In this episode of Trial Lawyer Talk, Scott speaks with Wyoming attorney Tyson Logan. Mr. Logan tells Scott about how a near-death experience helped him become a better lawyer.

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Transcript of Episode 36, with Tyson Logan

Scott Glovsky:

Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk. I’m Scott Glovsky, and I’m your host for this podcast where we speak with some of the best trial lawyers in the United States. We simply have great lawyers, tell great stories, from cases that had a profound impact on them. So let’s get started. I’m very happy, and pleased, and humbled, and honored to be sitting with my good friend Tyson Logan. Tyson is a phenomenal trial lawyer. A phenomenal human being. A phenomenal listener, and an all around wonderful person. Tyson is a partner in the Spence Law Firm, and Tyson practices all around the United States. He handles lots of different types of cases, but has a particular specialty as well in handling carbon monoxide poisoning cases. Tyson thanks so much for being with us.

Tyson Logan:

I’m humbled to be here with you Scott.

Scott Glovsky:

Tyson can you tell us a story of a case that had a profound impact on you?

Tyson Logan:

Yeah, I think the case that has taught me more about life, and myself, and who I want to be than any other was a case that I was gonna prove to the world what a stud I was, and I had read lots of books, and spent quite a bit of time with big shots like Gerry Spence. I was kinda just getting to the point where I was ready to show just how good I was, and did a lot of work on my own. Kinda told my senior partners that I could do it. I didn’t need their help. Developed a lot of fancy exhibits, and got some great fancy experts, and worked a lot on theatrical stuff so that I could really be impressive. My client had been hurt. He had soft-tissue damage from a heavy equipment accident, and he was really hurt, and I cared about him, but the truth is I think, at the time, that I was far more caught up with trying to prove to the world how well I could do in a courtroom.

I’ll never forget I stayed up most of the night before my closing argument, and I was reading books over, and over, and over again. I was reading Rules of the Road, and Reptile, and some of Jerry’s books. I can remember a whole stack on my hotel room desk, looking out over the street, thinking about the right analogies to use, and the right things to say. And I gave what I was quite sure was this amazing closing argument, and I remember going out after the closing and high-fiving one of the federal marshals who had befriended me, or I had befriended him. He told me, “Man, that was so great. I’ve never seen anything so great. I mean, this is gonna be amazing.” God, I was pretty high on myself, and we lost. I lost, and I cried the whole way home. God, it took me years to ever figure out that it wasn’t about me.

It set me on a path to start looking at who I am, and why I do what I do, and what’s really important. I started studying a lot, and trying to learn from people, and I really did a lot of soul searching about what the point is, you know?

Scott Glovsky:

How did you do that?

Tyson Logan:

Well, at first I just started reading even more. Not just the books on closing arguments, but I just started reading everything I could find because I wanted to be better. I wanted answers. Why wasn’t I good enough in my trial? What could I possibly have done? And then I got into a place where I really was struggling to be happy. I was stressed, and I started studying mindfulness, and then studying ego, and trying to figure out why I was struggling to find happiness, and balance as a trial lawyer, and as a human, you know? And so I kinda did it as I’m trying to rescue myself from the chaos of being a trial lawyer, and also just figuring I needed to be better, and looking for answers. So I started getting really into mindfulness, meditation, and trying to understand who to be happy and successful as a lawyer.

So, I mean, obviously it’s not like I have all the answers, but that’s been 10-12 years now that I’ve been working on that, and carrying with me some of those moments from that trial. I mean, standing up there so proud in front of that jury, puffing my chest up, and doing different things. Trying to make myself look good, and I mean there was a better way to learn because I could have done better for my client. I don’t know if it would have made a difference or not, but I’ll carry that with me forever. No doubt.

Scott Glovsky:

Where does that come from in Tyson Logan? That need to prove that you’re good enough?

Tyson Logan:

You know, I was fiercely competitive as a child. I was first born and always wanted to be better, and bigger, and whatever. In sports, and in school, and by luck I ended up in Wyoming, and so I kind of stumbled into an internship at the Spence firm as a law student. I was always competitive, but growing up as a baby lawyer around Gerry and a whole crew of hyper-talented, hyper-successful trial lawyers, and being fortunate enough to just be around people around the country that just were heroes to me for what they do. And wanting to be like that, and pushing myself, and wondering if I could be like that, and whether I belonged in that law firm or around those people. So I think for a long time it was just wanting to belong. Wanting to be good enough. Maybe it still is. I don’t know.

I think over the years I’ve learned that my motivation’s definitely changed. I mean, it’s not about me. I have a passion. I want to go help people. It fills me up to go be able to contribute a little bit and fight for people that need help. So it keeps me motivated, and that keeps me wanting to learn and get better too because I’ve been really lucky to be around lawyers who I feel like I could never be as good as, but I could sure try, you know?

Scott Glovsky:

So now that you’ve got tremendous verdicts, I know that you’ve got the largest verdict in the history of the Spence law firm, and that’s saying something. So you must have figured it all out. Can you share with us the easy answers?

Tyson Logan:

Well, no. In my limited experience, big verdicts, small verdicts, I mean we lay it out there on the line for our clients. Sometimes cases are big, and sometimes they’re small, but really we’re just there to do our part, you know? Give ourselves, and give everything we got, and we don’t control most of it, and so no. I feel like some of my successes, I guess, that I’ve had with huge teams of people, partners, you know? Others from other firms, and all over the world, sometimes I feel like they’re my biggest failures. I look back, and I think, “What did I sacrifice? What did I give? And did I really do a good job, or was it just luck, or somebody else?”

I mean, the success to me is when I know that I have helped somebody get to a better place. When I look back, or look forward, and think about what the point is I think that that’s what I do know. I know that that’s what makes it all worth it — can we help somebody? Because at the end of the day money, or whatever, getting a big ego off of a verdict, or something like that it just doesn’t really matter. I would far prefer to be able to look back and know that I made a difference in even a couple people’s lives, and how you do that? All that I’ve learned, and the more I study, and work at it the more I realize for me it’s just work hard, and care, and give what you can give. And some people have different talents. The more that I’ve done this the more that it makes me just want to work harder, and give a little more of myself because that’s, at the end of the day, that’s what matters to me.

Scott Glovsky:

Tyson, I know you, and I know that you’re constantly giving to those around you. Your friends, your family, your clients. How do you deal with the stress?

Tyson Logan:

Sometimes not very well. You know, sometimes it starts to eat me alive, and usually when it starts to eat me alive I get much better at working at the things that help me to sort of get back to the surface. As part of that whole study and journey dealing with mindfulness, and I’ve become a pretty big believer in meditation, and I try not to be a preacher about stuff, but I meditate a lot, especially when I’m in the middle of trial, or in a big push of work, or life stress. I’m a big believer of meditation because it starts me from a center place, so I meditate early, early in the morning. That definitely does amazing things for me. It allows me to find a place that I can return to center, and if I do it in the morning I find that I can come back to that place of being centered and grounded even in the chaos of the middle of a courtroom in front of a jury or a judge when things get panicky or crazy.

So meditation is probably my biggest healer for me, and another is exercise. I need the oxygen and sunshine sometimes, or the rain, but getting outside, and getting my body moving, and sort-of letting go. You know, for me in a way it’s kinda like moving meditation, but I am sort-of an outside exercise junky, and I feel like that’s a pretty good kinda yin and yang to what we do. Carrying heavy circumstance, heavy, high stakes, pressure filled cases, or people’s problems, or whatever is to allow just a little bit of freedom. Also, just to sort-of stop thinking for a while, you know?

So those are the two things that I really work at is meditation, exercise, and then just remembering what the whole point is, and trying not to lose track of who I’m doing it for. And staying in touch with the people that I want to help, and that really … I think when I’m taking myself too seriously, or getting too wound up and I get back in touch with a client who’s struggling, or who needs something. I feel like I can pour myself into that, and that really does a lot for me, you know?

Scott Glovsky:

I know that you almost died in an avalanche.

Tyson Logan:

I did.

Scott Glovsky:

And I’d like for you to share with us how that impacted your life and your career. And you can tell the story briefly if you want.

Tyson Logan:

Sure. Yeah, so I live in Jackson Hole in Jackson, Wyoming, and love to ski. I love to ski in the back country, and when I was in law school, actually, I was in a pretty serious avalanche on a big, big stormy day in the back country, out of bounds at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. I was with my wife, and all of my best friends who are skiers and serious skiers, and it was crazy. It was one of the best ski days of my life. Deep, deep powder, stormy, cold, and just kind of euphoric morning. I’ve always been a little bit of a adrenaline junky I guess. But there’s a euphoria that goes with that kind of environment, and I don’t know if I was just unlucky, or made a bad choice.

I mean, it was definitely both and some other issues, but I skied in a spot where I shouldn’t have skied. In an unstable, dangerous avalanche conditions, and I was swept down a slope in a wall of snow down the entire hill, and lost my skies, and was swimming … you know tossed and turned, and thrown over a cliff, and through a forest of trees, and shot down the mountain completely out of control. By complete luck I was able to catch one of the trees at the bottom of this stand of trees before the creek drainage at the very bottom of the canyon, probably 1000 feet below where I’d been swept off my feet by this avalanche. It beat me up pretty good. I was in pretty bad shape. Bloodied, and missing a ski, and some poles, and a glove, and hat, and goggles, and things like that. But standing up at the bottom of that experience, and everybody was gone. I was by myself.

It turned out later they weren’t more than a few hundred yards away at the bottom of the slope because they had already skied, but my friends and my wife … it was sort-of like an out-of-body experience where I was so full of fear, and so full of panic, and so unable to control anything with my life and just like rolling the dice. I mean I guess it scarred me, but it really heightened my awareness to just sort of the way I live my life, and it’s been on my mind a lot lately because I have connected the dots over the last few years that some of the anxiety, and the overwhelming feeling, the fear, the losing control of life.

That’s sometimes the way I feel as a lawyer with just the chaos, and the burden, and the weight that we carry. That I carry I guess. It kinda feels like that, and so I’ve been trying to learn from that experience because it’s something that I’ve carried with me, and then I’ve learned to recognize that I have those same feelings from stress that I did in that avalanche. So that’s been a pretty powerful thing for me. You know, trying to learn how to deal with those feelings and deal with those fears in both of those ways.

Scott Glovsky:

You talk a lot about control. You know, as lawyers we strive to control everything. Do we?

Tyson Logan:

We try to think we do right? We think we control all kinds of stuff, you know? If I stand up here and really impress these jurors. If I tell this witness in a positive instead of a negative way, he’ll answer it this way. I think we control a lot, and it’s what we’re used to. It’s really what our job is a lot of times. Help people, deal with witnesses, go take a deposition, do whatever, and we sorta become almost high on the idea that we can control everything. I think sometimes it’s completely delusional, in my opinion. I’ve been around a lot of big egos, and I’ve had probably an unhealthy ego for a long time myself, but boy I sure believe that we can do a lot. But I think it’s really important to work, for me, at building my awareness of in reality what I can control, and what I can’t. And just knowing that and being okay with it.

It’s okay that I can do my part, and maybe my part can be really awesome, but there’s things going on in a trial. There’s things going on with the jury, and with witnesses, and with our client that I can do my best, but I can’t control what’s gonna happen. I mean, I don’t know of anyone who’s ever walked into court, and tried a case, and had everything go the way they planned it. You know? I sure haven’t, and the reality is that’s life. I mean, we don’t control that much. I mean, and the other thing that’s been eating at me lately is that I’ve lost close friends in avalanches. I’ve lost close friends to illness. Our clients sort of just tend to ignore it, but people walk across the street and get hit by a truck every day.

So to sort of think that we can control everything in our life I think is pretty naïve. I mean, we depend on so many forces and so many people around us every day, all the time, and I think that for me to be able to recognize that, to look around and see how it takes a whole universe with me to be able to accomplish anything, and at the same time to be able to fail. And that’s okay, you know? So I work at that a lot for myself. Remembering and learning over, and over, and over again what I can control. What I can’t. What can I improve, and what do I just need to learn that maybe I can’t do anything about? You know?

Scott Glovsky:

There’s a lot of young lawyers out there who are looking for advice on how to get better and trying to figure out what skills to develop to be a great trial lawyer. What skills or advice would you have for them about what they should work on?

Tyson Logan:

You know, I don’t have it all figured out. I’m just starting to try to figure it out, but I certainly have been looking, and listening, and trying to learn for a long time. Boy, learning to listen?

Scott Glovsky:

What?

Tyson Logan:

Learning to … I mean to think that to get to a point where you would have the ability and courage to represent a client period, you’ve got to be confident enough and competent enough to have survived through law school, and believe in yourself to some extent. So I think that it’s really easy to get caught up in believing you can kinda Superman your way through anything, and for me if … especially when you get caught up thinking you can control things and you’re in charge. I constantly am having to remind myself, and work on, and learn from friends around me like you, and so many people I’ve been able to work with in my firm, my partners, people that I work with. People out at the Trial Lawyer’s college. I can learn from so much from the people around me, and if I just open my eyes, and actually look at people, and actually hear what they have to say, and am not caught up in my own stuff.

So I mean part of that is maybe taking myself less seriously sometimes, but I think, yeah. I mean, work on listening. Just shut up, and be quiet, and hear what people have to say, and actually hear it. Hear it in my real life. In my personal life, and hear it when I go talk to a witness, or my client, or the judge, or the opposing expert, you know? It’s so tempting to go show them that you can conquer them. You can crush them. You know, the other expert, or the defendant, but if I would just listen to them I’ll learn something that I can use later. It’s something that I work on constantly, and I think that we don’t teach people in law school. It’s something that we workout at the ranch or on a lot is helping people become better listeners, but I think a lot of people forget it, and want to work on, “How do I give an opening statement? How do I give a closing argument?”

Well, you can’t give an opening statement if you haven’t actually learned the reality, the truth from the people who you need to tell the story from the witness stand during the trial. You can’t even get to your opening unless you’ve been able to listen to the jurors in the box in the voir dire, you know? So I just think in every way for lawyer success and just life working and learning to really listen, and be okay with some quiet is something that goes a long ways.

Scott Glovsky:

I’ve seen in your Facebook posts that you often include a hashtag soulshine. What does that mean?

Tyson Logan:

Well, that’s something that I originally saw … I love Michael Franti. He’s great. He’s got such a positive message out in the world, and he’s got some soulshine, soul this, soul that, and he’s a very soulful, positive spirit. Soulshine for me kinda has a different meaning. Sometimes I use social media, and will post, and sometimes I kinda have to walk away from it for a while just to give myself a little peace and quiet, but I do use that saying soulshine as a reminder of what is it in my life that brings me joy. What makes my soul shine?

So it’s just a little reminder to find a piece of joy and hang onto it. I feel like so many of us, and I get caught up being busy, and stressed, and whatever, and so worked up about this case, or that case, or money. I really work to try and remember to find pieces of joy for my soul, and that’s something that I can hang onto for a long time, and get a little bit of that something that makes your soul really sing. It can carry you through the hard times. So for me that’s something I’ve hung onto.

Scott Glovsky:

Finally, you have two beautiful boys, and I think we can learn a lot about someone from the advice they give their kids. What do you tell your kids as far as the most important aspects of life? Do you have any sayings or phrases?

Tyson Logan:

Yeah, I tell them almost every day to be kind. We talk a lot about what’s really important. They’re little boys. They’re obsessed with cars. They’re obsessed with clothes, and haircuts, and stripes in their hair, and material stuff, or, “Hey Dad, if you win your next case can we get this?” And I lay down with them at night. I try to every night, and I ask them, “Would that really make you happy?” “Well, yeah. That would be so fun. If we got a Ferrari we could go really fast.” “So would that really make you happy? What makes you really happy?” I try to remind them, and you know they’re boys, but I try to remind them what really fills us up, and what’s really important, and how long we can have joy and happiness from being able to help people, and by kindness. So that’s my big one.

Scott Glovsky:

Well, Tyson, on behalf of our listeners, on behalf of your clients, and on behalf of all the folks that you teach around the country thank you. Thank you for taking the time to be with us. I’m very, very appreciative, and it’s my honor and great joy to call you friend.

Tyson Logan:

Oh, me too. I’m happy to be here with you and just really grateful. So thank you.

Scott Glovsky:

Thank you for joining us today for Trial Lawyer Talk. If you liked 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 S-C-O-T-T-G-L-O-V-S-K-Y.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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