He Woke Up After Six Months in a Coma and Wrote Three Words. That's Why I Do This.

The helicopter went down on a July afternoon in Colorado. The fuel tank ruptured and the aircraft caught fire. Dave Repsher was a flight nurse. He got out of the wreckage — already burning — and then turned around and ran back in. The pilot was trapped. Dave couldn't get him free. He finally fell away from the helicopter with burns over 90 percent of his body, having tried until the flames made it impossible.

The doctors told his wife Amanda he wouldn't survive the first night. He spent six months in a medically induced coma, underwent 53 surgeries, and went from 180 pounds to 89. He kept not dying.

When he finally opened his eyes, he couldn't speak. Someone handed him a whiteboard. He kept writing the same word: Why. Why. Why. Everyone assumed he was asking why the crash happened.

He was asking why he was still alive.

Amanda told him she understood. If he wanted to stop fighting, she would be there for that. The decision was his. She'd give him time to think. She came back the next morning and handed him the whiteboard. He wrote: Live. Live. Live.

I was brought into Dave's case to handle the workers' compensation side — the unglamorous part, the part that doesn't make news. I probably made $75,000 from Dave’s case. That's not what it was about. This is why I do workers' compensation law. Not for the headlines. For the people on the other end of the phone who are scared, in pain, and don't know what's going to happen next.

I Used to Be on the Other Side

I started my career representing insurance companies. It was the job I could get out of law school, so I took it. What I didn't expect was how quickly I'd understand exactly what I was doing.

The system is designed to minimize what injured workers receive. That's not cynicism — it's just how the incentives are structured. I watched it up close for years. Insurance companies and employers had the full weight of institutional machinery on their side. The injured workers had almost nothing. I decided I wanted to be on the other side of that.

I founded Babcock Tucker in 2007. I have never represented an insurance company or corporate defendant since. I never will.

Workers' Comp Is a Foreign Language. I'm Fluent.

People ask me why I specialize so narrowly. Workers' compensation in Colorado is genuinely its own legal universe — different procedures, different courts, different deadlines, different rules. I tell people it's like speaking a foreign language. I'm fluent. Almost nobody else is.

That specialization creates something hard to manufacture: deep familiarity. I've been in front of the same judges, dealt with the same adjusters, gone up against the same defense attorneys for two decades. I know how the system behaves because I've watched it behave that way thousands of times.

I've also had a hand in changing it. As past president of the Workers' Injury Law and Advocacy Group and a longtime member of the Workers' Compensation Educational Association, I've testified before the Colorado legislature and helped rewrite significant portions of Colorado's Workers' Compensation Act. The system is better than it was when I started. We're not done.

Mind the Gap

Here's something I tell every young attorney who asks me about building a practice: mind the gap.

Most lawyers chase gross revenue. That's the wrong number. What matters is net income — the gap between what comes in and what goes out. A firm with $5 million in gross revenue can have miserable partners because overhead ate everything. The gap is what you actually take home. The gap is what buys back your time.

Two years ago, I made the deliberate decision to shrink my firm back to just my wife and business partner, Steph, and me. Two lawyers. Fewer cases. More intention on each one. We are making more money than when the firm was larger, with less overhead and less stress than I've had in a decade.

This is also how I think about technology. The question isn't what a tool can theoretically do. It's whether it fits inside the actual workflow of your actual day. It might be the fastest car in the garage — but if you can't make it go, it doesn't matter.

What Eve Actually Changed

Workers' compensation is a hands-on practice. My clients need to know, in real time, what is happening with their medical treatment. Why is this surgery being denied? Where is the referral? Why hasn't the authorization come through? They call me. I need answers.

Before, that meant having someone organize records so I could read through them, then call the client back. Now I can be on the phone with a client and type a question into my legal AI tool while we're talking. Was the physical therapy denied? Yes, on March 6th — here's the physician advisor review. Has there been a response? Yes, four days later — here's what the treating physician said. What did the MRI show?

Three minutes. Answers with citations. The work that used to require a dedicated staff position now happens in real time. I got rid of a job I could never keep filled anyway — nobody wants to organize medical records all day — and replaced it with something that does it better.

The discovery response story is one I enjoy telling. I received a set of interrogatories from an insurance defense attorney — the exhaustive, absurd kind designed purely to create burden. Every complaint, every body part, every date, every provider. Eve drafted a 60-page response in four minutes. Organized by date, by body part, by provider, with citations throughout.

I read it. I sent it to my client to verify accuracy. Then I sent it to opposing counsel.

He called me. He's a friend. He said, "So... what AI product did you sign up with?"

I told him we're just very thorough over here.

Live. Live. Live.

The lawyers who commit to this early are building practices that can do more for the people who need them most. That's what matters to me. Not the tool. What the tool makes possible.

Dave Repsher is doing well. He got a kidney transplant from a stranger. He and Amanda are still together. His crash changed federal regulations around helicopter fuel systems — a defect the manufacturer knew about and had lobbied for immunity on rather than fix. The case he survived became the case that changed the industry.

I think about him when cases get hard. When clients are frustrated and scared and directing some of that at me. When the system feels slow and the bureaucracy feels designed to grind people down, because it is.

He ran back into a burning helicopter. He spent 397 days in a hospital. He woke up and chose to live.

The least I can do is answer the phone.

R. Mack Babcock is the founder of Babcock Tucker in Denver, Colorado, where he focuses exclusively on workers' compensation and personal injury. A Marine Corps veteran and past president of the Workers' Injury Law and Advocacy Group, he has spent nearly two decades helping reshape Colorado workers' compensation law through legislative advocacy.