Experienced Personal Injury Attorneys serving Macomb, Oakland and Wayne Counties

Hello. My name is Bob Garvey. I’m a plaintiff’s personal injury attorney serving Macomb, Oakland and Wayne Counties. Our lawfirm is located in St. Clair Shores, Michigan. I’m affiliated with the personal injury firm of Thomas, Garvey, and McKenna. We’ve been here for approximately 35 years. Represented a lot of folks from Macomb County, Wayne County, Oakland County, and actually all over the state of Michigan and for that matter in other states as well. I’m happy that you’ve decided to go to the web to select a personal injury lawyer. Because the web as you know is a great place to get information unlike choosing a lawyer because he or she happens to have an advertisement on TV or a billboard on a bus, you’re getting information from the web and you’re taking the time to get information.

How do I choose the best personal injury lawyer in Macomb County? Who is the best lawyer? So, I want to talk about a few issues that relate very specifically to lawyers in general and in particular to this area of the law. So first of all, you’re not calling about a real estate closing, you’re not calling about a will, things that you do multiple times during your lives. You’ve probably had something very serious happen to you for a family member, and you really don’t have any place to go, to find a lawyer. If you don’t have a lawyer in your family, or you don’t have a trusted friend who’s a lawyer, you’re kind of out there just searching.

I’m glad that you didn’t grab the first personal injury lawyer that you saw on TV, I’m glad that you didn’t call the first person who you saw in the newspaper. You’re taking the time to educate yourself, and that’s the purpose of our conversation today. So, you should know several things in this search that you’re doing. First of all, lawyers in Michigan are not certified in any specialty. So, a young lawyer can come out of law school and say, I’m a trial lawyer, or I’m a personal injury lawyer, or I want to help you with your medical malpractice case. There’s nobody that looks at them and says that they’re qualified, that they’ve tried cases, that they specialize, in fact, we can’t even say that we specialize. So that, sort of, limits you. If you were going to look for a cardiologist you could look that person up in a journal, or you could ask your family doctor, and you’d find out, is he or she board-certified. How many heart operations have they done? So with law, it’s much more difficult because we don’t have these certifications.Â So, what are the things that you should be looking for to help you in this search? First of all, I’d suggest you want somebody who limits their practice to the type of work that you’re looking for, which in this case is personal injury.

Second of all, you need to find a Macomb County lawyer who tries personal injury cases. And you’re saying, well, why is that important? I don’t want to try my case. I want to settle my case. It doesn’t matter whether you want to try or settle your case. You need a lawyer that tries cases. Why?Â If you don’t take the insurance, you’re dealing with insurance companies and major corporations. The people who are on the other side of this issue, they get up every day, and their goal is to save their company, their insurance company or corporation, money. How do they do that? By paying you less- what keeps a corporation or an insurance company honest, quite frankly, is a jury.Â Many lawyers are deathly afraid of trying cases. They never try cases. I’m sure a lot of the personal injury lawyers that you see regularly advertising don’t try cases. So why is that important? If you don’t try a case occasionally, at least, to keep them honest, they know that insurance adjustor knows that eventually you’re going to take whatever they offer. That’s just common sense. If you’re not going to take, if you’re not going to go to a jury once in a while to keep them honest and common sense tells you, that case is going to settle without going to a jury, which means you’re going to take eventually what they offer you.

The third thing that’s very important to keep in mind is success. What success has the lawyer had when they do take personal injury cases to the jury? And I don’t like to brag, and that’s not why I put it on my website, but I have a proven track record. We turned down $150,000 in one personal injury case, $200,000 in another personal injury case, and in both those cases, the jury came back with over $10,000,000. Well, adjustors know that.Â It’s possible an adjuster lost their job over those cases, because they so undervalued the case. So if I had not taken the most cases to jury. They would have been settled for the amounts, 150 in one case, 200 in another. But the results of that particular case are really not what I’m trying to tell you is important. What I’m trying to tell you is important is the fact that, we’ve taken those cases to juries, and those are just two examples and we’ve been successful, so that keeps them honest on the other side.

So, the other question I think you should ask as you’re doing your search is, what evidence you have of what, what other lawyers think of the lawyer you’re looking at. And that’s the reason I included a number of the organizations that I’m a member of. And I’d specifically ask that you click on the website for the American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Board of Trial Advocates.Â These are organizations that are, you are admitted to by invitation only. They’re generally made up of litigators on both sides, both plaintiff and defense lawyers. In fact, a lot of my cases come to me from defense lawyers who I’ve tried cases with, or had cases with and settled. And I’m very proud of that fact, they can settle those cases anywhere that, anywhere they want.

The last thing you should know is that we, the vast majority of our cases come from other lawyers, and that we pay a referral fee to those lawyers. They get a third of our fee. It doesn’t cost you anything. But what that tells you is educated lawyers, a lot of them trial lawyers, they can send those cases to anyone they want. And they get a third of our fee. So it makes sense, if they’re, if they’re sending their cases to us because they get a third of our fee, that tells you something about how the lawyer community looks at Bob Garvey, or looks at Paul Garvey, or Jim McKenna. That’s where we get the vast majority of our cases.

So I think with all that information, you, you’re, you’re more of an educated consumer this is not like buying a car, it’s a very personal relationship, it lasts usually for a year or two. You want somebody who is experienced, who has tried cases, who’s been successful, and who is well respected in the community. So, if you’ve accomplished that, whether it’s this firm or another firm, you’ve got a good lawyer.Â Thank you.