|
Firm Profile
INTRODUCTION
Founded
in 1939, our law firm combines the ability to represent
clients in domestic or international matters with the
personal interaction with clients that is traditional to
a long established law firm. One of the oldest firms in
the San Francisco legal community, members or past
members of our firm have been practicing in San
Francisco since the beginning of the Twentieth Century,
acting as attorneys, judges, and arbitrators, as well as
authors and lecturers to the legal community and local
colleges. Our attorneys are active in local foundations
and charities, priding themselves on helping the Bay
Area Community.
If you
retain our services, it is our goal to represent you,
your children and your grandchildren. That has been our
pattern for well over half a century, only we now
combine that effort with the technology of the twenty
first century. In the realm of our business clients, we
have several who retained our services before the Second
World War and now represent owners whose great
grandfathers first retained our services
Such
long term representation requires a degree of
commitment, communication and trust between the
professional and the client that can not be easily
attained, especially in the modern world in which
services seem often to be as mass produced as the
products we buy. It is our conviction, however, that the
relationship between a client and his or her attorney is
one that benefits uniquely from mutual trust and
understanding and such trust is created by adopting a
goal that the relationship is meant to last. We wish to
be seen as counselors and advisors who care about the
future of the client and his or her family and
business. Part of our task is to fight the adversaries
of our clients with vigor and we do so; but legal
victory at any cost is seldom to the benefit of a
client. We do not just want to be combative lawyers; we
wish to also be the legal counselor to the client, the
professionals the client turns to when confronted with
the myriad complexities and adversities confronting
business people and families in the domestic or
international arena. And our seventy year history would
seem to indicate that we have succeeded in that goal.
We
believe our longevity reflects success in achieving a
unique
attorney-client relationship based on
trust and mutual respect. As described in detail below,
we have honed our methods of interaction and billing to
maximize the ability to create this type of
relationship.
TYPES
OF LEGAL WORK
Our
firm regularly appears and advises on both domestic and
international business and commercial transactions, corporate
governance issues, drafting and enforcing contracts of
all types, construction disputes, non profit formation,
wills, trusts and probate and real estate transactions.
Such representation necessarily includes representing
clients in trials and arbitrations in those various
areas. We have appeared in courts, ranging from the
local municipal courts to the United States Supreme
Court. We often engage in domestic and international
arbitrations and mediations. Employment law and
intellectual property law necessarily fall within our
purview.
We make
it a point to integrate family dynamics planning into
the business structure since by far the bulk of
businesses in the world are family businesses in which
that skill is vital.
Our
firm represents a broad diversity of clients, both
domestic and international. We represent clients ranging
from individuals needing counseling for employment
contracts or estate planning to the Ukrainian government
in its effort to retrieve sums allegedly embezzled by
its former premier. One goal of our office is to be able
to represent a broad diversity of clients such that a
government or a individual needing advice on estate tax
can both obtain excellent and responsive representation
from our personnel.
We have
been awarded an "AV" rating in the International
Directory of Martindale Hubbell (granted to the top 18%
of all law firms) as well as being included in the
Martindale Hubbell Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers
for each year between 1998 and 2008 (top 4% of all law
firms.) Should you wish to speak to our existing
clients, we can provide referrals upon request. We pride
ourselves on the fact that our legal ethics are rated as
highly as our legal skills, both receiving the highest
rating granted by Martindale Hubbell.
Due to
extensive experience with international clients, we are
aware of their special needs, especially when first
confronting the strict and complex legal requirements of
the American legal system and we provide personnel who
are conversant in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese,
and, with some notice, Russian.
For a
sampling of the typical cases our office has handled for
the past several decades,
click here.
COSTS OF REPRESENTATION
Lawyers
are expensive. It is important to understand that lack
of legal advice and representation can be far more
expensive, indeed. To attempt to navigate the complex
business, estate planning or legal world of the United
States without good and trusted legal advice can seldom
be recommended. It is not a question of whether one
needs good legal counsel, but how to find one in which
the cost benefit ratio is acceptable.
Certain
work almost always has to be billed by the hour, such as
litigation or complex contractual negotiations, since
the amount of work required depends to a great extent on
the actions of the opposing parties. However, whenever
practical, we encourage our clients to consider the
alternative billing methods described below for the work
they wish us to perform. Our goal is a long term
relationship with the client in which the goal is to
achieve the legal end and concern about the hourly cost
is an issue that should often be avoided.
At
Stimmel, Stimmel & Smith, PC, we have a variety of
methods of payment, and we invite our clients to
consider the
various methodologies and determine which may
make sense for the particular task at hand.
USE
OF WEBSITE FOR LEGAL ARTICLES AND FORMS PAGES
The
role of attorneys in the modern world is altering due to
the complex nature of the global economy and the need to
create and enforce increasingly multi jurisdictional
contracts and structures. We feel that while the need
for a high level of legal sophistication has necessarily
evolved due to these changes, technology has allowed the
creation of forms and standard procedures that can be
automated by appropriate computer forms and the use of
the internet.
We have
thus created a large website which contains
detailed legal summaries and explanations of basic laws
and business concepts for use by the client without
charge as well as developing a retainer password web
page that has more complex proprietary forms and
memorandum for our retainer clients.
By use
of the pass word accessed website, the retainer client
can obtain twenty four hour a day access to an
increasingly large library of legal memorandum, advice,
and forms, ranging from simple employment agreements to
international distribution agreements or discussions on
how to bring your child into the family business. The
site is updated every month and, when used in
conjunction with actual advice with counsel, streamlines
access to good legal advice and form creation. There are
over a thousand pages of relevant law and forms
available on our web site, though none should be used
without also obtaining adequate legal guidance.
We
invite you to visit our
Articles and
Newsletter pages for our extensive library of
non retainer legal memorandum and if you are engaged in
a business requiring regular access to legal expertise
and documents, we invite you to inquire about becoming a
retainer client and obtaining access to our far more
complex and complete library of forms and memorandum by
means of a pass word. Our articles have been used for teaching purposes in law schools both as excellent introductions to legal areas and illustrations of practical applications of the law.
Thirty
years ago a fax machine was only occasionally available
for international communications, contracts were typed
repeatedly as negotiations progressed and most
communications occurred by telephone or mail. Today, our
contracts are exchanged and altered electronically
instantly, e mail constitutes over eighty percent of our
communications, and the regular mail is used only to
exchange final executed versions of contracts. The web
is the latest powerful tool that allows fast and
inexpensive creation and finalization of business
documents and communications. Given these new tools, we
feel it is actually less expensive to obtain good legal
advice and protection than it was a decade or two ago.
But
technology can not replace the type of personal
interaction that a trusting relationship between a
professional and the client requires and we make it a
point to familiarize ourselves with our clients' unique
requirements and to visit and get to know our clients
and their businesses on a regular basis. It is our goal
to combine the latest technology to save time and money
while maintaining the personal interaction that
constitutes the basis of a long term good business
relationship.
TRAVEL COSTS
The
multi jurisdictional nature of our practice necessarily
often requires extensive travel for meeting with
clients, corresponding counsel and opposing parties.
Many negotiations can only efficiently culminate if face
to face meetings occur and our attorneys recognize the
need for substantial travel commitments. Unlike many
firms, we have adjusted our fee structure to enable our
clients to afford the cost of having counsel travel long
distances since charging our normal hourly rate for the
time expended in such travel would result in even the
shortest trip costing many thousands of dollars. At the
same time it must be recognized that attorney’s time is
valuable and such travel time becomes cost prohibitive
if the attorney can not accomplish compensated work
during the travel. Our innovative approach to charging
for travel time has been welcomed by most of our
clients.
“CORRESPONDING FIRM” CONNECTION AND RESOURCES
On our
Attorneys Page are found the various legal professionals
available through our office. It will be quickly noted
that several of the professionals are located in other
firms, often in other countries around the world. These
firms are usually referred to as “corresponding
counsel.”
The
nature of international practice requires our office to
engage in regular work with attorneys and professionals
in other nations and over the decades we have developed
close and trusted working relationships with them. Often
these professionals have worked within our firm and vise
versa and our practice necessarily requires us to
communicate with them constantly and visit them abroad
quite often. These various professionals are therefore
available to our clients, and our firm normally acts as
the strategic counsel in any business formation or
international litigation, coordinating and instructing
counsel and other professionals in other locales. All
billing is through this office to simplify matters for
our clients.
But
this method of corresponding counsel is also used by our
firm for certain domestic matters. Some types of major
or complex litigations require large numbers of
specialized personnel to engage in the extensive
discovery and law and motion that can be encountered and
it is not unique for the larger firms to assign a dozen
personnel to a single case. The problem often
encountered with the larger firms is that the large
overhead they are required to maintain in an expensive
location such as San Francisco to have such resources
always available results in higher costs to the client
and a feeling among clients that their case can be
“lost” among the dozens if not hundreds of personnel
working in the firm.
Since
our office is accustomed to working in tandem with other
law firms around the world in our international matters,
it seemed appropriate for us to develop a similar
relationship for those complex litigation matters
requiring high levels of personnel. We have therefore
developed a long term relationship with some of the most
talented attorneys and personnel in a local larger firm
to allow us access to their resources in those matters
requiring significant numbers of personnel yet not
costing the client the usual high rates that the large
firms often must impose. This allows us to have
immediate access to the attorneys and support personnel
in specialized areas or procedures a large case often
requires without the usual higher client cost of the
larger firms, plus access to East Bay facilities if it
is useful for the client. See our
Attorneys Profile
page for a fuller description of those
personnel.
As with
international matters, we remain as “strategic counsel”
for the teams created for these complex cases,
developing strategy, instructing counsel, and having the
billing centralized in our office. We are aware that
these professionals share our philosophy as to client
service and loyalty. When required, we integrate these
people into the Teams described above, as needed,
thus allowing us to expand (or contract) a team to
handle anything from major complex international
litigation to the small local cases that make up the
bulk of day to day litigation. With this support always
accessible, we have the ability to handle almost any
case, regardless of the number of personnel that may be
required.
CONCLUSION
Our
office has prospered for seventy years by
providing the type of personal and common sense legal
advice and service that individuals and businesses
around the world require. In the American legal system,
having the correct legal representation is absolutely
vital to both individuals and businesses if they are to
protect their interests and one needs legal counsel that
is both experienced in the relevant fields and dedicated
to the interests of the client.
The
ability to combine personal attention to the client and
wide ranging experience in our various fields is what we
feel is unique about our firm. Our long history
indicates that we have been successful in making our
clients realize that we are there not just for a single
particular matter or litigation, but as continuing
trusted counselors to assist our clients navigate the
complex legal and business world confronting business
people in the domestic and international arenas for so
long as our clients need us.
That
has been our goal and mission since before the Second
World War and remains our goal today. We hope to provide
that service to you and look forward to having that
opportunity. |
