Tad Thomas on a $104.2 Million Verdict, Voir Dire, and Using Tech to His Advantage

This transcript of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR was generated using AI transcription and lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, and speaker labels are approximate. The audio recording is the authoritative version.

Welcome to Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, the podcast where we elevate the stories of the plaintiffs' bar and dive into the key trends shaping the civil justice system today. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and in each episode we'll bring you insightful interviews with leading attorneys, expert perspectives on current legal events, and in-depth discussions on the issues that matter most. Now, let's jump in.

[Cold open] Tad Thomas: The first question is: can you get business in? Because that solves all problems. If you can't get business in, it doesn't matter how smart you are, how rich you are, how good you are, you're not going to survive. I was a trial lawyer first. And yes, I'm one of those sick individuals that loves trying cases. I hate the prep, I hate the workup. But man, as soon as that jury panel comes in, you get to start asking questions and voir dire. That's where I want to be. I love it. I'm addicted to it.

Ray: Hey everyone, welcome to a new episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. I'm your host, Ray DeLorenzi, and today I'm honored to be joined by Tad Thomas of Thomas Law Offices. Tad's firm is in many states these days, but he is a Kentucky native and sort of headquartered there. He's been on my list to have on the podcast for quite some time, and as he teased me in the introduction before we hit record, he's been waiting for this moment. But what I was waiting for is that he tries a lot of cases. He's coming off a significant, to put it mildly, $104 million verdict he obtained last month in a ghost gun case. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. But with that long intro, Tad, thanks so much for joining the podcast.

Tad: Thanks for having me, Ray. I've been looking forward to it.

Ray: All right. So let's start from the top. Let's go to childhood, Tad. Tell me about your upbringing. I know your father worked at a butcher shop. Just give me your bio.

Tad: Yeah, my family, when I grew up, had a grocery store on the Haymarket down in Louisville. I learned how to work. I guess nine or ten years old, they had me stocking shelves. And then when I was old enough to run a cash register, I ran a cash register. When I was old enough to work behind the meat counter, I worked behind the meat counter, and my whole family worked there. So you learn the value of hard work pretty early.

Then, long story short, one of my grandfather's friends was one of the big-time criminal defense lawyers here in Louisville, and he came into the store one day. My grandfather told him, hey, Tad might want to be a lawyer. And he invited me to come be a runner there when I was an undergrad. And so I did that for a couple summers, and here I am. That was my introduction to the law.

Ray: So I'm curious about your family's background. I'm not sure if you're part or fully Lebanese. What was that like growing up in Kentucky?

Tad: You know, I loved it. Honestly, we had a big Lebanese community in Louisville, Kentucky. Growing up, they had what they called the Lebanese Country Club downtown, which was just a clubhouse and a pool. Back when my dad was growing up in Louisville, the community really stuck together. It's assimilated so much more in the last generation, but no, it was great. All the Lebanese would come into the grocery store, all the Lebanese went to the same church, and I had a lot of close friends and cousins.

It's funny, my team here, they're like, everybody's Tad's cousin. So we had to draft a no-sue list, because one of my cousins actually ended up on the other side of one of our car wreck complaints. And they're like, but everybody in Louisville is Tad's cousin, so we can't do that.

Ray: I recall you once told me about prominent Louisville lawyer Frank Haddad, and how in some ways he inspired you to become a lawyer. Tell me about Frank, how you learned about him, and that path to becoming a lawyer.

Tad: Frank was one of these people who was just larger than life, and there'll never be anyone in the law like him. When he was in his heyday, half of all cases in the city of Louisville went through Frank's office. He fed so many lawyers by referring out cases. And this is when advertising was deciding whether or not you wanted a bold listing in the Yellow Pages or just regular print. He was the man. Even to this day, you can trace his genealogy of lawyers that he brought up to some of the best trial lawyers in Louisville. He was amazing.

When I got to be around him as a runner, he was trying huge cases. One of his last cases was a big political corruption case he tried in federal court down in Bowling Green. There hadn't been an acquittal in years down there, and he got a directed verdict on the case. It was just amazing.

But yeah, that was kind of the inspiration, seeing him work and seeing what he did. He had a couple guys who worked for him that did a lot of his civil stuff. One of those guys was Ron Hillerich, and I got to be close with Ron. So when I got to law school, I kind of gravitated to Ron and gravitated to civil instead of the criminal work. I did criminal work for about three years out of law school along with the personal injury stuff, and now I've been 100 percent personal injury for 20-some-odd years.

Ray: So you said for Frank Haddad you were a runner. For those who aren't familiar with the term, and I think it kind of means different things at different firms, what did that mean working for Frank?

Tad: That's actually a great question, because I'm sitting here having meetings on what AI platforms we're using and our AI policies and procedures. But back when I started, I was the guy that if something had to get filed, I had to physically walk it over to court. It was called clock and drop. I took it, I had to clock a copy and clock the main one and drop it in a box for whichever court it was. I had to hand walk over complaints with a check and get them paid. And if somebody had a file to run over to the defense lawyer's office, I was the one who ran and picked up files and picked up checks.

I mean, I was literally a runner. I ran around the city of Louisville with pleadings and checks and running files.

Ray: So that only emboldened you to want to become a lawyer and didn't disabuse you at all?

Tad: It didn't. I just kind of picked up so much even just being a runner. I remember he had a whole file room that was like half of a floor in a tall building in Louisville, and I remember going and pulling out files, just looking at files and being intrigued as to what the case was about and who the people were. So even just handling old files, I was always interested in the cases.

And we would have people in our waiting room who were elected officials, congressmen, senators, sitting next to someone who was homeless a few weeks ago and got a public intoxication charge. They would be in the same waiting room. I was always intrigued by that. I always loved that.

And just the people aspect, kind of growing up on the Haymarket too, because it's all customer service, right? It's taking care of the people who come in that are customers. When it's practicing law, it's taking care of clients. It's the same concept.

Ray: So you graduate from law school, then you opened up your own practice. I kind of want to ask, what were you thinking? But then again, you had been around law firms where you're like, yeah, I could hang a shingle. Tell me about working in law offices but also being part of a family business, which you just said is customer service. Were you like, I got what it takes, why not?

Tad: Yeah, it was the support. So Ron Hillerich, who was my mentor, told me when I was in school, look, if you want to do this, they have a small office that was essentially behind the lunchroom. It was the furthest office down the hall, and it was a closet. It was where the clerks actually were most of my time. And he's like, look, I'll pay your rent and give you a stack of cases and see if you can make a go of it if you want to do that. And I'm like, hell yeah, I'll do that.

So he started giving me cases and taught me how to practice. I'd get a couple criminal cases here and there. I'd get a DUI and I'd go over and make a couple hundred bucks and I'd pay for groceries. Maybe after 30 days or 60 days I might settle a $2,000 car wreck and make a couple hundred more bucks. I just did whatever it took.

I did assigned counsel cases from the public defender's office. My first trial was a med mal that Ron gave me that was a very difficult med mal. So I was two years out of school trying a wrongful death case where a one-week-old died. And then a month later I was trying an attempted murder case where the guy was looking at 20 to life, because I was appointed counsel from the public defender's office. That was two years out of school, and I'm doing that.

Ray: How'd your clients fare in both of those?

Tad: So we lost the med mal, but it made me feel, you know, you have stories from every case, right? In that case, even though we lost, the jury sent a note out after the trial with the verdict, and sent a note to the judge and told the judge to tell the mom, you didn't do anything wrong here, because they really thought that the mom was going to blame herself. So we lost the case. It said there was no deviation from the standard of care. And in retrospect it was an incredibly hard case. So we lost that one.

The attempted murder case, though, I hung the jury. And when we came back for the retrial, they pled the guy out to a D felony and no PFO, no persistent felony offender. So he walked out of jail that day. I remember the judge saying, wow, this is a blue light special day, because we got him such a good deal.

Ray: So you're a couple of years into having your own firm. Was there ever a point where you're like, I don't know if this is going to work? Or did you feel like it was a stone rolling downhill and this is going to work?

Tad: Yeah, I always knew it was going to work, because the mentors that I had and my peers, the people that I was around and saw in the law, were all solo practitioners. They all made a good living. They weren't doing mass torts. They would do a med mal and then they would do a car wreck. They were all solo practitioners who made a good living and did very well for 25 years ago. And that's where I was headed.

After three or four years I was really hitting my groove and doing just fine. I wasn't killing it, I wasn't bringing down eight figures or anything like that, but I did fairly well. And then when my buddy got elected attorney general, it was really hard to make the decision to go work for him. And I did that for three years.

But those eight years from when I got out to going to work with Jack, I was very happy. I was doing just fine. I was content. I just assumed that I was going to practice with those guys the rest of my life as a solo practitioner, rolling in at 9:00 and having a nice lunch with the guys and heading home at 4:30 and making good money. That was going to be my life. And that changed a little bit over the years.

Ray: Which sort of led into my next question. In 2008 you essentially just walk away from it to become assistant deputy attorney general in Kentucky. How did you weigh that decision in terms of pros and cons? Clearly an amazing way to serve the community, and also I think it helped your career a couple years down the line. But you're walking away from a firm you built. What was the hard decision?

Tad: It was a very hard decision. He asked me a couple of times and I told him no the first two. And then finally, it was one of those things where I don't want to say that I like the new and flashy thing, but I like challenges and I like different, right? I don't like to do repeat. So when he came to me, at the time they were talking about Jack being a senator. He actually ran for senator after he'd been in office for a few years, and ran for governor eventually. So I was like, man, what the hell, I would give it a shot. And it turned out to be a great experience. It's led to some skills that I use now every day when it comes to managing the firm.

But no, it was an incredibly difficult decision. I remember going in his office and it was like, I call it my Braveheart moment. In Braveheart, he comes in and he goes, I'll fight for you if I get to kill the English. For me it was like, hey, Jack, if I go, I get to sue drug companies and insurance companies, right? And he said, oh yeah. I was like, all right, I'm in. And so that's what we did. I did that for three years.

Ray: So walk me through the initiation process, being there for the first couple of months. You had been your own boss, and you're running some divisions, but you don't get to make the rules anymore. What was that like? A bit of a wake-up call? Was there any point where you're like, why the hell did I do this?

Tad: Oh, it definitely was. The wake-up call was when I made one of our assistants cry. And I was like, oh, geez. Look, they were all really good people. And when I say they're state government employees, I don't mean that in a derogatory way. They're set in their ways. They have certain things that they do. Their job description is their job description.

I'm used to coming from whether it's being an entrepreneur or being a small firm or whatever, if you've got to take out the trash, you take out the trash. If you need to clean the windows, you clean the windows. If somebody asks you to do that, you don't say no, you don't say that's not in my job description. You go do it. So one of my earliest lessons was I really had to understand what everybody's role was and what I could and could not ask them to do. That was kind of the wake-up call.

But we had such a good team. I had so many good people that I got to work with every day. It was definitely different. But like I said, I like new, I like interesting and changing. I supervised four divisions, and in the same day I would have an open records appeal on my desk, some multi-million dollar civil litigation, an environmental case come through, a problem with the dental board. The breadth of what my job covered was amazing. I got to do some really cool stuff. For a while, every time I'd go grab the paper, on the front page there was a case I was working on, had worked on, or was getting ready to work on. That was cool too.

Ray: You founded Thomas Law Offices in January 2011. I'm curious about the lessons learned from your prior firm and then from being in the AG's office, where when you were putting together the firm you're like, this is what I need to do differently, this is what I can do better.

Tad: Yeah. What I learned from the prior firm is, especially back then, marketing was just networking. You got referrals. Websites in 2011 were fairly new. SEO was not like what it is now. So really getting the business was hustling and going around and reconnecting with my referral sources from three years before, following up with people that I met when I was at the AG's office, making connections with those firms.

I tell everybody that wants to go out on their own and start their own firm, the first question is, can you get business in? Because that solves all problems. If you can't get business in, it doesn't matter how smart you are, how rich you are, how good you are, you're not going to survive. But if you can get business in, you can figure out the rest. You can learn it. So rule one when I came out was, all right, I've got to go hustle and get business in.

And then what I learned from the AG's office really was the management side, because I went from being a solo practitioner to four divisions with over 100-something employees, 50 lawyers. I had cops that worked with me on cases. So it was the management and handling all the different aspects, different divisions, and running the operations part. That became very valuable in what I've got now. When I came back it was, hey, I might be a solo practitioner, but I've got other opportunities here. Then I hired my first associate in 2013, and here we are now, 20-some-odd lawyers.

Ray: You ascended pretty quickly through the ranks at AAJ. Eventually you became president of AAJ. Tell me about that, not the process, but the experience and how it also intersected with the growth of the firm, which has been really significant.

Tad: Yeah. I ran for office in AAJ. I've always been a true believer in the mission, right, and taking care of clients, taking care of people. The organization is an organization full of lawyers who go out every day and do really good things for their clients in courtrooms across the country, whether it's from trial court levels to the Supreme Court of the United States. The members are doing good things for society, not just their clients, but they're doing it one case at a time. So I've always just believed in the mission.

I came up through the education side of AAJ too, and spent so much time with lawyers who really cared about sharing the knowledge that they had developed with other lawyers so that they could do a better job representing their clients. That's kind of why I decided to run.

The six, seven years I spent on the ladder, on executive committee and then as an officer, it was just an amazing experience. I got to go all over the country and meet trial lawyers. I hit so many states, I forget the number. The year that I was president I did 120 flights. I was hitting three and four cities in a week. It was a lot. By the time I was done I was tired, but it was such a great experience. I loved it. Got to go to the White House a couple times. I met with all the politicians, and obviously Linda takes you to everything.

It's funny, the AAJ officers all talk about this. You go to AAJ when you're president, you're going to spend a day up there. They have this agenda for you. Every 30 minutes you have a meeting, and it gets to be 9:30 and Linda comes in and says, hey, come with me, we're going to this senator's office, this congressman. And it blows up the entire day. So there's no more agenda, but you're running and putting out whatever fire needs to be put out with Linda. I just thought that was so cool and so much fun.

Ray: Something we talked about when you were president, which I found absurd, was that I don't know of another AAJ president who tried a case when they were president. I don't recall how many you had on deck. First, what were you thinking? Second, despite having multiple offices and a lot of lawyers working for you, you're a trial lawyer and you love to try cases, I know. And I'm sure there's five lawyers at your firm who are like, Tad, stop it. But tell me about the AAJ component and why you're like, you know what, let's just do this. And also your trial schedule and what makes you love being in the courtroom.

Tad: So that year I tried four cases while I was president, and we were trying to think of another president who had tried a case when they were president, and we were going back to the early 2000s and couldn't find one. For me, it's a trial lawyers organization run by trial lawyers. And I actually learned this from Kathleen Nastri. She was president my first year when I was parliamentarian, and she didn't try a case that year, but she didn't ask for any continuances. She's like, it is a disservice to my clients to ask for a continuance because I'm doing something for AAJ. So either they got resolved or they got continued for other reasons, but she never asked for a continuance.

That was kind of my rule going in. I am not going to ask for a continuance. If there's a trial on the calendar and it's one of my clients, I'm going to go try the case. So I tried four cases that year, and I don't even remember what the results were. They were probably just like every other year.

But I'm a trial lawyer first, and I will always be a trial lawyer first. I'll be a manager second. I was an AAJ president second, I was a trial lawyer first. And yes, I'm one of those sick individuals that loves trying cases. I hate the prep, I hate the workup, but man, as soon as that jury panel comes in, you get to start asking questions and voir dire. That's where I want to be. I love it, I'm addicted to it. I've built my whole firm with the principle that I want to try as many cases as I possibly can. I've tried four already this year and we're in mid-August. So I'm going to set a record, I hope, this year.

Ray: You said before that voir dire is your favorite part of trial. Why is that?

Tad: Love the interaction. It's the only part where you actually know what the jury's thinking, because they're talking back to you. And being able to solicit and get someone to admit bias, right? You're having to get them to talk about things they really don't want to talk about.

We'll talk about the gun case. In that case, I stood up in jury selection and I kind of explained to them jury selection, and then I was like, look, I need you to be open. We're going to talk about all the hard stuff here. We're going to talk about guns. We're going to talk about mental health. We're going to talk about suicide. And we're going to do it with a room of 45 potential jurors and however many lawyers sitting up here. But we're getting into intimate thoughts that are very political, that go both ways, very hot-button issues. Being able to have that discussion and get people to talk about their experiences and their feelings is hard to do, but it's one of my favorite skills.

I feel like whoever does jury selection, because you have that interaction, you have the best connection with the jury at that point. And so that bodes well through the rest of your trial, because you actually build up trust and you build up credibility in jury selection. When you're the plaintiff, you're the first person that stands up. So it's not opening statement, it's jury selection when they're starting to judge you and feel you out.

Ray: So let's pivot and talk about the $104.2 million verdict you obtained in July against the ghost gun seller in the death of Henry Willis. I'm curious how it sort of comes in the door. You hear about a gun lawsuit and most lawyers are like, yeah, thanks but no thanks, because of the immunity that the gun industry has, which is being tested as you've now tested it. Just walk me through the beginning when that case comes in, what was your initial reaction, and then how did you work it up?

Tad: So it came in through Everytown, who I've worked with. We have another mass shooting case here in Louisville that I'm working with Everytown on, and it actually came through them because the client, Henry's mom, saw the news coverage on the Old National Bank shooting case, and she reached out to Everytown. Since I'm working with them here in Louisville, they called me first, and I immediately jumped on the case.

Henry was 18 years old, had just graduated from high school. He started having mental health issues nine months before he died by suicide. He was able to get online, and this company illegally sold him what they call an 80 percent gun and shipped it to his door. That's how we got around PLCAA, because it was an illegal gun sale. It was all the pieces for anyone to put together a working handgun. A novice can do it in 30 minutes. And five days after he received that box, he died by suicide.

This is a kid whose mom is in the mental health business, and she was doing all the right things. She got him counseling. She got him a psychiatrist. She took him to the hospital. They kept guns out of the home. They did everything that you would need to do to give him the time that he needed to recover. I learned all kinds of things about suicide. We had an expert witness on suicide and I even learned things that I didn't know. It was such a privilege to work on that case. It's one of the most fulfilling experiences I've had as a trial lawyer.

And obviously the jury sent a message to this industry. The best part about that case was the day after the verdict, when we did the press conference with RebuttalPR, actually. The day after that, once the press hit and the guy saw the news, he took his website down and stopped selling guns. I don't care if we never collect a dime on $104 million if the fact is that he has taken this website down and is no longer selling guns. Literally, we've taken illegal guns off the streets. I can't think of a bigger victory than that.

Ray: How did you communicate to the jury that this wasn't a lawsuit against the gun industry? You're in Kentucky, which has a gun culture. How did you sort of separate those things? And I'm curious if you were able to talk to the jurors after the case at all and get their perspective. I know it's not always possible.

Tad: Yeah, so we didn't in this case, actually. I always talk to them after my losses. I don't usually talk to them after my wins. I figure I won for the reasons I thought I was going to win, but for the losses I always make sure I understand why I lose. So we didn't talk to them in this case, but we did focus groups, and we learned a lot. Everything played out exactly the way our research suggested when it came to trying the case.

What we said to them, and the focus group showed this, is that gun owners were not an excluding factor for jury selection, because lawful gun owners don't like it when there are illegal gun sales. The single biggest and most important question that we asked in voir dire based on our research was: are you concerned about gun violence in your community? And if the answer was yes, I just went around the room and said, one to five, five being the most concerned, what are you? I was interested in how many people were fours and fives. There were no ones and twos. There might have been a one, a two, and then a couple of threes, but the vast majority were fives.

Because this was an illegal sale, it was a ghost gun, it was unserialized. They were clearly trying to get around federal law, and they posted federal law on their website and mocked it in their social media. So this was an outlier. This is not like most gun cases, for sure. The jury was clearly upset that you have somebody illegally selling a gun to an 18-year-old who ultimately dies from it.

Ray: So the defendant doesn't show. I'm sure that presented some different challenges. Did that also anger the jury, like, oh, these people can't even show up? What was the dynamic?

Tad: Oh, yeah. I clearly used that in my closing argument. I pointed to the door and I was like, they're going to go sell guns illegally, but they can't walk through these doors and be held accountable, or answer, or look this mom in the face and explain why they did it. And you would see when I'm hitting those points, the jurors are nodding by then. So we knew it was going to be good.

Really the challenge is going to be collecting, and the guy's moving around. So we'll go try to find him wherever he is and try to collect what we can. I said, I want his domains. That's the first thing I want to take down, because he has other websites that don't sell guns but they do SEO for ghost guns and other consulting for ghost gun companies. So I want all of his domains. I want to shut him down as much as I can, make it hard for him to do business.

But yeah, it was definitely a different dynamic. And we still picked the jury the same way. We still put on proof. We conducted ourselves in trial as if somebody else was sitting there. We planned out the way the witnesses came in. We didn't do anything in the trial that wouldn't have flown if somebody was sitting there. And here we are.

Ray: So in addition to being a trial lawyer and having a pretty large sized firm and operations in multiple states, you also have a video company that does work with lawyers. You have a technology company. I know you said you can't sit still, but what inspired you to build these other businesses? Was it seeing needs you had in your own firm and thinking, hey, why don't we just sprout off a company? Are you bored?

Tad: It's 100 percent what it was. And yeah, don't let me get bored, because they joke around, oh, Tad's bored, he started another company or he opened another office. We did a Zoom with my whole firm today and I was like, yeah, every time I say we're not going to grow anymore, I want to put the brakes on for a while, I make myself a liar, because then some opportunity comes around and we open up another office.

But yeah, with the other businesses, it's exactly what you said. There is a need in my office. Let me start with the SEO company. So Legal Insights is now merged with GAVL into GAVL Marketing. But when we started Legal Insights, essentially it was, I see what I have to pay to do SEO, and I'm like, well, if I'm going to pay that, why don't I just hire somebody? If I'm going to hire somebody, why don't I put a little more money into it, hire somebody good, turn it into a company and sell the SEO to other people? Maybe if I get lucky I'll get mine for free, because everybody else is paying for the operations of the company. Now it's turned into a nice business. So then we're like, okay, let's add services. We add video onto it, and GAVL Video becomes part of it, and then those merge into GAVL Marketing.

And with the software, I got tired of software that other people were writing that didn't work for me in trial, that just wasn't what I wanted it to be. So I'm like, hell with it, I'll just do it myself. I've learned a lot about software and it's been a lot of money to get to where I am, but I think we finally have a really, really nice product, and a lot of people are interested in it. I've been working on that for the last couple months. But yeah, it's all stuff where I started companies to address needs that I already had.

Ray: To close out here, I know you've been on the cutting edge technology-wise. You were an early AI advocate. Tad, where do you see that headed over the next 12 to 24 months, and what are you focused on?

Tad: So what we're focused on is efficiencies, really. Given the volume that we have with intake and medical records retrieval, where can we optimize so that our people, and we've got really, really talented people, are focused on the things that they're best at and the things that are the most valuable, highest level work? If they don't need to be making phone calls because AI will do it, let's just let AI do it. That's where my firm is going: how can we just make things more efficient?

For me as a trial lawyer, like I said, I've tried four cases this year, and my preparation for each of those four cases has been different because of the evolution of AI just this year. Using different software, I went from ChatGPT to Claude, I went from Supio to Eve, and I've got all of these different platforms that we're pulling together now to create a work product that is so much better.

I wrote an article that talks about how, for me in trial prep, AI is not saving me time, because I'm still spending the same amount of time writing a closing argument, for instance. But my work product is a thousand times better, because I can get through the different iterations and tweak, using AI focus groups. So I write the first version, I run it past an AI focus group, and it says, here are the areas that conservative jurors aren't happy with, consider this. And so you rewrite, and then you pull in more facts, and you just continue to mold, using AI to come up with the best possible product. For me, I mean, I'm a little bit of a tech geek, obviously, but man, it's exciting what we can do right now.

And we do spend a lot of time with the firm teaching it and encouraging use and making sure that everybody has the tools that they need. We just settled a significant $1.1 million med-mal case. We had $50 in expenses in it, because we were able to use AI, pull from PubMed, pull from the medical records, and put together such a good demand that we were able to resolve the case in four months. It was amazing. And AI is a big part of it.

Ray: With that, Tad Thomas of Thomas Law Offices in Louisville and elsewhere, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. Really appreciate your time.

Tad: Thanks, Ray. Enjoyed it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR. Don't forget to subscribe and follow to join us next time. We'll see you all then.