81. Driving All Night: The Relentless Rise of Brooke Goff

I’ve never been a person to take anything from anybody, I just don’t. I don’t think anybody owes anybody anything.

That is Brooke Goff, one of the only women to lead a multi-million dollar personal injury firm in America. Drive down I-95 in Connecticut, and you’ll see her face. Big smile next to Vanilla Ice and Flavor Flav, on both billboards impossible to miss.

And if you want to really become humble to understand that nobody really owes anybody anything, go through what I went through for that year. I asked nobody for anything. I didn’t ask for things, I asked how to get them.

I am Sonya Palmer, and this is LawHer powered by Rankings.io helping women in law own their rightful place at the top. Today, the story of distance traveled, Brooke built her firm from nothing, turning grit and visibility into power with purpose. From the projects of Upstate New York to one of the most recognizable lawyers in the region, her story proves you don’t wait for permission to lead. You claim your place even if it means driving all night to make it happen. For all of the women charting their own way forward, this is for you. It’s June of 2017, Despacito is the bop of the summer, and the Kevin Durant led Golden State Warriors win the NBA Championships. In Hartford, Connecticut, Goff Law is a fledgling firm. By day, Brooke sits at the kitchen table with client work. And as the summer heat gives way to those sticky, humid nights, she slips into her car, turns on the Lyft app, and trades hours of sleep for payroll.

I drove for Uber and Lyft at night to pay my employees because I wanted them engaged, I wanted them there, but the money wasn’t coming in. And I certainly didn’t have it. This is earmarked for this over here, and I have at this time a four-year-old son. So, a lot was going on. My wife would stay home with our son and I would go out driving. And then I would just drive all night into the night and then I would go to, like I said, to the courthouse with a suit in my trunk and then I would change at the courthouse.

At 04:00 in the morning, her passengers were often executives headed for early flights, consultants returning from business dinners, lawyers on the way to the airport. Her passenger list became her curriculum. Every ride was a case study in how businesses actually work, not the sanitized versions from textbooks but the messy practical reality of payroll and marketing budgets, and why companies hemorrhage talent.

You’re driving CEOs, you’re driving marketing experts, you’re driving HR experts, boy, you’re driving everybody. And I used to sit in the car because I was a female, so they would be much more talkative with me. And I would ask them, “What do you do and da, da, da?” And once they would tell me what they’re doing, I’m like, “Okay.” And I’m like, talk to me about… So today’s topic would be benefits. What benefits do you offer your employees? How do you do it? Who do you talk to? How does one get health insurance? You just call Anthem on the phone. Is there a special number?

Then the next one would be marketing. How do you market yourself? What’s your marketing budget? How do you get a billboard? How do you get it? I literally spent the first six months deposing people asking these executives questions. And I was like a sponge taking everything in, and I would journal it at nights so that I could use that for when my company got off the ground, like this is what I’m working toward, this is what I’m working toward. So I was picking years of people that were in business 35 years successfully multi bazillionaires and they were just talking to me.

Most entrepreneurs launched with capital or connections. Brooke launched with questions and a notebook. While her competitors were networking at Bar Association events, she was learning from CEOs who had no idea they were teaching her. Her notebook began to fill with strategies, how companies retain staff, what a marketing budget should look like, why turnover costs more than higher wages? Each ride added another piece to a puzzle she was still learning to name.

And I remember there was this one passenger that all he talked to me about was treatment of employees. It’s all he talked, he’s like, “And the cost of turnover and the cost of having an employee leave and then having to retrain. And the cost of upfront wages versus bonuses, and how bonuses are better than upfront wages. Because if performance…” I mean, people are in business 10 years before they find out. So I came in weaponized, and I’ll tell you it was stressful that first year. It was. There were times where I sat there, I bit my nails. I was so stressed out, I looked at my son. I hated myself that I did this because I’m like, “I can’t provide you everything I need to provide you right now, and my time being one of them.” And luckily I had a very supportive spouse at home and my son was so young that year. Although ,I think I was the hardest on myself during that year, that year was one of the most formidable years I’ve ever lived.

And I’ll tell you, it taught me about grit, it taught me about hard work and accountability, and I’ve never been a person to take anything from anybody. I just don’t. I don’t think anybody owes anybody anything. And if you want to really become humbled into that and understand that nobody really owes anybody anything, go through what I went through for that year. I asked nobody for anything. I didn’t ask for things. I asked how to get them. And I think having that piece was critical in my development of Goff Law firm.

Brooke’s MBA came from the backseat of a Hyundai logged in miles instead of credit hours.

And I’m telling you, people are like, “Oh, that’s terrible.” It was the best thing I could have ever done. Are you kidding me? They don’t teach you that In business school.

Driving Strangers at 04:00 a.m. was just the latest test of endurance. Long before she had employees to pay or billboards to dream of, Brooke was already training herself for the climb.

So, I grew up very poor. My parents both worked full-time.

Let’s go back. Hudson Falls, New York, 1990s population, 7,000.

My mom worked two jobs. We grew up in what people would call the village, or the projects, of Upstate New York. My parents had four children, so there’s four of us, and they did the best they could with what they had. My dad started as a janitor and a farmer, and my mom was a secretary in a hospital. Then she got her cosmetology license and was able to do that on the side, but it was tough. Having two kids now and sending them to camp, we didn’t know what camp was. I think we thought it was in the movies like Parent Trap, right? Where I grew up is very much women have gender roles and males have gender roles. And I was the first female to ever play football in the Foothills region of New York where I’m from.

And I look back and I hear the coaches say, “You’re a girl, you can’t play.” And so they actually told me they were going to try to get me to quit, and they did try to get me to quit. But different world, if we’re doing one of those things where I was so poor because cut type situations, when I was 13, they had to dredge the Hudson River where we lived because they found PCBs in the water. I mean, rough times, rough place. It did define who I became, and it certainly motivated me to take a better life from that.

Brooke mapped her escape route at 13 when most kids were figuring out middle school hierarchies. What does it take to turn a kid from Hudson Falls into a lawyer who won’t quit?

Sixth grade on was posturing myself to get to law school. And everything, every job I took, I saved everything, every book I read. I knew I could never afford college on, it was $5.15 an hour, minimum wage. My first job was McDonald’s. So I’m like, I can’t get to college where it’s $40,000 a year. I’ll have to work until I’m 80.

Hudson Falls, New York, a working class town where few graduates ever left for college. Brooke had decided she would. With no roadmap, she charted her own course.

I didn’t have parents that were college educated. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. So I relied a lot on the guidance counselors, which still at my school were not super resourceful because of where it was. Do you know this good school’s rating thing of a two? So they did their best, right? But even the guidance counselor couldn’t help me. The internet, I mean, I’m aging myself, was not… Like we were still like that the AOL. Like it’s not like it is today where you just Google. And what I did was I just got my hands on every book I could get. Magazine if we were in the store, and I really just tried to find as much information about college and how to get there as possible, because I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. Then I found out you had to go to school for 10 years.

Without Google, without guidance counselors who understood college applications, without parents who could decode financial aid forms, just magazines stolen from waiting rooms and an absolute refusal to accept geography determines destiny.

So then I found out about scholarships. Then what is a scholarship? And I have to go down that. Then I was really good at softball. I played from a little kid. So now I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to be really good at softball.” So all my friends would be out playing, and I’m in the projects of Upstate New York, had taken a wiffle bat and hitting a wiffle ball against the side of my house 200 times a day so I could get the scholarship done. I got the scholarship.

Scholarship in hand, Brooke made it to college. Then came the moment that crystallized everything, a dorm room movie night. Suddenly Brooke could see exactly what she wanted to become.

And one of the movie nights was Erin Brockovich. And I watched it and I’m like, “That’s what I want to do.” I want to do what she does. I want to go knocking on doors. I want to do that. So I will tell you, I figured that out. Okay, now I got to look up personal injury. Now, I have to try to get internship. I got to figure it out. I did it all by myself. Nobody helped me do anything. And then what happens is I get out of law school and it all comes full circle.

Years later, fresh out of law school, the universe delivered.

Not three weeks after I get out of law school, I get this call from one of my business professors, actually, my undergrad professors saying, “Listen, I have a referral I want to send you.” And I’m like, I’ve been out three weeks. I haven’t even gotten my business cards in yet. She goes, “We have to go to Virginia tomorrow, tonight.” And I’m like, I mean, “Okay, I guess.” I don’t know what I’m doing. The case was a case against Boy Scouts of America for abuse. I signed the case, spent the next four months self-funding, flying all over the country, sometimes three airports in two days, meeting with victims and scouts. So it’s just like Erin Brockovich, right? So she found one group, but then it ballooned and she knocked on doors. My knock on doors were getting my hands on rosters of men now that were in the same group and tracing them down.

So I would find them, then I would set it up, and then I would go to the airport and meet them. I met over close to a hundred people in four months all over the country, and that was my version of Erin Brockovich. So it’s so funny, the one thing I wanted to do. Most lawyers don’t do that. Personal injury, you get in a car accident, they call us. My first case was a, let’s play, Erin Brockovich. I didn’t get to settle in my seat, but it defined the lawyer I became and it really set me up to become the empire that we became.

From Hudson Fall’s Law School, Brooke had mastered one skill above all, relentless forward motion. Now, she faced a different challenge entirely. Starting a firm meant learning to hold steady while everything around her shifted, to radiate confidence while privately counting every dollar, every client. Every night she could afford to keep driving strangers around Hartford.

Goff Law Group was born at the kitchen table. I had two employees, it was every day. And I remember I went out, the one thing I purchased for all of us was a damn coffee machine because we needed the coffee machine, because we were all sitting there and I’m like, “We need to stay caffeinated.”

That was the empire. Brooke was betting her marriage, her savings, her four-year-old stability on the idea that she could build something better than what already existed.

So my wife and I had just rented a townhouse in West Hartford that was just built. My wife is a defense attorney. We actually met on opposite sides of a case, if you can believe that. So we met in a deposition, not opposite sides of a case. So, people ask who won? I always say, I did, but she obviously won. We started dating, she turned the case over to somebody else. So we got married, and we weren’t even married. We got married in September of 2017, and I started the business in June 26th, 2017. And I remember, I applied for everything I needed for the business. I was on a cruise with her. I finally got the opportunity to sit down and reflect and I’m like, “Angie, I’m going on my own. This is what we’re doing.” And she’s like, “I fully support you.”

So, I remember we’re at a cruise to Bermuda and we were coming out into New Jersey, and I was counting the minutes on the cruise. I felt bad, I’m like, “Ugh, I need to get to court. I need to file these documents. I need to start this part of my life.” And I remember we pulled into court at 06:00 a.m, and by 06:07 I was moving and grooving, and doing everything I needed to do. I mean defense attorneys, she was at the top of her game. She was doing in defense world very well, but they don’t do the same as successful plaintiffs lawyers.

We empty both of our 401k. And I looked at my wife and I’ll never forget, and I said, “Angie, I’m so young. I was 29 and I don’t want to work another 40 years, but I will.” I’m like, “I will make this money back tenfold.” It takes a year before you make money, by the way. Eight months maybe, especially when you’re new. But how are you going to get the cases? I luckily had made a lot of contacts as a paralegal and a lot of those people were hiring me, which was great. So started with probably a hundred cases, which is a lot, I guess, but managing most of them. I didn’t sleep most of the time. As I said, I drove for Uber and Lyft at night to pay my employees.

Long before her late night drives, she knew what was missing from the billboard’s lining I-95, women. Half the legal profession invisible in the advertising that shapes public perception of who gets to be powerful.

I will tell you that I created my firm when I was in my law firm practice management class in law school. They make you think, they make sit down, and I’ve always had an idea of what I wanted to build and I knew I was going to be totally different. I was going to use my approach to things in my thought processes, in my openness, and it’s so different than everybody else. It’s not the good old boys club. It’s very different, it’s very modern ask, so to speak. And the billboards, the first thing I said, I’m like, “Where are the women?” I know there’s female lawyers, where are the women? I will tell you the billboards, I always had this idea of being different and being able to… I always used to say, public speaking, I could speak in front of 500,000 people. It doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel a nerve at all, because I am who I am. And I use this to say, all I need is the stage.

And if I can just have the stage and be able to connect with people. I’m an ordinary person just like everybody else. I’ve lived just like most people. I’m not the 1% bajillionaire millionaire. Sure, I may live that life to an extent now, but I’m very humbled of that. I grew up differently. I’ve seen all sides of it. I think it makes me a weapon. And if I can take that stage and be able to connect with people on a level nobody else can, I mean, it’s a superpower, right? And that’s what billboards do for me. They’re my stage, and there’s a bit of me in every single billboard. I used to say, if you could take a flip book at the end and you flip it. And all my billboards are there, you can put them all together and see part of my life story there.

When Brooke’s face went up on I-95, smiling, confident, unavoidable, she wasn’t just advertising her firm, she was rewriting the visual language of power. For decades, those billboards told the same story, serious men, dark suits. Brooke changed that narrative.

There are days where you pinch yourself. You can see, I’m in this enormous glass-enclosed office in the corner of my office that was built for me. I have an 80-inch TV in here. I have a golden tea machine in my office. I have all of these accolades all around me. And I have a shoot studio. We built a million dollar shoot studio last year where our podcast. That studio is going to be two. And I’ll tell you, not until this year did I sit there and say, “Wow, you’re 38 and you’ve built things people can’t build in a lifetime.” It’s pretty crazy. But not until this year was I able to really have that moment to sit down and that clarity. I think as an entrepreneur and an attorney or business owner, whatever you want to say, you take that moment to really sit down and let that sink in, you only become better and more motivated from that point.

Success brought a question Brooke hadn’t anticipated. What do you do when you have everything you wanted? When the billboards are up, the firm is thriving, and you’re 38 with more power than you ever imagined possible.

When people hear power, they think of power over people. I don’t think of that. I don’t at all. I don’t care. I’m not any different than anybody that sits out here that works with me or for me, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s power to change. And I think that those are two very different concepts. Power over people means that you need to be in control of people. I don’t think anybody should be in control of anybody else, but I do think, and I know that I have the power to change. And that is a superpower. But that power to change, you have to understand when you have it, can be destructive or it can be amazing.

And you always have to check yourself to make sure that those decisions you’re making with that power are in fact amazing, and that don’t turn in a way that could become destructive. I think everybody in my role should have a therapist of some sort. Therapists are the number one people that check you at the door. And I think people in my generation especially are, they grow ashamed of it. I think it’s the best investment you can make in yourself. As a good therapist, that’s a sounding board that, like I said, just checks you at the door.

Power without purpose is just ego. Brooke learned this by watching what she could change, not just verdicts and settlements, but the fundamental barriers that had nearly stopped her, education, healthcare, opportunity, the things that determine who gets to dream big. Through the Goff Family Foundation, she began pouring resources into lowering the barriers she knew firsthand.

My goal is to be able to utilize my power to change, to raise money, to help educate, to take everything I had difficulty with. Everything that stood in my way of being successful and to create a nice, easier pave the path. It’s not dirt anymore, it’s paved for other young kids, young girls, young boys, to be able to have an easier time getting access to education, healthcare, food, the whole thing in a way that empowers them to find out about themselves what they need to know so they can become successful adults.

The best thing about having money is the power to give it away. I will tell you, you think success feels good? Give money away and watch it change somebody’s life. That’s a superpower. And for me, I had to grow up the way I did so I could fully appreciate that. And like I said, I don’t think all these people get balance sheets and they’re… I don’t care about that. What I care about is that little kid that now has a chance that never would’ve had one if Goff Law Group was not here. So trust me when I tell you, I think a lot of people have it wrong. They’re like, how much money? How much money? How much money? What’s the net worth? Listen, you don’t want to be the richest person in the graveyard. That’s the truth.

The measure of Brooke’s success isn’t in her billboard count or revenue figures, it’s the number of paths she’s created for others. The kitchen table empire became a foundation, literally and figuratively. For women who refuse to accept that the law can only look one way. For every woman who’s been told she doesn’t belong in the corner office, the courtroom, or on the billboard, Brooke’s story is proof that space and power are not given, they’re claimed. This is LawHer. Thank you for spending your summer with us. We are building something behind the scenes, stories that will challenge everything you think you know about what women can build in this profession. Season four is coming soon. Subscribe now.