Dudley DeBosier Injury Lawyers - March 2020

Dudley DeBosier Injury Lawyers - March 2020

APRIL 2020

“I am fortunate to have some amazing partners. I work with my best friends day-in and day- out. Our skills and personalities complement each other’s, and we love what we do. It has made this journey that much more fun and rewarding.” Houma 504-444-4444 7887 W. Main St., Ste. 101 Houma, LA 70360 Baton Rouge 225-444-4444 1075 Government St. Baton Rouge, LA 70802 Denham Springs 225-444-4444 419 S. Range Ave. Ste. A Denham Springs, LA 70726 Lafayette 337-444-4444 2800 W. Pinhook Rd. Ste. 9 Lafayette, LA 70508 New Orleans 504-444-4444 622 Baronne St. New Orleans, LA 70113 Shreveport 318-800-8000 4300 Youree Dr. Ste. 250 Shreveport, LA 71105

From the Tennis Court to Judicial Court How Chad Dudley Went from Professional Athlete to Attorney

I spent over a decade training to be a professional tennis player. The discipline, training, and work ethic that I developed during that time made up the best preparation possible for my legal career. I never expected that I would become an attorney, but life never turns out quite as expected. Both my parents dreamed of going to law school, but it just never happened for them. I grew up in Hawaii, and I dreamed of playing professional tennis. I practiced nearly every day for several hours. After competing locally, I started to compete nationally. Traveling was expensive, and my family could not afford to pay for all of it. There was a group of competitive tennis players from Hawaii, and we were all in the same situation: We wanted to compete nationally, but the cost was too high. Eventually, a local personal injury attorney, who had a son who played tennis, stepped up and helped us with the costs. He was one of the first attorneys I remember meeting. In high school, I climbed the national rankings for tennis and eventually got a scholarship to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Florida, which had the top tennis training facility at the time. Today, it is better known as the IMG Academy. During that time, I played national, international, and low-level professional tennis tournaments. It was tough. There are so many great players out there, and I decided to look at using my tennis talents to get a scholarship to go to college. I accepted a tennis scholarship from Louisiana State University, and it was an experience like no other. The tennis team was ranked top 10 in the country, and I worked harder than I had ever worked before. It was great playing on a team and playing for LSU. I will never forget it. When I obtained my marketing degree, Jerry

As a law clerk, I performed all the research for the lawyers — which is as important as you’d imagine — but our job was designed to be ineffective and cumbersome. At law school, we would perform research online. At the firm, they had this huge law library with all these old law books. Research that would take 15 minutes online at school could take hours in the library. It drove me crazy. One day, I decided to take all the research assignments and go to the law school library so that I could crank out the research online. I turned in my work and later got called in by one of the partners. He asked me how I had done so much research in such a short amount of time. I told him I went online and asked him if I got anything wrong. He said everything looked good, but I need to slow down because we were billing the clients by the hour and it didn’t help if I got it done faster and more efficiently. At that point, I made the decision that, if possible, I would avoid ever billing a client by the hour. From there, I switched to a personal injury firm. It was the first place where they told me, “It doesn’t matter how many hours you work; you just need to get the right result.” That was everything. It changed how I perceived the practice of law. We could help people and not just bill hours. I wasn’t tucked away in a library, and I got to meet the clients and see how our work helped them. I really enjoyed that. For many years, I got to work on some very cool cases. One of them was a toxic tort case where a company had exposed a neighborhood to all sorts of toxins. We represented nearly 4,000 people, and I was responsible for organizing all their information and communicating with them. To accomplish this, I taught myself >Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4

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