Christy Childers:

Predictability is where the insurance company lives.

Chris Dreyer:

Shake it up, dream big and think outside the box.

Christy Childers:

No limit experiences helps you in breaking your trial lawyer mold. It helps you think outside the box and think of what’s possible.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. The no Excuses, no BS legal marketing agency that works harder than the competition. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. All right, let’s dive in. Trucking legend, Christie Childers wants you to break the mold. She encourages no limit experiences that spark creativity and innovation moments that make us rethink what’s really possible. From reinventing CLEs to mastering niche practices to storytelling techniques that engage juries on a whole new level, she pushes past convention. Most lawyers would never dream of trying these approaches, but for those willing to toss out convention and shake things up, it can be game changing for their practice. So how exactly does one go about breaking the trial lawyer mold? That’s what we’re exploring today with our rule breaking attorney who helps others push boundaries and reimagine success. Here’s Christie Childers, founder of Mother Truckers and the Georgia Association of Women Lawyers.

Christy Childers:

I graduated with a philosophy degree and my philosophy teacher was like, Christie, grad school for philosophy’s a dead end, find something else to do. It’s not a great story, but it turns out I’m pretty good at it.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s awesome. And you weren’t just pretty good. You were number one in your class, so a little bit of humbleness there. Right out of the gate you just decided, hey, I’m opening to a firm, Childers and McCain. How did you meet your founding partner? What made you make the decision to just very early on launch the firm?

Christy Childers:

So we were just for a few years together at a larger firm and we just decided we really wanted to focus on helping injury clients. I did a lot of trials for DOT taking people’s land and didn’t really have the heart for that, but after I represented my first injury victim and got them to the other side of things, I got bit by the bug and knew that that’s what I was meant to do.

Chris Dreyer:

When did the trucking focus, when did the trucking expertise really take hold after that?

Christy Childers:

As you mentioned, I did graduate first in the law school class, but trucking, it really is attractive to nerds like me because there’s a ton of regulations that you can get your hands in. You read thousands of pages of material and you can really just do the job so well. And there’s of course always great insurance involved. I do still do some other injury cases, but largely doing trucking cases because it’s just so interesting to me and I’ve been doing it since the very beginning. When David and I first went out, we landed a pretty large trucking case and got a $5 million recovery pretty soon after going out and just learned from the ground up who the best experts were, how to work those cases up and how to get the most money from the trucking companies. So I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years now.

Chris Dreyer:

A lot of the personal injury attorneys listening, they’re doing car accident cases, those rear end collisions that clearly show who’s at fault and don’t necessarily have the complexities. What makes a truck accident case different than just a standard MVA just standard car accident case?

Christy Childers:

Just about as different as they can be, and I know your listeners have heard that before, but what I want to talk to, it can seem like this elitist niche that only the richest lawyers can get into because you have to have a hundred thousand dollars to potentially drop on an expert. Maybe you need to go buy the car or buy the motorcycle and you might need to, but a lot of the work that I do is to try to encourage lawyers who are wanting to become trucking lawyers to see how it is possible for more of us to get involved and more of them to get involved who maybe don’t have the same background as the trucking lawyers that you see getting the most attention. So by that young lawyers, I’ve created a PowerPoint that has links to all the books that you need to go and buy if you want to start your trucking practice.

That’s a big way that it’s different. Whenever you get a car wreck case, there’s no way your first thought is what books can I go through to just really delve in and see what all rules were broken and what standards exist, not just in my state but nationally. And that’s one of the first things we do after of course downloading the data from the ECM and the other data from the trucking company, sending out our spoliation letters and all the other things that your listeners know to do in a truck wreck case.

It’s about educating yourself on all of the possibilities and then funneling that down to approximate cause issue that you can use to create a great story in your trucking case. It’s all about getting that information to lawyers who are interested. Of course, you can always just refer out a case to somebody that does trucking. If you’re really interested in learning how to do trucking the best way and if you feel nervous that you’ve treated your truck wreck cases like a car wreck case in the past, you really need to team up with somebody who’s willing to teach you, not just take your case and send you back a referral fee.

Chris Dreyer:

I was researching this just because I wanted to ask some more pointed questions on truck accidents and just the definition of the large trucks. I mean, you’ve got 18 wheelers, you’ve got dump trucks, garbage trucks, logging trucks, tanker trucks. Is it that complex? I need to know the complexities of a dump truck versus a logging truck and maybe the weight that they are allowed to carry, even the type of vehicle. Is that a different nuance and complexity there?

Christy Childers:

You have done your research, Chris, that’s fantastic. And the answer is yes, you do. A lot of us though, learn it on a case by case basis. So you get a dump truck case in and you’re like, okay, what’s different about a dump truck case or you get a logging truck case in which I’ve got several of them right now, but there’s another way to do it if you really want to become an expert in trucking, there’s a board certification process and that PowerPoint I was talking to walks you through the process of learning everything. I’m trying to demystify it and break it down into small pieces. My attorneys that are studying for the board exam coming up, there’s one coming up in a few months. We get study groups together. They each learn parts of it and they teach it to each other. We’ve got a whole process for getting you through this.

If you really want to learn everything, if you’re just getting a case in and you’re working on that specific fact pattern, that’s a completely fine way to become knowledgeable about it too. And the truth is you will become a bit of a subject matter expert in that case area. I just don’t want you to have to wait 20 years of working cases to find every fact pattern. I want that truck case to come in your door as a PI lawyer and you go, okay, yeah, I read about this at least, I know where to go to. I go to these three resources and then we have of course great communities of people who help you if you have more questions

Chris Dreyer:

And let’s dive into that because you were the first board certified truck accident attorney, the first female in Georgia, and at the time when I was researching this, I believe you are one of five total in the United States.

Christy Childers:

That are women, yeah/

Chris Dreyer:

That are women, which is just absolutely incredible. When I think of school, I think you go to college, you get your associates, your BA, then you can get your JD. What goes into being boards certified? What is the process, the cost, the time? What is this?

Christy Childers:

I’ve had other PI lawyers ask me and they’d say, is it really a thing being board certified or is it just like you pay money and you get that? No, it is a legit thing. The test, the best trucking lawyers in the nation and they will tell you that it is difficult because they call me after the test and they tell me it was difficult and they say, Christie, oh my gosh, this came out of nowhere. I didn’t expect this to be on the test. But the thing is, if you follow a good study plan, the study plan that I’ve created and you stick to it and you do an hour or two a week for a few months, you know all the trucking stuff you’re going to do fine except for those couple of issues that the examiners throw in there that just would throw any of us for a loop.

You’re going to do pretty good on the trucking stuff. What was hardest for me is the evidence questions as well as the ethics questions. Because our brains no longer work the same way they did when we were just getting out of law school answering those questions. For example. Now when they ask an evidence question or I think about what my rules are in the state, but it’s very doable, it does take up a lot more time and I need younger lawyers and people who look different from me to come and become board certified experts because if you truly believe that our mission is to make our highway safer, to improve the transportation safety systems, then the best way to reach that is through having a diverse group of lawyers fighting these battles. And right now that doesn’t exist. I’m trying to make it better. It is a slow effort putting together as many of these workshops for lawyers as I can because a diverse group of people is the best way for us to get the best results for this mission.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s talk about a few of the organizations that you’re a part of. So you founded GAWL, the Georgia Association of Women Lawyers in your location, you’re the founder of Mother Truckers, which is a lot of fun. We had Christina Hagen on the show and was really excited about at the time when I was interviewing about one of the rallies that she was attending in Alaska. So tell me about these organizations and who can benefit from them.

Christy Childers:

I started MGAWL, the Middle Georgia chapter of the Georgia Association of Women Lawyers because I didn’t get invited to this after party that I threw for a judge. I was the president and I did the party, but I wasn’t invited and one of the guys made a comment, he was like, the outgoing president that said, if you came Christie, what would our wives think? So the next day I called his wife and I said, Hey, let’s start our own. So she and I created this amazing group of people. We get together and have Bunko nights, us ladies. We just get together and we have a good time and I’m still not invited to the after parties, but that’s fine. My law partner’s a guy, he can go to those and make those connections.

But what I’m doing in trucking, it’s called the Mother Trucking Lawyers or the Mother Truckers for short. And it’s a rally that we get together, the ATAA, I’m the education chair for the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys. They don’t let us call our women’s caucus, the mother truckers, it has to be called the Women’s Caucus. They say that the mother truckers is just the rally. Last year I organized this group of women to get together and drive tractor trailers and they had a blast in Montana and everybody was like, this was the most amazing thing ever. And I was like, hold my beer, let’s go to Alaska. If you didn’t think this was great, wait to see what I can do next. So I took 32 people to Alaska to drive tractor trailers and also it was an adventure CLE.

And that’s another thing that I do is I plan these adventure CLEs for trial lawyers, not just women, but we taught in a yurt and this time I had Joe Fried and Michael Eserman who were kind of inviting the principals to your party. I mean, these are big guys in our organization. We don’t want to be cut loose too much in front of them because we don’t want things to get out of hand. And [inaudible 00:12:05] too came and Jody Moore, one of the top trial consultants in the nation. I invited all of them to Alaska too, and it was all of us ladies and one day, see, I planned, I wanted as much of these next level concepts presented to these ladies as possible. And so unfortunately I planned the dinner that night, kind of late, 8:30 at night. We’re going to Alaska.

So a lot of people want to bring their plus ones, which is fine. And so I tell my husband, I’m like, here’s your job. We’re going to be in class all day long. I just need you to keep the plus ones happy. And so I didn’t even get a chance to take a break and go to the bathroom. So it’s about an hour left before dinner, and so I take a break and I run up to the restaurant where the boys are now. There’s nothing out there, nothing except this bar and this restaurant and we’ve been in this yurt learning all day. The wives have, I get up there and I say, Hey, I just was running to the restroom, but I want to check on my husband real quick. And I was like, do you know where he is? She said, oh, the guys on the porch?

I was like, okay, yeah, thank you. And she goes, good luck. And I was like, oh God, this is not going to be good. So I walk out there, one of the husbands is like, it’s my birthday, and there’s three bottles of champagne. And immediately I’m like, oh, bad word in my mind, I’ve got this dinner plan for all of these people with these world renowned trucking lawyers and people coming to dinner. This is going to be a dumpster fire. And so usually I’m there for it, I’m for the champagne, but because I’m in charge, my brain is not relaxing. So I start to make the walk back to the yurt thinking, oh gosh, this is going to be a disaster. And I hear one of the husbands yell out, Christie, let the wives out. Like I’ve got them trapped in the yurt.

Chris Dreyer:

Oh, that’s funny.

Christy Childers:

Learning, and so I walk in and Florence Murray, who’s from Ohio, you’re about to get to hear my Ohio accent impression. She says, “Christie, what’s wrong?” She could see it on my face. I said, the plus ones have been having a lot of fun and I’m worried about dinner. And so let me tell you though, we had a 30 minute break before dinner. I walk in and you would’ve thought these husbands had been at choir practice all day. They are perfectly dressed, they are sitting still and quiet on their hands. And I’m like, are you the same guys I just saw all nine of you out on the porch like raisings all hell? Then I saw, I knew what happened. I saw one of the wives cut her eyes at her husband and he looks back at her like, yes ma’am.

And I was like, you know what happened? I let those wives out and they assessed the situation and they laid the law down like, Hey, we’re about to have a dinner with all these mega lawyers. And so it went great. I was so worried that the dinner was going to be a disaster, but I think they got their payback the next day when I took them up on this little helicopter up to go dog sledding, was riding on the top of a marionette like pulling the strings. It was like these tiny helicopters that were bouncy, bouncy. And so that’s the next story I have is what happened at dog camp.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, not the most fun probably if you’re not feeling well, first of all, that sounds like an amazing CLE experience because I myself as a marketer trying to obtain new clients may have attended a few CLEs that, oh my God, I’m sitting in the back. Get me out of here. Fortunately I haven’t done one of those in many years, but yours sounds like it would be significantly more fun and educational.

Christy Childers:

And that’s a big part of what I tell lawyers for their cases too. You need to break the mold. For your CLE, for my women, I say think of the craziest thing you can imagine to challenge me to put that together for you and then let me figure out how to pay for it. It’s not about the traditional CLE, and I want them to do the same thing in their cases. I want them to think about methods that are not what we learned in law school because predictability is where the insurance company lives. They live in a world of assessing risks. They take your personal injury numbers and they put them into their database and they decide based on that how much your case is worth. They live in that world of predictability, so why keep using these methods, these same methods that personal injury lawyers have used for so many years that they know what the outcome’s going to be.

Instead, what I encourage people to do is to break the mold and to think about things from a story perspective. And I’m actually in Florida today consulting on a case using my story method that I teach across the nation. I will say that it is a very fun way to practice law, but also as a trucking lawyer, you do travel a lot and it’s very busy and putting together these things can be stressful. So when, I’ll get into the dog camp story now as we flew up to dog camp, we landed on the top of a glacier, but it’s not what you think, it’s going to look like this big flat area covered in snow. Our mushers are actually two ladies and they live there for four months at a time with a bunch of other guys and all of the most precious dogs who obviously love running, they live in these little igloo houses that are made of plastic and they have this makeshift kitchen and we’re told that all of this gets flown up on a helicopter each year.

We start going around the circle, me on the back sled and her on the front sled, and I noticed that things may be a little different from what I read about because what I read, it seemed like we might not even need a jacket much less my face get as cold as it was getting as we made the turn and all of a sudden I couldn’t really see very much and my face was just stinging and it was so cold. And so we got off the dog sled and the helicopter pilot walks up and he says, we’re stuck. We can’t fly out. There’s a cloud that came in. At first this wasn’t a big deal, but as time went on, I was in charge of this whole thing. Another thing I didn’t tell you is there’s no cell phone service up there. They’d already told us that.

So I forgot that of course, and I try to message down to my fellow instructor that I’m not going to be down in time, but of course it doesn’t go through. But in that moment of being stuck up there at dog camp, it was the most freeing thought, there’s nothing I can do. I’ve gotten 32 people to Alaska, but in this moment I can’t get flown out by a helicopter. I can’t even tell them what’s wrong or what’s happening. And so when the musher brought out the beers, I was like, yes, thank you. I will have a beer and just relax for a minute and enjoy this. It’s totally white up there. You have to wear glasses because you’ll get blinded by the snow. As time wore on. He starts talking about if we do get stranded overnight, what that would look like, we would each be given one of these igloos to sleep in.

The couples would, and we’d be given a dog for extra warmth. We’d pick out a sled dog to sleep with and the mushers would huddle up in the kitchen. Now as time went on, I mean it seemed like it was over an hour, a long time for us to be stuck up there. The helicopter pilot did come running out and said, this is our chance. Let’s go. And so we were crouched down running while the helicopter blades were turned back on and we got on the helicopter and he flew us out. And so it’s lucky that we were flown out where we were, but I was there for the adventure and it would’ve been another adventure within an adventure after getting stuck there with those mushers just for that long. It was one of my favorite parts of the trip. And then they flew us down on these two helicopters to what looks like an ocean of ice shards that we landed on, and all of us in both helicopters can hear them on the radio and he says, does my right ski look like it’s down?

And the other helicopter pilot says, give it a wiggle. And so my pilot gives it a wiggle and then goes for it, and we land on what just looks like ice shards. It doesn’t look like we should land there, but it was the most like being on another planet that anyone will ever experience for as far as you can see. And I think when you have these no limit experiences, it helps you in breaking your trial lawyer mold. It helps you think outside the box and think of what’s possible. We then flew on a private plane to the Alaska Driving Academy and we did drive tractor trailers because it is so important in our industry, especially for women where there’s an implicit gender bias against us knowing about big machinery and tractor trailers and driving them. For me to be able to stand up and now every one of those women can stand up in their respective states and say, I am Christie Crow Childers Georgia Trucking attorney, and I drive tractor trailers with other women lawyers across the nation and giving them that makes all the hard work worth it.

Chris Dreyer:

What an experience. I could just vividly see everything that you were saying, so amazing there. On the drive, I’m just curious, how important would it be for a truck accident attorney to get maybe their CDL or to get that official license? Because exactly what you said, do trucking attorneys do that? Is that a thing?

Christy Childers:

If any of your listeners want to email me, christie@childersmccain.com, Christie Crow Childers Childers McCain, you can Google me. I can give them information on how to go to a truck driving course. This truck driving course is for lawyers and it’s just a few days, and so it’s not as intense as getting your CDL, but a lot of us do go back to the expert course after that and then go on to try to get our CDLs. I don’t think it’s necessary to get your CDL to have the experience. I think a lot of people get it. I mean, it’s a point of pride in our industry, and so when one of us gets it, we’re all just extremely excited for each other, but I drive on closed courses and I get the same, to me benefit because I will not and have no business ever being an over the road truck driver.

It’s just not something that I think I would be good at. But in driving on these closed courses, you absolutely see the fact patterns and you are living the fact patterns that your truck driver, whether it’s your client in a multi truck pile up or the defendant truck driver that they are in when they’re making those left turns, the off tracking that the trailer does, how big it is, and the enormity of the responsibility really that you have when you are behind the wheel of something that big. Another way to think of it is in truck driving school, they tell when you’re going through, they say, take off your car driver hat when you get in your truck and put on your truck driver hat. That’s how different they want you to think of it when you get behind the wheel of a tractor trailer.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s incredible. That’s such a different way of thinking about it, just the responsibility alone. What’s your vision for the next big mother trucking lawyers event or CLE events?

Christy Childers:

Well, I have a lot of guys who reach out and they’re like, Christy, we’re feeling left out. You do all these great events for women, and that’s where I started for sure, doing a lot of these adventure CLEs for the ladies and we’ll keep doing those, but I think that it’s time that we do an adventure CLE that’s for guys too. That’s not just for the mother trucking lawyers. It really is something that I’m good at, putting all of this together from having led these BAR organizations in the past, and so I’m glad to do that. As far as what’s coming up next for the mother truckers, they always want me to go bigger, and so right now a lot of ideas have been thrown out there. [inaudible 00:24:08] has been thrown out, and they just think so big that right now having just gotten back from the Alaska trip, I’m just going to take a beat before I start planning the next adventure.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, it’s difficult to probably think of the next one after being stranded on an iceberg for who knows how long you’re going to be able to escape, but you got lucky in that one hour window or so. Where can our audience go to connect with you or just to learn more?

Christy Childers:

Yeah, so I’m one of those lawyers who doesn’t mind giving out my cell phone is (478) 737-6259. I do story consulting on all kinds of cases just because I love to do it. I love to help you tell your story and teach you my method, which I call the Muse Method, M-U-S-E mindset, universal story, epiphany. But to really get more of these resources that I was telling you about, the PowerPoint with the trucking resources and all of that, if you’ll just email me Christy, C-H-R-I-S-T-Y, at childers mccain.com, that’s C-H-I-L-D-E-R-S-M-C-C-A-I-N.com, and just I would leave you with the final thought of break the mold.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Christie for sharing her wisdom today. Let’s hit the takeaways, it’s time for the pinpoints. Niche up. Christie chose to zero in on trucking accident cases early on. She geeked out on all the regulations, got board certified as an expert, and became known as the go-to trucking attorney in Georgia. Specializing lets you get better results for clients, so find an area of law you’re passionate about and nerd out on it.

Christy Childers:

When David and I first went out, we landed a pretty large trucking case and got a 5 million recovery pretty soon after going out and just learned from the ground up who the best experts were, how to work those cases up, and how to get the most money from the trucking companies.

Chris Dreyer:

Build a squad, invest in community. Surround yourself with individuals who share your goals, learn, make connections, and get your name out there. Find your people. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, create the community you need.

Christy Childers:

So she and I create this amazing group of people. We get together and have Bunko nights, us ladies. We just get together and we have a good time.

Chris Dreyer:

Shake it up. Christie pushes attorneys to take unconventional approaches to CLEs certifications and storytelling. Think outside the box and break the mold. It can help you win big.

Christy Childers:

They live in a world of assessing risks. They take your personal injury numbers and they put them into their database and they decide based on that how much your case is worth. They live in that world of predictability, so why keep using these methods, these same methods that personal injury lawyers have used for so many years that they know what the outcome’s going to be. Instead, what I encourage people to do is to break the mold and to think about things from a story perspective.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about Christie, check out the show notes. While you’re there, please hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.