About First Counsel

Atlanta has more personal injury attorneys than most people realize. Fewer good ones than the marketing suggests.

If you've spent any time looking for legal help after a serious accident, you know the landscape. Billboards on every highway. Radio ads back to back. Websites that say roughly the same thing in roughly the same order. A lot of promises about fighting and winning and getting you the compensation you deserve.

What's harder to find is honest information about how to evaluate any of it.

The legal industry is unusually opaque for something so consequential. You hire an attorney to guide you through a process you've never navigated before, in a system designed to be difficult to understand from the outside. You make that hiring decision under stress, often within days of something that turned your life upside down, with almost no reliable way to evaluate who you're choosing or whether they're the right person for what you're facing.

My name is Josh Samuels. I'm a personal injury attorney in Georgia.

I handle motor vehicle collisions, trucking and commercial vehicle cases, daycare abuse and injury, and catastrophic injury cases. I practice personal injury law in Georgia, primarily in the Atlanta metro area. I'm an attorney at Burrow & Associates.

I built First Counsel because I kept having the same conversation.

Someone would come in for a consultation, already represented by another firm, and describe an experience that followed a pattern I'd seen too many times. They'd been referred to a doctor they didn't choose. Their bills were structured in ways nobody explained. They couldn't get their attorney on the phone. They had no idea what stage their case was in or what was supposed to happen next. They were told everything was fine, but nothing felt fine.

By the time they spoke with me they were frustrated, embarrassed, and distrusted the legal process.

I couldn't fix every one of those situations. But I could build something that helps the next person avoid them.

That's what this site is.

I believe health insurance should be used when it's available and you can afford the out of pocket costs. And liens for access to care for those who can't. Most clients don't know there's a choice. The billing model your attorney picks on day one can be the single largest factor in how much of your settlement you take home. I think that decision should be made with the client, not for them.

I try cases. And under the new legal landscape I'm going to have to try more. Part of how I'm adjusting to that is building cases better from the beginning. Insurance adjusters track which attorneys go to trial and which ones don't. That reputation is priced into every offer. I'd rather have the offer reflect that the case was built by someone willing to see it through.

What you get

I give everyone my cell phone number. If something is happening in your case, you hear about it from me.

I don't take every case. I take the cases where I can add value. That's the trade.