Inside look at the law
Book takes informative look at trials, legal work from the inside out
Thousands of trees have died in the telling of courtroom successes by Randi McGinn and her partners at the mostly women law firm MCML, McGinn, Carpenter, Montoya & Love.
Most recently it was the $67 million verdict from a Las Cruces jury in a case involving patients who got pacemakers they didn’t need.
But some wins stand out, and for McGinn, the case with particular resonance is the one she litigated on behalf of the family of 26-year-old Elizabeth Garcia, a clerk abducted from one of Allsup’s Convenience Stores Inc. units in Hobbs, raped and murdered working the graveyard shift during her second night on the job. Alone.
McGinn, who grew up in Alamogordo and got degrees in journalism and law at New Mexico universities, was asked by publisher Trial Guides to write a how-to litigation handbook. Virtually all of the previously published guides, McGinn said, were written by and oriented toward men.
“I thought it would be more interesting to have a chronological history of the case interspersed with ‘howto’ chapters,” McGinn said. “My idea was to give people a real idea what it’s like to be inside a case, how you get confronted with problems and how you confront them.”
The story begins with the mother of three small children being abducted from a store where she was the solitary employee on the shift, and the victim’s mother having to pay the $7,714 in funeral expenses because the insurance carrier turned down the claim.
Allsup’s had not put a second clerk on the job despite having made promises to other clerks or their families over the years, the plaintiffs claimed.
Garcia was stabbed 56 times on Jan. 15, 2002, and left in a field.
Allsup’s defense was that the killer, tracked down two years after Garcia’s murder, was meth-crazed and unpredictable — a loose cannon against which it was impossible to defend no matter how much security was in place.
The Garcia family lawyers thought otherwise.
They tracked down over 1,200 police reports involving Allsup’s clerks over the years, including that of Eva Pellissier, a former clerk and young mother at a Hobbs store who was robbed and had her throat slit ear to ear but survived. She testified at trial that while she was hovering near death, an Allsup’s store manager had promised her no woman would have to work graveyard shift alone again.
That was 16 years before Garcia was killed.
It took MCML thousands of hours of research, six years of motions and discovery, and over two weeks of litigation to reach a resolution. It came while the jury was still deliberating in April 2008.
A confidential settlement was reached with Allsup’s just before the jury was poised to hand over its $51.2 million verdict. McGinn and company, of course, didn’t know what the verdict would have been, but they did have the deal-clincher — a written, public statement from Allsup’s agreeing not to attempt to roll back new regulations on security at convenience stores, including a requirement that two clerks work the graveyard shift.
McGinn’s prose is straightforward, sometimes easier to follow than the machine-gun pace of her speech.
“Changing Laws, Saving Lives: How To Take on Corporate Giants and Win” is distinctly in the David-and-Goliath realm. Its message is that “tranformative justice” —litigation that seeks accountability —is within the grasp of any lawyer with enough preparation and perseverance.
McGinn says she is trying to “tell people how to really do a case.” She takes an inside-out look at preparation for trial and the day-to-day business. She tells lawyers to go to the scene. She offers women advice on balancing parenting and work, dressing for court and picking jurors. She tells lawyers to find safety rules related to the event, and if there aren’t safety rules, then look to the Bible, the Koran, the Torah or the Golden Rule. Conduct an independent investigation, she says. Follow the money. Discover the hero(es) and villains.
Ultimately, it’s all about storytelling.
But also a kind of “verbal jazz.”
“Not only are you going along telling stories, but someone on the other side of the courtroom is spinning a different story,” she said.
In a postscript, the Garcia case is ongoing. Allsup’s amended its complaint against its former insurance company, a subsidiary of the American International Group, after the settlement, alleging that the insurance company botched the defense and “exposed Allsup’s to unnecessary publicity that was exaggerated and riddled with half-truths, negatively impacting its employees, customers, vendors and ... causing financial harm to Allsups.”
A bench trial is scheduled in Santa Fe in May.