Video Transcript:
Hello, my name is David Lumb and I’m a personal injury attorney here at Darrell Castle & Associates.
Family Life:
I’ve got a family – I have two teenage boys and a twelve-year-old – that take up a fair bit of my free time. They’re all interested in sports and we attend sporting events together. They all play in the band, so there’s the band events.
On my own, if I get free time, I like to read mystery novels.
Becoming an Attorney:
I became interested in practicing law almost thirty years ago. At the time I was living in London, and I was thinking about becoming a solicitor, which is a type of lawyer in England. England has a bifurcated system: barristers are advocates and solicitors do everything else.
At that time my wife was working as an archeologist. She’s from Mississippi, but was working as an archeologist in Kingston, and she was offered a graduate teaching assistantship here at the University of Memphis. And I discovered I could do a law degree here, and if I qualified as a lawyer in America, I could do the work that both a solicitor and a barrister do, so it seemed advantageous to do that.
Two Sides of PI Law:
I’ve always done personal injury work, with Workers’ Compensation and Social Security Disability claims, but when I first started out, I worked for an insurance defense firm. That’s a law firm that represents insurance companies, and they defend insurance companies against claims brought by injured people.
When you do that type of work, it’s all about money. The insurance company either doesn’t want to pay the claim, or they don’t want to pay very much if they do pay. And so your job is to either avoid the insurance company having to pay or to limit the amount that they pay.
I did that for two or three years and then I switched to the other side, which is representing injured people. And that work’s a lot different because with an injured person you’re dealing with someone who’s gone through a traumatic event – an event which has often changed their lives: they’ve lost jobs, they’ve incurred large medical bills. They’ve gone through this traumatic event so it’s a far more emotional thing for them. So you see the other side of a personal injury claim; you see the human side, if you want, rather than just the financial side. And it’s very different.
Client Care:
Practicing from the plaintiff’s side – the injured person’s side – every client has different issues, every claim is different. That’s the good thing, is that no two claims are the same.
Each claim has its own problems, its unique issues; and it’s identifying those, what’s important to the client, and resolving those which I think is the most enjoyable part of doing plaintiff’s work.
We treat each client as they would want to be treated. And we try to get the best outcome as possible for each client.
Contact David Lumb:
901-327-2100
http://darrellcastle.com
