Damon Hudson is the founder of Hudson Injury Law, a personal injury firm based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He serves clients across the state in cases involving vehicle collisions, slip and falls, dog bites, and wrongful death, and has secured notable results including a $4.4 million recovery for his clients.
I asked Damon what led him to start his own firm.
"I want to be in charge, I want to make the decisions, I want to help people the way I want to," he told me. "And I wanted to be more in my neighborhood - to be a community component, not just a big business in the area."
His firm is the only personal injury practice in his immediate community outside Santa Fe. He sponsors the local library, does work for local schools, and builds his referral network one coffee at a time. He shows up on LinkedIn and social media by design.
The idea of going out on his own had been building for years. At one point, Damon was the first hire for a personal injury practice that a firm from out of state was launching in New Mexico. For a year, it was him and a paralegal, learning what it took to build something from the ground up. That experience gave him something invaluable: a clear picture of what running his own practice would actually look like.
He knew the moment was right when clients were seeking him out. Fifteen months in, he has a small, fully remote team and a growing caseload. He keeps everyone aligned through daily check-ins, end-of-week touchpoints, and a case management system that structures the workflow from intake forward. His approach to delegation is deliberate: hand off the tasks that pull him away from being a lawyer so he can focus on the work that matters - what he calls "delegate and elevate."
What shapes how he leads goes back further than the law. Damon studied organizational leadership as an undergraduate, and those lessons - that your words matter, that leadership starts with the heart - still inform how he shows up for his team and his clients.
"I recognize what it looks like when somebody's down on their luck or when someone isn't getting treated fairly," he said. "I feel pretty strongly that I'm able to help people put themselves in a better position than they could do themselves."
When I asked what he'd want other founders to take from his story, he didn't talk about strategy or systems. He talked about belief.
"You're going to have doubts. And it's how you address those. The best way you can improve your business is to absolutely be delusional about what you can do. Because the only person who's going to believe that kind of crazy is you."
Fifteen months in, he is building exactly the kind of practice he set out to build — rooted in his community, run on his terms.
Are you dealing with a personal injury matter in New Mexico? Connect with Damon Hudson and check out Hudson Injury Law.