Every case is somebody's worst year

There's a version of personal injury law that the public sees on a billboard, and there's a version of it that the client lives through, and they don't have very much to do with each other.

The billboard says: we'll fight for you. The lived version, for a lot of people, is: a phone call back two weeks late, a paralegal they've never met handling everything, a settlement check that lands a year and a half after the accident with most of the money already gone to liens and fees, and a sense that nobody on their side ever really knew their case.

I've spent enough years inside this work to have seen that version up close more times than I can count. National Advocates exists because I couldn't keep watching it and not try to build something different.

The middle of the curve is where most people live

The problem, in plain terms, is that the personal injury system in this country is set up to serve the cases at the top and bottom of the curve well, and the cases in the middle badly. If you have a catastrophic injury with seven figures of exposure, you'll get a real lawyer who fights hard. If you have a fender bender with no real damages, you'll get processed quickly and moved off the desk. But the cases in the middle — the soft tissue cases, the herniated disc cases, the broken arm with twelve weeks of PT, the cases that are worth fifty thousand or two hundred thousand dollars to a working family — are the cases that get dropped, traded, undervalued, and slow-walked. They're the cases that no one really wants to work, because the economics of a traditional firm don't reward working them carefully.

Those are the cases that pay rent, save jobs, cover the rest of the medical bills, and keep families from filing bankruptcy. They matter. Most of the country's PI cases are these cases. And the legal system serves them poorly.

So we built a firm around them.

Two stories that stay with me

Both real to the point of being composites of multiple clients but true to what we see.

The first is a woman I'll call Marisol. Rear-ended at a red light in a state where I'm not going to name the firms involved. Single mom, two kids, worked at a hospital. She had real neck pain that didn't go away. She signed up with a firm that ran a lot of TV ads. She heard from them three times in eleven months. Her case got transferred internally twice, and she was never told. By the time it landed on a desk where someone actually looked at it, her treatment had stopped because she'd stopped getting calls back from the case manager, the medical records were a mess, the demand was thin, and the carrier offered fifteen thousand dollars on a case that should have been worth four times that. She took it because she couldn't keep waiting. After the fees and the liens, she netted under three thousand. She told me she felt embarrassed, like she'd done something wrong. She hadn't. Her case had been worth real money to her family and the system that was supposed to fight for her had moved her through it like a number.

The second is a man I'll call Andre. Construction worker, traumatic brain injury, hit by a contractor's truck on a job site. Original firm wanted to settle for the driver's policy limit — twenty-five thousand dollars — and call it done. That's the number that was on the table because that's the only policy anyone had bothered to look at. When the case got to a team that actually investigated, what they found was a corporate parent on the contractor with a multi-million dollar umbrella policy that covered exactly this situation. The case settled, eventually, for almost a hundred times what the first firm had been ready to take. Andre's life changed. The difference between those two outcomes was about forty hours of work that the first firm hadn't done because no one was paid to do it.

I think about Marisol's case a lot more than I think about Andre's, because Andre's case got fixed and Marisol's didn't, and there are a lot more Marisols out there than Andres.

What we built

National Advocates is built so that a client like Marisol gets the work that a client like Andre eventually got. We work the file. We investigate every layer of coverage. We coordinate the treatment so the client isn't on their own figuring out where to go for an MRI. We pull the records when they come in, not three months later. We build the demand carefully, because the demand is the difference between getting fifteen thousand dollars and getting sixty. We stay in touch with the client the whole time, because the client's experience of the year and a half between the accident and the resolution is most of what they remember about whether the legal system worked for them.

And we work with one local trial attorney in each state we open, because when a case has to go to court, it has to be tried by someone who knows that courthouse, that bench, that bar. That attorney is the named local of counsel for our work in that state. They review every demand before it goes out. They have first refusal on every case we file. The book of business in their state is theirs to grow, with our team behind them.

That's the model. It's not glamorous. It's a lot of unglamorous middle work done carefully, by people who care about the cases in the middle of the curve, for clients who deserve to have someone actually working their file.

The reason this matters to me — the personal reason — is that I've watched too many people in my own life and the lives of people I love get steamrolled by an insurance process and a legal process that they had no realistic way of navigating on their own. The legal system isn't going to fix itself for them. What it can do is have a few firms inside it that are deliberately built to serve the middle of the curve well. We're trying to be one of those firms.

That's why we started National Advocates. That's what we're trying to do. I'll write more, over time, about how it's going, what we're learning, where we're falling short, and the cases that taught us something we didn't already know.

If a piece of this resonated, write to me. My email is at the bottom of every page on the site.

Ryan