Eric Chandler is an Omaha native who graduated from Burke. He spent one year at Texas State University on a football scholarship. After deciding he didn’t want to play football, Chandler transferred to the University of Kansas where he graduated with a major in business and a minor in psychology. He always knew he wanted to go to law school and was accepted to University of Nebraska Lincoln School of Law. Chandler went to law school for the educational background, he didn’t know that he’d be practicing law. During law school he clerked for a couple of judges in Lincoln; mainly Judge Colbert and Judge Fran. In his third year, Chandler did a small clerkship at the Douglas County Attorney’s office.

After law school Chandler took the bar and was offered a job at the Douglas County Attorney’s office in 2005 but wasn’t licensed by the bar until early 2006. Most of the cases he took on were domestic violence cases. The office lost a few lawyers for various reasons, so he got a lot of trial experience in a short amount of time. Chandler worked at the Douglas County Attorney’s office for a year and a half and then went to open his own law firm. At that point he had no kids to support and thought if he wanted to start his own business, he better do it sooner than later.

When he first opened his law firm, Chandler took any case that walked through his door. He had one adverse possession case, where a man was taking care of an abandoned property for some number of years and wanted legal rights to it. He worked a case against a cemetery. Most of the cases he was working at the time were criminal defense because that was his background. Chandler worked robberies, DUIs, petty theft, anything that came through the door. In 2007 a young man came into his office who broke every bone in his lower body in a motorcycle crash. The insurance company denied his claim and no other lawyers would represent him. They ended up winning that case and Chandler started taking on more and more personal injury cases. He never saw himself doing personal injury cases, but by 2012 most of his practice was personal injury, mainly motor vehicle.

Criminal cases – except murder – don’t take a lot of time. Citizens have a right to a speedy trial, and in Nebraska the statute on criminal cases is six months. A defendant can waive that right, but most don’t. Personal injury takes more time. A person might not know the extent of their injury for one or two years after the incident. It could be a year after the accident before a person gets in for surgery, then recovery is another six months before knowing the effect of the accident on a person’s everyday life. The claim can’t be valued until the extent of the injury is determined. In Douglas County, once the lawsuit is filed, it usually takes 1-3 years to get through a case. It could be two years before a case gets to trial. Chandler gets to spend more time with personal injury clients and get to know them.

The complexity of personal injury interests Chandler. Though personal injury is relatively straightforward as far as procedure, presenting the case is very nuanced. If a person got into a car crash and got hardware put into their wrist a claim would be different for a 45-year-old teacher who is in pain when they write on the board, compared to a 25-year-old guitar player who can’t book gigs anymore. “It’s a more personal area of law versus other areas that are more specific when calculating damages,” Chandler says.

Chandler views his time doing criminal defense as a check on the system. Guilty or not, the case begins by looking at the police conduct to make sure they didn’t cut any corners to try and get a conviction. Prisons are already overcrowded, and Chandler is looking to help keep good people out of them. He views mandatory minimums as unnecessary pressure for defendants to take a plea deal. They also take freedom for sentencing out of the courts hands when there are mitigating circumstances.