Our mission is to provide the services of top-rated attorneys in the most cost-effective manner possible, thereby making premier legal representation available to a greater number of individuals and companies.
Experience, Expertise, and Efficiency: A Vision Becomes Reality
Walker & Peskind, PLLC began with its namesakes and founding partners, Richard Walker and the late EJ Peskind. As lawyers with long, distinguished careers and national experience in large firms, Rick and EJ shared the concern that the ever-growing billing rates of the large firms puts premier legal representation beyond the reach of most individuals and small to medium-sized companies, and make the engagement of attorneys who can provide such high caliber representation difficult to justify even for the legal departments of large corporations.
In a large law firm, where billing rates are high to begin with, it is a common expectation that a premier lawyer will increase his or her rate substantially each year, which results in formidable increases in the cost of the same services over a period of even a few years. In addition to shouldering these large increases, clients often arrive at an “attorney meeting” only to find the table staffed with multiple younger partners, associates and paralegals – and their additional billing rates. These and other inefficiencies in the large firms make hiring a premier attorney simply too expensive for many.
Rick and EJ knew there had to be a better way to deliver premier service without putting clients to such exorbitant expense. The answer lay in experience, expertise, and efficiency. Experienced lawyers with well-developed expertise in their fields of practice are able to arrive more efficiently at clear assessments of the legal issues confronting their clients and devise insightful strategies for effectively dealing with those issues. When such quality service can be delivered from the context of a law firm built on a lean business model that never ceases to strive for greater operating efficiencies, clients receive the high caliber legal services they want and deserve, but at considerably lower cost than they otherwise would be required to pay for comparable service.
Walker & Peskind puts experience, expertise, and efficiency together to form a new model of the premier law firm. Engage any of our partners and you put decades of experience and knowledge on your side; your attorney is AV® Preeminent™ rated (highest legal abilities and ethical standards) and acknowledged expertise in his preeminent practice areas. At minimum, a Walker & Peskind attorney has excellent credentials and has been practicing law with a high degree of success for at least seven years, and our current partners have an aggregate of over 100 years of experience in the practice of law. Our emphasis on people with experience and well-honed expertise also extends to our paralegals, all of whom are required to have at least a college degree and five years of quality experience before they can be considered for a position with us.
We are a growing firm, but our growth plan is premised on these core values. Accordingly, all attorneys and paralegals who join us understand and appreciate that our special emphasis on the combination of experience, expertise, and efficiency is what sets us apart and puts us in a position to ensure that everyone who works on our clients’ matters adds value.
Our Clients, Our Business Partners
There are many law firms that claim to approach their relationships with their clients as if they were business partners. At Walker & Peskind, when we say we consider our clients to be our business partners, however, these are not just words. We are committed to doing whatever we can to help our clients be more successful, because we recognize that our clients’ success not only benefits them, but also us. Even if it has nothing to do directly with the legal services we have been retained by a client to provide, we consider it very important that we know our client’s business well enough to be in a position to recognize opportunities that can help the client reach or exceed its business objectives. We remain constantly on the alert for such opportunities and are only too pleased when we can help our clients take advantage of them.
Practice: Our Areas of Expertise
Our practice areas represent the depth and experience of our current attorneys. If we have listed a practice area, we have substantial expertise in that field. As we add to our team of attorneys, we will update this list.
- Complex Civil Litigation
- Class Actions & RICO
- Corporate & Commercial Law
- Commercial Transactions
- Executive Employment Agreements
- Business Planning & Exit Strategies
- Labor & Employment Law
- Collective Bargaining and Labor Arbitration
- Real Estate & Commercial Transactions
- Real Estate Development Services
- Real Estate & Commercial Litigation
The “Virtual Law Firm”
Although we are growing, we are a small law firm and have no aspiration to become a large law firm. Our extensive experience from inside the large law firms has convinced us that there are unavoidable inefficiencies that add unnecessarily to the cost of legal services provided by such firms. Because of this, we will be adding fields of expertise, but are not interested in growth for the sake of growth and have some very definite ideas about the optimal size for a law firm that seeks to do what we are doing.
One of the many benefits of the extensive experience of our attorneys, however, is the fact that we have been able to develop a very large network of contingent staff and strategic partners, all of whom we know well and trust to serve our clients’ needs in a manner that comports with our core values. By taking advantage of these relationships, we are in a position to handle effectively matters most small firms would not be in a position to handle at all. And our business model makes it possible for our clients to have available all the resources when needed, regardless of the size of the matter, without having to pay for them until the need arises.
