Founded by a defense-trained trial lawyer who spent 30-plus years on the plaintiff’s side, RCMS pairs civil-rights claims against police and jails with the personal injury and wrongful death docket the rest of this series covers — territory none of the first ten Phoenix profiles touch.
AN AWESOME ATTORNEYS EDITORIAL PROFILE Independently researched from public records, court filings, news coverage, peer-review directories, and firm-published materials.
ATTORNEY ADVERTISING / IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER. This profile is informational and may constitute attorney advertising. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Case results, recovery figures, ratings, and awards described below are reported by the firm or by third-party rating organizations and are attributed accordingly; they describe past matters and do not guarantee, warrant, or predict the outcome of any future case. Every case is unique and involves risk, including the risk of loss. Prospective clients should consult directly with a licensed attorney about their specific circumstances.
At a Glance
| FIRM | Robbins Curtin Millea & Showalter, LLC (“RCMS”) |
| FOUNDED | 2003, Phoenix; founding partner Joel B. Robbins (per the firm) |
| LEADERSHIP | Joel B. Robbins · Jesse Showalter · Matthew P. Millea · with Lauren Channell and Anne Findling handling plaintiff-side litigation |
| OFFICES | 301 E. Bethany Home Road, Suite B-100, Phoenix, AZ 85012 |
| PRACTICE FOCUS | Civil rights (police misconduct, jail and prison deaths) · personal injury · medical malpractice · wrongful death |
| SIGNATURE EDGE | One of the few Phoenix injury firms built around 42 U.S.C. § 1983 civil-rights litigation against government entities, alongside conventional accident and malpractice work |
| TRACK RECORD | Firm-reported “multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements across civil rights, malpractice, and personal injury cases” (per the firm) |
| FEE MODEL | Contingency-fee representation for personal injury and civil-rights matters (per the firm; specific terms confirmed case-by-case) |
| RECOGNITION | Four attorneys named to the 2026 Best Lawyers in America® edition; ranked by Best Law Firms in five specialty areas; four attorneys on Super Lawyers/Rising Stars lists |
| CONTACT | (602) 400-4400 · rcmslaw.com |
Phoenix has no shortage of firms that will take a car-crash case. It has far fewer that will also take on a police department. Robbins Curtin Millea & Showalter Phoenix occupies that second, thinner lane: a firm built by a career plaintiff’s trial lawyer who spends as much time litigating excessive-force and in-custody-death claims against Arizona municipalities as he does representing people hurt in ordinary accidents. Of the ten firms already profiled in this series, none combine that federal civil-rights docket with a conventional personal injury and wrongful death practice. This profile examines how RCMS built that combination, who carries it today, and what it means for a prospective client walking through either door.
Origin: From Prosecuting Insurance Defense to Suing the Government
Joel B. Robbins graduated from the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in 1986 and began his career at a mid-sized Phoenix firm, according to his own professional biography. By 1989, three years into practice, Robbins had shifted his focus permanently toward serious personal injury, wrongful death, and civil-rights matters — a pivot the firm’s own materials date to that year and that it has never reversed. Per the firm, RCMS traces its roots to 2003, when Robbins and colleagues built a practice around the belief that Arizona needed a firm willing to take civil-rights and serious-injury cases other firms would decline.
That civil-rights emphasis was not incidental. Robbins has represented clients in matters ranging from construction and automobile accidents to hot-air-balloon crashes and police shootings, per his own biography, and has spent decades building the kind of trial record that firm profiles elsewhere in this series associate with plaintiff’s work generally — except here it is aimed as often at a police department or county jail as at an insurance company. He served as the 2016–2017 Phoenix Chapter President of the American Board of Trial Advocates and as the 2017–2018 Trial Lawyer of the Year for the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association (also known as the Arizona Association for Justice), which he later led as president, according to the firm.
Leadership: A Four-Lawyer Bench Built Around One Docket
Jesse Showalter
Showalter focuses his practice on civil-rights cases involving misconduct by government officials, per the firm, with what its materials describe as extensive experience in both Arizona state and federal courts. He is frequently the attorney named in local media coverage of the firm’s higher-profile civil-rights matters, according to the firm’s own public materials.
Matthew P. Millea
Millea has been selected to the Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists, per Super Lawyers’ own attorney directory, with a practice that spans personal injury, civil rights, medical malpractice, and construction litigation.
Lauren Channell and Anne Findling
Channell joined the firm in 2018 and represents plaintiffs across government-liability, civil-rights, automobile and commercial-trucking, and premises-liability matters, per the firm. Findling’s practice concentrates on claims against governmental entities and public employees, with an emphasis on police accountability and correctional healthcare — including jail-suicide and inmate-assault cases — according to the firm’s own attorney biography.
The Differentiator: One Firm, Two Kinds of Defendant
Every firm profiled so far in this series fights insurance companies. RCMS does that too — but its stated core practice, per the firm, is “pursuing accountability in civil rights matters involving police misconduct, wrongful convictions, and inmates’ rights,” brought principally under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, alongside “serious personal injury claims arising from auto accidents and medical negligence” and wrongful-death representation for grieving families. The firm’s own practice-area list names excessive force, police shootings, deaths in custody, positional asphyxia, taser injuries, and prison deaths as a distinct pillar sitting next to the more familiar car-accident, premises-liability, and construction-accident caseload that fills the rest of this series. That pairing is the firm’s signature: an injured accident victim and the family of someone who died in a county jail can walk through the same door.
What Robbins Curtin Millea & Showalter Handles
- Civil rights litigation: excessive force, police shootings, deaths in custody, positional asphyxia, taser injuries, and prison deaths, brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments (per the firm)
- Personal injury: car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, pedestrian and bicycle accidents, and premises liability (per the firm)
- Medical malpractice and construction and workplace accidents (per the firm)
- Wrongful death claims arising from any of the above (per the firm)
The firm represents clients statewide, per its own materials, and has “handled cases involving some of the state’s most prominent law enforcement agencies, including municipal police departments and county sheriff’s offices.” RCMS operates on a contingency-fee basis for personal injury and civil-rights matters, with specific terms set case-by-case, consistent with standard practice among plaintiff’s firms profiled elsewhere in this series.
A Case in Progress: McAlpin v. City of Phoenix
RCMS’s civil-rights docket is not only a matter of firm description — one of its active matters has drawn independent, multi-outlet news coverage over the past two years. On August 19, 2024, Phoenix police officers Benjamin Harris and Kyle Sue detained Tyron McAlpin, a Black man who is deaf and has cerebral palsy, near an Indian School Road business after another individual falsely accused him of trespassing, according to reporting by AZFamily and KJZZ. Body-camera video showed the officers repeatedly punching and tasing McAlpin, who could not hear their commands; a third officer, Jorge Acosta, was separately accused in the resulting complaint of falsifying the police report used to justify the arrest. McAlpin was jailed for 24 days on felony assault and resisting-arrest charges that the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office later dropped.
RCMS attorney Jesse M. Showalter filed a $3.5 million notice of claim against the City of Phoenix on McAlpin’s behalf on November 19, 2024 — invoking the same 180-day government notice-of-claim statute discussed in the Legal Backdrop section below — seeking to resolve claims including wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution, excessive force, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, per the notice’s own language as reported by NewsOne. When the city did not respond before the claim expired, Showalter filed a federal civil rights complaint on March 5, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona (McAlpin v. City of Phoenix, et al., No. 2:25-cv-00757), alleging battery, negligence, and Fourth Amendment violations, and seeking compensatory and punitive damages plus attorney’s fees rather than a specified dollar figure, per AZFamily’s and KJZZ’s reporting on the filing. Phoenix police subsequently suspended the two officers without pay and ordered de-escalation training, per Fox 10 Phoenix. As of a mid-June 2026 docket entry reported by LegalClarity, the case remains active, with the parties currently engaged in settlement discussions; no verdict or settlement has been reported as of this profile’s research date.
Track Record
RCMS describes its record in aggregate rather than publishing an itemized results table: the firm states its attorneys bring “more than 75 years of combined trial experience” and that its “record includes multi-million dollar verdicts and settlements across civil rights, malpractice, and personal injury cases,” per the firm’s own site. A legal-referral directory unaffiliated with the firm has separately reported a $5 million settlement in 2025 in a high-profile excessive-force matter; because that figure comes from a third-party marketing site rather than the firm’s own published materials or court records, Awesome Attorneys is not treating it as independently confirmed and flags it here for verification rather than stating it as fact.
Past-Results Disclaimer. Every case is different, and results depend on each matter’s specific facts and circumstances. Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any other matter. Figures above are reported by the firm (or the cited publication) on its own published materials and have not been independently audited by Awesome Attorneys; amounts may reflect gross recoveries before fees, costs, and liens.
In Their Clients’ Words
RCMS’s own site publishes a handful of client testimonials describing the firm’s communication and follow-through during litigation — clients describe feeling supported “during such a difficult time” and credit the firm with treating their case “with respect” from beginning to end, per the firm’s published testimonials. Because the versions available to Awesome Attorneys at research time were not consistently accompanied by a verifiable reviewer name and platform, this profile summarizes the pattern rather than reproducing individual quotes verbatim; readers can review the sourced originals directly on the firm’s site.
Beyond the Courtroom
Robbins’s professional leadership — a term as Phoenix Chapter President of the American Board of Trial Advocates and, later, the presidency of the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association — reflects a form of bar and community involvement distinct from the pro bono programs highlighted elsewhere in this series, per the firm’s own biography. Awesome Attorneys did not identify a published record of dedicated pro bono clinics, scholarships, or named charitable programs at RCMS comparable to those documented for other firms in this series; if such programs exist, they were not part of the firm’s public materials reviewed for this profile.
Recognition
- Four RCMS attorneys named to the 2026 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® (per Best Lawyers)
- Ranked by Best Law Firms for excellence across five specialty areas (per Best Lawyers/Best Law Firms)
- Four attorneys selected to the Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists for Arizona (per Super Lawyers)
- Attorneys separately recognized by Expertise.com, per the firm’s own site
The Arizona Legal Backdrop
RCMS’s dual practice sits at the intersection of two distinct legal regimes, and a reader evaluating either side of the firm’s docket should understand both. What follows is general legal information, not legal advice.
Ordinary injury claims. Arizona’s general statute of limitations for personal injury and wrongful death claims is two years (A.R.S. § 12-542). Arizona follows pure comparative negligence (A.R.S. § 12-2505): a claimant’s damages are reduced by their own percentage of fault but are not barred outright, no matter how high that percentage runs. Wrongful-death claims are governed by their own statutes (A.R.S. §§ 12-611 through 12-613), and the limitations clock is tolled for minors and people of unsound mind until the disability ends (A.R.S. § 12-502).
Claims against the government. Because RCMS’s civil-rights docket runs directly against municipalities, counties, and their employees, the firm’s practice depends on rules the rest of this series rarely touches. Claims against a city, county, or other Arizona public entity or employee require a formal notice of claim within 180 days of the injury (A.R.S. § 12-821.01) and suit within one year (A.R.S. § 12-821) — both dramatically shorter than the standard two-year window, and both strictly enforced. The McAlpin matter above illustrates the sequence directly: a notice of claim within the statutory window, followed by a federal complaint once that claim went unanswered. Separately, federal civil-rights claims brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for constitutional violations by police officers or jail staff are not filed under Arizona’s tort statutes at all; they carry their own federal pleading standards, and government defendants frequently invoke qualified immunity, a doctrine that can shield individual officers from liability even where a constitutional violation is later found to have occurred. Navigating both tracks — the state notice-of-claim deadlines and the federal § 1983 framework — in the same case is precisely the kind of dual competency this firm’s practice depends on.
This section is general legal information about Arizona and federal law, not legal advice, and may not reflect changes after July 2026. Anyone with a potential claim, particularly against a government entity, should consult a licensed Arizona attorney immediately given the shortened deadlines involved.
The Awesome Attorneys Assessment
RCMS occupies territory this series has not previously covered: a firm whose founder built thirty-plus years of trial experience, then pointed a meaningful share of it at police departments and county jails rather than only at insurance companies. The McAlpin litigation shows that practice in action, independently confirmed by multiple news organizations rather than only the firm’s own account — a stronger form of evidence than the aggregate, firm-reported figures this profile relies on elsewhere. That is also a harder, slower, and more legally intricate practice than a conventional accident docket: civil-rights plaintiffs face qualified immunity, municipal-liability doctrine, and a federal court system layered on top of Arizona’s own notice-of-claim traps, and the McAlpin case itself remains unresolved after nearly two years. The trade-off for a prospective client is that RCMS still discloses fewer itemized dollar results than firms profiled earlier in this series, and the one settlement figure attributed to the firm by an unaffiliated marketing site remains unverified. For someone with an ordinary accident claim, that may simply mean a smaller public paper trail than a Goldberg & Osborne or a Snyder & Wenner. For someone whose case involves a jail death, a shooting, or in-custody misconduct, RCMS is one of the few Phoenix firms whose civil-rights work is independently, publicly documented in this much detail.
Methodology & Sourcing
This profile was researched from Robbins Curtin Millea & Showalter’s own website and attorney biographies (rcmslaw.com), the firm’s Best Lawyers and Best Law Firms directory listings, its Super Lawyers profile, and its Better Business Bureau listing. Facts are attributed to the firm or the cited third party throughout and were not independently re-verified against court records, bar records, or the conferring organizations beyond the public listings cited. Readers should confirm any specific detail directly with the firm before relying on it, and should treat the single third-party-reported settlement figure noted in the Track Record section as unconfirmed.
Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice
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Awesome Attorneys maintains a separate attorney directory. Only listings there marked “Sponsored” or “Ad” reflect a paid or sponsored relationship with Awesome Attorneys; this editorial profile is not such a listing.
Facts, figures, and claims in this profile were independently researched from public sources as described in the Methodology & Sourcing section and are current only as of the research date; they are subject to change without notice, and readers should confirm any detail directly with the firm before relying on it. This notice supplements, and does not replace, the Attorney Advertising notice at the top of this profile.