Most offices skim. I read. When you send me your case, the timeline, the records, the videos, the pages you wrote at your own kitchen table, I go through the whole thing, because a case only shows you what it really is when you follow it all the way down.
People do not come to a civil rights lawyer on a good day. They come after someone with power crossed a line, and they have usually been carrying it alone for a while. So they bring everything they have. That is not a burden to me. It is where I start.
I will be straight with you, because you deserve that more than you deserve flattery. Civil rights cases are hard. A rule called qualified immunity can shield an official even when a jury would call what he did wrong, unless a court has already said so on facts close to yours. Another set of rules makes a city hard to hold responsible for what its officers do. If you have read the case notes on this site, you have seen those walls. They are real, and I would rather you hear it from me.
So why read every one, closely, when so many are long shots? Because these are the rights that stand between a person and the power of the state, and because hard is not the same as wrong. Some of the hardest cases are the ones most worth bringing. I cannot tell which is which from a glance. I can only tell by reading, with real attention, what you took the time to set down.
That kind of reading is not fast, and I will not pretend it is. To answer you honestly I have to see what happened, find where it lives in the law, and test it against those walls. Done right, that is hours of work, and it is work I would rather do well than do quickly. So if you have not heard back yet, it usually means the opposite of what you fear. Your case is getting the attention it deserves.
Sometimes, after all of that, the answer is still no. A case I cannot win is not the same as a wrong that did not happen. If I tell you no, I will try to tell you why, and it will almost never mean that what happened to you did not matter. It will mean the walls were too high for this particular case. You deserve that honesty, not a comfortable maybe.
So here is my promise. Send me your case and I will read it myself, carefully, and answer you honestly, because that is what a person is owed when they hand a stranger the hardest thing that has happened to them. If I have already worked on your matter and you felt that respect, I would be grateful if you would say so in a review. It helps the next person, still carrying theirs alone, decide to reach out. And if you are that next person, wondering whether it is worth sending, send it. I will read it.
This is how I approach the cases that are sent to me. It is general information, not legal advice, and not a promise about any particular case or its outcome.
