Breaking Barriers to Justice
Your Network is the Case By Taylor Ernst It is 4:47 PM the day of expert disclosure. You sit with your client’s file, and the same three questions circle: Do I have the right experts on this case, or am I one expert short? Why is the defense lowballing this case when the traumatic brain injury is real, and the client needs help? Am I going to have to try this case? Every plaintiff lawyer who has handled a catastrophic brain injury case has sat with those questions. And every honest one of us has heard the same answer in the back of our head: I do not know . Not because the answer does not exist, but because you have not personally done it before. A catastrophically injured client should never settle for less because their lawyer has not personally faced that exact problem. I looked at 300 TBI cases for other plaintiff lawyers last year. We focus on TBI. We wrote a book on it. Lawyers read it and call with questions, and we answer. I read files for cases I will never try. Neuropsych batteries, neuroimaging reports, life-care plans, defense expert depositions - across 300 files, the gap is almost never effort, intelligence, or commitment. It is exposure. The 4:47 PM questions do not yield to preparation. They yield to the lawyer who has already fought that expert, already negotiated
that stipulation, already watched that defense carrier's valuation model in five other files. The answers exist; they are just somewhere else in the plaintiff bar. This is not a money problem. Every plaintiff lawyer in this state has access to CAOC, to listservs, to lawyers who have tried these exact cases. The lawyer who deposed your defense expert last year is someone you probably already met at a conference. Bluntly, it is an ego problem. “ I can figure this out myself. ” That is the voice. It is not a character flaw; it is how we are trained. Own the file. Master the medicine. Outwork the other side. That works, right up until the question is one you have never personally faced. Preparation without exposure just means you are guessing with more confidence. This is not a plaintiff-versus-defense problem. The best plaintiff lawyers in this state have more accessible experience than any defense lawyer will ever bring against them. The asymmetry is inside our own bar, between the lawyer carrying the file alone and the lawyer who picked up the phone before the record hardened against the client. Your network is the case. The lawyer you reach out to because you remember they fought this expert three years ago. The prior transcript that changes the temperature of a deposition before you ask your first question. The colleague who says, “do not waste your time there, the weakness is over here.” I did not build this idea, I inherited it. My father, Don Ernst, built his trial practice on a rule that seemed odd to me when I
Taylor Ernst of the Ernst Law Group is a nationally recognized brain injury trial attorney and the 2024 California Lawyer Attorney of the Year. He wrote the book on TBI litigation, The Ernst Way . te@ernstlawgroup.com
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM July/August 2026
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