Contact

Brian K. Findley

Findley Law

1620 Fifth Avenue, Suite 625

San Diego, CA 92101

619-860-1712

findleyinjurylaw.com

Injury and Medical Malpractice Attorney Brian K. Findley 

"Law at peak performance in the 21st century is a smaller, independent practice, leaning heavily into tech,” says Brian K. Findley, founder of Findley Law—Injury and Medical Malpractice. Findley launched the firm in November 2021. 

“A video camera has me in court in Napa Valley in the morning and Los Angeles in the afternoon, all from my desk in San Diego. And in the time in between hearings, I am meeting with a new client, either in person or over Zoom, to figure out how I can help. This was just not possible even a couple of years ago. I am helping more people and spending more quality time with my family than ever. My practice and my life have been elevated.”

According to Findley, doctors used to have this model of smaller, independent practices, but they lost it. “In the last ten years, there has been a massive consolidation in the healthcare industry that has gobbled most of those small practices up. Most doctors are now connected with hospitals and larger groups and have stricter productivity guidelines. They are seeing more patients in less time. It’s worse for the patients and it’s worse for the doctor. We are seeing physician satisfaction levels at all-time lows.”

Findley believes tech may have evolved just in time to save lawyers’ smaller, independent practices, and he’s fighting to keep it. “We don’t need to spend time managing a huge clerking staff if we move to paperless files. We don’t need a pyramid of supervision by other lawyers if we are sufficiently specialized and competent. We don’t need an army of staff if artificial intelligence can handle rote drafting and organization tasks.”

More tech has freed up Findley’s time to focus on a more analog concern—his clients. “I like to represent quality clients —good people who have had something bad happen to them, and who need somebody to stand up for them. I like to get to know my clients as people because I know the amount of time and resources I’m going to invest in their case. I want my clients to feel like we’re family,” says Findley.

Findley Law is a solo attorney operation. One of the problems traditional firms have always had is that there is usually a great lawyer on the letterhead who everybody wants to call, but clients sometimes discover that once the representation starts, the lawyer actually handling their case is an associate working for the prominent name on the letterhead. “That lawyer generally has less experience and less ‘skin in the game’ than the big-name lawyer. The younger lawyer becomes the filter for everything the client wants the attorney to know, and actually has a lot of control over how the case is handled. When a client hires my firm, the client hires me, one-on-one with no filters,” Findley says.

Stellar Performance in Injury and Medical Malpractice 

Findley’s “family” is fairly evenly divided between general personal injury cases and medical malpractice. Clients agree on his ability to handle cases efficiently, effectively and with the necessary personal touch that builds the confidence and trust between attorney and client that leads to a legal victory. 

Findley is best known for his casework in the arena of medical malpractice, of which most California practitioners steer clear. “I can get through a set of medical records pretty quickly and thoroughly. And I can speak the doctors’ language pretty well in a medical malpractice or personal injury case, and that is a significant advantage,” he says.

Due to California’s MICRA laws, a good medical malpractice attorney is hard to find. Because of his knowledge of MICRA and medical malpractice jurisprudence, he is often brought in as co-counsel on cases that have a medical malpractice overlap or are just medically complex. He maintains an up-to-date list of the cell phone numbers of some of the world’s top experts in a number of medical specialties. He has worked successfully with enough expert witnesses in not only medical specialties, but even the IT professionals who manage the hospitals’ electronic medical records systems, that he can read and truly understand a patient’s medical chart—and the people that created it.

“When you know the language corporations, insurance companies and medical institutions speak—money—you know how to make them pay attention. And that attention is directly proportional to the amount of money we can make wrongdoing cost them. So, I say let’s fight hard for that and see what we can do to make a change,” Findley says.

A Case of Butterflies

Findley recently tried a case with attorney Jan Mulligan in Anaheim. A local hospital had been sold to a for-profit corporation that immediately slashed budgets for nurses’ pay, training and education. A few years of record profits later, a cascade of preventable nursing errors took the life of their client’s husband during a routine procedure. He left behind a large family, including two adopted grandchildren, who depended on his income to live.

The hospital refused to offer a reasonable settlement. Findley and Mulligan rented a house near the court and turned it into a war room. They prepared for dozens of expert witnesses’ technical testimony at trial in addition to the emotional testimony of family and friends.

The trial lasted a month. The jury gave a multi-million-dollar verdict in their client’s favor. The following day, the client went to her husband’s grave to tell him about the victory. Arriving at the site, she saw twelve paper butterflies suspended on wires, so that they seemed to hover above his grave. A note read, “With sympathy and respect.” The note was signed by “the Jury.” 

Taking on complex and challenging cases is something in Findley’s nature. “I love solving a medical mystery. I love making a significant difference in one person, or one
family’s life, versus making smaller differences for more people,” he says.

An Early Look at the Future

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, an early experience with an attorney initiated a process that eventually led to a successful and growing law practice.

When Findley was a teenager, a woman T-boned him with her pickup truck. His car was destroyed. No one was seriously hurt, but he found himself in a position where his immediate future was on the line. When the police arrived at the scene, they took one look at Findley and then to the lady who was heading to church (and who was at fault), and they cited Findley for the accident. 

He had a date in traffic court and feared that he would never have the right to drive again—or worse. A friend’s dad was a lawyer who offered to represent him in court. He met with Findley on the day of the hearing, wearing a suit, nice shoes and handing out business cards to everybody. He was professional and impressive. He counseled Findley and put him at ease and proceeded with the representation. 

Findley noticed how the judge and everyone in court treated the attorney with respect as he stood up for his client and explained the story to the judge. The judge agreed and dismissed the ticket. 

“I can’t say that in that moment I knew I wanted to be an attorney, but that feeling of being counseled and calmed, and stood up for by someone with power, never left me. I try to give that feeling back to my clients every day.”

The Construction of a Law Firm

“There is a revolution going on with lawyers starting up smaller firms and solo practices. We are on the front lines of that. Especially now coming out of the pandemic, where a lot of remote technology was pushed to the forefront. There is a synergy now between what is possible for the small firm practitioner to do along with a recognition that this is actually better—better service to our clients and better quality of life for the lawyer,” Findley says.

He comes by that belief through experience. For example, when he was just out of law school, Findley practiced construction defect defense with a mid-size defense firm. He found himself sitting around a deposition table with thirty or so different attorneys representing different sub-contractors. He says half of them spent their time reading the paper or playing on their phone while somebody else took the deposition (usually Findley).

“I’m not a handy guy. I can’t even build a bird house, so it wasn’t interesting. I wasn’t passionate about it, but at least I was practicing law. One night, I went into the office of another associate attorney and said, ‘Is this it? Is this what we’re going to be doing, always working late, and hoping someday to be partners in this firm? Doing this work?’ She said I needed to practice the kind of law that I could be passionate about. ‘You need to practice where you can represent one person at a time and make a real difference in one person’s life, instead of saving a developer a few bucks on a sub-division they threw together too quickly,’ she said. That really was my ah-ha moment.”

Findley says he “cut my teeth in injury work” with Mulligan, Banham, and Findley. He began working with Jan Mulligan and Betsy Banham in 2012. In 2014, they offered a partnership. “Jan and Betsy had been doing personal injury and medical malpractice work for 30 years. They were excellent at it. Learning from them was a gift. There is truly no higher standard of compassionate lawyering and thoroughness in preparation than Jan and Betsy’s work.”

The pandemic provided the opportunity of creating his own firm. “The isolation necessitated by the pandemic caused us all to become more self-sufficient and tech-savvy. We had been pretty decent at adopting tech and streamlining services at MB&F. But with Findley Law I wanted to take it to the moon,” he says. By using artificial intelligence to power through discovery, cloud computing to manage complex file systems, and remote conferencing to be everywhere at once, Findley believes he is doing just that.

» Education

• B.A. University of Georgia, 2003 – double major in Psychology and Philosophy
• J.D. Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 2007 – cum laude

» Bar Admissions

• State of California
• United States District Courts for Southern, Central and Northern Districts of California

» Honors and Awards

• Best Lawyers in America, 2020 – present
• Super Lawyer, 2017 – present
• Super Lawyer Rising Star, 2016
• Outstanding Trial Lawyer Award, Consumer Attorneys 
• of San Diego, 2018
• Top 50 Verdicts in California, 2018
• Top Young Attorneys, San Diego Daily Transcript, 2013
  

» Community and industry leadership positions

• President-Elect, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego, 2022
• Board of Directors, Consumer Attorneys of San Diego, 2016 – present
• Executive Officer, American Association for Justice, Professional Negligence Section, 2019 – present
• Chair, American Bar Association, TIPS Medicine & Law Committee, 2020 – present
• Bench-Bar Committee, San Diego County Bar Association, 2018 – present
• Vice Chair, American Bar Association, TIPS Standing 
• Committee on Plaintiff’s Policy, 2017 – present 
• Barrister Alumnus, Louis M. Welsh American Inn of Court