A Partner Walked Out. I Struggled for Two Years. Here's How I Saved the Firm.

In the fall of 2005, I walked into my business partner's office and told him to cut it out. He was doing something that could jeopardize everything we had built together. He was my mentor. A recovering alcoholic, ten years sober. I respected him. I told him straight.

The next day, there was a letter on my chair. He was leaving. Opening his own firm.

I was 37 years old. I produced about 40% of the firm's revenue and was now responsible for 100% of the bills. I needed roughly $80,000 a month just to keep the operation alive. For the next two years, I borrowed from my wife to pay bills and make payroll. I never missed one.

The Verdict That Saved Everything

In 2008, I tried a slip-and-fall case for a veterinarian from Kentucky who had fractured his ankle. The offer was $240,000. I asked the jury for $5 million. Two and a half million in economic loss and two and a half million in noneconomic loss.

I called him the Michael Jordan of vets. He had to get down in a catcher's position to inject medicine into a horse's hock. One of maybe three veterinarians in the country who performed that procedure. After the fracture, he could not crouch like that anymore. We built a detailed lost-earning-capacity argument showing what his career could have been worth absent the injury. That formed the basis for the economic loss argument.

For pain and suffering, I kept it simple. His wife had testified about watching him try to teach their daughter how to ride a bike. He held on as she pedaled faster, tried to keep up, and fell. She crashed.

I told the jury: if that image is not worth every penny of what those economic damages are for this man, I do not know what is. That was my entire pain and suffering argument.

They came back at $2 million. The defense attorney told me afterward that he had defended death cases where opposing counsel did not ask for that much.

After the clerk read the verdict and the courtroom cleared, it was just me and my brother sitting there. I thought: “we did it.” I put every dollar in the bank. And I created a safety net that I swore I would never touch. I never wanted to be in the position I had been in from 2006 to 2008 again.

The Unglamorous Side of Running a Firm

When my partner walked out in the winter of 2006, I pulled every piece of data I could from our bookkeeping system. Org charts. Vendor lists. Revenue patterns by month. I learned that in a plaintiff's firm, you have to pack money away in certain months because March, April, July, and August will bleed you dry if you do not have reserves built up by February and June.

I learned when insurance companies pay. End of year, they want cases off the books. So I stacked trials from September through mid-January. If you had a reputation for actually trying cases and winning, adjusters would rather settle at top dollar in December than risk a verdict in January.

I cut everything in the firm to fighting weight. We had a man who had worked for my family his whole career doing investigative work. He was in his 70s. I had to let him go. It was one of the hardest conversations I have ever had. But I could not afford anything that was not essential.

Close the Gap

My paralegal, Jackie, has been with me since 2009. My team is small. We have six people. But I would put those six against firms three times our size because every one of them is reliable, loyal, and capable of more than their job title suggests. One came from a job at Mohegan Sun. One was a manager at Starbucks. I hire for character and train for expertise.

Six or seven years ago, I went to the probate court and asked my buddy the judge how much of the PI work flowing through the courthouse was going to big advertisers versus the rest of us. The answer was 65/35. All of us who didn’t advertise were fighting over 35% of the business. I knew that if I did not adapt, we would not survive.

So I adapted. I put a sign on the side of my building that faces the one-way traffic running between the two casinos. Over COVID, I got a bus wrap. Then another. I started using technology to close the gap. A mediation position statement used to take two and a half days. Two days of paralegal time drafting the document, half a day of attorney revision. Now my Starbucks hire drafts one using Eve in twenty-five minutes.

From 13 lawyers and a mountain of debt to six people and a practice that is more efficient and more profitable than it has ever been.

In 2006, the biggest verdict I had ever gotten was $375,000. Two years later, it was $2 million. Last month, $2.7 million. The trajectory has not been smooth. But it has been upward.

I still have not missed a payroll.

Chris Anderson is the president of Anderson Trial Lawyers in Norwich, Connecticut, where his family has practiced since 1967. He serves on the Board of Governors of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association.