For the People – Except When It’s Their Own Client

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a 75-year-old cancer patient who signed an arbitration clause on an intake tablet during a routine medical appointment. We litigated that clause. We lost. That article ended by pointing to something we find more troubling than a healthcare provider pulling this move on a patient: a personal injury firm doing the same thing to its own injured clients.

The firm is Morgan & Morgan. The self-described largest injury law firm in America. The one whose billboards, TV spots, and website all carry the same three words: For the People.

We don’t usually write about other plaintiffs’ firms by name. Most of what happens in this line of work is collaborative. We refer cases to other lawyers, share resources, and when any injured person gets real accountability from any firm, it boosts the credibility of the whole profession, ours included. Normally that is exactly where we leave it.

Morgan & Morgan doesn’t leave it there. Its marketing isn’t built around “here’s why we might be a good fit.” It is built around the idea that bigger is simply better, and that smaller firms just aren’t very good. That is a specific argument, made loudly and often, and we think this case earns a direct answer.

What happened to Robert Wyrosdick

In March 2023, a 73-year-old Marietta craftsman named Robert Wyrosdick was rear-ended by a box truck. He hired Morgan & Morgan the way millions of Americans have, because the firm has spent decades building a brand around exactly this promise: hire us and we will fight for you.

According to reporting by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Wyrosdick said he spoke with his assigned attorney once, early on, and mostly heard from a paralegal after that. He was preparing for a deposition when, instead, he was handed a settlement to sign. His case, one the firm’s own file had estimated could be worth $250,000, had already been resolved for $45,000. He says he never gave permission for that number.

When he tried to hold the firm accountable, he found something else buried in the paperwork he had signed on day one. An agreement requiring any dispute with the firm itself to go through arbitration, not court. In plain terms, that means no jury, limited discovery, limited right of appeal, and a confidential proceeding held in a private forum. The same basic mechanism we fought against for our own patient client. This time it wasn’t a hospital using it against a patient. It was a law firm using it against the person it was supposed to be protecting.

Wyrosdick took the case to arbitration anyway, represented by Michael Flint and Mary Ellen Lighthiser. In July, the arbitrator ruled decisively in his favor on legal malpractice, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty, and awarded him roughly $4.3 million. Roughly $3.15 million of that was punitive damages, the kind of award meant specifically to punish and deter. Legal trade press covering the outcome described Wyrosdick as having been “thrown to the wolves.”

A CEO who talks about fighting for the people

Responding to the AJC’s questions about the award, Morgan & Morgan’s CEO, Alexander Clem, said the firm’s attorneys “live and breathe our mission of fighting for the people.” Read that next to what actually happened. A client who says he barely heard from his own lawyer. A settlement finalized without his knowledge. A contract clause that kept the whole matter out of public view and away from a jury.

We are not the only ones who noticed the gap between the slogan and the outcome. We are simply setting the two next to each other and letting the reader do the math.

This wasn’t a one-time mistake

If this were an isolated incident, we might chalk it up to one bad case, one bad year. It isn’t.

Georgia court records show a pattern. In Brown v. Morgan and Morgan Atlanta, a husband and wife sued the firm and one of its attorneys for legal malpractice after a car accident case. The firm moved to compel arbitration under a representation agreement broad enough to cover fee disputes, negligence, malpractice, breach of fiduciary duty, and fraud in a single clause. Moving to compel arbitration over a client’s objection means asking a judge to force that client out of the courtroom and into private arbitration whether the client agrees or not. In a separate federal matter, a judge in the Southern District of Georgia sent another Morgan & Morgan client’s malpractice claim to arbitration over his objection. And according to the AJC, a second former client, represented by a different Georgia attorney, settled a confidential arbitration against the firm days after Wyrosdick’s award became public.

Clem told the AJC that claims against the firm represent “an infinitesimal .0002%” of its Georgia caseload. That may well be true. It is also true that when a firm settles nearly 50,000 cases in five years out of one Atlanta office alone, even a tiny percentage adds up to a lot of real people who, like Mr. Wyrosdick, discover only after the fact that they never had a jury waiting for them if something went wrong.

Bigger isn’t better, it’s just bigger

Morgan & Morgan doesn’t just happen to be big. Being big is the entire pitch. The firm calls itself America’s Largest Injury Law Firm in its own marketing, and one national ad campaign was even titled Size Matters. According to the firm’s own pages, that scale looks like more than $35 billion recovered, more than 700,000 clients served, attorneys licensed in all 50 states, and the tagline “The Fee Is Free.” The message, repeated across hundreds of millions of dollars in billboards, TV spots, and commercials, is that the bigger the firm, the better the lawyer.

That is like thinking McDonald’s must serve the best food in America because it sells more hamburgers from more locations than anyone else, or that Walmart must carry the best products because it operates more stores than any other retailer, or that Motel 6 must offer better service than a locally owned inn because it has thousands of locations instead of one. In almost every industry, once a business grows past a certain point it optimizes for volume and consistency, not individual attention. That is not a knock on scale as a business strategy. It just means size and personalized quality tend to pull against each other more often than they go hand in hand.

Here is the irony we can’t get past. According to Wyrosdick’s own malpractice allegations, the exact thing Morgan & Morgan sells as its strength is what failed him: a caseload so large that attorneys are stretched thin, cases handled predominantly by non-attorney staff, and lawyers financially incentivized to settle quickly and in volume. What has been reported about his experience matches that closely. One early call with an assigned attorney, mostly a paralegal after that, a settlement he says he never approved. If that pattern holds up the way the other cases suggest it might, more billboards and more locations did not make his case go any better.

There’s more than one way to build a law firm

Some firms advertise as aggressively as they can, take in as many cases as that advertising generates, and hire enough attorneys to work through the volume. We built ours the opposite way, by design. Both of us started our careers at one of the largest and most respected law firms in the world before choosing to focus exclusively on Georgia medical malpractice. We have spent the years since building the kind of specialized experience that comes from doing one type of work at a high level, and we have been recognized within the profession for it. When you hire our firm, both of us work on the case. It is not handed off to whichever associate has room on their desk.

Could we hire more lawyers, take on more cases, and probably make more money doing it? Sure. That is simply not the firm we set out to build.

We turn away the vast majority of the cases that come to us. Not because those cases don’t matter, but because they don’t fit what this firm was built to do. We could hire a room full of associates, take on those cases, and grow revenue. The moment we did, we would lose the direct control over quality and expertise our clients are paying for. Instead, we take on a small number of the cases that reach us: the ones serious and complex enough that we believe our direct, hands-on involvement will make a real difference in the outcome. Growth traded for control was a deliberate choice, and we intend to keep it that way.

The same clause we fight for patients, running the other way

We’ve spent a lot of time arguing against pre-dispute arbitration clauses in courtrooms across Georgia. We know exactly what these agreements do, because we’ve made the arguments against them ourselves, more than once.

For our 75-year-old patient client, we argued she never gave meaningful, informed consent. Clicking through a screen on an intake tablet, with no explanation and no negotiation, is not the same as truly agreeing to give up a constitutional right. We argued the agreement was one-sided; it bound only her to arbitration while the provider kept its own right to sue her in court over a bill. We argued Georgia’s legislature specifically tried to protect patients from this scenario. The court disagreed. Loss.

In a separate matter, our client had signed an arbitration agreement during one hospital admission at Emory University but did not sign at a later admission. We argued the earlier agreement no longer applied. The court agreed and threw out the arbitration clause entirely. Win. Some of these fights we lose. Some we win. We keep having them because we think they are worth having.

Now look at Mr. Wyrosdick through that same lens. He hired a law firm because he needed someone to fight for him after being hurt. He was not a sophisticated party negotiating contract terms. He was an injured man signing whatever was put in front of him, the same way our patient client did at check-in. If a lack of any real, meaningful choice is what makes an agreement unfair, an injured accident victim signing paperwork from the largest personal injury firm in the country, with no lawyer of his own to explain what he was giving up, is a clearer example than most. The difference is that our patient’s clause came from a healthcare provider she trusted to treat her body. His came from a law firm he trusted to protect his rights. We’d argue that makes it worse, not better.

How is this even legal in Georgia?

Fair question, and it deserves a real answer, because the legal landscape here is genuinely different from the medical malpractice context.

O.C.G.A. § 9-9-62 is the Georgia statute that says medical malpractice arbitration agreements are not enforceable unless they are signed after the malpractice, after a dispute exists, and while the patient has a lawyer. Georgia’s legislature built that protection specifically for patients. It is imperfect, and federal law can still override it, but at least the state tried. There is no equivalent statute protecting a law firm’s own clients. In 2020, the Georgia Supreme Court decided Innovative Images, LLC v. Summerville, holding that arbitration clauses in attorney-client engagement agreements, including clauses covering future legal malpractice claims, are generally enforceable and not automatically unconscionable, even when the attorney never explained the tradeoffs of arbitration to the client signing away a jury trial. The Court found nothing about the attorney-client relationship that puts it outside Georgia’s general policy favoring arbitration.

In other words, Georgia lawmakers looked at doctors asking patients to sign away a jury before treatment and decided that deserved special protection. No one has done the same for injured people signing away a jury before their own lawyer even opens the file. If anything, we think that gap runs backward. Lawyers are the one profession that is supposed to understand exactly what a jury trial waiver means. Using that knowledge advantage to write one into our own clients’ paperwork is not a technicality. It is a choice.

We fight for our clients, not with them

That is not a slogan we picked because it sounds good next to “for the people.” It is the reason we are writing this article at all.

An arbitration clause in an attorney-client agreement exists for one purpose. To protect the firm if the firm gets something wrong. Not the client. The firm. It is a tool for managing the law firm’s own exposure, dressed up in the same language of efficiency and faster resolution that healthcare providers use to defend the clauses we fought against for our patient client. We didn’t buy that argument when a hospital made it. We don’t buy it when a law firm makes it either.

If we ever make a mistake, and any firm, including ours, is capable of making one, our client shouldn’t have to find out, buried in paperwork they signed on day one, that they’ve already lost their right to hold us accountable in the same courtroom we spent months telling them they deserved.

What our own engagement agreement says about arbitration

Our client engagement agreement does not contain a mandatory arbitration clause. It never has. If we ever failed a client the way Mr. Wyrosdick says he was failed, that client keeps the same right to a jury we fight to protect for every person who hires us.

We’re not saying that to pat ourselves on the back. We’re saying it because we think it’s the baseline, not the exception. If a firm’s entire pitch to injured people is that they deserve accountability and a jury of their peers, that promise should extend to the fine print of the firm’s own contract, not stop the moment it might apply to the firm itself.

Three questions to ask any injury firm before you sign

The useful questions before hiring an injury lawyer are almost never about how big the firm is. They are structural. Who signs your retainer, who returns your calls, and where a dispute with the firm would be resolved. If you are evaluating a personal injury firm, this one or any other, three questions are worth asking directly:

• Does your engagement agreement contain an arbitration clause? Ask to see the fee agreement in full before you sign, not after, and read the paragraph about how disputes with the firm get resolved.
• If something goes wrong with my case, where does that dispute get resolved, a Georgia court or a private arbitration forum? A straight answer should be easy to get. If it isn’t, that is worth paying attention to.
• Who will actually handle my case day to day, and how often will that person change? Mr. Wyrosdick’s experience, one early call with an attorney and mostly a paralegal after that, is worth asking about upfront, not discovering later.

None of this makes you difficult or distrustful. Any firm that is genuinely for the people should be able to answer these questions without hesitation.

The common thread

Whether it is a hospital handing a patient a tablet at intake, or a law firm handing an injured client a fee agreement, the mechanism is the same. Lock in the decision to give up a jury before the person on the other side of the table has any idea what they might eventually need it for. We think that is wrong when a medical provider does it, and worse when a law firm does it. The more people understand what these clauses are and know to look for them before signing anything, the fewer times this fight should need to happen at all.

Questions Georgia readers are asking about Morgan & Morgan

Can a lawyer settle a case without the client’s consent?
Generally, no. The client, not the lawyer, has the final say on whether to accept a settlement, and that baseline is set by ABA Model Rule 1.2 and by every state’s parallel ethical rule. Georgia has a narrow wrinkle under O.C.G.A. § 15-19-5 that lets a lawyer bind a client in limited situations, but whether any specific settlement rises to legal malpractice depends on the facts, and an independent lawyer should evaluate those facts.

What should a Georgia client do if they believe their case was settled without their permission?
Do not cash the settlement check. Cashing it is often treated as ratifying the settlement after the fact. Put every communication with the firm in writing, keep copies of the fee agreement and any settlement paperwork, and speak with independent counsel about a possible legal malpractice claim. Georgia’s filing deadlines for legal malpractice claims are short, and evidence gets harder to preserve as time passes.

What is the Wyrosdick arbitration award against Morgan & Morgan?
Per Law.com reporting from August 2026, a Georgia arbitrator awarded Robert Wyrosdick approximately $4.3 million against Morgan & Morgan in July, with roughly $3.15 million of it in punitive damages, on claims of legal malpractice, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty. Georgia court records suggest the underlying pattern is not isolated.

How long does Morgan & Morgan take to settle a case?
According to the firm’s own published ranges, simple cases can resolve within a few months, moderate cases in six months to a year, and complex cases in several years. Some reported outcomes have fallen outside those ranges. As with any firm, ask about your specific case type before you sign.

What does an arbitration clause in an attorney-client agreement actually mean?
It means a dispute with the firm is decided by a private arbitrator rather than a Georgia jury. Discovery is limited, appeal rights are limited, and the proceeding is confidential. In Wyrosdick’s case, the arbitration clause is why the whole matter was resolved outside of a public courtroom, even though he ultimately prevailed.

Does Davis Adams handle personal injury cases against Morgan & Morgan?
No. Our practice is Georgia medical malpractice, exclusively. This article is not a solicitation for personal injury matters. If your situation involves a medical malpractice question or a mandatory arbitration clause a healthcare provider asked you to sign, we may be able to help.

If a clause you never really read is deciding your case

If your situation is a medical malpractice question, or a mandatory arbitration clause a healthcare provider asked you to sign, that is our lane and the door is open. You can reach us here to talk it through. We do not handle personal injury cases against Morgan & Morgan, and nothing in this article should be read as an offer to.

This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Every case depends on its own facts, medical records, and expert review. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship.