Meet
Drew Shirley

01The detour

Law school first. Then the microphone.

I finished at the University of Texas School of Law and was licensed to practice in Texas in 1996. Then I spent the next ten years as a local sports anchor — Grand Junction, Sherman, Lake Charles, Austin — and finally at KHOU here in Houston, before I decided to come back to law.

People assume that means I could not decide what I wanted to be. It was closer to the opposite. Broadcasting is a discipline, and a demanding one: a hard clock, an audience under no obligation to keep listening, and a subject more complicated than the time you are given to explain it. Every night you find out immediately whether you made it clear.

Nobody gets to say “as I mentioned earlier.” You are clear the first time, or you have lost them.

A decade of it is still floating around on YouTube, if you go looking. I am not going to stop you.

When I came back to law, I expected the two careers to have nothing to do with each other. They turned out to have almost everything to do with each other.

02What it changed

Most of the misery is not the injury.

From the client’s side, an injury case is a long stretch of not knowing. Not knowing what it is worth. Not knowing why nothing has happened in six weeks. Not knowing whether the number the adjuster just said is fair or insulting. Most of the misery in this process is not the injury. It is the uncertainty stacked on top of it.

So I tell you what is happening, in language that does not require a law degree, before you have to ask. If something is going badly, you hear it from me early rather than late. If I think your case is worth less than you hope, I will say so in the first conversation rather than at the end of it.

That is not a personality trait. It is a decade of having ninety seconds to make something clear to people who did not have to keep watching.

“I’m Drew Shirley. Let’s go to the tape.”