Disrupting the Personal Injury Space with the Launch of Postman Law

Warren Postman (center), founder of Keller Postman, recently struck out with partners Ashley Keller and Adam Gerchen to form a dedicated personal injury practice: Postman Law.

The numbers produced by leading mass tort law firm Keller Postman are staggering. A $60M win in the first trial of the NEC/infant-formula litigation. Seventy-five thousand individual arbitrations against Amazon. The largest privacy-related settlement by a state in history – $1.4B from Meta to the State of Texas this past summer. In all, the firm’s cases add up to more than one million clients represented and $3B recovered to date, relying on the expertise of more than 300 attorneys and staff across six offices in the seven years the firm has been in operation.

Now, the founders of Keller Postman are reaching for a new number: one.

Keller Postman’s founders, Ashley Keller, Warren Postman, and Adam Gerchen, recently struck out to form a dedicated personal injury practice: Postman Law. The new firm will represent individuals in a wide range of personal injury matters, from traditional slip-and-fall cases and motor vehicle accidents to complex medical malpractice and wrongful death cases.

At Postman Law, the attorneys will leverage their experience in high-stakes mass tort litigation in the nation’s highest courts, bringing their prowess to the personal injury space. It’s a bold entry into the market, and a model that Postman says can be “disruptive if done well.”

“There are a lot of small firms who don’t have the resources to do what we do on the litigation side or the client services side,” Postman explains. “We are bringing those principles of aggressive, well-resourced, high-stakes and highly skilled litigation and really great client care to the personal injury space.”

The new firm will have a synergistic relationship with Keller Postman, able to both draw support from its attorneys and benefit from its relationships and resources, including referrals and industry-leading tech systems. That access to the heft of a mass tort firm combined with the unparalleled experience of the founding attorneys means that the new firm will be able to push individual personal injury cases forward aggressively, quickly and innovatively – delivering results when their clients need it most. Facing recent personal trauma and often-mounting medical bills, personal injury clients uniquely require speed, rigor and unparalleled client care; there’s a sense of urgency and empathy in every case.

We are bringing those principles of aggressive, well-resourced, high-stakes and highly skilled litigation and really great client care to the personal injury space.

Keller, Postman and Gerchen have spent the last seven years shaking up the mass actions world on behalf of thousands of individuals. With their stamp firmly made on that space, the innovators are ready to see how they can transform individuals’ lives in the personal injury sphere.

FROM MANY TO ONE: KELLER POSTMAN TO POSTMAN LAW

If Keller Postman’s founders aim to cause disruption, it won’t be the first time; when they switched to the plaintiffs’ side by forming Keller Postman in 2018, they took the field by storm – quickly and deeply revolutionizing the mass tort space. The triumvirate are trailblazers in mass arbitrations, a relatively recent development in civil litigation and that they took to new heights. They sought to give individuals access to arbitrations, a move that shook up corporate entities that may have been used to using arbitration as a tool to skirt accountability. The trio’s fight for individuals in the personal injury space carries a similar theme: giving each person equitable access to the justice system.

Keller Postman has taken this fight to multiple major corporations – including Uber, DoorDash, Amazon and TurboTax, representing hundreds of thousands of clients across multiple litigations. By 2021, for instance, Keller Postman had filed 75,000 individual arbitration claims on behalf of Amazon Alexa users who had been recorded without permission. Rather than tackle so many arbitrations, Amazon made an unprecedented move and eliminated its arbitration clause, opening itself up to individual and class-action lawsuits from consumers and changing the legal landscape.

As a result, Keller Postman is currently co-lead counsel in two litigations representing potential classes of clients against Amazon on antitrust claims. In Frame-Wilson et al v. Amazon.com Inc. and De Coster, et al. v. Amazon.com, the lawyers allege anticompetitive pricing policies led to consumers overpaying for items purchased through both Amazon and non-Amazon retailers. The cases’ estimated damages sit in the eleven to twelve-figure range, and, if certified, could be the largest class in class action history.

In cases like these, Keller Postman dives headfirst into novel areas of law that require creative legal argument. While that level of creativity is not necessary in every personal injury case, the team is skilled at looking at a typical case with fresh eyes and wondering if there might be a different, more successful strategy. “That’s part of our culture – coming to a case and not just accepting the standard playbook, but trying to come up with ways to increase the value and result for the client,” says Postman. “That is really helpful even when you might not expect it to be.”

THE FIRST CASE: LIL DURK AND MURDER-FOR-HIRE

The firm’s first case puts that creative, complex thinking to the test. In February, the Postman Law team was contacted to represent the family of Saviay’a Robinson in a wrongful death suit in Cook County. Robinson, 24, a father of three and cousin to rapper Quando Rondo, was shot and killed after assailants fired at least 18 rounds into Rondo’s car in Los Angeles in August 2022. Just this past November, however, a federal indictment was released that linked Robinson’s death to a murder-for-hire plot allegedly orchestrated by Grammy-winning rapper Lil Durk (Durk Banks) as a hit on rival rapper Rondo.

The federal indictment alleges that Banks, as the leader of Chicago-based rap collective and association Only the Family (OTF), ordered Rondo’s murder through hitmen who used funds from Banks and OTF; one OTF associate allegedly planned and paid for one-way flights from Chicago to California before the shooting, and another allegedly purchased ski masks for the shooters and paid for a hotel room using a credit card in Banks’ name.

When the news broke, Postman Law was contacted by Roden Law, who had a relationship with the Robinson family, was looking for Chicago-based partners for the case, and had exchanged referrals with Keller Postman in the past. Postman Law and Roden Law are now co-counsel in the civil wrongful death case on behalf of Robinson’s family, which is running concurrent to the criminal case against Banks and other alleged conspirators in the plot. The case seeks to recover damages, especially on behalf of Robinson’s three small children who are now without not only their father but the primary earner in their family. “We can’t ever bring him back, but we can try to make sure that they’re set up in a way that takes them through the next 15 years or so that they would have had a father providing for them,” says Marquel Reddish Longtin – Partner and Chief Client Officer at Keller Postman and Postman Law.

“You can’t ever replace the family member who is lost, but [the case] is the mechanism through which they can get some sense of justice and closure,” Postman adds.

While the federal criminal case further untangles the knot of Durk’s alleged involvement in Robinson’s death, the civil case requires creative and sophisticated lawyering, the team says. While the Postman Law lawyers have never taken on a murder-for-hire case before, they are battle-tested in diving into new areas of law. Both in mass tort work and in Postman and Longtin’s prior work on the defense side, “you end up dealing with really novel, complex situations,” says Postman. “So the place of working through a new, complex fact pattern is familiar.”

The case “just shows the breadth of what we’re capable of,” says Longtin. From an open-and-shut slip-and-fall case to a complex interstate murder-for-hire conspiracy, “there’s really not an issue that’s too simple or too complex. And we look forward to taking on all those cases,” she adds.

A PERSONAL TOUCH: OUTREACH, TECH AND CLIENT EMPOWERMENT

It may seem counterintuitive that lawyers used to handling massive groups of clients would be uniquely equipped to serve individuals. But that’s the Postman Law model – and a key aspect of how they’re shaking up the personal injury space.

“We’ve spent the last seven years thinking about how we can make sure an individual client has a good experience, and then how to do that tens of thousands of times,” says Postman. “We make sure that we have processes and systems in place so that balls don’t get dropped. So, now we are going to bring that to personal injury cases.”

As Keller Postman’s Chief Client Officer, Longtin has been the architect of many of those systems – and by bringing her over, Postman Law is putting its full weight behind client service. Longtin, who came to Keller Postman in 2018 from Kirkland & Ellis, has been a partner and Chief Client Officer since 2023. She focuses on combining thoughtful, personalized attention for clients with tech products that help ensure clients are taken care of at a mass scale.

“In personal injury, one of the most important things a client can do is take care of themselves,” Longtin says. One vital way they can do so is through doctor’s appointments. To ensure that every client is receiving the medical care they need, the firm has created technological reminders that will help clients remember when they have doctor’s appointments and even transport them to those appointments. Afterward, the client will receive a text or notification to let their legal team know how the visit went – ensuring on the legal side that lawyers are kept fully up-to-date with any health changes that could impact the case, and on the personal side that lawyers know their clients are getting the care they need throughout the legal process.

The firm’s systems are cutting-edge; Longtin and team are currently developing an AI-assisted medical record review that will service clients both within Keller Postman and Postman Law. The program will operate within an already-existing self-service portal where clients can answer questions, provide updates and upload documents. It’s an example of how the Keller Postman/Postman Law relationship will have beneficial overlap not just on the legal side, but also within client services and technology: The personal injury firm will have the benefit of large-scale investment in cutting-edge client services tech, while the mass tort firm will be benefitted by the Postman Law team curating and employing products for highly individual cases. Keller Postman has a dedicated 30-person tech team to ensure that clients are able to connect with lawyers via tech tools, as well as the 175 non-lawyer staff extensively trained to answer client questions.

To that end, clients won’t only be interacting with tech. Longtin explains that most personal injury clients judge their lawyer not by the legal nitty gritty, but by two things: the result, and how their lawyer makes them feel. “We are really focused on making sure that clients have someone to get ahold of,” says Longtin. “They’re not going to be waiting weeks for updates about the case. They’re going to be able to get ahold of someone, they’re going to be able to know what’s going on in their case, and they’re going to have someone who's going to walk them through this whole process.”

For Longtin, the key question behind her processes is whether clients feel they have input and agency during an incredibly stressful time in their lives – suffering from a serious injury while worrying about how that event has impacted them financially. While the team works with urgency to get awards to clients as soon as possible, it’s about restoring a lost feeling of agency even before the verdict or settlement is reached. “The number one thing is we want them to feel empowered,” says Longtin. “We don’t want them to feel like victims. We want them to feel like they have a say in what happens next and that they’ve got a little bit of control back.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Since Postman Law’s launch, the firm has already brought on four attorneys outside of the Keller Postman family. With those new faces outside Chicago, the firm is already delivering on its promise to quickly expand outside its home base of Illinois. The plan is to begin working throughout the Midwest and soon, nationally – a similar model for growth that Keller Postman followed. 

We don’t want them to feel like victims. We want them to feel like they have a say in what happens next and that they’ve got a little bit of control back.

As the firm grows, so does the attorneys’ enthusiasm for this new phase in their careers. For Postman, it’s the client stories that he finds the most fulfilling about taking on personal injury cases. He reflects on his switch from defense to plaintiffs’ law when he joined Keller Postman seven years ago: “The biggest shift and most gratifying thing was seeing how our clients on the plaintiffs’ side are really looking to us to solve a problem they can’t handle by themselves – whereas big corporations could swap in another big firm lawyer any day. So, that feeling was always the basic thing that keeps us excited about plaintiffs’ law,” Postman says. “In personal injury, every case is a really individual injury story. Every time I end up talking to a client and hearing their story, I get excited about trying to help them.”

Longtin agrees, adding that on the mass claims side, while you hear many stories, their resolution can often take years. Whereas, in personal injury, she says, “I think it’s going to be really rewarding to be able to work with so many individuals and to be able to see those life-changing settlement awards on a rolling basis – to be able to feel that tangible impact every single day when you go into work.”