“Great customer service is something we strive to achieve in addition to providing great legal services.” —Scott Gerien
It’s said that lightning never strikes in the same place twice. Yet for the second consecutive year, the law firm of Dickenson Peatman & Fogarty (DP&F) was voted the Best Company to Do Business With in Napa County by NorthBay biz readers.
How did the firm earn this coveted award once again? “I hope it’s because our clients appreciate the work we do for them and the services they receive from us,” says Scott Gerien, co-managing partner in the Napa office. “We’re no different from any other service business where clients need to be treated well and receive our full attention. It’s an especially large honor because we’re competing against not only other law firms but also other customer service companies. Great customer service is something we strive to achieve in addition to providing great legal services.”
DP&F has nine practice areas that cover nearly all types of civil matters: alcohol beverage, business, intellectual property, labor and employment, land use, litigation, real property, and trusts and estates. It specializes in wine and hospitality. (The firm’s second office is located in downtown Santa Rosa in Old Courthouse Square.)
Anticipating that business growth would escalate in 2013, DP&F added five new attorneys in 2012. “It’s always good to have new attorneys come in and add to the excitement,” says Gerien. “They also bring in new clients and ideas, and their skills complement some of the practice areas we’ve traditionally offered.” With these latest additions to the staff, the firm now has 19 full-time attorneys and four of-counsel.
Among the new hires were Katja Loeffelholz, a licensed patent attorney who, Gerien says, generates a new level of expertise for the firm, and Thomas Adams, an expert in land use and the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA. “That type of experience was something the firm didn’t have before, so both of these attorneys help round out our group,” he says. Other attorneys who recently joined the firm are Scott Greenwood-Meinert (with a practice focusing on complex business transactions), John Trinidad (working in the alcohol beverage and business departments) and Natacha Kolb (specializing in estate planning and administration, charitable giving and trust litigation).
DP&F isn’t branching out into new practice areas, per se, but has expanded to encompass more aspects of those areas, according to Gerien, who splits his time between the firm’s Napa and Santa Rosa offices. “Adding the new attorneys represents a bounce-back for us from the economic downturn. We’d been looking to fill out different groups more completely, and it’s really working out for us.”
Also in anticipation of increased business, the firm moved last year to the Napa Square building at First and School streets. “We’d been in our old building [at Third and Coombs streets] for more than 30 years,” says Gerien. “And it’s pretty amazing what accumulates in three decades! We did a lot of shredding, and many other things went into storage. But it was a good purging process that brought us to the new building with a really fresh outlook.”
Spread out over two floors at its previous location, the firm now occupies a single floor, the third, at Napa Square, in what the city and Gerien refer to as the “west end” of downtown. “It’s a great part of town to be in––vibrant and exciting,” he says, adding that it’s convenient for client meetings, too. “We can just walk outside and step right into a world-class restaurant such as Oenotri or Norman Rose Tavern.”
Free street parking nearby and a free city garage only steps away is also convenient for the firm’s clients, adds Gerien. Plentiful and free parking is a definite perk, he says, because before he joined DP&F, he worked at a law firm in San Francisco for many years. “There, you paid a lot of money to park 10 blocks away from your office.”
The move to Napa Square has given the firm a new lease on life, he says. “It’s a huge upgrade for our clients, as well, and we’re getting positive feedback about it. It’s our same staff and quality of service but with a renewed enthusiasm, I think. Because we’re now all together in one open floor plan it’s a more spacious environment where we can all see each other, and therefore it’s much more efficient. And when you’re happy to be working more efficiently, you’re more productive.”
