Derek Hays

Derek Hays came to law as a second career. The son of a Methodist preacher raised in Alabama and Florida, he grew up in a parsonage family that was “on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week” for hospital visits and family crises. After college he chased advertising, airbrushing T-shirts on Florida beaches and then working in animation at Disney in Orlando. When Disney moved the department to California, he took the LSAT instead and moved to Atlanta for law school, where the “path of helping others” returned.

Derek says a great trial lawyer needs both empathy and sympathy: the ability to put himself in a client’s circumstances and to feel for them personally. He recalls a single mother with a shoulder injury from a car wreck who was the sole caregiver for a severely disabled adult son. At trial he brought the son into the courtroom so she could demonstrate her daily routine, and the jury’s verdict reflected that connection. “You have to have both,” he says.

Four or five years into his practice, Derek represented a family whose rental single-wide trailer caught fire the day they moved in. An electrical outlet shorted while the grandfather was showering; a 4-year-old girl died of smoke inhalation and her 2-year-old brother was burned over 85% of his body. The trailer had none of the smoke detectors required by statute. The case settled shortly before trial, helping the family buy a home and fund the boy’s lifelong care. Derek still keeps the children’s photos in his office.

Derek’s closing thought is to know clients well enough to personalize them for a jury, which otherwise hears only injuries and medical bills. He describes a wrongful death case in which a commercial pickup doing 90 to 95 mph in a 45 mph zone killed a daughter on the first day of her senior year. Talking with the family’s church and neighbors let him tell her story, and discovery showed the driver was high on crystal meth. “You’ve got to be able to let that story be told,” he says.

Derek Hays Law is in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where Derek founded the firm in 2013. The practice concentrates on personal injury, including car wrecks, wrongful death, medical malpractice and nursing home injury and death. Derek also hosts his own podcast, Injury Insider, where he has covered some of the strangest lawsuits he has come across. The firm’s website is derekhayslaw.com.

Derek earned his J.D. from Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School in 1996, finishing in two years by attending year-round, a pace the school no longer allows. He served as vice president of the student bar association and earned numerous academic awards. While in school he clerked at a personal injury firm and at a firm handling federal criminal appellate work, an experience he says prepared him well for state and superior court trial practice.

Over a career of more than 25 years, Derek has secured more than $125 million for clients since 1997. He has been honored by the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum and the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, and listed among the Top 100 Trial Lawyers in Georgia, Top 25 Motor Vehicle Lawyers in Georgia and Top 10 Nursing Home Lawyers in Georgia. He belongs to the National Brain Injury Trial Lawyers Association and the National Academy of Best Selling Authors.