From Cop Car to Courtroom

An old maxim attributed to baseball player Yogi Berra states, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” For Hamburg criminal defense attorney Tim Brooks, life has been all about taking those forks.

It started when Brooks’ dad, chief of detectives at the Lackawanna Police Department, encouraged his son to take the civil service exam. Brooks, then 21, was studying business administration and marketing at the University at Buffalo when the opportunity arose. “Consumer product marketing was my dream job,” says Brooks, now 51. “But I thought to myself, ‘It’s always good to have contingency plans.’”

That’s how, in 1994, while finishing his undergrad degree, Brooks joined the Town of Hamburg Police Department—making DWI arrests and responding to accidents and domestic calls. He quickly left his timidity behind and jumped at the “hot calls” before everyone else. “It just really toughened me up,” Brooks says. “Your adrenaline goes from zero to 10, literally within half of a minute.”

“I’ve always had that internal drive that says, ‘You’re going to do it, and it’s going to work.’”

On a cold St. Patrick’s Day in 1995, Brooks handled his first incident involving a death. An irate driver, stopped in a line of vehicles at the juncture of three railroad tracks, honked his horn at the young mother ahead of him until she maneuvered around the closed gate. The oncoming train killed her on impact. “It was just absolutely heartbreaking,” says Brooks. “But I had to strengthen my resolve. You just keep pushing forward.”

Still determined to pursue a business career, Brooks completed his MBA in 1999 while working the midnight shift at the police department, only to be told by several interviewers that he didn’t have the corporate marketing experience they wanted. One day, as he drove into the parking lot of a major pharmaceutical company for yet another interview, he says, “I got this feeling that it wasn’t meant to be.”

So he turned to his “back burner” plan: law school. From 2005 to 2009, Brooks would leave his house at 5 a.m. on Tuesdays; drive to Cleveland-Marshall Law School in Ohio; study and take classes for three days; and then drive back to New York for his patrol job.

“I remember distinctly waking up at 4 o’clock to the winds howling and a major blizzard, then thinking, ‘What in God’s name did I sign up for?’” he recalls. “But I’ve always had that internal drive that says, ‘You’re going to do it, and it’s going to work.’”

After earning his J.D., Brooks decided to remain a police officer long enough to collect his pension and medical benefits. Finally, in 2015, he ended his 21-year police career and joined the Trbovich Law Firm, where he handled criminal defense work and served as lead counsel on an estimated 1,400 DWI cases. Unsurprisingly, Brooks knew the New York state penal and traffic laws like the back of his hand. “The transition was altogether a lot easier than it otherwise would have been had I been going into another area of practice,” he says.

Brooks’ background in policing also gives him a different perspective in lawyering. “It’s a strong selling point to say, ‘I can put on my former police hat to analyze and understand things from that point of view. And having that knowledge when I put on my criminal defense attorney hat, I can see it from the police, prosecutorial and defense sides,’” he says. “It was, and still is, invaluable.”

In 2021, Brooks struck out on his own, something he’d always wanted to do. He now handles a range of cases, from DWI and domestic violence to harassment and child abuse. “Every case has little differences and little minor variations, and I’ve always been intrigued by that,” says Brooks. “It keeps it fresh, kind of like when I was a police officer.”

In a case he wrapped up earlier this year, Brooks defended a client who had been stopped by a police officer because the man’s Penske truck resembled one involved in a series of burglaries. “The legal memorandum alone took 20 hours, but I had the facts and the law on my side,” Brooks says. “All counts in the indictment—three felonies and one misdemeanor—were dismissed outright, and that made me feel like a million dollars. And my client literally cried his eyes out in court. I get shivers up and down my spine just thinking about it.”

Brooks harbors no regrets about the long road that brought him to the law, or to his solo practice, specifically. “No misgivings, no second thoughts,” he says. “I’m where I need to be and where I was hoping I would be. I love everything about it.”