Ep. 80 – Hidden Truths In Dangerous Companies

Ep. 80 – Hidden Truths In Dangerous Companies

Sam Littrell: We get to help uncover truth that is hidden for a purpose. And I think that’s part of the cool part of our job, is we get to find the truth. The truth exists out there and we believe that the former employees are a really great way to find that truth.

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 inside 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. This is Dave Craig, your host, and I’m going to interview today, a gentleman by the name of Sam Littrell. And Sam is the COO of a company called Stratejic Relationships, and I’m going to read off what it says on LinkedIn. “As former employees, know where the bodies are buried. We identify your defendants, former employees, who can testify and provide evidence.” And if that doesn’t get your attention, folks, I don’t know what will. Sam, welcome to this episode of After the Crash.

Sam Littrell: Thanks, David. Good to see you.

David Craig – Host: So, I thank your company. I’ve used your company, I will vouch for your company. You’ve done amazing work, but why don’t you talk a little bit about, so, what you guys do?

Sam Littrell: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we have a very interesting niche in the field. We have been around for about 20 years, and what our company specializes in is, an attorney might come to me and say, “Hey, Sam, I believe this thing is going on at this company that we are either suing or looking to sue, and I want to learn more about it.” And so, what we do is we help you guys find the people that you think exist out there somewhere. You’re just not really quite sure who they are or where they are or when they are. And really, for you guys, how we break that down simply is you come to me and you say, “Hey, Sam, this is the company we’re looking into. Here are the job titles of relevance that would hold the knowledge we’re looking for. And then here’s a timeframe of when they would’ve worked there.” And so, what we do is we find those people. We find the people that you’re looking for, and we can either give you that research as raw data, or we can then get after it and interview these leads and learn from them, policies and procedures, hiring practices, potential areas of negligence or corporate wrongdoing. And really, the benefit to you guys is we get to do that in the background while you’re doing your daily life and doing all the other things that you guys got to do. We’re getting after it and calling these people seven, eight, nine times, different times of the day, different days, different area codes, so that we can actually have real conversations with these folks. So, if I boil it down simply, we’re finding the people that you think exist out there somewhere, and we are then learning from them the inner stories of what’s going on within these companies.

David Craig – Host: So, and I think that is great. I mean, it’s amazing to me that not more lawyers do this. We do it in our firm. And so, there’s oftentimes when you’re suing some company and you just know that the company’s bad. You just know there’s stuff going on. And when you take the deposition of the employees that work there, they toe the line and oftentimes they don’t tell you the truth or they will shade it or they won’t answer the questions directly. And so it’s like, boy, if we just had a whistleblower, if we just had somebody that used to be on the inside and that will talk to us, we would learn not only maybe what the bad stuff is, but we would know who to ask, who to talk to, what to ask. There’s so much more information. And we can do so much of a better job by obtaining as much information about somebody or some entity as possible. And I think that’s great. And so, your company’s been around for 20 years?

Sam Littrell: Yeah, my father founded this company 20 years ago, and I feel like he’s a hard fellow to miss. He wears these kind of crazy shirts and boots at conferences. So Paul, yeah, it’s my pops. And yeah, it’s a really fun thing that we get to do, because we get to help uncover things that you’re not traditionally going to find in traditional discovery, and get to uncover things that are really interesting, I think are really fascinating.

David Craig – Host: Well, and you’re helping people by doing that. I mean, obviously if you’re going to the trouble of digging around and trying to find ex-employees of a company that might help you, then typically, those cases are significant injuries or deaths. And so, they justify the expense of trying to find people like yourself that will help us put our case together. And I think that’s… If I ask the defense, if I’m suing a trucking company, trucking company is, somebody’s killed my client in a truck wreck, truck accident. And I could ask them, “Well, tell me all the former employees that might help me.” They’re not going to tell me. Anybody they disclose, I guarantee they’re going to say nothing but good things about their company. And so, that’s where I would turn to you, and have turned to you, and said, “Hey, I think this trucking company is hiring bad truck drivers. I don’t think they’re training them. Or I think they’re sending them into a CDL mill, or they’re sending them to get their CDL from a doc who’s doing bad, who’s just rubber-stamping their medical cards.” And we would reach out to you and say, “Hey, see if you can find some bad employee or former employees to tell us what’s a secret, what’s going on inside this company?”

Sam Littrell: Yep, yep.

David Craig – Host: Well, do you find that sometimes, and I’ve interviewed people who you’ve given me their names and told me a little bit about what they had to say. And sometimes former employees, they don’t like the place. Sometimes they don’t like, and that’s why they’re not there, is because they felt like it was a bad place, a dangerous place to work. Do you see that very often?

Sam Littrell: We see that all the time. I mean, I think that a common question I think I get is, “What’s in it for these people? Why would they give you the story or do we need to pay these people or how does it work?” And honestly, these people that we find, often what happens is they left their place of employment for a reason. Commonly, let’s say in a nursing home case, those places are notorious for just being absolutely terrible places to work, and same thing with a lot of trucking cases as well. And what’s interesting is we get them involved, and they really didn’t think they were ever going to have the opportunity to even share their story. And so, what’s cool is we allow them to have that opportunity, and they just want to tell their story. They left and they want to be able to tell someone, “Here’s what happened when I was there. Here’s why I left. And maybe I even reported these things to management and they didn’t do anything about it.” But people don’t like staying in crappy situations. They want to get out. And so I think what we get to do is find the people that were there, were there when your client got injured and could talk about, maybe here’s part of the reason why they got hurt.

David Craig – Host: And I know, I mean, you work all over the country. So I mean, it’s not like you just have to search this particular state. You guys look all over the country, don’t you?

Sam Littrell: Yeah, we work all over the country. I live in Marietta, Georgia. I’m soon moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, but we work in just about every state. I think there’s five states, that’s not because we can’t or have any limitations, but I think we have clients in about 45 states.

David Craig – Host: So, tell me how this works. I mean, so a lawyer’s out there and they have a really bad catastrophic injury. Let’s say it’s a trucking case. And trucking companies, they’ve got bad drivers that aren’t qualified either medically or through training to drive a truck, or they have fatigue. I’ve had cases where they’re pushing their drivers and they’re fatigued and they have drivers falling asleep at the wheel. So, how does a plaintiff lawyer, the person who’s representing the victims, what do they do? What do they need to give you to get started?

Sam Littrell: I mean, most of the time I’m either getting a phone call or an email that just outlines, “Here’s the company, here are the job titles.” So maybe an example would be, “Here’s this trucking company. I am most interested in finding drivers and managers and loaders who could talk about these certain dynamics. And to be relevant for my case, they would’ve needed to work there from 2018 to 2020.” And the only other question we ask people from time to time, or I guess we ask it most of the time is, “Does it matter at all where these folks are located now?” Let’s say they did work for this company, they were living in Georgia, but now they for whatever reason, have moved to California, maybe for family. So, typically in the age of Zoom, as we’re on Zoom right now, that doesn’t matter as often as much anymore. But we do like to verify and make sure it’s okay if they’re not in state.

David Craig – Host: So, how long does this normally take? So let’s say I hire you on a case, what are we talking about? How long of a process is this?

Sam Littrell: Well, it takes two weeks to get you the list once we’ve gotten started. And so, I think that’s something that separates us from a lot of folks. I remember I was at a big truck and auto summit not that long ago, well, actually it’s probably been longer than I thought it was, August or so. And I was talking with an attorney there and he had talked to some private investigator that maybe did some similar things, but it took him about three or four months to get back to them with maybe half the amount of leads. And so, getting involved with us, it really does, I think it’s 10 business days really, once we’ve gotten launched to get you that list back.

David Craig – Host: And let’s talk about, I don’t want to give any specific names of cases or specifics, names of defendants, but can you give us an example of, let’s say a trucking case where you’ve worked on where you helped the plaintiff lawyer, like myself, determine that they had some bad apples and found some witnesses that helped them turn the case around?

Sam Littrell: Yeah. I think there’s two trucking cases that ring in my head. One was a case where it was, unfortunately, I think there was 12 fatalities in this case. And what we did was we found former drivers who could talk about, how does this company work? What’s going on behind the scenes? And what we did was we found former drivers, and I think we found some managers and maybe a few other job titles. And what we learned was the people that were hired to do the driving for this company, while it was referred to as a no-touch company, they actually when it came down to it, that’s not at all how it operated. So, drivers were mandated to first drive and then unload, and then reload, and then drive again. And by the time they’re back on the road, they were exhausted. And so, that’s what happened in this instance is that they were saying, “Oh, everything’s above board. We didn’t do anything wrong.” But really, what was happening is these drivers were completely exhausted. They didn’t have the energy to keep going forward, and were pressured by corporate and management to keep going on and keep going strong. The other example I was thinking about was there’s a large retail company that all of us probably use to some extent that they often use different third-party services to do a lot of their day-to-day operations. And so in this situation, yeah, this service was trying to, or the bigger organization was trying to say, “Hey, we have nothing to do with this. This is all them.” And we ended up finding, I think we found in this situation maybe about 15 or 20 folks who worked for this company. And every single one of them said, “Hey, we deal with their management, we deal with their technology. If anything goes wrong, we report directly to them.” So everything we were doing is just helping build the case of saying, while you’re saying, “We don’t have anything to do with it,” really our day-to-day operations, we operate as that big entity. There’s no distinction between the two. So, helping build the case that they are liable and it’s not just trying to push off liability to somebody else.

David Craig – Host: Yeah. Well, and I mean, that’s extremely important when you’re trying to establish agency or you’re trying to establish chain of command, you’re trying to show that one person, one entity controls another entity, so that you can reach up and get a bigger insurance policy or someone more responsible who can financially pay for the harm that’s been done. And so, that’s the kind of information you have. And even if you strike out, at least you know that you’ve done your due diligence, that you’ve looked and you’ve tried. And there may be times where you find out that there’s nothing there and that’s okay. I mean, that happens.

Sam Littrell: Absolutely.

David Craig – Host: But the reality is, at least you know you’ve done your due diligence as a lawyer to figure that out. And so-

Sam Littrell: Yeah. To piggyback off that, I think what’s really cool and something that I didn’t anticipate coming into our company is, obviously scenario one, we find a smoking gun and we find the information that you’re looking for, you say it’s true, and we find it. We find somebody who says, “That’s exactly what’s happening, and more.” But outside of that, there’ve been other situations where maybe a not so great situation, but still something that happens, like what you just said. Maybe you discover, “Hey, we found all the people that used to work there and they cannot and will not corroborate what you’re saying.” So, maybe it’s not something that you want to invest all your time into this case or maybe you don’t want to invest a lot more money into this case because the people that are out there are saying, “Hey, that’s not actually what’s going on.” But outside of that, what I think is really cool is we got a couple of cases in the not so distant past, where one was a slip and fall case and it was at a restaurant in California. And we found, I think in this situation, probably about 15 or so folks as well. And everyone we actually talked to said, “Hey, there was this broken up path. There was some issues, but it wasn’t that bad.” And the word got back to the restaurant that we had called all their former employees, and it was clear they were hiding something because, actually, they ended up settling for $1.2 million. So, I don’t know what was going on in that case, but it’s clear that they were hiding something because they weren’t really sure; there was some fear there that we uncovered where they’re like, “I don’t know what you know, but I don’t want to find out.” We had a similar case where it was a wrongful death at a dealership also in California. And our attorney’s theory was that there was a high drinking kind of culture on the premises and that had something to do with this incident. And same thing, what we do, we collected the name of the company, the job titles, the timeframe. We found these folks and then we called them and every single person we talked to said, “That’s not really true. That’s not going on.” So, obviously that’s not good news when we get those kind of reports back. We’re like, “Man, we wish we were…” Obviously, it’s a complex thing. But what happened in this case similar, it was a pre-lit case. He got us involved, I think the week that he got the case and similar in as the last case I had mentioned, the word got back to the dealership that we had called all their former employees. They weren’t sure how many employees that we had called. They didn’t know what we knew. And I believe the case settled pre-litigation for $14 million. So, similar thing, I think the attorney at that point was like, “Man, I wish I’d asked for more.” So, there’s a few, obviously again, smoking gun is a great situation, less good situation, but still may be helpful in some situations is to know, hey, maybe your story that you’re looking into, maybe it’s not true. And then also maybe leverage for, hey, there’s fear of what we don’t know of what they know about us, and that can help put some pressure on the defense.

David Craig – Host: What kind of cases do you… I mean, obviously, I mean, this podcast reaches a lot of folks that have been in truck accidents, semi-accidents. But there’s other people who listen to this that just may have been involved in other types of injuries or accidents or wrongful death cases.

Sam Littrell: Sure.

David Craig – Host: What other kind of cases, what kind of other areas do you guys, what’s the most common and what kind of areas do you guys typically find yourself researching employees?

Sam Littrell: Yeah, I mean, we do a lot of trucking cases, we do a lot of nursing home cases. We also do product liability cases, finding maybe engineers for a product that failed. I can think of tire defect cases. We have done, I mean, honestly, everything under the moon. There’s not really any kind of limitation. But if you have a high damage case that, let’s say maybe a sexual assault, we’ve done some of those where we had one not that long ago where it was a sexual assault at a bar. And what was really fascinating that we found was actually, all the employees actually got together offsite one night and said, “Here is everything that is wrong with this bar, everything that we would change if we could.” And they wrote all that up and they sent it to management and they’d never acted upon it, and then I think two months later is when this sexual assault happened. So really, if you think about any company where there are former employees that have left and could bring context, whether that be really high level issues like that corporate structure, corporate wrongdoing, but sometimes learning about those policies and procedures, how maybe that stacks up with what they’re saying, with how it actually plays out. We’ve had nursing home cases where we’re supposed to do all these things, but really, they don’t track the data, never trained on the crash cart. And on the day-to-day, they’re overworked and understaffed and they can’t complete their duties. So, if you have a high value case where former employees hold some knowledge out there, what we’re going to be able to do is kind of circumvent the defense counsel and getting you those people because we’re not going to trust that they’re going to give us every person that’s going to be helpful for our case. We’re find the folks that they don’t want you to find.

David Craig – Host: Yeah, and I think it’s important for people to know. I mean, as a plaintiff lawyer, I’m trying to find out the truth. I’m trying to find out if I can help my clients. I want to know the good and the bad. I don’t want to invest years chasing down something that’s not there. At the same time, I sure in the heck don’t want to miss something that is there. I owe that to my clients, I owe it to my clients to go find this stuff out. And I think for other people, I guess for people to understand too, because a lot of folks that are listening to this aren’t lawyers, but it’s perfectly legal and it’s perfectly ethical, right?

Sam Littrell: Yep, absolutely. Yeah. Recently, we’re working on a case, a very large sexual assault case that happened quite a while ago. And the terminology that our client was using was— we actually did the first stage. We found maybe 30 people or so. We interviewed them, found some really good information. But then he came back to us and said, “Hey, we really want to leave no stone unturned here. If we maybe opened the parameters up a little bit more and did a few things, could we find more people and interview those folks to see if they know of any other wrongdoing or knowledge on behalf of the defendant?” And so we got that second stage started. But I don’t know, it’s a lot of fun. We get to really hear some really cool stories, obviously really sad stories, but we get to help uncover truth that is hidden for a purpose. And I think that’s part of the cool part of our job is we get to find the truth. The truth exists out there, and we believe that the former employees are a really great way to find that truth.

David Craig – Host: Is there any other cases you can think of that sticks out in your mind that you just think, this is one where we really made a huge difference?

Sam Littrell: Yeah. I think there was a case that we did for a client of ours named Michael Hill in Ohio, and he’s a good friend of ours that really put us on the map in Ohio for a lot of attorneys. And what happened was, I think we actually found maybe 40 former nurses and RNs and aides at this nursing home. And we actually did the interviews on this case, and we ended up finding about nine people who testified at trial that the corporate entity of the nursing home was actually mandating that their employees falsify records, commit Medicare and Medicaid fraud. I think they had three or four of these people actually cried on the stand, apologized for what they had done and just uncovered all this. And that case actually ended up getting a verdict of $25 million, and at the time it was a record for a nursing home case in the state of Ohio. And I think Michael Hill would be the first person to say, “That doesn’t happen without you guys finding these people.” So, it’s really cool to get to find some of this information.

David Craig – Host: And it’s great to, like you said, let people tell their story, let the truth find its way to the jury or in your negotiations. I think it’s a fascinating way to do it. So, if people want to find you or they want to try to hire you, first of all, your name is spelled different, Stratejic. So, tell us a little bit about how we find you, the name of the company.

Sam Littrell: I don’t know when the slogan was made, but we say we spell Stratejic with a J for justice. So instead of a G, it’s a J. Stratejic with a J. And we’re at www.stratejic.com. You can call my cell; my cell phone is 502-334-8158. Call me anytime. And my email’s sam@stratejic, so I’m pretty easy to find. If you call me, I’m pretty approachable. You’re not going to get some kind of a gatekeeper. It’s my cell. And I like talking to you guys about your cases. I think it gives me a lot of purpose to be able to help you guys learn what’s really going on and get to uncover truth that you’re— is really hard to find. So, pretty easy to find guy.

David Craig – Host: Out of curiosity, have you ever been hired by a non-lawyer? Let’s say if somebody had a family member who was abused in a nursing home and they wanted to find that out, have you ever been hired by… Or is it usually… I mean, because obviously a lawyer is going to know who to hire and-

Sam Littrell: Sure.

David Craig – Host: … who to call and what’s important. And I was just curious if anybody’s ever hired you that’s not a lawyer.

Sam Littrell: I don’t think anyone that’s not a lawyer has directly hired us in the sense that they just found us. There have been people who’ve hired us who maybe are working through business disputes and they are working with an attorney and they hire us directly. Because we do a few other things. We do other similar incidents reports, which are pretty hefty documents that do a lot of social media background checks, do a lot of searching for similar incidents within a situation. We do skip tracing and we do asset searches, those kind of things. So, different people have come to us for those kinds of sources, but you can think of us as the ex-employee experts, that’s how you can remember us. But we do a lot. Honestly, if you have a question about a case where you’re like, ‘Could you guys find this or could you help me uncover this?” Oftentimes, I’ll say, “Let me look into it. Let me see if we can help you out.” And we’re always trying to expand more menu items to see if we could help you guys in more ways, not just the ex-employees.

David Craig – Host: Well, Sam, I appreciate it. I appreciate you taking the time to spend with us. If anybody’s out there listening, if you’re an attorney, I would highly recommend that you don’t leave any stone unturned trying to protect and help your clients, and certainly looking for former employees is a good place to start. So, thanks, Sam, for being on.

Sam Littrell: Yeah, thank you.

David Craig: 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.