What Waiting Tables Taught Me About Injury Law
I've worked in my family's Greek restaurant since I was fifteen. I still do. If you want to understand how my practice runs — and why it runs that way — start there, not with my diploma.
Fifteen, and Counting
Every lawyer's website has an origin story. Usually it involves a courtroom. Mine involves a tray.
I started working in my family's Greek restaurant at fifteen — bussing, then waiting tables, then whatever the night needed. I'm not going to tell you which restaurant; my family runs a business, not a billboard for my practice, and they deserve to keep it that way. But I will tell you this: I never stopped. Through college, through Charleston School of Law, through the years I spent at some of South Carolina's top personal injury firms before opening my own practice — I kept taking shifts. I still do.
For a long time I thought of that as two separate lives. It took building my own firm to realize it was one life, and that almost every deliberate choice in how I practice law — the choices that make clients pick me over the billboard firms — was actually made in a dining room years before I ever read a statute. Here are four of them.
The Table Is Yours From Hello to the Check
In a family restaurant, there's no relay team. The person who greets the table takes the order, watches the food come out, fixes what's wrong, and brings the check. If the kitchen is behind, you don't send a stranger out to apologize — you go yourself, because it's your table. The guest gave their evening to you, specifically, and handing them sideways to someone else would be a small betrayal of that.
Now look at how most injury firms are built: an intake specialist signs you, a case manager returns your calls, a paralegal assembles your records, and an attorney you may meet twice appears for the settlement conference. Every one of those people may be good at their job. But nobody owns the table.
I built my practice so that someone does. I'm solo on purpose. The person who sits down with you at the first meeting is the person who reads your medical records, argues with the adjuster, drafts the complaint if it comes to that, and calls you with news before you have to ask for it. From hello to the check. It's the single biggest structural difference between my practice and the firms on TV, and it isn't a slogan — it's staffing.
Read the Table Before You Open Your Mouth
Stand in a dining room long enough and you learn to read a table from across the room. The couple celebrating something. The family that just came from a hospital and doesn't know what to order because nobody's hungry. The regular who wants to talk, and the regular who absolutely does not. The skill isn't charm — it's paying attention before you speak, so that what you say fits the people you're saying it to.
Injured people get read all the time, but almost never that way. The insurance adjuster reads you for what you'll accept. The billboard firm's intake script reads you for whether your case clears their minimum. By the time someone lands at my table, they've usually been processed twice and listened to zero times.
So the first thing I do at a consultation is nothing. You talk; I listen to the whole story before I say a word about statutes or dollar figures. Partly that's the dining room in me. But it's also just better lawyering: the details that decide cases — the exact words the other driver said, the camera you noticed on the corner, the shift you're afraid of losing — come out when a person tells their story whole, not when they're answering a script. Damages can wait twenty minutes. They're worth more when they do.
Friday Night Doesn't Care That You're Tired
Restaurants have a word for the moment the whole dining room needs everything at once: slammed. And here is the entire professional ethic of a restaurant family in one sentence — when it's slammed, you show up. Nobody in the weeds wants to hear that you'll circle back Tuesday. The night is happening now, and you are either in it with people or you aren't.
An injury is somebody's Friday-night rush. The tow truck, the ER, the adjuster calling before the pain medication wears off, the paycheck questions — it all arrives at once, and it does not schedule itself during business hours. A law practice that responds to that week on a five-business-days basis has, in restaurant terms, walked out mid-shift.
That's why same-day is the standard in my practice, and why clients reach me directly instead of leaving messages in a queue. I understood the promise below long before I could sign it as a lawyer — it's just what showing up when it's slammed looks like in this job.
"Every client gets my personal cell number. Call or text me directly — you'll never chase a case manager."
Clients hear back from me the same day — and for emergencies, anytime.
— Thomas Spiro Conits
Hospitality Goes to People. It Doesn't Summon Them.
There's a Greek word my family would say I grew up inside rather than learned: philoxenia — literally, love of the stranger. It's usually translated "hospitality," but the translation loses the direction of travel. Hospitality, done right, moves toward the guest. You bring the water before it's asked for. You carry the plate to the table. When a regular is sick, food goes to their house; you don't wait for them to feel well enough to come to you.
Most of the legal profession runs in the opposite direction. You, the injured person — the one who can't sit comfortably, maybe can't drive, maybe can't climb stairs — are summoned downtown, to the marble lobby, at the firm's convenience. The architecture announces who is being served, and it isn't you.
I refuse to run my practice that way, and it's the reason "I come to you" is not a tagline on my site but the operating model of the whole firm. Kitchen tables, front porches, hospital rooms, across Greenville and the surrounding counties. I've written elsewhere about why almost no injury lawyers make house calls — the honest answer is that their business model can't afford the driving. Mine was built by people who deliver.
Photo slot: tom-restaurant-hands
What the Restaurant Did Not Teach Me
I want this post to stay honest, so let me draw the line myself before you have to wonder about it.
Waiting tables did not teach me South Carolina's statutes of limitation, how to value a herniated disc, how to read an accident reconstruction, or how insurance defense lawyers think. Charleston School of Law taught me some of that; the rest I learned the way it's actually learned — working injury cases at established South Carolina firms before I hung out my own shingle, and working them every day since. A busy Friday is not a trial, and I won't insult either by pretending otherwise. If you want the professional half of the story, it's on my about page.
What the restaurant taught me is the part law school doesn't grade: how to treat a person who has handed you something important. That the work is not finished when the food is technically delivered, but when the person is actually taken care of. That you say the true thing about the wait time, because trust survives bad news and does not survive surprises. The legal knowledge decides what I can do for you. The dining room decided how it would feel to be my client.
Regulars
One last thing the family business burned into me: a restaurant does not survive on strangers. It survives on the table that comes back every Sunday, and on what those people say about you to the people they love. There is no advertising budget that substitutes for it. You earn regulars one honest plate at a time, over years, and you can lose them in one bad night of not caring.
A solo law practice lives by exactly the same arithmetic. I don't have a skyscraper or a jingle. I have former clients who tell their brother-in-law to call me — you can read what they say in their own words on my reviews page, all 20+ five-star Google reviews of it. Every case I take is somebody's Sunday table: handled personally, because the next twenty years of this practice depend on how I handle it.
If you're reading this because you're hurt, I'm sorry — and the invitation is simple. Call or text (864) 777-1000. You'll get me, not a script. The consultation is free, there's no fee unless we win, and if coming downtown is the last thing your body wants right now, don't. Hospitality goes to people. I'll come to you.
Hospitality means going to the guest. So I come to you.
I personally drive to clients' homes across Greenville and the surrounding counties — hospital rooms and kitchen tables included. You were just hurt; the last thing you need is a trip to a law office.
— Thomas Spiro Conits
The Questions People Actually Ask Me About This
Do you still actually work in the restaurant?
Yes. I've worked there since I was fifteen and I still take shifts. It keeps me honest about what a long day on your feet feels like, and it keeps me reachable by the people I grew up serving. I don't name the restaurant publicly — my family didn't sign up to be part of my advertising.
Isn't this just a marketing story?
Fair question — lawyer websites are full of origin stories. Here's my answer: everything in this post is checkable in how the practice actually runs. Call the office and see who answers. Hire me and see who handles your case. The story only matters because the practice matches it.
If I hire you, will I ever be handed off to a case manager?
No. I'm a solo practice by design. The person you meet at the consultation is the person who negotiates with the insurer, prepares the filings, and calls you back — me. There is no one to hand you off to.
Do you only take cases in Greenville?
No. My office is in downtown Greenville, and my regular footprint covers Greenville, Spartanburg, Laurens, Anderson, Pickens, and Abbeville counties — and I drive to clients across all of it. If you're outside that area, call anyway and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.
Pull up a chair. The first conversation is free.
Free consultation. No fee unless we win. If getting to an office is hard right now, Tom will come to you.
Office: 100 Williams St, Greenville, SC 29601 · (864) 777-1000