Welcome to the introductory episode of Legal Squeaks.

I’m your host Dennis VanDerGinst. Our intention is to give you good, useful information to know and apply in your daily life with respect to legal and consumer issues. And our intended audience is the normal, average layperson. So we hope that we’re going to avoid all the legal gobbledygook and mumbo jumbo.

By the way, those are legal terms.

And we intend to present information in a way that’s easy to understand. Obviously, there are complicated issues that require a lot of legal training in order to have a full appreciation of the subject. So if we discuss something that’s more involved than a layperson would be prepared to tackle, we’ll try to refer you to good online resources or attorneys we know who are able to help you.

If it’s unclear, I’m an attorney. As with many lawyers, I’ve also had my fair share of exposure to many areas of law.

I began my career doing criminal defense work. Then I did insurance defense and business law. And from there I handled a wide variety of matters in a general practice law firm. But for almost 30 years, most of my career has been devoted to helping people who have been injured on the job or due to the wrongdoing of others. That’s included everything from car accidents to medical malpractice cases, nursing home abuse cases, cases where someone was harmed by faulty or dangerous products. And just about every other kind of negligence case you can imagine.

I’ve handled those types of cases in almost every state in the country, and I have worked with and against some of the best lawyers in the country.

I’ve been involved in class and mass tort actions against some of the largest companies in the world. I’ve represented clients against cities, states and federal agencies. So I’m equipped and qualified to speak on a number of law and consumer related topics.

But when I feel a topic requires some input from a source more experienced than I, I’ll have other experts chime in. The bottom line is, we want the information that we present to not only be interesting, but potentially useful in the lives of many Americans.

If you have a specific legal topic that you’d like to know more about, please reach out on Vlaw.com.

At the end of every episode, I’ll be signing off by saying “I love you all”. I realize it may seem an odd way to sign off, but it’s not simply an empty gesture. It comes from a genuine, and sincere place in my heart.

You see, my parents were my greatest role models and I loved them profoundly. My dad passed away many years ago and my mom unfortunately joined him just a few years ago. She had been diagnosed with lung cancer, which she battled bravely, but eventually it was too much for her to endure.

When the end was nearing, she insisted on being in her own home.

And in a rare moment when all my siblings were able to be there together, she allowed herself to gracefully pass with all her closest loved ones there.

We were all able to say our goodbyes. And when we had her very last words where “I love you all”, and then she was gone. After she died, we came across a sort of prayer book that she had kept for many years. It was filled with the names of countless people and aspirations that she held dear. She wrote them all down so she would never forget any in her daily prayers. And by anyone’s reckoning, she was a kind and thoughtful person.

So in her memory and in an effort to somehow emulate her in a small way, my signoff is “I love you all”.

So please subscribe to Legal Squeaks and encourage your friends to do so as well. I hope you’ll tune in each week.

And for now, thank you. Stay safe. And I love you all.