On the work, honestly.

I have been practicing law for twenty-seven years, and running this firm for most of them. I am still trying to figure out the same questions I started with: who is the work for, what is it really about, and what would it look like to do it well.

When I tell people we have stayed deliberately mid-sized, the response is usually polite confusion. The conventional wisdom is that small is a stage; that everyone is trying to grow. But growth, for its own sake, has never been a thing I respected in other firms. It produces a particular pathology — the partner you trusted is unavailable, your matter is a number on a spreadsheet, the bills are higher and the attention is thinner. I have known too many lawyers who started small for the right reasons and grew themselves into people they would not have wanted to hire.

What I have wanted, and what I think we have managed, is something narrower. We are big enough to handle the matters we choose; small enough that the partner who answered your call last spring is still going to be the one negotiating with the other side this fall. We turn down work — more often than I think most clients realize — when we cannot promise that level of continuity.

That is not modesty. It is a strategic choice that has costs.

We have given up the volume that bigger firms enjoy. We do not run the kind of mass-market practice that supports leveraged associate growth and Class A real estate. There are conferences I do not get invited to and matters we cannot pursue because of conflicts that, in a bigger firm, would never surface. The trade-off is a real one.

What we get in return is a practice where the work is unmistakably ours. There is no partner I do not know well, no associate whose work I have not read, no client whose matter I cannot speak to. When something goes wrong in one of our files, it is on me, and I know exactly who else it is on. That accountability is not theatrical; it is the difference between a firm that runs on systems and a firm that runs on people. We have always been the second kind.

The harder question is what we owe to the clients who choose us. I have come to believe — in a way I did not when I started — that the most important thing we offer is not legal expertise. It is judgment. Expertise, at the level of the firms we compete with, is broadly a commodity. Most of us read the same statutes, follow the same cases, attend the same CLEs. What separates one firm from another is what each does with the same set of facts, the same set of options, the same competing pressures.

Judgment is hard to teach and harder to brand. It does not photograph. It does not translate well to a website headline. But it is what our clients are actually buying, whether they know it or not. They are buying a partner's sense of when to push and when to fold, when to litigate and when to settle, when the deal is broken and when it can still close. That sense is built up over decades, and it cannot be transferred. The partner you hire is the partner you are getting.

I am sometimes asked what makes us different. The honest answer is that we have a small group of people whose judgment I trust completely, and a long list of people I cannot stop recommending to my friends. That is the firm. The rest is operations.

I want to say one thing about the next twenty-seven years, in case I am still here for some of them. We are going to lose people. The partners who have built this firm with me will not all retire at the same time, and the next generation will not replicate us. That is fine. It is, I think, what should happen. The version of this firm that exists in 2050 will not look like the version that exists today, and it should not.

What I hope endures is the principle that drove the founding: that you can practice law at the highest level without sacrificing the relationships that make the work worth doing. That a small firm of careful people, working for clients they have chosen, is a viable thing — not just morally, but commercially, in the place we actually live. If the firm of 2050 is still betting on that proposition, in whatever form it takes by then, I will consider it a continuity.

For now, we are still here, doing the same work we set out to do. If you have a matter we should hear about, please call.

— J.K.

New York · Spring 2025