Built From Scratch. Built for People Who Had No One Else.
We started in a Detroit office the size of a closet. We took the cases other firms passed on. Thirty-five years later, we have recovered $300 million for those clients — and we still work the same way.
Standing Against What Is Wrong
Christopher Trainor founded this firm in downtown Detroit in 1989 in an office so small that when you opened the door, it hit the chair the client was sitting in. Two chairs, one desk, no staff. His first clients came from Neighborhood Family Legal Services — people who had been turned away by other attorneys because their cases were seen as too complicated, too risky, or not profitable enough.
That was never how Trainor saw it. He took those cases. He fought them. He won them. And 35 years later, that same approach defines every case this firm accepts.
What We Have Built
The firm now has 9 offices across Michigan, from the Upper Peninsula to Metro Detroit, with a dedicated team of attorneys, paralegals, and legal assistants. The three largest verdicts in firm history — $6.2 million, $5.8 million, and $5.5 million — were all police misconduct cases. All three required taking the government to federal court and winning.
Those results are not what most people expect from a Michigan personal injury firm. They reflect a deliberate choice to be different: to handle the cases that are harder to win, to invest in the preparation those cases require, and to refuse settlements that do not reflect the full value of what a client has lost.
Our Areas of Focus
We handle serious personal injury, civil rights and police misconduct, wrongful death, employment law, and workers' compensation cases across Michigan. Our clients include car accident victims, people who have been brutalized by police, workers injured on the job, families who have lost loved ones to negligence, and employees whose rights were violated at work.
Our 9 Michigan offices are in White Lake (our headquarters), Southfield, Grand Rapids, Ann Arbor, Flint, Lansing, Kalamazoo, Bay City, and Marquette — Metro Detroit, West Michigan, mid-Michigan, southwest Michigan, the Tri-Cities region, and the Upper Peninsula — so clients work with attorneys who know their local courts, judges, and opposing counsel.
We Are Not a National Firm
Large national advertising firms generate volume by settling cases quickly and moving on. We are the opposite. Every attorney at this firm works in Michigan. Every case is handled by people who know Michigan law, Michigan no-fault rules, Michigan civil rights statutes, and the Michigan court system. There are no out-of-state referral fees, no cases handed off to associate firms in other states, and no settling fast to fund the next TV ad.
We prepare every case as if it is going to trial. The other side knows it. That preparation is what produces settlements that actually account for what our clients have been through.