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They say life is not what happens to you, but what you do about it. If you or a loved one has ever been injured, you know this to be true. The question then becomes, what do you actually do about it?
One top rated Santa Ana injury lawyer, Ed Flores, may have that answer. Holding the preeminent AV Peer Review Rating, alongside over thirty four years of legal experience, Flores is the pinnacle of professional excellence.
When an injured client reaches out to him at (714) 769-1200, the first thing they hear is the sound of compassion. That compassion resonates because many moons ago, Ed was on the other end of the phone.
Growing up on and around motorcycles, Ed Flores was never naive about the dangers inherent to riding them. Along with lessons about proper safety and maintenance protocols for using these powerful machines, Ed’s father also taught him that no amount of skill a rider felt they had — real or imagined — could stave off accidents forever.
There’s a tacit understanding among bikers that, given the relative obliviousness of everyone else on the road, there’s no room for complacency. It’s not a matter of if, but when, you’ll eventually have to lay the bike down.
All the lifetime experience accrued and preventative measures taken are major determining factors in how easily one gets up after the inevitable wipe-out occurs. Some other, often far more powerful factors are entirely out of the rider’s control.
Ed’s father had been through and bounced back from two such ordeals before. The causes: a sideswipe from a careless driver swerving into his lane and an unmarked freshly oiled and graveled road. The provenance of his third motorcycle crash was never determined, but it would also be the final one Ed’s father endured.
To call the accident a life-changing moment for the entire family would be an understatement. A college freshman at the time, Ed dropped everything to join his family for the somber trip out to the hospital where his father convalesced.
Found barely alive in a roadside ditch, the man’s body was badly broken. Both lungs had collapsed, countless bones were fractured, and — the most devastating news of all — his spinal cord was irreparably severed. He was paralyzed from the armpits down and would remain so for the rest of his life.
Initially, Ed brushed off the spinal cord injury as a small price to pay for what he saw as the far more important news that his father would survive at all.
As he would come to understand over the next 30 years of the man’s increasingly difficult life, assisting with and bearing witness to his father’s recovery process and then the “new normal” day-to-day struggles of living as a paraplegic, Ed had vastly underestimated the depth of loss that comes with such a prognosis.
The emotional damage left behind by the accident was just as severe and long-lasting as the physical, and the compounding effects of these stresses would only go on to create further misery and life disruption for his father.
What 19-year-old Ed could never have known at the time of the accident was how that one fateful moment on the Wyoming interstate took so much more than just the use of his lower body from his father. It stole his ability to drive himself around for errands, to dance, to play sports, to make love, and to use the restroom without assistance.
In short, the crash stripped a once proudly independent man of both his autonomy and dignity. As the humiliation and helplessness of this new existence took their toll on Ed’s dad, his impotent grief began to manifest in increasingly unhealthy ways. Fits of rage, heavy drinking, and emotional outbursts became the new normal.
Coping with and tending to such ordeals requires a herculean effort from even the most well-off. For Ed’s already struggling working-class family, the financial toll of the accident and its myriad subsequent expenses wreaked havoc on their lives, leaving them in a constant state of financial precarity.
Medical bills aside, the cost of remodeling the homes and vehicles for paraplegic accessibility is tremendous. Such costs are made all the more difficult to scrounge together when you have no disability insurance to rely on or any idea who or what caused the crash, leaving you unable to seek restitution.
One substantial silver lining to confronting the grimness of his father’s plight head-on was that it instilled in Ed a deep well of empathy and desire to rectify injustices like the one that befell his family. Even as a kid, Ed had always known he wanted to become a lawyer when he grew up. His father’s accident helped him focus that desire beyond the goal of the job title. He finally knew what he wanted to do as an attorney.
Fresh out of law school, Ed understood he was far too green to be able to effectively mete out justice for the wronged just yet, so he devised a long-term plan and took the first steps on a journey that would teach and hone the practical skills he’d most need for and while en route to that ultimate goal.
Ed’s legal career officially began with him clerking for Arizona Supreme Court Justice James Duke Cameron. In those scholarly judicial trenches, he cut his teeth researching and writing complex legal decisions. Following his clerkship, Ed was scooped up by a large firm, where he primarily practiced product liability defense.
Helping large corporations defend against lawsuits from people who were injured while using their products provided invaluable insights and experience for a lawyer like Ed who hoped to eventually be representing the clients on the other side of these cases. His corporate clients’ concern for money over all else, let alone whether or not their products were harming people, only galvanized Ed’s conviction to fight for the little guy.
To most effectively represent people who’d been injured through no fault of their own, Ed knew he would next need to hone his trial techniques. Fortunately, his first offer of full employment from the Orange County District Attorney’s office would give him plenty of time in court to do just that.
Accepting the position immediately. Ed began his next phase as a prosecutor, often representing society’s most vulnerable. Initially, Ed had planned to spend just three years at the DA’s office sharpening his skills. But now a top-level prosecutor, the DA kept sending him increasingly challenging and rewarding work, which was hard to turn down.
Only a few years behind schedule, Ed did finally move on from the DA’s office, now more than prepared to champion the unjustly injured and bring home a mission that’s taken the better part of a lifetime.
Finally in the legal role that forever called to him, Ed got straight to work helping the harmed. Though he’s since won millions of dollars for his many clients over the years, Ed knows from firsthand experience that these settlements provide so much more than money to the injured. They also offer a chance at security, dignity, freedom, and hope to those who may have lost it.
Ed never got a chance to claw back those things for his father after the accident. At the same time, he also understands and appreciates that the powerlessness from his past is the very engine that drives him to fight so hard for his clients today for one simple reason: Life is not what happens to you, but what you do about it.