Why Work With Us
Choosing an attorney is important. We want to make it easy by letting you know what you’re getting.
1. Experience & Knowledge
With First Truth Law, you have the benefit of an entire career devoted to helping people like you, people hurt by others’ negligence, especially from medical malpractice.
Right out of law school, as the youngest member of a team of personal injury attorneys, invaluable mentorship was abundant. Almost immediate courtroom and litigation experience followed quickly, including trials in federal and state courts in every corner of Virginia – from Lee County to Roanoke to Alexandria to Abingdon to Grundy.
Then came a once in a lifetime career opportunity to look behind the curtain, so to speak, by working for a federal judge in Roanoke.
The role as a federal law clerk involved overseeing the judge’s cases and closely scrutinizing the arguments of all the attorneys on those cases. There was no way around it – judges work really hard to get to the truth, to get the right answer, and to reach the right result.
This resonated – always looking for the truth at the heart of a matter and working harder for the clients and causes with truth at their core. This planted a seed that steadily grew – the search for truth and for getting to the right result, for the right reasons.
After the judge’s retirement, the return to private practice was accompanied by rejuvenation and more clarity – about the kind of life and law practice that could be built. Choosing clients and cases carefully. Being responsive to clients’ needs. Building work around clients who feel like family. It is all very possible.
With First Truth Law, we want to help you focus on life’s priorities, and get back to them.
2. Honesty & Clarity
It is hard enough to navigate through something complicated when you actually know a little something about it. For most of our clients, they have never had an attorney before or spent any real time in a courtroom, and they would rather keep it that way. The last reason they want to do it is either because they were hurt by someone else’s negligence.
When being thrown into an unfamiliar situation that you would rather have avoided altogether, honest answers are a must.
We are honest with the people we serve. If we think we can help, we say so. And vice versa. A successful attorney-client relationship involves trust and honesty.
In addition to honesty, we want our clients to understand. We communicate clearly and frequently, answering questions along the way. Unfortunately, most families who are victims of medical malpractice do not get answers about what happened from the doctors and hospitals. We work to provide those answers.
3. Strategic Representation
Perspective is one of the most important skills for a lawyer to have. This means realizing what is important and what is not. It means focusing on the right things and seeing their place in the bigger picture. It is about remaining focused on our clients’ best interests, rather than serving our egos.
When we help people, the point is to get to the right result, not just to “win” at every step. In fact, we know that conceding some points may provide an advantage later. For example, if you have $1,000,000 in medical bills, it is not very helpful to draw everyone’s attention to $5,000 in lost income. The lost income is a real loss, no doubt, but it distracts from the astronomical medical bills.
Another example is looking ahead. Planning several steps ahead often provides a different and better course of action than considering an issue in a vacuum. For example, when we talk to medical experts, we do not just talk about the things that support the case. We also talk about potential problems. When they come up later, we are prepared, not surprised.
4. Personalized Attention
We help people at a particularly vulnerable time in life. We take our responsibility to them very seriously. So while some things are common across cases, each of our clients and their circumstances are unique. And we treat them that way.
We know that building trust helps build relationships so we start working on that in our very first conversation.
We value genuine connections and give our focus and attention to clients when we are talking with them.
One of the most important jobs we have is to listen well.
Trust, genuine connection, and listening well translate into understanding our clients on a deeper level, understanding their life, their story, and their goals. When we know those things, we can tell that story and help optimize their recovery.
5. Empathy & Compassion
We have all been through hard things that tested us, things we did not think we would make it through. And yet somehow we survived, and even thrived.
Sometimes stepping from I can’t to I will, from victim to survivor, from hopeless to hopeful,involves someone helping us through. We offer that help.
We show compassion, curiosity, and empathy. Our goal is to have genuine curiosity about people’s lives, to listen deeply, for people to feel heard and understood.
6. Innovative Approach
We know the standard ways to solve problems, but capitalize on opportunities created by identifying new and different solutions. Some of the most satisfying results involve creative problem-solving.
One example deals with a creative settlement. When a client had to sue her employer for medical malpractice, settlement negotiations only got so far before they started to stall. Our numbers were just too far apart. But what had the client shared in a previous conversation? She really valued vacation, traveling, and time off from work. And who controlled her time off? The case settled shortly after her employer provided a substantial amount of paid time off as part of the settlement. For the client, it was better than money in the bank because she could travel and spend more time with family.
Another example involves finding multiple avenues of recovery under one set of facts. In a case involving an Emergency Department visit, a client was left to literally have a stroke on the floor of a hospital hallway while he waited almost twelve hours to be seen by a doctor. Miraculously, he survived. The medical care he received was bad. But really, it was non-existent for those twelve hours. Could this really only be a claim for plain negligence? Or was there more? That nagging feeling eventually led us to find and successfully pursue a second claim based on a federal law that required hospitals to evaluate patients when they arrived at an Emergency Department. The judge agreed with our position, and the case successfully resolved.
Yes, we value having standard practices to help us represent people. Standard procedures help things run smoothly and efficiently. But we really love it when out-of-the-box thinking helps lead to a better result for our clients.