Berg lets client vision grow the practice

Some companies start with a vision to lead their industry, and some start with a vision to help clients lead theirs.

The latter carved the course for Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti LLP, according to one of its founding partners: George Berg.

When the law firm opened in 2001, it focused primarily on real estate, construction and water law.  Today it deals with those areas as well as everything from banking to business disputes.  The more manageable description of the firm’s focus is to list what areas BHGR doesn’t do, which is family law.

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Berg, who’s been practicing law for 42 years, credits BHGR’s stability and success to keeping its focus on the needs of its clients as well as its employees.

“The difference in us and firms with a national presence is that we go strategically where our clients go rather than going other places to expand,” he said.  “Our growth is relative to client growth.”

As BHGR clients expanded into other markets and other areas, the company expanded its services to meet their needs.  “We like to think of ourselves as being strategic partners with our clientele.  As they grew and had a need for diversified services, we’ve focused on providing those services so they didn’t need to go to another law firm or source.”

BHGR now has offices in Boulder, Denver, Los Angeles and Cheyenne and attorneys who are licensed in areas that include Texas, California and New York.  “To be able to accommodate growth of our clientele, we’ve gone to other locations to obtain other licenses or to hire other attorneys to support them.  The focus of our practice is to show clients that we’re interested in supporting them regardless of where they go or what other markets they enter.”

Some of BHGRs early-on clients started out as local and regional businesses and grew to national and international levels through their own expansion, mergers and acquisitions.

“Law mirrors the economy,” Berg said.  “Boulder has grown from an incubator for start-ups to having the second largest amount of venture capital investments, second only to Silicon Valley, even though it’s impossible to quantify that ranking.”

To keep up with the growing needs of those growing start-ups, BHGR includes a patent law group that keeps up with the technological strides made by groups like those in computer science, health science, physics and geophysics at the University of Colorado.

“Start ups are offspring of existing technology companies where someone comes up with a better way of facilitating a process and leaves to pursue a new idea that’s a spin-off technological advancement,” Berg said.  “They need financing and grow or hit a target and get consumed by another company that needs their service.”

Thus grows the need for advanced legal support, IP protection and patent attorneys with expertise in new technologies.

With a similar eye to basing company growth on client needs, BHGR has worked to grow by satisfying the needs of its team.

“As parochial as it sounds, we started out with a family-oriented relationship with our employees,” Berg said.  “It’s important that we know each other in both work and play.”

As a result, the practice, which has grown from five attorneys to 40 with an additional 45 staff and support members,  has experienced little turnover in terms of core personnel, he added. 

“We make sure everyone can be the best they can be as quickly as possible.  For example I hired two people as legal assistants and realized they could be paralegals so sent them to paralegal school and then urged them to go to law school — which they did.”

One of the challenges of today’s technology, according to Berg, includes the need to give more care when responding to situations rather than giving in to the pressure of rapid response and rapid resolution. 

“The world used to slide by a lot slower, and there were social mores that supported professionalism and communication.  We had time to think about those things for one or two days before responding.

“You know how you read something once and think you’ve identified the issues and then you get distracted and read it again to see something you hadn’t seen before?  Because of that, I try to review circumstances rapidly and then give time to review them later before responding.”