About Dan

I have worked in complex litigation for 20 years — in two federal clerkships and three elite law firms. My experience spans a wide range of areas, from business disputes to medical malpractice and other personal injury.

After law school and clerkships, I spent eight years in commercial litigation at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York — one of the nation’s leading litigation firms. At BSF, my work included contract disputes between hedge funds, defense of securities fraud class actions, and defense of products liability mass torts, among other matters. At BSF, I was fortunate to work with a number of highly skilled lawyers, including David Boies, one of the most accomplished lawyers of his generation.

I left BSF in 2013 to join a boutique firm in South Dakota focused on insurance bad faith litigation (on the plaintiff side). I worked for five years with Mike Abourezk, a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates (an invitation-only group of 100 of the best plaintiff trial lawyers in the US). Under Abourezk’s occasionally firm hand, I learned much about the workings of insurance companies and how to develop cases dealing with an insurance company’s bad-faith denial of insurance claims.

While working with Abourezk in 2016, I attended Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College. I am likely the only lawyer ever to have both worked with David Boies and also to have trained with Gerry Spence — another of the most accomplished trial lawyers of his generation.

In 2018, my wife and I moved to Atlanta, where I joined Bell Law Firm – working with Lloyd Bell (another member of the Inner Circle). The firm focused exclusively on medical malpractice (on the plaintiff side). After I got my legs under me, I started making improvements to the case development process at the firm. Over time, I became the Managing Partner of Bell Law Firm. I created the case development process that Bell and I presented in a Medical Malpractice Masterclass at Trial Lawyers University in September 2023.

In the Spring of 2024, I embarked on a solo law practice, to work in a broader practice drawing on my full range of expertise. That includes business disputes (plaintiff or defense-side). It also includes medical malpractice and other serious injury cases (plaintiff-side only).

General Approach to Legal Work

As a kid, I wanted to be a preacher when I grew up. I knew well enough that the world was broken (though I didn’t know the extent of it), and I wanted to make it better. Ultimately, I became a lawyer, not a preacher, but I still have the occasionally annoying moralistic streak I had as a kid: I can’t stand bullies. Lies offend me. And I hate it when people won’t own up to mistakes that hurt others. Now that I’m in my 50’s, though, my moralistic streak is tempered. I see all too well that I myself fall short. So I try to exercise a little humility, and a little sympathy for the failings of others. But I still believe in accountability. I believe it makes for better people, better societies, better lives.

Analytical & Compassionate

Reason without emotion is heartless, but emotion without reason is foolish. We move through life by the twin means of reason and emotion, intertwined and acting together.

In legal work, it is especially important to be analytically rigorous — in evaluating potential claims and defenses, in parsing the logic and evidence for the arguments, in assessing the likelihood of success. I care about my clients. Their injuries and losses are often heartbreaking. But compassion isn’t enough: Without rigorously analytical work, holes and weaknesses in a case don’t get identified and fixed — and ultimately can sink a case.

Morally Serious

A lawsuit is not a game. Lawyers who treat it as a game pose a threat to the judicial process. As I’ve written elsewhere:

“The idea of the lawyer as an amoral technician debases everyone who embraces it. Lawyers sometimes talk of lawsuits as a game, with all the moral consequence of a poker tournament. Lawyers sometimes say a good lawyer should be able to take any side in a dispute, with equal ease. Maybe that vision of lawyering applies to the few controversies with no moral weight. But in most of our work, someone has harmed another person either carelessly or deliberately — or has been wrongly accused of doing so. We may disagree about what the truth is, but the truth matters. It has moral weight. The outcome will impact people for good or ill. Most of our work sags under the cargo of moral consequence. If we participate in causing or perpetuating an injustice, we bear some of the blame. A bar card does not immunize us from moral responsibility.
“The idea of the amoral lawyer also degrades the lawyer’s effectiveness. Decision-makers care about making the right decision. If the lawyer arguing to them does not, often the judge or juror will feel the apathy and recoil from it. … We do our best as lawyers and as persons when we approach issues with moral seriousness and act with integrity.”

From Lawyers, Judges & Semi-Rational Beasts: Cognitive Science and Persuasion.

Fair, Decent, & Reasonable — but Tough

I dislike the idea of the aggressive, bullying lawyer, and I hope I never resemble that caricature. I try to be fair, decent, and reasonable — with opponents as well as allies. I don’t always live up to that goal, but I try to.

I believe fairness requires truth and accountability. And I believe truth requires straight talk. Not invective, not exaggeration, but simple words that unflinchingly describe the thing you’re talking about. This can make some lawyers, and some judges, too, uncomfortable. There is a feeling that it’s impolite to speak bluntly about unpleasant facts that concern a fellow attorney. I reject that. Soft, vague language clouds the truth, impedes accountability, and helps to ensure more misconduct.

Accountability for misconduct in litigation is good for the judicial system generally. It’s also good for my clients. Misconduct by opponents hurts my clients. I won’t accept that. I want opponents to know that it’s risky for them to engage in misconduct that harms my clients.

So when opponents make dishonest arguments or break the rules, I tend to call them out and seek some accountability. I try to be reasonable about it. I don’t want to make mountains out of molehills. I don’t hold anyone to a standard of perfection. But when I think there’s clear wrongdoing, I’ll call it out. I’ll request sanctions when opponents make frivolous arguments that throw sand in the gears of the justice system. I’ll submit ethics complaints when a medical expert gives testimony that I believe is dishonest. In one case, a medical expert gave testimony that I thought was so egregious that it constituted perjury. Against the advice of a lot of colleagues, I (with Lloyd Bell) filed a motion seeking severe sanctions for perjury and suborning perjury. (Those papers are in the “Medical Malpractice” section.)

In deciding whether to call out misconduct, it doesn’t really matter what the decision-maker — the judge, the ethics board, whoever — is likely to do. However they approach their jobs, I have my own job to do.

Of course I understand that by calling others out for wrongdoing, I’m putting a target on my back. They’ll jump at any opportunity to accuse me in return. That’s fine. I’m accountable for my conduct the same as anyone else.

Persistent, Questioning, Creative

Conventional wisdom can be wrong. Habits and customs can be counterproductive. Of course convention can be right, too, so it would be foolish to disregard it reflexively. We should depart from convention only thoughtfully, for good reasons. But when solid reasons exist to depart, we should not stick to convention out of fear.

Repeatedly over my career, I’ve found important issues, arguments, approaches that have been overlooked by convention. Most recently, for example, I found and developed an overlooked issue in Georgia medical malpractice law. A Georgia statute requires a jury to apply a “gross negligence” standard in certain cases dealing with emergency medical care. If a jury applies that standard, it’s much harder for a plaintiff to win — and of course much easier for a defendant to win. The conventional wisdom in Georgia was that the gross negligence applies to most care in emergency departments, and it’s only the exceptional case in which the gross standard does not apply. After pushing the conventional wisdom out of my mind and going back to fundamentals, it became clear that the conventional wisdom had it backwards: In truth, most emergency-department care does not qualify for the gross-negligence standard. It’s only the exceptional case in which the standard does apply. This point has huge implications for med-mal cases in Georgia, but because the conventional wisdom was so strongly rooted, it took some work even to convince my fellow med-mal plaintiff lawyers. (The papers relating to this issue are also in the “Expertise & Sample Work” section.)

An important note here: On that issue of the gross-negligence standard, I only managed to push the conventional wisdom out of my head because my wife told me to. My wife, Linda, is brilliant and takes an interest in my work. When I was (I thought) telling her the law on this point, Linda said it sounded wrong. She insisted that I go back and take a close look with fresh eyes. I did, and indeed she was right. Linda is a secret weapon for me (and my clients).

Empirical Research over Gut Feelings

When making decisions in legal cases, I don’t trust gut feelings much. I’ve been fooled by gut feelings too many times. The best lawyers I know all admit to being fooled by gut feelings. David Boies was an early adopter of empirical jury research, and it was at Boies, Schiller & Flexner that I became convinced of the importance of such research.

To the extent I can, I use focus groups and various forms of survey research to reduce reliance on gut feeling. This sort of research has limitations. It’s not magic. But it’s useful in figuring out how to develop, structure, and present a case. Sometimes, of course, you have to rely on gut feeling. But I try to minimize the need for that.

Simplicity & Plain Talk

I think we lawyers tend to undermine ourselves (and our clients) by failing to make things as simple and clear as they can be. We do this in three major ways. First, by failing to learn the issues well enough to explain them simply. Second, (the flip side of the coin) by falling in love with the detail and complexity of issues and wanting to show off how well we’ve learned them. And third, by using lawyer language when it’s not necessary — sometimes out of habit, sometimes to sound smart.

Simplicity and plain talk increase our abilities (a) to communicate and (b) beyond that, to persuade. Simplicity and plain talk are tricky, though, because some complexity and lawyer language is necessary. Figuring out what needs to be said and what details or words just get in the way takes work, insight, and (sometimes) empirical research. As David Boies likes to say, it’s easy to state things accurately, if you don’t care about simplicity; and it’s easy to state things simply, if you don’t care about accuracy; but to figure out how to state things simply and accurately takes elbow grease.

I have spent a lot of effort over a lot of years, developing the skills and habits of simplicity and plain talk — without losing accuracy or important details. This shows up in my legal writing (I hope). You can find samples in the Medical Malpractice section, under “Sample Litigation Documents”.