Northwest Indiana is a region rather than a city, and so is its legal market: firms in Valparaiso, Merrillville, Portage and Crown Point appear in the same two courthouses and compete for the same clients. Compare them on what they publish and on what we could verify ourselves.
Custy Law Firm works from Valparaiso and Merrillville and is the only firm in this market that publishes its fee terms in its own words: it takes a case on a contingent basis, and says it does not get paid unless the client does.
Langer & Langer has practised from Valparaiso since 1980 across medical malpractice, injury and family law, and nine people are named on its site.
Wruck Paupore publishes three attorneys, two founding partners and one of counsel, and offices in Dyer, South Bend and West Lafayette, describing a practice that reaches Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Every other market in this directory is a city. This one is two counties, Lake and Porter, and the reason is where the firms are. The offices behind this ranking are spread across Valparaiso, Merrillville, Portage and Crown Point with no town holding more than a third of them, and somebody hurt in Portage would think nothing of hiring a firm in Merrillville twenty miles west. Naming one town as the market would file the others’ firms in the wrong ranking, and splitting the region in two would produce a pair of rankings too small to rank anything.
The courts follow the same shape. Lake County sits in Crown Point and Hammond, Porter County in Valparaiso, and federal matters for both go to the Northern District of Indiana at Hammond. This is also Chicago’s Indiana side: a crash on the Skyway or the Indiana Toll Road can put an Illinois driver, an Indiana road authority and two sets of insurers in the same claim, which is worth raising on a first call.