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Gary L. Bailey Jr.: If you wanted to sue Santa Claus, tell me where the North Pole is at. They offered us $5,000 because they thought it was the dumbest case we could even bring. His own lawyer got up during "Closing Argument"s and said, well, know, some cops make mistakes and things get... I promise you it was one of my best closings ever. You should have saw it because I was outraged.
Narrator: Welcome to "Celebrating Justice" presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal at CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation's top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at triallawyersjournal.com. Now here's your host, editor of TLJ and VP of marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.
Chad Sands: Welcome back friends to "Celebrating Justice". In this episode, we welcome Philadelphia Bay's trial lawyer, Gary Bailey. From a fourth grade reenactment of the Dred Scott case to fighting civil rights violations and tough personal injury cases, he's built his reputation on taking the hard cases others pass on and winning. To get to the stories, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?
Gary L. Bailey Jr.: My story starts back when I was about 10 years old, fourth grade. I went to a Catholic school here in Philadelphia and my teacher, Ms. Kayette, I'll never forget her at the time, she had us do a demonstration of a famous Supreme Court case. And I was excited to know as a kid, but I found out once we came in law, it is considered the worst opinion in Supreme Court history. It was, I believe, 1862, 63, something like that. Why is that important? was a couple years before slavery ended. It's called the Dred Scott case. Here it was in a nutshell. It was a case to where a former slave bought his freedom with money from the owner and then on top of that moved to the North, which as most people know, slavery was outlawed. Some plantation owner went up to the North, brought him back, jailed him, basically brought him back. And the court basically said that the law was not made for former slaves, free slaves, Africans, et cetera, et cetera, and basically put this man back in bondage. As fate would have it, Lincoln took office right after a couple of years later, Civil War, slavery was outlawed. Again, think about a 10 year old going through this example, myself, one other friend of mine, and then two other people on the side and we're doing this demonstration without any knowledge, only for the teacher to say, Mr. Bailey, you're part of the YouTube Lose. I'm like, what? Hold on. This is what's going on or what's happening? Oh, I want to be a lawyer. It just stuck with me. So as I got older, I understood more and more about the profession and what it meant in terms of the amount of influence and responsibility and power in a way you could change people's lives. And then it just so happened that my personality fits the profession and family members and friends for the past 40 some odd years are saying, you like to argue, you should be a lawyer. So it was just at that point, just confirmation bias and me sticking with it more and more. And then finally decided, all right, it's time to go to law school. Best decision never made, never looked back.
Chad Sands: You went to temple. Yes. so tell me about your first kind of years as an attorney after graduation and what that was like.
Gary L. Bailey Jr.: After graduation, I worked for two different firms,
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