‘Where I’m Supposed to Be’

In 2016, six weeks pregnant with her second daughter and lying on the ultrasound table for a routine examination, Natanya Brooks felt healthy, strong, and full of hope for the future.

All that changed in a second. 

“There’s a mass here 10 times bigger than your baby!” she remembers the doctor shouting.

At this point in her life, Brooks wasn’t even used to being sick. A lifelong swimmer, she had broken numerous records in high school and at Georgia Tech. As an insurance defense attorney, she says, “I could never really relate to any of the plaintiffs having surgery or being in the hospital or having problems with their body.”

Swimming is, in fact, what led her to the law, when the attorney-parents of several kids she was coaching offered to write letters of recommendation for her to Emory. At the suggestion of another friend, she chose insurance defense to quickly learn how the law, and law firms, work. 

“Trying cases kind of translated to swimming to me,” Brooks says. “You’re training and you’re working and then you have a meet, a competition, a trial, and you’ve got to prepare and perform under pressure. I liked that feeling.”

After the tumor in her uterus was discovered, a specialist began monitoring it via ultrasound. Despite the initial alarm, there was a chance that the tumor might not need to be removed, and if she needed surgery, it could be done laparoscopically, but only before the 20th week of pregnancy. After that, it was too late. So of course the mass remained stable until a few days before that 20-week deadline. During her weekly sonogram, the radiologist’s face turned “white as a ghost,” Brooks says. The tumor had grown and changed shape.

“I’m so sorry,” he told her. “But you’re going to have to have emergency surgery.”

The abdominal procedure was even more complicated than expected, with the surgeon working to protect Brooks’ unborn baby while removing the lesions. When it was over, she says, “I couldn’t move at all and if they even touched the hospital bed, I was in excruciating pain. I’ve never felt anything like that in my entire life.”

As the pain subsided, Brooks began to question her career path. She wondered: Am I doing the kind of work my kids will be proud of? 

“I remember taking depositions of people who’d had surgery, and it just didn’t register with me because I hadn’t experienced it. And now I knew what pain and suffering was. I wanted to help them, and I felt like I could put their feelings and thoughts into words as an advocate for them. Because I had felt it myself.”

Thankfully, the excised tumor turned out to be noncancerous, the baby was fine, but recovery for Brooks was still difficult. “When I first went back to court, I couldn’t even carry a folder,” she says. “In my first trial, I had to lie down in my car between sessions. And it started consuming my thoughts that I needed to get on the plaintiff’s side.”

She adds: “The reality was I was making insurance corporations more money. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it or unthink it. I needed to make a change.” 

I would never go back to the defense. … I am so much more fulfilled in representing real people instead of a huge corporation.

So a year after her surgery, she quit her job and joined a small personal injury firm. Then she went a step further. One day in 2018, “I rose up from my seat and put in my notice,” she says. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I knew that it was time for me to go out on my own. A lot of people thought I was too young, but I knew how to try a case and I knew how to work hard.”

To gain experience while her firm got off the ground, Brooks served as co-counsel for an attorney friend in a trial on behalf of two young girls seriously injured in a car accident. To her surprise, the senior lawyer asked her to give the closing argument. She’d never done one before.  

Brooks closed her eyes and asked the jury to do the same. Then she told them to imagine the horrific scene as she described in detail what the girls went through that day. “The defense attorney was shocked and couldn’t believe it,” she says. “But I was able to channel my own fears, pain and experience to the jury; and they felt it because it was authentic.”

The jurors returned a six-figure verdict for her clients—far more than the cost of their medical bills. Says Brooks, “That’s when I knew: This is where I’m supposed to be.” Brooks Law Partners now has locations in Peachtree Corners, Atlanta and Peachtree City.

Following in her parents’ humanitarian footsteps—her dad worked for a nonprofit, her mom was a social worker—Brooks launched the We Care Law Foundation, which provides school supplies for kids in need and acquaints them with lawyering through mock trials, showing them that they, too, can pursue careers in this field. In addition, she is co-founder of Sisterhood of the 8, a nationwide group that supports female trial attorneys and offers advice on achieving eight-figure verdicts.

Her former practice, she says, helped her prepare for her current one. “I would never go back to the defense. I wanted to do the job I was hired for, and I had pride in what I was doing, so I’m able to understand where the defense is coming from. But I am so much more fulfilled in representing real people instead of a huge corporation. It’s important for all of us to help others, and I’m so lucky I get to do it in my job every day.”

She considers herself lucky on a personal level, too. Her daughter was born with no complications. “She’s wonderful,” says the proud mom. “She’s a great swimmer and very focused. Who knows? One day maybe she can be a plaintiff’s trial attorney.”