The Power of Connection and Transparency with Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen’s Eric Halsey

Throughout nearly two decades of litigating plaintiffs’ medical malpractice and personal injury matters, Eric Halsey has been fiercely committed to the core tenets of his practice: know the facts cold and forge a client connection with warmth and truth.

From the early days of his career, Halsey knew that he wanted to work on matters that affected individuals: “Working for real people who have real problems drew me in,” he says. The first half of his career focused on a broad base of tort litigation, including significant wrongful death, negligent security, motor vehicle accidents and medical malpractice cases. He achieved notable wins in the process: In 2013, he second-chaired a trucking negligence trial representing a driver who lost his left leg in a crash. He and his team obtained a $7.3M jury verdict.

The last nine years of his career, though, have been more narrowly focused. Since 2015, he has been one half of Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen’s two-lawyer Boca Raton, Fla. office – a powerhouse wing dedicated almost entirely to medical malpractice. Joining the firm with a specific focus in mind excited Halsey; after a decade litigating a wide range of cases, he was ready to specialize.

That passion, focus and drive has yielded striking results. Halsey recently secured his seventh eight-figure resolution in his time at the firm, most recently on behalf of a client who suffered an incapacitating brain injury while in an MRI machine at a hospital.

Halsey is dedicated to walking his clients through every step of the process with full transparency. He also shares a career’s-worth of experience with past clients who have been through similar situations. His clients are universally navigating the most difficult times in their lives, from major illness and injury to the untimely death of a family member. As they go through that process, he serves as a confidant and advisor, fighting steadfastly for them in litigation while simultaneously guiding them through the way he’s seen other clients navigate the medical, logistical and emotional toll the effects of medical malpractice can take.

Halsey is a member of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Consumer Lawyers.

Lawdragon: What brought you to a career in the law?

Eric Halsey: I had no desire to go to law school. When I got out of college, I was a general assignment reporter at a Fox affiliate in Lansing, Michigan. I did weekend sports and three days of news. I did that for about a year, then I decided I didn't want to do that anymore. I also didn't want to live in Lansing, Michigan. So, I moved back to New York City where I went to college. My brother was working as a paralegal at Davis Polk in New York. He got me a job temping and I eventually got a job as a paralegal in the tax department. I did that for about a year and a half, and I was sort of in between careers. My cousin was a 1L at the University of Miami and I had a lot of discussions with him about law school and it was sort of a little bit of a, "What do I do with my life?" moment. I thought law school might be something. And honestly, 9/11 happened and quickly after that I thought, "I’ve got to get out of New York." So, I started studying for the LSAT through the rest of 2001 and then started law school the next year.

LD: What brought you to plaintiffs’ injury law?

EH: I was older in law school, and I wanted to jump into career mode immediately. So, after my first year of law school, I got a job as a law clerk. Because of my time in television, I thought I wanted to be a media lawyer, so I found some firms that said they handled media law. When I went to one of them, it so happened that the managing partner had been a personal injury lawyer for 25 years. He didn't really want to do personal injury anymore, even though he got a lot of case referrals. So, I basically ran his personal injury cases. I tried some cases and always liked personal injury because it wasn't staring at how two parties interpret a contract. Working for real people who have real problems drew me in.

LD: And how did you come to Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen?

EH: After working with a friend at another firm for a number of years, my wife and I started a family, and we were getting a little tired of Miami. I was reading the Daily Business Review one morning, and it said, “Associate wanted for medical malpractice firm in Boca Raton," which is where I'm from. At the bottom is usually some generic email to respond with your resume, but this one read nar@grossmanroth.com. Being a lawyer in Miami for almost 10 years, I knew exactly who that was. Even though I'd never met Neal, I'd met Stuart plenty of times and I knew some of the lawyers here. So, I sent in my resume, and they told me they’d like me to come in for an interview with Gary Cohen.

I came in and I think the first thing that I was told was that they had already offered this job to somebody else, but Gary and I hit it off very well, and we talked about Miami Heat basketball for about an hour and a half. He said, "I've been doing malpractice for 37 years. This is all we do." And that was all I needed to hear because I really wanted to specialize in something. Then, that was it. We moved to Boca nine years ago. Out of three very highly accomplished, long-tenured lawyers that I've worked for, Gary is by far the best lawyer I've ever seen. So, learning from him has been the greatest career accomplishment of my life, honestly.

LD: What lessons did you learn when you started working in medical malpractice that you would share with others?

EH: Number one, preparation. Doing medical malpractice, you have to know exactly what happened. You have to know exactly what every term means, what the medical issue is, how the standard of care was breached and how to present that to a jury. And it all starts with the medical records. If you don't have the medical records at the tip of your tongue, you're going to fail.

I think the other thing that we do well around here, and you have to do well as a trial attorney, is you’ve got to know your client backwards and forwards. You can't meet them the first time and not give them your cell phone number and not be texting with them all the time or letting them know what's going on with your case and asking them what's going on in their life, because we have to tell their story at some point. You've got to know their story stone cold, and you have to be their friend because you can't be their advocate unless you're their friend. GRYC is very good at starting that relationship very early on and it being an intense period of time of getting to know your client right off the bat. And then it turns into a friendship. It really does.

You've got to know their story stone cold, and you have to be their friend because you can't be their advocate unless you're their friend.

Also, you don't have to be a jerk. That's the other thing. I've never been a lawyer who gets into fights needlessly. It's pointless. It really is. Litigation doesn't work when you're yelling and screaming at each other.

LD: Can you tell me a story about a case or a client that really stands out to you in terms of building that connection with a client?

EH: There are many. In the most recent example, we represented a husband who was injured and rendered mentally and physically incapacitated. His wife was also a plaintiff, and she was the one that I dealt with on a daily basis. I would be on the phone with her probably three or four times a week. She would ask my advice on what type of medical treatment she should be getting for her husband. She was sort of alone in the world and really relied on me and Gary to help guide her through not only this process, but the post-injury process of medicine and how patients navigate life. You learn a lot about the human struggle doing this, and you prepare people for what you have seen people in their situation, come to next. Being in touch with that in your relationship with your client is very important. This lady really needed our help. The case ended very, very successfully, and she and her husband will never have to worry about anything in terms of paying for medical care for the rest of their lives. But they're in their 30s and they've got a long way to go. So, understanding that and understanding how everybody really struggles in that circumstance, I think can help our clients navigate a little easier.

LD: How was he injured?

EH: He had a brain hemorrhage, and they decided to do an MRI after they found the hemorrhage on a CT. But between the CT and the MRI, his respiratory efforts started to diminish and change. He was also having problems speaking. He had had a hemorrhagic stroke. They decided to do the MRI instead of waiting for his respiratory effort to normalize, and he was laid flat, which caused him to aspirate. He suffered a brain injury because it took them forever to get to him, resuscitate him properly, get a code called, etc. So, he was down for somewhere between six to nine minutes and probably longer. The medical records were not put together very well at all. So, there were large gaps of time where there was nothing going on. It’s so sad because he is such a vibrant guy and the hemorrhage that he had totally resolved on its own. No surgery, nothing. So, the injuries he suffered were only due to the operation and the code and the MRI.

LD: That’s awful. Then, looking at your current practice, are there any trends you’re noticing in your practice lately?

EH: One thing that I am noticing that's really rather interesting is I'm now finding that a lot of the defense lawyers are using experts who have long been on the plaintiffs’ side. This practice is an expert-driven type of litigation. I can’t tell a jury who breached the standard of care without an expert telling me. Now, obviously every expert sees every case. They get all the medical records, and they decide whether anyone did anything wrong or not. So, they're not our experts, but they're people that we go to because we trust them to give us good opinions. And if they formulate those opinions that are positive for our case, they never waver from them. And I think the defense lawyers have gotten smart and have realized, “Why not tap into the pool of experts we keep seeing from this plaintiffs’ firm?”

LD: That’s interesting. And what cases are you working on at the moment?

EH: I have a lot of cases in their infancy. We recently settled a matter that we've been litigating pretty hard all the way through experts. It was involving a 59-year-old gentleman who was in the hospital for uncontrolled seizures. He was put on bedrest, and when you’re on bedrest, you can develop blood clots from the stasis. He was in the hospital for a total of six days and in the ICU for four days, and they never put him on a chemical blood thinner. He ended up dying of a massive pulmonary embolism. So, the case was about the critical care team not seeing the signs that he was high risk for blood clots and not putting him on a chemical blood thinner. It's another one of the long list of recent cases where we get to the doorstep of trial and the case gets resolved. That's happened a lot over the last few months, hence why all of my cases are now in their infancy. So, that'll be the rest of my year: building up this new batch of cases and moving in towards either resolution or trial.