Why your neighbors don’t hire the lawyers on billboards
There is a reason you have never seen the name of your dentist’s husband’s favorite trial lawyer on the side of a bus.
The plaintiff personal injury industry in Houston has two very different halves. One half advertises. The other half does not. The half that advertises is built on marketing volume — television spots, radio placements, billboards along 610 and the Katy Freeway, Spanish-language commercials, search engine ads, sponsorship of stadium signage. The business model is intake velocity: sign as many cases as possible, resolve as many as possible at scale, keep the marketing machine fed with the resulting fees. It is a legitimate business. For many clients, it works fine.
It is also, inescapably, a model that depends on scale. When a firm signs hundreds or thousands of new cases a year, those files are not going to be worked by the lawyer whose face is on the billboard. They are going to be worked by associates, paralegals, case managers, and — increasingly — contract lawyers and legal-process outsourcing firms. This is not a criticism; it is arithmetic. One lawyer cannot personally try five hundred cases. Nobody can. The cases get processed.
The clientele you belong to — the CEOs, the bankers, the partners at law firms, the physicians, the energy executives, the private equity principals, the business owners who built something from nothing — that clientele does not, as a rule, want their case processed. You want your case handled by a discreet, world-class professional — the lawyer you actually met with, the lawyer whose name is on the letterhead, the lawyer you can pick up the phone and call or text directly. You want discretion. You want your file on a short list, not a long one.
That is the practice we built.
Who we are, and where we live
Brian Beckcom is a seventh-generation Texan. Texas A&M University. Texas A&M letterman. Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. Ross Volunteers. University of Texas School of Law, with honors — where he served as Chief Notes Editor of the Texas Law Review and as a research assistant to Professor Charles Alan Wright, the author of Federal Practice and Procedure, the definitive treatise on federal courts, cited thousands of times by the United States Supreme Court. Admiralty law studies under Professor David W. Robertson, whose name the University of Texas’s annual maritime conference now bears. To say Brian has deep Texas roots would be an understatement.
Vuk Vujasinovic is Brian’s law partner and co-founder of VB Attorneys. He has tried cases to verdict across Texas. Like Brian, he is Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization.
We live in 77024. Our kids go to school here. We eat at the same restaurants you do. We see you at church, at the carpool line, at the grocery store, at the Houstonian, at River Oaks Country Club, at Memorial Park. We are not flying in from another city to take your case. We are four minutes down the road.
That matters — not just for convenience, but for something more important: reputation. A lawyer whose neighbors are his or her clients cannot afford to be anything less than what they promise. In a community as interconnected as West Houston, one handled case well is a hundred conversations at dinner parties. One handled case poorly is a hundred conversations of a different kind. We have never been willing to risk that, and we never will be.
Who we represent
We represent a specific kind of client. Not a demographic — a situation.
We represent the business owner who was T-boned by a commercial truck on I-10 and cannot work, and whose company depends on them personally. We represent the physician whose spouse was killed in a crash and who is now navigating the estate, the minor children, the carrier, and the at-fault driver’s excess policy simultaneously. We represent the energy executive who was badly hurt offshore or onshore and whose compensation package, carried interest, or equity grants make a standard wage-loss analysis almost useless without a real economist in the file. We represent the retiree who never expected to be injured this late in life and for whom quality of remaining years is the real question. We represent families in wrongful death cases where the only thing the money can do is acknowledge, and enforce, the value of a life.
Our firm has represented more than 1,000 flood victims from Hurricane Harvey — the Addicks and Barker reservoir releases by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — in federal court inverse condemnation litigation. Vuk and VB Attorneys held a leadership role in that consolidated action. If you live in West Houston, you remember the water. You may have been in it. Some of those homeowners were our neighbors. Some of them were us.
We have represented the crew of the Maersk Alabama — the ship taken by Somali pirates, later depicted in Captain Phillips — in the litigation that followed. We have represented Captain Wren Thomas, kidnapped from a vessel in the Gulf of Guinea and held hostage, in a case against Edison Chouest Offshore and Chevron. We have represented refinery workers, dredge hands, tugboat captains, pilots, truck drivers, crane operators, physicians’ widows, and children who lost parents.
And I have represented many people you will never hear about. Executives in defamation cases that required total confidentiality and discretion. Professionals whose reputations could not survive a public filing. Business owners whose matters were resolved before a complaint was ever drafted. Those cases do not appear on any website, anywhere, and never will. That is the point.
Many of the largest recoveries of our career are confidential and will never appear on any website. That is the nature of serious resolutions. Confidentiality is the price. We accept it gladly on our clients’ behalf.
The Hurricane Harvey work
A specific word on Harvey, because it is relevant to this community in a way that no other case is.
When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Addicks and Barker reservoirs during Hurricane Harvey, thousands of homes upstream and downstream were flooded — many of them in West Houston, including homes in and near 77024, Bunker Hill, Piney Point, Spring Branch, Memorial Thicket, and the neighborhoods west of Beltway 8. The flooding was not an act of nature. It was a deliberate, federal, reservoir-management decision.
VB Attorneys was one of the lead plaintiffs’ firms in the federal court inverse condemnation litigation — a Fifth Amendment takings claim — against the United States. Vuk Vujasinovic held a federal court leadership position in the consolidated case. Over a thousand homeowners were represented by our firm in that effort.
We know the Addicks and Barker reservoirs. We know the Corps of Engineers. We know West Houston’s flood topography in a way that no other firm in the city does, because we litigated it.
Our firm is not accepting new Hurricane Harvey cases at this time. We mention the work here because it is part of our record, and because it is part of the reason people in this community know our name. If you are dealing with a separate West Houston matter — a serious injury, a wrongful death, a flood or water-damage case unrelated to Harvey, a professional or executive matter requiring discretion — that is a different conversation.
How we actually work — a mutual interview
When you contact a typical high-volume personal injury firm, an intake specialist takes down your facts, runs them against the firm’s case-acceptance criteria, and signs you up if the file fits. It is efficient. It is not personal.
At VB Attorneys, the first meeting is different. It is an interview — in both directions.
You are interviewing me to decide whether I am the lawyer you want carrying your case for the next one to two years. You should be. I encourage it. Ask me about my background, my litigation record, and the largest cases I have ever handled. Ask me about the cases I have lost, and why. Ask me how the team works and who is doing what on your file.
And I am interviewing you. Because we are not a volume practice, we take a limited number of cases, and the cases we take are cases we believe in. If you come to us with a fabricated claim, an exaggerated injury, an inconsistent medical history you are hoping we will not notice, or a set of facts we do not think we can win, we will not take the case. Politely. Respectfully. But clearly.
That is the trade-off. We decline cases that a volume firm would take. In exchange, the clients we do take get something they cannot get anywhere else: a trial-ready lawyer whose name is on the door, whose reputation is on the line, and whose full professional attention is on their file.
When you hire us, you get us. Your case is led by a Board Certified trial lawyer — Brian or Vuk — who stays on the file from engagement through resolution. We use paralegals and junior lawyers, the same way every serious litigation team does; we would not be doing our jobs if we didn’t. The difference is that a Board Certified partner is actually running the file, making the strategic calls, taking the important depositions, and going to trial if the case goes to trial. That is the structural distinction. It is not marketing. It is how the practice is built.
What “Board Certified” actually means
Less than 1% of Texas lawyers are Board Certified in Personal Injury Trial Law by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. The certification requires a documented trial record, written exam, peer references, ongoing continuing legal education, and periodic recertification. It is the only credential in Texas that the State Bar itself has blessed as an indicator that a lawyer actually tries cases.
Most of the lawyers on television in Houston are not Board Certified. Some of them have never tried a personal injury case to a jury verdict in their career. That is a verifiable public fact. It is worth verifying before you hire anyone.
I have been Board Certified for more than two decades. Vuk is Board Certified. Between us, our career has been trials and appellate work, not marketing.
What the biggest recoveries of our career have in common
I have spent twenty-plus years thinking about this question. The largest results we have obtained — eight-figure results that are not, for confidentiality reasons, on any public page — share a handful of features.
These are not marketing claims. They are the lessons of a career.
A personal invitation
If you live in 77024 — or in Hunters Creek, Piney Point, Bunker Hill, Hedwig Village, Spring Valley, Hilshire Village, the rest of the Memorial Villages, Memorial West, Memorial Park, or the West Houston corridor — and you or someone in your family has suffered a serious injury, lost someone in an accident, or been wronged in a way that requires a real trial lawyer, I invite you to call.
Not a 1-800 number. Not an intake center. My office. You will reach me, or Vuk, or someone who will put us on the phone with you the same day.
We will sit down. Likely not in a downtown high-rise conference room with catered food and marketing brochures — though we can do that if you prefer. Usually in a quieter setting. We will listen. We will ask hard questions. We will tell you, honestly, whether we think we can help and whether we are the right fit.
If we are not, we will tell you who else to call. We know who the serious trial lawyers in Texas are, because we try cases against and alongside them. We will not refer you to a lawyer we would not hire ourselves.
If we are the right fit, you will know it in the first meeting. So will we.
That is the practice. That is how we have worked for twenty years. That is why, in a community where everyone knows a lawyer, the people who need a trial lawyer quietly find their way to us.
