He Rear-Ended Another Semi. Most Lawyers Would Have Said Take the Million. We Got Him $7 Million — And Then Kept Working.

A while back, I wrote about our representation of a semi-truck driver who rear-ended another semi-truck driver. Life-flighted to the hospital with catastrophic injuries. A million-dollar policy that wouldn’t begin to cover his medical bills, which already exceeded that amount. By every conventional measure, he had no case worth pursuing. Most Orlando personal injury lawyers would have told him to take the million and walk away with literally nothing.

We took the case. We developed a bad faith argument that started as a long shot. We got creative on the liability theories. We tried the case. The result was $7 million.

That’s where most case write-ups end. The case resolves, the article runs, the firm celebrates, and the client moves on with the settlement. I want to write about what happened next, because it’s the part of representation that almost never gets discussed, and it’s the part I think actually matters just as much as getting the settlement in the first place.

But first I want to describe some of the work that happened during the case itself, because it’s the same kind of work and it’s part of the same story.
He needed a hospital bed. His broke during the case. We bought him a new one.

He was going through a divorce. We found him a divorce lawyer, advanced the cost as a case expense, and made sure no divorce-related issues would interfere with his settlement. That’s not personal injury work, and it’s not standard for a firm to handle. We handled it because it needed to be handled, and there was no one else to handle it.

When the trial was scheduled in Miami, we paid $18,000 to transport him by ambulance from Atlanta. We arranged for a caretaker to stay in the hotel with him to help him shower and get in and out of bed. We bought him two new suits for trial because he didn’t have anything to wear.

We learned the details of his daily life. How he uses the bathroom. How he gets a sponge bath. My partner watched a sponge bath, because we wanted to be able to tell his story accurately — to a jury, to a judge, to anyone who needed to understand what this man’s life had become.

During the week of trial, he had access to an accessible shower for the first time since the accident. He cried. He hadn’t been able to shower properly in years. We are now making sure he has an accessible shower at home permanently.

The trial happened. We were able to push a successful settlement based on trial performance after the jury went out.

Once the settlement was reached, our fee was earned. Locked in. We could have closed out the file, done the standard paperwork, and moved on. That’s what the contingency agreement required, and it’s what most Florida truck accident lawyers in our position would have done.

What I want to share is everything that happened after that point — work we did when work was no longer required, on a case that was already financially complete from our end.

A settlement of this size doesn’t help a catastrophically injured client unless it’s structured correctly. Medicaid liens can consume enormous portions of personal injury recoveries. Special needs trusts protect future benefits. The wrong financial setup can leave a client worse off than someone with no settlement at all. Most Orlando semi-truck accident lawyers negotiate liens as part of closing a case — that’s routine, and honestly, many firms are pretty lazy about how hard they push for reduction. What we did was different. We found a lawyer who specializes in Medicaid lien reduction, who only takes a percentage of the reduction he achieves. The structure mattered: he had real incentive to push for the largest possible reduction, because that’s how he got paid, and his fee would cost our client nothing from his recovery apart from this lien he owed (meaning our client’s financial recovery could only improve). We weren’t doing routine lien work. We were investing in getting our client more money that we wouldn’t see a dollar of.
We interviewed multiple potential special needs trustees. We flew the chosen trustee and an architect from Florida to Atlanta to be in the room when the trust was being structured. We wanted it set up correctly the first time, and we wanted to make sure the client’s interests were represented in the room.

He wanted to build an accessible home. So we searched for land. We interviewed architects who specialize in accessible design. We made twelve trips from Orlando to Atlanta during the case and the months after.

We sent him an expensive pair of shoes for Christmas.

I want to share why we did all of this — both the during-case work and the after-fee work. It wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t a marketing position. It wasn’t us trying to be unusual.

We did it because we actually care about him and his needs. And that’s how we feel about all of our clients. When clients tell us their problems, we listen, and we genuinely try to solve them. Clients who are more seriously injured need more help, so they get more help. Clients with less serious injuries get the level of help their situation calls for. But the underlying orientation is the same: we pay attention to what the person in front of us actually needs, and we do what we can to help with it.
All law firms say that they care. I’m describing the specifics of this case because specifics are the only way to show that the words, coming from us, actually mean something. Anyone can say “we care about our clients.” The proof is in what happens when caring would cost the firm something — time, money, attention, work that won’t be paid for.

Once our fee was earned and we could have stopped, we didn’t stop. That’s the test, and that’s the only test that matters.

It also matters that we took the case in the first place. He was the rear-ender. The other driver was the apparent victim. The conventional analysis said he had no case. We took it because he had nowhere else to turn, and because we believed there was a path. The path required risk on our part — financial risk, professional risk, time risk. Most firms can’t or won’t carry that kind of risk on a case that looks like a long shot. Our practice is structured so we can.

This isn’t possible at high-volume firms where each lawyer carries hundreds of cases. It’s only possible when you take a small number of cases and look at each one closely. That’s what allowed this result, and that’s what allowed everything that came after.

If you have suffered an injury that’s going to change the rest of your life, the question isn’t whether someone will take your case. The question is who will take it, what they’ll actually do with it once they have, and what they’ll keep doing after the check clears.

For our client, the answer was: everything we could think of, and then some things we hadn’t thought of yet. Because that’s how we are with the people we represent.
If you missed it: how we got him $7 million when other lawyers would have settled for one.