Dave Abels has built his practice at Abels & Annes, P.C. around helping people whose lives have been upended by catastrophic injuries caused by others’ negligence. His clients are people who have lost loved ones, suffered permanent disabilities, or face months of painful, exhausting recovery.
“It doesn’t matter how much money you recover for somebody that’s been badly injured in one form or another,” Abels says.
Consequently, Abels focuses his work on helping them secure the monetary awards they need to rebuild their lives as fully as possible.
That client-centered mission remains the core of the firm, even as Abels also keeps a close eye on the digital side of the practice—tracking the firm’s growing visibility across leading LLM platforms, the performance of its website, and the settlements and case results that reflect the impact of its work.
The Path to Abels & Annes
Abels developed his capacity for aggressive advocacy in his youth by playing hockey in high school in the Chicago suburbs, then walking on
to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s junior varsity hockey team as an undergrad.
The demands of school eventually pulled him off the ice. But for years after he moved back to Chicago to practice law, Abels brought his skates to the office and ran to Johnny’s Icehouse to play hockey during lunch breaks.
An early interest in criminal law led him to a prosecutor’s office, where he conducted more than 20 jury trials in a short span.
He returned to Chicago for a stint in criminal defense before a friend from law school contacted him. She worked for her family’s firm but was scaling back her hours and offered Abels her personal injury caseload. “I decided to try it out, and it went well,” he says. “And I just kept at it.”
Clients started referring friends. The caseload grew. Eventually, it made more sense to open his own shop than to keep working for someone else — and by 2008, that shop had outgrown him, too.
Enter Gary Annes. The two had circled each other for years in Chicago’s legal scene, sharing mutual friends and running into each other at lunches and industry events before the partnership took shape. Abels took on marketing, management, and pre-litigation duties. Annes, whom Abels calls a first-class litigator, took over in court.
Their boutique firm began to generate big-firm results, from motor-vehicle accidents and premises liability cases to high-profile sex abuse claims against the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
The Digital Edge: Getting Found in the Age of AI
For nearly two decades, Abels & Annes successfully competed in one of the country’s most saturated personal injury markets by investing in search engine optimization. Partnering with the digital marketing agency Rankings.io, Abels & Annes outranked much larger, older firms on Google results.
Then ChatGPT launched. Gemini and Claude followed. Now, people who would have started with a Google search ask AI instead, including people looking for a lawyer.
“LLMs tend to flounder without data,” says Matthew Laurin, who manages Abels & Annes’s account for Rankings. “They basically act as agents, scouring the highest-ranking search results and returning what they think is the most beneficial information. Firms and attorneys with a wealth of data out on the internet — brand mentions, name mentions, authoritative directory profiles — tend to show up way more in AI results.”
Rankings strengthened the firm’s topical authority and local relevance through legal directories, Chicago news outlets, and niche auto and injury sites.
With Rankings’ encouragement, Abels started answering questions on Avvo and Justia, platforms LLMs lean on heavily for legal queries, hunting for questions he could help with.
Often, the askers seemed to want legal self-help. Abels nudged them toward a free consultation with a lawyer instead. He has decades of horror stories about people who accepted lowball settlements from insurance companies for a fraction of what their injuries would cost to treat. Abels hopes the posts prevented a few more of them.
A Wikipedia entry helped, too. They’re notoriously hard for lawyers to earn, but Abels’ suits against the Catholic Archdiocese had already merited one, and LLMs weigh Wikipedia heavily.
The results began to show. Abels & Annes started signing cases it directly attributed to ChatGPT conversations. The clients arriving this way tended to come in informed. They’d already worked through their situation with the AI, figured out they had a real claim, and decided Abels & Annes was the firm to handle it.
In other words, the AI didn’t replace the lawyer. It sent a better-prepared client to one.
Quality Results, Lasting Relationships
Abels & Annes has never focused on volume. They prioritize client access. Clients can speak directly to their lawyers, who call them back quickly. “A lot of people we work with are just so thrilled to be able to get that return phone call,” Abels says.
It also helps to serve clients in their own language. Chicago has the largest Polish-speaking population outside of Poland. At Abels & Annes, those clients can talk to Roman Drewniak, a Polish-speaking attorney on staff.
The firm’s first big case, years ago, was a wrongful death settlement for the family of a passenger killed in a crash. Abels is still friends with them. That often happens at Abels & Annes: A satisfied client leaves, but the friendships endure.
“We approach big and small cases the same way,” Abels says. “We want to deliver work and experience to a client that’s good enough where they’re going to want to refer us to their friends and family, or not hesitate to use us in the future.”
