This as-told-to essay is based on three conversations with Brett Schreiber, a California-based lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the Miami Autopilot case involving Naibel Benavides Leon. In 2025, a federal jury found Tesla partially responsible for the crash that killed Benavides Leon and seriously injured Dillon Angulo. The jury ordered Tesla to pay more than $242.5 million in damages. Tesla is appealing the verdict. Tesla and its attorney did not respond to requests for comment. The conversations have been edited for length and clarity. I've practiced law in California since 2005. I came up in a plaintiff civil litigation firm in San Diego and had the opportunity to work up and try serious-injury cases. Around 2021, I started getting calls about Tesla crashes. At the time, I had a GED-level education in autonomous vehicles, but that already put me head and shoulders above many of my contemporaries. Now, my firm has weekly meetings called "Tesla Autopilot Review Team" and gets dozens of calls a month from across the country on incidents involving Autopilot or Full Self-Driving modes. The vast majority of them involve minor or modest injuries that I'm simply incapable of reviewing. The barrier to entry due to the cost of litigation is so high. In the Miami case, I spent over a million dollars on litigation costs alone — not including fees, but experts, depositions, data work, and everything else. I'm a contingency lawyer. The math on that has to be a $10-plus million case to make sense. So we have to limit the cases that we look at to those involving catastrophic injuries or, unfortunately, a loss of life. For someone who is minimally hurt: great for them, bad for their lawsuit. At the end of the day, the courthouse doors are closed to most of