Strategic Visuals That Turn Cases Around, with Seton Claggett

Voice over (00:03):

Every trial lawyer knows that moment when you've built what feels like an airtight case, but you're still lying awake, wondering what will the jury actually think? Jury research was once a luxury reserved for cases that could support a big data study bill. Not anymore. Join trial lawyer and trial scientist Alicia Campbell, empirical legal scholar, Nick Schweitzer and data guru Kevin Doran as they break down the barriers between you and the minds of your jury. This is The Fred Files produced and powered by LawPods.

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Alicia Campbell (00:38):

Welcome to the Fred Files. We're so happy you're joining us today. We are here. Finally, I called out Seton, what, two podcasts ago, three podcasts ago. He's a busy guy, important dude, he's hard to get ahold of and get on the calendar, but we've been wanting to get Seton here to talk about focus graphics, so I'm loving your hat. Of course. I'm here with Nick Schweitzer. If I can talk today, well just Thursday. So I'm on the tail end of the week and we're here again without Kevin Doran still insisting upon getting hitched. He has, I think has done so.

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Nick Schweitzer (01:10):

He should be doing honeymoon, although I saw him checking in on some Fred stuff. He said he wouldn't, but of course he's a pro, so he pops in now and then to help out,

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Alicia Campbell (01:19):

Which is great. I think they're like going to Asia I think is where they're going for a while. So we're happy for them. And then we have our Fred mics which I'm loving, so it's awesome. And yeah, usually what we do, Seton, now that you're here, is we have you introduce yourself and we would like you to talk about how you're a triathlete because we like personal information as well as part of your introduction. So it's all you. Seton. Thanks for coming.

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Seton Claggett (01:44):

Great. Well, my name's Seton Claggett. A little bit about myself. I grew up in Idaho mainly with my two brothers, Sean and Tyson. Sean is an attorney, which many of you might know. And my other brother, Tyson lives out in North Carolina and he's in the demolition industry. And my mom actually recently had home movies transferred digitally and I have some epic video of us. My dad, we fought all the time as kids. And so my dad came home one day and he was sick of us beating the shit out of each other, so he brought boxing gloves home. And so my mom has the video of us unloading on each other in the front yard at around nine, 10 years old, just beating the shit out of each other for fun. And we're laughing until someone gets hurt and then you're mad. And then it's just W-E-M-M-A all in one. You literally watch the video and you're like, oh my gosh, this is where MMA started was my front yard.

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Alicia Campbell (02:44):

Oh my gosh. That is fun.

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Seton Claggett (02:46):

Yeah, fun times.

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Alicia Campbell (02:46):

And of course you're a triathlete. Tell us a little bit about that. I think that's fascinating.

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Seton Claggett (02:51):

Yes. Well, I say I was a triathlete. I raced for 30 years. I've done hundreds of triathlons and people are like, do you do hundreds of triathlons when you race for 30 years? And I raced eight triathlons a year. It becomes hundreds pretty quick. And so yeah, I've done everything from super small sprint triathlons up to Ironman's. I raced the Ironman World Championship. I kind of got to the pinnacle for myself. My last Ironman I did, I won, won my age group. And about that time I'm like, you know what? I've raced a lot.

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(03:24):

I've raced a lot.

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(03:25):

Yeah. So that was my triathlon life. I've done a lot of endurance stuff. 24 hour mountain bike races, done Leadville mountain bike.

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Alicia Campbell (03:34):

Did you? Why it's so high there? There's no oxygen there.

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Seton Claggett (03:38):

Yeah, I've been in the pain cave a lot. I've taken myself deep into the pain cave. One of the biggest rides, I kind of became famous after I did it. I live in Tucson and there's two mountains here. One is Kit Peak, it's one of the biggest observatories in the world, and there's tons of telescopes up there and we ride it sometimes. And then there's Mount Lemon, which is right behind my house and it has an observatory on it as well. Just one telescope though. But the point is when you're riding up either one of those mountains, you can look across and see the other mountain and see the telescopes if air is clear enough. And so I had this amazing fantasy that I wanted to do that ride in one day, tower to tower, I call it Twin Towers ride. That ride started at, we started at four in the morning near the base of Mount Lemon and we crossed Tucson.

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(04:28):

And then of course if you did this, you had to make sure it was as challenging as possible. So there's a pretty decent climb out of Tucson called Gates Pass. So we went over Gates Pass. One guy started with me and I picked up three other friends that were at the university and they did the kit peak route with me. So we went over Kit Peak, we went, I mean over Gates pass up Kit Peak, back down Kit Peak, and then rode from U of A. They split off. And then me and this other guy went back over Gates pass back across Tucson. And I want to also preface this with, this was in the middle of July in Tucson. It was really hot. And so we got to the base of Mount Lemon, which Mount Lemon is 99,157 feet tall. The base is right about 2300 feet.

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(05:09):

So we hit that base at about, I think it was like two o'clock or so to two 30 in the afternoon. So it's 110, 108, and it's really humid here in July. I know people think it's a dry heat, but we get the monsoons and this monsoon, it just hit the top of Mount Lemon while we were approaching it. The crazy thing about this ride was here it is, it's super hot. You're just sweating balls all day and you get to the top as you're approaching the top Mount lemon, this monsoon, it hit and there was four inches of hail on the side of the road and it was in the forties. It was absolutely freezing up there. And so the guy I was with who was one of the strongest cyclists in town, he literally lost his mind. And so we got to the ski area and there's one two mile stretch above the ski area that is really steep in it.

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(06:00):

I mean, you're already exhausted. So I was waiting for him there and he comes up and all I wanted all day, my goal was to get up to the ski area and have a Coke or a Dr. Pepper. That was my reward. So I get to the vending machine and all that comes out of the vending machine, our sprites, and I was so pissed. He shows up and I'm like, oh man, I got all these Sprites. Do you want one? And he's like, yeah. And he just starts dumping it on his head. He was gone. He was mentally delirious and he's like dumping on his head and he had this shirt wrapped around his head and he's dumping the Sprite all over himself. And he's like, I'm like, well, we got to go. We have two miles left. This is the whole point of the ride.

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(06:36):

And he's like, no, I'm out, man. I got to go back down. I'm freezing. I can't make it. So he left me and I did the last two miles alone and it was, I mean like carnage. I mean this storm just unloaded on the road. I mean there was trees down, there was hail everywhere. There was runoff. I mean, I should have been on a mountain bike and I was on a road bike. So then came down and finished the ride. But as far as I know, I'm the only one that's really done that ride.

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Nick Schweitzer (07:01):

I mean, that's incredible. It's

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Seton Claggett (07:02):

200.

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Nick Schweitzer (07:03):

Yeah, I was going to say Kit Peak, I spent 20 years up in Phoenix and Kit Peak is not close to Mountain Lemon. They're not, yeah, there's two peaks, but they're not right next to another.

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Seton Claggett (07:14):

No, no, no. If you just leave from downtown, like that university area and just do the kit peak ride, that's about 105 mile round trip.

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Nick Schweitzer (07:21):

Wow, that's incredible.

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Seton Claggett (07:22):

So those are some of the crazy things I've done. And my other hobbies, I golf and stuff, but I do woodworking. I do a lot of woodworking. My new triathlon, I'm now a jet pilot, so I fly Jet and I'm actually leaving this evening flying out to Dallas, pick up an attorney to take to fly to Utah to pick up another attorney to fly to Vegas to pick up two more attorneys to fly to LA for the Outer Realm conference.

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Alicia Campbell (07:48):

Oh yeah. Outer Realm is this weekend. I forgot about that. So who are you picking up in Dallas?

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Seton Claggett (07:55):

Jay? Jay Murray.

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Alicia Campbell (07:56):

Jay Murray. Okay.

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Seton Claggett (07:58):

Yep. Then Ben Clouder out in Utah.

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Alicia Campbell (08:01):

Got it.

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Seton Claggett (08:02):

And then Will Sykes and Matt Granda and Vegas, my brother's partners, and then we're a full boat over to la. Wow. So tomorrow's a big flying day. So I'm going to reposition it to Dallas tonight and then get some sleep and tomorrow will be a lot of flying.

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Alicia Campbell (08:17):

That will be, how long does it take you to get your pilot's license?

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Seton Claggett (08:20):

That all depends. The minimum you need is 40 hours to become a private,

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Alicia Campbell (08:24):

I feel like you got yours fast,

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Seton Claggett (08:25):

But when I did it, I was in no rush and I told my instructors, I'm like, I'm in no particular rush to do this. So I took my sweet time, but I had about probably 80 hours by the time I finished my private and then my instrument. I knocked that out in about two weeks up in Seattle. I was very focused on getting that done and then got my type rating in the jet in this past May.

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Alicia Campbell (08:48):

That's crazy. That's awesome. I think probably all that leads into, so then how did you get into Focus graphics?

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Seton Claggett (08:54):

Well, I had a previous company that was in the triathlon space and we sold triathlon equipment all over the planet. We'd sold about 200 million worth of equipment around the world, so a lot of stuff. We were the biggest UPS shipper in Tucson. Anyways, after that venture I had nothing to do and Sean was asking me, well, what are you going to do? And I said, I don't know what I'm going to do. You can't get a job when you run a company. I tried to apply to jobs afterwards and it was useless. I couldn't get a job because I'd never worked for anybody and no one wants to hire you. Like if I hire this guy, he's going to take my job. I think that's why maybe I just suck. It's probably I suck. But anyways, so Sean asked what I was going to do, and so Sean, he has a place in Newport every summer.

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(09:40):

He'd rent a place there and he now owns a house there, but at the time he was renting, so we're just sitting out there and he's like, oh man, I got a great idea for a company. You can start. I'm like, what's that? He's like, we can do graphics, graphics, it'll be great. I'm like, I don't know anything about that. He's, it doesn't matter business, you can do this. I'm like, okay, well tell me the competitive landscape. And so he rattles off three or four people in the space and I'm like, wow. Well, that seems like a crowded space for such a niche market, but we can give it a try. Now, I want to preface this with, I actually am an entrepreneurial fellow at the University of Arizona. I teach entrepreneurship. I lecture on entrepreneurship to the college of engineering. It's kind of in my wheelhouse, and I threw air all on my knowledge to the wind and just went off this literally 10 minute conversation with Sean.

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(10:30):

We started the company without my research. Was Sean telling me that that was my industry research? I'm like, well, Sean knows I don't know anything. So we started the company and it was really slow. I mean, this was the end of 2018 was when we started. I mean, Sean gave us the first project to Casey was working on, and then he was referring people to us, and it was slow, and then COVID hit, and then I took the time, by the way, to do the research after we started the company. I'm like, Sean, do you realize there's 300 competitors in this space?

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(11:04):

He's like, I know, but there's only three or four that really count. So I'm like, okay. So Sean did a ton of teaching over COVID a ton, really built a reputation of someone that gives his time, and I think a lot of attorneys really appreciated that. He wasn't charging, he was just spewing out his brain, and I think a lot of attorneys really appreciated that. And so he's really built a tribe around him of really great attorneys. And so now it's really starting to flywheel as far as, we work with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of firms around the country, so we're very fortunate.

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Alicia Campbell (11:41):

They were, yeah, I mean either hosting or giving their own talks, just it was a new idea and everybody was stuck in their houses

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Seton Claggett (11:48):

A ton. They were on there three to five days a week.

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Alicia Campbell (11:52):

That's very awesome. Yeah, I guess he and John both spoke on TLU. I remember during COVID, just a ton. Just a ton.

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Seton Claggett (11:59):

And that whole transition to that online platform, it was Sean's idea because at the time they were doing in person go to a loft firm thing, and Sean came up with the idea for them to take it online and teach for free, and that was Sean's mandate. Hey, I'll do this, but it has to be for free. And so that's what Sean did.

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Alicia Campbell (12:19):

Yeah, I think COVID probably was good about or for that. Really?

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Seton Claggett (12:24):

Oh, yeah. I mean, it was lightning in a bottle.

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Alicia Campbell (12:26):

It was like there was one thing that came out of COVID that loosened up a lot of this idea that you always have to be, because I appreciate now CLEs that I can just do remotely. Yeah. Some of 'em I like going to because you get to meet with people who see 'em. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also like the convenience of not having to go. And now that there's a class I can take online and I can get my credits and it's all good, it's a much better option. I mean, if you want to go, you still can. It's just that before judges in Missouri wanted to see you in their courtroom, now everybody's a little bit more like, cool, let's do it by Zoom.

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Seton Claggett (12:58):

Yeah, it

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Alicia Campbell (12:59):

Won't be that bad, but we can all be in our soft pants. It'll be fine.

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Seton Claggett (13:03):

It's definitely saved everybody a lot of time

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Alicia Campbell (13:05):

For sure.

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Seton Claggett (13:06):

Now it's pluses and minuses. There's minuses of being stuck in your house all day. Anytime there's anything locally going on, for me, I jump at it. I have to be around other humans that are not in front of the TV screen. Anytime I get to see you, it's like I don't get a hug you, but when I see you in person, I do. And Alicia gives the best, so it's

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Alicia Campbell (13:26):

Great. Oh, thank you. I try. Okay, so now I wanted to do this because we've obviously had lots of studies that include your graphics and you're the people that we always recommend. Why don't you talk a little bit about your process, so people who are interested or need animations or thinking about animations, maybe what they should consider, what kind of cases are worth it, what process they go through with you, just kind of soup to nuts. How does it work to get involved with focus graphics? I always think that's a really good use of attorney time and money, frankly, in most cases, not all, but in most,

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Seton Claggett (14:02):

It's a great question. And we have a class we do, I'll call it a CLE class, but I don't know how to give credit for this, but we call it our visual masterclass and we give this class to firms all over the country. And so basically the biggest gap I see within firms is there's a head honcho or head honches that runs these firms and those people in charge of the firm know that these visuals need to be made, and that process breaks down there down the food chain, the other attorneys, the paralegals, the other staff, it's not in their system. This is a huge challenge for firms. Initially, if I had a firm, I would set the parameter of, Hey, because really we're dealing with insurance companies, what's the policy limit on this case? Number one, assuming we can't open the policy, that kind of thing, but what's the policy limit on this case?

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(14:54):

And then create an internal threshold for that. If there's a $25,000 policy, clearly you're not doing anything right? I mean, you're just going to do what you can to get that 25 grand, but let's say your internal policy is 50 grand or a hundred grand, so you're like, Hey, there's a hundred thousand dollars policy limit. We know we can most likely get that entire policy based on the damages. We now have a process where that if yes, then we need to get visuals. There's a big misconception about how much visuals cost. We do projects all the time that are hundreds of dollars. I mean every day, hundreds of dollars. I didn't say thousands, I said hundreds of dollars. And so you can get a colorization of an MRI or something, get a couple of them and be out of the door for less than a grand, and they are extremely impactful.

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(15:42):

And so we deal with some firms, and this is their process. We know this because they're sending us three to five cases a week, and they're spending about a thousand bucks or less, 500 to a thousand bucks because this is part of their process. They've built this into their process. We know these are impactful. We want to get to that policy limit as fast as possible with least amount of work. Well, this is how you do that. This is not rocket science. One firm in particular, Randy Sores, he's like, Hey, I'll give you guys a chance. Literally, I think the first case he gave us, they sent us the imaging and we reviewed it and the radiologist was wrong. And so we let him know that the radiologist was wrong. And after that he's like, these are our folks. You guys know what you're doing. And so there's so many errors in medical records, it's unbelievable. And we find stuff every day. I have a really good buddy who's one of the chief radiologists here in Tucson, and one time I went and I sat with him and watched him do his job. It was fascinating. And I asked, and I don't remember the numbers, but I asked him, how many radiology reviews do you do a day? And I can't remember the number, but it was a lot.

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(16:50):

And I walked out of there, I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't remember the exact math, but it was something like if he's 99.999% right,

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(17:00):

He's still wrong 500 times a year based on the volume he does. And I'm like, it was stagger. I'm like, nobody's 99.99%, right? I mean, that's really amazing. You just do this math and we love math, right? Big data. And you're like, oh my gosh. Statistically then there's heirs and this guy is amazing at his job and he cares and he does a thorough job, but nobody's perfect. Even if you're 99.999% perfect, you're still wrong and you can miss stuff.

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Nick Schweitzer (17:29):

For example. What is it that you were able to pick up or see that they didn't?

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Seton Claggett (17:34):

I don't remember the exact reason for this one, but they were missing a disc bulge. One of the other cases we worked on really early, by the way, this is early on, Brian Blankenship, who works now, he had his own firm, but now he works with Sean. When Brian had his own firm, he brought me a, and by the way, at the time, I didn't even know what I was doing, and we got the imaging and the imaging study called for to review the cervical spine. Well, when they took the imaging, it went C one down to into the thoracic area. Well, the request was look at the cervical area. So the radiologist called out the issues with the cervical spine, but didn't bother mentioning the issues with the thoracic spine. And I don't know anything, but I'm looking at this, I'm like, I don't know. Those thoracic discs seem bad to me. And so our partner, Sam LaRusso, he's one of the partners in Focus Graphics, he's a chiropractor and really great at imaging. I reached out to him, I'm like, can you double check this for me? I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing, but so sure enough, the radiologists, they did their job. They called out the cervical issues, but didn't bother noting the thoracic issues that were still present in the imaging.

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Alicia Campbell (18:45):

Wow, what a catch.

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Seton Claggett (18:47):

Yeah,

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Alicia Campbell (18:47):

What a catch.

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Seton Claggett (18:48):

We've salvaged a lot of cases, found an incredible golden nuggets in medical records and stuff like that. I mean, incredible. And also on the non-medical side, we're working with Jay V out in Kentucky, and he had a case, and it was a truck that they just repaved this road and the truck, the front tire went off the side of the road. They made it too steep. If your tire dropped off, you're supposed to be able to get back up. They made it too steep. It was impossible. When he finally did, he kind of overcorrected a little, went across the road and killed this woman. It was very sad, a super sad case, especially because her kids, she was taking her two kids to school and they didn't die. So they saw their mother die, and then the next car on the scene was her son who was driving to high school. Anyway, it's a horrible case. Well, he gave us all the information, gave us everything they had from the expert, and we started building out the 3D models and analyzing it. And I spent so much off cycle time thinking about this case. I came back to Jay and I'm like, Jay, I think what you think happened is not what happened. This is what happened. And it was just different. And so we put 'em on a different path for that case, which was super cool. So we find stuff all the time,

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Nick Schweitzer (19:59):

And this is all just in the normal course of reviewing all of the stuff that gets sent to you.

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Seton Claggett (20:04):

Yeah, it's a wonderful service. It's quite amazing the stuff we find.

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Alicia Campbell (20:09):

Yeah, that's crazy. So in the medical context, what are the most normal or the most common types of animations or imaging that you do

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Seton Claggett (20:18):

In the medical context? I mean, we do a lot of spines,

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Alicia Campbell (20:21):

A lot of spines,

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Seton Claggett (20:22):

Spine imaging for sure.

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Alicia Campbell (20:23):

Some of these questions I'm going to ask, and I know the answer to Seton, but we're on a podcast, so let's do this. So a lot of 'em you do like surgery

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Seton Claggett (20:29):

Animations? Yes.

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Alicia Campbell (20:31):

What kind of information do you need to be able to do in animation like that?

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Seton Claggett (20:35):

So we're going to need the op report, the operative reports, what we'll need. We get the request sometimes, Hey, my client had a cervical fusion. Can you make an animation? And we're like, we need the op report. Why do you need the op report? We need to know what they did. I didn't know this before we started the company. It still is amazing to me how many variants of the same surgery there are. Like take a C five, six anterior fusion. I bet you we've done 50 variants of that surgery. Every surgery is different. It's unbelievable to me. I thought there'd we'd have some ability to economy of scale. I'm like, oh, this is going to be great. We're going to have all these assets and then we can reuse them. I can't count how many times I've been burned on an attorney calls. I got this C five six fusion. I'm like, sweet. Yeah, we've done that before. Send me the OP report. Hey guys, review this OP report. No, I haven't done this one before. I mean, it happens all the time. It happens every day. It's incredible to me.

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Alicia Campbell (21:34):

That's crazy.

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Seton Claggett (21:36):

Yeah, no, like these doctors are just dealing with a bunch of artists. They're all trained to do the same thing, but they're all have their own tricks up their sleeve of how they're going to approach this procedure.

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Alicia Campbell (21:48):

I see. So when you say you hand that off to people, what do you mean?

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Seton Claggett (21:52):

So we have a medical team and a forensic team. So the medical team we will hand off, we have a couple people. One person in particular, she's amazing at her job. They'll review the records. So our kind of process is, Hey, Seton, we have a case. Tell me about the case, whatever. And then based on that conversation, we're going to request records that would most likely we're going to need. So that could be radiology, imaging, radiology reports, operative reports, crash reports, the list goes on, imaging pictures of the client, and then we'll gather all this information. And then we have a medical review process where we'll take all this information and disseminate all of it into what is here and what is missing. There is a severe lack of knowledge at the majority of firms of the understanding of medicine and medical records. We see it all over the country.

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(22:47):

They know they have to get the records from the hospitals, but they don't really know, I don't think what they're looking at. And so they'll get 10,000 pages from the hospital and they're like, sweet, we got 'em. Now there are some firms that are really good. They know what they're looking for and they have everything organized. Most of them are like, okay, focus graphics. Here's our 10,000 pages that you've asked for. You want the medical records? Here they are, this is what we have. And then we start going through them, and then that's not all of 'em. There's 5,000 pages that are missing. And so there's a game of whack-a-mole. So we get all the information, we disseminate all of it, and we go back to the client and we're like, okay, based on this information, here is your list of exhibits we think you're going to need. And it could be one, it could be 30. We don't know all the information on the case. We don't know any case value. We're just like, Hey, here's some things you could do. And from there, it's up to them to decide how much money they want to spend. I'm not here to spend their money. I'm here to help them represent their client and make the best decision to return the most value for their client. That's our job.

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Nick Schweitzer (23:46):

Do you prioritize when there's many things that you think could be done? Do you say this thing is you need this and then here are some niceties?

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Seton Claggett (23:56):

Yeah, I mean pretty much mean. We kind of organized it in bunches. I just saw a quote we just sent out yesterday. I had to have 40 exhibits in it. We're working on this case out in Vegas right now. That three wheel vehicle case, I think we did 60 exhibits for that case. I've never seen a human injured so badly that didn't die. I mean, it's just a myriad of injuries. So we go back to the client. The client says, okay, I want to do A, B, C, and D. We send them a contract, they send the contract and we're off to the races. Most difficult part of what we do is document collection because an attorney will reach out once again, and usually it's the head honcho or che and they're like, Hey, we want to do, I want to do this visual right? Great. We're going to need these records. And then it breaks apart, they don't have all the records. So then we get some records and then they're not all the records. And then we get some of the records and it's still not all the records. And then we get some of the records and not all the records. It's actually surprising. I've had some conversations at some of these conferences. There's these document collection companies that go and get your documents. I talked to one of these companies, I'm like, don't you get medical documents?

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(25:07):

That's what we do. I'm like, I don't understand. There's all these companies that offer this service, but I rarely

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(25:14):

Deal with a law firm that has all the documents. I don't understand. And then they told me something that was

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(25:22):

Amazing.

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(25:23):

They said, well, the way this process works is they only get the documents that the client knows about. Well, if you told me, Hey, Seton, go get all your

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(25:35):

Medical records. I'd be like, records, I don't even know where to get 'em. The onus is on the plaintiff to go get their medical records. And I'm like, no wonder why this is broken. You're dealing with a guy like me who's like, I don't care. I went to the doctor. I don't remember. Yeah, I have no idea what the doctor's name was. Now you want me to go get records from them? Unbelievable.

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Alicia Campbell (25:57):

That's crazy. So are there times where you interact with the expert report, where you're tasked with doing what originally was done in the medical records, but an expert who's saying they should have done something else, or they should have been on the lookout for this particular cyst or they missed this, it was obvious.

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Seton Claggett (26:14):

Yeah, we see this a lot on med mal cases and product defect cases. So we'll do right way, wrong way. And med mal cases in particular, they're fun. They're way more fun and more challenging because you have a medical report that's not right, it's full of lies. So that's not what happened. It's full of inaccuracies, I guess I should say. And so they'll get it to us, but we know what it says in here is not what happened because this is the person died. I mean, we will get med mal cases, you'll read the medical records, and nowhere in it does it say they killed the person.

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Alicia Campbell (26:48):

That is definitely true.

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Seton Claggett (26:50):

And the surgery was successful. End of report. I'm like, wait, wait, the person died. I don't know.

‍

Alicia Campbell (26:59):

Yeah, that's crazy. So when your medical team goes through it and they identify what they need, do you have a separate team that builds it or does the medical team also build it?

‍

Seton Claggett (27:07):

So on the medical side, the medical team will review. We have two people really, and we're building that team out even more now. We just have so many records they review, and then once the contract is signed, then we have a whole team of artists and extremely talented artists. I don't know if you know this or not, but there's only four schools in North America where you can become a medical illustrator.

‍

Alicia Campbell (27:31):

Really?

‍

Seton Claggett (27:32):

Yeah, it's like four or five schools. And to become a medical illustrator that's a master's degree. Your first year is alongside the medical school students doing gross anatomy and then art, and then the second year is all artwork. And so it's a fascinating group of individuals. They understand the science and the medicine, but then they can do the art, which most people can't equally use both sides of the brain and these people can, which is amazing to me, super talented group. And each of these schools, they put out five to 10 grads a year,

‍

Alicia Campbell (28:02):

Five to 10 a year,

‍

Seton Claggett (28:04):

Very small classes

‍

Alicia Campbell (28:05):

Besides doing animations, what do you do with that degree?

‍

Seton Claggett (28:08):

Well, that's what I thought. Well, there's a conference called the Association Medical Illustrators, and they have a conference. And when I started the company, I went to this conference really early on, I didn't understand. Well, it's amazing as a lay person, all the medical illustrations we see in our daily lives that it never dawned on me that a person made them. And so now that I'm telling you this, you will see it all the time. You watch something on TV for a drug and they'll show drug delivery or a bandaid, or you go to the doctor's office, there's medical illustrations all over the place.

‍

Alicia Campbell (28:43):

Holy crap. Oh my God,

‍

Seton Claggett (28:45):

God, I just never thought about it because it wasn't my world. And now I'm in and I'm like, oh my gosh, there's medical illustrations everywhere and people had to make them.

‍

Alicia Campbell (28:54):

Yeah, I was just thinking of Grey's Anatomy and it's like, isn't that kind of done?

‍

Seton Claggett (28:57):

Yeah,

‍

Alicia Campbell (28:57):

The book's done right. Who needs Now you're talking about it. Holy crap.

‍

Seton Claggett (29:02):

Well, in the med-legal space that we're in is a small sliver of the medical illustration world. I mean probably less than 8%.

‍

Alicia Campbell (29:12):

Oh wow.

‍

Seton Claggett (29:13):

So I mean, think of all the medical device companies, the drug companies, there's a huge world out there for these folks to work in those environments.

‍

Nick Schweitzer (29:23):

Was it trouble to assemble a team then, given that there's all these other things that they're doing?

‍

Seton Claggett (29:29):

No, I mean, you definitely find there's certain people that enjoy this kind of work. The biggest thing we dealt with when we started a company, it was me when I started the company and I had some freelancers doing work for me, and we got to the point they just weren't giving me the service I needed, so I had to hire my team. And so when I hired my creative director, he told me, he's like, Hey Seton, the problem with the med-legal industry. I'm like, what's that? He's like, burnout. These attorneys just grind these artists to death and they burn out. And I'm like, well, that's cool. Well, we need to build a company where that won't happen. And so one of our core values is protect the hive. And so we do a really good job of making sure our artists are not overworked. I need them around for the long haul. And I mean to date, we've never had an artist quit. We protect them. Some of our competitors attorneys deal directly with the artist.

‍

Alicia Campbell (30:17):

Oh wow,

‍

Seton Claggett (30:18):

You want to burn an artist out quick, have that interaction. And we don't do that. We have visual strategists that interact with the attorneys and then our artists are separated. Sometimes we'll bring the artists in to calls and stuff. Rarely do we do that because we need them to focus on actually producing the work. And we keep our artists on. We monitor their hours. The systems we've built internally to manage the company are really great. A lot of metrics, something that most artists aren't used to, but it's something we do to make sure that we know when we need to hire people. We know when, if someone's getting pushed up to the upper limit of their work schedule. And it's something I'm really proud of. The culture we've built in our company is like nothing I've seen. I have a business consultant that works with us and we do anonymous surveys in our company. He works with all kinds of companies in all kinds of industries. And I mean, he's told me over and over, and I know this because this is not my first rodeo. He's like, I've never seen metrics like this coming out of a company internally, cultural and willingness for people that are happy in a place to work. And so protect the hive is one of our core values for sure.

‍

Alicia Campbell (31:26):

Well, yeah, I can't think of two professions that are more different than a lawyer and an artist. No, even lawyer work hours. You know what I mean? I know that because I'm a lawyer, but I also have clients that are lawyers. So I know I have a good sense, but I can't imagine being someone who wants to draw and create and make something who's like, yeah, this is great to be pushed, push pushed. I mean, because what lawyers are really good at pushing, not letting go, trying to be precise, demanding preciseness, but I can't imagine an artist enjoying that or really being able to understand that very well.

‍

Seton Claggett (32:00):

Yeah, no, it's a challenge. And I mean, I took Brandon and my creative director when he started, and he told me that I listened acutely to what he said because my goal, I build great companies. That's what I do, and I build great cultures in those companies. That's what I do. And so I listened to him very intently when he said that to make sure that we built a system that would do our best to protect those, our artists and our team. And so we do a lot of rush projects, a lot of rush projects, but we share those rush fees with our artists. They're on the take.

‍

Alicia Campbell (32:33):

Oh, interesting. That's really great. Seton. That's really great.

‍

Seton Claggett (32:36):

Yeah, we have an artist that just started with in the first three weeks he was with us, he made 10% of his annual income in rush fee bonuses. And he is like, I love this place. My job is to take care of my team. If I take care of my team, they're going to take care of the attorneys and then I eat last, I'll be taken care of. But you think the law world's crazy. One of our other partners in the company, Lucas, one of Sean's best friends, Lucas is in the entertainment industry. And when we started, his team would do some of the work for us. It was kind of the birthplace of focus graphics. Sean would have Lucas's team do animations and stuff, one or two of them. But anyways, now we do work for them. And so we just finished a big project for Disney.

‍

(33:20):

So we've done work for Disney, Marvel, Apple TV we've done a Lexus commercial. So it's kind of nice. Those projects are way higher stress than any attorney project, surprisingly. I don't know how Lucas works in that environment. It's crazy. But it gives our forensic team a chance to work on things. We're always dealing with not good things. People get hurt or die. That's what we do for the most part. In general, that's what we're dealing with. And so to give them a project where, hey, guess what? We get to make a video, a fake video game for a movie or a TV show. They're stoked.

‍

Alicia Campbell (33:57):

It's better than a car crash, terrible semi crashing in and killing a family.

‍

New Speaker (34:02):

So

‍

Alicia Campbell (34:02):

When the forensic stuff comes in, when those type of cases come in, they go to your forensic team. So we know about medical illustrators. What is it to be a forensic illustrator? What kind of background would those people have?

‍

Seton Claggett (34:13):

So on the medical side, there's medical illustrators, medical animators, that's that team. And then on the forensic side, it's all forensic animators. And so kind of the same process. It's the same document collection. More often than not almost all the time there's some going to be some medical piece of what we're doing. Sometimes damages aren't disputed, so you don't do that. So same thing, we review and then we brainstorm and come up with an idea of how we're going to present this. We deal with some attorneys. Ed SLI is the one that comes to mind. Ed is awesome to work with because he's very creative and he'll be like, did I got this idea? He's like, can you do it? I'm like, of course we can Ed. This is going to be awesome. We had a case with him once. He's like, Hey, this case it might go to trial, but we're going to mediation first, and I want shock and awe.

‍

(34:56):

I'm like, all right, so you want sound effects and music and blah, blah, blah. He's like, yeah, I want all of it. And I'm like, all right, here we go. Let's do it. He's really fun to work with. It's fun to work with attorneys who have just really out of the box ideas that we get to work on. We're working on a case right now, a little girl, a very sad case, died at a daycare and the defense has a well-known engineering firm working on it with all kinds of mathematical models showing how there's no way this kid died on this high chair. What really happened? And so the attorney wants us, we're making an actual physical body of the child, exact replica of the child so they can take the body into the courtroom and show it on this high chair and show how it really happened.

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Alicia Campbell (35:46):

Holy crap. So you don't just do, I think that this is a image animation type game, but that's not what all this is. Seton, you need to talk more about this. Oh my gosh,

‍

Seton Claggett (36:01):

Yeah. So we do physical models as well. Do we do a lot of 3D printing spines? We are actually the first company, and Sean was the first law firm to use a 3D printed spine in trial. The Roy Ball case a several years ago.

‍

Alicia Campbell (36:14):

The Roy Ball? Yeah.

‍

Seton Claggett (36:16):

So their client was, he was hit by a stripper bus in Vegas. I like to say stripper bus. It was actually, it was a stripper, SUV, but it's more fun to say a bus. So the client, they were out riding their bikes doing a hot wing challenge or something, and it was him, his brother and his wife. He got hit by this guy who drives a suburban for the strip club and goes to the hotels and picks people up and takes 'em to the strip club. He ends up hitting this guy, bust him up really bad, and he subsequently has to have a whole bunch of water falling fusions. I mean, one led to another, led to another. It was horrible. In the meantime, back in, earlier in his life, he was shot in the face by a shotgun, and so he still has buckshot in his head, and so they couldn't do an MRI of him, and so they could do x-rays, but not an MRI.

‍

(37:05):

So we had to build a spine to match his spine, and then the hardware, they contemplated putting the real hardware into his spine, but it was going to cost us a quarter of a million dollars to acquire the hardware. There was so much hardware in his spine, and so we opted to 3D print the hardware into his spine. So we modeled out all the hardware and printed it into his spine so they had the spine. I mean, if you go to Jordan Logan's office at my brother's firm, he proudly has that spine in his office.

‍

Alicia Campbell (37:31):

Holy, wow. Wow.

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Seton Claggett (37:33):

It was great watching it in trial too, because holding it, the defense is holding the spine, everybody's touching the spine. So yeah, and 3D printing technology is just gone unhinged. It's crazy what you can print now. Yeah. I just was at a demonstration two weeks ago up in Phoenix, and they had a banana sitting there on the counter, and I'm like, it's the weirdest thing. Why would they leave this banana sitting on the counter with all these other objects printed? The banana looked like a banana. It had a sticker on it, like a banana. It had a couple bruises, like a banana. It felt exactly like a banana except for it was not a banana, it was a 3D printed banana.

‍

Alicia Campbell (38:13):

So is there a project you've not done that you can't do?

‍

Seton Claggett (38:16):

Well, I shouldn't say that. We've had to turn away a couple projects recently where the timelines are just unreal. I mean, you get these like, Hey, so our trial starts tomorrow. We'll have

‍

Alicia Campbell (38:27):

Fun.

‍

Seton Claggett (38:30):

No, we do get those. I'm assuming there's time. No, we'll kind of tackle anything.

‍

Alicia Campbell (38:34):

So people shouldn't think of focus graphics as only limit. I've thought of you as well, because what I see obviously are a lot of animations, things dealing with imaging probably because dealing in more in a world of those things being needed for trial and studying them, but I had no idea that you guys could make a baby. I think I've limited all of your capabilities to just what I've seen. So I think it's really important that everybody knows that because yeah, thinking outside the box and being creative I think is a really good thing for lawyers to do in front of the jury and everything else. I mean, they want to know how things happen. The more real you can make that so that they can get a sense of what it is that you're arguing, I think is really important. So that's amazing. When does that case go to trial? Will it be on Ste VNI want to see the baby.

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Seton Claggett (39:20):

It's coming up next year, early next year.

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Alicia Campbell (39:22):

What a great thing.

‍

Seton Claggett (39:24):

Yeah,

‍

Alicia Campbell (39:25):

What a great thing. Seton.

‍

Seton Claggett (39:27):

Yeah, we had another case. We didn't end up doing it, but because the problem with when you do realistic, if you saw it sitting there, you would think it was real because once again, our partners in the Hollywood industry, so it's real. And so they were doing a science experiment in high school, gone wrong, and this is a high school girl, and it exploded on her and just torture her. And so we were going to do a full bust of her, what she looked like right after she got torched. The attorney ended up not doing it, but it would've been awesome. We were looking forward to doing it because it would've been super cool.

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Alicia Campbell (39:59):

Was it a welding class?

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Seton Claggett (40:01):

No, it was a chemistry class.

‍

Alicia Campbell (40:02):

God. Well, that's really amazing. Seton. I had no idea. So when I think of your partner as being in the entertainment industry, I do think of it more like you guys do work for Hollywood. I'm just going to call it Hollywood. So does he help in terms of doing the more realistic?

‍

Seton Claggett (40:17):

Yeah, so I mean, whenever we need help, that's something new like this, and we just reach out to him. He's so connected in that industry. I mean, this job we did for Disney obviously came from him, right? Focus Graphics isn't doing a job for Disney, but we're doing it because of him. And by the way, this TV show is called High Potential.

‍

Nick Schweitzer (40:34):

Oh yeah, I watched that.

‍

Seton Claggett (40:36):

You do?

‍

Nick Schweitzer (40:36):

Yes.

‍

Seton Claggett (40:36):

The episode we did is coming out pretty soon and in the next couple of weeks, and it's crazy, the timelines, could we just finish the project two weeks ago? And they're filming probably right now, and I thought they filmed these a year ago, but when they released those things, they just filmed it two weeks ago, which is surprising to me.

‍

Alicia Campbell (40:53):

So the opposite of Stranger Things.

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Seton Claggett (40:55):

Yeah, a little opposite.

‍

Alicia Campbell (40:56):

Just taking years.

‍

Seton Claggett (40:57):

Yeah.

‍

Alicia Campbell (40:58):

Wow. So what did you do for that show? How would we know?

‍

Seton Claggett (41:01):

I'll tell you, the premise of the show is a kid dies and he's a gamer, and they have this hunch that the person who killed him was another gamer. And so we had to build the entire game, and it's like Zelda ish. The game is called Battle Dynasty, and so we made all the gameplay of this game.

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Nick Schweitzer (41:23):

Do you create video then is just kind of played and it's simulated that someone's playing, or do you actually create a real

‍

Seton Claggett (41:30):

Correct. When you watch TV shows or movies and they're stuff on a screen, think of all the things, right? Whether they're playing a video game or acting like they're working on a computer, it's all fake and the video games are off. We recently did a NHL hockey game to license that. NHL. The real NHL hockey game for your show is probably half a million dollars. And so they have us make a fake hockey game, so it looks like they're playing the game. They're just acting like they're playing it. Same thing, you'll see people with their iPhones. It's not really an iPhone, but what you see on the screen is not real. It's fake.

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Alicia Campbell (42:06):

That makes you such a unique, well-rounded animation company, really,

‍

Seton Claggett (42:12):

Entertainment industries.

‍

Alicia Campbell (42:13):

There are companies out there that just do medical animations or medical highlighting on scans, and that's all they do, but to be able to do all of this is just really fascinating and really amazing, Seton.

‍

Seton Claggett (42:26):

Well, I mean, it's funny because there's all this real world experience. So my background, I'm an engineer by education. I have bachelor's and a master's in hydrology. And so for example, we've done a couple projects that were solely because of my degree. They're big contaminant, transport animations, factors that contaminated town and everybody got cancer and just horrible things like that. I don't know if there's anybody else in the world you could talk to that has an animation company that has a hydrology degree that you have an intellectual conversation about vinyl chloride being transported through the Vedo zone. It's kind of weird. And so we'll get projects like that, but it's other things. I mean, our team is really smart. We did an animation, I think this happened in, I want to say Alaska, I don't remember where it was, but it was a boating, it was a tugboat, and it was all this stuff. We had to learn about rigging on a tugboat. Ultimately, the rigging failed. And this guy, I think he got his legs chopped off by the rope or something, I don't remember exactly, but all of a sudden you become an expert in rope rigging on a boat, all these things. That's what does make this super fun to do is that you learn things. You're like, oh my gosh, do you know in your car? Do you know that there's an explosive mechanism in your seatbelt?

‍

Nick Schweitzer (43:38):

Yeah, pre tensioner.

‍

Seton Claggett (43:39):

Yeah,

‍

(43:39):

Yeah, yeah. I didn't know that. When you get in a crash, you know how your seatbelt locks? That's a mechanical lock, but there's an explosive mechanism down where you buckle your seatbelt that literally there's a charge, an explosion, and it sucks that the buckle part back into the seat simultaneously when you're in a crash. I had no idea that was in there. Now, see, now all these things you learn, I've learned a lot about lockout tagout procedures, all these things that, and the interesting thing is the phone rings and you have no idea what's going to be on that other side. You'll go from a massive brain injury case and five minutes later you're talking about a seatbelt or a lockout tagout issue of it's just something or hydrology or something. It's something completely unrelated to what you were just talking about, and your brain has to switch and be like, all right, well, let's talk about this.

‍

Alicia Campbell (44:31):

That is fun.

‍

Nick Schweitzer (44:32):

Hey, I've started to see people talking about, they've been talking about this for a long time, but using VR to show people things. Is that something that you've thought about or done or,

‍

Seton Claggett (44:47):

No, we are completely capable of doing it. We haven't had the request yet. The problem is I love the idea, but I mean, we just did a case recently where the courtroom didn't have a television. We'll have internal discussions like, well, should we do VR? I'm like, these attorneys don't even know how to use PowerPoint. How are they going to be using VR headsets in the room? It's a great, it's cool. I mean, there's endless possibilities of what we can do a hundred percent and we can a hundred percent deliver on them. Then there's the reality of actually implementing them in the courtroom, which is a challenge.

‍

Alicia Campbell (45:19):

Yeah, for sure. I mean, half the time I can't get good wifi.

‍

Seton Claggett (45:22):

Yeah,

‍

Alicia Campbell (45:23):

That's really fascinating, Seton. So if someone wants to contact you, what's the best way to do it?

‍

Seton Claggett (45:28):

Call me or email me.

‍

Alicia Campbell (45:29):

And what I also hear you saying is they should not assume that you're out of their price point.

‍

Seton Claggett (45:34):

No, no. That's a horrible mistake because of the breadth of what we do. I mean, we deal with both sides of the coin. We have attorneys where we'll quote 'em a thousand dollars for something and they're like, oh, that's too expensive. And I'm like, okay. And then on this other side, you'll quote an attorney $50,000 and they're like, oh, thank goodness. You saved me money.

‍

New Speaker (45:56):

I don't know.

‍

Seton Claggett (45:57):

And it's everything in between. So when it comes to charging customers, I mean, we charge what we charge to make sure that my team can have a sustainable wage and take care of their families. I'm not here price gouging. I mean, we're here to charge a fair price for the work we do and the experience we bring, which is a lot of experience at this point, and especially with Sean involved. Our company is a hundred percent position in a completely different place than any of our competitors. Because for me, I feel like Sean's kind of on the line. A lot of people work with us a ton that have no idea Sean's involved even though he's on the website, but they don't know that. But those that do, it's important for them to know that. And the other thing I did want to bring up, our company's called Focus Graphics, by the way, because we do focus group our work.

‍

(46:44):

It's a service we offer. And so in an ideal situation, let's say of a kind of a complex case and you're like, we meet and we're like, Hey, we have this great idea. We both agree, me and us and the attorney, like this is what we're going to do and we have time. We then run it through. We'll get a neutral statement from the attorney and we'll prefo group it in front of real people and they'll get feedback like, Hey, here's the case. Here's kind of the lay of the land. What would you want to see to help describe this? We'll get that feedback. Then we'll come with the final plan. We do the work product, and then we'll focus group it on the back end and any feedback that comes back from the moderator, it's on our dime to fix.

‍

Alicia Campbell (47:21):

Oh, interesting.

‍

Seton Claggett (47:21):

Yeah. So let's say we do this whole animation and we're like, we nailed it. And then the moderator, they do another focus group and the moderator's like, yeah, so they purple dancing cows on the side of the road. What's going to need to be done? And we're like, Hmm, didn't see that, but we have to pay. It's no charge. We're going to fix that. That's another service that we offer that nobody offers. Unfortunately, more often than not, there's not enough time to do these great things, but in some cases there are some cases there are. So that is why Focus Graphics actually has the word focus in it because of the focus group aspect of what we do.

‍

Alicia Campbell (47:55):

That's really cool. Even I didn't know that. I didn't know you guys did that.

‍

Seton Claggett (47:59):

So we partner, we have another company called Paramount Focus Group, and we just, we'll piggyback on with their focus groups. Our focus groups are just an hour, and so we'll piggyback onto them. Sometimes we'll get attorneys who they're like, I want focus group, my entire case. And I'm like, that's not, I'll just hand them off to the Paramount and they'll run with it. But if it's just the visual piece, we'll pluggy back on and we don't make any money on that. We charge 1500 bucks and pretty much nobody's making money on that. It's just a great service we offer. It's cool, I guess.

‍

Nick Schweitzer (48:33):

Yeah. Does it help? How much extra lead time do you need? If you want to do that,

‍

Seton Claggett (48:38):

You need about four weeks to even schedule in the focus group, typically. Ideally, we have that about that much time. And then the big one is the lead in on the first one and the second one as we're producing, we can already schedule the next one. So we know we're going to be doing it. And the feedbacks are real time. We get the reports and the videos of the focus group the next day, and so then we can make decisions on what changes, final changes need to be made.

‍

Alicia Campbell (49:02):

That's really cool,

‍

Seton Claggett (49:03):

Man. There's all these things, Alicia, that you didn't realize we did.

‍

Alicia Campbell (49:06):

No, it's so true. And I'm so glad you came on the podcast to tell everyone because need to know. I mean, I've seen tons of your animations and a lot of the stuff that you do with the spine work and highlighting that part or brain lesions, things like that, and it's always great. So you're always, for us, we're like, you need to call focus graphics, but I had no idea just how in depth you are, which I think is really important because people do need to start earlier on their cases, right?

‍

Seton Claggett (49:30):

Yeah. And so like I said, that visual masterclass that we do, we go into, we just did one for a firm out in Pennsylvania last week. They had 35 people on the call, their firm, because this attorney wanted his team to know everybody, to learn this process, start early. You're not going to break the bank with $500 to do a colorization or whatever we just outlined. This is when you need to start. This is what we're going to need. This is how long things take. This is we talk about return on investment because you are investing in the case and you should get a return on that. We talk about how much it's going to cost. We give real world examples of people that have used our work to make strategic decisions, whether it was the judge saw this and it was amazing and the case was worth 200 and walked out of the courtroom with a million bucks, or you did this for me and I thought this case was one thing, but now that I'm actually seeing it, I realize it's a giant pile of crap and I need to settle this case as soon as possible.

‍

Alicia Campbell (50:26):

That's really great. Seton, do you have anything else that you want to share that you think will help?

‍

Seton Claggett (50:31):

I think we've covered a lot. One of our other core values, by the way, is we help good attorneys do great things. There's a lot of attorneys that are in this for the money, and you need to make money. You also need to be giving back to your communities and other notable efforts. So it's really fun to work with those attorneys for sure. You see them doing things in their community, really good things in their community, and it's great being around someone like Sean and his wife Lou, who really lead by example. I mean, they give a lot back and it's kind of the same level. I kind of hold most attorneys to this is what should be going on because there's more to life than just money. So taking care of your employees, taking care of your communities is real important.

‍

Alicia Campbell (51:09):

Totally agree. Well said.

‍

Nick Schweitzer (51:11):

Well, that's it I guess for today. Thank you Seton, and good to see you also, Alicia, and we'll be back in a couple weeks with another podcast episode. I think if we do these in order, we'll be talking about AI next, so that'll be fun. And yeah, that's about it for today on The Fred Files.

‍

Seton Claggett (51:31):

Yay. Thank you.

‍

Alicia Campbell (51:31):

Thank you guys.

‍

Voice over (51:34):

Thank you for listening to The Fred Files. If you found value in today's discussion, please subscribe and share this episode with your colleagues. To explore how Fred can transform your case preparation, visit us at focuswithfred.com. Produced and powered by LawPods.