Hi, I'm Griff Tonkin. I'm one of the partners here at the Arthofer & Tonkin Law Offices. I want to talk to you today about why I'm a personal injury attorney and how that came to happen.
I don't know what most young law students imagine when they think about going to school, becoming an attorney, and then practicing law. Maybe it's one of those great criminal courtroom dramas like you see on TV or the movies. But when I ended up going to law school, I thought I wanted to be a real estate attorney.
I fell in love with real estate as an area of law when I was studying it, and I started practicing early on with a firm that also did real estate law, and I enjoyed it. But that firm's primary business was insurance defense. That's the process where an insurance company hires an outside attorney like myself to defend a case where their insured is alleged to have been negligent and caused an injury to someone else.
Well, primarily I worked in insurance defense for the first several years of my career. On May 1, 2009, my business partner and I, Ken Arhoover, founded this office. I like to joke with Ken that on May 1, 2009, he went to work for the first day of our new firm, and I went to play golf, which is actually true.
At the time, I was representing a local university in a litigation, and I was invited to play in their charity golf tournament to support their sports teams. That kind of made sense. Invite the lawyer, make him pay a lot of money to play golf with us, and it goes to a good cause.
So that's exactly what I did. Well, everything changed for me personally and professionally after that golf tournament was over. I was driving back from a local golf club and kind of a rural road, two lane road, but relatively high speed with a 50 mile an hour speed limit.
I had no stop signs or traffic control devices in my direction of travel, but I did approach a stop sign control insurance, and a young lady pulled up to that stop sign in a car smaller than mine, a Honda Civic, and she looked to her right, but did not bother, excuse me, she looked to her left, but did not bother looking to her right. Had she looked to her right, she would have seen me. She didn't.
She turned left right in front of me and made a driving mistake. Very violent T-bone collision, full airbag deployment in both vehicles. Both vehicles totaled.
My car went careening off the road and into the adjacent stop sign and ultimately up onto a curb. A bad accident. I'm actually very grateful that there was no passenger in her car, which was where the area of impact was because that passenger likely would have been killed.
My vehicle intruded into her car, 18 to 24 inches, which is pretty severe intrusion. Fortunately, neither she nor I suffered very severe injuries, but I did develop a significant shoulder injury that ultimately required surgical repair. And in my dealings with an insurance company, I thought they were taking advantage of me.
And the real problem with it was this was an insurance company that I did work for. This insurance company hired my firm to provide defense services to their insurance who caused accidents. When I got a taste of how the insurance companies treated folks who'd been injured in an accident, who weren't represented by attorneys because I was just representing myself at this point, I decided I wanted to change my practice.
I wanted to be someone who would fight for the little guy. These insurance companies, they're not all bad. They employ a lot of folks and most of those are good people, but they do have a very serious economic incentive to make sure that you don't recover on your personal injury case.
And there's literally billions of dollars at stake in this industry every day around the United States. So I decided I wanted to work for a little guy and I wanted to represent people because it could make a difference in their lives at an individual level. No longer was I saving money for a big giant insurance company that no one would ever hear from again, see again, or whatever, help me out if I ever needed it.
Now I would be using whatever skills, talents that I had along with the team here at Arthofer & Tonkin to represent individuals. And that's all we do here at Arthofer & Tonkin. We know what you've been through.
We've been in the accidents. We've been mistreated by the insurance companies and we've taken them to task time and time again now for 15 years. It would be our privilege to consult with you about your personal injury case.
We don't charge for our consultations. We're happy to sit down with you if it looks like you have a case that would be appropriate for our firm and we'll talk to you about all the ramifications of your case and legal representation at no cost. Call us today.
