In 1972, a young Windle Turley, fresh out of law school, found himself arguing before the nation’s highest court to correct Texas’s flawed child support laws. To the joy of the “kid from Cheyenne, Oklahoma,” the decision was for the children. Driven by his lifelong sense of urgency to fix that which is broken, Turley went on to found his Dallas-based Turley Law Firm a year later with a singular calling: to bring justice to victims, or those left to carry on their memory, silenced in the immense shadows of companies and institutions who injure and kill.  

In this memoir of real-life Davids and Goliaths, Turley tells stories of taking on titans from the airlines and firearms industry to the very institutions of the Catholic Church and the U.S. government. Here he charts a legacy of legal victories that would draw widespread attention to dangerous public oversights and empower citizens to fight for justice on their own behalf.

Interwoven with vivid memories of a hardscrabble adolescence, crises of identity, and death-defying adventures, A Sense of Urgency is by turns lyrical and unflinching, revealing tale by tale how the instinct to stand up for others—and the guts to take risks others won’t—often takes root long before the real battles ever begin.