He was seventeen when a torn meniscus ended a professional soccer career in Ukraine — and put him on a plane to a country whose language he did not yet speak. Boris Grushko has been building on that improbable start ever since. Boris Grushko, a Brooklyn-based personal injury trial lawyer whose road to the courtroom ran through two arenas most attorneys never see: a professional soccer pitch and a Marine Corps boot camp. Grushko arrived in the United States at seventeen with little English, worked weekends as a busboy, and slowly found his footing before enlisting in the Marines out of a search for discipline and direction. Nearly four years of service, he says, gave him the perseverance, the organization, and the leadership that now shape how he prepares a case. The law itself came later, and largely through his sister — an accomplished tax attorney who became mentor, role model, and something like family after his parents stayed behind in Ukraine. Every decision she made with him, he says, was a positive one. Grushko tried on criminal prosecution and criminal defense, enjoying the latter for a full year, before a veteran solo practitioner named Robert Marcus showed him the craft of plaintiff-side injury work. What emerges across the conversation is a through line of care. Grushko is an extrovert by his own description, someone who can walk into a room and find common ground with almost anyone — a judge, a colleague, a client. He ties that ease partly to his own nature and partly to the perseverance the Marine Corps drilled into him: the strength to stand up, introduce yourself, and keep going whether or not it lands. That same discipline shows up in the small habits of his practice — clearing his desk and writing tomorrow’s notes before he leaves each night — and, he argues, in how he treats the people he represents. As he puts it, “you tend to represent people better with care.” He is candid, too, about the losses. Grushko walks through a bruising small claims matter where the law, as he read it, was on his side and the outcome still went the other way — a case where he put in hours of preparation, presented his evidence, and watched the court sympathize with the other party anyway. It taught him to adjust his approach, to sometimes absorb a setback, and to carry on with the plan of his day. Now practicing at Karasik Law Group, P.C., he treats each proceeding as a place to learn as much from difficult results as from favorable ones. Perhaps what stays with the listener most is where Grushko lands in his “Closing Argument,” a reflection on gratitude, opportunity, and what his adopted country made possible for a young man who arrived with almost nothing. Key Takeaways Discipline built outside the law — in sport, in the military — often becomes the foundation of a trial lawyer’s daily practice.Caring genuinely about clients is not soft; it is a competitive advantage that sharpens attention to their needs and details.The ability to find common ground with anyone in the room — judge, opponent, or client — is a skill worth cultivating deliberately.A loss you believe was wrongly decided can teach more than a win, if you use it to adjust your strategy rather than stew in it.Sometimes the right move is to absorb a setback with composure and carry on with the plan of your day.The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai. TLJ Instagram TLJ YouTube TLJ LinkedIn
