Dan Knowlton

More About Dan Knowlton

I’m a third-generation lawyer. My grandfather, Horace John Knowlton, started practicing law in Utah in 1923. My father, also named Dan, still practices family law in California. If you google my name, you’ll see results for both of us, who look alike. Law runs in the blood. Unlike many lawyers, however, I didn’t sprint from kindergarten through law school. I spent some time in the Army, serving as an infantryman with the 2nd Infantry Division at Camp Greaves, South Korea, and with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

I lived some life before I made my way to law school. After being admitted to the Idaho Bar, I took a clerkship with a district court judge, the Hon. Melissa Moody, at the Ada County District Court. If you’re not conversant in talking like a lawyer–that is, you’re a normal person–a clerk is essentially “the judge’s lawyer,” an attorney who assists the judge in getting it right. And Ada County is the busiest courthouse in Idaho. After my clerkship ended, I worked with a boutique insurance defense and coverage law firm in Boise. That firm later merged with a prominent Boise full-service law firm, where I defended cases for insurance companies.

 I eventually moved to another full-service firm, the largest law firm in Idaho, where I continued defending cases for the insurance companies and analyzing particularly thorny insurance coverage questions for those same companies. I had the office at the top of the shiny building in Boise, with a marble lobby and a long elevator ride up. I decided to leave. Somewhere along the way, I realized that I didn’t want to be a partner in a fancy firm. I didn’t want to work for the insurance companies, to live a life measured by the tenths of a billable hour, to nickel-and-dime real people so that some insurance conglomerate’s quarterly earnings report ticked up. I didn’t want to spend my life representing businesses that had hurt others and were now trying to buy their way out cheaply. When my wife and I had the opportunity to return to Twin Falls, her hometown, we jumped. 

Now, I use everything I learned working for the insurance companies to help real people hurt by someone else’s carelessness. The Real Stuff Dan lives in Twin Falls, Idaho with his lovely wife and the world’s most reasonable dog. They have three children–a daughter and son working through college, a beautiful little girl who loves princesses and superheroes, and that mom and dad fight bad guys for a living.