Begam Marks & Traulsen Phoenix was founded in 1957 — two decades before lawyers could legally advertise — and it has been trying Arizona injury cases ever since. The three-attorney boutique behind the “Make America Safer” motto closes our series as its smallest firm, its longest continuous lineage, and a standing argument that in the plaintiffs’ bar, reputation was the original advertisement.
PHOENIX — JULY 9, 2026 · BY THE AWESOME ATTORNEYS EDITORIAL BOARD
READER NOTICE. This profile is independent editorial content produced by Awesome Attorneys. No law firm can purchase placement in, or influence over, our editorial series; sponsored features on Awesome Attorneys are always labeled as such. This article is general information about a law firm — it is not legal advice, and reading it creates no attorney–client relationship. Case results depend on the unique facts and law of each matter; past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict a similar outcome in any future matter.
AT A GLANCE — BEGAM MARKS & TRAULSEN, P.A.
| FIRM | Begam Marks & Traulsen, P.A. — successor shingle to Langerman, Begam & Lewis |
|---|---|
| FOUNDED | 1957, Phoenix, Arizona — practicing personal injury law exclusively |
| MOTTO | “Make America Safer” |
| HERITAGE | Co-founder Robert G. Begam (d. 2015) — past president, Association of Trial Lawyers of America |
| ATTORNEYS | Stanley J. Marks (senior partner) · Richard P. Traulsen (managing attorney) · Steven J. German (of counsel) |
| OFFICE | 11201 N. Tatum Blvd., Ste. 110, Phoenix, AZ 85028 |
| PRACTICE FOCUS | Personal injury & wrongful death; trucking collisions; medical malpractice; insurance bad faith; burn injury |
| FEE MODEL | Contingency — no recovery, no fee; free consultations; costs advanced in most cases (firm statements) |
| CONTACT | (602) 254-6071 · arizonapersonalinjuryattorneys.net |
I. The Long Game
Nearly every firm in this series was built for the world that Bates v. State Bar of Arizona made — a world of billboards, jingles, and toll-free numbers. This one was built before it. When the firm now called Begam Marks & Traulsen Phoenix opened its doors in Phoenix in 1957, a plaintiffs’ lawyer could not lawfully buy an advertisement of any kind. A practice grew or died on verdicts, on referrals, and on a name spoken well in courthouse hallways. Sixty-nine years later, the firm still runs on the same fuel.
The name at the front of the door belongs to Robert G. Begam, and his obituary reads like a period drama of the American bar. Raised in Brooklyn, an early graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, he went through Yale College and finished Yale Law School among its youngest graduates, was admitted in New York in 1952, and came to Phoenix in 1954, where he served in the United States Air Force. He stayed, took the Arizona bar in 1956, and soon co-founded the partnership then styled Langerman, Begam & Lewis. Over a fifty-year Phoenix career he argued Arizona’s side of the Colorado River water-rights fight before the United States Supreme Court, kept a docket that ranged to the United Farm Workers and the Navajo Nation, and rose to lead the national plaintiffs’ bar itself as president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America — the organization known today as the American Association for Justice. He died in 2015, at 87, having also directed more than a few plays and written two novels along the way.
The shingle has evolved with the generations — Langerman, Begam & Lewis; then Langerman, Begam, Lewis & Marks, the name under which the firm appears in the Arizona Reports as amicus counsel for the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association in Rawlings v. Apodaca, 151 Ariz. 149 (1986), the decision that anchors Arizona’s modern law of insurance bad faith; then Begam & Marks; and, today, Begam Marks & Traulsen. The founder’s name remains on the door in the way the profession has always honored its architects: posthumously, and on purpose.
For its first twenty years, this firm’s only lawful advertisement was its reputation. It has never really switched marketing strategies since.
II. “Make America Safer”
The firm’s motto is not a slogan bolted on by a branding agency; it is three words that sit in the site footer next to the copyright line, and the senior partner’s biography reads like its footnotes. Stanley J. Marks founded the Arizona chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and chaired it for several years; he now sits on the national board of We Save Lives, the highway-safety organization started by MADD founder Candace Lightner. He is a past president of the National Crime Victims Bar Association, a past national board member of the Public Justice Foundation, and a former officer and board member of the Arizona Burn Foundation. The theory of practice underneath all of it is the old, unfashionable one: that a well-tried injury case is a public-safety instrument — that verdicts deter what regulations miss.
III. The Bench Today
Marks, the senior partner, has practiced for more than fifty years. He took his B.A. at Cornell in 1961 and his LL.B. at New York University in 1965, collecting American Jurisprudence Awards in procedure and torts, and he is admitted before the United States Supreme Court. He led the Arizona Trial Lawyers Association as president in 1973–74, served the American Association for Justice as a state delegate and Board of Governors member, and was a founding member — and later president — of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, the same public-interest institution a founder profiled earlier in this series helped establish. He is AV Preeminent rated, has been selected to Southwest Super Lawyers every year since 2007, and belongs to the National Trial Lawyers’ Top 100 for Arizona; his firm biography also lists him as a judge pro tempore of the Maricopa County Superior Court and a magistrate for the Town of Paradise Valley.
Richard P. Traulsen, the firm’s managing attorney, is its trucking-litigation spine. With the firm since 1996, he took his J.D. cum laude from Arizona State in 1994 with membership in the Order of the Coif, edited legislative review for the Arizona State Law Journal, and clerked for Judge Noel Fidel of the Arizona Court of Appeals. He is a past national chair of the American Association for Justice’s Interstate Trucking Litigation Group, teaches on the faculty of its trial-advocacy college for truck-collision cases, and devotes much of his docket to crashes involving semis and commercial carriers, alongside car, bicycle, motorcycle, boating, and construction cases, medical malpractice, and dangerous road design. He carries Martindale-Hubbell’s highest peer and client ratings, belongs to the National Trial Lawyers’ Top 100 for Arizona, and his biography likewise lists him as a judge pro tempore in the Maricopa County Superior Court.
Steven J. German, of counsel, supplies the insurance-bad-faith depth — fitting for a firm whose earlier name sits in the Rawlings caption. A cum laude graduate of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law (1992), he began on the defense side at a large downtown Phoenix firm, learning how insurers build their walls, then crossed over and opened his own plaintiffs’ practice in 1999. His work centers on insurance bad faith, catastrophic collisions including rollover and tread-separation cases, birth injury, and nursing home neglect; his biography reports tens of millions of dollars recovered against disability insurers, including a jury verdict above $6.5 million in September 2017.
IV. The Practice Today at Begam Marks & Traulsen Phoenix
Begam Marks & Traulsen practices personal injury law exclusively — serving as a Phoenix truck accident lawyer, Phoenix burn injury lawyer, and Arizona insurance bad faith attorney among its core roles — car, truck, motorcycle, and bicycle collisions; burn injuries; premises liability; construction accidents; medical malpractice including birth injury; nursing home neglect; insurance bad faith; and wrongful death. What distinguishes the firm’s public posture is a set of service commitments unusual in their specificity: the firm states that a caller will be on the phone with an attorney within five minutes, that clients communicate directly with the attorneys rather than being routed to assistants, that lawyers are reachable after hours and on weekends, that they will meet clients at home or in the hospital, and that in most cases the firm advances all litigation costs on top of its no-recovery, no-fee contingency model. Those are the firm’s own representations — but they are representations a three-lawyer shop can only afford to make if it intends to keep them.
V. The Ledger
Where some storied firms publish institutional claims and ask for trust, this one publishes the table. The firm reports more than $500 million recovered for its clients across its history — including as an Arizona wrongful death lawyer in cases like the ones below — and it maintains an itemized public ledger of representative outcomes, from which the entries below are drawn. All figures are the firm’s own reported results.
Representative Results — As Published by the Firm
| RECOVERY | MATTER | CATEGORY |
|---|---|---|
| $8.9M | Failure to diagnose a heart condition; permanent brain damage | Medical malpractice |
| $5.25M | Runaway tractor-trailer | Wrongful death |
| $4.25M | Faulty railing on a construction site | Construction accident |
| $2.5M | Stovetop burn | Burn injury |
| $1.9M | Tractor-trailer rear-end collision | Wrongful death |
RESULTS DISCLAIMER. Every case is different. The recoveries above depend on the unique facts, law, and circumstances of each matter; past results do not guarantee, warrant, or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. All figures are the firm’s own published results and have not been independently audited by Awesome Attorneys.
VI. What Clients Say
Awesome Attorneys does not reproduce testimonials verbatim; we read them in volume and report the pattern. Across reviews published on the firm’s website and major directories, the recurring theme is that the firm’s unusual service promises are honored in practice. Motorcycle-crash clients describe retaining Traulsen after insurers stonewalled them and receiving settlements that exceeded their expectations. Multiple reviewers independently praise the same paralegal by name for step-by-step guidance and constant case updates — the signature of a small office where staff continuity is a feature, not an accident. The composite is a service reputation built on responsiveness — which, for a firm founded when reputation was the only permissible marketing, is less a strategy than an inheritance.
VII. Community & Public Service
The firm’s civic record concentrates, fittingly, on safety and on victims. Marks’s founding and chairing of MADD’s Arizona chapter and his current We Save Lives board seat sit alongside his past presidency of the National Crime Victims Bar Association and his burn-foundation service. Traulsen is a past president of the board of the Arizona Hemophilia Association, a supporter of the 100 Club, a MADD volunteer, and a Public Justice board participant, and his biography notes a continuing-education habit running at several times the State Bar’s annual requirement, including lecturing at programs on commercial trucking litigation. The through-line from the founder’s generation — Begam’s boards ran from the Boys & Girls Club to Arizona’s major theatres — is that the firm has treated Phoenix as a hometown rather than a market.
VIII. Credentials & Recognition
Both partners hold Martindale-Hubbell’s highest peer-review rating — Marks is AV Preeminent rated, and Traulsen’s biography reports the directory’s top peer and client ratings along with a Client Distinction Award. Marks has been selected to Southwest Super Lawyers annually since 2007 and to Arizona’s Finest Lawyers — the Super Lawyers directory’s own firm profile shows two of the firm’s attorneys selected to its Super Lawyers or Rising Stars lists — and both partners belong to the National Trial Lawyers’ Top 100 for Arizona. Forbes Advisor’s 2023 best-of lists for Phoenix included both — Marks among the best personal injury lawyers, Traulsen among the best car accident lawyers — per the firm’s biographies, which link the listings. The firm has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau since May 2026. In keeping with Arizona ethics rules, Awesome Attorneys notes that no attorney is described as a specialist in this article and that the firm’s current biographies claim no State Bar certified-specialist status.
IX. The Arizona Legal Backdrop
The rules this firm has practiced under for sixty-nine years remain among the most claimant-favorable in the country — and this firm was already decades old when several of them took their modern form. Most personal injury and medical malpractice actions must be filed within two years of accrual under A.R.S. § 12-542, with wrongful death claims accruing at the death of the injured person. Arizona is a pure comparative fault state under A.R.S. § 12-2505: contributory negligence and assumption of risk are always questions for the jury, and a claimant’s damages are reduced in proportion to the claimant’s own fault rather than barred — though the statute allows no comparative recovery to a claimant who intentionally, willfully, or wantonly caused or contributed to the injury or wrongful death. Article 2, Section 31 of the Arizona Constitution forbids any law limiting the amount of damages recoverable for death or personal injury, subject to a single, voter-approved exception shielding crime victims from damage claims brought by persons injured in the course of their own felony conduct.
And there is a closing symmetry worth naming. The rule that governs how every firm in this series may describe itself — ER 7.1’s command that lawyer communications not be false or misleading, which since January 1, 2021 has also absorbed the state’s certified-specialist regime — polices a marketplace of lawyer speech that did not lawfully exist when this firm was founded. Begam Marks & Traulsen spent its first two decades in the pre-Bates world this series began by describing, competing on the only signal then allowed: results. That the firm still leads with a results ledger rather than a slogan is, in its way, the oldest advertising compliance program in Arizona.
X. Editorial Assessment — and a Series Coda
Awesome Attorneys’ assessment: Begam Marks & Traulsen Phoenix is the series’ proof that durability is a credential. It is the smallest firm we have profiled and the oldest continuously operating one, and the density of bar leadership per lawyer — a national ATLA presidency in its lineage, a state trial-lawyers presidency and a national crime-victims-bar presidency in its senior partner, a national trucking-litigation chairmanship in its managing attorney — is unmatched by any roster ten times its size. The honest caveats are the mirror image of its virtues: a three-attorney firm is necessarily selective in its caseload; several of its recognitions are documented through its own biographies (with links to the conferring publishers) rather than pages Awesome Attorneys fetched independently; and the marquee name is a memorial, not a practicing partner. None of that dents the core proposition. This firm was excellent before excellence could be advertised, and its ledger has been doing the talking for sixty-nine years.
With this profile, the Editorial Prestige series on Arizona personal injury closes at ten. We began with the institutions, moved through the brands, the verdict specialists, and the constitutional origin story of lawyer advertising itself, and we end with the firm that predates the entire conversation. The series’ method — every claim traced to a primary source, every figure attributed, every superlative earned or cut — was built for exactly this market: one where the loudest voice and the best lawyer are not always the same office. Ten firms in, the distinction still holds.
Methodology
This profile was prepared by the Awesome Attorneys Editorial Board and verified on July 9, 2026 against primary sources: the firm’s website (arizonapersonalinjuryattorneys.net), including its attorney roster, the individual biography pages of Stanley J. Marks, Richard P. Traulsen, and Steven J. German, and its published case-results ledger; the Arizona Republic obituary of Robert G. Begam (2015); the Arizona Reports caption of Rawlings v. Apodaca, 151 Ariz. 149 (1986); the Better Business Bureau business profile; and, for the legal backdrop, the Arizona Legislature’s static statutory files for A.R.S. §§ 12-542 and 12-2505 and Ariz. Const. art. 2, § 31 (azleg.gov) together with State Bar of Arizona guidance on ER 7.1. Attorney recognitions are stated as documented in the firm’s biographies, which link the conferring publishers. Claims that could not be traced to such sources were cut. Figures identified as firm-reported are the firm’s own statements. No firm may purchase placement in this series; Begam Marks & Traulsen did not pay for, review, or approve this article. This is the tenth and final article of the Editorial Prestige series.
Publisher Disclosure & Independence Notice
This profile is an independent editorial article published by Awesome Attorneys. Awesome Attorneys does not endorse, recommend, or warrant any lawyer or law firm profiled on this site, and inclusion in this series is not paid placement. “Awesome Attorneys” is a brand name only; it is not a rating, ranking, or claim that any profiled firm is superior in any legal category.
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 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 Reader Notice at the top of this article.