January 10, 2025

“One of the things that I said is, well—what would Sari say?—‘What do you want to know from the jurors, Anna?’ I thought, ‘Oh, I know what I want to know. I want to know how many jurors here help people. Why is it important to help people? Why would you want to help people? That’s just out of the goodness of your heart. Basically, do you want to protect people and help them? Is that your spirit? Is that your heart?’ I want to find those people and put them on my jury.”

– Anna Martinez

Podcast Transcript

Sari de la Motte:
Well, welcome, everybody, to another episode of From Hostage to Hero. I am here with Anna Martinez—Anna, Anna, we’ve got to get that right—Anna Martinez, who just won an amazing verdict in a very tough situation. We’re so absolutely thrilled to have her on here and talking with her today. Welcome, Anna. Anna—am I saying that right?

Anna Martinez:
Yes. I tell people I truly and honestly answer to both, because my parents call me “Anna,” and all my friends and my sisters call me “Anna.” I have this sort of double identity, being a Latina lawyer, hearing Spanish in my home and my parents saying my name a certain way, but I didn’t know that was a thing until people in my professional life—in school, I was always called “Anna,” but when I became a lawyer, people were just like, “Anna or Anna?” And I was like, “I don’t know. Is there one right way?” When I tell people, “It really is both,” they get freaked out. But truly and honestly, I do answer to both. My friends call me Anna. Many of them call me Banana, so it is a term of endearment.

Sari de la Motte:
Okay, great. Having a weird name, I’m very sensitive to that. In fact, I hated my name so much that I added an H when I was 13, so I was Shari for a long time. But then, of course, everyone called me “Sherry,” because that’s how they were reading it, so that didn’t solve anything. And then, when I met Kevin, my husband, he was like, “What’s your name?” and I said, “Shari—well, my real name is Sari.” And he’s like, “That’s what I’m going to call you.” That’s kind of how I went back in my thirties to Sari. But my parents, every time I complained about my name, they were like, “It’s pronounced Sari!” I’m like, “And no one’s going to do that in America. So wrong choice, people.” But now I love it, especially with my weird last name after marrying Kevin. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We’re so excited. Let’s hear a little bit about you before we jump into the case. Tell us about you as a lawyer and then how you kind of came to H2H.

Anna Martinez:
I’m a trial lawyer. I’ve been a trial lawyer—surprisingly—my whole career. It’s a little accidental. I’ve been practicing for almost 20 years. It’ll be 20 years in May and—

Sari de la Motte:
So you started practicing when you were eight, apparently.

Anna Martinez:
Pretty much. Thank you. It’s the skin care routine.

Sari de la Motte:
Oh, my gosh, I need that afterward. Okay, continue.

Anna Martinez:
I am from Colorado. My father is from the San Luis Valley, which is kind of a big deal in Colorado. We have a historically Latino/Hispanic population in the Southwest, as most people know. Being from San Luis—it’s kind of like a big deal for people who know that area, because it’s very hardscrabble people. My mother’s from northern New Mexico, also from a land-grant family, and I grew up here in Colorado. I went away for school, I went to law school in New Mexico, had plans on staying there, but the world decided to speak for me and I followed. I got a clerkship in the Colorado Supreme Court with a now-deceased Chief Justice, Mary Mullarkey. She’s the one who really identified something in me I didn’t see. She had really said, “It’s time for you to figure out what you’re going to do, and I want you to stay in Colorado,” because I was going to go back to New Mexico. She said, “No, no, no, no, no—you need to stay here.” She got me a bunch of interviews with women-owned firms and women who were trial lawyers. So it just [inaudible 00:03:13] my whole career path because of her.

Sari de la Motte:
Bless her.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, she changed my whole career path.

Sari de la Motte:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I used to do a lot of work with a group here in Portland that is really getting women more active in politics and running for office and all of the things. I remember going to one of their events that says, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” It’s so amazing when women who are in those positions of power really reach out and say, “Listen, you need to also take the mantle.” I just love that story. What’s her name? Did you say Mary?

Anna Martinez:
Yes, Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey. Yeah, she’s passed.

Sari de la Motte:
My Mary has passed, too, but I have a “nom,” is what I called her—a new-age mom. Mary is a very special name to me. I love that. Tell me a little bit about your practice. What kinds of things, cases do you take?

Anna Martinez:
I went out on my own a few years ago, after COVID, and I focused almost primarily on personal injury for a while. The interesting thing about going on your own is people come to you with problems, and I’m like, “Oh, I know how to solve that.” I started taking just slightly different cases where I could see personal injury elements in them. This particular case was one that a friend of mine said, “Hey, I have this weird conflict, and I’ve got to get off this case.” She was trying to tell me about it, and I was just like, “I can see the personal injury aspect in this,” and that’s why I took it. But that’s really my jam: personal injury. If there’s an element of that or some element of “Can I correct a wrong for you,” even if it’s not profitable—if I can correct the wrong, and would it be fun if it’s not profitable?

Sari de la Motte:
Right. Well, this is one of the things that I love about you, is that your passion for helping people so shines through. I noticed that about you immediately when you came into the Crew. You came into the Crew like a rocket ship. You were just like, “Hello. I have questions, and let’s get them answered, because I’m going to go out there and beat some ass”—which you did. Tell me, what brought you to H2H, before we get into your case?

Anna Martinez:
When I left my old firm, I had a lot of good practical training and experience there, but what was really missing is I felt like I went five years with no good outside deep work—like CLE training. I love the trial work, but I understand there’s also an element of needing mindset, needing something more to get you through it, because it can’t just be something that we do over and over the same way. It caused a lot of burnout for me, so I spent quite a bit of time doing—I did TLC, Trial Lawyers College. They brought a program to Colorado. They did a week-long program in Estes Park that I did. I think the one thing it gave me was this idea that “getting ‘soft skills’ training”… I already know the law. I already know how this part works. What I need to know is how do I keep my brain in a place where I don’t suffer from burnout, and I also don’t feel so scared? TLC gave me a taste of that in a different way with psychodrama training.

There was a very key piece that was about jury selection. One of the things they did was put me in front of my group of mock jurors, and they told me, “You’re standing in front of them—what are the thoughts going through your head?” And when I said them, they were really terrible things in my head about my jurors. I didn’t even know. Terrible!

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah. I mean, Coach Jody talks about that—where she went to Rick Friedman’s “ethos,” and same thing. It’s like, “I hate you, you guys are all going to kill me, and I’m going to kill you first, and I don’t trust you.”

Anna Martinez:
Yes, those were all the things. Then they had me sit in the chair, and people said it back to me. I think that’s the moment where I was like, “I’m doing this totally wrong.” And I was like, “Somebody—”

Sari de la Motte:
I love that. [inaudible]

Anna Martinez:
—yeah, I was like, “Somebody else has to be doing this.” I had heard a podcast, and I think you were on some other person’s podcast, and they interviewed you, and you had just done—

Sari de la Motte:
Possibly Michael Cowen.

Anna Martinez:
I think it was, because I do listen to his podcast. Somebody had just mentioned—there was this 12 Heroes, 12 Voices or whatever book. But then they were like, “Listen, you’ve got to read this particular book, Hostage to Hero.” And I was like, “Oh!” I got the book, and I was like, “This is totally what I need.” And then I was like, “Oh, wait a minute—she has a website, she has a podcast, I need to sign up for this group.” Then I was like, “I need all these things now, because this is where my heart is. I want to do this work, but I also want to do it in a way where it’s more than about trying the case for my clients. It’s about really engaging in the community that responded to my subpoena to come to trial. They responded and respected me enough to show up for me, and I want to make it about including everybody. I’m going to just take you as you are, and that’s what you’re about.” That is a strong philosophy in our family. My mother is very much that way. She’s not trying to change you; she’s not trying to make you something you are not. Her whole thing our whole lives has been “Leave people alone and respect people as they are,” just period. She won’t get rid of you; she won’t try to isolate you. You could be crazy. Your philosophy about jurors is very similar and familiar to me. So after reading the book and doing—I read some of the other stuff you referenced, and then I did the free training you did—that convinced me, like, “I have to join her group.” Once I got in, so many more things moved into place for me about what we do and why we do it, and that’s the way out of burnout.

Sari de la Motte:
Well, a couple of comments on all of that is—one of the things we’re hearing a lot from our members is “trial can be fun again,” and that, like you’ve pointed out, this is so much bigger than just trial skills. I mean, our big secret is “come for the trial skills, and then you stay for the community and the mindset,” because nobody thinks they need mindset. I mean, you were self-aware enough that you’re like, “No, I need that.” But I think people are just like, “Yeah, yeah—what’s the answer, what’s the answer?” And then they come in and they’re like, “Oh, wait, this is so much bigger.” As Rick Friedman says, “Trial work is personal work.” If you want to be really good, you’ve got to get into your own shit, which TLC is so good at with the psychodrama stuff. We’re dealing with the mindset piece.

The second piece that pinged me when you were talking—we were just at TLU a couple months ago, and one of our new members, who I also just interviewed because he literally was in my seminar—

Anna Martinez:
Yes!

Sari de la Motte:
He never heard of me, he was in my seminar on Friday, went to trial Monday, and got a $2 million verdict.

Anna Martinez:
Yay!

Sari de la Motte:
He’s insane. He’s like, “I just tried it. I just learned this two days ago.” But he said, “This just resonated with me—this is for me, this is the way that I want to try cases.” That’s the thing that we constantly say—there’s no necessarily right way, it’s just what’s the way that resonates with you. This obviously resonates with a lot of people, including you.

Before we talk about your trial—and this is going to come, the podcast is going to come out later—but for you and me, right in this moment, the election just happened. A lot of, particularly women—so I wanted to get your take on this—women trial lawyers are struggling. I’ve heard this with, “I can’t trust my jury, actually. Half of America just told me that women don’t matter, that minorities don’t matter, that marginalized groups don’t matter. How can I now stand in front of this group and trust them? Maybe I’ve been naive this whole time, Sari.” What would you say to that?

Anna Martinez:
I hear that. What I’m hearing also is the fear of unknown—what is going to happen? How is our jury system going to be affected? How are jurors going to be affected by the kind of clients that we sometimes represent that they may not like? But I had the odd experience—and I say “odd” for myself—I have represented people I deeply care about who I found out later are Trumpers, and I’m not. But I think what I learned from representing these people—I love these people. Deep down in my heart, I care for them so much, and they cared for me back. It was really difficult for me to have resentment toward them, and I think that’s how jurors are. Politics is weird, because it does require us to take a philosophical, extreme position about something. In doing so, what we’re trying to do—what’s really the motive behind that?—is to be included and connected with people. My thought about this election is—I’m a million, but my thought, looking at all the data and all the things people are saying, is people don’t feel connected, and they feel like there is something happening that they’re either being disconnected from people, they’re frustrated, and they don’t feel like they’re seeing themselves. That could be really hard for people—not to see themselves anymore reflected back at you in society, because it’s changing how we deal with that. That’s the philosophical difference.

What I would tell women is, “Don’t hold it as if it’s an automatic judgment,” because that’s what you’re having. What you have to do is make that juror matter to you—that we’re not here to talk about any of that. I had my second trial that I just did not long ago, and it was on the day of the election. One thing I emphasized to my jurors is how grateful I was: people are doing double duty. You’re only called for jury service because you registered to vote in Colorado—that’s how you get on the rolls. I said, “Everybody here is doing double duty. You have registered to vote; you’ve probably exercised your right to vote or you’re going to do that today, but you showed up for us today anyways, because what really this is all about: we show up for each other. This is our community. You get to decide these issues. It’s not up to people we elect. It’s literally up to you.” I strongly believe that.

Sari de la Motte:
I love that. I love that. I love that, because what I do know is that there are two primary emotions that motivate decisions, and that’s fear or love. If, in fact, this election—and I believe it was—decided from a place of fear, our reaction cannot be responding in fear.

Anna Martinez:
Correct.

Sari de la Motte:
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that it’s love. I do know that love is the answer. I think that, just like we talk about, you can do focus groups all day long and be like, “The jurors think this.” The only jury that really matters is the jury in front of you on that first day of trial, and you have to take them as they are—just like your mom would say—instead of bringing in all of your shit, which I totally understand why we would after what’s happened. Thank you for your thoughts on that—I thought I would just ping on that. All right, tell us about this case, and give us a little overview, and then we’ll just dive a little bit into how you overcame some of the issues.

Anna Martinez:
I got involved after the case had been picked and had been started by another lawyer that I truly adore, who is a fantastic, what I would call the modern generalist. She’s from Louisiana. She’s an amazing trial lawyer here in Colorado, Natasha Gutierrez. She came to me with a case and, at first, I’m just not familiar with this area of law. We have a construction defect law in Colorado, and it has some harsh things about statutes of limitations—how long you have to sue somebody. Then it has caps on certain remedies or damages that you have. I was just like, “I don’t understand the story of what happened here.” So she says, “Listen,” she’s like, “I’m from Louisiana, and if there’s anything we understand in Louisiana, it’s flooding.” And I said, “Touché,” because in Colorado, it is such an extremely odd occurrence, in the sense that we don’t get a lot of moisture here, so if it does happen, something unusual must have happened that [inaudible 00:21:14].

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah, I think of Colorado as dry. Every time I’ve been to Denver, I feel like I use more ChapStick than ever—and I use a lot of ChapStick normally. Yeah.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, it is very dry, and the moisture that comes is mostly snow—it’s not rain. I just was like, “Tell me what happened here.” Her thumbnail sketch is: I have an elderly couple who buys this home. It’s a custom home in this really nice subdivision in a small town about an hour north of Denver. It’s called Greeley, Colorado. It’s kind of an urban/agricultural city, because we have a small university there, the University of Northern Colorado. They have a vet college there, so it’s very agricultural-focused. It’s not a “city-city”; it’s more of a town, so it’s got a cool mix of people. It’s in a county that I actually really enjoy trying cases in, because I feel like the jury pool is pretty spread. It’s like you get a little bit of a good mix of urban and rural, a good mix of education and age, because people can afford homes there. I feel like, if you’re going to try a case, it’s got, to me, a pretty good spread of people.

I was like, “You already got me sold on where this happened, because I do like being in this county.” And she says, “Well, they buy this house—what happens is there is a terrible, horrible rainstorm that comes in 2021.” When the rain comes—I mean, it is one of the heaviest rainfalls in about 50 years that they had in the region, and it swells the Thompson River, et cetera. But the rain comes, and all of a sudden this torrent of water comes from behind their home. There’s a farm behind their home, and it’s just like a tsunami wave, and it just rushes over, spills into their yard, floods their entire basement in minutes—about seven feet of water in less than 10 minutes. Very extreme and scary. They’re both home at the time, and she’s like, “This just shouldn’t have happened.” I said, “Yeah, it’s a custom home, it’s in a beautiful area—the subdivision seems like… Something happened.” So we both tried to understand it better. “Well, tell me why you think it was wrong, and could they have avoided the harm, and can money fix it?” Right? It’s kind of the Sari question.

Sari de la Motte:
Right, yeah. My question immediately, I’m listening to this, is how could that have been avoided? It never floods in Denver or in Colorado. Yeah.

Anna Martinez:
I’m like, “Act of God,” all the things. [inaudible]

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah, who could have seen this? Yeah.

Anna Martinez:
Who could see this coming? She’s like, “Oh, no.” She’s like, “Let me tell you: the way flooding normally happens is it’s not because you get a ton of rain, and then the front yard fills up.” She’s like, “Water has to go somewhere.” She goes, “That’s the whole point of land development and planning. They knew it from the beginning when they built this development—water has to go somewhere, because there’s a 500-acre farm behind the subdivision. It’s enormous.” She’s like, “I guarantee you, just based on what happened, something’s happened there.” So she had looked—

Sari de la Motte:
They didn’t plan for where the water would go. Got it.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah. She says, “Listen, my whole theory is there is something wrong with the design and the execution of whatever they were supposed to do with the drainage and where the water’s supposed to go.” I’m like, “Okay.” She did a ton of work; she got all the plans that were publicly filed. I mean, I learned so much, too, about how this process works, so it was also kind of fun. But she then hired a very brilliant expert in Colorado who does water engineering and hydrology. This guy teaches also, and that’s really what sold me on the case, because he walked me through, in about 15 minutes, really basic things about, “This is how development works. Your biggest concern is the water has to go back to the river.” In Colorado, we have Western water rights, so he’s like, “If water’s not seeping back into where it was supposed to go originally, you got a problem. People have water rights. Part of planning your development is how do I get this water that normally falls back into this river?” I mean, that’s kind of the whole premise.

Sari de la Motte:
That sounds like a teaching section.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, it was perfect.

Sari de la Motte:
It sounds like teaching section—“Here’s how you do this correctly when creating a development.” Did you put that in your teaching section?

Anna Martinez:
Absolutely. He had this really beautiful—everyone understands in Colorado, we’re a dry state; you need to get water back to where it’s got to go, because people use it. And in this community, they understand it because they deal with irrigation and farming. It’s very familiar with “Of course, the water’s got to go back where it’s got to go.” And then, from that conversation, he also did such a great job of explaining, like, “Here are all the ways that we divert water.” I didn’t know—streets, sidewalks, gutters, those are things that divert water. It was just such a beautiful situation, where he just opened the door to very simplistic understanding: how this was supposed to work and where the water should have gone, and pointed out, “Listen, I can show you on the plans what happened.”

The minute I could see it in real time, I was like, “I see what happened. They were supposed to do one design; they switched it for another design.” Essentially, they switched the whole design from this complex channel system—it was supposed to be a really wide, 16- to 25-feet-wide channel to divert water—to literally a mound or hump of dirt that was two feet high.

Sari de la Motte:
Okay, so immediately my mind goes to motive. Why did they do that?

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, I wonder. This development was done in about 2008. It’s like the market’s crashed; houses are not selling. Definitely, that farm property is likely not going to develop, so you have all these other elements happening. My clients are these innocent purchasers—they come and buy their home. They think, “This is our forever home till…” They’re in their eighties now, and it’s their forever home. That was the thing: Why would you ever think your home was in danger of flooding? It’s just not a thought that crosses your mind. She put all these things together. I step in in the discovery phase, and once the expert disclosures were made and once the depositions were completed, it was very clear: now we have a story and a picture here that we understand what happened on the developer’s side, we understand what happened when my clients purchased the property and what they expected, and then we had the disaster.

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah. Let’s talk about that. What were the damages? How much damage was done to the house? Was it just the basement? Was it foundation? Was it yard? What were the actual damages and the amounts?

Anna Martinez:
They had about seven feet of water in their basement, and they had no water, thankfully, in the upper floor. The good thing is, they could stay in the home while it was being remediated. My client—he was like, “Listen, I ended up spending at least $300,000 on the total amounts of the repair.” He had receipts for something less, because he just didn’t think of keeping it all together with everything going on. But here was the beautiful thing: even on something as mundane as economic damages—what are all the things you did to repair the basement?—the neighbor was there when this happened, and the clients are home. They’re like, “Oh, my God—our neighbors!” People come to check on them, and they’re like, “Help us! Our basement’s flooding. There’s all this water. It’s scary, the sound.” All of the neighbors come together. A guy who works in the oil field has a sump pump, like an industrial-sized sump pump that’s portable, that he pulls from home, parks it in front of their house, and sucks all that water out in a couple hours. The neighbors come to the rescue.

Sari de la Motte:
Community is alive and well. I love it, I love it. So why not just file an insurance claim? Why do we have to go to trial and do this?

Anna Martinez:
In Colorado, there’s no flood insurance. If your home is damaged from floodwater, as opposed to if a pipe bursts and your home floods from a broken pipe, that’s a covered claim, but we don’t have FEMA zones. There are very few FEMA zones that people even build in the Boulder area, but home insurance does not cover this. This is directly all out of their pocket. This is the goodwill of the neighbors coming in to help them. This is a man and his wife who spent about a year, year and a half working with neighbors and contractors, putting their house back together out of their own pocket.

Sari de la Motte:
A major disrupt, for sure. How are they defending this? What are they saying?

Anna Martinez:
They had a couple theories. The first one is more of a legal/technical argument that, “Listen, this is a statute-of-limitations issue. This development was done in 2008. You’re just S.O.L. on the time.” They had very technical legal arguments on that side. As far as the water and where it came from and this, that, and the other, the other argument they had was, “Well, the house next door—the lot next door to them—did not get sold and built until 2016, so much later.” Even our water engineer was like, “Water would come, and it would flow through that lot, and there would be no flooding, because most of the water ran through the vacant lot next door, so you didn’t have this problem. But once the house is built, you have a much narrower lot now.” Their theory was, “Oh, they built up the house too high; there were all the downspouts; everything was kind of slanted toward my client’s house, so it was really their fault that all the water’s coming into their house.” We were able to really address that head-on with our engineer, who was like, “The bottom line is the volume of water that’s coming toward those houses—that’s what was supposed to be controlled by proper drainage.”

Sari de la Motte:
And then I’m assuming the other things on your fears list would be the things we started with—“Act of God, we never have flooding.” Are there other fears that you had to overcome besides the defenses that they were putting up?

Anna Martinez:
Right. I had created—I don’t know if I brought my cards. I did not. I use index cards all the time, and I—okay, here’s one of my fears. I put my fears on a card, and it says, “It’s the neighbor’s fault and the builder, not our fault.” And then on the back, I put, “Okay, how do I respond to that?” But for the failure of the drainage berm, the runoff from the acreage off-site, all that water would not have drained between the houses—it would have been a fraction of that amount.

Sari de la Motte:
I just want to stop for a minute and just remind our listeners that Anna—Anna—is working the H2H one-year process, which is: have a fear, write out all your fears. She does them on index cards, which I think is brilliant, and then ask yourself, “What would a juror have to believe to negate or nullify this fear?”—which is what’s on the back of your card. I love that. Now, just for time, let’s go to voir dire for a sec. I know there, in Colorado, you get, what, two minutes? No, I think it’s like 20 minutes.

Anna Martinez:
Average.

Sari de la Motte:
Was that true in your case as well? Yeah, average.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, so we got 20 minutes apiece, and that’s very average in Colorado, unfortunately.

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah, yeah.

Anna Martinez:
I know a lot of people fight it. I’m of the opinion—listen, I had a great conversation with some lawyers and law students two or three days before trial. I went to a soiree to celebrate a friend—she has her own firm, and she does an “I’m the Greatest Lawyer in the World” party every year, and it’s awesome. Everyone comes, and they’re like, “Yes, you are!”

Sari de la Motte:
I love that.

Anna Martinez:
It was so fun, because I wasn’t going to go, but I was like, “I need to just turn my brain off.” The good thing is, I was able to talk to people about the case, and people kept asking, “Oh, my God, what can you do in 20 minutes?” I was talking about your book, and I was like, “Listen, here’s what I’m doing: I am thinking about all the things my jurors are doing today to prepare to show up for me on Monday. I have people who are rearranging childcare so that someone’s driving their kid to school. I probably have someone on my jury who had a doctor appointment that had to cancel and reschedule. I definitely have some people that have had to call off work, and people depended on them to show up that day, and someone’s covering their shift.” Part of my prep work is thinking about all the things the jurors did to come and help me to be on this jury. And that’s what’s helping me prepare, is because then I can step into this 20 minutes having gratitude for them being there instead of fear. Because it’s like [inaudible 00:28:12]

Sari de la Motte:
Well, that’s mindset right there. That’s mindset. You’re preparing your own mindset of putting yourself in their shoes before you lay it on. What did you voir dire on, then?

Anna Martinez:
I had a whole voir dire plan with all the things. The good thing about doing that is I got through my design alliance, which I thought was important. I had people say—

Sari de la Motte:
Did you get objected to, or did the judge shut you down?

Anna Martinez:
No.

Sari de la Motte:
I always ask that, because everyone is always freaked out about that, like, “Oh, my God, I’ll never—” Everybody on my podcast goes, “No, it was fine.”

Anna Martinez:
Yeah. I think that even the defense was just sort of like, “Oh, okay.” They kind of had some buy-in. When they did their voir dire, it was like, “Well, Ms. Martinez already covered blah, blah, blah.” It was really funny, because he just kind of referred back to my questions. But I did design alliance. What I focused on was—remember, you had done a podcast a while ago, and you were talking about how sometimes defense points get in our funnels. I was thinking about my funnels, and one of the things you all did was to say, “Instead of first asking about my fears, why don’t I start asking, why did I take the case and identify those reasons?” That’s how I started with my funnels.

One of the things that I said is, well—like, what would Sari say?—“What do you want to know from the jurors, Anna?” I thought, “Oh, I know what I want to know. I want to know how many jurors here help people. Why is that important to help people? Why would you want to help people? That’s just out of the goodness of your heart. Basically, do you want to protect people and help them? Is that your spirit? Is that your heart?” I want to find those people and put them on my jury. What I asked is—

Sari de la Motte:
I love it.

Anna Martinez:
“Has anybody ever been displaced by a flood, hurricane, or disaster, or have you helped somebody who has?” Literally, everyone’s hand went up—everybody in the box. They had fascinating stories. I had a guy, this IT tech guy who just looked super—like, most people would never pick this guy—tell this incredible story: how he’s like, “Well, I volunteered with a group of people, and I went to help hurricane victims; we painted houses.” Another guy who was in the same boat was a tech guy, and was just like, “Yeah, my church—we got together, and we helped people after Hurricane Harvey.” So many people were affected by hurricanes, like their family members in Texas, in Florida, and they all talked about, “I helped my grandma, I helped neighbors; we sent several trips down there to just help people.” And I was like, “There you go.”

Sari de la Motte:
Love it.

Anna Martinez:
That’s the connection. Then I was able to put them in conversation with each other. “You heard so-and-so talk about what they had gone and why this was important—can you tell me why was it important to house your brother after this? Why was that meaningful for you?” It was so cool, because some of these things that we talk about and think about—once you get people agreeing on a principle or on the idea that it’s a good thing to help people and it makes you feel good, that’s the mindset you’re creating, where it doesn’t even have to be about your case. It’s just like, “Why are we all here?”

Sari de la Motte:
That’s what I think is so brilliant about it. You are brilliant, and I knew that the minute I met you, but that’s primarily the big thing that they’re there to do. I love what you did with that. It’s very similar to getting danger in the air. Sometimes we’ll ask a question that we don’t really care about the answer; we just want the danger in the air—like, “Who’s ever shared the road with a semi truck? What was that like?” We’re not really trying to go anywhere; we’re just being like, “That’s scary.” It sounds very similar, like, “How important is helping people? I want that in the air in a case like this—and probably in most of our cases.” I love that. I’m going to steal that, and I will credit you, of course. Did you feel good with the jury that you ended up with?

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, I didn’t get to any of the money/responsibility questions. I did make sure—I had a sticky note that said, “Ask the jurors if they want to serve or they want to go home,” because I did promise—so I did. I said, “I just have one more question: does anybody think, ‘This is not a case for me—I don’t think I could be on this jury’—let me know, please.” And I did my hand raise. Everyone said, “I want to serve.” They all looked around, and they were like, “I’m okay.” Not a single person tried to get out.

Sari de la Motte:
Excellent. In 20 minutes. In 20 minutes.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:
That’s unbelievable. And you didn’t use the whole time to go after cause challenges and do all the things.

Anna Martinez:
No, I mean—

Sari de la Motte:
It’s such a waste of time. Yeah.

Anna Martinez:
No, and I think cause challenges are just also something that’s—really, those people out themselves. They’ll usually say, “I have all these issues or problems and I can’t serve and make excuses.” I’m like, “The judge is going to let them out anyway. You don’t even need to really—” The judge doesn’t want people who don’t want to be there either.

Sari de la Motte:
That’s right. That’s right. Was there an offer in this case?

Anna Martinez:
There was a formally filed offer—it’s not confidential—of $75,000 was the formal offer.

Sari de la Motte:
Okay. Before we reveal what you got on this, let’s talk about opening. How did that go?

Anna Martinez:
Oh, great. I did follow the pattern that we use in H2H. The good thing is—this is a plug for motions practice and sometimes why it is important—I had to defend a summary judgment motion, all these motions. But the good thing is, it helped me really refine, “How could the danger have been eliminated, avoided, or how could you have warned against the danger?” Those were the three things I focused the whole case on, because there’s an answer to each of those questions. It was very easy to put my opening together, because everything revolved around these three things that I had actual facts and evidence to support, like, “This whole thing could have been avoided if the original design was built. This whole thing—you could have minimized the danger, even if you built not the original design, if you had employed a maintenance plan to make sure this dirt berm lasted over time. And then, at the very least, you could have just warned the homeowner and said, ‘We didn’t have a maintenance plan in place, and this thing probably washed away, so I think it would be a good idea to take steps to raise your window wells or build up dirt behind the home to divert water.’” Whatever. Those three things—

Sari de la Motte:
There’s our safety triangle, right? Yep—eliminate it, mitigate it, warn. I love it, I love it, I love it. And so how long was the trial?

Anna Martinez:
It ended up—let’s see—it started on a Monday, and we got to a verdict on Thursday, so it was a four-day trial. It probably could’ve been—

Sari de la Motte:
I love it. Coach Jody will love that.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, I was trying to do it in three, to be honest, because I am a strong believer in “shorter is better.” I do love the idea that length is fear and brevity is confidence. I’m a strong believer in that.

Sari de la Motte:
Yes, you listened to that “Confidence or Fear” podcast?

Anna Martinez:
Yes.

Sari de la Motte:
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. It’s not that short is what we are going after; it’s clarity. And when you’re clear, short is the result. It’s not like, “Let’s just make this short;” it’s, “Let’s get so clear on what our case is that we don’t need to have it drag on for weeks and weeks.” Okay.

Anna Martinez:
Because you can say it once, and literally, the juror heard you, and you’re not having to repeat it a million times with 10 witnesses. This is why judges hate cumulative evidence, where they’re just like, “Why am I having this witness say this when someone else already said it?” Lawyers are skeptical about that, but I’m like, “No, you’re right, we don’t need that additional person,” because someone already said that.

Sari de la Motte:
Right. It goes back to fear, right—“I gotta make sure that I really nail this,” but it’s doing the opposite. What was your ask in the case? What did you ask the jury for?

Anna Martinez:
I asked the jury to give the full compensation for what we could show receipts for. We used the neighbor—he was also a contractor, and he did all the work at a discount. And what I had him do is, I had him go through his bills, and I said, “Listen, some of the stuff that’s itemized in here is additional stuff that wasn’t original to the home,” and I said, “Take that out.” He did this really good job of, “Yeah, I added a bathroom in this.” We adjusted, actually, what the document said. It was $140,000 for the economic damages. And I used the “Triple C Damages House.”

Sari de la Motte:
Damages House—oh, from Christy Crowe Childers. I just podcasted with her last week. I love it, I love it, I love it.

Anna Martinez:
Her Damages House was great because it was a case about a house. The cool thing is, in my closing, I was able to put the foundation of the house is the basement. I said, “This is where the $140,000 goes.” I said, “Let’s talk about the rooms upstairs where the clients now live.” We had a jury instruction that has four elements for non-economics. That included impairment of the quality of life, it included mental pain and suffering, emotional stress, and inconvenience. I made the biggest room in the house the impairment of the quality-of-life piece, because as an elderly couple, one of the challenges they faced is she was so fearful of staying in the house that this could happen again. They were like, “We have to sell the house and leave. Let’s repair it and then let’s sell it, because you’re not getting rest here, literally.” They sold the house, and the tricky part is, they had moved for a little while, but she hated where they were. She packed her Subaru and was like, “I’m going back to Colorado,” and her husband stayed behind to try to sell the house. It actually resulted in this really terrible situation where they had to live apart. To me, the whole case was about the personal injury, the non-economic damages.

We asked—for each of our rooms, we basically had a total of $600,000 for the non-economic damages, to be shared between the two plaintiffs. The total ask was $600k for the non-economics and the $140k for the economic damages.

Sari de la Motte:
Oh, $740k.

Anna Martinez:
Yes.

Sari de la Motte:
And they had offered $75,000?

Anna Martinez:
Correct.

Sari de la Motte:
Okay. And what was the actual verdict?

Anna Martinez:
$890,000.

Sari de la Motte:
They brought back more than you asked. Were you able to talk to them about why? Or if not, what are your thoughts on why?

Anna Martinez:
I did speak to the jurors afterward—mainly my clients wanted to meet them and just tell them, “Thank you for being on our jury.” They were so cute. We all waited outside, and I just said, “Could you tell us what this was like for you, being on this jury? What were some of the important things for you?” And all of them said—they referenced back to voir dire, where they said, “All of us have been in these situations where we’ve helped people, and we understood how devastating it is to have part of your house has been ruined and wrecked. You’re doing what you can to minimize or mitigate your damages, staying in your home while repairing it, and how life-altering it is to lose your family photos, lose all these things.” Everyone kept going back to this original conversation in voir dire, and they had this experience that they could talk about. What we heard was very compelling, because they had literally seen family members and people they know go through that. I think that was what was meaningful—making that connection. Again, it’s connection—it’s like these are people who don’t know each other. We had a woman who was a Ph.D., we had a guy who was a retired oil-field worker. These are things they had in common: these are people who care about people, and they cared about our clients.

Sari de la Motte:
So why the $150k bump? Were they just, “You know what—”

Anna Martinez:
They thought it wasn’t enough.

Sari de la Motte:
I just love that. I just love that. $75k offer, $740k ask, and $890,000 verdict—that is incredible. We were so cheering you on, and to hear that at the end was just amazing. What was your big learning, either from H2H being a part of this or from the trial itself, that you would share with other trial lawyers?

Anna Martinez:
What you spend time on is what’s important.

Sari de la Motte:
You make important, yeah.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah, what you make important—that was very key for me, because when I would get distracted by the crazy technical legal arguments, I had to keep reminding myself: those are defense points. Jurors don’t think technically about defenses—lawyers do—and what they’re worried about, the jurors, is just like, “How did this play out? I understand the story as the juror. The legal arguments are dumb.” What I tried to just constantly refocus on is, “Okay, they’ve said this crazy thing. I have to just refocus it back on what is my story that I’m trying to tell—why was this wrong, how could it have been avoided, and what can money do?” I mean, those were just the constant refrains I had to have, to plumb myself down in trial, to be like, “Don’t take the bait and get into this wild, crazy rabbit hole of a defense,” because then the jurors will think there’s something there, and there really wasn’t.

Sari de la Motte:
Right, right. The more attention you give to it, the more you make it important. You are now in our Mindset Mastery class, so I’m sure you’re learning way more mindset things there. You already sound like such a mindset master. I’m just so thrilled for you. I’m so excited. I’m sure your clients were absolutely dumbfounded by this result.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah. I think what’s really wonderful about having clients with you, even in a scary moment—we had to wait for a verdict. Normally I have never eaten through trial; I just can’t, because my stomach and my nerves are bad. It’s like the first time in my life, my whole lawyer life, I ate after the case was over, and I was like, “I’m hungry.” We ate and waited for a verdict, and I felt just so different, because I knew, “Even if this doesn’t turn out the way we want it to, we got people to care and pay attention. My clients felt taken care of, and I felt like I took care of them.” That’s why I’m here, is I wanted to show them that.

Sari de la Motte:
The verdict is the jurors’ job.

Anna Martinez:
Yeah. For once, I let it go. That was really helpful for me. I know you always say “Trust the jury.” The other thing I really felt was helpful is, in the preparation to the trial—thinking about them—I also thought about them. I tried to make it very intentional: “What did my jury hear today?” so that I didn’t repeat myself the next day.

Sari de la Motte:
I love that.

Anna Martinez:
And just tell myself, “Okay, they already heard this, this, and this—good, I can move on from that,” and just make sure everything I said mattered. I tried to think of it like a movie script, or when you watch a television show—I watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, but the reason I like it is Shonda Rhimes is a really brilliant screenwriter, because she has a thing where she says, “You can act however you want, but you have to say every word that I write because it matters.” The more I watch it and I hear the dialogue, you get really intense emotion in two- or three-minute segments of people. It’s never more than three minutes. There’s very little dialogue that could even happen sometimes, and I think it’s really instructive that I don’t need to have a laundry list or beat a point to death. If you are patient with the point and talk about it and let the person reflect on it to give you the answer, that’s what’s creating—

Sari de la Motte:
Right. You’re talking about some nonverbal marking there, too—some pausing and voice tone—because I just think about if I say to Kevin, “Don’t forget to pick up Elena today,” and then I’m like, “Don’t forget to pick up Elena today,” and two hours later, “Don’t forget to pick up Elena today.” He’s going to think, “You don’t think I’m going to pick up Elena today?” When we’re consistently reminding our jurors, “This is important,” they’re going to be like, “You obviously think we don’t think it’s important—maybe it isn’t important. Why would she think that?” Versus, “This is just the truth, and I know you know it and I know it—it’s important to help people, and this was wrong, and bye-bye.” By the way, I don’t know if you’re a documentary person, but Anatomy of Lies—about the writer for Grey’s Anatomy who made up cancer and a bunch of other shit and got found out—you gotta go watch Anatomy of Lies.

Anna Martinez:
Oh, I know there’s a documentary. I read the articles. I’m going to watch it, yes.

Sari de la Motte:
Okay, yes, in Vanity Fair. Yes, I did too. Okay, yeah. Well, Anna—Anna, my dear friend—you’re just magic. You are magic. I knew it the minute I met you. It’s always fun when the jury reflects that—they don’t always. Like you said, you had a loss after this. But thank you so much for being in our lives, in the Crew, and I’m just so grateful for you and that you are in this world making the change that you’re making. Thank you for being here.

Anna Martinez:
Well, thank you, and for sharing what you have seen that’s hard for us lawyers to see—that we can have connection with people, and it is scary. It’s okay to feel scared, but they’re not scary people. They’re just everyday people that are there to do the right thing.