Page 8 - Cleveland Vol 5 No 3

ATTORNEY SPOTLIGHT
Michael A. Liner
The Face of Ohio Disability Law
AALM: Do you have any mentors or professors that encour- aged you along the way?
Liner: For me law school, in reality, was the rst job I had as an associate attorney working at Nager, Romaine & Schneiberg in Cleveland. I learned a lot more in that job than I did in law school. I worked at the rm for a little over two years before starting my own practice in 2013, and my mentor David Nager (a fantastic workers’ compensation attorney) knew very little about disability law. However, Dave taught me everything my law school classes did not about running a successful law practice. I learned from him to value my clients like gold, work tirelessly to make a le perfect, and how important it is to respect co-counsel relation- ships. ese are all lessons from Dave which quickly made my rm a success.
AALM: What do you nd particularly rewarding about your practice?
Liner: I have the greatest job in the world. When I do my job well, my clients keep a roof over their head, food on their table, and clothing on their family’s back. For many of my clients, a disability application is something they feel ashamed of ling. However, we ultimately restore dignity to their life.
AALM: Tell us a little bit about your sta and your working relationship.
Liner: I don’t have a sta ; I have a team. ough I may be the de facto leader in the o ce and am the one to sign the paychecks, everyone has a voice. We have an o ce manual, which we call our “playbook.” I wrote the rst dra of the playbook ve years ago. However, the current format of the book—which outlines our systems and procedures for everything we do as an o ce, starting from the greeting you get when we answer our phones to what our o ce’s holidays are—is the product of input from each and every member of the team.
ATTORNEY AT LAW MAGAZINE · OHIO · VOL. 5 NO. 3 8