Kaitlin Nares

Kaitlin Nares traces it to a fourth-grade assignment: dressed in her older sister’s graduation gown, she presented herself as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “I just hitched on that I was going to be a lawyer,” she says. She entered law school already set on civil rights work, and when one of Manhattan’s premier civil rights attorneys offered her a job on the Central Park Five case, the first call she made was to her mother to talk about that fourth-grade presentation.

Kaitlin brought a civil rights litigator’s toolkit into a personal injury firm. Years of police brutality cases taught her to dig deep into evidence and gave her a sophistication with brain injuries, which Nares Law Group now specializes in alongside truck wreck litigation. Holding trucking companies accountable for putting profit over safety, she says, feels familiar after holding the NYPD and major municipalities accountable for their tactics. Advocacy and changing the laws come first.

The Central Park Five case spanned Kaitlin’s lifetime: the 1989 assault happened when she was 1, the exonerations came while she was in high school and the civil case ran from her first years as a lawyer until it resolved for $40 million. Her client Corey Wise used his proceeds to start the Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Boulder, and she followed him to Colorado. She also cites a current case in which a nanny catastrophically injured an infant client and no homeowners coverage applied.

Kaitlin founded Nares Law Group after a maternity leave at a large firm during which colleagues kept asking how her vacation was going. She wanted a firm that delivered great results with real life-work integration, then learned she was pregnant again while launching it. The firm gives families clarity and transparency: staff available late at night, updates on the next five steps and a team of working mothers. She benchmarks client satisfaction against Starbucks and Apple, and asks staff whether they would let the firm represent their own families.

Nares Law Group, based in Denver, Colorado, focuses on truck wreck and brain injury litigation for families severely injured through no fault of their own, partnering with lawyers nationwide. Kaitlin describes trucking cases in which companies hired unqualified drivers, ignored repeated violations of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act and never retrained them. Her civil rights background also informs work on police brutality and brain injury claims. The firm’s website is nareslawgroup.com.

Kaitlin earned a B.A. in sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2010 and her J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law in 2013. She began her career in Manhattan, litigating in the Southern District of New York from 2013 to 2019, and is licensed in Colorado, Texas and New York. She serves on the Colorado Trial Lawyers Association board and the Denver Sheriff’s Advisory Board, and belongs to the American Academy of Justice’s traumatic brain litigation section.

Kaitlin was filmed for four years in Manhattan for “False Confessions,” an award-winning documentary by a Danish crew that premiered at festivals in Los Angeles, New York and Denver. It follows four cases in which interrogation tactics led innocent people, including children, to confess to crimes they did not commit. Kaitlin worked as an expert in false confessions, and she and the lead trial attorney had the tactics used on themselves to see who would confess first. She also hosts the “Mother Justice” podcast.