After graduating college and taking the LSAT in California, Tyrone Glover took an alternative path to the practice of law and Law Week Colorado’s 2024 Top Litigators.
Glover grew up all over. The son of a U.S. Army physician, Glover’s first memories are of his time in Frankfurt, Germany. He lived there for five years, before moving back stateside. Stints in West Point, Boston and San Antonio followed. Ultimately, his father’s first civilian placement was Northern California, where he credits his formative years.
His family’s history is storied in its own right.
“My grandmother on my mother’s side was a teacher and professor at a local Black college,” said Glover. “Nine of her students started the Friendship Nine. There’s sort of those activist roots there. My grandfather was in the military and was the first Black man, I think in the country, to franchise a Texaco gas station. So that’s kind of where some of my entrepreneurial roots come from.”
Glover said that on his dad’s side, his grandfather was one of the top Black farmers in Smithfield, Virginia. He said growing up around the idea of activism and building your professional skill as a way to embed yourself and advocate for your community, along with his early years in Europe, informs his perspective.
After finishing his undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Glover worked for some dot-com companies and was really into, and successful at, Brazilian jiu-jitsu and MMA. His instructor ended up going to Santa Barbara.
“So I was coming out of high school wrestling and karate and stuff like that and got super into jiu-jitsu, at the early stages, and ended up being that school’s first black belt, fought MMA for a while, fought over in Japan for Pride Fighting Championships,” said Glover.
Glover added a lot of the skills he learned through his jiu-jitsu and MMA career helped to build a lot of the skills he uses as a lawyer today. But Glover didn’t see much longevity in the ring, and he wanted a career that was more long-term. He left fighting undefeated and moved to Colorado for law school.
A Different Type of Fighting
After graduating from law school, Glover worked for a year on transactions. While he liked his colleagues and the partners at the firm, he found out that type of work wasn’t his calling.
“I remember a mentor of mine in law school, I was going into a trial team competition,” said Glover. “He kind of looked at me and was just like ‘Look, with your background and the fighting stuff, you’re never gonna get that if you’re not a trial lawyer.’”
Glover transitioned to litigation, where he’s found great success. Glover finds trials multifaceted and works to present a case to the judge and jury that is persuasive.
When he’s going to the courtroom, he thinks about how he can tell the most compelling narrative story about his case.
“It needs to be compelling emotionally, it needs to be compelling logically,” said Glover. “And I think the outcome and ultimately what we’re seeking, the justice that we’re seeking, needs to be reasonable.”
“And justice is a very important concept that we all need to understand and embrace and really see the role that it plays in society,” added Glover.
Glover works to support this narrative in a whole and consistent way by combining the evidence at his disposal, jury selection and delivering cross examinations or eliciting testimony.
He added that during his time in criminal defense, he learned that the best prosecutors he went up against were the ones doing work on the front end, and who could essentially try the case during the preliminary hearing.
Putting the Narrative to Action
An example of his style at work comes from his victory in a landmark jury verdict for one of his clients, who was severely injured in a crosswalk. The jury awarded the client nearly $3 million following a five-day trial.
Glover said his ability to identify the narrative early on in a case is probably where he excels as a lawyer, and his team’s ability to find a video of the crash early on in the case helped him and his team secure justice for his client.
“My co-counsel on that case went right out to the intersection and was looking around,” said Glover. “Between doorbell cameras, H.A.L.O, there’s always something. He found this security camera from a local business that was pointing at the intersection and we were able to get a video and it captured what happened.”
He noted this upfront investigation started things off well for this case. Initially, Glover’s client was the one ticketed in the incident. The video helped Glover and his client get that traffic ticket dismissed and informed the liability piece of the ultimate personal injury case.
His client’s injuries were largely invisible but were manifesting in her day-to-day life. Glover’s training as a trial lawyer came through in his ability to tell his client’s story.
“She was this powerhouse, woman trailblazer, in an area of law that I think was not necessarily that friendly to women when she was coming up, and she ascended the ranks to essentially be number two under the governor,” said Glover. “It was just a really inspirational story and then a tragic intervention, but also showing her tenacity in trying to fight through all of this day to day.”
With the liability piece of the case squared away with the video, Glover and his team were able to focus on how the incident changed her life and make the case for justice in the civil system.
Building on his Activist Roots
Glover said when he pivoted to the civil rights arena, he wanted to make sure he was still doing what he felt was righteous work.
Some of the earlier cases Glover worked on occurred around 2020. Glover noted the protests from the Oromo community to raise awareness of what was going on in their communities in East Africa, the Black Lives Matter protests and the Elijah McClain protests. Glover worked with a group of people charged relating to protests during those times, and he was proud of his work in ultimately getting all of the charges dismissed in those cases.
Glover also worked on cases related to protests over homeless sweeps.
“Those ones actually didn’t get dismissed,” said Glover. “We ended up going to trial on those after litigating a bunch of First Amendment issues and ended up getting not guilty for the client.”
At the moment, Glover and his team are working on cases related to the ongoing protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war.
“There’s like 15 folks who’ve been charged on that,” said Glover. “And we’re not representing all 15 of them, but we’re sort of helping to facilitate, making sure they all have competent counsel, and we’re in the mix on that too.”
Glover said these types of cases are a way to do criminal defense work in a way that’s consistent with his firm’s mission, values and vision.
Glover is looking forward to his upcoming work and the future of his firm. He feels like the firm is through the proof of concept phase, and can mobilize his skills as a trial lawyer, along with the firm’s effectiveness and nimbleness, to leverage things like innovation and collaboration to run his vision of a modern litigation shop.
“I just feel like we’re doing it from a really authentic place,” said Glover. “So that’s what I’m looking forward to, is building that out and making sure that people that want to do this work in this way and have a place, they can come here, they can be part of a team.”