This year’s Super Lawyers Top 10 sees the return of two attorneys, Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell’s Hugh Gottschalk and Brad Levin of Levin Sitcoff. But neither of them are strangers to the list, and in their decades of practice, Levin and Gottschalk have developed some insights about the most satisfying parts of practicing and what makes them feel they’ve served their clients well.
Although it’s difficult to discern exactly what accounts for an attorney’s movement on the list, Gottschalk explained he has tried several high-profile cases in the last year. Most recently, he won FCA U.S. v. Spitzer Autoworld Akron earlier this month in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which examined whether federal legislation put in place following Chrysler’s 2010 bankruptcy preempted Ohio state dealer laws.
Gottschalk also represents Vail Resorts in wrongful death litigation brought by the family of Taft Conlin, a teenager who died on Vail Mountain in 2012. That trial is currently pending. Additionally, he represents Noble Energy in the case of a 2017 home explosion in Firestone resulting from a gas line leak.
“I think all of those things together just represent a very active and very visible and dynamic trial practice for a variety of clients in a variety of situations in a variety of courts,” said Gottschalk, who ranked in the Super Lawyers Top 10 in 2008 and has also been in the Top 50 several times.
He said the difference between doing a good job on a case and a great job is often subtle and only discernible to him, but when talking about what makes him feel he has done a good job for a client, Gottschalk said he takes pride in knowing he has gone all in.
“I look internally on the excellence,” he said. “I can look inside and know that I did an excellent job whether my client says so or not. What I really enjoy is the client saying I was completely committed and dedicated to their case.” Gottschalk talked about the importance of knowing an opposing side’s case better than they understand it themselves as part of going the extra distance.
“I always [tell] lawyers who work for me to not stop at figuring out our best arguments and how to present them,” he said. “You have got to understand the other side’s arguments, and preferably understand them better than they understand their own arguments. And if you do that, you’re doing a great job for your client.”
Levin, who last appeared in the Top 10 in 2016, said he believes he has done right by a client when a case reaches a resolution that allows them to move on with their life.
He called representing individuals or families against large insurance companies “a David and Goliath type of fight,” and his job involves counseling clients about the complexity of litigation.
“The difficulty with litigation is that you’re always living in the past,” Levin said. “It’s always about something that happened before. … One of the things that’s always very therapeutic is for them to be able to move on” when they have suffered some kind of injury or other harm.
On the rare occasion one of his cases does go to trial, he said finds satisfaction when he knows he has done everything he can to present his case well. He expressed a sentiment similar to Gottschalk’s about going all-in.
“One of the things I pride myself on is taking every case and working as diligently as I can on behalf of my clients and always being prepared” regardless of how large or publicly significant a case is, he said. “My responsibility is to the client and to be making sure that we, myself, my law firm [are] giving 100 percent to that client.”
He said he believes the ability to let go and leave a case in the hands of the decision makers once he has done everything he can is both a learned skill and a personality trait, and explained the importance of balancing that ability with passion for the work.
“The way you do your job as a lawyer is you obviously have to be able to step back from your client, whatever emotions that they’re feeling and so on,” Levin said. “Your job is to approach the case [from] what’s the best way to bring this case to a resolution.”
Gottschalk said one of his favorite things about trial work is the ability to persuade judges through logic and credibility that his side has the better argument, especially in difficult cases.
“[Persuasion] is getting somebody to do what you want them to do even though they don’t have to,” he said. “And there’s a huge satisfaction for me in…the ability to look somebody in the eye and actually persuade them that what you’re saying makes sense.”
— Julia Cardi