Latest / Ask the Lawyer / 09/28/2023 Ask the Lawyer with Harvey Peyton
Transcript
- 0:00Our area's most beautiful properties deserve the finest realtors. Meeks Realty Group. We
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- 0:13four zero one zero one. The views and opinions expressed on this program do
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- 0:23VRC Media. Put the power of Baby on your side. We have a
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- 0:45the power of beating on your side, the power of Bason. It's a
- 0:57twenty two and good morning to your Thursday morning. Jeff Jenkins with you and
- 1:02Harvey Peyton with the Peyton Law Firm in Nitro. Any question is about the
- 1:04law, Harvey ist here three oh four three four five fifty eight fifty eight
- 1:08three oh four three four five fifty fifty eight. Lines are opening. As
- 1:12you heard Jenny Murray, just say and and like Harvey and I were talking,
- 1:18if you are going I seventy seventh South, that's everybody takes it.
- 1:23You have to really have to take it if you're going south. It's really
- 1:25the only way south, it is, unless you you know, you can
- 1:27get down the Corridor twenty three pike. Well, I mean that's the way
- 1:32when I go to visit our youngest son and in Asheville, just outside as
- 1:38I generally get down that way through Virginia just because that's because it's boring to
- 1:42drive down the turnpike and well, you've done it so many times, and
- 1:47then you take a forty and it's just pounding the paved road where you taking
- 1:49eighty one down and come out the same way at Johnson City. Yeah,
- 1:53but really the only official way to go south is I seventy seven, and
- 1:57it's you know, the accident half on that part of the road that's just
- 2:01difficult to drive. It's from Mossy to Mayhean. Yep, it's hilly,
- 2:08you know, mountainous. You come through there at packs and the next thing
- 2:12you're right there on the Mossy exit if you're northbound, and then it's bridge
- 2:15after bridge after bridge, Yeah, winding road and then you get a little
- 2:20straight stretched here at the bottom at Mayhand. But if you've got a truck
- 2:23turned over, and there you get trouble. Yeah, and apparently that's what's
- 2:27happened. Yeah, it's what's happening. So the detour there is basically,
- 2:31if you're going south, the detour is I mean, you can try sixty
- 2:35but that gets all backed up, you know. But the official detour is
- 2:39Ice seventy nine north to Route nineteen, right right night Route nineteen. On
- 2:46Ice seventy nine south to Beckley. You go up to exit sixty five on
- 2:51seventy nine, which is Beckley and it's okay, okay, that's sixty five.
- 2:57Next one is Sutton. So yeah, yeah, you take the exit
- 3:00go down and takes us through Somersville and in there on the getting Backley at
- 3:07the North Backley intercheck, and then and then the and then if you're coming
- 3:09north, then that's just opposite. Just rewind it. I mean, if
- 3:14you're having north. Actually, if you're coming north and going north of Sutton,
- 3:19that's the way most people go anyway, because it's a direct shot right
- 3:22to get off at Backley, and the cruckers and travelers, the Canadians going
- 3:27to Myrtle Beach, they all get off. They used to stay at the
- 3:30Cafe Semina all the time, and then the would just get up the next
- 3:32morning and head down nineteen and bypass the Charleston area. It's a it's a
- 3:37mass. But what can you do about a speed? Of course, is
- 3:38I think always a factor. I don't know what time this turnover happen,
- 3:44sixty and it was probably raining at the time. It starting to break a
- 3:47little bit of rain, I know, down in Thames Valley, and you
- 3:50get a little speed and a truck loaded with material, particularly it's liquid.
- 3:55You know, that stuff shifts, shifts, and I just hope no one
- 4:00was hurt and that the environmental damage it results is not as great as what
- 4:04we had the last time you turned that one over with really bad chemicals and
- 4:10all the work those folks have done to restore Paint Creek over years and years,
- 4:14it was pretty much wiped out in a day. Yeah. And and
- 4:17they do have in effect now in the turnpikes, so if there was traffic
- 4:21kind of caught in between, they have those gates. They can open the
- 4:25gates and turn people around, which is obviously a good thing for a situation
- 4:29like this, because well, if you're not the mossy yet and get off
- 4:32at Mossy and go out to the road there and come out on one nineteen
- 4:36just south of Yeah okill yeah nineteen yea past that old company store. Us.
- 4:44If you're at coming north, you can get off of packs right and
- 4:47it's pretty much do the same thing. It's just get off the packs and
- 4:50get it right and takes it back cords ok. Kill. And but I
- 4:54mean those are a little what happens there is what happened last I forget that
- 4:59they of the week last week when the hay truck caught on fire sixty four.
- 5:03Yes, yes, well it's like getting a blockage in the main artery,
- 5:06you know. The next thing, you know, every little capillary starts
- 5:10to fill up. Yeah, near Milton, just short of Milk. Yeah.
- 5:12And they were yeah, and there were folks you know who took an
- 5:15hour to get from the Windfield Interchange Downtay's Valley Road to to the hospital,
- 5:21right. I mean it was just bumper to bumper both ways because everybody gets
- 5:26off you know, well we got to get off the interstate. Where do
- 5:29you go there? And it's if you get an accident, a dunbar on
- 5:33sixty four will be on you. If you don't you get off on a
- 5:38turnpike. You may sit for hours because the same thing happens. It just
- 5:42backs up and Route sixty backs up. And I remember the before they put
- 5:46the gates in, because that was a whole big thing because they had that
- 5:50just really isolated, like five or six miles snowstorm or the turnpike and R.
- 5:57J. Rick John Johnson was caught in it and he ended up spending
- 6:00all that time at Picks because at that time his grandkids where he was visiting
- 6:03with his grandkids down in like Bluefields, got called on the way back,
- 6:08no way out, managed to get off at packs, couldn't go anywhere anywhere,
- 6:12yea. And of course he was quite complimentary of the you know,
- 6:15the hospitality, the pox fire department. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the
- 6:18fire department at little gas stations right next to it. Right. But then
- 6:21they but then they made the gates where you can turn around. So now
- 6:25they've they've saved that. But again, we don't know how long the term
- 6:27pike's going to be closed, but anything heading south toward Beckley, the detours
- 6:32are are in place. Well, are we good to see it? Were
- 6:34good to see you. You know, the topic comes up sometimes. It
- 6:39came up maybe a decade ago when one of these UH tie up truck accidents
- 6:45occurred, I believe it was on sixty four westbound, and at that time
- 6:51a lawyer tried to concoct some sort of a class action on behalf of everyone
- 6:56who's delayed by the accident for whatever amount of time they lost, or if
- 7:02you hadn't if you were late getting to work, or that didn't go anywhere.
- 7:06I mean, there are just things that you talk about proximate cause you
- 7:11have to prove. But for this person's negligence, a foreseeable harm occurs.
- 7:16Well, it's not necessarily foreseeable. It's a likely result at times that there'll
- 7:24be some delay, but it's not something that's readily foreseeable to a driver.
- 7:28It's it's not a risk that's compensable. Now, obviously, if there's a
- 7:33turnover and the load leaks, which is what happened with the last turnover they
- 7:38had up there on Paint Creek, and contaminates the soil and contaminates people's wells,
- 7:42well, then there is liability because if you're hauling as a substance,
- 7:46it's clearly foreseeable that if it leaks it'll do some harm, but not necessarily
- 7:49that someone driving from back Leave to Charleston's going to be thirty minutes late.
- 7:54That's just outside the realm of predictable danger that's compensable. So I don't think
- 8:01we'll see it now. Unfortunately, we just have to watch and see what
- 8:03environmental damage. That's a really sensitive area up there. You know, there's
- 8:07a big, big tract of land in there around the head of waters of
- 8:11Paint Creaks and well there's some mining going on up to one holidayre and they're
- 8:16still operating. But you know, the big timber company from North Carolina,
- 8:22I think bought out the Party Curtain lands to forty forty or fifty thousand acres,
- 8:26but as far as I can tell, they haven't started taking the timber,
- 8:28as they may have it booked up for one of these carbon credits.
- 8:33Because I thought when that transaction took place, we're going to start seeing some
- 8:39you know, some roads going in here, some timber activity, but I
- 8:41haven't noticed any from the turnpike. But it is an environmentally sensitive arey.
- 8:45A lot of bears, a lot of wildlife. The creek was stocked with
- 8:50trout in the season. It also had a fairly healthy, reproducing population of
- 8:54bluegill, smallmouth mass and things like that. The people in this area aren't
- 8:58used to because he lives there so many decades with polluted water and now it's
- 9:03a shame it's gone away. We'll see what happens. Yeah, see,
- 9:07I hope they can get that cleared up quick. And numbers are the call
- 9:13and the lines are open for Harvy. The number to call three or four
- 9:15three four five fifty eight fifty eight. Three oh four, three four five
- 9:18fifty eight fifty eight. We've been in the news this week. We first
- 9:24reported the story last Friday about about the opioid settlements. Course, we've done
- 9:30all the opioid stories in the settlement in the state, getting about nine hundred
- 9:33and forty million dollars almost a billion, almost a million, and it may
- 9:37be a billion by the time it's all By time's all over, it probably
- 9:41will be. And you know, there are attorneys that worked on these for
- 9:43multiple years and there was a process set up and a recommendation from a former
- 9:50circuit judge, Chris Wilkes on the attorney fees right, and then that has
- 9:54been filed with the three judge pan with the mass litigation panel and and it's
- 10:01come out about one hundred and forty one million dollars to be split in various
- 10:03ways. Right, you're comment on that, Well, my comment is,
- 10:07uh, you know we well as as a complete disclosion. We our office
- 10:13was not involved in any way. And that opiate litigation. We thought about
- 10:18it, Tom thought about I said, look, stay out of that.
- 10:20A lot. That's a lot of this at the local level and country level
- 10:24is going to be politically decided. If you're not willing to get in there
- 10:26and really turn the soil for about three or three years and earn your keep,
- 10:33you're not gonna be entitled to get paid. You know, we were
- 10:35involved in the water country litigation, and we did everything that the group was
- 10:39required to do and filed everything on behalf of all of our clients and filed
- 10:43lawsuits and we got paid. But let me tell you, it wasn't without
- 10:46a significant amount of time and effort to be put in, not nearly as
- 10:48much as the lead counsel did. And in this case, I would I
- 10:52would wager that Ness Motley probably had a dozen lawyers who did nothing for five
- 11:00years except reviewed documents, submit discovery requests, attend depositions, go to court,
- 11:05and you've got Majestro. You know, Majester didn't have a big law
- 11:09firm. It's to three people, and it just put his entire earnings at
- 11:16risk for a five year period to put in hundreds of thousands of combined hours
- 11:22to get a results. And I thought, is what did the state have
- 11:26when this started zero? What do we have when it's finished? Eight hundred
- 11:33and ten million dollars And that's after all the expenses. Keep in mind the
- 11:41thirteen million dollars of expenses that are being reimbursed. We're thirteen million dollars that
- 11:46the lawyers went out and borrowed or took out of their hip pocket and paid
- 11:50in advanced to prosecute these lawsuits with no guarantee that it would be paid back.
- 11:56If all the manufacturers have said no and they went to trial, you
- 12:01could get a result just like happening down here in Charleston. We watched that
- 12:05case, a federal court case. It was trying in front of Judge Faber,
- 12:09and lawyers put kajillions of hours and time into that and he ruled for
- 12:13the defense. So that could have happened. But because of the hard work
- 12:18of the lawyers. And I'll say this, I'm not a fan of you
- 12:22know, sort of non resident I won't say carpetbaggers, but nonresident enrollees and
- 12:28our system like Pat Morrissey in public office. There's nothing wrong with it.
- 12:33And it's a free country. I wish we had a I just thought the
- 12:37Republicans could come up with a homegrown candidate for attorney general. They're going to
- 12:43have one this time. But my understanding, has he done a really good
- 12:46job overseeing this lawsuit? I mean, I don't know, what do you
- 12:48want? And one commentator, one so called political consultant I saw blowing off
- 12:58online about this is another example of the planeff's personal injury industry. But no,
- 13:03it's not. It's an example of a government and a group of people
- 13:05suffering a significant loss. Communities destroyed, lives, destroyed, resources, taxed
- 13:16to the limit, a problem with no individual could address that was addressed by
- 13:24entities in cooperated public private efforts with the governing bodies who were harmed and sought
- 13:31redress from the people who committed wrong. And if they didn't commit wrong,
- 13:37they wouldn't have paid that kind of money. They know what they did,
- 13:41you know, big pharmer knows what they did. The sales reps know what
- 13:43they did. Cardinal enterprises, I mean the middleman, they knew what they
- 13:48were doing. And these pharmacies knew what they were doing, I mean big
- 13:52league pharmacies who look at us store and say, well, wait, wait,
- 13:54wait, wait wait, get a little story out here in Putton County,
- 13:56got one end Tay's Valley. Now it's near a hospital, so you
- 14:01expect that maybe apioid prescriptions will be high there because people are leaving the er
- 14:05or the hospital income. But the astronomical numbers of opioid prescriptions being filled,
- 14:13and then you've got you know, these pop up pharmacies in some of the
- 14:18Coldfield counties and people driving up here from Florida to pick up bills. They
- 14:22knew what they were doing. They knew what they were doing over then,
- 14:24and they knew they were in an area like eastern Kentucky and West Virginiary.
- 14:30We don't have the resources and we're underfunded and couldn't stop it, and they
- 14:33were going to suck all the cash they could out of here and did.
- 14:37And so tell me what's wrong with suing those people and recovering almost a billion
- 14:43dollars for the state of West Virginia and paying a fifteen percent attorney's fees for
- 14:48people who weren't guaranteed. They get a penny a lot of dime. That's
- 14:52the thing. And all the lawyers who were working with the drug companies,
- 14:56how much did they cumulatively get paid? I would ways are more than one
- 15:01hundred and forty one million dollars if we had a full disclosure on that,
- 15:05and they got paid win or lose, Right, That's the thing about You
- 15:09take a look at a lawsuit here against some insurance company or some agency the
- 15:15estate, and the lawyer works hard and gets a big recovery for a client
- 15:18who deserves it, and they get paid a fee, said all kind much
- 15:22as the lawyer go. I said, okay, well, what did the
- 15:24lawyer, the lawyers get one of these big law firms that's guaranteed payment by
- 15:30an insurance company or by the board of risk. What did they get guaranteed
- 15:33to assign a bunch of associates to turn that case for a two or three
- 15:37years and get guaranteed checks every month? How much did they get? I
- 15:41mean, that's the thing that's never addressed. Now, what will happen.
- 15:46I'll assure you well, I don't think anybody pays attention to this so called
- 15:52political consultant who was blowing off about this. He's associated with the AstroTurf group
- 15:58called Citizens Against Laws. What you're going to hear in the legislature now is
- 16:03we have to further restrict the rights of people who are hurting car wrects,
- 16:07or who are poisoned by chemicals, or who are injured by defective products or
- 16:11negligent doctors or anything of nursing cause we've got to further limit their rights because
- 16:17the lawyers who got us a billion dollars got one hundred million bucks in the
- 16:21fees. That's that's that's the conflation that's going to occur, and I assure
- 16:25you it will be the first thing that comes up in this term of the
- 16:26legislature. I mean, if you've got a legislature as unbalanced as the one
- 16:30we have now, and we also now have a freedom caucus in the state
- 16:34legislature, But what do you want? And we don't want any We don't
- 16:41want cold companies to pay another penny. We don't want another dime from the
- 16:45natural gas industry. But we don't want people making fifteen bucks an hour,
- 16:51because that's a great threat to our economy. Anything about it. We're suffering
- 16:56because people are making twelve dollars an hour want to make fifteen. That's that's
- 16:59our That's just nuts to me. But that's not a legal issue. As
- 17:03far as the attorney fees are concerned, I have no problem with it.
- 17:06Now there are going to be some windfalls, I believe because a lot some
- 17:11of these cities and counties, you know, just on a political basis,
- 17:18hired lawyers who didn't do any work, essentially just along for the ride,
- 17:22ride on the cocktails that people who are doing the work, and they're going
- 17:25to be having their hand out for twenty five or fifty or one hundred grand.
- 17:27I would urge the county commissioners and city officials to take a look at
- 17:32that. So, well, you know, how much did you get out
- 17:33of the big pie before we start? You know, you're not You're entitled
- 17:37a reasonable fee, but not an unreasonable fee, regardless of what your contract
- 17:42says. So we'll see about that. In fifteen percent, Harvey in it
- 17:48because the number is so big, fifteen percent, you look, but that
- 17:51is that is a lower rate right than or well, I mean, there
- 17:55isn't any contingency fee contracts are I mean, they're the bane of the existence
- 18:02of the vested interests because if you took a person who was injured in a
- 18:07lot of accency, they're out of work for six weeks, they're laid up,
- 18:11they got a bunch of medical expenses, they're behind on their bills,
- 18:14they cannot afford to go hire a lawyer to simply, I mean, I
- 18:18have to blow us a business you can't and pay him win or lose to
- 18:25handle this claim. And so the contingent fee contract is the poor man's key
- 18:29to the courthouse. It always has been. They said, look, I
- 18:30think your case has got some there's some merit, so we'll take it and
- 18:37we will work for a percentage of what we can recover if we recover,
- 18:40and if we don't, you don't know us anything. You don't know us
- 18:42the expenses we put into it. So it's it's the fairest way for John
- 18:48que Public to get high quality counsel, you know, which is the last
- 18:55thing that the vested interests want is for mister every man Joe main Street to
- 19:03get the same quality lawyers that Joe wall Street can have because with a contingent
- 19:07fee, you've got a chance to make some money while doing good and you're
- 19:12not guaranteed payment. So while there's no standard, you know, you think
- 19:17about twenty five percent or thirty percent of a recovery generally is considered reasonable.
- 19:23There's somewhars who charges highs forty percent. We don't, you know. And
- 19:30you know, I always say that you should ask the lawyer. If you
- 19:33get to a lawyer to hand in your king said, you know, what
- 19:34about this percentage? I mean, let's talk about is there how big is
- 19:38the risk here? I mean how much? I mean, we negotiate them
- 19:41all the time. You know, sometimes as well, I'll take x X
- 19:45number of dollars if we get this resolves, So don't be afraid to ask.
- 19:51But I think fifteen percent of the recovery and view of the amount of
- 19:53work that was done, it is quite quite reason Well, so did Judge
- 19:56Wilkes, right, Yeah, yeah, Chris Woks. Yeah, there's an
- 20:00income conservative from over in the eastern Pannel. He's not a given away kind
- 20:03of guy. Yeah, And you can you can go to our story and
- 20:06read his. It's like thirty pages or something. Actually read most of it,
- 20:10and I understand Majestro was on Hobby Show yesterday as usually did a good
- 20:14job. I'm sure I didn't listen to it, but did a good job
- 20:18of, you know, outlining what was actually done. Now they're getting paid
- 20:23like twenty million dollars, which makes everybody envious, but you shouldn't be resentful.
- 20:30I mean, of course any minute would like to be able to work
- 20:33at a job. But the interesting thing Harvey and Harvey Patin's with this is
- 20:37his show Painting Law Firm in niner three or four three four five fifty fifty
- 20:41eight and we'll take we'll take the break in just a second. But the
- 20:44rest of the money is now the West Virginia First Foundation, which which has
- 20:48this board, and they'll be hiring a person kind of to run that thing,
- 20:53like an expert. That's one of their first things, and then that
- 20:56will decide where does this money go in the communities to help deal with what
- 21:00the aftermath of the opioid epidemy. And I think that was to Morrissey's credit,
- 21:04that idea, I don't know who came up with it all around of
- 21:08having this foundation it's going to administer the money to remember, you know,
- 21:14over the objections of Governor Caperton, who was in you know, the invested
- 21:18interests, the state got involved in tobacco litigation and recovered hundreds of millions of
- 21:26dollars. Well, what did the legislature do? They just spent it on
- 21:30other things. They balanced the state's budget with it for about a decade instead
- 21:34of anti smoking programs and health programs. So that's not going to happen.
- 21:38I mean this, you can you imagine you take up somewhere like Kermit,
- 21:42you know, would have to be one of the hardest hit location, got
- 21:45the bridge going right across the Kentucky I mean, they had the pop up
- 21:48pharmacies, or you go to Mullins or Itman or would they would they Scosiana?
- 21:55They called it Oxiana Oxiana. Now go to Osiana. Yeah, I
- 22:00was, I was there recently. I think think of what eight or ten
- 22:03million dollars in a program addressed to trying to help those people who are harmed
- 22:10by this convene to a community like that. A lot of money, But
- 22:14don't let the politicians get there, don't let the legislature get their hands on
- 22:17it. I think it's in exactly the right place and we'll see who the
- 22:19executive director is. And no one entity had the power to a point all
- 22:25of I think the governor only had what five Yeah, I don't know much
- 22:29about him, but it's you know, if it's handled correctly, this could
- 22:34be a really, really good thing. Now, you know, I live
- 22:38and work in Putnam County and have been primarily associated with Putnam County for almost
- 22:42fifty years. We have areas in the county where the apioid crisis was at
- 22:52the level that it may have been in some of the other counties. And
- 22:56we have myriad many sho have lost loved ones to overdose deaths, prominently Jack
- 23:06Whittaker's daughter, granddaughter, who died of an overdose and her boyfriend. I
- 23:11mean, they but what we're gonna do, I mean, I don't know
- 23:18what we're gonna do. In Putnam County. We have some some organizations in
- 23:22existence, the Rock Church and you know, the the religious community that's tries
- 23:30to address these problems where they can find a way to work with them within
- 23:33a structure that needs constitutional muster. But these other counties, where things tend
- 23:38to get money tends to drift away if not watched after. I think it's
- 23:42going to be watched after quite well. I hope made a big difference in
- 23:47Huntington, make a big difference here in Knall County. You think you look
- 23:48at the what's happening in Sheil, you know what's happening in Saint Albans.
- 23:52These cities needs some help. Let's take our brake Carve's with us Peyton Law
- 23:56Firm in Nitro. Give us a call. Lines are open three four five
- 24:00fifty eight fifty eight three oh four three four five fifty eight fifty eight in
- 24:04questions about the law for Harvey, it's eight forty five. This is five
- 24:07eighty Wucach. Accidents happen when we least expect them, leaving us confused and
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- 24:23process, ensuring your rights are protected and you receive the compensation you deserve.
- 24:29Trust Paytent Law Firm to be your advocate during challenging times. To call seven
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- 26:40five eighty Sea Jas the Voice of Charleston Jeff Jenkins with your Harvey Painton and
- 26:44the Paint Law Firm. Again, as Jenny just mentioned there, the West
- 26:47Virginia Turnpike is closed so in Fat County. So if you're traveling south on
- 26:51the Turnpike coming into Charleston ready to hit there, or you're on I seventy
- 26:53seven, you need to go I seventy nine north to US route nineteen,
- 27:00the exit fifty seven, Exit fifty seven. So we've got to go like
- 27:03fifty seven miles up seventy nine, hit nineteen, hit nineteen and go south
- 27:08right, go through Somersville, get the okill Beckley and then get back on
- 27:12the turnpike there. I would say it north Beckley. It would be the
- 27:15way to do it. You know you mentioned again. I want to throw
- 27:19in a word here about the paid law firm. Yes, because I mean
- 27:25we are a small firm. There are two of us, me and my
- 27:29oldest boy, Tom, and we have a staff of six, most all
- 27:33of whom have been with us for years and years. And while we and
- 27:37we have an office in a smaller town, it's in Nitro. But the
- 27:41fact that we are small and then a smaller town doesn't mean we're small time
- 27:44lawyers. We get tremendous results for our clients, particularly in matters of body
- 27:49injury or death or economic harm. There's some really significant employment claims that Tom
- 27:55has handled. I think in this past month he's way over a million dollars
- 28:00in cases settled. And that's dealing one on one with the clients. You
- 28:04come in, you talk to me, you talk to Tom, you talk
- 28:07to Ambury, you talked to Sarah, you talk to Mary Anne, you
- 28:11talk to Melody. You see the same people time after time. You don't
- 28:15see paralegals. It's not all done over the telephone or computer. And you
- 28:21know, we don't advertise on television, and we don't say that we're the
- 28:23biggest in the United States or in the world. You know, we're probably
- 28:27the smallest, really high class, good results personal injury law firm in the
- 28:33whole area. And we take pride in that right because, in the nature
- 28:38of handling people's problems one on one, bigger is not always better. If
- 28:44you do, think how much better service you got from AT and T or
- 28:48compu serve, you know, try calling one of them, as opposed to
- 28:52dealing with or if you buy something online from Amazon and you have a defect,
- 29:00compare that with going down to Center Hardware and Saint Alban's and buying something
- 29:03you have a defect. You walk back in, you talk to J.
- 29:06D. Anderson to get your problem resolved. The same thing holds true.
- 29:08I believe in the law business, we're lucky here in West Virginia. We've
- 29:12got really, really good lawyers. We've got really good judges from top to
- 29:18bottom. There are always a few exceptions, but the Payton Law Firm is
- 29:22an exception. And we're small. We have a regional sort of practice anywhere
- 29:29in the southern West Virginia, southeast Ohio. We're getting ready to follow another
- 29:33claim up in Columbus here, and I just don't think you're going to find
- 29:37anybody that has we have handled a claim for who is going to say we're
- 29:44dissatisfied with this, We're dissatisfied with the way we contacted, we're able to
- 29:49contact our lawyer, were dissatisfied with the person we've dealt with in the office,
- 29:52Because they're not. Because our attitude is the case is only as big
- 29:56as the lawyer thinks it is, and the most important case that in the
- 29:59world is one that client has when they walk in the door. Now,
- 30:02sometimes you have to tell them and they appreciate honesty. Look, this is
- 30:06not a case, or yes, this is a case, but I'm going
- 30:10to tell you to get where you want to be. You're gonna transactional costs
- 30:15are gonna eat this up, and so you should go home and think this
- 30:19over. And mist I would say ninety percent of the time folks are well,
- 30:22at least you're you're honest about that. You know, they get to
- 30:26another lawyer who says, well, I'm too busy or I've got to look,
- 30:30no lawyers too busy to take a good case. If they're ping pong,
- 30:33and you know which happens, they'll send them to one office to another,
- 30:36and they'll get to hire office as well. Look, here's why people
- 30:38are sending you away and why they sent you down. Here is the last
- 30:42resort because they don't want to tell you the truth. They just want to
- 30:45be I don't want to be rest right, honest looking and and say you
- 30:48just don't have a case, which happens I'd say probably thirty percent of the
- 30:52time we talk to people. You can you can do it in a number
- 30:55of ways, and we do it the right way. We talked about everybody
- 31:00and you can come to Nitro. And I heard on again, kudos to
- 31:03Nitro. I heard on the news on the way in. There's an ordinance
- 31:07being mannered about in Berkeley Springs, the town of Bath regarding parallel parking.
- 31:14Can you parallel park against traffic? Right? In other words, if you're
- 31:17going in this direction, can you just pull across the street and park on
- 31:22the opposite side and on the left side facing into traffic. You can in
- 31:26Nitro. You know that that battle was fought in Nitro about twenty five years
- 31:30or so ago. It's always been the case in Nitro, the people parked
- 31:33on both sides of the street, particularly in the old part of town from
- 31:37like or Second Avenue splits off all the way down to fortieth Street. Streets
- 31:42are straight. And when there was a move a foot for the police to
- 31:49start putting tickets on cars a parked against traffic, well, that lasted about
- 31:53I think Don Carnes might have been the mayor, and I don't know what
- 31:56got into Don's head, some sort of a brain flee or something that he
- 32:01thought that would be a good idea. When that lasts about a week.
- 32:05You know people who have been parking in front of their house but just pull
- 32:07across the street, not the many ways you have to turn off First Avenue
- 32:10to get to almost anywhere. So if you live on the left side of
- 32:14the street, we go up and turn around and come back down. They
- 32:16just pull over and park for other house. I remember a story about the
- 32:22w W Coliseum and if you go to the Mountain basketball games, which a
- 32:24lot of our listeners have. You know, there is parking up and down
- 32:27mom Boulevard. There is just parking on both sides. And there was a
- 32:30police chief who came and he got the idea that I'm going to ticket all
- 32:34these people, including a circuit judge. We got ticketed and towed during the
- 32:38game where the chief wasn't around long. No, I wouldn't think to be
- 32:42around long. And you can't still park on books bad if you can park
- 32:45on both sides of the street and light are Unlike I parked on Smith Street
- 32:51at the Capitol Market. On the Smith Street side, there's just parking.
- 32:54Yeah, so I just pulled across the street and park end up getting a
- 32:58ticket. Welcome to church, Welcome to shopping in Charleston. Right. I
- 33:01noticed the other day with great pride that we announced down at Putnam County the
- 33:07Director of Development Authority to sale two more parcels for expansion in the most recent
- 33:14business park, the one that's down off forro Out thirty five. You know
- 33:19what happened in what happened in Kanau County today, Well, they got a
- 33:22grant to explore whether fifty eight years later, they can add two hundred feet
- 33:30to the runway at the air base. M that was the big news here.
- 33:35It was big news this morning. All right, we've got another grant
- 33:37to study filling in a park at an airport that's been outdated for fifty plus
- 33:43years. While in Putnam County, I just hate to say it, if
- 33:47it was for state government, if it wasn't for state government, Charleston would
- 33:54would look like Welch, I believe, honestly. State. Well, the
- 34:00banks are gone, the banks are dupots down to sixty employees. You see
- 34:04that today what's left a DuPont. The bone pickers are now picking the last
- 34:08little bits off the bones up there in Bell, it was sixty work.
- 34:12If my sister worked up there as an operator in the six to other seventies
- 34:15and eighties, when they had eight or nine hundred people working in that plan,
- 34:20well you know what Bell was like in the in the DuPont east banking
- 34:23everyway, and my wife's grandfather would drive from he lived up to Mault Lookout
- 34:30and with four or five other men, they were getting a car every day
- 34:34in Carpool and drive for a mountain. That was before I was before Route
- 34:37nineteen. Brother that was when you drove down and came over Gaully Mountain,
- 34:40came over sixty, came over sixty all the way to drive down, came
- 34:45to work at DuPont because it was a good job, drove back home every
- 34:49day and didn't that, and did that making a three shift, change the
- 34:52day's lights and evenings. Right, and but now, I mean, it's
- 34:58just there's just not much aft. I'd like to think that there's a lot
- 35:00of potential here, but it's just hard to see. You know, we're
- 35:05talking now. All we're talking about it is whether they can drink liquor on
- 35:07the streets in Charleston. That's going to be a big help. Right next
- 35:10next maybe we'll have a little pocket casinos so you can just take your money
- 35:15out and throw it a slot machine somewhere on the street. That might be
- 35:16a big help too. I don't know. One of the things that the
- 35:20Peyton we got a couple of minutes here you talked about some of your case.
- 35:24Another thing, it's you've decided years ago that you also are going to
- 35:29offer services to people that may not pay a lot of money. I mean
- 35:31maybe, I mean, it doesn't make you a lot of money. But
- 35:34it's a it's a service deeds and will. We do a lot of consult
- 35:40with small business people, and we consult with individuals and families about things like
- 35:45a state planning, a little real estate. Now we're not like you know,
- 35:49there's some firms like Mark slot Nick here in Charleston. He does a
- 35:52lot of high quality real estate work. Bob hal from up chess Peak,
- 35:55same way. So we don't do it on that scale. But I would
- 36:00say probably twenty five to thirty percent of our office time, my office time
- 36:05almost exclusively, it's spent doing things that people need. Now, yeah,
- 36:08the mattter as well, you do that for a client, maybe someday they'll
- 36:14have a rack and they'll call you. Well, that's that's not the case.
- 36:16People go where they get results. We get likes as injury claims and
- 36:22death claim because we get results for people, and people hear about it and
- 36:24they come to see us and they trust us. We do it without the
- 36:29expectancy of anything in return. Right, you're here to help people that would
- 36:34get paid. I would wage your eye over our fees. I mean I
- 36:36even get in a tussle with Tom. He thinks I charge too much.
- 36:39Said Tom it's lower than anybody else. You know, we've got to make
- 36:44enough to keep these lights on. And he well, no, so I
- 36:47know we do a lot of that sort of work and we take great pride
- 36:52in it. You know, a long time ago, I just got to
- 36:54law school and Tom Caitle and I were good friends. End up in the
- 37:00judge up in Buchanan. An old lawyer told him study to see forever as
- 37:07long as that courthouse is standing of a deed or a will or a contract.
- 37:12You right, that's put on record. Now, how do you want
- 37:15people to think about you sloppy? We're really careful and really good. That's
- 37:21a choice you're have, and so we've opted. I mean, documents come
- 37:23out of our office, get proof read two times a dead minimum, sometimes
- 37:28three, and you can always find something, all right, Harvey seven five
- 37:32five fifty five fifty six as the Peyton Law Firm in Nitro sent fifty five
- 37:37fifty six or Paytent Law Law Firm dot com. We're actually we're revamping our
- 37:42website and making contact with us even easier. We got a chat there now
- 37:45we can have a live chat. Oh okay, all right. ABC News
- 37:49is next, then the local news and five eighty live. This is five
- 37:52eight whas the voice of Charleston H five A A w C h S A
- 38:09F ninety six point five F M Charleston and one oh four point five Cross
- 38:13Lanes w U p r C Media Station. We are proud to live here too,