Edelman & Thompson

Focus and practice areas

Edelman & Thompson is a personal injury law firm based in Kansas City, Missouri. It was founded in 1994 by Ron Edelman and James Thompson. The firm represents injured people across Missouri and Kansas.

Its work centers on two connected areas: personal injury and workers' compensation. The practice list on the firm's site covers car accidents, truck accidents, and motorcycle accidents. It also includes pedestrian and bicycle accidents, wrongful death, slip and fall cases, defective products, dog bites, and insurance claims.

That mix tells you the firm handles both the collision side of injury law and the workplace side. In my opinion, keeping workers' compensation in-house alongside general injury work is a practical fit. Many clients arrive with one kind of claim and find they have another, and a single firm can carry both.

How the team is built

The firm states that it has 16 attorneys. It also says those attorneys average more than 28 years of experience. According to the firm, the group includes former defense lawyers and a former workers' compensation judge.

That last point is worth pausing on. Lawyers who once worked the other side of injury claims, and a judge who once decided them, tend to read a file differently from someone trained only to bring cases. The firm presents that varied background as part of how it staffs matters.

The partners

Ron Edelman co-founded the firm in 1994. He earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1979 and his law degree from the University of Missouri in Kansas City in 1982. He is admitted in both Missouri and Kansas. His past cases span automobile collisions, products liability, premises liability, and workers' compensation.

James Thompson co-founded the firm the same year and leads its personal injury team on complex civil cases. He has been named to Missouri and Kansas Super Lawyers. He is also a member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum.

The work injury group

Several attorneys are grouped around workplace claims. Mike Downing and Keith Yarwood each bring more than 20 years handling work injury matters. Carl Mueller served 20 years as a judge with the Missouri Division of Workers' Compensation before joining the group.

Steffanie Stracke worked as a legal advisor with that same state division for over a decade. The firm also lists Brendan Buckley and Brett Coppage among its attorneys, though it gives no further detail on them. As a reviewer, I read the depth on the workers' compensation bench as the clearest signal of where this firm has chosen to concentrate.

Where the firm works

Edelman & Thompson serves clients throughout Missouri and Kansas. It runs five offices across the Kansas City area. These sit in Kansas City, Independence, and North Kansas City on the Missouri side, and Olathe and Lenexa on the Kansas side.

That footprint matters for injury clients. People who are hurt are often still recovering and cannot travel far, so having a nearby office can decide whether a first meeting even happens. Offices on both sides of the state line also line up with a practice that files under both Missouri and Kansas law.

What the record shows

The firm reports that it has helped more than 14,500 injury victims in the Kansas City area. It also states that it has recovered more than $800 million in settlements and verdicts. These are the firm's own figures, drawn from its home and about pages.

A reviewer cannot independently confirm those totals, and readers should treat them as self-reported numbers rather than audited results. Read that way, they still point to a long operating history and a steady volume of injury and workers' compensation files. A firm active since 1994 has had the years to build a record of that size.

What the numbers do not tell you is the shape of an individual case, and no firm total predicts one. Anyone comparing options should ask about matters close to their own, not just the headline figure.

Community work beyond cases

In 2014 the firm established the Edelman & Thompson Charitable Foundation. Its stated purpose is to support charitable organizations in the Kansas City area. That gives the firm a formal channel for local giving, kept separate from its casework.

Put together, the picture is a regional injury firm with a settled base in Kansas City and a clear lean toward workers' compensation experience. The named backgrounds, from a former state judge to a longtime division advisor, support that read. For someone weighing an injury or work injury claim in the Missouri and Kansas area, the firm's stated focus and staffing are easy to match against the kind of help a case needs.