Ep. 266 – [TRIAL DEBRIEF] – How Kent Hammond Won a $2.4 Million Dollar Verdict Despite Tough Liability

In this episode, Kent Hammond joins us to break down how he walked away with a $2.4 MILLION VERDICT in a case that could’ve easily gone the other way.

If you’re ready to STOP hoping and START knowing how trusting the jury can lead to massive wins, even when the odds are against you — this is the episode for YOU.

Tune in and crack the code. 🧠💥

Xo,
Sari

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"I’ve always thought, and I know you preach the same thing, that juries, at the end of the day, just want to do the right thing. They’re not your enemies. Listening to them afterward, hearing how they deliberated, definitely brought that home to me."

kent hammond

EPISODE 266 TRANSCRIPTION

Sari de la Motte:
Well, welcome everyone to another episode of From Hostage to Hero. Today, I'm here with Coach Marlo, who is a coach in the H2H Playground and H2H Crewbie, and my favorite person to tease all the time—Kent, who is known as Kent-a-ford around here. Because if I love you, you get a nickname, and Kent got a nickname, so that means I love him... sometimes. Not all the time, but most of the time. Today I do because he's here, willing (kind of), to talk to us about his recent $2.4 million verdict with a tough case on liability. Welcome, Marlo, and welcome Kent.

Kent Hammond:
Good morning. Thanks, Sari.

Sari de la Motte:
You're so welcome for being here with me. Marlo, you're here because Kent relied on you somewhat throughout this trial, and you talked him into doing this trial debrief with us. So, who wants to give me the overview of this case? What were you looking at? Kent, do you want to take us there?

Kent Hammond:
Sure. It was a wrongful death case. My client was an 82-year-old father of two adult children, living up in Flagstaff, Arizona. Actually, he lived on a reservation outside of Flagstaff. His truck broke down, so he called a tow company from Flagstaff, and the tow truck driver came out to pick him up. It was a flatbed tow truck, and this is where the dispute in the whole case arises.
They put the pickup truck on the flatbed, and it was our contention that the decedent was in his pickup truck on the flatbed, not in the cab of the tow truck. As they were driving back to Flagstaff, a car crossed the center line and hit the tow truck head-on, causing it to catch on fire. The decedent, our client's father, was badly burned and, probably about six weeks after the accident, died from his burn injuries.
So, the major dispute in the case was: Where was the decedent at the time? Was he in his own pickup truck, or was he in the cab of the tow truck?

Sari de la Motte:
Just from hearing that, I can tell you already, you've got all kinds of problems in this case. He's old, he's going to die anyway. And, we almost always have problems in wrongful death cases in general because what's money going to do? But also, he's old. And if he was in the cab of the truck, I can see jurors blaming him for that. You mentioned a reservation, so there might be some issues there with racism around Native Americans. I'm assuming that's what you mean by reservation?

Kent Hammond:
Yes.

Sari de la Motte:
So, lots of problems here. My question to you is, how do they not know where he was? Didn’t someone pull him out of wherever he was? Talk to me about that—I'm confused.

Kent Hammond:
Well, no, because once the tow truck caught on fire, which then started the pickup truck on fire, he jumped out of his pickup onto the roadway, and soon after that, he was badly burned. They had to intubate him, and then they took him to Flagstaff and later evacuated him to Phoenix. The tow truck driver says he was in the cab, "Sitting right next to me, and when the accident happened, I got momentarily knocked out. I looked over, and he wasn’t there."
That didn’t make a lot of sense because, amazingly, the impact was right on the driver's side where the fire started—right underneath the driver of the tow truck. The driver was completely uninjured in the accident. So it just defied common sense that he would get out and completely escape but the guy allegedly sitting next to him was badly burned—and the impact wasn’t even on his side.

Sari de la Motte:
So, you're suing the tow truck company?

Kent Hammond:
Yes, we had already resolved the case with the guy who crossed the center line. He had a minimum policy.

Sari de la Motte:
I was going to say, that was the other issue I was thinking about—well, it’s the person who ran into this. So what crazy bastard would take this to trial? Talk to me about that. Looking at the facts of this case, which makes it even more amazing that you got such a great result, what was happening for you when you got this case and started digging into it?

Kent Hammond:
I liked the clients. The one son was the main one. He had a really close relationship with his dad. He had some rough edges, but he really cared about his father, and the other son did too—he lived in New Mexico. I really liked the clients, and to this day, I know he was in his pickup on the flatbed of that tow truck. I just know it in my heart of hearts. Everything pointed to that. And for the tow truck driver to completely lie about it—I think that might’ve been the downfall of the case. If they had just not fought about that so much, I think the outcome would’ve been different.

Sari de la Motte:
I hear some righteous anger in there too. That’s such a stupid thing to lie about. So, I’m assuming the guy never gained consciousness or was able to talk once he was intubated—is that why we never heard from him?

Kent Hammond:
He did later. Once they intubated him and flew him to Flagstaff, they said, "We can’t handle this burn patient. You’ve got to fly him down to Phoenix." So, he was in the burn unit in Phoenix, which is one of the best in the country. He did tell his sons and one of the nurses, "I was in my pickup when the fire started, and I had to jump out."
And that brings me to an interesting point—one of the jurors said afterward, "Why would he tell that story—that he had to jump out of his pickup truck—if, in fact, the defense’s theory was true?" Because their theory was that he jumped out of the tow truck and ran around to the driver’s side door to try to help the driver out, and that’s when he got burned. And the juror said, "Why wouldn’t he have told that story? Why wouldn’t he have said, 'I was a hero, I tried to get this guy out of his truck, and I got burned in the process,' if that’s really what happened?" Most people want to be the hero.

Sari de la Motte:
Absolutely. Marlo, you were shaking your head as Kent was dropping some of these things. What were your thoughts when you first heard about this case?

Marlo Arnold:
Well, Kent called me maybe a week before trial and said, "I have this case I’m taking to trial. Will you help me clarify my opening and my voir dire?" And it was clear to me early on that this was a perfect example of our XY filter. We've been working on this concept in the [inaudible], and Coach Jody created the XY filter.
So, if the jury believes X, we win, but if they believe Y, we lose. And Kent’s issue was very clear: If the jury believed that the decedent was in his pickup truck on the flatbed, he was going to win. Because that’s insane. All the experts agreed that you can’t let someone ride in the back of a pickup truck on the back of a tow truck—that’s not safe.
But if the jury believed the defense's story that the decedent was sitting in the passenger seat of the tow truck, then we lose. And Kent and his brother Kurt, who tried the case with him, focused very clearly on where the driver was, both in their opening and throughout the case, because that was the XY filter.

Marlo Arnold:
There was no question that he was badly burned. It was just about that particular thing.

Kent Hammond:
And the—

Sari de la Motte:
So, we didn’t really have a causation argument. Go ahead.

Kent Hammond:
And the interesting thing was, as you always say, you make the case what you talk about. Instead of spending a lot of time talking about the guy who crossed the center line and caused the accident, the defense wanted to fight about where he was sitting at the time. So the whole trial, for the most part, was about where this guy was sitting, not about the fact that someone crossed the center line and caused the whole accident.

Sari de la Motte:
So, two issues came up for me. First, what about defensive attribution? People might think, "You’ve got to be an idiot to sit up there; you’ve got to know that’s dangerous." And what about the fact that, well, even if he was sitting in the cab, he could have gotten hurt there too. It was just lucky that the driver didn’t. Did you have to deal with those issues, or is that just my crazy brain talking?

Kent Hammond:
No, some of it I think there was, and I think some of it was that he was an older gentleman who was Native American, maybe just doing what the tow truck driver told him to do. It didn’t come in at trial, but the son had said at one point that his dad told him he didn’t want to... The tow truck was brand new, with only 500 miles on it, and the tow truck driver didn’t want a ‘stinky Indian’ in his new truck. That didn’t come into evidence, but that might have been a factor.

We didn't think about it too much because it was more about the XY. And what was the other issue?

Marlo Arnold:
He would have gotten hurt anyway, so who cares where he was?

Kent Hammond:
Well, I think the fact that the tow truck driver escaped the cab of the tow truck without injury—even though the fire started right below him—played into our argument. I just said, "It’s common sense". If the decedent was sitting next to him and climbed out the door, he wouldn’t have been hurt at all. He may have been hurt, but he wouldn’t have been burned, and the burns are what caused him to die.

Sari de la Motte:
What about the issue that he was 82 years old and going to die anyway?

Kent Hammond:
I talked about that in voir dire. I just discussed wrongful death cases and how we put a dollar amount on that.

Marlo Arnold:
And—

Sari de la Motte:
You were able to overcome that. Marlo, what do you want to add?

Marlo Arnold:
Oh, I was going to jump in because Kent and I talked after the trial, and I remember I asked him about resonant conversations in voir dire. He got shut down on an objection, but he was able to pivot beautifully using the profound loss question. Kent, do you want to talk about that?

Kent Hammond:
Well, I’m—

Sari de la Motte:
Let’s back up for just a minute because I want to hear about that too. But first, how did you do voir dire in general? Did you use an H2H voir dire with funnels and all of that?

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, the funnels in this case were responsibility. In terms of liability, everyone agreed that if he was in his truck on the flatbed, that was wrong—even their experts agreed with that. I also talked about listening to tow truck drivers—where the tow truck driver told him to sit, experiences people had had with tow trucks. But the big issue was really determining who was telling the truth about where he was. So in voir dire, I asked how you determine truth when you have two competing stories.

Sari de la Motte:
And what did they say? What did you get from them?

Kent Hammond:
They talked about common sense—listening to the person and trying to judge their credibility. They also said they’d look for independent facts that support one story over the other—facts that weren’t biased and just plain evidence.

Sari de la Motte:
So, it sounds like you ran into some trouble when it came to the price versus value conversation. What was the objection there?

Kent Hammond:
Well, some of it was probably my clunkiness. It was the first time I had done it, to be honest. So I started getting into it, and the defense objected, saying, "This has nothing to do with..." I had been talking about the medical bills we had, and then I moved into the non-economic damages. The judge just told me, "Move on, Mr. Hammond".

Sari de la Motte:
And that’s when you—

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, that’s when I pivoted. I think it was Randi McGinn I saw at TLU who used this approach, and I basically stole it from her. I said, "This is a wrongful death case, so now I’m going to ask about people who have lost someone and the profound impact that’s had on their lives."

And almost everybody on the jury... I had prefaced it with, "Does the fact that someone is elderly change the nature of the relationship?" We had talked about people having adult children—even though your parent may be elderly, is the relationship still important? Some jurors said the scarcity of time made it even more important. I touched on that.

Sari de la Motte:
Sourcing it from the jury. So, as you were doing your voir dire and getting answers, and you had to pivot on the price versus value, what was the feeling during that time? Were you like, "I’m getting what I need," or were you thinking, "Oh my God, I don’t know what these people think"?

Kent Hammond:
Well, as Marlo knows, in Arizona, we have a strange rule—they no longer allow peremptory strikes, so we only had for cause strikes. But most of the people seemed to be in tune, and I felt good about them. I think I only had one for cause challenge. They all seemed responsive.

Sari de la Motte:
Love that.

Kent Hammond:
And having worked with you for what, 10-plus years now, I’ve always thought—and I know you preach this too—that juries want to do the right thing at the end of the day.

Sari de la Motte:
That’s right. Did you believe that in this case?

Kent Hammond:
Yes, I did. I’ve always felt in my heart of hearts that juries aren’t the enemy. They really do just want to do the right thing. And listening to them afterward, as they talked about how they deliberated, really reinforced that for me.

Sari de la Motte:
I love this, and I want to commend you. In a wrongful death case, with an 82-year-old, and in Arizona where you don’t have peremptory challenges anymore—it would’ve been easy for you to say, "Screw it, I’m going in with old-school voir dire." You could have tried to knock off people for cause left and right. But you only had one for cause challenge and got this great result. Marlo, remind me if I’m missing something, but I believe there’s a story about someone calling you a greedy bastard—what’s that about?

Marlo Arnold:
I think it was more of an implication.

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, I don’t think the defense attorney used those exact words in closing, but I think he was surprised by how much we asked for. We had $1 million in non-economic damages, and I used that as an anchor in my wrongful death ask. I said, "Look, they spent a million dollars to keep this guy alive for six weeks. What is his life worth for the next four and a half years?"
So I used that as an anchor and asked for 4.5 million for each son for their dad. The defense attorney insinuated that we were just greedy trial lawyers.

Sari de la Motte:
So, you asked for what, about $10 million total?

Kent Hammond:
Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:
Did the jurors give you any feedback on why they awarded $2.4 million?

Kent Hammond:
No, because only four of them stuck around. But they told us they had averaged out their amounts. They put up a chart and each of the ten jurors wrote down what they thought the wrongful death case was worth, and then they just averaged it out. Some were on the high end, and some were on the low end.

Sari de la Motte:
Got it.

Kent Hammond:
The defense attorney had said the case was worth $100,000 each.

Sari de la Motte:
My goodness. Well, that’s a fantastic result for the case. It’s interesting, we had a trial here a couple of weeks ago, and they were asking for $77 million. But right before the ask in the opening statement, they mentioned the guy was 66 years old, and nearly all the jurors started with $66 million. So fascinating. They eventually got to $77 million, but I just told them, "Stop saying his age. Just say, ‘by the time he’s in his seventies’." So, I’m wondering, when you say you anchored with $1 million, maybe anchor higher next time. Still, it was a fantastic result. How was the opening?

Kent Hammond:
I used the opening template pretty much. I talked to Marlo about how much time I was spending trying to prove where he was, but I felt like that was the crux of the case. I used the template almost verbatim, with a few changes.

Sari de la Motte:
And it felt good?

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, it did.

Sari de la Motte:
Marlo?

Kent Hammond:
This case actually lent itself to recreating what happened. I acted it out—pretending I was sitting in the driver’s seat, and then the fire, and the impact, and he jumps out.

Sari de la Motte:
Yay, good for you. I love that.

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, I enacted the whole situation. Storytelling made it so much more powerful.

Sari de la Motte:
So much more powerful. I’m beaming with pride over here because I know that’s not something that comes naturally to most people. But when you can bring the story to life, the jurors can see what happened. And then when the other side says, "No, it happened differently," it doesn’t make sense. It sounds like this case really came down to common sense. Marlo, you were going to say something?

Marlo Arnold:
Well, I was going to bust in and just point out two things here. Kent talked about his ask, and I think that was an evolution in the days before trial. When we first talked, the ask was much lower, and then there was an evolution. One of the mindset challenges that I perceived, whether it’s true or not, going into the trial was this concept of, "This is a rural jurisdiction, and they’re going to be skeptical about you slick Phoenix attorneys—big fancy Phoenix attorneys coming in." Because Kent and his brother practice in Phoenix. So, I just want to commend Kent for getting through his mindset issues about the ask and getting to a bigger ask, which led to a bigger verdict. And then also getting through the mindset issue about these slick attorneys. It took that in order to be able to really get in there and go all in on storytelling. So, I don’t know if you want to tell us about those two mindset issues, Kent, and how you overcame them.

Kent Hammond:
I guess once I saw the jurors, whether we were in Phoenix or not, I just liked the panel that we got. They all seemed engaged. Some of them I thought maybe the defense attorney would have struck based on their answers, but with no peremptory strikes, it cuts both ways. They just had to try for cause challenges, and if they failed...

Sari de la Motte:
Did they get any for cause challenges?

Kent Hammond:
I don’t think they did. I don’t think the defense attorney tried that hard.

Sari de la Motte:
Well, I remember when the rule came down that there were no more peremptories, everyone was freaking out, but you were the one person who emailed me saying, "I don’t know if this is necessarily a bad thing." For exactly what you just said—it cuts both ways. What was the original ask before you nudged your way up?

Kent Hammond:
Do you remember, Marlo? Maybe $2 million?

Marlo Arnold:
I feel like we were at $2 million when we first started talking. I pushed back hard and said, "Kent, if you were 82 and your family asked me to try this case because you got killed, I would ask for a lot more money for my friend." Kent’s not anywhere near 82!

Sari de la Motte:
He’s kind of close!

Kent Hammond:
I feel like it some days.

Marlo Arnold:
No, no, he’s not even close! Anyway, I remember pushing back hard, and it just took that nudge for him to evolve the ask after that. It went from $2 million to somewhere around $8 or $10 million.

Sari de la Motte:
That’s interesting because we’ve been talking a lot about big data—or big daddy as I like to call it—and how my issue with big data is that they say, "Ask for this number, and you’ll get this number." I say, "The reason you’re getting that number is because you believe you can get it." It’s not just asking for more that leads to that result—it’s believing you can get that number. Before you told me your actual ask, I had a sense that you really believed you could get $2.4 million, which is what you got. I think part of it is knowing you can get that amount, even if you’re asking for more.

Kent Hammond:
I think I just evolved the trial. It’s interesting because I tried this case with my brother, and my other brother, who is also a lawyer, came to watch the closings. I told the jury in closing, "Look, talking about money makes me uncomfortable. Growing up, my parents never talked about money, so it wasn’t something I was used to. But I’m afraid if I ask for too much, you’ll think I’m just a greedy lawyer. And if I ask for too little, am I really doing my clients justice?" So I talked about that discomfort and said, "I think this is the right number for the case. You may agree or disagree with me." Money, and I know you talk about this a lot, is not something that’s always comfortable for me.

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah, you also have money shit, which is a problem I think you should fix! But yes, I think when we tell the jury, "This is the right number, but you can decide," we need to come with, "This is the right number, and here’s why." Not just leaving it up to them but saying, "This is what it is." That’s the next level for you. I do love in the notes from Marlo that you saved the burden of proof for closing, and the jury totally got it. Talk to me about that because we always say they never understand it in voir dire—they always think you’re trying to cheat them, saying, "Well, you don’t have to prove that much." So, here at H2H, we say don’t even cover it in voir dire. That’s sacrilege to most trial attorneys. Talk to me about how you handled it.

Kent Hammond:
I’ve tried covering burden of proof in voir dire before, and I’ve never gotten much out of it. People just nod, and it’s not a resonant conversation. So, I didn’t discuss it in voir dire. In closing, I used the jury instruction and explained it’s "more probably true than not". Then I laid out the evidence and weighed it, saying, "Here’s all this on one side, and here’s what they have on the other." I used a scale metaphor and said, "Your job is easier because you don’t have to be 100% certain."

Sari de la Motte:
Yay!

Kent Hammond:
I used mostly your template.

Sari de la Motte:
You do listen to me!

Kent Hammond:
I do.

Sari de la Motte:
From time to time. I love that! And for those who don’t know, when we talk about preponderance, we’re not using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. We’re saying, "Guess what? Your job is easier than you might think—you don’t need to be 100% sure. You just need to figure out what’s more likely than not." And that’s what the judge will tell you. They’re like, "Oh, thank God!" So, we give it as a gift rather than a crutch. Marlo, closing thoughts, and then I’ll come back to Kent.

Marlo Arnold:
I’m going to circle back to preponderance because not only did Kent save it for closing, but the jurors who stuck around kept giving it back to him. They said they weren’t 100% sure but more probably true than not—he was in his pickup truck. They got it so clearly because he didn’t shove it down their throats at every phase.

Kent Hammond:
Yeah, when we talked to the four jurors who stuck around, they said, "More probably true, we think he was in his pickup." They weren’t 100% sure, but they knew they didn’t need to be.

Sari de la Motte:
Love it. I love it.

Marlo Arnold:
Kent and his brother took a hard case to trial and got a great result. So, I just want to run a victory lap for Kent—so proud of the work he did!

Kent Hammond:
In my closing, I used a theme from a book called There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer. I said, "Tragedies happen when a dangerous condition meets human error." The dangerous condition was created by the defendant, and the human error was the guy crossing the center line. I think that theme helped.

Sari de la Motte:
Ooh, beautiful. Who’s the author again?

Kent Hammond:
Jessie Singer, and the book is called There Are No Accidents.

Sari de la Motte:
I love that. What was your biggest learning from this trial?

Kent Hammond:
I think my biggest learning was trust the jury. As much as the lead-up to trial sucks, once you’re actually in trial, it’s fun. After I got done, I was like, "God, when’s my next trial?"

Sari de la Motte:
Yay! So, to translate: Listening to Sari was the thing you learned! Thank you for that. Congratulations on your $2.4 million win in a wrongful death case for an 82-year-old. That’s an incredible result with the facts you had to work with. It was so fun having you both on the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Kent Hammond:
All right, thanks, Sari.

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