Meet Attorney Kristina J. Anderson

Attorney Kristina J. Anderson joined the Wallace Miller team in 2024 as an administrative mass torts attorney. She focuses on mass tort and personal injury litigations and works with clients to streamline the litigation and settlement process.

How did you choose to become a lawyer?

Attorney Kristina J. Anderson.

I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since forever. I went to Butler University in Indy, and I did their mock trial program for a year. The year I did it, we went to several competitions, and I won a Best Attorney award at one of them.

I really wanted to move forward with it, but I was really burnt out on school. So I took five years off and worked at different places. And then I ended up in a focus group for a lawsuit, which made me realize how much I missed it. The way the attorneys asked you questions—I wanted to know more about what they were thinking and why those questions mattered.

So I went and applied at my last firm as a legal assistant, and I worked my way up through their social security disability department and then moved to focus on personal injury cases. And then I went to law school at night while I worked with their primary litigator full-time. That’s how I got here.

What do you like most about working in the legal field?

It truly is a field that helps people. That’s why I like mass torts too. Because single event cases—I think it’s a common misconception that are super hard and mass tort cases  are easy. The reality is that to work up a single mass tort case for a   and to work up a single event personal injury case like a car crash takes the same amount of work from the lawyer. But in the end, the single event case is only going to get some form of compensation or justice for that one client. Whereas a positive bellwether trial could go a long way to getting a great settlement for 30,000 people or more.

You’re an administrative mass torts attorney—how do you define that position?

I look at it as someone who’s here with the paralegals, to be not just a resource for them, to help them answer questions that only an attorney can answer, but also to be here for the clients—because sometimes a client just needs to talk to their attorney.

That’s what my focus is, but it also helps the other attorneys. If I can take away emails from other attorneys’ inboxes, they can focus on doing the work for their cases.

How did you end up in this role?

Attorneys come from all different backgrounds and experiences.  I think the best attorneys are the ones who were case managers and paralegals first, and then went to law school. Because it’s so much easier to understand what a paralegal is doing day to day, that you as an attorney don’t always see.

Having done that, I think this job is a great fit for me, because I’m able to say to a paralegal, “I get where you’re coming from, I know why you’re asking this. This is the lawyer answer, and this is why.”

What else makes someone a good attorney?

Caring. Not just about the ethics or the legal work and meeting your ethical duties and all that, but truly caring about the clients.

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to bring any clients from my old firm. But my boss came to me after I turned in my notice and he was like, “No, you’re taking them all.” And part of why I’m doing that is because, you know, I’ve talked to Sarah*  every three months for the last five years. I need to know how it ends for Sarah. And at this point, Sarah knows my dog’s name, and I know where her granddaughter is going to college.

Seeing it through to the end and making sure she gets that last settlement is important to me. And I think caring about the people is what matters. In the end, it’s what helps me sleep at night. It’s important to know who you’re fighting for.

What insight does working across litigations at Wallace Miller give you?

I get to talk to clients about all sorts of different issues and help guide them through the process. Ideally, if I’m doing my job right, we can keep things rolling on settlements. There are a lot of places where the process can be made better and simpler.

Having that person who can walk the clients through basic details as the litigation wraps up makes it so much easier, and it helps us grow. I can predict if we’re going to need another paralegal or another intake person in a few months and that can keep us from being overwhelmed. We just have to watch the process.

What do you think makes a good law firm?

Definitely caring about the clients, wanting to make a difference—but also how they structure things. Making sure that the people who make the decisions for the firm don’t live in an echo chamber of people who are just going to agree with them because they’re the boss. So having those disagreements and being able to still be on the same side and working towards the same goal is important.

And having diverse voices in leadership roles really matters, because it makes things so much better for everybody. You have to acknowledge that problems happen, and you’re trying to fix the problems and do good things. You want everybody to feel like we’re all on the same page and we’re all working towards the same goal.

What advice would you give a new client at Wallace Miller ?

I would say please be patient. It’s a long process—in the Camp Lejeune case, the attorney who wrote the law has been working with the same client for decades to try and get justice. And then eventually the law got passed and now, finally, they’re getting their day in court.

For a lot of the process, what’s happening is that the attorneys are reviewing documents, going through  , and getting the evidence we need to build a strong case. That takes time, and effort, and we get a lot of pushback from the defense attorneys. And then even once a settlement is announced, we need to figure out how to register everybody who’s entitled to a payout, and figure out how to divide up the money based on injuries, and work with a settlement special master to make sure that the distribution process is fair and as quick as possible.

Everything takes time, and it’s absolutely okay to call for updates. But please be patient. And please, every time you change your email or your phone number or your address, let us know.

* Name has been changed to protect client privacy.

Read more about Kristina and listen to her interview on WGN’s Let’s Get Legal on October 12.