Heff was in the San Jose Business Journal this morning with an article about his law firm, Heffernan, Seubert & French, LLP. He went out on his own when we were first pregnant with Francie (made the big announcement the same day we announced we were pregnant which also happened to be on his 35th birthday!) and has been joined by Dan Seubert and Tom French. They are great guys and Heff is very lucky to be doing what he loves doing with great colleagues. Congrats Heff, Dan and Tom!

Here is the article....

“I wanted more control of my destiny,” said Brian Heffernan, left, who was joined by his former colleagues Dan Suebert, center, and Tom French after leaving megafirm DLA Piper. The smaller firm offers the three lawyers the ability to do the legal work they love with the clients they know while charging less than big-firm rates."

In 2007, at a time when law firms believed survival meant more attorneys and a broader geographical footprint, a disenchanted senior real estate associate at DLA Piper LLC struck out to hang a shingle of his own.

Within a year, Brian Heffernan, 37, would be joined by Dan Suebert, a 48-year-old DLA real estate partner who himself had grown weary of the big firm model at 3,500-attorney DLA Piper.

This year, the duo became a trio when another annual rate increase at DLA caused 67-year-old corporate partner Tom French to leave the firm.

Today, Menlo Park-based Heffernan Suebert & French LLP, born in July, is an amalgam of three attorneys, all at very different stages of their career. Joined by a common objective, the aim is to serve their clients better and cheaper than the big firms while recreating the collegiality of a close-knit partnership.

Part of what brought the three lawyers together was the big law firms’ pricing structure.

For years, business clients have complained about increased billing rates. Now lawyers have joined the conversation either because their firms are pricing them out of competition or because they simply feel uneasy about charging clients more each year to support a big firm’s rigid cost structure.

Heffernan’s rate at DLA, which he declined to divulge, encumbered his ability to build the client relationships needed to support a successful real estate practice.

“It wasn’t the road I wanted to go down, long term. I wanted more control of my destiny and saw it being much more quantitative than qualitative in terms of relationships,” he said. “The machine was an impediment.”

Confident in his legal and business development skill, Heffernan set out on his own in March 2007. He had practiced since 2001 at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich LLP, and then DLA after it merged with Gray Cary.

Heffernan spent a little more than a year solo, counseling clients who included commercial landlords, developers and investors on all facets of commercial real estate transactions, entity formation and governance.

Meanwhile Suebert was discovering that the big firm platform and the financial crisis were combining to stifle his practice.

For Suebert, it wasn’t just the rates that were adversely affecting client retention and development, it was the big firm model itself.

The big firms bill high rates, to big clients on big-money legal issues. Senior associates can fetch as much as $500 an hour, while veteran partners bill out between $750 and $1,000 an hour. Big firms compete for business from Fortune 500 companies. Matters are often vetted on their feasibility. In some cases, the cost of opening and maintaining a client file makes it economically unattractive to take that particular matter. In a case where an individual real estate investor is in need of minor easement issue, for instance, the administrative and procedural tasks to open the file take longer than the legal work.

Like Heffernan, Suebert believed his practice would benefit from a smaller, more flexible platform. The pair had practiced together at DLA, as well as at Gray Cary. Recognizing that their practices would complement one another, Heffernan & Suebert LLP was born in October 2008.

French, over a longer career, had been similarly disillusioned.

He began his career in 1971 when a “big law firm” was one with more than a dozen attorneys. As a witness to the growth trend for close to four decades, he said he’d become desensitized to the big firm culture.

“I’d been working at big-firm paces for so long I didn’t know any better,” said French. “I was programmed to work long hours and had gotten everybody in my family more or less conditioned to it. I didn’t really rebel against it because at my core, I liked being a lawyer.”

At his peak, French billed as many as 2,500 hours a year, or nearly 50 hours per week. But a “billable hour” includes only that time spent working directly on cases, not the time spent serving in managerial and administrative roles.

When DLA instituted another annual billing increase across the board on Jan. 1, French, too, cut his tether to the firm.

At the new firm, all are finding it easier to retain clients and capture others. According to French, a “high percentage” of his client base came with him to his new firm.

Each of the three lawyers service about 50 clients to some degree, French said.

All are quick to say that their change of platform isn’t a personal indictment of their former firm. But they agree that somewhere along the way in their legal careers, the essence of practicing law, such as close client relationships and a partnership, got lost.

“I had very good partners and colleagues at DLA, particularly within the group I practiced, but that ran against the institutional force that threatened to make that kind of collegiality go away,” Suebert said. “That wasn’t something we were going to overcome in a small practice group.”

All three shared a feeling that a firm with collegiality, mutual respect and a respect for client service had to be started from scratch. The result is a firm that concentrates on corporate and real estate law.

They acknowledge it’s an odd fit on the surface.

“Here’s a corporate guy and two guys that really prefer real estate to corporate. How does that work?” French said.

Suebert answers best.

“We felt like we would complement each other and be able to collaborate on certain things,” Suebert said. “If you go back to this whole notion of working with someone who you trust, it’s easy to pass work back and forth because you know your partner is someone who’s going to look at a situation and figure out what’s best for the group rather than what’s best for me.”