How Atticus Employees Help Their Families Get Benefits: Chris’s Story

At Atticus, our golden rule is simple: we’ll never connect a client with a lawyer we wouldn’t trust with our own family member or loved one—and we truly mean it.

Below is a story from a series featuring Atticus employees who’ve helped a loved one apply for disability benefits.

Chris Best

Chris Best, the Head of Talent at Atticus, received a call in 2021 after his dad made a small, yet life-changing mistake. When getting out of his work truck, his dad expected a running board—like in his personal truck—but there wasn’t one. The fall tore his meniscus. A few days later, his dad suffered a stroke and spent a week in the hospital re-learning how to walk and talk. Because of the chaos of the stroke, he assumed his employer had filed a claim for the workplace injury, but they hadn’t.

For months, Chris encouraged him to get an attorney, but he resisted. He didn’t see himself as the kind of person who would hire an attorney, and he was determined to get back to work—he had spent 45 years building homes and loved his job. But ten months after the injury, the Department of Labor and Industries in Washington State still hadn’t approved a medically recommended knee replacement surgery. Chris connected his dad with a lawyer at Atticus, and that very same day, his knee surgery was approved. 

The recovery process was brutal and still, even four years later, Chris’s dad experiences pain and is unable to bend his leg long enough to sit in a stadium seat and enjoy a Seattle Seahawks game.

For a year after the surgery, Labor and Industries monitored his dad’s progress to understand the severity of the injury and determine how much long-term function he had lost. This is where having a lawyer mattered most—helping negotiate a fair settlement in a system that tries putting a number on something that can’t truly be measured. “He lost a piece of himself. He's got long-term damage that's never going to go away,” says Best. Still, the settlement was a game-changer. “My dad is not a rich man—he's a person like so many Americans who are dependent on Social Security as his primary source of income in retirement…the amount of money that he got was material, and it helped him not only get through those years when he didn't have much of an income, but it also helped bolster his retirement.”

“Every client is someone's parent or son or brother or sister. That's an approach I've always tried to bring—to treat our clients like they're a friend or a family member that we care about."

At 68, he’s still trying to work in whatever way he can, taking on small side projects and odd construction jobs. The settlement provides him with greater financial stability as he enters his non-income-earning years.

The whole experience has shaped how Best shows up to work: “Every client is someone's parent or son or brother or sister. That's an approach I've always tried to bring—to treat our clients like they're a friend or a family member that we care about,” he says. 

He now understands that clients need more than just their questions answered. “What they really need from us is help and an olive branch, and also continued compassion through this process. This process is not a magic bullet, doesn't solve all of life's problems, and goes too slowly. So what can we do, not just to get them on the right track, but also to continue to support them?”