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HHJ TRIAL ATTORNEYS

6435 Caminito Blythefiled, Suite D

La Jolla, CA 92037

2175 Salk Avenue, Suite 180

Carlsbad, CA 92008

(619)-INJURED

hhjtrialattorneys.com

HHJ Trial Attorneys celebrates five years of excellence in winning complex and high-profile cases, driven by a dedication to total client service and never backing down from taking any case to trial.

"I think the difference between then and now is that I’ve been able to see and actually experience what I knew we were capable of doing from the beginning. Before, when our future as civil litigators was unknown, there was some uncertainty as to whether or not we could prove ourselves in this new area. We always believed our skills would translate in the courtroom so that we would become one of the top trial attorney firms in this arena, but we didn’t know because we hadn’t done it in a civil context. Now we know. We’ve experienced it. Now we know, factually, that not only do we have the skills and the resources to do it, but we’ve also done it. We’re really excited to see what we’re going to be doing in the future,” says Elliott Jung, Founding Partner.

Formed in 2018 by Adam Hepburn, Michael Hernandez, and Elliott Jung, HHJ Trial Attorneys has become one of Southern California’s premier personal injury and sexual abuse/sexual assault law firms. The Partners at HHJ have tried over 100 jury trials. They have won tens of millions of dollars for their clients and have been voted “Best Litigation Firm” by the San Diego Union-Tribune multiple years in a row. With confidence in the abilities of the partners and their carefully assembled team, the firm has not shied away from taking complex and even controversial, high-profile cases against governments, insurance companies, celebrities, and large corporations. Each partner has been voted as Rising Star Super Lawyers.

Hepburn says, “Part of our success was that all three of us never thought of failure as an option. We’re all pretty confident in our own right when facing the unknown and we knew we worked incredibly well together. With the synergy we brought to the table, with all our skills and abilities, we never doubted that it would work. What we didn’t know, however, was the route it would take or the speed it would take off, and that can be challenging and scary at times. We are very grateful for our success as a team because we know very well that success is never guaranteed when you form a new law firm. The common denominator amongst the partners was that we would just keep grinding until we got where we wanted to be, and I think that’s our same mentality today.” 

Hernandez says that from the beginning, the firm’s focus would be on serving the needs of the client above the needs of the business’s bottom line. “We try to be the best law firm and get the best for our client. It’s not about how much money we can earn from a given case. We work to make every client happy—period. That often results in referrals on bigger cases and other attorneys trusting us. When we get referrals from other attorneys, we make sure to be aggressive with the case and make sure they know they obtained value in coming to us. That’s the biggest compliment. People trust us enough to send us their friends, relatives and business associates and the only way to earn that is by making sure every client walks away happy.”

 “The strength we have in numbers and resources to be able to prosecute people who have caused some type of injury to our clients is much more powerful when combined with our trial experience gained over the past decade. That combination is a very big threat against people who are doing wrong,” Jung says.

“Michael and his team were so great during this entire process. They helped me to get a pretty significant settlement from my case and they were never delayed in any of the processes. I am confident that had I not “fired” the first attorney that I started to work with and called HHJ trial attorneys, I would not have gotten the results that I got with HHJ. You can’t go wrong with working with these guys to settle your case.”—Khala Barkus

Going the Limit

One of the firm’s strengths gained between “then and now” is their reputation for total client service, including a willingness and an ability to take any case to trial—to refuse to back down regardless of the apparent odds against them.

A high-profile sexual assault case makes the point. The firm’s client was a young female who graduated from college and had moved into the job force. She experienced a sexual assault during her college years and because of the trauma, she began therapy. She went to a facility named PsyCare, which set her up with a male therapist. He started to groom her by asking her questions such as how often she masturbated, did she find him attractive, and he even started putting her in role-playing scenarios in which he played the part of her boyfriend. 

Months later, at the end of the therapy sessions and when she was about to move out of state, he asked her if she wanted to have a sexual relationship with him. She said yes. They had sexual intercourse at a hotel the next week and then he left and had no further contact with her. 

HHJ sued PsyCare and the employee. They reached a settlement with the employee, but PsyCare said they weren’t going to pay anything because they had done nothing wrong. HHJ confirmed that they would be moving forward with a jury trial. During the discovery process, HHJ learned that six months earlier another female had filed a complaint against the same employee for making improper sexual comments to her during a therapy intake session. The case was based on his prior conduct and that PsyCare had acted negligently for not firing him or for continuing to allow him to see female patients and thereby putting those clients at risk of harm. 

A week before trial, PsyCare’s attorney called Hernandez and said, “I have been doing this for 16 years. You have no case and it won’t get past in limine motions. She said that she was going to go after our firm and the client when she wins the case for malicious prosecution.” She followed up with a 998 for zero dollars and an agreement not to sue us. During trial, the defense relied on the fact that they created a 6-month review plan where he had to speak with a supervisor every week for an hour to discuss his clients. They said that was more than enough to protect the public from future harm. Hernandez and Jung concentrated on the grooming, the fact PsyCare knew the employee was a predator and chose to put their clients at risk when they continued sending female patients with boundary issues with men to a person that knowingly had boundary issues with women. 

Unintimidated, HHJ tried the case before a San Diego jury and won a $1.75 million verdict, which is one of the highest medical malpractice verdicts in San Diego history. The jury found PsyCare 60 percent wrong and the therapist 40 percent at fault.

Hernandez says, “It was the confidence and the knowledge in our skills that gave us the ability to push that case forward because all the way up until trial, the representatives for PsyCare were telling us to dismiss the case immediately and that if we didn’t do that, they’d be going after our plaintiff. Another firm, lacking the confidence and skills and understanding that we had at that point, might have folded quickly in the face of those challenges. We did not. We knew we were doing the right thing. People know now that we will take a case, no matter how challenging, all the way to protect our client.”

Jung says, “We have really started to specialize in sexual assault cases. For example, we currently have a case against a large youth organization where a young woman was sexually assaulted for years. The new statutes passed in the last few years allow so many more survivors of abuse to obtain justice against their perpetrators. These cases are extremely important because they are very common and too many people are unwilling to speak up about these situations. They are very dark experiences, but they’re righteous cases for the ones we believe we should stand up for. The subject matter is tough. The cases are not easy, but we know we’re doing the right thing for the right people.”

An Ideal Match from the Start

Hernandez says, “Adam and I were roommates in law school, and we started at the public defender’s office together. We had a plan to ultimately leave the office and form our own civil law firm. Elliott was an attorney working with us and he was crushing a lot of trials—handling complex criminal trials. We thought he’d be a good addition to the firm. We asked him if he wanted to join and the next day he agreed.”

They had the right formula for success from the beginning. “If we had three Adams in the firm, things would not work out. If we had three Michaels this firm would not operate. If we had three Elliotts, we would never survive. The different personalities, abilities, and talents coming together make it work. We have similarities, but the differences meld,” Jung says.

Hepburn says, “That’s the biggest mystery to most people. The reality is we’re like brothers. We have discussions, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a heated argument. We are all extremely cool-headed and we don’t get into confrontation with each other or anyone else. If there’s a problem, we figure it out and avoid pointing fingers at each other. The most important consideration for me in choosing whom to partner with was asking the question of: Who do I want at my side in tough times who won’t freak out when really difficult challenges arise? Elliot and Michael are people I’ve never seen freak out over a single thing in life. All of us focus on the solution and just get on with it.”

The effectiveness of HHJ in serving their clients is in large part due to the assembly of a remarkable group of professionals and the building of a firm culture devoted to the client rather than the dollar. The firm now has a staff of 12, including six attorneys.

The three partners manage the firm with the input of their head paralegal, Shelby Cardoza. “She is the ‘mother hen’ of our group. We take on a lot of cases for other firms and everyone who has worked with Shelby says she’s the best paralegal they’ve ever seen. Even opposing counsel has tried to recruit her multiple times. The fact that our staff is so loyal speaks to the quality of our firm’s culture,” Hernandez says. 

“Recruiting the right people is a skill we had to learn. That’s another ‘then and now’ difference. Having the right culture at the firm to recruit the right people is essential and we’ve been able to do that. We’ve created a culture of people who are dedicated to our clients, who want to work hard, and who obviously want to work here, but because we’ve built this strong foundational team of exceptional people, it has allowed us to do so much more as a firm,” Jung says.

Hernandez says, “Our staff, our case managers, paralegals, and our associates are so good, they allow us to be more creative and to take on other issues that we never would have been able to tackle, but for their amazing abilities. They are phenomenal.”

Then and Now ... Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Creating a new business in a complex and highly competitive environment is a challenging prospect. For Adam Hepburn, Michael Hernandez, and Elliott Jung and for HHJ Trial Attorneys, the challenges of the past have helped create great prospects for the future. 

“I felt very competent as an attorney in general, but when you’re going into a new area of law you can experience things that come out of left field. After doing this now for years, I feel very confident in taking on novel cases in a slightly different area of the law because I know the skill set is the same, but the laws just may be a little different. But no matter what, I know I’m going to do a really good job. And I say that for each of us. We’ve taken on a case or two where initially we thought we might need to associate with other, more experienced attorneys in a specific field only to discover we didn’t need to do that. We had what it takes from the beginning,” Hernandez says.

Hepburn says, “I don’t think there is a ‘secret sauce’ to success. There are just times when the right circumstances come together with the right people who are effective at what they do. I think our firm does that. When we started, our motto was to treat every client as if they were a member of our family. That’s easily tossed around, but if you are an attorney and you really do act that way and you really do treat every client as if they’re a member of your family and you’re thinking about how I need to be fighting for this person as if they were my spouse, my cousin, that makes all the difference. It becomes life-or-death and you have to win for this person. We’ve abided by that since we started.”

Jung compares the firm and especially the partners to Watchmen. “We need people in our industry willing to take a chance for people who don’t have any money or resources or ability to push these cases forward, we have the legal ability as a contingency fee attorney to put up our own abilities and our own resources for cases we believe in. We want to be those Watchmen who say, ‘Hey, if you’re a defendant and you’ve done something wrong that hurts our client, we’re coming.’”