I think there are a couple of things that makes our Law Firm different from a lot of the personal injury law firms in Kansas City, and I always tell people when they come to see us it won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t hire us, but make sure that whoever you do hire makes a couple of firm commitments including attention to the client, attention to detail, and a commitment to trial. I consider our Law Firm to be a concierge boutique style firm. We assign two attorneys to every case; we send a two-attorney team to every trial. But everyone who walks through the door, first we evaluate can we add value? If we can’t add value, I will offer to work for free, give free advice, or be a resource, but we won’t take that case under contract because if we can’t make a case significantly better, it would violate our core value to let somebody pay us to accomplish what they could accomplish on their own. We want to take cases where we can really be impactful in helping them achieve full justice, which means investigating all potential recovery sources, being consistently and constantly available to our clients in terms of responsiveness, answering questions. I tell my clients, call me any time. People always lead with “I hate to bother you.” It’s never a bother for us to talk to our clients. I understand that they’re going through a process where they’re likely in pain, they’re unfamiliar with the systems, they have been paying insurance premiums for years and years, and buying into the representations on television commercials that insurance companies are there to protect you. So they’re frustrated that all of a sudden an insurance company is taking the position that either they didn’t cause the injury, if they did cause the injury, the injury was pre-existing; if they did cause the injury and it wasn’t pre-existing, it’s not as serious as they claim. They really spend most of the time attacking a human being so that they can maintain their profits. So a differentiator, I think, for us is that we understand that, and we try very earnestly to take care of people. We care about our clients; many of our clients end up being lifelong friends. We stay in touch; we want to know how they’re doing after the case. But most importantly, while they’re going through this experience, we want them to feel like they’re not alone and that they have the right person, the right team of people in their corner, protecting them, making sure that they understand what is happening and why it is happening, and that they have as much assurance as they can in a very uncertain process.

Another piece that we offer that I think is different is in our commitment to take any meritorious case to trial. We run regular focus groups where we hire 12 people to come in and sit in our office while we present pieces of our cases so that we are educated, our clients are educated in such a way that we identify issues or problems early. If an insurance company adjuster says, “Well, you’ll never get X because of Y,” we can run that by a focus group and ascertain is this something we genuinely have to be concerned about? If not, we can discount it. Also, to enhance our preparedness because the most success, I think, comes from being prepared for every part of the journey, but most specifically for trial. What a lot of people and lawyers I don’t think really fully appreciate is that trial preparation starts when you file the petition, not the month before trial. So we have a system here that we follow that includes drafting the jury instructions concurrent with a petition; that includes doing our opening statements to focus groups very early in the process so that we can really make sure by the time that we’re standing in front of 12 good people or six good people, depending on what court we’re in, that we know that story and we know our client. So we also spend a lot of time with our clients in their home, out of the office, trying to make sure that we walk in their shoes to some extent, that we see them in their home environment. The things that we have learned about our clients when we’re spending that kind of time have really dramatically changed the way that we tell the story to the jury.