Chris Dreyer:
What happens when your courtroom reputation is so intense, it literally stops a trial in its tracks?
Kila Baldwin:
I will never forget this as long as I live we're about to start the trial and the defendant doctor was looking over at me and I'm warming up my microphone. To start, he had a heart attack in front of the jury. Trial stopped, trial rescheduled. Needless to say the case settled.
Chris Dreyer:
Thankfully, the doctor survived, but the courtroom legend has already been born.
Kila Baldwin:
Maybe a year later, I happen to be in Pittsburgh again and some woman comes up to me and she's like, "You're that lawyer. You're that lawyer from the courthouse who gave that man a heart attack." And I'm like, "Oh my God." She's like, "That was awesome."
Chris Dreyer:
Today's guest has put up some massive numbers on the scoreboard. We're talking verdicts of $80 million, 57 million, and a recent 20 million verdict against Honda. How does she do it? By finding eight figure paydays in the exact cases everyone else throws away. And today we're going to hear how she does it. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today we're speaking with Kila Baldwin, a partner at Anapol Weiss. We talk about spotting hidden liability in catastrophic cases getting early on mass torts and the extreme trial prep required to win multimillion dollar verdicts. Let's get into it. I'm so excited to speak with you. By the way, doing the research, you've put up some major numbers, some scoreboard, big numbers, verdicts, 80 million, 57 million, 40 million, 20 million hit against Honda, 11.6 med mal against a neurosurgeon. I mean, those are huge and I want to dig into some of those, but what's a recent win that you're really excited to share? Just something in the business, something that just comes to mind.
Kila Baldwin:
Gosh, I mean, that $20 million verdict against Honda was fairly recently and understanding the facts of that case, it was a really tough crashworthiness case. It was unbelievable if you want me to share with you the facts.
Chris Dreyer:
Yes, I would love. Let's hear the story.
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. We had a really young African American gentleman who was driving a motorbike illegally on the streets in Philadelphia and he hit a trash truck. It was his fault. The accident was his fault. But in the course of the accident, after he hit the trash truck, the gas cap on the top of his motorbike popped off and he burst into flames and he got third and fourth degree burns all over his body. So we sued Honda alleging that there was a defective design of the gas cap and it really was... The case was my partner, Larry Coben's baby, but I was able to participate at trial with him. But it was really just an amazing win because when you hear about it, you're like, "This guy was driving illegally. He's driving a motorbike. It's not even street legal. He hit a trash truck." But because of the defective design of the gas cap, we were able to get this great verdict against Honda, which was really awesome.
Chris Dreyer:
So I have a bunch of questions after that. Is this one of these cases that most attorneys would've just looked at and been like, "Nah."
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that I guess we specialize in or that I do is I get a lot of cases that other lawyers, they try to get expert support for, they look at it, they can't handle it. They don't understand what to go or where to go and we give it a second or third look. I've handled a bunch of birth injury cases that way where somebody gets a case, they don't know what they're seeing and they hand it to me like, "Can you make anything out of this?"
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. I mean, it's wild. So it just wasn't screwed on properly?
Kila Baldwin:
I mean, the way that the cap is designed, it can pop off in an accident sequence. It just didn't screw in a properly designed mechanism. I don't know how to say it without getting real technical and talking to you about the different variants of gas, which could have bore everyone to death. But just if you're riding a motorbike illegally, make sure you have your gas cap on tight.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow. Unreal. Well, congrats on that.
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Moving on attracting cases, getting these opportunities, getting these major injuries, these wrongful deaths, these big cases. How do you think about the firm, their positioning? Obviously Anapol Weiss, they had... I remember I talked to Saul a while ago. I think he had one of the big prison cases like longstanding record of litigating, but how does the firm think about attracting cases?
Kila Baldwin:
Sure. I mean, the firm itself, we do a lot of mass torts and we're in leadership and a lot of mass torts. And then I'm on the other side, which would be the single injury trial side. But I think one of the most important things that you have to do is actually try cases to attract cases. If you want to be a law firm and not a referral firm that refers cases out, some folks advertise their brand and want to refer cases out, but we want to work the cases and litigate the cases. And one of the best ways to get cases to actually try cases so people know who you are and what you're capable of. I think that would be kind of the best thing out there.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about that. So when you have a big case like this, is there a component to it? Do you hire a PR team to announce the win? Is there a strategy to get the visibility to your peers so that they know that you had the success?
Kila Baldwin:
Sure. I mean, we work with the digital media team, Esquire Digital Media. I'll give them a shout-out. They're great, but they do mostly all of our PR work for us. They take care of our website, they issue press releases, they do all that kind of stuff and try to get attention around when we have big verdicts or big wins. Sometimes it can be difficult because many cases do end up settling. They won't let you in the courtroom and make some outrageous demand and they'll get paid. And that's tough because oftentimes those are confidential. So they've got to think of new and creative ways to get the word out about the firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic. Yeah. I've always wondered that. I always thought, I see a lot of these firms advertising digitally and they'll put their numbers on the website and I don't know that I would put those numbers on the website. I would probably focus on the number of cases, like we've handled X amount of cases because they just don't have the big numbers. So I don't know, but maybe the consumer isn't aware of what's big, what's small.
Kila Baldwin:
I think consumers are aware just talking to my clients. I mean, they know I've gotten big results because I have plenty of clients who call me and say, "I want you to get me the same result you got in this case. I want $57 million." And I'm like, "Well, not everybody has a $57 million case."
Chris Dreyer:
Very true. Very true. Everybody wants it though. And then talk to me about the split. So you said the mass torts, the single event side, the strategies to get the tort cases, obviously being on the committees probably get a ton of referrals. The strategies to get those just because they start, stop a lot of paid probably different than your traditional brand advertising. Just any thoughts on any of that?
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of what we do on the mass tort side is try to be on the forefront of mass torts before they get rolling so that we can be early into the game. I think early entry is really important. A great example of that is the Depo-Provera litigation, which just came around in the last year or so. It's alleged that Depo-Provera, which is a birth control, caused meningiomas in women. And we were one of the first firms to get out there, advertise and say that we were accepting referrals. And I think that helped us to get ahead of the game so that when other firms started getting them, they knew already that we were in the game and they could refer us the cases.
Chris Dreyer:
So that's before the MTMP conference where they announced it.
Kila Baldwin:
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, as soon as we heard about it, we looked at the science, we did our due diligence on that end. But I think first entry is often important to getting the cases.
Chris Dreyer:
Moving on from the marketing and your reputation, you're getting a ton of referrals. And like you said, moving on to the intake side just briefly, do you have two intake departments? You have one that's single event and one that's the tort related, that's the stricter script versus maybe a framework a little looser on the single event.
Kila Baldwin:
I don't want to say we have departments. We have individuals who handle intakes for different types of cases and they're trained on those different types of cases. So for instance, much of our work here at Anapol Weiss is sexual assault and we have intake people who are trained on how to do those. It's obviously very sensitive and you have to be prepared for someone who's been through a very traumatic event. So those folks would handle all of our sexual assault intakes. We have folks that are trained on our birth injury intakes and they know what questions they ask about whether a woman had preeclampsia, what her prenatal testing was, whether she had an abruption, what her strips look like, all these medical terms. So we have different staff that are trained on kind of the different types of litigation and that really helps the process flow better so that the attorneys don't get bogged down too much sifting through intakes.
Chris Dreyer:
So like on this case that you just had the success on, I mean, is that where the intakes like it's a little questionable and then they bring on someone like yourself or an intake attorney and say, "Hey, actually thumbs up, let's go for it."
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. As I already said, all the shout-outs go to Larry Coben, my partner. He really manages our crashworthiness practice here, but with those crashworthiness cases or these really unique ones, those ones oftentimes require an attorney to look at them firsthand, like here are the facts. Sometimes you got to streamline past the paralegals and get it right to the attorney on some of those tougher cases.
Chris Dreyer:
I had a client of ours asking if... They were questioning whether or not to have all attorneys on the intake. And I'm like, and I see many that don't have a single attorney. They're hooking them and then it goes through a review and it's like, yeah, I think sometimes they're-
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. Oh, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I think people, when they call a law firm, they need to talk to an attorney. I think that's really important and that's absolutely part of our process. I mean, they go through a paralegal first, but they need to talk to an attorney. Sometimes the attorneys just know what questions to ask.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree. I think you could maybe spot something that other individuals couldn't, right and absolutely. Generating referrals and finding mass towards early is a great strategy, but if your intake department is disorganized, you're going to bleed cases. When Kila joined Anapol Weiss, she watched the firm grow from 12 attorneys to nearly 35 in just three years. You simply cannot scale that fast without an airtight system. For them, intake, not as a general call center, but as a highly specialized trauma informed first line of defense with attorneys making the final call. Let's dive into how Anapol Weiss handles operations at scale. So there's a ton of things going on in the space. There's consolidation all over the place. You went from a large PI firm, you started your own practice and then you made the decision to join Anapol Weiss. Talk to me about that decision. Because you've done it all, right? You worked at a big practice, then you went out on your own and now you're with Anapol. So talk to me through that decision and...
Kila Baldwin:
Sure. I mean, the decision was easy at the time. It just wasn't the place for me. I wasn't happy. The decision to leave was easy. I went out on my own just not sure what to expect or what to do and then things were chugging along fine, a little hectic, but actually Anapol Weiss approached me and asked if I'd be interested in joining them and they essentially bought me out, which was a good deal for me financially, obviously, but it's been really great here. It's nice to have a network and a foundation underneath you of a very large firm. When I went out on my own, we were starting out very small and hiring as we needed to go, but we've actually grown Anapol quite a bit. When I got here, I think we were at 12 lawyers and now I think we're at close to 35, including some folks that we just hired. It's crazy the amount of growth we've had in just under three years. It's unbelievable.
Chris Dreyer:
Well, I had these notes on my paper here. I said 12 attorneys to over 30 attorneys in seven states.
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about that expansion. There's operational bottlenecks, there's a lot of training involved, finding the right talent. First of all, let's start with the talent. How do you find 18 solid attorneys with all this competition?
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah, it's a lot, but we get approached by people. I think because of our reputation and our ability to handle cases and we made some, I want to say strategic acquisitions of some partners and some shareholders in these three years and that's how you attract more good legal talent. We were fortunate enough to have Krissy Feden join us as a shareholder. Richard Golomb joined over here as of counsel. Alex Walsh joined as a shareholder and with them it brought a whole host of other attorneys that we're really, really thrilled to have on board with us and talent attracts talent and good lawyers attract good lawyers. And I also think it's really easy to get people in when you have a nice working environment and a good place to work. I think the people here generally like it, which is so important.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. You know that community, that's one of the things that I miss about... I have a remote company. It started from inception being remote. That's one of the things I miss. It's like crickets in here right now. I'm the only one in the office and it's like, "Oh people." Right? So you end up going to the coffee shop just to engage and have these weird conversations. You're like, "That was awkward."
Kila Baldwin:
Don't get me wrong. I love a good Friday afternoon sitting at home in my sweatpants on my computer, having not seen anyone all day. I do enjoy the flexibility that COVID brought us and the ability to work from home. But I think in the practice of law, I think it's so important to have an office where you can just walk around and knock on somebody's door and say, "Hey, let me run this by you." I mean, they call it the practice of law for a reason. There aren't 100% answers and I think you miss that if you're not in person in the office at times. And so I encourage all of my attorneys to get in here and I try to show up every day of the week for that reason. Even if I'm not here for a full day and I have to run what kids event or something, I'll just come in for the morning, things like that.
Chris Dreyer:
That immersion and then competition, right? You want to be the best in the office. Talk to me about just the things that you or Anapol does to be that top 1% trial. I mean, do you have like mock courtrooms, you do big data, do you do focus groups? What are some of the things that come to mind that just make Anapol what Anapol is?
Kila Baldwin:
I can tell you preparation is key and putting in the hard work early. Jim Ronca and I are starting a trial next October and in three weeks we are going to deliver our openings to the paralegals and attorneys in the office to see what they think of them. And it's a very large crashworthiness trial. It very well could settle between now and then, but getting ready early I think is so important and being prepared. And that's something I stress all the time. You got to put the time in. I am an early riser. Anyone who knows me knows. I get up between four and five almost every day of the week and I put probably an hour or two in just reading and doing the quiet hard work before I get distracted by emails and questions and phone calls and all that other stuff. I think it's important that you put in that deep work and it merits the results.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more and that is a ton of pre-work On that, what's involved in the pre-work? Is it just you're looking at the opposing side like this is the angle that they may take, you hear the openings, you do multiple openings. Is that where the focus groups and things come in?
Kila Baldwin:
I've never actually used a "focus group." There's companies out there that you can hire to do focus groups. I have never ever done it. I'll give my spiel to my poor husband and my kids. I'll make all the paralegals in the office listen to an opening and tell me what they think. I do very informal focus groups. It's worked out so far so well. But a lot of the prep work, I've always thought of a trial as more like a tennis match. I'm going to serve the ball. How are they going to serve it back? How are they going to defend this case? And you have to spend a lot of time anticipating what the defenses are so that you can get around them when the ball's in your court.
Chris Dreyer:
Well said. Well said. And yeah, these are just things from the non-attorney perspective, just wondering because your guys' numbers are just incredible. What about just the selection and it's back to the intake, but like these expert witnesses and the commitment, you're going to spend so much time. It's an October case. I imagine the criteria changes what types of cases that you're going to take. Is it just, hey, for maybe a new firm listening, maybe the soft tissue case is like, "Hey, maybe you should contact Anapol because maybe they got some cases that they're just..."
Kila Baldwin:
I think it's important as a firm owner that you recognize what kind of cases you specialize in and you can take. We wouldn't take those soft tissue cases. I don't handle a lot of rear end auto accidents. I don't take little slip and falls. Our injuries are truly catastrophic and so we have to streamline everything, but we do refer out a good amount of work for the kind of cases we don't handle. And so you have to be experienced in knowing what you're good at and where to stay away from so you don't waste your time and efforts and areas that aren't your forte. If you have a small auto firm, that's fine, but then you shouldn't be messing around in the world of say like complex med mal because you're just going to waste time and energy and not know what you're doing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And talk to me too about like the team, right? So you've got your 30 plus attorneys. Do you have the lit paralegals? Do you have the case managers? What support staff does that go into? Or is it like, "Hey, I'm full cycle. I'm Working soup to nuts."
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. Well, each of the different mass torts that we're involved in, which is almost everyone that's out there, but like the Depo-Provera team is separate from the Roblox team is separate from like the Illinois sex abuse team is separate from the social media team and they have their own paralegals and their own attorneys that work on them, if you will. And then once a month or once every two weeks really I should say, we have a mass tort meeting of all the attorneys that are on the mass torts and we go through sort of the inventory. This is what's happening in this case and this case and this case. So everybody's aware and we all know and that's been a really great system there. And then on the single injury side, we sort of set up teams of two attorneys and they have their own caseload.
I have one team of attorneys who handles mostly birth injury cases, children with HIE or encephalopathy, things like that. One team that does a lot of products liability work, they're handling like our auto products cases, they handled a defective lawnmower case, things like that. And then I have another team that handles some of our medical device products. We've handled defective neurosurgical devices, defective mesh implants, defective graft implants in the head, things along those lines.
Chris Dreyer:
And I guess to have the... Because these are very specialized, what you're referring to, these different areas. It's like, hey, you get one of these cases, have the big result and then you tend to get more similar cases because, hey, Anapol has handled an HIE or cerebral palsy, what have you case, then you get more and it helps facilitate that growth.
Kila Baldwin:
Right, right. Yeah. I mean, we've just had some good outcomes in birth injury cases and I know that I got one, gosh, it was about three years ago. I got a case from an attorney out in Pittsburgh. It was a deceased infant and he couldn't find an expert for the case. So I managed to get an expert on the case and then right before trial, I filed a motion to amend and the court actually granted our motion to amend that allowed us to plead punitive damages against the doctors in the hospital, which was a huge win. And I will never forget this as long as I live, we're about to start the trial and the defendant doctor was literally looking over at me and I'm warming up my microphone to start. He had a heart attack in front of the jury. Trial stopped, trial rescheduled. Needless to say the case settled, but that was one of those ones.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow.
Kila Baldwin:
But I tell you this, not about the story, but gosh, maybe a year later, I happen to be in Pittsburgh again on a different issue and I'm standing at Dunkin Donuts getting iced tea because I'm an iced tea addict. I'm always drinking unsweetened iced tea. And some woman comes up to me and she's like, "You're that lawyer. You're that lawyer from the courthouse who gave that man a heart attack." And I'm like, "Oh my God." She's like, "That was awesome." And I'm like, "Oh wow, thank you." So that was a really cool story, but I guess that the legend grows and we get work that way.
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, you got to have a social media video for that.
Kila Baldwin:
It was something I don't know what was weirder. The heart attack itself happening, that poor man, he must have been so distraught. I felt awful. I felt like I was going to vomit. I felt so bad for him. Then I felt like a terrible person. And then this woman coming up to me a year later, I'm like, "What the heck? This story's going around."
Chris Dreyer:
So you went through this growth and we talked about the 12 to 30. Is it like 12 to 30, I mean, that's a bunch. That's 18 lawyers. And then look, the head costs for the attorneys are not... I mean, it's a higher cost. Is it, "Hey, we had these, you're just reinvesting back into the firm." What really was the catalyst? Was it the big verdicts and like, "Hey, we're going to double down in these areas?"
Kila Baldwin:
Well, when I came on board here, I think things were changing. Saul Weiss was getting ready to retire. They had some attorneys that really needed to move on and things were changing. And then I came on with a team of like, gosh, I guess I think at that time I had two lawyers or three lawyers with me, but then I instantly needed more help. And my practice was growing rapidly because I had just left my former firm not very long ago. So my practice was growing rapidly, which enabled us to hire some more lawyers. And then like I said, the strategic acquisitions, when we brought in some pretty big shareholders and of counsel, they brought a team with them to manage their caseload. And as we've grown and the momentum's grown, there's just been more and more of a need. And it's funny, we have two really great law clerks who sit outside my office and we just gave both of them job offers. So I'm excited to have two more lawyers joining us shortly. So that's great.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing having that nurture program. And then just briefly, and I'm kind of hitting this over the head, but when you do these acquisitions, does everyone merge and use the software that Anapol uses, do you have like a particular trial method? How does the integration work, the natural integration?
Kila Baldwin:
Integration's tough. I'm not going to lie. We use, for instance, Solidifi Network. I am not the most tech-savvy person in the world. I had to learn how that worked. We use iManage to store stuff. I had to learn how that worked. But we do when we bring these lawyers in, we have trainers on staff to train them in all the different software and things like that. I don't think you can ever have like a routine, "This is how you're going to try a case, this is how you're going to prep a case." I think that's a lawyer and their job, but we welcome people with open arms and an important part is just integrating and getting everybody to get along and get in the same system so that everybody can help on anything.
Chris Dreyer:
And I guess I have to ask this, the AI question gets brought up. Is it more like, "Hey, we're analog. I've got the experience and the extreme preparation." Or is there any software tools that are AI giving you some additional... Are you running like, "Hey, here's my tactic. What do you think, Gemini? "
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah, again, as I said, I am not the most tech-savvy. So I am still pretty old school. I'm probably one of the few people in the office who has paper on their desk anymore. I am very old school like that. Ironically, Jim Ronca, who has much more gray hair than I do, just be polite. He took a deep dive into AI over the last year and tried a bunch of different programs, a bunch of different software. He had a bunch of the associates form a team and analyze different things and we do use it to a certain extent. I think AI is great to summarize depositions, for example. We have a company that uses AI to summarize medical records and put them in a chronology for us to help you flip through things easily. As far as writing and opening or things like that, I wouldn't use AI for something like that.
I just don't think it's there yet. We obviously don't use it for brief writing. I just don't think it's there yet. I think you have to go old school. Jim wants to try after we do our openings in preparation for this upcoming trial, he wants to run it through an AI program to see what their comments are versus what our paralegals and the folks here say, just to see how the program works and how good it is. So we're integrating it because if you're not, you're falling behind. If you're not growing and keeping up with the times, you're falling behind, but we are integrating it with extreme caution.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. If he's listening, I would say if you could get some transcripts of a bunch of trials and even the wins from the defense side and you upload that to NotebookLM and then you have your own database and you can put that up against it with a little bit more control, but super interesting.
Kila Baldwin:
Yeah. It's a fascinating world and I am learning as much as I can as quickly as I can, but it's ever-changing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Kila, this has been amazing. For an audience that has questions about cases you've been on, some questions about the pod, or they want to refer a case to you guys, what's the best way to get in touch?
Kila Baldwin:
Sure. My number is 215-790-4581. Email is kbaldwin, B-A-L-D-W-I-N, @anapolweiss, A N-A-P-O-L-W-E-I-S-S.com. Obviously, you can find us on the web at anapolweiss.com. Happy to take referrals, talk people through cases, anything they may need.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Kila, thanks for coming on the show.
Kila Baldwin:
Oh, Chris, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Chris Dreyer:
Kila Baldwin is proving that the biggest verdicts don't happen by accident. Her success comes down to extreme preparation, a willingness to dig into complex cases other lawyers reject and a trial preparation that quite literally stops the defense in their tracks. If your firm is putting in the same level of hard work, you need a marketing strategy that reflects it. At Rankings, we help elite personal injury firms dominate search results so you can focus on what you do best, winning for your clients. Reach out to our team at Rankings today to see how we can help you scale. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer and we'll see you next time.
