By San Diego Business Journal | March 11, 2024
Going to War on Nuclear Verdicts®
LAW: Tyson & Mendes Lead Charge to Save Insurance Industry
LA JOLLA – The nationwide law firm of Tyson & Mendes LLP, founded and headquartered in San Diego, continues to be a leader in major legal victories for the insurance industry.
One of its latest high-profile wins, a decision from last month out of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, resulted in Tyson & Mendes saving Progressive Insurance more than $4 million in a high-risk car accident case, with a verdict rendering about one-fifth of what was initially asserted.
In another case, in Orange County last October, Tyson & Mendes scored a major defense win for a non-skilled home care company accused of liability after the death of one of its clients. In that case, plaintiffs seeking more than $9 million saw the ask rejected.
In other accident-injury cases, the firm has successfully defended Fortune 500 companies and also smaller businesses like Indiana-based Spear Corporation, a design/build company. Among its wins in 2023 was a wrongful death indemnity suit, a premises liability and negligence suit at a shopping mall and a medical malpractice case affecting three clients.
Tyson & Mendes reports that it saved the insurance industry more than $679 million in 2023, on top of nearly $1.1 billion saved in 2022. Tyson & Mendes says it has saved clients nearly $3 billion in the last four years.
What began in San Diego with co-founding attorneys Bob Tyson and Pat Mendes working out of a mail drop in Del Mar in 2002, now operates in 21 states across the country, and is 465-employees strong, including 230 attorneys. The two insurance defense lawyers first met in 1994, when Tyson, a New York transplant, was an associate working for an insurance defense firm in downtown San Diego, and Mendes, a Chula Vista native, was a partner-at-large at a regional firm.
Specializing in ‘Nuclear Verdicts®’ a Success for Firm
Over the past two decades, Tyson & Mendes has developed specialized defense methods to keep down damage awards and stop what are known as “Nuclear Verdicts®.”
The term was trademarked by Tyson, who literally wrote the book on it in 2020 – “Nuclear Verdicts®: Defending Justice for All,” an Amazon best-seller with a sequel coming later this year. Nuclear Verdicts® refers to those findings in which jury awards exceed $10 million, or where noneconomic damages outweigh economic damages in ways inconsistent with the facts of a case.
Awards of those kind have major impact on insurance companies, and with that, consumers. Tyson said he wrote the book because he believes in fairness.
“That book has been kind of a game changer,” Tyson said.
A decade before the book, and the impetus for it, was perhaps Tyson & Mendes’s most well-known victory — the 2011 Howell v. Hamilton Meats & Provisions case, which resulted in a landmark California Supreme Court decision that changed the state’s litigation landscape.
The case centered around former schoolteacher and professional surfer Rebecca Howell, who suffered a work-ending back injury from being hit by a Hamilton Meats truck after its driver made an illegal U-turn. The Howell ruling holds that an injured plaintiff is only allowed to recover the lower amount paid by health insurance to satisfy medical bills rather than the typically inflated figure billed to insurance companies by physicians and hospitals.
Since then, California courts have expanded the ruling to apply to Medicare payments, Medi-Cal payments, workers’ compensation payments, future medial damages and noneconomic damages. California also extended it to allow evidence of the Affordable Care Act when determining the cost of future care in medical malpractice cases.
Tyson said not only has that led to saving insurers and defendants billions of dollars, it also protects consumers by serving as a tool to determine the reasonable value of medical care and insurance premiums. The ruling has also impacted jury verdicts and appellate court rulings beyond California.
Howell Win Leads to Growth
“We were probably less than 15 or 20 lawyers at that time,” Tyson said.
“And we’ve been growing no less than 20% every year for the last decade, and it started with that case.”
Tyson said that trends show Nuclear Verdicts®, which “affect the economy at large,” are on the rise in both frequency and severity.
“It was only a couple of years ago that we had our first ever single-plaintiff billion-dollar verdict, and now there’s multiple billion-dollar lawsuits or jury verdicts for personal injury cases for just one plaintiff,” Tyson said. “I mean that that’s an incredible sum.”
He said it used to be that those types of verdicts came in “judicial hellholes” like Chicago, south Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, but now “it’s spread across the entire country.”
On the heels of the growth of the massive verdicts, Tyson & Mendes in 2022 launched a Nuclear Verdicts® Defense Institute, a four-day academy that teaches the methods presented in the book to defense lawyers across the country.
In 2023, Tyson and his sister, Denise Tyson, founded insurtech startup Schaefer City Technologies LLC to defuse Nuclear Verdicts®. Schaefer City Tech uses a software solution that utilizes machine learning technology that embeds into existing insurance software. It uses predictive analytics based on the key traits of more than 10 million data points analyzed in thousands of cases that resulted in Nuclear Verdicts.
The company is also moving forward on its own process that will incorporate Artificial Intelligence to help stop Nuclear Verdicts®.
“As the world becomes more automated, and AI becomes a part of everyday life, I believe we have the structure in place to take full advantage of technology and continue to be innovative thought leaders in our space,” Mendes said. “I am really looking forward to the next chapter of our firm’s development and growth, and excited to refine the way we provide quality legal services to our insurance clients across the country.”
Office Growth, Diversity and Disruption
In the past year, Tyson & Mendes has opened four new offices: Jacksonville, Florida; Houston, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; and Philadelphia. All have women managing partners.
In 2022, the company reported a 329% overall growth from the previous five years and that it was 60% women-owned.
“We hire a lot of younger, newer attorneys and we do a lot of training with them,” Tyson said. “So we’ll get asked something like, ‘How did you guys get here?’ And quite frankly I don’t know that people really like the answer, because if I was to boil it down to just one word, its ‘more.’ Like Pat and I just did more, and the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. We also took some chances that helped us grow.”
Tyson & Mendes also started a subsidiary called TM Halo, which stands for Tyson & Mendes High Altitude Low Opening. Tyson said TM Halo works on a 100% contingency model and specializes in taking the high-risk cases many other firms won’t touch.
Tyson & Mendes is focused on much more than Nuclear Verdicts®, says Cayce Lynch, administrative partner at the firm.
Lynch is also in charge of the firm’s women’s initiative, its young professionals committee, its inclusion initiative and a webinar presenter.
Her favorite webinar delved into defense methods and trial strategies as might be seen through the eyes of pop superstar Taylor Swift.
“I believe that we are disruptors in this industry for the better,” Lynch said. “We are incredibly passionate about what we practice and in standing up for justice for our clients, and we are doing it in a very different way than has been traditionally done and presented to juries in the decades past.”
Media Contacts:
Laura Desjean, Chief Marketing Officer
laura@schaefercitytechnologies.com, 858-900-3005
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