Michael Stites, Esq.

While Michael may only be 37 years old, he has already achieved a long and successful legal career spanning nearly two decades. His career started at the ground floor and has basically seen him hold every possible position one could have at a law firm… from front desk secretary answering phones, to paralegal, to associate attorney, all the way to owner and managing partner of a multi-million dollar auto-accident and real estate practice with hundreds of clients. 

Michael’s legal journey began seventeen years ago as a junior in undergrad when he took an internship with another prominent auto-accident law firm here in Orlando. What started out as just a summer internship, or so he thought, quickly transformed into an intense, 2 year career-level job. “Yeah, I’ll be honest; when I first started out I may have gotten in a little over my head. I was just a twenty-one year old college kid that thought I was signing up for a fun little 3 month internship just so I could have something to slap on a resume… BOY was I wrong.” 

What Michael would quickly realize is that his first boss was an extremely intense, no-nonsense attorney that demanded the same level of productivity from his summer interns as he did from his forty-year-old associate attorneys. No exceptions. “To be blunt, my first job scared the hell out of me. For about the first two months, I would wake up every morning at 6:00 AM, around the same time my roommates were going to bed, and I would just sit at the edge of my bed contemplating if I was even cut out for this type of job or if the law was just too much for me. But you know, for some reason I just couldn’t quit. It wasn’t in me.” So Michael stayed chipping away at that “internship” for the last two years of his undergrad career, eventually working almost full-time and overseeing over 50 case files. “I don’t think I realized it until probably a decade later, but that “grit” I learned at that first internship, to dig down and keep pushing when things got stressful or scary, that laid the groundwork for the rest of my career and has gotten me to where I am today.”

Grit is the characteristic that Michael feels has most benefited, and ultimately, carried him all these years. “Being a lawyer is already a tough job and if you want to be a SUCCESSFUL lawyer, it’s even harder. The hours are grueling, and in the beginning, the pay isn’t great. You have to be tough in this business or you won’t last.”

His legal career has no doubt been a long and rewarding one, filled with many ups and downs over the last 17 years, but when you ask Michael if he plans on dialing it back now that he has other attorneys and staff working for him… “I’m just getting started.”