David Klink

David Klink grew up with a father who practiced mostly criminal defense in Arizona, and during college he helped in that office preparing demand packages for insurance companies, his first real look at personal injury work. When a post-college plan fell apart, he applied to law school and started at UNLV’s Boyd School of Law just as the 2008 financial crisis hit Las Vegas. After four years at a small medical defense firm, he resigned on his 30th birthday to represent injured plaintiffs, his calling all along.

David built Klink Law on litigation skills learned defending medical malpractice cases, and he says he is not afraid to file suit. He once sued over $500 on behalf of his own legal assistant because an insurer was shortchanging her, and the company promptly paid more. He gravitates to unusual cases with odd injuries or facts that big advertising firms pass over, noting the biggest case he ever settled had been declined by seven other lawyers. “I will litigate a case as far as it needs to go,” he says.

Early in his firm’s life, David represented a man with little money who was injured in a brawl on a bus, one of roughly 15 plaintiffs. The client called daily asking for updates, and defense delays dragged the case out for years, but Klink Law was “the last man standing” and finally handed him a check. David says the case still reminds him that trial lawyers work for people who cannot bring legitimate claims themselves. “It’s a vocation. It’s a calling,” he says.

David’s closing thought is that plaintiff lawyers are fortunate: no billable hours and the freedom to choose their cases. Clients who call his office are often frightened and unfamiliar with a system lawyers take for granted, and it is the lawyer’s job to keep them from being taken advantage of under economic duress. Minutes before recording, he had told a seriously injured young woman her case was settled, and she cried. Concluding a long battle for a client, he says, is one of the greatest privileges in the profession.

David earned a Bachelor of Science in economics, cum laude, from Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in 2008, then his J.D. from the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2011. In law school he concentrated on health care law and worked in the risk management department at University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Nevada’s largest public hospital. He passed the Arizona and Nevada bar exams on his first attempt and is admitted in both states.

Klink Law, PLLC is in Glendale, Arizona, where David founded it in 2015. The firm handles serious personal injury and medical malpractice claims and for years defended licensed health care providers, especially nurses, in licensing board complaints, though David says the practice is now nearly all personal injury. He works almost as a true solo with two assistants and prefers putting cases into litigation rather than pushing clients to settle. The firm’s website is davidklink.com.