Michael Cohan’s “Closing Argument”

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There’s one moment that stands out to me. I’ll never forget it. So the law firm that I worked at—again, it was a big law firm—we had floors 74 and 75 in the Empire State Building. If you walk through the lobby of the law firm, you would see newspaper clips and plaques of all the large settlement awards and victories that the partners had won. I was on the 75th floor, and the main partners were on the 74th.

 

So they had this audio system where they could call you out and tell you to come down to their office. So I’d be sitting on the 75th floor, and all of a sudden you hear, Hey, Mike Cohan, come down to 74. I got to talk to you. And it’s very off-putting because these are large figures. These are successful attorneys. They’ve got all these plaques hanging in the hallways of the office about 100 million dollar, 500 million dollar settlements in cases that they’ve had. So at that firm, it was a competition for the bigger and better cases. As a younger associate,

 

I never got the better cases. I got the worst ones. Anybody would tell me, Hey, how come you’re not trying anything? How come you’re not settling anything? I would say, Look, I have all the bad cases. What do you want me to do? One day on the 75th floor, my boss calls me down on the microphone. Everybody hears it. Ooh, Mike, you’re in trouble. You’re going down to his office. I go to his office, and he goes, Mike, I’m looking at your settlement numbers. I’m looking at your trial numbers. Why is everything so low? I said, You know what? I was like, I’m going to tell him I have all the bad cases. You give me all the bad cases. And this line, I’ll never forget. He points to all the newspaper clippings and plaques on his wall of the big cases that he had won, and he goes, You see all those? Those were bad cases too. And in that moment, something clicked inside of me. And from then on, I didn’t see the clients as cases and file numbers and matters. I saw them as people that I had a responsibility for personally, to take care of.

 

Once you start looking at your clients as the people that you’re working with every day and tell yourself you have a responsibility to these people, your results and your success are going to grow exponentially. I then developed a reputation for turning bad cases into good cases. So I would voluntarily take all the bad cases because of what he said to me. And I had a chip on my shoulder. I can’t believe this guy said this to me. So I would take on the people’s bad cases, and I would try to turn them into gold because they weren’t cases to me anymore. They were people. They were brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, uncles, cousins.

 

It was my responsibility as their attorney to make them whole. And it still drives me crazy to this day when I call another lawyer and they say, Oh, what file number are you calling about? or What file are you calling about? It drives me nuts because these people are not files. Your clients are not files. They are people. They are going through problems. They have hired you. It is your job to help them. And that day, that line—I can still picture myself in the office. I can still picture his face when he told me that—it has stuck with me for my entire career. And I’ve made a note to tell my staff all the time, and myself every morning: These are people.

 

These are human beings. They are going through problems. It is not just a file. And this personal injury field is just littered with trash, I’m sorry to say it, but people that are on social media throwing their settlement checks around and like making memes and jokes about people faking injuries. I think it’s horrible. I don’t think it’s appropriate because there are people that are really injured. To be honest, I have a lot of friends and family who look down on what I do because of the stigma against personal injury lawyers.

 

I want the people close to me to know what type of dedication and sense of responsibility that I bring to my job, and how I’ve turned people’s lives around. And I think that’s important. I think trial lawyers, personal injury lawyers, but attorneys in general—you should value your clients, you should value your responsibility to your clients, and you should value the oath that you took when you were admitted to the Bar Association, and make sure that every single client that you take care of, you’re giving your best to.