The most nervous lawyer won $105M

There is a trial lawyer in San Diego who grips the wheel on the drive to court, heart pounding, wondering what she was ever thinking. Twenty years into the job, and it still happens every single time.

That lawyer is Bibi Fell. She has taught trial advocacy at the University of San Diego for two decades, which means she trains other lawyers to do the exact thing that still rattles her. In 2018 she won a $105 million verdict against a man who told cancer patients he could cure them with baking soda, the largest intentional tort verdict in California that year.

Most lawyers treat the nerves as a problem to solve. Bibi decided a long time ago they are the job.

The quietest lawyer in the room.

Ask most people to picture a great trial lawyer and they picture a table-pounder who owns the room. Bibi is the opposite. Walk her into a networking cocktail hour and her instinct is to turn around and leave. She’d rather have one real conversation than work a crowd.

So how does someone built that way end up with a top-ten verdict in the country? Because trial work doesn’t reward the loudest person in the room.

It rewards two things people mistake for one: the willingness to sit in discomfort, and the discipline to show up anyway. Neither is the same as being fearless.

She won by refusing to hide her client's worst choice.

The case was Kali v. Young. Robert Young was the self-styled father of the alkaline diet, a bestselling author who ran a ranch and told cancer patients he could cure them with lifestyle changes and IV drips that were mostly baking soda. Bibi's client, Dawn Kali, had treatable Stage 1 breast cancer and every resource she needed to beat it. She chose the ranch instead, and when the money ran out she went to work for Young, bringing the next round of patients through the door.

The problem at trial was Dawn herself. A jury had to be persuaded to care about a woman who walked away from a cure. Bibi's answer was to hide none of it. She put Dawn on the stand and let her carry the full weight, down to journal entries where Dawn blamed her cancer's spread on eating two bites of a hot dog. That is how deep the manipulation ran.

The jury came back at $105,356,000, fifteen million of it punitive. Here is the part worth stealing: Bibi had read every document and knew every argument cold, then used maybe half of what she walked in with. The preparation the jury never saw is what made the part they did see look effortless. Bibi tells the whole story, social anxiety and all.

One more thing.

I would love to tell you I have Bibi's nerve. I just don't need it in my current day-to-day. The scariest thing in my week is a typo reaching 17,000 inboxes.

If you actually walk into courtrooms, though, there is a trick worth stealing, and Bibi lives it. A Harvard researcher named Alison Wood Brooks found that people who say "I am excited" out loud before a high-pressure moment outperform the ones who try to calm down. Nerves and excitement run on the same wiring. You just relabel the wire.

So naturally I tried it on the biggest stage I've got. Before hitting send on this issue, I stood in my office and said "I am excited" to my monitor, with the conviction of a man who does not believe it.

Friends, it helped. I think. What it did not fix was my hands.

Anyway. I am excited.

Quote of the week:

“You do get nervous. The difference is preparation.”

- Tony Elman, in "Nobody in Cook County Has Tried More Jury Cases Than Me".