Posted on Monday, September 30th, 2024 at 9:00 am
Alexandrea M. Messner joined the Wallace Miller team as an attorney in June 2024. She focuses on personal injury cases and mass torts, including the paraquat, Suboxone, and Roundup litigations. Prior to working at Wallace Miller, Alexandrea worked as a defense attorney.
How did you get into the legal field?
Attorney Alexandrea M. Messner
It’s a cheesy story—I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was in junior high, and I just wanted to be Atticus Finch. So I decided I wanted to be a lawyer in like sixth grade, seventh grade, and I haven’t looked back.
How did you end up working in civil litigation?
I initially thought I was going to go into criminal prosecution. Then, as I got through undergrad and law school, I realized that it wasn’t something I wanted to pursue, morally. I realized that, through civil litigation, I could achieve the same goal of wanting to help people. Prosecution and defense work on the criminal side can be so political. Civil cases are a better way to help people more directly.
You currently work in mass torts and single event cases. How do you see these litigations helping people?
The way the system works, people can try to find justice or peace through the criminal courts or civil courts. For criminal courts, accountability and punishment are what’s available. With civil lawsuits, the remedy they offer is financial—money. Sometimes that may seem like it’s not enough, but at the end of the day, what’s everybody’s biggest stressor? It’s paying bills, and especially when these medical bills come up—I mean, you hear people joking all the time that you don’t even want to get an ambulance because it’s so expensive.
Money won’t fix everything—but that money can go so far to help reduce somebody’s stress and improve their life after something like a car accident or a bad injury. It can relieve a huge burden for people.
And then, with mass tort litigation, money is really the only language these corporations speak. If we can make some kind of an impact on their bottom line, that’s the only way to get them to listen and hopefully improve safety standards going forward.
You used to work on the defense side. What made you shift to plaintiffs’ litigation?
When I started at Wallace Miller, I had done defense work for seven, eight years. And it just really wasn’t rewarding to protect these corporations and save them a couple of dollars.
The best part of that job was working with individual employees at my clients’ companies to protect their individual interests, because it’s stressful for these employees to get dragged into lawsuits, even if they’re not the ones at fault. Taking on a protective role was one of my preferred parts of the job.
Nicholas P. Kelly, who also works at Wallace Miller, was instrumental in convincing me that I’m a plaintiffs’ lawyer at heart. I was a jaded defense attorney for so long, but the way this team talks about the philosophy that they have on these cases—they’re really looking for people who deserve to be compensated and who have actually been wronged. And those are the people I want to fight for and who deserve to have somebody on their side.
It took Nick about a year, but he finally convinced me to come over to this side, and it’s already so much more rewarding.
What have you found most rewarding about working on the plaintiff side?
Being able to work directly with clients, hands-on, I’ve enjoyed so far. When you’re going through insurance adjusters and big corporations, it’s just so impersonal. Nobody really has a personal stake in what’s going on. So I’ve appreciated getting to work with our clients more directly.
I also like the fact that we’re protecting the little guy. The legal system is so convoluted and so difficult to navigate that I can’t imagine doing anything legal without what I learned in law school. So being able to step up and be a voice for people—it just feels better.
Is there anything you think a lot of clients or everyday people misunderstand about the law, or about what plaintiffs’ lawyers do specifically?
Personal injury attorneys can get a bad rap, but there’s an area of personal injury and a group of firms who are actually taking on reputable cases and putting in the work, like Wallace Miller. Other types of firms might take on 10,000 cases just to settle all of them for a little bit of money—for them it’s a numbers game. And that’s not what our philosophy is here. We’re going to put in the work and the time to get people what they deserve and actually make a material difference in their lives.
What about the city of Chicago made you want to practice here?
I love Chicago. I grew up in the suburbs, but I always wanted to live in the city. My parents would take us downtown all the time to hang out. But really, what keeps me here now is the food scene. I’m a huge foodie and we have one of the best restaurant scenes in the country. And Chicago’s beautiful. There’s always something to do. I’m not leaving anytime soon.