For me, day-to-day is all about the individual clients. We’re not a high-volume practice, or what I would sometimes call a mill. You see a lot of people that are heavy into advertising or do high volumes of small cases. Ours is really the opposite. We have a new case conference every week, where lawyers from all over the state refer cases to us for possible handling because of our well-known little niche of expertise with insurance bad faith.

And so we are very selective on the cases we take because we have to be. We don’t get paid here unless we prevail and get money to change hands from an insurance company or a defendant to our clients. And then we take our percentage of that. And so because we have to invest the resources and the money into the cases, a big part of the viability of a case depends upon who’s the plaintiff? So we have to really scrutinize the people before we agree to basically go into partnership with them on a case.

We have wonderful clients, typically, because they’ve been wronged by an insurance company. They wouldn’t otherwise be able to go after the insurance company to get justice without partnering up with lawyers who are willing to do the work completely at risk and put in our money. And in those cases where we’re lucky enough to succeed, the best day of our practice is when we meet with a client to distribute money to them to try to make their life better. Most of the time, they’ve suffered a great deal, either personal injury, or wrongful death of a family member, or something really catastrophically wrong in their life. And so, it’s rewarding for us to be able to change their life.

Without a doubt, the most significant mentor for me has been Bill Shernoff. And what I learned from Bill was in order to be a really effective lawyer in a specialty practice such as we have, you have to start with an understanding of the law. There’s no substitute for that. And that caused me about ten years into my practice, by the time we were about 12 years, by the time we went into partnership, to specialize and to absorb all of the case law in our area.

I would say that that was probably the biggest single thing that Bill taught me. And then, of course, Bill is one of the most ethical lawyers I’ve ever known, and hopefully I had the same characteristics that Bill saw in me. I think it was just a continuation of the need to deal with all of your clients and the courts ethically.