Summit Law Raises the Bar in Personal Injury Law Practice

By: Emily Mook / Photo Above: Cameron Andrews (left) and Hannah Bowie (right). Photo by Joshua Hanson.

When it comes to representing clients of their recently established personal injury law firm, Summit Law, attorneys Cameron Andrews and Hannah Bowie do more than walk the walk: They climb the climb.

Andrews and Bowie worked at the same local law firm before deciding to start Summit Law together. Although they were at different points in their respective careers and neither had set out with intentions to start their own firm, the two discovered that they had a shared vision for how they wanted to practice law and decided to take action.

“I think at some point we both realized where we want our futures to be and where we want our careers to be and had the conversation of, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’” Bowie said. “For me, I’m 41, so it’s either I do this right now or I don’t do this ever in my life. Now is the time to take the jump, and here we are.”

Andrews, who is in her late 20s, said she thought, “Why not?” And so, the two hit the ground running.

“We created the LLC earlier this year, and it was a storm of activity to get it ready to go!” Andrews exclaimed. “We worked with people to build our website, we had to get a new case management system set up for client files, and we’ve been learning all the ins and outs of the Googleverse.”

After doing this legwork and tackling their own branding, Bowie and Andrews officially established Summit Law in April.
The significance of the firm’s name resonates on many levels, and the fact that Andrews and Bowie both came up with the same name separately speaks volumes about the authentic synergy that drives their firm and sets it apart.

“We were discussing what our firm was going to be called, and we knew we didn’t want our last names in the name of the firm,” recalled Bowie. “We wanted it to represent something bigger than us and something that meant something to us. We actually both came up with a name separately and then were talking one day, and it turns out we both came up with the same name! It had to be Summit Law.”

On one level, the term “summit” describes the attorneys’ dedication to helming a top-notch and tireless trial law firm rather than a transactional firm.

“We want to have a heavy focus on litigation and trial work,” Andrews said. “In the practice area of personal injury, the vast majority of cases resolve without going to trial. But there is a subset of cases—usually catastrophic injury cases, wrongful death cases, and cases where you have a big institution with really systemic bad conduct—where it is really difficult to recover full value without going the full distance and taking them to trial. There are a lot of attorneys in this practice area who either do not prefer to or are unwilling to take a case all the way to trial. We want to be known for and to focus on honing our litigation and trial skills for those cases that have to go the distance.”

“We want to be really excellent and exceptional at what we do,” added Bowie. “To be those two things, you can’t just sit at your
desk and not go to the courtroom.”

For Andrews and Bowie, “summit” functions not only on a figurative level, but also on a literal level: Both women participate in a mountain climbing challenge called 29029. For this challenge, climbers train extensively before participating in a 36-hour endurance event in which they repeatedly climb the same mountain until they accumulate 29,029 feet (the height of Mount Everest) of elevation gain.

Bowie completed the challenge last year while Andrews cheered her on, and this year they completed the challenge together.

Electing to take on this highly grueling and ambitious trial together not only typifies their collective quest for excellence, but also speaks to their extraordinary investment in their relationships both with each other and with their clients.

“We work really, really hard on developing relationships with our clients,” Bowie said. “They aren’t numbers in our system. They are names, they are human beings, and they are people who have been through a lot. We try to explore—as much as they want us to—what they’ve been through.”

This exploration entails a considerable level of legal, scientific, and medical expertise attained through countless hours of research and an extremely sensitive, intentional, and involved approach to determining appropriate fiscal recourse for their clients’ pain and suffering.

“People either perceive attaching financial value to the loss of a loved one as inappropriate or they don’t understand the process of arriving at what that number should be, but it’s something that we try to be really intentional about,” noted Andrews. “In the civil system, money is your only remedy, so how do we pursue that remedy in a way that properly acknowledges the value of what our clients have lost? We’re not going to just do that in a routine multiplier way, but actually put ourselves in our client’s shoes and try to evaluate what those losses have been.”

Although Andrews and Bowie have already secured six- and seven-figure results for clients, they both define true success as the strong relationships they build with their clients as they walk a steep and difficult path together.

“Cameron and I are two people, and we have a full caseload,” Bowie said. “It’s hard to be two people carrying that weight, but it is the right way to practice. It’s challenging, but it’s also so rewarding when, at the end of a case, you have somebody say to you: ‘I hope this doesn’t mean this is the last time I get to talk to you.’ Or they invite you to a birthday party or out of town to a conference. You build relationships with people, and it’s nice knowing that it’s about more than their cases and that you may have made an impact.”

As Summit Law continues its ascent, the two attorneys hope to continue investing back into their profession and community, grow their team, and reach new heights in innovating personal injury law for the better.

“We want to be able to generate results in our community, our state, and potentially nationwide that make bigger changes for injured people—whether that’s holding institutions accountable or making favorable changes in the law,” Andrews said. “We want to have the ability to make a broader impact.”

For more information about Summit Law, visit summitlaw.co.