Justin’s favorite success story as an attorney

One of my favorite success stories I remember—it’s actually a bankruptcy that I filed. It was a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, the kind where you’re reorganizing your debt.

This lady came in. She was older, she was a grandmother. Her grandkids had just been using her like she was a bank, basically. I mean, she couldn’t say no to them. They were absolutely abusing the privilege of being able to ask Grandma for money and use her car, use her house, etc. The bottom line is she wound up sunk so far in debt that she couldn’t pay her mortgage, and she got behind on it. They foreclosed on her house.

So, she came in, ready to file bankruptcy. I felt terrible for her because this was a lady who had no prior bankruptcies, no prior debt issues before her grandkids started doing this to her. Of course, we had the big conversation about how it’s time to cut the grandkids off, right? Like, you can’t just file bankruptcy and wind up back in the same shoes again.

Then I filed for her, and for me, it was a pretty cut-and-dried case. I mean, I don’t want this to sound bad, but I almost didn’t even have to think very hard about that one because the terms of the bankruptcy were so simple to me. I didn’t realize how nervous she was about the entire thing because she wasn’t asking me questions that indicated that.

But we go to the hearing—the last hearing where the bankruptcy is approved—and everything goes well. After the hearing, I always talk to my client and say, “Okay, here’s what all that legal mumbo jumbo meant,” right? And she started crying. She hugged me and said, “I was so afraid. I thought I was going to lose my house.”

And it was one of those moments where I thought, I’ve got to get out of my own head. Because to me, I was just going through another day at work. I hadn’t realized the gravity of it. But this woman thought she was going to be homeless if this didn’t work out.

It made me step back and really appreciate my job more than I had up until that point. Because my average Tuesday can keep someone with a roof over their head. It can literally prevent homelessness—one person at a time.

And you know, I hear a lot of law firms talk all about their biggest verdicts and all that. I kind of don’t care about that as much as I care about the fact that that grandmother got to stay in her house. And when she hugged me, it was probably one of the best experiences of my legal career.