One of the things that sets the Garner Firm apart from other ERISA and employment law firms is our approach to client service. Now, many lawyers talk about client service. We live it. When our clients call, they don’t get handed off to a paralegal. They don’t get handed off to a legal assistant. Of course, if they call the paralegal with a legal assistant, that’s who they’ll speak with. But if they call the attorney and we’re at our desk and not on the other line, we will take your call. We will talk to you about your case.
And we will do it for as long as it’s necessary to make sure you are comfortable with what’s going on with the case and that you have an understanding of the issues. We regularly call our clients. We don’t just email. We don’t just text. And it’s not just our paralegals calling. Either Melanie or I will pick up the phone. We will call you, and we will talk to you about your case. And we are available to our clients just about 24 hours a day. I often get text messages and phone calls from clients after hours when we respond to them.
When clients call me at my desk at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m., I take the call. If I have to stay two hours late in the office, miss dinner with my family to talk to a client about his or her case, we’ll do so. We are not a volume-based practice. We take a select number of cases. We work those cases up thoroughly. And so that each client who works with us feels that their case has been handled in a thorough, workman-like way and that they have gotten the best possible representation they can at the most reasonable.
So there are a number of ERISA firms that handle cases on a very high volume. And there’s really only one way to do that. And that is either have a lot of attorneys or, more likely have a lot of support staff. And that support staff take a very, very prominent role in the managing of the case. And it may be that there are just a handful of attorneys handling hundreds of files that are really being worked up by support staff with little to no involvement from the attorney.
It’s really important that the attorney be involved. There is nothing wrong with having paralegals or legal assistants working on a case. That’s an important part of delegating work. And there is a lot of work that should be performed by paralegals and legal assistants as opposed to an attorney because it’s a better use of resources. But an attorney can’t and shouldn’t be stretched so thin that he or she doesn’t know what’s going on with your file or isn’t available to answer a client’s questions. And so one of the things that the approach we take is we are focused on the client, not on the number of cases we have, the number of cases we’ve closed, or the number of cases we settled. We want to talk to our clients. We want to make sure our clients are comfortable and that they feel that they’re being heard in a legal system that can often make it hard for the little guy to feel like he or she has a voice.