Berger Singerman Llp

We worked hard on the formulation of our mission statement, and literally every word of it has special meaning: We – we think of our firm as a team, and each of our attorneys practices principally on one practice team. Our Firm culture encourages and rewards collaboration in all aspects of our business, because we believe collaboration enhances client service. You may be introduced to our Firm by one of our attorneys or your matter may be handled principally by one attorney, but when you engage, you get the benefit of whichever of our team members can add value to our representation. Our attorney compensation system does not reward or encourage attorneys who resist involving others within our Firm who can help in a particular engagement or aspect thereof. Deliver – the greatest legal work in the world adds no value unless it is translated into a timely action plan for clients. We know that our clients usually operate under intense time constraints and that time is money. We encourage our attorney team members to always be sensitive to the reality of our clients’ business and to deliver the advice and counsel we are called upon for in a timely manner. Creative – we know that there are lots of smart lawyers. But smart is frequently not enough. Some lawyers have a well deserved reputation as “deal killers,” and indeed often times it is easy for business lawyers to find lots of good reasons to advise clients against pursuing a transaction. We pride ourselves on the creativity of our attorney team members, and on our ability to get deals done-especially the hard ones. Effective – by including the concept of effectiveness in our mission statement, we demonstrate to our clients and remind ourselves that our approach to an engagement always has to be governed by the particular attributes of the engagement, including size, time constraints, and the like. Within the notion of effectiveness, we include efficiency as well. We know that incurring $100,000 in legal fees for a $250,000 transaction is not effective for our clients, regardless of the elegance of the documents we could prepare or the approach we could formulate. Many of our attorney team members joined us after practicing at large institutional firms, and experienced firsthand the dismay of clients who were assigned multiple layers of attorneys and para professionals on their matters. We think a lot about effective representation in the way in which we staff the engagements entrusted to us, and our clients appreciate immediate access to senior attorneys for the handling of their matters. Business Solutions – while we have the pleasure of representing many institutional clients, our practice is largely transactionally driven, and we consistently demonstrate our ability to relate to and significantly help our entrepreneurial and business based clients solve the problems that stand between them and their business goals and objectives. Our lawyers are not afraid of numbers and financial analysis, and we pride ourselves on ongoing Firm initiatives to educate our attorney team members about a variety of business and legal matters, including finance and valuation. Counsel – at the end of the day, our clients and prospective clients come to us for counsel. Sometimes that counsel takes the form of a legal representation, and sometimes that counsel is to suggest to a client or prospective client that a desired business outcome is not feasible. Other times the best counsel we give clients and prospective clients is that we are not the best Firm to help with a particular engagement or aspect of an engagement, perhaps due to the area of substantive law implicated by an engagement, or perhaps because the attorney team members best suited to handle the particular matter are too busy to undertake another new matter when needed by the client. In all the counsel we give, we consistently demonstrate that we are long-term relationship-oriented with our clients and prospective clients, and that we understand that even by foregoing a representation offered to us, we build faith and trust in our clients. Our desired relationship with our clients is that they call us for all of their legal or professional service needs, and we help to guide them to the appropriate professionals, within or outside of our Firm.