The Kind of Attorney You Want in Your Corner: A Conversation with Ethan Minkin

BS Law: You’ve spent decades trying cases across a huge range of matters. What first drew you to litigation, and what’s kept you doing it this long?

Ethan: Honestly, I didn’t set out to be a litigator. I got a master’s degree in public health before law school. My father was a physician, and I grew up around healthcare, so it always felt like familiar territory. When I went to law school, I still didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it. I took a job at a large firm with basically no interest in litigating. I hated public speaking. Then the market shifted early in my career, corporate work dried up for a stretch, and I ended up in a courtroom almost by accident.

It wasn’t love at first sight. The first cases were stressful, and there was a lot I didn’t know yet. But the more I did it, the more I realized litigation is like a very long chess match. No two cases are the same, you’re dealing with real people and real personalities, and you’re constantly trying to figure out the most effective way to get your client what they need. I never expected this to become my career, and I definitely never expected to love it as much as I do.

BS Law: You’ve represented everyone from individual physicians to some very large companies. Does the way you approach a case change based on who you’re representing?

Ethan: It has to. Different types of clients come into litigation with completely different philosophies, and understanding that early changes everything about how you handle the matter. Larger organizations, especially ones that deal with disputes regularly, tend to treat litigation as simply part of doing business. It’s a process, almost like any other business risk, and they expect it to come up periodically.

Smaller businesses tend to experience it very differently. Getting sued isn’t a routine event for them. It’s disruptive, it’s stressful, and there’s real fear attached to it, because there’s often more at stake relative to the size of the business. Recognizing which kind of client you’re dealing with, and adjusting how you communicate and how you strategize accordingly, is one of the more underrated skills in this job. You can’t treat every client like they’ve been through this before, because most of them haven’t.

BS Law: You spent years doing transactional and finance work before focusing on litigation full time. Does that background actually help you in the courtroom?

Ethan: Enormously, and I think it’s something the profession undervalues. When you’ve spent time building agreements, understanding how deals are structured, why certain provisions exist, and what actually makes a clause enforceable versus just boilerplate copied from the last deal, you develop an instinct for where problems live inside a contract or a transaction. When a dispute lands on your desk later, you’re not starting from zero trying to understand the structure. You already know where to look.

I believe every litigator would benefit from doing some transactional work at some point in their career. It’s one thing to argue about whether a provision was breached. It’s another to actually understand why that provision was written the way it was, and whether it was ever enforceable to begin with. That difference shows up constantly in complex commercial and healthcare disputes, and it’s part of what I try to bring to a case that a purely litigation-trained attorney might not.

BS Law: Let’s talk about what’s happening right now. We’re seeing a lot of pharmacies and telehealth companies get caught off guard by GLP-1-related legal issues. What are you seeing?

Ethan: If you’re a pharmacy or a telehealth company involved in GLP-1s in any way, my advice is simple: call your attorney now, not after you’ve been sued. There’s an enormous amount of litigation forming around this space, and it’s coming from a couple of different directions.

One is straightforward false advertising claims: class actions built around the idea that a product doesn’t work as advertised. The other direction, which a lot of pharmacies and telehealth companies don’t see coming, involves their websites. We’re seeing claims industry-wide involving website data collection that can implicate protected health information.

What we recommend, every time, is to start with an audit before there’s a problem. Once you know exactly what’s happening on your site, we can help fix it. Audits and any resulting fixes cost real money, but so does defending a class action — legal fees, potential judgments, and the reputational fallout. Every situation is different, and there’s no way to know for certain what a given case will cost either way. But in our experience, clients who get ahead of it tend to be glad they did.

This isn’t a trend that’s going away, either. There are firms that specialize in bringing these claims, and as GLP-1 products keep evolving and the market keeps growing, the exposure is only going to grow with it.

BS Law: Are there other areas where you’re seeing healthcare and pharmacy clients get exposed to litigation risk?

Ethan: Trademark disputes are becoming a real issue in this space too. As the GLP-1 market has grown, some manufacturers have gotten much more aggressive about protecting their trademarks, pursuing claims against telehealth platforms and pharmacies they believe are using their product names or marks improperly in marketing. Beyond that, we’re seeing a real mix: everything from 340B program disputes to general compounding pharmacy issues. It’s not confined to one type of matter. If anything, that’s the pattern worth paying attention to. Healthcare and pharmacy businesses are exposed on more fronts right now than most of them realize.

BS Law: So say someone reading this actually gets served with a lawsuit, or receives a demand letter. What should their first move be?

Ethan: Call an attorney immediately. That’s not just something we say to get the phone to ring. If you don’t respond to a lawsuit, the other side can get a default judgment against you, and at that point your options shrink fast. It’s a much worse position to be in than if you’d picked up the phone on day one.

The second thing, and this is harder for people to actually do, is to treat it as a business decision. When a client gets sued, or gets a letter threatening suit, the first reaction is almost always emotional. Nobody enjoys being accused of something, and it’s natural to want to respond to that feeling instead of the substance of the claim. But the businesses that come out ahead are the ones who can step back and ask what this is actually worth, what the exposure really is, and what they’re willing to do about it, the same way they’d approach any other risk to the business. That’s a hard shift to make on your own in the moment. It’s a big part of what we help clients do.

BS Law: Last question. After decades of trials, what do you think actually separates a good litigator from an average one?

Ethan: A lot of it comes down to wanting to win. I played competitive sports growing up, and litigation has become that same outlet for me now. I genuinely want to win for my clients, and I think that drive matters more than people give it credit for.

But the harder skill, and the one I spend the most time on with clients, is helping them separate emotion from business decisions once a case is actually underway. There’s usually a real emotional charge behind a dispute, and you can see it building in the correspondence before anyone ever files anything. That’s completely natural. Nobody enjoys being in a fight, and it’s easy to let frustration start driving decisions that should really be driven by risk and cost. Part of my job is noticing when that’s happening and walking a client back toward the actual question in front of them: what do you want, what’s it worth to you, and what are you willing to do to get there.

The clients who do best are the ones who eventually treat the decisions in front of them, what to pursue, how hard to push, when to hold firm, as business decisions about risk rather than a referendum on who was right. Knowing the law matters, but so does helping a client think clearly about risk when it’s hardest for them to do that on their own. That’s the kind of attorney you want in your corner: someone who’s going to fight for you, and who’s going to help you think straight while doing it.