“Upstart Start-Up” GeyerGorey LLP Opens Dallas Office

Aug. 14, 2013 - PRLog -- The antitrust and white collar boutique GeyerGorey LLP has opened its fifth office, in Dallas, Texas.  Joan E. Marshall, a veteran criminal antitrust lawyer with the U.S. Department of Justice, will be partner in charge.  The firm also has offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

“It’s phenomenal that we have been able to open offices in five cities within one year,” said Bradford L. Geyer, one of the firm’s founders.  “Dallas gives us a whole new range of business opportunities.”

NEW BUSINESS MODEL

GeyerGorey represents a departure from the traditional law firm. 

The firm follows a “virtual” business model which dramatically lowers the dollars spent on physical infrastructure.  Co-founder Robert J. Zastrow, who developed the idea, explained it this way:  “I believe that clients will increasingly demand that the savings made possible by the Internet be passed on to them, and we are positioned to do so.  The brick and mortar law firm, like a number of other brick and mortar professional services businesses, is slowly going the way of the buggy whip.  I wanted to push the envelope a little bit more, believing that this is how law firms will operate in 20 years.”

GeyerGorey is staffed entirely by experienced antitrust and white collar lawyers, each having an average of 20 years’ experience.  Again, this represents a major departure from the traditional law firm.   Zastrow, who spent 15 years in-house with Verizon before co-founding the firm in 2012, sees this as an advantage.  “Traditional law firms follow a leverage model, where work is pushed down to associates, who are the real profit center for the firm.  The leverage model is in the process of breaking down.  Clients are not willing to train lawyers on the basics of their business or pay junior lawyers to learn on the job.  In addition, clients these days hire specific lawyers, not large law firms, for their legal work.  They want and expect the attention of the lawyer they have selected.”

When asked whether it is more cost-effective to have junior lawyers and paraprofessionals do less critical or more routine work, Zastrow responds, “We typically don’t charge for those things and in any event I don’t think the theoretical savings are actually passed along to the client.  Law firms feel under tremendous pressure to keep billings high, and that has led to some embarrassing disclosures about law firms padding bills and churning work.  Put bluntly, traditional law firms have some incentives that do not align very well with a client’s incentive, which is to quickly and efficiently solve its legal problems.”  

Geyer echoes this sentiment.  “Because our overhead is lower and our attorneys have so much experience, we can get to answers more quickly and this can result in shorter timelines and quicker resolution,” he commented.

Beyond the business model, GeyerGorey has something else that makes the firm unique.  Last year, the Antitrust Division closed four of its field offices.  Geyer saw the closures as an opportunity to recruit seasoned lawyers who were not interested in picking up and moving to Washington or other cities where the field offices stayed open.  “The closure of the field offices was widely criticized by people both inside and outside the Antitrust Division.  But for us, the closures represented a perfect opportunity to pick up exceptional litigators with years of experience like Joan Marshall in Dallas and Rich Rosenberg and Wendy Norman in Philadelphia,” Geyer explained.  “Stay tuned.  We are not done yet.  Not by a long shot.”

The Dallas office, under the leadership of Joan E. Marshall, now joins with the firm’s Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia and Boston offices in providing international and inside-the-beltway experience to individuals and companies that have become — or wish to avoid becoming — the subject of federal enforcement agency interest.  The firm’s Web site may be found at www.GeyerGorey.com.

The Dallas office is located at 3514 Cedar Springs Road in Dallas, TX 75225. The office telephone number is 214-865-6854   For further information, please call Joan E. Marshall at (214) 865-6855 or send an email to Info@GeyerGorey.Com.