Cassady Toles
SBN 291411
Licensed to practice in 2013, Cassady has been an employment attorney his entire legal career. He has been advising local businesses even longer. He has tried two cases before a jury to verdict, tried three more in federal administrative courts. He has taken up federal appellate work, and won cases before the criminal courts of Santa Clara County. He has negotiated seven figure international business deals, and opened the firm with clients on multiple continents.
I created this firm with a simple thought in mind: Legal services are more expensive than they ought to be. When a firm pays Gunderson, or some other massive White-Shoe firm like it four-figures an hour to respond to a former employee's threatened lawsuit, they're paying for rent in expensive offices in four states, a massive set of books no one reads, a kitchen that's always stocked with snacks and high-end coffee, several support staff, and two lawyers so that an associate who may have less than a year worth of experience out of law school can draft memoranda to a partner that the partner then parrots and pretends they wrote, overbilling the whole thing.
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I wanted to create a firm where the client would always know the lawyer who was actually doing the work. I wanted a firm where the clients would be able to afford to make a follow up call. I wanted a firm where no one would ever feel nickle-and-dimed, and if I got a call from a client with a billing error the comment would be, "You forgot to bill me for those phone calls we had at the beginning of the month."
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And my response could be, "Nope, those were included in your subscription, and you don't have to pay for them," or perhaps, "No, I felt that since those were clearing up something I wrote in a letter that I had billed you for, it was correcting the error that the letter wasn't clear enough, so I didn't bill you for two six-minute phone calls."
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Because I think it's time that Legal Services were treated like a Service industry.
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Cassady's Vision
I don't think the law has to be a zero sum game. I don't think the world is a place to be won or lost. I think that the real world is a place where people do things and very few of them do those things alone. There certainly are businesses that work by getting the best of everyone they work with and there are attorneys who probably want to work with those people. I got out of litigation because I'm tired of that way of thinking. I'm sure there are an army of attorneys who want to work for Donald Trump. I don't.
I want to work for people who see every deal as a chance to build a relationship. I see every client as someone I want to work with again. If you come to me to help you with your articles of incorporation, I want you to think of me when you're negotiating your lease. I want my clients to think of me as an ally and a strategic partner.
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My flat rate plans are a way of helping to perform that service. I developed the flat rate idea as a way of making legal advice available to small businesses and individuals who might want the ability to check in with or talk to someone on a regular or semi-regular basis, but didn't want to have to watch every minute of every phone call and pay for every word of every e-mail.
If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going.
-Maya Angelou
Every lawyer knows to review and study the law, but when we take on a client we take on their industry. We'll get to know your industry, whether it's retail, medicine, shipping, trucking, or hospitality. Our history with logistics, transportation, video-games, non-profit, and numerous others may mean we're already following your industry.
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We may not be experts in your field, but you won't have to tell us how things work twice.
Email : cassady@flatratelaw.com Tel: 510-776-4936
No one should be concerned about whether or not they should ask a clarifying question because they don't want to pay for the answer.
( Balzac)
