Most law firms talk about personal service. Most don’t actually deliver it. The structural reality of how mid-size and large firms staff cases makes that hard.
Jill on how this firm is different:
The economics of a typical law firm push work down the chain. Partners bring in matters. Associates do the bulk of the work. Paralegals handle the operational pieces. The client meets the partner at intake, hears from the associate during the case, and rarely sees either of them in court. That’s not a criticism — that’s how most firms have to operate to be profitable.
A two-attorney boutique works differently because it has to. There’s no chain of associates to delegate to. Every case is handled by Jill or by me. Paralegals support us, but they’re not running the matter. The person who shows up at the hearing is the person you hired.
This structure has trade-offs. We can’t take volume the way a larger firm can. We can’t take cases outside our specialties. We can’t always take a new matter on the timeline a client wants. The cases we do take get the actual attention of the people working on them.
For guardianship work, this matters more than in some other practice areas. A guardianship case has a lot of small procedural steps that can go wrong if someone isn’t paying attention — the inventory, the annual accounting, the plan, the report on the ward, the request for fees, the petitions for authority on specific actions. A paralegal-driven case is fine until something doesn’t fit the template. Then it’s not fine.
The other piece: communication. In a firm where the partner brought you in but the associate is handling the case, you’re often communicating with someone who has incomplete context. They know the facts of your case but not the strategic conversation the partner had with you at intake. A boutique avoids that loss of context because the same person is at every conversation.
What we don’t do is pretend we can be everything. We don’t take cases outside our specialties. We don’t take volume that would compromise the attention any individual case gets. We’re not a fit for every situation. We’re a fit for clients who want their lawyer involved at every level of their case.