It Was 30 Years Ago Today...The History of Mordini & Schwartz

On June 11, 1996, Mark A. Mordini and L. Bradley Schwartz formed Mordini & Schwartz. It was the two of us. We had no files and no clients. I was 29 years old. Mordini was 31.

Before the formation of Mordini & Schwartz, we were working for Moss & Hillison, a law firm that had broken away from Parillo Weiss & Moss in 1990. They were a fighting civil defense firm that taught us how to fight hard at trial, how to defend personal injury lawsuits, and how to appeal cases we lost.

After working for Moss & Hillison for about five years, Mordini and I were hired, along with another associate, Tim Meade, to become in-house counsel for a well-known carrier based out of Bedford Park.  The firm was called Galvin, Mordini, Schwartz & Meade.

We lasted nine months.

During the summer of 1996, a friendly personal injury lawyer let us work out of one of his spare offices. We used phone books, one computer, and land lines to call the insurance companies we were after. We were young, aggressive, and determined to make a difference.

After about three months, we obtained our own office. Eventually, we grew to about 15 attorneys. We tried hundreds of jury cases on behalf of multiple insurance companies, many of them low-policy-limit files where the economics mattered as much as the law.

This Law Bulletin announcement still makes me laugh. It was written in our favor: two name partners leaving an in-house insurance defense firm to start their own firm. The article confirmed we had tried more than 100 cases to verdict and that Mordini & Schwartz would handle insurance defense work.

What really happened is that we got busted before we were scheduled to resign and leave. The carrier we were working under learned we were planning to start our own firm. When they found out, they fired me and Mordini. Regardless, According to Mordini, I was the one who pushed him to leave in-house lawyering and forced him to quit with me.

Mordini and I remember the rationale behind leaving a corporate setting a little differently. I always thought that me and Mordini were in sync and on the same page about our future. But he just told me the following:

“I'll always remember you telling me it was time to get away from any in-house insurance defense firms. I didn't want to. I was scared. I had young kids and feared the unknown….What the fuck was I doing?” asked Mordini. “I couldn't speak in front of a class through every level of school. Now I'm going to start my own firm?”

My memory of why we started our own firm was because we were just doing what we had to do. We were young, unhappy, and convinced there was a better way to practice insurance defense.

I remember what Mordini’s wife, Jane, was up to and the impact she had on my future.  To be blunt, Jane was an intense insurance defense attorney who left Moss & Hillison to become a med mal defense lawyer. She was the one who helped me get hired there while she was dating Mordini. She was also the one who took control and convinced Mordini to get the hell out of Bedford Park and partner up with someone like me. She obviously forced Mordini in the right direction and I thank her incredibly. I know Mordini feels the same way I do.

Between 1996 and 2004, we grew fast. Our goal was to train our associates in how to win. We were not trying to build a high-end litigation firm. We were trying to build an aggressive and successful trial firm.

Our first associate was fresh out of law school. We were impressed with his abilities and his attitude. His name is Mark Galasso, and we hired him about a year after we started. Galasso is now a partner at an esteemed defense firm he founded. Here’s how Galasso describes his first associate position:

“Being the first attorney they hired, I look back very fondly at my time there. Mordini and Schwartz both helped me become the attorney and person I am today.  I was trained to be a litigator. I was honing my litigation skills and becoming a better lawyer. To this day, I honor Mark and Brad through training and mentoring attorneys. That means more to me now than any verdict ever did.”

Speaking of verdicts, here is a list of our firm’s trials from the day we formed until the spring of 2001. According to recorded history, our 4-year-old insurance defense law firm already tried 190 cases to verdict.

It was exciting to grow as fast as we did as a defense firm. After a few years, we landed taxicab defense, slip and fall defense, dram shop, carnivals, bad faith claims, uninsured and underinsured motorist claims, bar fights, and premises liability. We were persistent in going after clients and our caseload grew quickly. In response, we went on a hiring spree. And it worked.

We also billed differently. That became a big part of who we were. In the Spring of 2001, we used this defense proposal to show carriers what we had done and where we were headed. It was not a subtle document. We promised an aggressive, proactive approach, but we also promised cost-effective defense.

The proposal said we were more concerned about winning and saving money than excessive billing and ego boosting. We used what is known as phase billing. In other words, we would accept a certain fee from the time we received a file until discovery was complete. That was the end of phase one. Then the case moved into the next phase and so on.

Low-policy-limit cases forced us to be efficient. It forced us to prepare for trial without turning every assignment into a billing project. It also made the pitch easy: comparing our integrity, attitude, and results to those of other firms.

There are plenty of civil defense lawyers in Cook County who are not on good terms with the plaintiff attorneys they opposed. Some of that is just the nature of the business. Some of it comes from accusations of trickery, lack of honesty, and keeping cases open so lawyers can bill like crazy. From the Mordini & Schwartz perspective, we did not want to be that kind of firm.

We tried cases. We reported to our carriers. We tried to satisfy our insurance company clients. But we also made sure we had great times together.

To this day, we are tight and cordial with many of the plaintiff attorneys we went up against. When I have a potential plaintiff case, I know who to refer it to. I spent years learning who were the best plaintiff attorneys in the city.

As our caseload grew, so did our number of associates and staff. There was a period when we had about 20 people working at Mordini & Schwartz, including attorneys, secretaries, accounting, law clerks, and docketing.

We handled thousands of defense cases. We took countless depositions. We prepared reports for carriers. We prepared for arbitrations. We prepared for trials. The rhythm was hard to explain unless you lived it. Opposing counsel might be ready for one trial. We had to be ready for many at the same time, never knowing which one was going to trial.

And at the end of the day, we needed to wind down and relax. And we did.

Mordini described the fear that drove him, the toll it took, and the way our firm shaped his life. These are his words:

“The one thing I never lost was the love of fighting in court. I also wonder about the people who worked at Mordini & Schwartz. What stories do they have? How do they judge us as bosses and co-workers? I realize now how I have changed over the years.”

“The sick thing is I have never been able to shake the fear of failure. That always drove me to outwork everyone. I know now the toll it took on me. Less and less real time with my family. More and more booze. More and more isolation. “

Mordini never wanted to be involved with interviewing or hiring new lawyers. He never wanted to fire anyone either. “I loved to teach. But my teaching had to be spontaneous. And I usually taught over drinks. I tried to focus attorneys on the importance of being themselves.”

“Drinking caught up to me,” said Mordini: “Not overnight, but over years. It went from magical to medicine to misery. I took people down with me. In the end I got what I wanted, to be left alone. On 7/3/23, I did the unthinkable. I stopped drinking. That day changed my life. I was handed a new life. My drive now is to once again help others.”

As Mordini stated earlier, “I never wanted to get involved in hiring.” Here's what Betsy Rosenberg (n/k/a Betsy Grover) told me the following:  

“At my interview, Brad joked that the experience I would get warranted me paying the firm instead of me receiving a paycheck. While I did get paid, Brad was not wrong. The skills I learned during my years at Mordini & Schwartz are worth far more than any salary.”

According to Betsy, she learned litigation skills—how to take a deposition, how to argue before a judge, how to write a brief and how to persuade a jury. “Mordini & Schwartz was a ‘work hard, play hard’ environment, internally and externally. The days were filled with lawyering, and the nights were filled with socializing. We laughed, cried and traveled together.“

By 2004, Mark and I were working harder than ever. All of us — attorneys, staff, clerks, everyone — stayed at the office late to get things done, report to carriers, and prepare for the next day. The number of cases kept increasing. As partners, we felt responsible for everything. From my perspective, I was becoming overwhelmed.

The time and energy were taking a toll. I cannot prove what stress did or did not do to my body. I only know what the pace felt like. I was overworked. I was under stress.

On Mother's Day weekend in 2004, I went to the hospital by with a horrible headache. The short version of what happened is this: I arrived at the ER via ambulance as a confident trial lawyer who thought he knew how to speak up for himself. Having deposed countless doctors and cross-examined them at trial, I became affluent in medical language. I knew the importance of having family by my side. But once I became a patient, nothing protected me from inadequate medical care.

The ER was short-staffed. My blood work showed panic-level problems, but the results were missed during a shift change. No one realized I had bacterial meningitis and was becoming septic. About ten hours after I arrived, alarms went off. I spiked a 105-degree fever, went into full-blown septic shock, and was rushed to the ICU.

I spent the next month comatose and on life support. When I woke up, I was told I was lucky to be alive. Six months in the hospital and 24 surgeries later, I left as a quadruple amputee.

After a year of rehab, I was back to work at Mordini & Schwartz. But everything had changed. Mordini wrote that the fear of losing me was a life changer for him:

“I worked at the hospital for months to be with him while he was on his journey. The day he left the hospital was exciting. The way he carried himself from that day on is something no one could wrap their head around. I know I could never have done it.”

After my illness, I started my own law practice. Patients and families started calling me, often not because they had a lawsuit, but because no one in the medical system was listening to them. They had billing problems, communication problems, second-opinion problems, insurance problems, and fear. Eventually, that’s what led me to Independent Patient Advocacy.

In 2017, I started a nonprofit called Greater National Advocates because I believe patients and families need someone whose job is to listen, communicate, and to fight for them. Mordini & Schwartz taught me how to fight for clients. The hospital taught me what it feels like when no one is fighting for you. Greater National Advocates was formed as a life-saving organization that helps patients and families get the medical care they deserve.

Click on this Link to watch and hear my speech.

Please feel free to check out what we’re up to in life. I would love for every lawyer to know about Greater National Advocates at gnanow.org/about.html

You can also learn about my Patient Advocacy history here https://lbradleylaw.com/recognition-and-presentations and read the front-page Sun Times article from a couple weeks ago.

In conclusion, thanks for reading this. We started our law firm with no files and no clients. Somehow, we prospered quickly and worked our asses off. Me and Mordini were both close to death. More than that, we built a life.

It was Thirty Years Ago Today when we started, and we told our story about what it was like to have A Day in the Life at Mordini & Schwartz. That was from the beginning of Mordini & Schwartz to the end.

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