Nick Teel - Seattle, WA

Nick Teel spent a decade responding to other people’s worst days before he started litigating them. Then he had one of his own. A traumatic brain injury ended his military career and sent him to law school instead. His own injury case put him on the client side of a claim. He has not forgotten what that felt like. Both through professional practice and individual experience he knows the tactics insurance companies use to delay, discount, and wear people down, and he knows how to make them pay what a case is actually worth.

Nick served seven years in the Air Force as a medic. He supervised emergency department operations at RAF Lakenheath in England, worked humanitarian missions around the world, and responded to three aircraft crashes, including the rescue of an ejected fighter pilot. He later ran the Nuclear Weapons Personnel Reliability Program at Minot Air Force Base and led health readiness for Oregon’s largest Air National Guard unit, where he also fought wildfires on the California border. Along the way he earned a nursing degree.

Nick graduated cum laude from Portland State University and cum laude from Lewis and Clark Law School, where he externed for a federal magistrate judge in the District of Oregon. Following law school, he built his trial skills representing people through the hardest moments of their lives, in high conflict family disputes, criminal defense, and creditor collection matters. That work kept him in the courtroom week after week. He has been lead counsel in multi day trials and pulled together emergency hearings on a few days’ notice. Nick believes the courtroom is the only real leverage an injured person has, so he builds every file as if a jury will see it. If the insurance company refuses to make a fair offer, he is ready to try the case.

When he is not working, Nick enjoys paragliding, riding motorcycles, and traveling with an eye toward destinations he has not yet explored.