BJ AbronFounder at
Abron Law

Long before the courtroom, Byron J. (“BJ”) Abron lived in Compton, California. And in Compton, BJ watched people disappear. In his experience, losing people – to jail, to death, to a system that didn’t notice either way – was something you learned young. It was part of growing up.

And yet, he never speaks about those younger years with bitterness, but instead, with a kind of hard-won clarity: “I’ve seen a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn’t have seen at that age.”

These experiences didn’t send him straight to law school. Instead, BJ took a longer road – through fashion, product branding, city infrastructure, and a stint as an electrician for the City of Los Angeles – learning, in each setting, how corporate systems work. How the decisions made at the top tend to land on people at the bottom.

So, when BJ finally enrolled at Southwestern Law School at 27, it wasn’t fulfilling a lifelong plan. It was the convergence of everything he’d seen and done, in a place it could finally mean something.

Now founder and civil trial attorney at his personal injury law firm, Abron Law, serving the Los Angeles County area, he represents injured individuals and underserved communities – the kind of people he grew up alongside, in circumstances he’s seen firsthand. Particularly, BJ’s casework involves ordinary people pitted against institutions with vastly more power and resources.

“I’ve seen how having access to resources can change you and change the trajectory of your life,” BJ says. “Those experiences absolutely shaped me, especially doing the work that I do.”

Rather than hardening him, his early years sharpened his sense of empathy and responsibility, qualities that now define how he shows up for his clients.

Lived Experience Shapes a Lawyer

The law, BJ will tell you, is ultimately about people. Not strategy or precedent. And at Abron Law, a family practice run in part by BJ’s two sisters, Tyiesha Abron and Ashley Abron, that belief has a very specific shape: clients in catastrophic injury, wrongful death, traumatic brain injury, and sexual abuse cases. These are people arriving at BJ’s door at their most fractured, looking for someone willing to sit with them and piece them back together.

“You become their therapist,” says BJ. “We talk about the verdicts and the settlements, but the day-to-day relationships, the conversations, the crying on the phone…those are the moments that really impact them as we try to piece [together] their lives.”

But BJ wasn’t always on that side of the courtroom. Early in his career, BJ worked defense where he represented corporations and institutional clients. At that firm, BJ met someone who became his longtime mentor, embedding in him the value of civility in a field too often defined by combat.

“Now, as an attorney on the plaintiffs’ side, I’m able to utilize those tools I gained from working defense,” BJ notes.

Such experience proved foundational, where learning how powerful entities assess risk, deploy resources, and approach litigation gave BJ a strategic vantage point he still draws on today.

“To [help] people who are underrepresented brings me a great joy, and it’s a drastic difference from working on behalf of corporations,” recalls BJ.

“I knew I would navigate to [plaintiffs’] law because I align with the natural person who’s walking down the street – not a corporate figure or entity – but people who otherwise would not have any access to justice.”

This was BJ’s key motivation in founding Abron Law. And his purpose shows up not just in who he represents, but in how he represents them. Because a significant portion of Abron Law’s cases – around 85 to 90 percent – arrive through referrals from other personal injury firms, typically when a case is approaching trial and the stakes are highest. It’s a collaborative model that lets BJ do what he does best: walk into a courtroom and fight.

When the Stakes Are Someone’s Entire Life

Not every client who walks through BJ’s door can tell their own story. Some have had that ability stripped from them – whether by injury, by trauma, or by years of silence enforced through shame or fear. His job, as BJ sees it, is to find the truth of that story and bring it into a courtroom to finally be heard.

Such a responsibility was at the center of a defining case in BJ’s career. One afternoon, a 58-year-old elementary school janitor – also a husband, father, and preacher – had his life upended by a catastrophic car accident. As he was leaving his school in Riverside, CA, the man passed through an intersection and was T-boned at full speed by another driver running a red light, totaling both vehicles.

While BJ’s client miraculously survived, it still cost him almost everything. He suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and ultimately required a two-level cervical spine fusion, leaving medical hardware in his neck for the rest of his life.

Yet, what made the case difficult wasn’t necessarily the injury, but the defense’s lie.

“They lied and misrepresented what the facts were at the incident,” BJ remembers. “They’ll do whatever it takes to save a dollar.”

The opposing driver denied liability entirely, claiming it was BJ’s client who had run the red light. As expected, the insurance company followed suit, acting in bad faith through years of litigation, dragging the case toward trial rather than settling at reasonable value.

Not only this, but they did what insurance companies often do when an injured plaintiff keeps showing up to work despite chronic pain – they used it against him. The client, unable to simply stop living his life, continued to preach from his pulpit when he could. That’s when defense investigators photographed him there to paint him as uninjured.

But the turning point came when BJ cross-examined the defendant directly, and the lies began to unravel.

“Right off the bat, we showed that she was not telling the truth. I impeached her with the deposition testimony she had given earlier that year,” BJ recalls.

Liability, which had been denied for years, crumbled on the stand, and the jury saw it. In the end, the verdict came back in favor of BJ’s client. But what BJ remembers most isn’t the compensation amount, but the moments following the announcement.

“I’ve sat with this family on numerous occasions. We’ve shared tears together. That moment is hard to put into words.”

That kind of intimacy is what continues to define BJ’s approach across all the work he does. This includes some of the most emotionally demanding cases his law firm handles, which are representing survivors of sexual abuse. While still involving incredible pain and anguish, these survivors arrive differently than other clients – reserved, often gripped by a fear that extends beyond the legal process and into embarrassment, not being believed, and reliving traumatic experiences they’ve spent years trying to reconcile.

“There are some things that you can’t undo. We can get compensation for medical bills, past and future, but you can’t undo pain,” explains BJ. “These are victims [of abuse], and victims have trouble speaking out against those who victimized them.”

This is proof that the law is more about people than strategy. With these cases, BJ’s responsibility is to build enough trust with clients that they’re willing to carry their traumas into a courtroom with the weight they deserve. Because for many of these clients, there is no other option.

“Without trial lawyers, these victims would have no one else – nowhere else – to turn to,” BJ says.

Fueling the Fight

There is a version of a trial lawyer’s work that looks, from the outside, like pure passion – a civil litigator who believes in justice and seeks to find it. And that’s true, to a certain extent. But passion alone doesn’t pay expert witnesses, and it certainly doesn’t fund the years of preparation that precede just a single week in court.

The financial reality of a contingency fee law firm is one that BJ has years of experience tending to.

“Each case is an investment,” he asserts. “I’m going to spend one- or two-hundred thousand dollars because of the expert fees involved.” In a field where opposing counsel is often backed by billion-dollar insurance companies with near-limitless resources, access to capital isn’t a luxury – it’s the imperative to avoid being outgunned before trial ever starts.

“Esquire offers that opportunity to make sure your firm isn’t just backed properly, but that your client is backed properly, [too],” says BJ.

Paying it Forward

For Abron Law, that financial support has extended well beyond the courtroom. Since the firm’s founding in 2019, and thanks to its partnership with Esquire, the law firm has gained the stable footing required to start giving back to its community – the same community where BJ grew up.

Through the University Pathways Public Service Academy, a high school in LA, BJ co-founded its Law Society alongside a childhood friend. The program’s purpose introduces at-risk students to the legal system through hands-on curriculum in trial advocacy, cross-examination, and oral argument. At the end of each semester, students receive a blazer and a pin – a small gesture, but representative of something much larger: an open door that wasn’t there before.

“I can only imagine how my future would be today if I had that access – if I just had the information,” BJ says. “That’s why I’m trying to create a pipeline; to act as a conduit for young students to have a pathway toward where I am today.”

That impulse to provide stable pathways is the same that runs through every case he tries. BJ sees trial lawyers not as a last resort, but as a necessary counterweight to institutions and corporations that – if left unchecked – will always prioritize the bottom line over the people they neglect.

Without that necessary counterweight, the people BJ grew up alongside, those clients who sit across from him in the office – they would have no course of action other than silence.

“I’ve always wanted to foster change – to [help] people be better than they were yesterday.”