The latest episode of the AZ Big Podcast with Michael & Amy has officially dropped. Episode 14's guest Wendi Sorensen of Burch & Cracchiolo, talks about the impact of arbitration on law.
Listen to more of the AZ Big Podcast here.
Transcript:
Michael Gossie
Welcome to the AZ Big Podcast sponsored by Burch and Cracchiolo. I'm Michael Gossie, editor-in-chief at AZ Big Media, and I'm joined by my co-host, publisher Amy Lindsey. Today, we are very happy to be joined in the studio by Wendi Sorenson from Burch and Cracchiolo.Amy Lindsey
Wendi, thank you for joining us. Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your legal practice at Burch and Cracchiolo?Wendi Sorensen
Well, thank you both for having me here. I really do appreciate it. It's so nice to meet you and so nice to be here today. I mostly work in the area of personal injury and wrongful death. I've been practicing law for a little over 35 years now and I've been with Burch and Cracchiolo for 10. I love the firm. It's fantastic. I'm so glad you're speaking with me and some of my partners.Michael Gossie
Wendi, why did you decide to focus on personal injury?Wendi Sorensen
I enjoy it. I find that the facts so much more interesting than real estate or contracts or areas like that, it's… it’s real life.Michael Gossie
I know the pandemic has kind of wreaked havoc with businesses across Arizona, but I know that you also focus a little bit on mediation. How has the mediation practice been affected by the pandemic?Wendi Sorensen
It's stepped up tremendously. So, what happened when the pandemic hit is the courts shut down among so many other businesses and so many other organizations, the judges couldn't have people in their courtrooms and you know social distancing was a thing. So, cases just stopped going all the way to trial and people needed another way to get cases settled and they reached out to mediators. Mediators are still incredibly busy right now trying to help people get cases solved.Michael Gossie
What's the benefit of going the mediation route instead of like, going to trial?Wendi Sorensen
It's predictable. With mediation you have some control over the outcome of your case, that's the beauty of it. What mediation is, is this: You go and speak with the mediator these days over mostly over Zoom. You can also do a mediation live, but typically it happens over Zoom. Each party will be in a separate Zoom room and will speak in turn to the mediator – one at a time.So, you have your private time with the mediator to explain what your case is about, but the mediator also has a private time with you to say look here are the risks with your case, so you may think that your case is worth a ton of money, and by the time you talk to the mediator about potential downsides of your case and what could happen in front of a jury. You start seeing maybe a little bit more reality and start bringing the number down.
On the other hand, the person who needs to pay you the money, usually the insurance company, will start coming up with their number. They'll start to see their risk at trial and start to see where they would’ve maybe only wanted to pay you $50,000, now they need to pay you $100,000 to get the case settled and the nice thing about mediations is typically before mediation, each side will have a sense of what they think their case is worth and in the mediation they will get a whole lot closer and we'll be looking at numbers to settle the case that they never thought they would accept before.
Michael Gossie
Is there a time frame? When you compare going to trial, with mediation what's the time frame difference?Wendi Sorensen
To go to trial, it takes a minimum from the beginning of the case. Well, so let me start at the beginning of the case. Day one, there's an injury. A lawsuit can happen as much as two years later. There's a thing called the statute of limitations in Arizona and for personal injury cases, the typical statute of limitations is 2 years and let me just put a little asterisk there. There's exceptions to that. So, don't listen to that as an ironclad rule.Consult a lawyer. Don't let your statute of limitations pass because sometimes there are different statutes of limitations, even within personal injury law, but typically lawsuits can happen as long as two years after the accident.
After that, a case will typically go to trial somewhere between a year and two years after the lawsuit is filed, and in the period of time between the filing of the suit and going to trial. The lawyers are working on what's called discovery, trying to figure out what the other case is about. Mediations, though, can happen at any time. They can happen before the lawsuits even filed. They can happen immediately after. They can happen, basically whenever the parties feel that they have enough information to properly assess their case.
Amy Lindsey
What types of cases are best for mediation?Wendi Sorensen
Any case, any case at all, as long as they're well developed enough that people have some sense of what they're worth. The importance about mediation is the sharing of information. You know, I can't properly assess my case to decide how much to take and I can’t, if I were on the other side, about trying to decide how much to pay, I can't properly assess my case unless I know what the other side knows. But other than that, any case.Michael Gossie
Okay, you know Wendi, we're seeing a record amount of construction going on in Arizona. There's all kinds of new manufacturing coming to Arizona. Does that generate a lot of personal injury cases. The construction industry and the manufacturing industry.Wendi Sorensen
Oh, it does definitely. People get injured at work all the time and you know, work injuries add another whole wrinkle to injuries and that's the whole aspect of workers compensation. If somebody's injured at work, typically their employer has workers compensation insurance for them and they typically then can't sue their employer. That’s part of the deal with workers compensation. The employer gets workers comp coverage for you, now you can’t sue your employer. There again are exceptions to that, but what people do sometimes is sue other subcontractors, other contractors on the job, other employees that are unrelated to their company on the job and so we see lawsuits about that as well. Also, there are workers compensation claims and sometimes they have to be litigated but yes, by all means, all this increase in manufacturing does mean unfortunately increases in injuries.Michael Gossie
Is there anything that you see that employers could do, either construction companies or manufacturing companies they can do to kind of lower their risk of facing a personal injury claim?Wendi Sorensen
You know, so often they do… do what they can and they do try to avoid injuries. I see a lot of really good risk management out there. You know where companies will even bring a lawyer in, someone like me, to assess whether a work site is safe. To make sure that all of the safety protocols of a given industry, and there are so many different ones, are followed, but it's just exactly that, just trying to keep things safe. You know, like fall protections, employees over a certain height should always have fall protection, because that way if they fall, they're going to get arrested by that rope rather than hit the ground, unfortunately.Michael Gossie
OK, I have a million questions I have to ask you, but first I want to say the attorneys at Burch and Cracchiolo have been proving for more than 50 years that a successful business or legal case of any kind starts when you hire the right lawyer, let them prove it to you. Learn more at bcattorneys.com that's bcattorneys.com.You said something that was really interesting to me there. So, you go into a construction site before to kind of check on the safety. How important is that to have kind of a third party look at it before the injury takes place.
Wendi Sorensen
Oh, it's incredibly important because it keeps the injury from happening at all. Also, employers and other people can get into bigger trouble at times, attorneys who represent injured people can seek punitive damages, damages to punish an entity, if they've been really haphazard about safety. If they just act like they don't care, that's another whole level of damages that are available to plaintiffs when they were injured in those sorts of ways.Michael Gossie
Wendi, I… I'm going to take this in a completely different direction because you said something earlier when we were talking that really fascinated me. How did you get into glass art?I think that it's so important for professional people to have outside interests and you said that you're a glass artist now. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
Wendi Sorensen
I'd be happy to. I just stumbled into it. I was looking up some classes on glass blowing and then I found a solid glass art – torchwork – out at Mesa Center for the Arts. Fantastic Place, great organization, but yes, I think it's so important for any professional, for any person to do something that makes him or her happy, to find that Zen spot, that flow place, you know.Years ago, I said I can't draw. I just can't and I always wanted to. So, I took a class in drawing and learned how. You know, there's, it's good for the psyche to know that you can do something you've never done before or to do something you've always wanted to learn how to do. But certainly when you can do something that takes you from a place of thinking about facts and thinking about stuff at work to just a place of just being, to that zen spot that art puts youand we talked about that too, Michael. Yeah, it's fantastic.
Michael Gossie
Have you been able to see how art has made you a better attorney?Wendi Sorensen
It's calmed me, I'll say that that's for sure, plus it always gives me something to fiddle with on my desk. I have my glass pieces.Michael Gossie
Okay, Last question. How has the pandemic impacted the practice of law now in Arizona?Wendi Sorensen
Oh, tremendously. So, I mediate cases like we talked about. The courts have been shut down and they are now getting back to business and that's nice, but even so, they're a little bit slow and a little bit behind because of the backlog and because criminal cases have to take priority because of the right to a speedy trial, and certainly we get that.So, mediation business has been incredibly busy – and that's great. I love mediated cases. I settled a case once where the parties were $24 million apart and what a great feeling of service to be able to bring them together and get a case resolved and let everyone walk away and feel good about it.
Michael Gossie
Do you see this increase in mediation and arbitration kind of like staying? Do you think that has staying power?Wendi Sorensen
I do. I also see it, that it has staying power by Zoom, I think that the whole electronic response to the pandemic if that’s a good way to put it, is something that's going to be with us for a while. You've probably talked to some real estate people about how real estate is going to be changing based on the whole Zoom aspect that followed the pandemic.I think that mediations are here to stay because people realize, and really mediations have been on the rise for a long time anyway, but they've really been pushed hard since the pandemic. It's a much less expensive way to resolve a case. Trials are costly, it's not just a lawyer having to spend 5 or 6 or 8 to 10 days in trial. It's also the experts that you have to bring to prove your side of the case or to prove your side of 1 aspect of a case.
Sometimes lawyers will bring 5 or 6 experts to a trial. An expert will be $10,000 for 1/2 a day of sitting there and waiting for his turn to talk. That's expensive and that comes right off of the parties bottom line.
Michael Gossie
You know one question that I forgot to ask you earlier is with COVID, can that justify itself as a personal injury if you get that at work?Wendi Sorensen
I haven't personally handled any cases like that, but it very well could be. I know that our business at Burch and Cracchiolo has been incredibly careful about that. We mandated masks. We had people coming in several times, they did wipe down surfaces, surfaces rather. We make sure that we're well aware of what's happening in the building, if any of the other tenants have any symptoms or any positive tests. Yeah, it’s… I don't personally know from a legal standpoint whether that would be considered an injury, but I would expect so and I do believe that there are some cases working their way through the system now along those lines.Michael Gossie
Great. Wendi, I could talk to you all day. Fascinating attorney. Wendi Sorenson from Burch & Cracchiolo. Thank you for joining us on the AZ Big Podcast. Thank you for listening to the AZ Big Podcast with Michael and Amy and once again, thank you to our sponsors at Burch and Cracchiolo.