Get to know Scott Glovsky with guest host Kim Savo. Scott discusses cases that helped change the lives of thousands of people suffering from eating disorders and autism spectrum disorders. He then turns to the importance of storytelling and of integrating all the senses.
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Kim opens, “Scott has the biggest heart of just about any lawyer I’ve ever known. He fights in every case on behalf of ordinary people who have been harmed or injured by institutions that are bigger and more powerful than they are. In particular, he has a specialty in fighting against health companies that won’t provide medical coverage.”
The award-winning Law Offices of Scott Glovsky specializes in insurance bad faith, catastrophic personal injury & health-related litigation. Scott Glovsky started the firm to help ordinary people suffering because of the negligent and bad acts of organizations and corporations. The firm’s cases have impacted millions of lives by forcing insurance companies to change their behavior – including their processes of reviewing requests for medically necessary treatment and their medical practices.
Scott first discusses a case that taught him the power of caring and connecting. His client, a 26-year-old all-American girl who was close with her family and loved by everyone, had a mental illness – an eating disorder of anorexia and bulimia. She tried to free herself from her hurt, loneliness, pain, and feelings of powerlessness by controlling her food intake. At 68 pounds and needing a feeding tube to stay alive, she was hospitalized. Her insurance company kicked her out of the hospital and days later she committed suicide at home.
Scott got to know his client through the unconditional and powerful love and pain of her father. As they visited her grave and reenacted very painful scenes, he showed Scott tremendous kindness and trust by sharing this incredibly intimate and painful memory. “Part of what made this so meaningful and so special was that he was open with me, and honest with me, and trusted with me, and that developed such a bond between us that ultimately anyone around us could see that level of trust and connection, and we cried together.”
As painful as reliving this ordeal was, the father’s goal was to spread the word about what happened to stop this from happening to others. Not only did they win the case and tell the story on Anderson Cooper 360, The Early Show, and in the pages of People Magazine and elsewhere, but Scott was awarded the Consumer Attorneys of California’s (CAOC) “Street Fighter of the Year” Award for his work on this case.
Next Scott describes a group of cases he did on behalf of kids with autism spectrum disorders who were denied treatment of Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and speech therapy by their insurance companies. Another lawyer told Scott regarding one of the cases, “You’re crazy, you’re not going to win that case, and if you do you’re going to have to go to the court of appeal, and it’s going to take years, and the chances of you winning are slim.” Scott felt he had to get involved. “I couldn’t see the situation and not try to help.” Scott was successful – he was instrumental in helping to get the insurance company to stop systemically denying ABA and speech therapy to children with autism spectrum disorders. This decision impacted 45,000 kids with this insurance company and provided a nearly $9.3 million dollar settlement for class members and autism research.
“That case is probably the one I’m most proud of because we were able to really make a difference and hopefully changed the course of children’s lives, and their families’ lives, and at least be part of doing something meaningful.”
Scott finishes by speaking about storytelling and the need to integrate all the senses. He says, “It’s not just about what happened in the past, but how is the defendant acting in the trial, how are their lawyers treating your client, and how are they treating the witnesses? The jury is actually experiencing the story in real-time, which is the story of the trial. The relationships that we develop with our clients are seen and felt by the jury. We communicate on this on an emotional level with our nonverbal body language. The heart and soul of how we feel is what other people connect with.”
Scott said, “Building real relationships with clients and loving our clients is imperative to what we do. To connect with someone in pain and say, I’m going to fight for you, and to be able to help them is such a tremendous gift.”
Transcript of Episode 40, with Scott Glovsky and Guest Host Kim Savo
Scott Glovsky:
Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk, I’m Scott Glovsky, and I’m your host of this podcast where we have lawyers tell great stories from great cases that had a profound impact on them. Today we’re gonna change it up a little bit, and we’re gonna have Kim Savo who you probably remember from her amazing interview on this program. Today she’s gonna interview me, so let’s get started.
Kim Savo:
Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk. I’m your guest host, Kim Savo, and I have the pleasure today of interviewing the creator of this podcast, Scott Glovsky. Good morning, Scott.
Scott Glovsky:
Good morning.
Kim Savo:
Scott is a dear friend and also on the faculty of the Trial Lawyers College with me. Scott has the biggest heart of just about any lawyer I’ve ever known. He fights in every case on behalf of ordinary people who have been harmed or injured by institutions that are bigger and more powerful than they are. In particular, he has a specialty in fighting against health companies that won’t provide medical coverage, and I’m so happy to be here today to talk with him.
Scott Glovsky:
Thank you for those very kind words.
Kim Savo:
Scott, the very first thing I want to ask you this morning is why this podcast?
Scott Glovsky:
Well we know some amazing trial lawyers and I learn so much when I listen to other people tell stories, and I thought this would be a great way to really learn personally about storytelling and to figure out what other great lawyers are doing to fight for their clients.
Kim Savo:
When you think about storytelling and fighting for your clients, why do those things fit together?
Scott Glovsky:
Well we think in story and one of the things I’ve learned through this podcast is that when I talk to people and ask them questions, normal interview questions like “how do you do a good job?” It gets into dialogue, which ultimately is boring, but when people tell stories, when people talk from their heart and talk about things that were really meaningful to them on an emotional level it draws us in like magnets. And our desire to hear the story, our desire to listen is humongous. I mean I can’t tell you how many times when you’re in your car, and you get to your destination while you’re listening to a story, I’ll stop and instead of going into my house I’ll sit in the car because I’m listening to the story that’s really meaningful, and the same with a song. If I hear a song that really moves me I’ll sit there and wait. But when I’m listening to the normal dialogue of a normal conversation, it just doesn’t have that magnetism.
Kim Savo:
Is there a story from your life or your practice that touches your heart right now that you’d like to share with us?
Scott Glovsky:
Well there is, yeah, this is a story of Jane and this goes back about 10 years, but it really had a profound impact on me because it taught me the power of caring and the power of connecting. Now Jane was a young woman who by the time I got to know her let’s say had already passed away. Her father, Bill, had come to me with the story of his daughter who was a lovely young woman and she had blond hair, blue eyes, loved by everyone … was sort of the all-American girl who was close with her family, had a lot of friends, but she developed demons and her demons were anorexia and bulimia. And she like many other young people, primarily women, but not only women, would feel powerless and unfortunately because of her mental illness, and by mental illness I mean her eating disorder, the way that she could feel to try to get out of the pain was by trying to control her food intake. And then the shame that went along with food intake with the binging and trying to just take control when she felt that she didn’t have any control.
And of course that’s something that I think we all know about and we all can connect with that feeling of powerlessness, and of hurt, and of pain. And so her father came to me and told me the story of how she was hospitalized for an eating disorder and the insurance company essentially kicked her out of the hospital, and ultimately she committed suicide. And when he came to me I was moved by his love for his daughter and by his pain. So to learn the story I really got to know him and we went out to her grave site, which he did every Sunday, and he had a little packet of tools that he kept in his trunk, which included a brush and a little scarf. And we went to the grave site, he opened his trunk, he pulled out his little duffel bag with these tools in it and we walked over on a beautiful sunny day across the green grass to her grave site. And he unzipped his bag, picked out the brush, brushed away all the dirt from her tombstone, and then took out some flowers that he had brought, put them in the ground right there, and proceeded to talk to his daughter, and tell him how much he missed her.
And I’ll never forget the tears in his eyes, and it was so incredibly powerful to see this love and this pain from a man who was just trying to make sense of it all. He felt aggrieved, but as any parent who lost a child there’s a sense of guilt, of course, what could I have done, how could I have changed the outcome, and watching him talk to his daughter was just so profoundly moving. And then we also went to the spot where he had found his daughter, he had been calling his daughter for a couple of days after she was out of the hospital and ultimately he went to her apartment because she wasn’t answering her phone. He rang the buzzer, she wasn’t answering, and he literally climbed up the back of the building through a banister to the second floor where her apartment was and onto the balcony, and opened the screen door, and walked in, and found his daughter there on the ground. And we reenacted that scene, and he showed me the tremendous kindness and trust to share such a painful, human memory with me-
Kim Savo:
Intimate memory.
Scott Glovsky:
Incredibly intimate, and part of what made this so meaningful and so special was that he was open with me, and honest with me, and trusted with me, and that developed such a bond between us that ultimately anyone around us could see that level of trust and connection, and we cried together, and we hugged, and it was just so meaningful to me.
Kim Savo:
Was there something, Scott, about that story that that connected personally with you that made you better able to tell that story?
Scott Glovsky:
Yes, Brian’s love for his daughter was so unconditional and powerful, and when I grew up my folks were divorced and my dad left the house when I was about two, and I was never particularly close with my dad. And I’ve always longed in my life to really have a father figure and have a father who would care about me, and be interested in me, and support me, and really connect with me. And seeing this incredible love that Brian had tapped right into a need, let’s say, or something that I really had a longing for and just drew me closer to him. And the other thing is that when I was growing up I often felt powerless, I often felt lonely. I have memories of myself as a kid in the backyard throwing a tennis ball up against the side of the house and really just being alone and not being connected to other people, and not feeling safe. And so this concept of Jane with her desperation, and loneliness, and pain, was something I related to and fortunately I have not sunk as low as she did.
But seeing her father’s love for her, and her family’s love for her, and her friends’ love for her in the midst of a time when she couldn’t feel that and not because it wasn’t there but because of her mental illness, and to have an insurance company whose sole responsibility is to simply provide treatment, nothing else. I mean her family brought this case not to get money, but to stop this from happening to anybody else. And part of their mission was to spread the word and despite the fact that it was incredibly painful for them as you can imagine for anyone who’s gone through a tragedy to expose yourself and relive these experiences. And as part of their mission they wanted to go to the media, so of course, as they went to the media, and got involved, and told her story that not only opened them up to the insurance company’s defenses, which of course, are not really based on the truth but they were based on what would best defend them in the lawsuit based on their lawyer strategy, and then also in depositions when they’re opening up their heart.
And as we all know, in deposition they get attacked, that’s what happens, and to take their pain and to open themselves up and expose themselves to make the world a better place. And then to be sitting in a room with lawyers who are essentially blaming them for their daughter’s death, it’s ugly, and it’s painful, and it’s distasteful, but it’s part of the fight and there’s ultimately no way around that. And to see their courage, and when I say “their” I’m talking about their family’s courage in the face of these attacks to really want to help other people was just inspiring, and incredible, and empowering. And that’s one of the things as lawyers, we have such a tremendous privilege for people like us who get to represent people, to be able to take people when they’re at some of the worst points in their lives if not the worst points in their lives, and let them know that you care, and show them that you care, and take on their cause to fight for them. And if things go well, help them, and that type of reward to be able to step in to someone in pain and say, “I’m gonna fight for you,” and to be able to help them is such a tremendous gift.
Kim Savo:
What did you learn about yourself from telling Jane’s story?
Scott Glovsky:
Well I learned that I have some power, and it was very empowering to be able to almost with abandon dive into a story and dive into connecting with other people, and in this case specifically her father, and her sister, and her mother and get to know them and get to know them on a deep level and share with them my story and my experiences in the context of becoming close. And of course, it’s not about me but when you have a relationship with someone it’s a real relationship. And to be able to know that, look, if I lost that case these people who I care so much about are going to be hurt. They had entrusted me to go through this process, which they were reluctant to do in the beginning, but they entrusted me to do this and then getting to know them in a real way and knowing that I’m exposing them to this pain through the lawsuit and these attacks by the defense lawyers. And then if we lose that it’s horrific. I mean I know you, Kim, and when we work on a case and put our heart into a case and lose that case it’s almost like a little depression that we go through, it’s not just the guilt of losing for our client and the pain of feeling rejected by the jury.
When we are taking something we worked so hard on and showing the jury the truth, and when they reject not just our clients but us it’s painful, but conversely that’s what’s the beautiful thing. It’s like they say it’s better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all. It’s like when we share our clients’ story, the real story from their hearts, and their souls, and the truth about it, not with the big legal words, but just the true humanity of what’s happened, and the jury comes back and finds in our clients’ favor, it’s such an affirmation, and it’s so empowering both in the criminal world and in the civil world when we take on a case and it feels like in this criminal world you’re fighting the government and the imbalance of power is gigantic.
And in the civil world when we’re battling corporations we risk a lot, we take loans against our homes to be able to finance these cases just to get the basic documents that we’re supposed to get as a matter of course. We have to file motions and do a tremendous amount of work just for the basics, and the whole time having the defense lawyers and sometimes judges telling us that we shouldn’t be here, that there’s no basis to our case, that we’re greedy lawyers, that our clients have some ulterior motive. And it’s the sense of the fight and the struggle, which is hard quite frankly.
Kim Savo:
I mean I think you and I agree that building real relationships with clients and loving clients is imperative to what we do, but what would you say to the people, the skeptics, attorneys who think that’s not smart, that it’s not a good idea that maintaining very strict boundaries between yourself as a professional and your clients is necessary. Where do you draw the line and why do you, Scott Glovsky, think that it’s important to build those kinds of intimate relationships with clients in your cases?
Scott Glovsky:
Well I mean I would say not just in my cases but in life meaningful close relationships are what it’s all about, now I’m firmly of the belief that our happiness as people is a function of our connections with others. And those of us that are blessed with wonderful loving people around us or very fortunate, and for the lawyers that do what we’re taught in law school to not become emotionally involved with your clients, well that’s fine and dandy if you don’t want to get good results and you want to have sort of an anemic and deceptive law practice that I mean, shoot, if that’s the case you might as well go represent some corporation. If you want to have a job where you go to work, and make a lot of money, and are just doing a job without connecting with other people, without having relationships, without fighting for people. Well I mean that’s not for me, and that’s not how to get good results. The relationships we develop with our clients are seen by the jury and felt by the jury. And we communicate on this emotional level with our nonverbal body language, and who we are. The heart and soul of how we feel is what other people connect with.
Kim Savo:
You ever had a juror or jurors remark to you about relationships with your clients, comment on noticing your relationships with your clients?
Scott Glovsky:
I have and I’ve had jurors tell me that, “Look, we know you care about your client, we could see every day.” And they’ve talked about certain things that a particular point in the trial when you reached over when your client was crying and just put your arm around her that that was meaningful and that they knew you cared. And they see it all, that’s the thing is that we can’t bullshit the jury, plain and simple, and it’s almost endemic that we’re taught in law school or at least my perception was that you have to talk like Bill Clinton. You have to have the best oratory in the world. You can’t say “uh,” or have gaps, or stop to think, or be embarrassed, or be human when it’s the exact opposite. What really matters is how you make someone feel. I mean there was that saying that someone will never remember what you said to them, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel, and I think that’s a lot of the heart of what we do.
Kim Savo:
If you could talk about one story, any story in your practice or your personal life that for you it sort of epitomizes why you do, what would that be?
Scott Glovsky:
Well I think I would have to talk about a group of cases I did on behalf of kids with autism spectrum disorders, and some insurance companies here in California were not covering the main treatments that were most beneficial to kids with what we call ASD is autism spectrum disorders, and that’s applied behavioral analysis and speech therapy. And so when I learned about this because I was very lucky to have a wonderful man come into my office whose son had been denied these therapies for his autism. I really looked at and tried to understand what was going on because I had not had any experience before that with autism. And I went into the home of this nice man and saw that his son at the time was two and a half years old, and was in this small apartment in Pasadena. And I went over to meet the family and his son was basically in his own universe. I was sitting on a brown couch talking with his father, and his son was in the middle of the room and he moved the coffee table out of the way and spinning around and just spinning around, and he was in his own world.
Scott Glovsky:
And I saw his father had these eyes that had these huge bags under themmm and he hadn’t slept for months because his son, because of his autism, wasn’t able to sleep more than an hour or two at a time. And to see this family dealing with their son and just trying to help their son, their whole lives were turned upside down. They didn’t sleep because you can imagine with a two-year-old and I mean I know you-
Kim Savo:
Yes, I can.
Scott Glovsky:
You go to a park and you want to play, but your kid is hitting the other kids. Your kid cannot talk, so he cannot verbalize his wants or his needs, and we love our kids. And seeing this utter chaos in a home where can you imagine not sleeping, just not sleeping on a regular basis, trying to do your job, trying to care about your son and raise your son who is completely out of control I mean being nonverbal, not being able to talk with other kids, attacking other kids, running away. I mean life was so chaotic and so out of control.
Kim Savo:
And you felt that because you went there?
Scott Glovsky:
Yeah, absolutely, I mean I’ll never forget sitting in that apartment and seeing the terror, I mean you could feel all the way around, I mean it was palpable in the room. And so taking on that case for this family that ultimately turned into several cases for several families, and to try to change the system to get these treatments covered was something that another lawyer told me, “You’re crazy, you’re not going to win that case, and if you do you’re gonna have to go to the court of appeal, and it’s going to be seven or eight years if you win, but the chances of you winning are slim to none.” But I couldn’t not get involved, I could not see the situation and not try to help, and ultimately in that case we’re able to win the case basically, and we were able to get the treatments covered and money sent back to families that had paid for it, but this little boy that had been so out of control early on after I got involved was able to get the therapies. And the reason he was is because, of course, we filed the lawsuit and with the defendants’ every act being analyzed because now they’re facing a lawsuit, and we get to talk about everything they’re doing.
They ultimately allowed him to get the therapies, and by the time we got the case resolved about seven years later, ultimately, he got the therapies, and he was in a normal school, it was mainstreamed, and it was like night and day. I went back to the apartment several times seeing him after he got the help that he needed, and it wasn’t just him whose life was changed, but his father’s life, his mother’s life, his siblings’ life, and we’re all like that. I know Gerry Spence talks about dropping a stone in a still lake, and the ripples that go out across the lake and that’s sort of what we do when we represent someone. We are not just representing them. I mean we’re affecting their lives, and their families lives, and so that case is probably the one I’m most proud of because we were able to really make a difference and hopefully changed the course of thousands of kids’ lives, and their families’ lives and at least be part of doing something meaningful. And we take a lot of grief as trial lawyers in the public for being selfish, greedy, whatever, but we’re the last hope for a lot of folks.
We’re the people, I mean, and I’m just a civil lawyer, but you’re keeping innocent people out of jail.
Kim Savo:
Mostly, I’m keeping guilty people from spending inordinate amounts of time in prison for crimes that don’t merit that punishment, but you mentioned Gerry and so I wanted to ask you if you feel a difference in your approach to your practice and the use of storytelling in your practice since your involvement with the Trial Lawyers College?
Scott Glovsky:
Absolutely, I mean that’s the rudimentary basics, the stepping stone, and we’re very privileged to have met Gerry and gone through Trial Lawyers College because learning how to connect with other people, and learning how to have relationships, and learning how to look at our own pasts, and our own pains and traumas, and deal with those, and not run from them and let those impact our daily lives, but to deal with them and know what they are so that when we’re in the courtroom and when I’m in the courtroom I’m not scared of that judge because I’m projecting my dad onto that judge. I can be myself, my whole self, and understand that judge is a man or woman doing their job, who are trying to do the best job that they can do given the circumstances that they’re in and to be able to respect that and connect. And really I’ve gotten so much more personally out of the ranch as we call it than professionally and it’s funny because even the case I started off talking about was the case where before I went to the ranch, we had tried to mediate this case and we were offered a lot of money.
But it wasn’t enough for this family and for what was right and for justice because again they weren’t there for the money. And we ultimately lost that case at summary judgment, the judge had decided we didn’t even have enough evidence to get to a jury. And after I came back from the ranch I felt incredibly empowered, I felt confident that we could change the world, we could change the industry with that case. And as part of that when it came to going forward, the numbers that we were talking about at that first mediation, the number went up exponentially, and that really, and it’s not about the money, but the reason that illustrates my self-confidence that I learned at the ranch in the growth that I developed, and the belief that I could change, I could make change and help people. And I’m regretting bringing up money, but the concept that the power that I felt and the amount of good that I felt that I could do went up dramatically as a result of the ranch, not to mention the fact that I’ve made the best friends I have in the world like you, who when we’re working on cases we get together, and we connect, and we support each other, and we love each other, and we help each other, and that’s what it’s all about.
Kim Savo:
Because you brought it up I thought it would be worth talking just a little bit about doing group work on cases, workshopping cases that we do locally. You and I for a period of time maintained a small working group, which has been sadly defunct for quite some time, but our faculty member, Adrian Baca, is doing a larger very consistent working group every third Saturday here in downtown Los Angeles. And I wondered if you could just talk about the process of doing that group workshopping of cases?
Scott Glovsky:
Look, as people we’re a group animal and we get in front of juries who are a group of people. And we’re always better off knowing how people feel, after all, we get in front of a jury and ask them to side with our client to help our client. And in every case there’s good parts of the case, bad parts of the case, good facts, bad facts, and the bottom line is that you can’t know how people are going to react to all the different parts of a case without asking people. And when we work in a working group we’re reenacting parts of the case, we’re finding our personal connection to the case. We’re getting emotionally connected to the story and we’re finding the story. And I mentioned earlier we think in story and to find the story we need to put things in action. We need to understand what people care about, and it’s almost like through putting scenes in action, I say scenes, different parts of the case real or imagined that are related to the case, we’re finding out what resonates with other people. And for example, when we introduce a character that’s in our trial or in our case, and we find out what other people want to know, that’s usually helpful because at the end of the day when we put on a story we want to know what resonates and what doesn’t resonate. And the only way to find out what other people connect to is through putting on the reenactments.
Kim Savo:
I think one of my favorite parts is bringing criminal and civil practitioners together to really add perspective. One of the things certainly for me is civil attorneys are much more likely to be my jurors than my public defender colleagues. And I think I remember still a working group that we did on a case of yours probably five or six years ago. And I can remember that we were trying to prepare for cross-examination of a doctor who was the rubber stamp denier of medical coverage. And we were exploring her motivations and really trying to understand who that person in that job might be in order to enable you to do a better cross exam. And the reason I mentioned that is that I remember that from five or six years ago from participating in discovering her story, the story of the witness. And if I remember it five or six years later that says to me that the preparation for that cross exam had to have been extremely potent because it still lives in me, I still remember that story.
Scott Glovsky:
Absolutely, I mean we’re putting something in action. We connect emotionally and when we connect emotionally with something it’s going to resonate with us and we’re going to remember it. And that’s why through the work we do when we get up to put on a case we don’t need notes, we have our preparation, and we have our stuff written down. But I know when you get up to do a cross-examination, when I get up to do a cross-examination, it’s all in our gut and we’re operating from our gut because it’s real, and it’s open, and it’s honest. And in fact with that witness you’re talking about who had gotten upset in her deposition and stormed out because of her shame is what you helped me discover so many years ago. When she testified on the stand ultimately she was uncomfortable because of that shame, and she made a comment to the jury right when the judge called for lunch break. She looked over at her lawyers and said, “You guys owe me lunch.” And the jury saw that and that became part of my closing argument, and that’s a very vivid memory.
Kim Savo:
I wonder if there was one thing that you could share with other trial lawyers who are listening to this podcast that you haven’t said yet, some parting gift that you’d like to give, what would that be?
Scott Glovsky:
Well I’ll tell you one of the lessons that I’ve learned in doing this podcast and learning about storytelling is that we need to integrate all the senses. It’s got to be about the story, we’re taught in law school that it’s all about the facts. It’s not about the facts, it’s about this story. So studying storytelling, learning about how to write screenplays, learning about the hero-centric journey, learning how to find the story and let the story be the trial, and also how when we’re in trial that’s part of the story, it’s not just about what happened in the past, but how is the defendant in a civil case, and how are their lawyers treating your client, how are they treating the witnesses in the trial, so the jury is actually experiencing the story in real time, which is the story of the trial. And also it’s so important to bring in the senses, bringing people to what happened.
Kim Savo:
Can you give an example of how you’ve done that?
Scott Glovsky:
Sure, absolutely, yeah. Well I recently handled a products liability case against an automobile manufacturer on behalf of this wonderful couple, the nicest folks in the world, and they were driving … we’ll call her Jane just because the case resolved in a confidential manner. And Jane and her husband, Bob, they’re retired, they worked all their lives as hard-working folks. I mean they were out of money and she decided that she was going to open a café, so she literally on her own went and rented sort of a storefront, pulled off the flooring, re-floored it herself, painted it herself, got furniture that she bought at garage sales like a little table for like two bucks, chairs for five dollars each, and started this business with her own two hands, and built this business where they would become sort of a hub of their community. There’s a little café and they had this one man who had come in who was mentally disabled, and they would reserve the table for him every day so he could have the table there. There were people that came in hungry and they’d always give them food.
There was a kid that came in one day who came from sort of a broken home and they saw that he didn’t have enough to eat, so they gave him a job and he was like 12 years old and just to give him stuff to do and to feed him, and these people were just the salt of the earth. And they’re driving, they got in their SUV, and we’re driving to a town nearby to pick up some new sheets because her sister was coming into town to visit them, and they’re driving in their SUV on a beautiful sunny day where you could feel the sun on your skin, and they’re driving on this two-lane road in the country in the mountains. So off to the left side of the road is a drop of about 200 yards into a stream. To the right side of the road is mountains you’re literally on a mountain so if you were to veer off the road two feet, you’d crash into a mountain. And so as they’re driving there was a car and that was in front of them that was going very slow and the road sort of turned on their side into a two-lane road with a passing lane.
Scott Glovsky:
So she said, “Honey, I’m gonna try to pass this car.” And she stuck her foot down on the accelerator and the car picked up speed and then all of a sudden she heard like a jet engine sound. She didn’t know what it was, and as they got up the hill she took her foot off the accelerator, but the car didn’t slow down. And then after they got up to the top of the hill, the hill sort of straightened out and then the road started to go downward. And she put her foot on the brakes and said to her husband, “Look, the cars not stopping.” So as they’re going down this road, this two-lane dangerous highway, she’s slamming on a brake, she stuck both feet actually on the brakes to almost make her body straight, she was slamming on the brakes and holding onto the steering wheel with both hands as hard as she could. She said, “Honey, I don’t know what to do. The car’s it’s not stopping.” And she put on her flashers, her emergency lights, her husband unbuckled his seatbelt with his right hand from the passenger side, leaned down into and put his head under where the steering wheel is and tried to physically pick the accelerator up off the ground and it wasn’t working.
Scott Glovsky:
So he got up and said, “It’s not working.” And as you can imagine this is now about a minute and a half and their car-
Kim Savo:
They must have been terrified.
Scott Glovsky:
Absolutely terrified, and there’s cars in both directions coming at them. They can see the cars going by and they’re driving and there’s cars behind them. A couple of people saw what was happening, and so they’re driving and she says, as a miracle, there was a road, a dirt road that went off to the right of the road. And she said, “Honey, hold on I’m gonna try to stop this.” She yanked the wheel over the right, went up this dirt road, and fortunately there was a gravel road, and the tires spun and she could hear the tire spinning, and then crashed right into a tree. And fortunately they weren’t killed, and the import of the story I’m not sure if I did a good job explaining it, but using the senses to bring yourself into the story with the sunny day feeling the sun on their skin and hearing the jet engine type sound of their engine, and that sort of details in real time, in the present tense, how it’s being experienced. It’s an example of storytelling that is interesting that people want to hear as opposed to, “They were in the car. The steering wheel got stuck, they couldn’t slow it down, so they drove on and went up a road and crashed.”
Kim Savo:
You’re a parent of a couple of kids and I am a parent, and one of the things I always find remarkable are the endless stories that my kid can generate spontaneously about anything and everything and with no inhibition, with no fear, with no internal critic. And I wonder if you ever take anything from observing your kids into the storytelling that you do?
Scott Glovsky:
Absolutely, in fact what I do is I will always give my opening statements to my kids who now are 9 and 11, but I’ve been doing this since they were 7 and 9 to find out what they want to know, what they care about, whether they can understand it. But absolutely, I mean the creativity of children is what I strive for. I mean the ability to explore, and find beauty, and find story in everyday things is what’s magical. And so absolutely, I mean what I try to do we talk about the concept of doubling, of trying to feel what it’s like to be in someone else’s skin, and I do that with my kids, and to be able to enjoy life with the imagination, and the creativity, and the love for things like that the sun set, or this cool plane that’s flying by in the sky, or the chipmunk, or the squirrel that’s on the tree, it’s beautiful.
Kim Savo:
I want to thank you because you gave me an opportunity to spend some time with you talking with you about things that we both care about and because you trusted me to be the person that got to interview you. I think that the path that we’ve been on together is all about deconstructing ourselves as lawyers and rebuilding ourselves as people.
Scott Glovsky:
That’s beautifully said, I mean it’s been a privilege of mine to have you, and an honor, as a mentor, and as a friend, and as just a beautiful person in my life. And I thank you very much for doing this and for being you.
Kim Savo:
Let’s do it again sometime.
Scott Glovsky:
I would love to. Thank you for joining us today for Trial Lawyer Talk, if you like the show I’d really appreciate it if you could give us a good review on iTunes and I’d love to get your feedback. You can reach me at www.scottglovsky.com, that’s SCOTTGLOVSKY.com, and I’d love to hear your feedback. You can also check out the book that I published called Fighting Health Insurance Denials, A Primer For Lawyers, that’s on Amazon. I put the book together based on 20 years of suing health insurance companies for denying medical care to people, and it provides a general outline of how to fight health insurance denials. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you in the next episode.
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