Contacting the firm does not create an attorney-client relationship. Please do not send confidential information until one has been established in writing.
Phoenix · Established 1994
A boutique practice of eleven lawyers, retained by companies and families who have already learned what the alternative costs.
We take fewer matters than we are offered, and we staff the ones we take with the people whose names are on the door.
The firm
We are a small firm that never had to. The distinction sounds like marketing until the week something goes wrong, and then it is the only thing that matters.
Small enough that the partner who takes your call is the one who reads the documents. We have declined to grow twice.
Founded in 1994 and independent since. No mergers, no parent firm, no conflicts inherited from an office we have never visited.
Nearly all of our work arrives from clients we already have or lawyers who could have kept it. We have never bought an advertisement.
Practice areas
The list below is the whole of it. A firm this size that claimed twelve specialties would be describing a directory rather than a practice, and you would find that out somewhere around the second invoice.
Mergers, acquisitions, capital raises and the joint ventures that outlast their founders' enthusiasm. We draft for the meeting where everyone has stopped being friendly, because that is the meeting the document is for.
The practice
We try cases. That sentence is worth checking at any firm you interview, because a great many quote litigation rates and settle everything on the courthouse steps.
The practice
Entitlement through disposition, including the hearings where somebody's neighbor has brought a binder.
The practice
Estates, trusts, and the succession conversation every family postpones. Structured so the next generation inherits an arrangement rather than an argument.
The practiceIn detail
Nobody reads an operating agreement while everyone still likes each other. We draft for the meeting three years out, when one founder wants liquidity and the other wants control, and the only thing standing between them is a sentence somebody wrote quickly.
When to call somebody else
If you need a template entity formed this week for under a thousand dollars, use a filing service. We would charge you more and you would not get more.
The firm
Independent since 1994
We have never merged, which means we have never had to run a conflicts check against an office in a city none of us has visited. When we say we can take your matter, the answer does not arrive from a committee.
Eleven lawyers
Both times the arithmetic was appealing and both times it would have meant handing matters to people the client had never met. A firm that grows past the partners' capacity to read the documents has changed products without changing its brochure.
How we staff
There is no pyramid here to feed. A partner and, at most, one associate — which is why our hourly rate looks high next to a large firm's and our total bill usually does not.
Our people
Founding Partner · Corporate
Thirty-one years of transactions, and a settled view that most deals die of ambiguity rather than disagreement. Chairs the firm's opinion committee.
Founding Partner · Litigation
Has tried more than sixty cases to verdict and will tell you, unprompted, that he settled far more than he tried and was right to.
Representative matters
Clients are not listed. Most of them would rather the transaction never be discussed at all, and a firm that advertises its representations is telling you what it will one day say about yours.
Represented the founding family through a competitive process against three private equity bidders.
Obtained a preliminary injunction within eleven days of a departing engineer's resignation.
Carried a contested rezoning through eighteen months of hearings to unanimous approval.
Restructured holdings across three generations and four states without triggering a gift tax event.
Defended a general contractor through a six-week trial to a defense verdict.
Unwound a nineteen-physician partnership without litigation or a single practice closing.
Matters invented for this demo. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
How we bill
Legal fees are unpleasant to discuss and worse to discover. We would rather have the uncomfortable conversation in the first meeting than the far more uncomfortable one in month four.
Rates quoted before engagement
In writing, with the staffing named. No blended mystery number.
Monthly detail
Time entries you can actually read, sent monthly rather than at the end.
Estimates that hold
If a matter is going to exceed its estimate, you hear it before it does.
The first call is free
Thirty minutes to decide whether there is even a matter here.
Alternative arrangements
Flat fees, blended rates, and partial contingency where it fits.
No junior padding
You are billed for the lawyer who did the work, at that lawyer's rate.
Request a consultation
Describe the matter in general terms only. This form is live — it reaches Mesa Web Designers exactly as it would reach the firm — but on a real site, as here, nothing you send before an engagement is privileged.
Before you write
Sending this form does not create an attorney-client relationship and does not make your message confidential.
Straight answers
End of the demo
Everything you just clicked — the animations, the calculators, the forms that actually deliver — was built by hand for a company we invented, so you could see the work instead of reading about it. Yours would be built the same way, around your trade, your jobs, and the customers you would rather have more of.
Whitmore & Vance is a fictional law firm created to demonstrate this design. The staff, prices, reviews, addresses, and phone numbers shown above are invented and should not be treated as real.
