For many years I worked for nonprofits as volunteer, employee, officer, advisor, and pro bono attorney, latterly alongside a traditional legal career. I started at a boutique corporate law firm that served small- to mid-sized corporate clients, which turned out to be the best place to watch how good lawyering makes or breaks the client’s situation. It was a firm where the work standards were exacting all the way down to the mandatory forty-five-degree angle of staples. Everything was set up so that the attorneys only had to worry about getting it right and saying it best. It was a constant lesson in keeping the client’s needs centered, and since we didn’t come cheap, we couldn’t waste words or time.

I did this work while continuing to support a number of nonprofit organizations, and it was impossible not to notice that nonprofits need legal support just as much as corporates do, but they usually did without until something went very wrong. This wasn’t harmless. The most common harm was good projects unnecessarily smothered due to uncertainty, but I also saw issues as severe as organizations destroyed by a single bad actor in completely avoidable situations.

A foot in both worlds also makes it clear that nonprofits need legal advice that goes farther and takes more into account. A for-profit company gets to stop thinking once they reach the bottom of the balance sheet. Nonprofits have to balance the books too, but also think about the expectations of their community, their volunteers, their donors, their stakeholders and anyone impacted by their mission. The nonprofits I saw needed informed, specialized, holistic legal support much more than for-profits did because of the more rigorous expectations and dynamics. Unfortunately, the quality of legal advice they received did not meet this challenge.

So I created this firm. I wanted the nonprofit sector to have the same accurate, actionable advice that supports their practical needs, but goes the further step of understanding the importance of matching their actions to their values, and to their long-term goals. This is a firm built to offer thoughtful, knowledgeable, useful support to anyone running up against problems in giving or service so they stop being problems, regardless of the context.