Attorney
Glasheen, Valles & Inderman, L.L.P
I’ve work with Pat Montes on cases for more than a decade. We’ve worked on all sorts of personal injury cases together, from routine car wrecks to complicated serious injury and wrongful death cases. She has deftly navigated challenging family dynamics and clients who are very hesitant to open up or reserved.
It almost feels unfair because with Pat’s process I feel like I get such a jump start. In one day, or sometimes half day, I can gather information and build relationship with my clients that would often take months or a year–if I was ever able to achieve that depth of knowledge.
The benefits of working with Pat are too long to list exhaustively, but there are few key benefits that I have touted to my firm and friends that they have found most significant. (1) Unearthing key witnesses: Through Pat’s methods, she has a systematic way of finding key damages witnesses that have not been mentioned despite my many hours trying to uncover meaningful witnesses; (2) Teaching clients how to talk about their pain and emotional experiences: Pat’s experience as a plaintiff’s lawyer and work with hundreds of clients has honed a clear method to teach clients how they can meaningfully explain to a jury the pain they’ve experienced from their injuries and the emotional consequences of their new life; (3) Understanding the client: Despite spending a lot of time with my clients, going to their home, and striving to understand them, I often get much more out of a session with Pat when it comes to understanding my client’s experiences and what generally makes my client tick; (4) Building connection and trust: Pat’s process is personal for all the participants. It requires that I share some of myself. This leads to an openness and connection with clients that can be hard to create in many cases. This creates a level of trust as well because the clients feel that you know them and that you have trusted them with personal experiences in your life so they trust your advice more; (5) Clients feel heard: In our practice, most cases never get tried. There is a cathartic process to the client being able to share his or her story. It’s not met, and is often frustrated, by the cross examination of the deposition process. Working with Pat allows my clients to feel that they had a chance to tell their story or the story of their loved one. I feel like this is a service to the client. I find many of them feel such a weight lifted off their shoulders because they’ve shared the burden they’ve been forced to carry because of whatever incident necessitated the case.
I’m also a graduate of the Trial Lawyer’s College, so I have received training in some of the areas that form the general foundation of Pat’s work, but working with her goes far beyond that. She brings a lot more experience working with clients to discover and tell their stories, and she brings an educated outsider’s eye that can identify issues and even help find the stories that explain the issue. My office knows that I use Pat on every case I litigate and for any big case, we will likely have her help with both deposition prep and trial testimony prep. Even on cases that I do not try, I frequently break out the notes from her session with my client to help me prepare for many phases of a case, such as demand writing, damage witness and doctor depositions, and even cross examination of opposing experts and witnesses.
Working with Pat gives me an indispensable edge in my cases that I cannot recommend enough to other injury trial lawyers who want to make sure the jury really understands their clients’ stories.”
