Well, a couple of things. One: We like being a law firm that can help most people with most issues. It’s hard for me to turn people away! If they have a legal need, I want to be able to help them. And unless you’re a full service firm, you’re going to turn away a lot of people!
“Full service,” you know, we’re using that term, so I should address it. It really means that we can do most any type of legal work that’s required for most people. And that’s becoming less and less common now. There’s a tendency to be a lot of specialization and little boutiques that do nothing but this and nothing but that. But we’ve been able to maintain it so we can do most any kind of legal work that comes in the door.
Part of the reason we do it is because we’ve marketed pretty well over the years. My brother and I, our firm, we’ve been here for 35… 37 years. A lot of people know us so a lot of people come to us with a great diversity of legal needs. And we want to be able to meet those needs; we don’t want to turn away business.
And you know being full service also has kind of some challenges because when you’re full service some people will try and pigeon-hole us and say “well you only do personal injury work” or on the other side they don’t do personal injury work and “you only do corporate and real estate.” So it’s a little challenge because we want to have an informed client base and want the public at large to be informed that we can do virtually anything and we don’t believe at all that we compromise at all our abilities or expertise.
Some competitors will say, “Oh well you know, unless you’re a boutique you’re not really that good,” or, “You can’t be full service and really be…” And that’s just not true. We have within the firm lawyers who specialize in each of these areas of the practice so they’re every bit as qualified and competent as lawyers in boutiques. The difference is we just have a bunch of boutiques come under one roof! And so sometimes competitors will try to say, “Well they’re a full service law firm and their lawyers are sort of jack-of-all-trades but master of none,” which really isn’t true because we don’t have any lawyers here that are general practitioners.
Every lawyer in our law firm has a practice area or one or two practice areas or so where they really hunkered down and learned the law and are able to do it like a boutique would.
So we’re happy with it. It’s been good to us. We think our clients like it. Because they know they don’t have to re-learn new people, new location, and new staff every time they have a legal matter. They’re going to see the same faces, the same people.
For instance, if someone has a good relationship with me (and I have a lot of clients that I’ve known for 30 years and 20 years) and they’re not real excited about going and establishing a relationship with a new lawyer. So they come to me and let’s say they have a criminal matter and I’m a real estate lawyer, I can give them to our criminal defense lawyer (or it’s their son or somebody, you know, or whatever…). And if they want me to be involved, to keep an eye on the billing, and kind of walk them through things that they don’t understand from time to time, I can do that.
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We have within the firm lawyers who specialize in each of these areas of the practice so they’re every bit as qualified and competent as lawyers in boutiques. The difference is we just have a bunch of boutiques come under one roof!
And so that’s one of the advantages we have of being a full service law firm… If you have the right combination of attorneys (which we do, we’re sort of like multiple boutiques within the law firm), then we’re able to do both. We’re able to be as good as a boutique law firm but at the same time we don’t have to send you to 4 different law firms for your different legal needs.
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– Rulon D. Munns is an experienced real estate attorney and managing shareholder of Bogin, Munns & Munns, a full service law firm with offices in Orlando, Clermont, Kissimmee, Orange City, Daytona Beach, Ocala, Melbourne, Gainesville, and Leesburg, Florida. He welcomes questions and comments regarding the above and can be reached at rulon@boginmunns.com.
NOTICE: The article above is not intended to serve as legal advice, and you should not rely on it as such. It is offered only as general information. You should consult with a duly licensed attorney regarding your Florida legal matter, as every situation is unique. Please know that merely reading this article, subscribing to this blog, or otherwise contacting Bogin, Munns & Munns does not establish an attorney-client relationship with our firm. Should you seek legal representation from Bogin, Munns & Munns, any such representation must first be agreed to by the firm and confirmed in a written agreement.
