Here is what the public is never told.
When you have suffered something catastrophic, a brain injury, paralysis, the death of someone you love, you are forced, at the worst possible moment, to make a decision you have no way to make well. You have to choose a lawyer. And unless you happen to work in the law, you have no real way of knowing who is actually any good.
So most people choose a name they have seen. The billboard. The television ad. The face on the bus bench. But the lawyer with the biggest advertising budget and the best trial lawyer in town are almost never the same person. One is the best at marketing. The other is the best at winning. Telling them apart, from the outside, is nearly impossible.
The people who can tell them apart are other lawyers. They know who actually tries cases instead of settling them on the courthouse steps. They know who wins the verdicts that change the law. They know whose name makes an insurance company nervous. And when it is their own family on the line, they set aside the billboards and call the person they know is the best.
When a lawyer’s own child is hurt, or their wife, or their father, they do not call the number on the billboard. They know better. They call someone like me.
For more than 25 years, I have been one of the lawyers other lawyers turn to when the injury is catastrophic and the case is too important to get wrong.
