Admiration for lawyers at one of Atlanta's oldest personal injury firms, Finch McCranie, helped persuade Lee Gutschenritter to switch from the defense to the plaintiffs side last fall. Now the firm has made him a partner.

Gutschenritter, 34, said he knew he wanted to be a litigator when he started law school, but he wasn't sure what type. He went to work for a big Atlanta defense firm, Carlock Copeland & Stair, after earning a law degree from Florida State University in 2008.

When he decided to switch to plaintiffs-side work, Gutschenritter called Finch McCranie partners Richard Hendrix and Steven Wisebram, who'd been on the other side of what he said was a hard-fought medical malpractice case that he and Carlock Copeland founder Wade Copeland litigated for almost a year. “I took close to 25 depositions,” said Gutschenritter, an associate at the time.