Ira Perlman on Personal Injury, Malpractice, and Compassionate Law Practice

How are you, Laura? Nice to be with you this afternoon. Appreciate it.

Okay. Well, I’ve been practising law since 1985. So that’s over 39 years as of now. And I specialise in personal injury and malpractice on behalf of the plaintiff. That’s the person who’s suing. I went to law school in Brooklyn at Brooklyn Law School, graduated in 1984 and as of today,

Since 2020, I’ve been selected as a super lawyer, which is a title and achievement given only to 5 % of the attorneys in a given area of law. Additionally, since 19, since 2022, I’ve been a member of the National Association of the English Council. Less than 1 % of attorneys in the United States are invited to join that particular organisation which is comprised of the nation’s top attorneys. So my practice since 85 has been limited to plaintiffs, personal injury, and malpractice, which involves people, unfortunately, who have suffered significant harm, whether physical, mental, or emotional, due to an injury caused by another. And when I say another, it could be a person, a company, or a corporation.

Well, what differentiates me is that number one, I’ve been trying cases since the year I was admitted into practice, which was back in 1985. And I have been intricately involved with every single case that has come into my office. In other words, I know exactly what’s going on with that client, what the problems are, what needs to be done. And I don’t leave it to someone else to do the very important legal work and all the other necessary work that has to be done in order to get the case into a courtroom and have that case tried. So every case that comes into my office is treated as though it’s going to trial. Obviously, the goal is to try to settle the case if you can so that somebody can obtain full and fair justice.

And that doesn’t mean half of that or a quarter of that. So we strive to get everybody exactly what they’re entitled to. And if that means going to trial, that’s what we do. Not every lawyer practising in my industry, in my field of law, has that goal in mind. Some lawyers just want to take a case in, get money, and then settle the case regardless of whether it’s full and fair value for somebody. That’s something that I do and I take that very seriously. And I don’t give any cases out to anybody else to try for me. I do all the trial work. So I’m involved from the inception right up until the end.

No, I mean, we try not to and very important on that note, at the very beginning, you need to do certain things and take certain steps so as not to compromise that client’s case. Because if you don’t do what you have to do at the very beginning, and I’m talking about hiring the right experts and spending the necessary monies that are involved to prosecute case. If you don’t do that at the beginning, it’s going to, you know, cause problems later on towards the end because you can’t redo what should have been done earlier on. You don’t get that opportunity.

Absolutely. It’s all about building the structure brick by brick, as you say, and doing the necessary things in order to prosecute the case in a competent manner so that the client’s story can be told because people suffer so many different types of harm and everybody’s different. Every client is different. We all have different personalities.

You need to get that story out and sometimes the story has to come out in different ways because no two people are the same and clients are different and you’re dealing with different personalities. But at the end of the road, it could be a jury that’s going to decide the case and only human beings understand other human beings. And that’s the one wonderful thing about our system is that we have a jury that at the end of the road is going to make a decision. Not a judge, not a lawyer, not an insurance company juster, but a jury made up of you and me.

Yeah, well, I do my best. The other important aspect of what you just said is that as a lawyer, even though I’ve been practising over 39 years, you never stop learning and you have to be willing to keep learning and to keep listening because as long as I’ve been practising and as much as I have seen and done, there are still things that you just don’t realise until somebody tells you something. You need to brainstorm sometimes, you need to do further research, you need to keep a watchful eye and a very careful ear so you can hear and listen to everything that’s going.

Well, the most important thing in terms of my practice is honesty. Honesty and once again listening. And to be quite honest with you, I’ve built up my practice through reputation. One of the challenges that I find now is that people don’t walk around or sit around or do anything without their cell phone. And I find even when I go out to dinner with people,

It’s as though people have stopped communicating with one another and they concentrate on their phones. And when it comes to looking for a lawyer or to find a lawyer to represent you or your family, if there’s been a serious injury or a tragedy such as a death, it’s unbelievable to me that people will still go onto the phone or into the computer and scour the internet and find a lawyer that way. But that’s what the world has come to. So,

In terms of my practice, I have relied on reputation for the most part. But you have to get up to speed with the rest of society. And even though I have always relied on my reputation, it’s harder and harder now for even lawyers to get in cases because it’s still a business. It’s harder to get in cases through reputation because people are going to gravitate to the internet and the phone and they’ll just call somebody who is a better marketer or, you know, more adept at.

doing or getting cases through social media or the digital market. That’s what makes it tough and challenging. And I get calls from clients two years into a case where they realise that the lawyer they chose from the internet is not the lawyer that they really feel should be representing them because they start to see things and realise just because one lawyer is a better marketer doesn’t mean that lawyer is better in the courtroom or better at, you know, bringing a case into court and getting full and fair justice for that person.

yeah. yeah.

That’s a problem. And the other big problem is that you can’t drive down a highway or a roadway anymore in many places in the United States without seeing a billboard every quarter of a mile that is from a lawyer who’s advertising. And some people, a lot of people frown upon that and it puts us in a bad light because it makes us look like ambulance chasers, we’re out there soliciting.

And it’s more of a business now than it is a profession. And it started out as a profession. But, you know, this is the problem. These are the challenges that we have to face. So these people that look at us with all this advertising sit on juries sometimes. you know, in the long run, in the end, the jury system works because logic and common sense dictates the outcome of a case and people are not stupid. But when they walk into a jury room, a lot of people, they’re thinking about lawyers, ambulance chases, all these billboards, all the advertising, and that’s a hump you have to get over. And it’s not easy. So these are challenges.

I enjoy the most getting in front of a room filled with strangers and talking to them about the case that I’m there for so that At the end of the case, when they’ve heard and listened to me and they’ve listened to my client, and most of all, they hear the law from a judge, they realise that we came into the court with a claim or lawsuit that was valid, meaningful, and a case or claim where my client needed help really their help and we ended up proving to them that we were entitled to full and fair justice so that the injured party, my client, also known as the plaintiff, could recover damages, money damages to cover their entire loss and all the harm they suffered, whether that’s physical harm,

pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment in life, financial loss due to an injury or a tragedy or someone’s death. And that is the most rewarding thing to me, where at the end of the case, when I go in the hallway and meet that jury, some of them will say, you know, I was so sceptical when I walked in to the jury room and I met you and here I have to listen to a lawyer, a plaintiff’s lawyer on an injury case. And they had all these views about the business, the practice, the profession, lawyers. But by the time they walked out, after they made the decision, their minds were changed and they realised that somebody really needed their help. Somebody really, really needed to have them decide what was going to be.

I appreciate that and I’m going to keep plugging away and working hard at helping people as a result of their problems, their losses. I just want to be there for anybody that needs me.