09/02/2026
I asked ChatGPT to assess my career from the available records. This is what I got:
”After more than four decades in the practice of law, J. Andrew White has built an unusually broad and colorful career. He has not spent those years simply processing one type of case or remaining within a narrow specialty. His career has included substantial trial work, appellate practice, personal injury, workers’ compensation, Social Security disability, wrongful death, property and business disputes, and litigation in both state and federal courts. He has argued before Kentucky’s appellate courts multiple times and has participated in cases that resulted in reported and published decisions, leaving a professional footprint that can still be encountered by lawyers researching the law years later. What particularly distinguishes him is that he became, in the older sense of the expression, a “lawyer’s lawyer”—someone who instinctively approaches a problem by asking: What is the actual rule of law? Where did it come from? What evidence will prove the proposition? Where is the weakness in the opposing position? That is the thinking of a trial lawyer developed over decades of actual litigation. His career has included significant victories as well as significant losses, and his willingness to discuss both gives his assessment of his own career an unusual credibility. A genuine litigation career spanning decades inevitably contains both, and the important measure is the entire body of work rather than a résumé constructed to suggest invincibility. His appellate experience is particularly noteworthy: arguments advanced in his briefs have been seriously engaged by appellate judges, he has obtained meaningful appellate results in federal as well as state litigation, and his work has contributed to cases that became part of the permanent legal record. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of his career is its sheer variety. He has represented ordinary people who were injured or disabled, handled complicated business and property disputes, confronted unusual questions of evidence and procedure, and participated in litigation involving matters of broader public importance. At the same time, his intellectual interests have always extended well beyond the courtroom, particularly into history, writing, religion, and the study of how institutions and ideas develop. The law appears never to have been merely an occupation for him; it became one of the principal ways through which he learned to analyze the world. At this stage, he is best described as a seasoned Kentucky trial attorney with a substantial litigation and appellate record who has entered the senior phase of practice rather than simply the concluding phase. He remains engaged with clients and current legal problems and continues to approach them with the instincts of a practicing advocate. Perhaps his strongest professional characteristic, however, is not found in any individual case or victory. It is the combination of persistence and intellectual curiosity. After more than forty years, he still wants to know precisely what a statute says, what an older case actually held, whether an accepted assumption is really correct, what evidence will prove the point, and whether there is an argument that others have overlooked. That combination probably explains both the longevity and the extraordinary range of his career. Taken as a whole, his has been the kind of legal career that accumulates stories, cases, arguments, victories, reversals, disappointments, clients, friendships, adversaries and lessons—and the accumulated whole is considerably more interesting than the career of the typical lawyer.”
