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After more than 40 years as a personal injury lawyer in Las Vegas, Rick Harris has enough stories to fill a two-volume memoir.
And having built a tremendously successful law firm – not once, but twice – he has enough hard-won insight and acumen to write the quintessential how-to guide.
But he’d rather spend his time tending to the Richard Harris Law Firm, exploring ways to strengthen and enforce its identity as the top personal injury law firm in the state he loves.
Born in Idaho, where his father worked at a nuclear testing facility and was involved in the development of the first nuclear reactor for the USS Nautilus submarine, Harris moved with his family to Newport Beach, California, when he was a teenager. His father, Donald, had decided to change careers and go into retail. After opening a Hallmark store in Newport Beach, Harris’s father next looked to open a second store in Las Vegas.
Harris’s arrival in Las Vegas is a story he’s told so many times over the years that it’s nearly mythological. He’s even included it in some of the firm’s advertising spots.
On the day they moved, the rest of the family was ahead in a moving van while Harris and his father followed in the family’s 1963 Mercury Colony Park station wagon. In the sweltering desert heat, the car overheated and blew a head gasket, leaving the father and son stranded on the side of the road.
“What do you do in June of 1968 when your car breaks down?” says Harris. “Well, you stick your thumb out and you hitchhike, which was very common in the ‘60s. I always tell people I hitched into town.”
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