Most personal injury firms don’t also handle criminal defense. Matthew C. Hines built his Atlanta practice around doing both, a combination that’s less common than it might sound and that shapes how his firm approaches a case from the moment a client walks in the door.
A Business Degree Before a Law Degree
Hines earned his undergraduate degree from Clemson University before going on to Georgia State University College of Law, where he completed both a J.D. and an MBA. That dual degree isn’t just a resume detail. Running a firm that has grown to more than a dozen attorneys across seven Georgia offices takes the same operational thinking an MBA is built to teach, and Hines has structured the firm’s growth in a way that reflects that background: methodical expansion into new markets rather than a single office trying to cover the entire state.
Founding the Firm in 2004
Hines founded his firm in 2004 and has spent more than two decades building it into what it is today: a practice covering personal injury, workers’ compensation, and criminal defense, with a particular focus on DUI cases. That combination of practice areas is unusual. Most personal injury firms don’t touch criminal defense at all, and most criminal defense attorneys don’t handle civil injury claims. Hines has said the overlap gives him and his attorneys a working knowledge of both sides of a case that a single-focus firm doesn’t have, particularly in situations where a criminal matter and a civil injury claim arise from the same set of facts.
Why Criminal Defense Experience Matters in a Personal Injury Case
That overlap shows up most directly in DUI-related accident cases, one of the firm’s stated practice areas. When a car accident involves a driver facing DUI charges, the civil injury claim and the criminal case move on parallel tracks, and what happens in one can affect the other. An attorney who understands how a DUI prosecution actually works, including how field sobriety evidence gets challenged and how a blood alcohol reading gets contested, is in a better position to evaluate what a police report in a related civil case is actually worth as evidence, rather than treating it as an unquestionable account of what happened. That same familiarity with how police investigations get built and sometimes get built incorrectly carries over into the firm’s broader personal injury work, including claims involving disputed liability where the initial police report doesn’t match what the physical evidence actually shows.
A Wrongful Arrest Case That Became a Defining Result
Among the firm’s case results is what Hines has described as a successful wrongful arrest case, a category of claim that sits outside typical personal injury work entirely. A wrongful arrest claim generally requires showing that law enforcement lacked probable cause for a detention or arrest, a civil rights claim brought under federal law rather than an ordinary negligence theory. These cases are difficult to win because courts extend significant deference to an officer’s on-the-scene judgment, and proving a lack of probable cause after the fact usually requires reconstructing exactly what an officer knew and didn’t know at the moment of arrest, using body camera footage, dispatch records, and witness statements gathered well after the initial incident. Attorney Advertising: past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case. A case like this rewards the same investigative instincts the firm’s criminal defense work requires elsewhere.
Building a Personal Injury Practice Around Everyday Accidents
The firm’s personal injury caseload centers on car accidents, motorcycle accidents, bicycle and pedestrian accidents, wrongful death claims, dog bites, and slip and fall cases, the kinds of claims that make up the bulk of personal injury practice statewide. In Georgia, most personal injury claims are subject to a two-year statute of limitations running from the date of the injury, a deadline that sounds distant when an accident first happens but that can arrive quickly once a client is focused on medical treatment and lost income rather than a legal filing deadline. Missing it means losing the right to sue entirely regardless of how strong the underlying claim was, which is part of why the firm emphasizes getting a case properly evaluated and documented well before that window closes rather than waiting until a claim is close to expiring.
What Georgia Workers’ Compensation Adds to the Mix
The firm’s workers’ compensation practice runs on a different legal framework than its personal injury work. Rather than proving another party was negligent, an injured worker generally only needs to show that an injury happened in the course of employment, but the tradeoff is that workers’ comp benefits are capped by statute and don’t include compensation for pain and suffering the way a personal injury claim can. Disputes in these cases often center on whether an injury actually occurred at work, whether a preexisting condition disqualifies part of a claim, or whether an employer’s insurer is pushing an injured worker back onto the job before they’ve genuinely recovered enough to do it safely.
A Firm Built for Volume Without Losing Direct Access
The firm has grown to more than a dozen attorneys handling cases across seven Georgia offices, a footprint that lets it serve clients throughout much of the state rather than requiring everyone to travel to a single Atlanta location. The firm also offers services in multiple languages, a detail that matters in personal injury and criminal defense work specifically, where a client’s ability to describe exactly what happened, in their own language and without a communication gap, can affect both the strength of the case and how comfortable a client feels through what’s often the most stressful period of their life. The firm has represented more than a thousand clients, a caseload volume that a smaller single-office practice generally can’t match, though it’s a tradeoff a growing multi-office firm has to manage deliberately to keep client communication from suffering as the numbers climb.
Recognition Built Alongside the Practice
Hines holds a strong client-rated Avvo profile and was named to a Top 5 list among Georgia personal injury attorneys in 2025 based on business performance metrics. He’s a member of the American Bar Association, the Georgia Trial Lawyers Association, the Atlanta Bar Association, and the Cobb County Bar Association, memberships that keep him connected to both the statewide plaintiffs’ bar and the local Atlanta and Cobb County legal communities where much of the firm’s caseload originates. The firm’s attorneys collectively bring more than 40 years of combined legal experience to its caseload, a bench that matters for a practice spanning three distinct legal disciplines rather than one.
What a Stated Success Rate Actually Reflects
The firm cites a 90% success rate across its personal injury caseload, a figure worth understanding rather than taking at face value. A success rate like that typically reflects the outcome of cases the firm chose to take on and pursue to resolution, whether through settlement or verdict, rather than a random sample of every personal injury claim a firm might encounter. Attorneys who screen cases carefully before accepting them, declining claims with weak liability or minimal damages, tend to post higher success rates than firms that take on every case that calls, which is one reason that number is more useful as a signal of case selection discipline than as a guarantee about how any individual case will turn out. Attorney Advertising: past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future case.
A New Office Outside the Firm’s Core Georgia Footprint
The firm has also opened an office in Brentwood, Tennessee, extending its footprint beyond Georgia for the first time. That expansion is recent enough that it sits outside the firm’s established Georgia-focused presence, and prospective clients in Tennessee should confirm directly with the firm which practice areas and services are currently available through that location before assuming full parity with the Georgia offices.
Staying Involved Beyond the Caseload
Outside the firm, Hines has been involved in community initiatives touching on drug rehabilitation support, human rights advocacy, and education, areas that don’t typically overlap with personal injury or criminal defense practice but that reflect a broader interest in the kinds of systemic issues his criminal defense clients in particular often intersect with, whether that’s addiction underlying a DUI charge or gaps in a community’s access to legal education about its own rights.
