Why I Limit My Caseload

Conn Law is deliberately selective about the cases it takes. That isn't a capacity problem, it's a choice, and it's the organizing principle behind how I've run this practice since day one.

I get to pick my clients, frankly, and I take that seriously. When I interview somebody on day one, what I'm deciding is whether this is a person I can genuinely go to bat for and fight for. I've turned down cases that could have been high-compensation cases because the fit wasn't right.

This last chapter is about how I work, which is another way of saying it's about how you decide whether I'm the right lawyer for your case. Some of what follows will tell you I'm not, and that's fine. You should know either way before you call anybody.

Now, ten years of trying complex litigation taught me something that shapes how Conn Law is run today. A lawyer spread across too many files cannot give any one client what a serious injury or a wrongful death case demands, and I don't think that changes no matter how good the lawyer is. That's why I deliberately limit how many cases I take on at once and refer out or get co-counsel on smaller matters rather than handle them at volume.

Catastrophic injury, medical malpractice, products liability and serious truck collisions take real time, real investigation, and real relationships with the experts who make a case provable. None of that scales the way a high-volume practice does.

That said, a smaller case is never a small case to the person living it. Some of what I've handled over the years wasn't a permanent injury or a wrongful death. It was a back injury, or a neck injury, and to that person it was the most important case in the world. It never stops being that. So somebody with a neck injury out of a minor wreck gets the same attention from me as somebody who lost a husband.

There's a piece of this that has nothing to do with the law at all. Attorneys in the personal injury world double as therapists, whether we planned on it or not. I've sat on the phone or in a meeting for hours with people whose cases I already knew I wasn't going to accept, for a legal reason or some other reason, because I still want to be a resource for them. This is the most important thing in their life at that moment, and while I'm sitting with them about it, it's the most important thing in mine.

One small thing on my desk reminds me what this work is worth to the people who go through it. Years ago I helped a client with a pro bono matter, no fee at all, and she paid me with a little hand-made bobblehead action figure of myself. It's an odd thing to be proud of, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the size of a case or the eventual size of anybody's check.

I learned something in somebody's living room that I could not have learned in a classroom, and it surprises people who assume this work runs on greed.

People's motivations are not money. What I hear, over and over, is that they want somebody to establish publicly what was right and what was wrong, and they want assurance that it will not happen to the next family. That is ninety-nine percent of why my clients bring lawsuits.

A lawsuit isn't only an avenue for compensation. It's an avenue to change practices in an entire industry. A trucking company that changes its safety practices runs a safer operation, which means fewer wrecks, which means fewer injuries and fewer deaths. A hospital fixes a protocol that let a mistake through. That is the lever, and in the right case it's the only one available.

I could feel the pull toward that side of it before I had handled a single case. My older brother was a lawyer at the time, but nobody else in my family was, so I went to law school knowing next to nothing. Plenty of people around me had parents or grandparents who were judges or lawyers and seemed to know exactly what they wanted. I had no idea. Then in that first year, professors make you argue against yourself. You argue one side of a point and then they tell you to flip and argue the opposite. I always had an easy time arguing for the person who had been wronged or harmed, and a genuinely hard time building the case for the other one. That happened over and over, and it told me where I belonged.

If you take one practical thing out of this chapter, take this. Don't just call the first person on a billboard or the first person on TV.

There are good attorneys at those firms, and this isn't a knock on advertising. It's that this may be the only time in your life you ever bring a claim, so do your due diligence. Talk to more than one attorney. I've had people come meet with me and I've told them to go research other attorneys in the area, because that's what I'd want somebody to do for my own family.

Look at the actual lawyer, not just the firm. My own firm's results page exists for exactly this kind of comparison. A big firm can have a few lawyers with enormous results and plenty of others who have never tried a case to verdict, or who tried them and lost. So ask who is actually going to handle your file, and ask what that person has personally done, not what the marketing says. On my site you'll see eight-figure results, seven-figure results and sometimes six-figure results, and those are all cases I handled myself rather than numbers borrowed from a colleague down the hall. Check that on me too.

I understand where the ambulance-chaser reputation comes from. There are lawyers who don't approach this work ethically, and there are bad actors in every profession. That has never been my practice. Every client I've ever had came from a referral, either from another attorney who trusted me with somebody they know, or from a friend or somebody in this community. By the time a person is sitting across from me, their case doesn't feel insignificant to either one of us, and it never is.

Every one of my clients also gets my cell phone number, not my office line. They text me, they call me. Sometimes I can't call back right away because I'm in a deposition or out investigating another scene, and I get back to them as fast as I can. I'm not good at everything, and there's a long list of things I wish I were better at. But what I think you'd hear from my clients across eleven years of practice is that they could trust me, and that I've always been here for them.

My MO has always been the same one, and I say it to myself before every hard case. "You might be smarter than me. You might be prettier than me. You might be a lot of things that I'm not, but you'll never outwork me."

There isn't a case I've ever been outworked on, and I've faced some genuinely tough, hardworking defense attorneys over the years. I take pride in never letting one of them out-prepare me. Preparation guarantees nothing about the verdict, and losing while knowing you left something on the table is a considerably worse feeling than losing a case you prepared all the way.

So the thing I measure myself against isn't the verdict. Win, lose, or settle, the question is whether I did everything I possibly could to advance what you were trying to accomplish. That's the one thing I want every client to be able to say about me when it's over.

I'll be honest about trial, too, because it's the part of this job I'd do for free. I'm a crazy person about it. Trial is fun for me and it's what I got into this to do. It is almost never fun for my client, who has to sit in a room and relive the worst thing that ever happened to them so twelve strangers can price it. My appetite for a courtroom is never a reason to go to one. What's best for you is the only reason.

One case from recent years explains the whole thing better than I can. My client lost the eyesight in one of his eyes in a workplace injury, and we had to argue in front of a judge over whether his case would be allowed to go to a jury at all. It was a Zoom hearing, so he watched it. I'd set expectations with him beforehand and told him plainly that we could win and we could lose, and that it was ultimately going to be up to this judge. Afterward he called me and told me he didn't much care anymore how it came out, because he'd seen how much I cared about his case and about him, and that meant everything. I still wanted to win for him. I still want to win every time. That call reminded me what the job is underneath all the procedure.

I got some advice early on that I think is the worst advice you can give a young lawyer: don't take your cases personally. I take every case personally. The tragedies, the heartache, the pain my clients carry in with them.

I've represented a family whose son died, and that case has been tried and the claims are finished, and I still text with them. We check in. We talk on the phone every now and then. They mean a lot to me. I have three young kids, and I think about my own family constantly in cases like that, because I cannot imagine what losing a child must feel like. I can only try.

None of this happens in isolation from the rest of my life, either. I've served on the Executive Committee of the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association for more than a decade now, currently as its Directed Giving Co-Chair, after rotating through more committee roles over the years than I can easily list, education chair, membership work, the new lawyers division, before landing where I am today.

I also sit on the Brightside board, the local CASA chapter here in Chatham County. A CASA is an advocate who goes to bat in court for kids in foster care, and the organization does a great deal more than that. I've learned an enormous amount from it. Frankly, it helps me understand some of my own clients better, because sitting with children whose lives were upended by things entirely outside their control sharpens what vulnerability actually looks like when I walk back into my practice. While they make me better, I hope I make them a little better too.

There's one decision I never make for you, and it's the biggest one. Clients ask me the same question in every hard settlement conversation: what if I were your mom? What if I were your sister? What I tell them is true: "I've been treating you like you're my mom or you're my sister this entire time. In fact, I have a fiduciary obligation to you." That fiduciary standard is not a figure of speech, and it is the reason I will give you my honest read even when it isn't the one you want. So I'll tell you I think this is something you need to seriously consider taking, or I'll tell you I don't think it's enough for your case. And then you decide. It's your case and it was your loss, and whether it settles or goes to a jury belongs to you and not to me.