My name is Mark Vogt. I’m a personal injury trial lawyer here in Fresno, California. As fate would have it, I knew a few people that were at a law firm, and I joined a fairly large law firm…Fifty or so attorneys, and it was everything I saw on TV. It was cubicles and side corner offices, and that just didn’t suit me.
And so I met my law partners, Jason Helsel and John Fowler at that law firm. And there was something about those guys, their ideas, the way they thought, the way they spoke, that spoke to me as a person. And we started talking about whether we’d like to do our own thing, and with our own clients, and our own way. And sure enough, it always made sense to me, but there was a day when I finally said, “here’s the day”, and I joined my partners, and here we are.
I chose personal injury for a variety of reasons, and one of the things I had in common with my partners Jason and John was the desire to help the underdog. And frankly, personal injury is set up that way. There always is a big corporation or insurance company on one side and real people on the other. There’s never a dynamic where a corporation is suing a corporation for personal injury. These are real families, real people, real lives. And it spoke to who we are, what we’re about to represent those people and tell them in a sense, no one’s going to hurt you, not on our watch, not now, not today. And that’s what we’re about. So I got into personal injury because of the dynamic it presents. And it really is one of the only opportunities to change somebody’s life.