For plaintiff firms — and the families they serve
Catastrophic harm starts with a choice. We focus the trial on that choice.
Wren | Cook is a trial firm for catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases where the harm traces back to a business system someone chose to run unsafely. We associate with plaintiff firms nationwide and represent families directly — working every case backward from the moment of injury to the decisions that made it predictable.
100+
civil jury trials taken to verdict by Jim Wren, Louie Cook, or Liz Fraley — and many more prepared and assisted
$40.5M
wrongful-death jury verdict against one of the largest trucking companies in the United States
20+
states where our cases have been litigated
Reforms
vehicle recalls, in-cab safety cameras, driver cell-phone bans, stronger broker vetting
Why we research the system before the moment of impact
Accidents happen in a moment. Systems are built over years.
The defense wants every catastrophic case to be about a single moment — a driver who glanced away, a nurse who misread a chart, an operator who missed an alarm. Inadvertence in a moment can be forgiven. So we ask a different set of questions. Why was that driver on hour eighteen of a twenty-two-hour stretch? Why did a multibillion-dollar logistics company put a solo owner-operator on a load that needed a team? Why did the maintenance request sit unapproved for eleven months? Why did the safety policy exist on paper and nowhere else?
Work backward from almost any catastrophic injury and you find the same thing: a series of decision points — often months or years earlier, and several levels up — where someone understood the risk and chose to accept it at the expense of other people, because fixing it cost money. Every system is perfectly designed for the results it gets. Until a bad system is challenged and changed, it will keep producing the same results, and another family will absorb the cost.
That is the case we build.
How we work
The justice story, built from day one.
Jurors do not weigh evidence on a scale. They organize it into a story — characters, motives, consequences — and act on what the story means. We commit to finding that story, the true and morally compelling account of the defendant's choices, before the first pleading is filed.
Then we let it drive everything that follows.
01
Create a clear vision for the case and the team.
A structured early case assessment works backward from the injury: what safety rule existed, who knew it, who chose to break it, and what they gained by breaking it — then identifies the experts, pleadings, and discovery the case will require.
02
Create a targeted discovery plan to have the proof to prevail.
Proprietary data tools, operational records, industry insiders, and former federal investigators turn the story into evidence the defense cannot reframe — and surface the competing defense story before it is ever told in court.
03
Create a clear voice for the justice story.
Early focus-group jury testing, trial themes, evidence admissibility, and the jury charge — built to get, and keep, a significant verdict. When a trial is needed, we will be ready.
Cases we handle
Six kinds of cases. One standard.
We are highly selective in the cases we agree to pursue, committing our efforts to cases with high value — not just monetary value, but real potential to make our society safer.
Trucking Crashes: Catastrophic Injury & Death
Profits don't justify cheating the safety rules.
Read more →Freight Broker & Logistics Liability
The company that chooses the carrier owns the choice.
Read more →Product Liability
A known defect is a decision, not an accident.
Read more →Medical Malpractice
Patient-safety rules exist because lives depend on them.
Read more →Oil Rig, Refinery & Industrial Explosions
Production never outranks protection.
Read more →Wrongful Death
A verdict that fully values a life protects the next one.
Read more →
The record a defendant hoped no one would read aloud.
A representative case
A $1 million coverage case that became an eight-figure resolution.
The key evidence in a brokerage case lives in the data — and that data is designed to disappear or be electronically manipulated. Years of research, an international investigation, and millions of dollars invested in finding brokerage bad actors are how we learned to build broker cases out of the brokers' own data. This is how finding the proof led to justice.
Stage 01
A double fatality with $1 million in apparent coverage
An 18-wheeler driver ran a stop sign, killing a mother and her daughter and orphaning the baby riding with them. The driver's employer appeared to be a mom-and-pop shop run out of a Chicago apartment, and the defense told co-counsel the driver was excluded from coverage altogether.
Representative matter. Past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict a similar outcome; every case depends on its own facts and law.
A different kind of plaintiff firm
We stand with the honest companies, too.
Demonizing an entire industry fixes nothing — it ignores the root cause and insults the people doing it right. Some of the safest family-owned trucking companies in the country have partnered with our attorneys to expose competitors who cheat, because bad actors win when they keep honest industry out of the courtroom.
When predatory, rule-breaking cost-cutting threatens to drive safer competitors out of business, we pursue the commercial losses inflicted on honest companies with the same conviction we bring to injured families. Removing the cheaters protects both.
From the industry we serve
“The Wren Cook Team have done an outstanding job standing up to bad actors in the freight brokerage industry and holding accountable those who profit from unsafe and unlawful practices. Their work is about more than winning cases — it is about protecting American carriers, defending honest businesses, making our highways safer, and fighting for victims and families whose lives have been forever changed by preventable tragedies. They give those families a voice, pursue the truth, and demand accountability from the companies and individuals responsible. I am grateful for their courage, persistence, and commitment to removing illegally operating carriers from our roadways and bringing meaningful change to the trucking industry.”
Cole Stevens
Chief Strategy Officer, Stevens Trucking
The team
Decades in the courtroom. One method.
Trial leadership
Jim Wren
More than four decades of jury trials, board certified in civil trial and personal injury trial law, former Leon Jaworski Chair of Practice & Procedure at Baylor Law, and co-author of Proving Damages to the Jury with Laura Brown.
Freight brokerage liability
Louie Cook
One of the country's preeminent thought and action leaders on freight brokerage liability — chameleon carriers, doctored electronic logs, and the first civil RICO suits of their kind against multiple freight brokers.
Jury strategy & trial science
Liz Fraley
Thirty years as a highly lauded defense lawyer, now Director of Baylor Law's Practice Court program — turning the defense playbook into a plaintiff's strategy for case themes, jury testing, and the charge.
Behind the trial team: purpose-built data analysis and a national network of industry insiders and former federal investigators.
Meet the team →Results
Results that changed the system.
- $40.5M verdict †
- $64M settlement
- $17M settlement
Recalls, camera mandates, and vetting reforms
† Obtained by our attorney while practicing with a prior firm. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
See results →Two ways to bring us a case.
For attorneys
Association, referral, or trial-team support on a catastrophic case.
For families
If you have lost someone, or someone you love will never be the same, talk with us. No cost, no obligation, and no pressure to decide anything today.