Michael Stephenson’s “Closing Argument”

Published June 29, 2024Updated Aug. 23, 2026

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One thing I would love to just bring more awareness to is the good that civil litigation and plaintiff side personal injury and plaintiff’s litigation in general does. It’s been so demonized in pop culture for decades, right? Like I remember being a kid and watching The Simpsons and I loved that show. But the only lawyer in that show is like the shadiest personal injury lawyer that I think was like trying to get his clients to injure themselves so then he could represent them and make all this money and another show I loved when I was young was Seinfeld, right? And the lawyer in that is always doing something with Kramer where they’re gonna sue the coffee company and blah blah blah.

And I think those are funny, you know, those are funny things to have happen in a show. I think unfortunately it disguises what’s really going on. What I see going on in the world so much in my work is corporations taking advantage of people. And those corporations could be Uber, Lyft, various insurance companies, could be Amazon, Facebook, anybody, really. And the only way that we as individual people have to stand up for ourselves and enforce our rights and force a corporation to ever do the right thing is to sue them typically. I think we’re all frustrated with politics. It feels like our voices don’t matter. And in many ways, our voices don’t really do much when all we can do is vote.

But when a corporation does something to you that’s wrong or to a loved one that’s wrong, you actually sometimes have the power to go into a courtroom and talk to 12 people in that jury box that are just like you. If you explain it clearly enough and you might need a lawyer to help explain it, often the right thing will happen. And if the jury and the judge tell, it could be the biggest corporation in the world. If they tell that corporation, you have to pay back so -and -so, or you have to make it right, you have to compensate them for the harm that you caused, then they have to do it. And it’s one of the most powerful things that you can do for good in the world.

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