Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Sam Katz of Athlaw LLP.

Sam traces his path from a lifelong sports fan in Los Angeles to an internship at Athletes First, where he learned a lesson that still shapes his practice: provide an excellent service, skip the shortcuts, and treat every client as an individual. A chance connection with a former player at the USC law library led to his first case. Rather than turn it away, Sam spent two years mastering NFL disability case law before filing, won full benefits, and built a firm from there.

Sam and Ray also dig into why so many players are denied benefits they bargained for and the pending class action his firm has brought against the NFL disability plan. Sam closes with what he hopes changes over the next decade: a process built around the plan’s purpose of taking care of players who put their bodies and brains on the line for the game.

Learn more about Sam and Athlaw LLP: https://www.athlawllp.com/

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Jillian DeSimone, the firm's Vice President of Business Development, to examine a line item almost every plaintiff firm carries: tens of thousands of dollars a month to an SEO agency, paid out for years. For most of the last decade that spend was defensible. Search meant ten blue links on Google, and a firm that ranked on the first page reached people at the moment they went looking for a lawyer. Firms that invested early built a real advantage over firms that did not.

Ray and Jillian walk through the three shifts that ended it. People stopped starting at Google: consumers who said they would use LLMs to research an attorney went from 9% in 2023 to nearly 42% in 2026, while Google's share of that research fell almost fifteen points in a single year. The systems answering those questions barely read law firm websites at all, and when one agency asked ChatGPT which personal injury lawyers to call in a real American city, the number of firm websites cited was zero. And the work an SEO vendor can still do has become a commodity any firm can handle in house.

The conversation turns to what these systems do trust, which is what other people say about you. Earned coverage, third-party validation, and a public record consistent enough for a model to rely on are the inputs that decide whether a firm shows up in an AI answer, and none of them come out of an SEO contract. Ray and Jillian lay out how firms should be reading the latest AI search data, where the marketing budget goes instead, and what it takes to build the kind of authority and reputation that holds up no matter which system is doing the answering.

Read the full report: https://www.rebuttalpr.com/ai-guide/

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Tad Thomas, founder and managing partner of Thomas Law Offices, a plaintiffs' firm he started in 2011 and has grown to more than 20 lawyers across multiple states. Tad traces his path from a family grocery store in Louisville to a job as a runner in a legendary criminal defense practice, a solo shingle hung straight out of law school, and a stint as assistant deputy attorney general for Kentucky that taught him how to run an organization.

The center of the conversation is the $104.2 million verdict Tad won this July against an online ghost gun seller in the death of 18-year-old Henry Willis. He explains why the illegal nature of the sale opened a path around the federal immunity that keeps most lawyers out of gun litigation, what his focus groups revealed about how gun owners think about illegal sellers, and how he handled a defendant who never showed up to trial. Days after the verdict, the seller shut down his website.

Tad also talks about why jury selection is his favorite part of any trial, why he insisted on trying cases during his year as president of the American Association for Justice, and how AI has changed his trial prep. 

Learn More about Tad Thomas and Thomas Law Offices: https://www.thomaslawoffices.com/attorneys/tad-thomas/ 

Episode 40 of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR takes on trial communications, from the moments in a case that are newsworthy to what you do in the hours after a verdict. RebuttalPR founder Ray DeLorenzi joins host Hannah Gallagher to explain why filings and verdicts aren't the only news hooks in a litigation, his first rule for trial media strategy (do no harm), where the line sits between talking to a reporter and angering the judge, and why spiking the football after a win is a bad idea when an appeal is coming.

The conversation once again returns to AI: why the AI companies want immunity and the competitiveness argument they'll use to get it, how you tell the story of an injury you can't photograph, Reddit as a mini focus group, and Ray's bet that half the legal AI vendors on the conference circuit are gone within a year.

Want to learn more about Ray and the RebuttalPR team? Visit www.rebuttalpr.com

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Nicole Smith, a partner at Langdon & Emison in Kansas City, Missouri. Nicole started at the firm as a law clerk during law school and has built a career spanning single-event litigation, mass tort leadership, and the operational side of running that work like a business.

Nicole traces her interest in the law back to a sixth-grade mock trial of the Lindbergh kidnapping and shares a winding route to the profession that ran through architecture, journalism, and a stint as a teaching major before a legal assistant job at a mass torts firm pulled her toward plaintiff’s work. The conversation digs into the business of mass torts, and Nicole explains how she works through revenue projections and case selection and the thinking behind her article questioning early vetting and census rules. She also talks about mentoring younger lawyers, her Society of Women Trial Lawyers talk on work-life balance and “mom guilt,” and the advice she wishes she’d had starting out.

Read Nicole's piece on mandatory early vetting: https://irlaw.umkc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=lawreview

Learn more about Langdon & Emison: https://www.langdonemison.com/

In this episode, Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Jean Martin, a mass torts and class action litigator who recently joined AWKO as founding head of its consumer class action practice. Her path to plaintiff's litigation was unconventional: childhood courthouse visits in North Carolina, business school, candy manufacturing, Wake Forest Law School.

Early asbestos work led to a neurodevelopmental injuries case that lost on a Daubert ruling two nights before trial, but shaped her instincts as a litigator. Jean credits her economics and business background with giving her an edge in damages modeling and expert depositions, and emphasizes the importance of remembering the human behind every class member.

Jean sees AI and data misuse as the next major wave of litigation, targeting tech companies that monetize user data and manipulate images. She notes the irony of AI itself now appearing in class action objections and client inquiries, and why plaintiff lawyers need to collaborate to succeed in that space.

The conversation closes with Class of Our Own, the invitation-only summit Jean founded four years ago for women class action lawyers. Now drawing 140 attendees with a 46-person waitlist, the free event has become a sisterhood that gives women visibility and community in a profession that has long offered such networks to men informally. At a firm with ten female partners, Jean reflects on what it means to have "coup sisters" in her corner.

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Eric Cramer, chairman of Berger Montague and co-chair of its antitrust department, whose career spans more than three decades of plaintiff-side class action work and more than $4 billion in recoveries for workers, consumers, fighters, and others harmed by concentrated corporate power.

Eric traces his path from Woodstock to Princeton and Harvard Law School, where he sidestepped big-law recruiting in favor of environmental public interest work. He shares how a chance meeting brought him to Philadelphia, how a small generalist firm threw him into depositions and appellate arguments from day one, and how a 1995 conversation with Berger Montague's founding partner set the course for his career.

The conversation moves into Eric's early work on nuclear weapons facility cases, including communities around Rocky Flats and Hanford and prisoners at Oregon State Penitentiary who were irradiated in Cold War experiments. He explains how those cases taught him to translate complex science and economics for judges and juries, a skill that carried directly into antitrust work and a deep facility for econometrics and economic proof.

Eric then walks through the UFC fighter pay antitrust case: how the UFC used exclusive long-term contracts to lock fighters out of competing organizations, suppress pay to well below 20 percent of sport revenues, and monopolize the market for elite MMA. He covers the economic proof, the media dynamics of litigating against a powerful sports entity, and the resulting settlement for the fighter class.

The episode closes with Eric's take on the state of antitrust enforcement, why the field is having a moment across the political spectrum, and his work with Public Justice and the American Antitrust Institute.

Episode 36 of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR takes on AI search — and the vendors selling rankings that don't exist. RebuttalPR founder Ray DeLorenzi joins host Hannah Gallagher to break down what actually drives visibility in tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, which AI model he prefers and why, and how plaintiff firms are already thinking about AI accountability through litigation.

The second half gets practical: what to do after your first media hit, why "billion dollars recovered" isn't the homepage stat you think it is, and how to write a lawyer bio that doesn't sound like everyone else's.

Want to learn more about Ray and the RebuttalPR team? Visit www.rebuttalpr.com

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Rich Ruohonen, a partner at TSR Injury Law in Bloomington, Minnesota, whose career spans nearly three decades of plaintiff’s work in traumatic brain injury, car accidents, product liability, and premises liability cases.

The conversation digs deep into what Rich calls the parallels between being a competitive athlete and being a trial lawyer — from his firm’s “Fight Club” practice sessions for opening statements, to the sports psychology principles he applies in the courtroom, to the mental resilience required to push through week-long trials on four hours of sleep. Rich has tried roughly 90 cases and has not lost one since around 2011 or 2012, a streak that now stands at 27 consecutive wins heading into 2026.

Rich also shares the story behind his Olympic journey — eight failed bids before coming out of retirement at 55 to help a younger team through injuries, winning the Olympic trials, and then traveling to Milan–Cortina as the oldest American Winter Olympian in history, breaking a 94-year-old record. He describes what it felt like to finally stand in that arena with his family watching, and why the experience was the greatest moment of his life.

The episode closes with Rich’s account of speaking out at his Olympic press conference about ICE operations in Minnesota — a decision he made deliberately, knowing there would be death threats and backlash from the administration. He explains why he believes lawyers have an obligation to speak when the rule of law is being violated, and why free speech isn’t free if it stays in the locker room.

In this episode of Raising the Bar with RebuttalPR, host Ray DeLorenzi sits down with Rachel McCarthy, Executive Director of The Milestone Foundation, a Buffalo-based nonprofit that provides pre- and post-settlement funding to plaintiffs at rates designed to help rather than exploit. 

Rachel shares how a Jesuit education, an AmeriCorps stint in Buffalo, years as a paralegal in New York City, and a detour through the San Francisco tech world eventually led her to John Bair and the founding of what would become The Milestone Foundation. She describes being there at the very beginning, when the organization was little more than a board and an idea, and what it meant to watch it grow into a team serving over 1,000 plaintiffs and working with over 320 law firms nationwide. 

The conversation covers what separates consumer litigation funding from commercial litigation funding and why so many trial lawyers have a hard-line opposition to the practice. Rachel explains how the foundation’s nonprofit model keeps money in the mission and out of anyone’s pocket, and why attorneys who are skeptical of funding companies often come around once they understand what The Milestone Foundation is actually doing. 

Rachel also takes stock of the regulatory moment the industry finds itself in, including New York’s Consumer Litigation Funding Act going into effect this June, and where she sees the biggest gaps still left unaddressed. She closes with the story of a veteran turned quadriplegic who used The Milestone Foundation’s funding to adapt his home to his disability, and a call to the trial lawyer community to support the foundation as it heads into its 10th anniversary year. 

Learn more about The Milestone Foundation here: 

https://www.milestonefoundation.org