Westwood plaintiff’s law firm McNicholas & McNicholas LLP, well into its third decade of work, has expanded into its third region in California.
The firm is currently seeking office space in the Bay Area, tentatively referred to as its Oakland office. With this location, the firm aims to bolster its work in the region and in Northern California with more boots on the ground as it seeks and fights for plaintiffs in personal injury, employment law, class action and consumer-oriented cases.
The move was driven in large part by the firm’s work with law enforcement officers and firefighters – it already counts unions for San Francisco’s police officers and firefighters as clients.
“Over the last seven or eight years, that work has really ballooned to the point where now we get inquiries from all over the country,” explained Matt McNicholas, managing partner of the firm. “We also wanted to have as a base of operation in the middle of the state, because we spend a lot of time going back and forth and we just thought it was appropriate.”
Attorney Jeff Ponting joined the firm as senior lawyer in the move and will head the new outpost. He and the firm know each other well – they first co-counseled in 2003 on a pesticide drift case representing a farming community, while Ponting worked for the pro-bono California Rural Legal Assistance Inc. and have frequently collaborated since.
After spending much of his career with the pro-bono operation, Ponting said he felt regulations had significantly altered the range of services those firms can provide. At McNicholas & McNicholas, he said, he can continue his work to secure hard wins for vulnerable clients.
“This firm provides equal representation to its clients that the biggest corporation corporate law firms in the country do, but the difference is, this firm has a heart just like legal aid firms,” Ponting said, “so I feel fortunate because I’m now able to engage in a practice of law that’s very similar to what was the dream of the legal aids of the 1960s and ’70s, which was to bring services to people that don’t have them.”
McNicholas said it would be advantageous for the firm to have actual people in the region. It keeps most of its client intake and other services in-house. An office will also preclude him and other traveling attorneys from having to rent out numerous hotel rooms and cars when they have long trials in the area.
This perk, McNicholas added, will help make the expansion cost-effective – typically more difficult for plaintiff’s firms than defense-oriented operations because they are usually commission-based.
“For plaintiff’s firms, it is riskier than for hourly firms, and we don’t jump into it lightly,” he said. “But we have so much ongoing business in the center and northern part of the state that we just have a need for it. I’ve gotten ready for several trials up in the Bay Area. They’ve all settled on the eve of trial but doing a trial without having a local office is a pain. It is a nightmare.”
McNicholas’ father – John McNicholas – cofounded in the firm in 1993 with his older son Patrick McNicholas. Among other clients, the firm has distinguished itself in recent months for obtaining large settlements on behalf of various employees with the county and city who claimed to be wrongfully terminated or retaliated against by their superiors.
