Craig Murphy

Craig Murphy decided as a young boy that he would be a lawyer, even though his father was an electrician and he knew no attorneys. Growing up small and uncoordinated, he practiced sports for hours just to keep up, which built an underdog mentality and a work ethic. After nearly 10 years of working jobs after college, he enrolled in law school in his early 30s because he did not want to reach adulthood admitting he never tried. He took the LSAT with no prep at all.

Murphy spent years on the defense side, including as the Major Case Unit Trial Attorney for The Travelers Insurance Company in Nevada, so he learned how insurers evaluate and build cases and where plaintiffs’ lawyers fall short. Unlike the high-volume billboard firms, he runs a small practice where clients talk to him and his assistant directly. “You can’t get a good settlement of a case on your knees,” he says, so every case is prepared as if it will go to trial.

Two stand out. In a slip-and-fall case against Walmart, Murphy supplemented the record every two weeks with new evidence, even a $5 prescription copay, until defense lawyers mocked him as “Mr. Supplement.” At mediation, a risk-management vice president flown in from Bentonville asked why he would not accept their largest-ever pre-verdict offer; he said it was not fair, and the case settled higher. He also won a jury verdict for a chef, nearly homeless after his injury, who had rejected $200,000 against more than $300,000 in medical bills.

Murphy explains his firm’s motto, “Winning is no accident.” Injured people are usually ordinary working people facing insurers, corporations, hotels and casinos whose goal is to pay nothing or pennies on the dollar, and whose tactic is to deny, delay and defend until claimants give up. Winning, he says, comes from believing in the client and doing the unglamorous daily work of forcing out videotapes and policies, building the case “one brick in the foundation at a time.”

Murphy earned a B.S. in communication and media studies from Ohio University in 1981 and, after almost a decade in the workforce, a J.D. with distinction from Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law in 1990, where he edited the law review and belonged to the honorary Willis Society. He is admitted in California and Nevada. He began his career in Las Vegas practicing family law, moved to insurance defense and later represented Travelers’ insureds before founding his own firm.

Murphy co-founded Murphy & Murphy Law Offices (venturainjurylaw.com), based in Ventura, California, in 2000. The firm handles personal injury matters including motor vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle accidents, wrongful death and VA disability claims. Over more than 34 years as a trial attorney, Murphy has tried cases involving spinal cord injuries, car crashes, slip and falls, medical malpractice and property owner liability. He describes it as a small, serious practice rather than a high-volume one.

Murphy’s results include a $5,056,965 jury verdict in a premises liability case, a $4,423,614 jury verdict in a car crash case, $2 million and $1.9 million settlements in car-versus-motorcycle collisions and a $1.55 million settlement for a fall at a large national retail store. Those recoveries earned him membership in 2012 in the Million Dollar Round Table and the Multi-Million Dollar Club, which his bio notes fewer than 1% of licensed attorneys achieve.