After an accident, most people are forced to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives with very little information: choosing the right lawyer. In this episode, Clarke shares the qualities he believes truly matter when selecting a personal injury attorney, including accessibility, compassion, experience, resources, specialization, and authenticity. He also gives an honest behind-the-scenes perspective on online reviews, law firm marketing, firm size, and what people should pay attention to before trusting someone with a life-changing case.
Here’s what we discuss in this episode:
⚖️ Choosing A Lawyer Is Harder Than Most Realize
📞 Accessibility Matters More Than Marketing
🧠 Experience And Focus Can Change Outcomes
⭐ Reviews Should Be Read Carefully
🤝 Compassion Still Matters In Law
0:00 – Qualities to look for
4:28 – Big Firm or Small Practice?
7:39 – Rely on Reviews?
Featured Keyword & Other Tags
Personal injury lawyer, law firm reviews, catastrophic injury attorney, choosing a lawyer,
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Transcript (Click To Read)
Clark: I’m, um, Clark speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict. Okay.
Carson Grace Toomer: Now, we’ve talked kind of a lot about, you know, personal injury law, but. And obviously you’re very analytical when it comes to, you know, traveling with your family about things. Now you would know best. What qualities should somebody like me, you know, look for when looking for a personal injury lawyer?
Clark: Well, that’s a good question. Um, and it’s hard to. It’s hard to determine, right, because you’re. You have to make these determinations in a limited period of time, and you have to make these determinations based on limited information. And it’s always hard to make good decisions based on incomplete information. Um, m. So, you know, I talk about my kids sometimes. My. I got, you know, three kids. Two of them recently were trying to figure out what college to go to, and there are books and m. They got months and maybe years to figure it. To figure this thing out, you know, and it’s still hard to get it. To get it right. You know, you don’t know till you get there and you go to class and you’re on campus and you’re walking around, you know, and you see people and does it feel right? Do you want to go to a big school or do you want to go to a small school? So I went to a huge undergrad school, and then I went to a small law school. I really preferred the small law school, but you couldn’t have convinced me that I wanted to go to a small school. And when I was 17 years old, when I went to college for anything, you know, I was like, uh, I want to go to a big place with a bunch of people. Well, so, uh, so, so. And my kids, you know, they. One of them wanted to go to one place and one want to go to the other place. And, and, and, and they, and they had to make those decisions based on. And you probably had to make decisions, similar decisions based on limited information. And maybe it worked out great or maybe it didn’t work out great. It’s just. It’s hard. It’s hard to know. And sometimes we’ll never know. But. So this is a little bit of the same sort of scenario, right? And that is. Is people have to make the decision about what lawyer to choose based on, you know, billboards like this. Look at this. You know what I mean? Like, uh, you’re supposed to make a decision about who can help you and your family recover from a. Could be a small accident, you know, where you have to go get, er. Emergency, uh, Rooms treatment and some physical therapy. But it could be something more serious, a broken leg or it could be something catastrophic. You know, but you’re supposed to make a decision about who can help you and your family recover financially, physically and emotionally from looking at a billboard with uh, some middle aged guy in a owl. You know, it’s um, it’s, it’s insanity. So it’s, it’s very hard. Or commercials or radio commercials or tv. It’s just, it’s just, it’s hard to do that. And so the real reason why we do these things, these podcasts, this podcast and the other podcasts and, and, and stuff we do is we want to inform people, we want to educate people. It’s all part of our mission. Right? Our mission is to help people recover physically, financially and emotionally from accidents, from injuries. But what I also want people to do is to kind of see who we are and what we do and why we do what we do. And I hopefully uh, they’ll see us as something other than some middle aged guy on a billboard, right? And so hopefully they’ll see us as somebody who uh, who can help them make. Even if you don’t use us in your case, you know, like if, if somebody’s watching this and they’re in California or Alaska or whatever, I don’t, I’m not licensed in California, Alaska or any of those places, you know. No, I, I, I do know I am connected with people who do what I do all over the country. So, so I could help them find somebody. Uh, but even if we don’t help them in that way, I think the idea is that we can help them make good decisions. And so in terms of the decision about who they might want or what they might want to look for in a lawyer, uh, I think what they would look for in a lawyer would be accessibility, uh, experience. One thing that I do think is important is uh, you know, compassion. You want somebody who’s, who can, can think about it from your perspective and will be sensitive to the idea. It may be one of a thousand cases for your, the law firm, but it’s one of one for you. Which leads to the next question is do you want it to be one of a thousand or should it be a smaller operation, just a single individual? I didn’t really realize this because I used to be a small practice, right. Like 20 years ago. I was just me and a. In fact when I first started, I remember, uh, my mom would come to town and she would come uh, to town like one day a Week and she would sort of work in the front desk and um, I would encourage her to leave like a sweater or whatever in the chair. So it appeared we were larger than we were. You know, not to mislead anybody, but just because I was self conscious about being in such a small, small operation. But I did work hard and do the best that I could for, uh, for people. But the reality is then, and even when we had three, four, five employees, we just did not have the resources that we have now. I mean, the res. So the size of the firm becomes important to. At a, at some point, you know, especially when there’s a, A, A serious, relatively serious injury, the size of the firm and the resources of the firm become important. I have relationships and I have access to medical and legal and financial professionals, uh, that I never would have had 20 years ago. And so that becomes very important. Also specialization becomes important. Twenty years ago I would do, uh, I did criminal, I did. Maybe 25 years ago I did criminal. I did, uh, I did some divorce, I did some different, different, different things. Whatever I could do to help people and make a living. And uh, now it’s been almost 30 years and we’re um, so much better at what we did then. So that, so that specialization, I mean, or that focus, I guess I should say the focus. And uh, uh, there’s no legal specialization in North Carolina for personal, um, injury. But as there might be a specialization available through the state bar for criminal defense or whatever, um, but the focus on personal, um, injury is different. The resources are different. The commitment, character, uh, of the people that you’re dealing with. You want people who feel, uh, a personal sense of obligation to, to help other people. Kids, Kids always ask me, parents always, always come to me and say, and maybe if they’ve said something like this to you, you know, man, my kid would be a great lawyer. My kid, he, he or she loves to argue, you know, And I’m like, um, you know. But the reality is that has absolutely nothing to do with that. Just that might make you a jerk, you know, if you’re argumentative. Um, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good lawyer. What makes you a good lawyer is you have to have a deep and genuine interest in helping other people and, uh, helping them through difficult times and helping them through, uh, times that, uh, maybe nobody else is necessarily there to help them through. And that is the important, uh, component. So those are some of the things that I would look for if I was finding a lawyer. And how you find those things is going to be. You know, in order to find a, a person, a firm that has resources, you probably do want to look at some of the firms that have tv, billboard and radio stuff. And then you would want to read the reviews. Um, the reviews are funny. It’s, it’s like uh, so we have lots of reviews, probably more than anybody else in our area. And when in one market and then uh, we’re getting a lot of reviews in another market. And um, reviews are funny. Some, I see some firms that have uh, like all five star reviews, you know. And so I, uh. And I’m looking at them and some of them are relatively new firms and I’m like, I know for a fact that you haven’t represented that many people in this period of time, you know, and then I read their views and I’m like, these are not real reviews. These are, these are manufactured, robot or something, you know. So like, any way you can tell a lot of times is, you know, there’s no grammatical mistakes. There’s no, you know, um, spelling mistakes or punctuation. And if you look at our reviews, they are authentic, every single one of them. And you can tell because there’s like what. How people communicate. You know, some of them are. They’re written in the personality and it’s a style that. With the people that wrote it. Every one of our reviews, as uh, far as I know, is 100 legitimate. And uh, so no, not, not all of our reviews are five star, you know. And so, so every time we get a bad review, like, I’m sure that m. Frustrates some of the people that work here. Like if we get a bad review, I send it out to everybody. And so, and then what I want, or at least our leadership and what I want to do is I want to be like, hey, and this, it’s the same thing every time, right? They go, that’s not true. This is, this is not. This is what happened in this case. We did a really good job. Here’s what happened. They’re not telling the whole story. You know, this is a person who wouldn’t be happy. And we’ve all been to restaurants, right? And the people eat the whole food. They eat the whole meal and then try to send it back, right? Or they, or they, or they, they, uh, they eat a whole dessert and then they say, hey, this was, this was cold or this was hot or this wasn’t good. And it’s like, you know, and a lot of times they’re just leveraging to try to get you to Give them something for free. And that’s the way most, half. Some of our negative reviews are made up. They’re from competitors or people that never even came to us. Um, I remember one of our reviews a few years ago that was negative was like, um, he called to ask if we could help him. Um. Ah. And he. And he was. His car was damaged, but he wasn’t injured. And so when that happens, we’ll say, here’s. Here’s something we can send you. Information we can send you. Uh, we’re a personal injury law firm, so we don’t do just property damage. In fact, no personal injury law firm that I know of does just property damage. And you don’t need an injury lawyer. You don’t need a lawyer to do that. There’s no money to be able to pay your car payment and pay an attorney too, and pay your car damage and recover that money. So here’s what you do, right? So we tried to help him and do this. Well, he wrote a review. Um, they don’t care about people. They’re. They only care about you if you’re injured, right? And I’m like, we’re a personal injury law firm. So I. I’m not sure how to. I’ve never pretended to be anything else. So I don’t understand. It’s funny because this guy has a. Has a shirt company. He makes shirts, right? And I found out later that he makes and sells shirts and he has a business that has reviews. And it was. I. I’ve wanted ever since then to put a review on there and goes, this company is terrible. If you want pants. They don’t, you know, they don’t have any interest in helping you. And I, uh, haven’t and I wouldn’t, but I still kind of wanted to do that. But anyway, that’s so. So in other words, there are some times when, I mean, every. Every legitimate firm that has a. That helps a lot of people is going to have a few bad reviews. Some of those are, hey, the reason I send them. Send them out is because I want our people to look at them and go, okay, for better or for worse, maybe we did everything right. Maybe we didn’t. Let’s look at it and see how we can get better. How can we get better? And sometimes, you know, I’m going back and look at those. Hey, there’s something we can learn from this. Let’s learn and get better. Let’s make an improvement. And so one of our core values is improvement. We want to improve, and we want to, uh, improve, uh, our process. We want to make improvements every, every day. And so that’s a way that we can do that. So, um, but. So one of the things I would do is look for reviews. And if a firm has, you know, a 4 or 5 or better in terms of star, average star reviews, I think that’s a good indication. Four, six or whatever. And um, but I would also look at those reviews because what you can find, especially nowadays, is people can become, uh, angry for whatever reason, and they, they can just torpedo a firm, uh, and get like 100 people to write bad. No, this has never happened to us, but it could happen. So what you want to do is read the reviews and see what these people are saying about them. And you should be able to see from the reviews, are they legitimate? Are they all perfectly written? Does it sound like a lawyer wrote them, or does it sound like a person wrote them? And if it sounds like a person wrote them, do they seem authentic? And are they saying the kinds of things that you want said about your lawyer? They were communicative. They did a good job. Uh, uh, they got me a good result. And then you maybe want to read the bad reviews as well. Is that something that is legitimate? How long ago was that something they could have improved on? And then you can ask them about it. Hey, this person said thus. And so the biggest thing I have found is when you’re talking to somebody, when you call a law firm and you ask them, hey, uh, I remember I, uh, was in college and I was gonna, uh, buy a computer, right? And so I call my, uh, I call my cousin knows a lot more about computers than I. And so I say, hey man, I’m gonna buy this computer. Um, and he. And he goes, he goes, uh, he gives me the name of two stores. And I, uh, I can’t ever get in touch with the first guy. And so, uh, I call him back and I’m like, hey man, I can’t get in touch with the first guy. You know? And he’s like, well, my experience that if, if, if it’s hard to get in touch with them before you sign up with them, it’s going to be really hard for you to get in touch with them after you sign up for them. So accessibility becomes important. But I think when you talk to somebody who, uh, after you have a claim or a legal need of any sort, you say, oh, look at the reviews, um, look for these qualities. And then I would have an appointment and talk to somebody or have a phone consultation and talk to somebody, and then I would, uh, you know, see how I felt about dealing with this person. Is this person. Do they seem compassionate? Do they seem knowledgeable? Do they seem like they care about me and my case, my family, and how I’ve been affected by this? And then. And then, uh, I would make my decision, uh, based on that. Thanks for joining us. 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