for their communities? The communities are impoverished, there are benefits, there are homeless veterans who could be receiving benefits who are not receiving benefits, who are not receiving healthcare. And where would that money go? It would go back to the city of Chicago. They would spend money in their communities and they would be getting treatment. It would help with the homelessness. And the third part of it is this, back when you and I were younger, who led the communities? Well, it was the church leaders, the pastors, the ministers, the priests. Well, are as many people going to church? No. So who is there to lead the communities? Our veterans are there and they want to lead. They want to get out, and they want to lead, and they want to do these things. So yes, it’s important that we have places of worship where people can go and receive guidance and learn about values.

But that’s not the only place. And as those numbers are decreasing, for whatever reason, there is an opportunity for the veteran community to step forward, to begin to teach young men and women about leadership, service, and how to improve their communities. Because we’ve done it. We’ve been to the third world countries. Hey, we’re the ones, some people say, “Well, maybe it’s the state Department’s mission.” We did the humanitarian service. We went in there and fixed their water pipes. We went in there and helped build schools. So when you think of veterans, these guys just aren’t sending hot lead downrange. Most of us had peacekeeping missions on top. Yes, the primary mission is combat, seek and destroy the enemy. Yes, close and destroy the enemy. Yes, that’s the primary mission. But we’ve been given so many other missions, and especially in the Guard and Reserves, you’ve got floods, hurricanes, all these natural disasters.

And we’ve got, like I said, we keep the peace throughout the country, but we also, the way we keep the peace is by building, building schools, building infrastructure, helping communities. And so the veterans have all those skills. I can’t think of a more qualified person to have in government or to help build those communities than someone who has done it and volunteered to do it and knows what it looks like at scale by serving in the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, the United States Army or the United States military. I don’t want to make the other service branches mad.

David Craig – Host: And folks, if you’re listening and you want to look at John, read John’s book, Veteran Led is available on Amazon. That’s where I got it. It’s a great read and I would recommend it. One thing I would say too, I have a lot of veterans come in and they do have a pre-existing condition. They have aggravation of a pre-existing. Insurance company, as we said, beat you over the head over it, and they feel beat down, and they don’t want to go try the case. And I always tell people, the reality is, jurors respect the folks who stood and protected us and who went overseas, who raised their hand and went over there. And I believe jurors take care of these folks, and they may be easier to hurt and harder to fix, but by God, people don’t care.

They don’t care if you did hurt them, if you did aggravate their injury. If you’ve made their life worse because of this semi or because of this truck or bus or whatever it happens to be, jurors don’t care that they had pre-existing. They understand they may have been a little bit easier to hurt, they also understand they’re harder to fix and they will compensate them. And you shouldn’t be afraid to fight because of the fact that some insurance adjuster sitting in an office who probably never did serve, is making a claim and making a value determination based on nothing.

John Berry: Yeah, absolutely. And if someone comes to me, and if I have a veteran in Indiana, I say, “You need to go see David Craig. He’s going to take care of you.” And they say, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to be…” Wait a minute. What we did in the military was we believed in accountability. It’s your turn now, your duty to hold these insurance companies accountable. They hurt you, I understand you don’t want it to be about you. This isn’t about you. This is about accountability and there is nobody better to hold others accountable than a military veteran. And I wouldn’t have the privilege, neither would you, of practicing law if there weren’t men and women who took the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And so that courtroom, yeah, it’s sacred. It’s hallowed because you, the veteran, provide the freedoms under which it operates.

So you should not be afraid to go in the courtroom and face down those insurance companies or anybody else who wants to deny you justice because you are the reason we have courtrooms in the United States. You’re the reason why we have justice in the United States, because somebody is protecting our freedom. And that somebody was you. And now that you’re out, that oath you took, that didn’t end when you got your DD214 when you got out of service; we still need you. And the way you can continue to serve is to hold us accountable, hold our government accountable, hold our insurance companies accountable, hold our corporations accountable. The military understands accountability. That is what we believe in. Integrity, accountability. And so by holding others accountable, you’re still doing your duty. And don’t ever be afraid to walk into a courtroom if you wore the uniform. You deserve to be there more than any lawyer, more than any judge, because you served, you took that oath to protect it.

And none of this would be here if it were not for those who protected our freedom and protected today. So I always tell veterans, don’t be afraid. You own the courtroom. I mean, I like to go in there and I like to feel like I own the courtroom, but when the veteran client walks across, I’m like, “This is your courtroom.” We the people, and who is more deserving than the person who has protected all of this? So please don’t be nervous, don’t be afraid. Don’t be shy, don’t be embarrassed. Ask for what is rightfully yours. And don’t be intimidated, don’t feel bad. Just go in there because other veterans are looking at you, they’re watching you. You need to lead by example, just like you did in the military.

David Craig – Host: Well, John, thank you so much for being a guest on our podcast. Really did appreciate it. And hopefully people will have learned something today and will reach out to you if they need your help.

John Berry: Well, thank you, David. Thank you for all you do for protecting the rights of Americans, but most importantly, all the veterans that you represent. And I know you’ve represented quite a few and in some pretty tough situations. And look, you’re known as the guy that people go to when there’s a catastrophic injury, especially trucking accidents. And look, those are difficult situations. But I can tell you, most of our veterans have been in situations where we know somebody who’s been killed in combat. We know, we’ve had to talk to family members. We’ve had to have those tough conversations. And you handle those cases with compassion, communication, openness, and honesty. And I can’t tell you how much that means to members of the veteran community because we’ve seen it before. And we appreciate you extending that same level of compassion and care because it’s not easy when someone that we love is hurt, injured, or killed, and somebody else caused it. And we’re sad, but we also want accountability.

David Craig – Host: 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, C-K-F-L-A-W.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.