Michigan DUI Attorney

Answer: As I said, I came from a family of doctors, dentists primarily. And there were no lawyers in my family at all. So when I left the law firm doing medical malpractice, I had really no one in my family to help guide me on what to do. But I did have a lot of lawyers that I had met when I was a clerk for Judge Kuhn, and a couple in particular took me under their wings and acted as mentors for me early on in my practice. Back then, I was totally just a solo guy and I remained that way for many years. Early on in my career, most of my income came from court appointed cases, and I was able to get the court appointments—the system's changed since then—but back then, because I had a connection to the court through Judge Kuhn and many of the other judges that I knew, they would give me court appointed cases. The cases came directly from the judge. And that allowed me to have a source of income while I explored other ways to actually make a living.

Because I knew back then that I didn't want to rely just on the court appointed cases, they don't pay very well. And I saw colleagues who were doing that, and they were stuck in that rut. So they would do the court appointed cases and that would end up being their career. I didn't want that. And I had another lawyer who was one of my mentors who said, “Make sure you don't rely too much on this and find something else to do.” So early on in my career as I was trying to find the confluence of science and the law, I tried a bunch of different things. I tried to specialize in consumer law, for example, in particular Lemon Law; I also became certified as a direct placement adoption attorney back when they had certification for that—they no longer have certification for that anymore, but back then they did. And eventually I decided to focus primarily and then exclusively on drunk driving cases. That was up until 1999; so this is 1992 to 1999, basically a seven-year period, I was still completely solo. I didn't hire my first employee until 2000, and it was just me and one secretary.