The Go-To Guy
for Business Litigation Referrals by Dan Baldwin
Our referrals come from other lawyers in town when the dispute is serious enough that a lawyer tells his or her client or friend, ‘You need a good litigator.’ Other times, larger firms find themselves in a conflict situation and want to refer an existing client to a litigator who is not going to try to take their client from them. When referring attorneys send us a matter, that client will get a successful outcome,” says Jason Kirby, Partner in Kirby & Kirby, LLP, a business litigation firm based in San Diego. The reason Kirby and his firm attract so much referral business is a commitment to finding a way to win. “Our track record of success is rather unbelievable. We obsess about how to win a case. I have a talent for seeing how all the evidence can be shaped together and how best to present it. Whether we’re working directly with a client or with a referral, we are in it to win.” “We are very hands on about our cases. We make our clients’ problems our problems. Our representation always becomes very personal. We treat our clients like family and develop great relationships. A client that knows his or her lawyer is fully engaged in living their dispute creates a bond and a level of trust that makes
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Attorney Journals Orange County | Volume 193, 2022
the attorney-client relationship seamless,” he says. The firm “fights above its weight,” meaning that they find that a smaller team can handle large litigation cases as well, and often more efficiently, than a larger and less flexible firm. As an example, the firm represented approximately fifty defrauded investors in the litigation against Chicago Title arising out of the local Ponzi scheme run by now-disgraced Gina Champion-Cain. There were big firms hesitant to take on fifty individual clients with competing interests. But in 2021, Kirby and his team recovered more than $22 million for their fifty clients. “Handling that many clients was a total team effort wherein everyone in our firm was fully engaged. And that case was just one of many and not necessarily the largest that we were handling at the time,” he says. Kirby compares trial work to putting on a play. There is an art to putting on a case, the order of witnesses, the witnesses through which the facts will present best. There must not only be a beginning, a middle and an end, but a simple narrative that runs throughout the trial and holds it all together. Kirby says, “Doing defense work, I have always believed there is a way out.” He cites a high school experience in which a police
