Breaking Barriers to Justice
was younger. Other lawyers, lawyers he was not co- counseling, lawyers he had no financial stake in, would come try their cases out of our office. He would share the conference room, the trial cart, the transcripts, the experts he had worked with, the crosses he had already built. He would lend what he had spent a career accumulating to lawyers he barely knew on cases that would never pay him a dime. I asked him why. He said, " Because it's the right thing to do. " That was his version. Here is what I think he meant: the catastrophically injured person on the other end of the file did not care whose office did the work. They only cared whether the work got done. If he had already solved the problem another lawyer was still fighting, keeping it to himself was a quiet kind of failure.
Not a failure of competence, but a failure of whose work we think we are doing. Get the case right - that is the duty, not proving how much you can hold alone. A catastrophic case should not rise or fall on what one lawyer has personally faced. None of us has faced all of it. But together, we have. Someone in this bar has already deposed your expert, fought your carrier, litigated your exact injury presentation in front of your exact judge. They are one email away. The only thing standing between your client and that answer is your willingness to ask before it is too late. Nobody tries a catastrophic case alone. The only question is whether you admit it early enough to matter. Your network is the case. Will you lean into it?
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM July/August 2026
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