About

A Different Kind of Law Firm

With creative personnel in locations as diverse as Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and India, and with hundreds of media-related and other clients on either side of the Atlantic and the Pacific, SmithDehn LLP is a national and international law firm that delivers top-tier service, while meeting the needs and budgets of companies and individuals in ways that few large firms can. Our practice originated in 1996, after Russell Smith, a partner of Frankfurt Garbus Klein & Selz (now Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz), decided to create a different kind of law firm. SmithDehn LLP now includes outstanding U.S. media lawyers Frank Dehn, Mike Cleaver, Jeff Holmes and Benton Levy; international media transactions specialist Alex Hannell, who heads our London office; U.S. media immigration law expert Priya Kumar; and US/UK-law-trained-but-India-based attorney Padmavathi Shantamurthy. Our practice has progressed from an innovative experiment to a recognized model for the legal industry, attracting some of the best clients, attorneys, and casework in the business.

For example, we are now among the counsel of choice for the film and television production industries, from Hollywood to New York, London, Dublin, and Mumbai. In particular, our attorneys have been chosen to represent nearly a dozen television series, several of the most significant motion pictures in recent years (including, for example, “Borat,” "The Yes Men Fix the World," “Bruno,” and “Death of a President”), and clients such as HBO, Sony Pictures, ITV, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Channel Four Television, Media Rights Capital, Coquette Productions (the production company founded by Courteney Cox Arquette and David Arquette), Talkback Thames Productions, Lion Television, Tiger Aspect Productions, and over 100 other media companies. We also have been libel defense counsel for several newspapers, and counsel for many other clients in the television, motion picture, music, publishing, fashion, information technology, and other industries.

Although we are a general practice law firm, our areas of special expertise, in addition to television and film production counseling, media litigation and libel defense, include copyright and trademark counseling, and immigration processing for companies and individuals in entertainment and other fields.

Our clientele has rapidly expanded -- not through marketing campaigns, but almost exclusively through "word-of-mouth" generated by satisfied clients.

At the Forefront of a Paradigm Shift in the Way Legal Services are Provided

The growth of our practice confirms our belief that in reaction to mega-firms and mega-fees, there is a virtually unlimited market for top-tier, responsive legal assistance at more reasonable rates. In our drive to dramatically increase quality, responsiveness and efficiency, we are the only law firm that has established a legal outsourcing (a/k/a legal process outsourcing / LPO ) subsidiary in India. There, we can leverage the latest and best in communications and other information technology, as well as outstanding, Western-law-trained talent, for our clients around the world. With the inception and growth of our Indian company, SDD Global Solutions, we are at the forefront of what promises to be a paradigm shift in the way legal services will be provided in the twenty-first century. SDD Global is ranked as the #1 outsourcing company in India, the US, and the UK, out of over 2,700 vendors evaluated, according to the comprehensive 2010 survey of 6,547 clients by the Black Book of Outsourcing.

The India Advantage

Companies such as Microsoft, GE, Allstate, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, DuPont and American Express have moved in-house legal work to India, because they know that in India, the talent pool is outstanding, the cost of living is low, and the quality of service can be high. We have taken the concept of off-shoring legal work several steps further.

First, we are pioneers in focusing not on low-end document processing or clerical work, but rather on higher-value services, such as legal research, initial drafting of briefs and all other litigation papers, commercial transactions of any type, intellectual property registrations and searches (including patents, copyrights, and trademarks), film and television production services, and a host of other functions.

Second, unlike virtually all other Western companies that outsource work to third-party vendors or captive subsidiaries in Mumbai, Delhi/Gurgaon, or Bangalore, we have headquartered our subsidiary in what is now the ideal business location in India. The “Heritage City” of Mysore stands apart from India's congested and increasingly inflation-ridden major metropolitan areas, yet is still near some of India’s top universities – the incubators for thousands of extremely qualified job candidates in the legal and information technology fields.

Third, in yet another innovation, and in keeping with the ethics of our practice, we are moving against the grain of "outsourcing" U.S. jobs. For example, our new legal services model is actually creating additional U.S. legal work, by allowing companies to fight frivolous litigation, instead of simply settling it to avoid the traditionally high cost of mounting a vigorous defense. While many American firms are laying off attorneys, we are leveraging the talents of our lawyers through the intelligent use of top-notch legal support abroad. Our clients benefit from the high morale of our U.S. attorneys and the unleashing of talent that we have facilitated on both continents.

The financial advantages that accrue to our clients can be readily seen not only in the well-known differences between salaries and costs of living among the workforces of the U.S. and India, but also in the price of office space, which of course is ultimately paid by a law firm's clients. Many traditional firms locate virtually all of their personnel in palatial offices in the most expensive real estate markets in the United States. As a result, most of each dollar that these firms charge their clients goes to pay for office rent. Although we too have offices in Manhattan and London, most of our office space is located elsewhere, especially in India, where the attorneys at our subsidiary work in state-of-the-art facilities at 1/43rd the cost of our comparable space in the West. This is how we fulfill our promise to clients that they will pay for legal services, not real estate.

Billing That Makes Sense

Our firm is also known for its innovations in billing methods. Indeed, we were founded in part because of our antipathy to the typical hourly billing structure that so often leads to unnecessary friction between attorneys and clients. Many lawyers are wedded to hourly fees, because the less efficiently they work, the more their client pays. Worse, each monthly bill can be a surprise or even a shock, after the client opens the envelope to discover the mystery number of often unnecessary or inflated billable hours that have been tallied. Soon the client begins to avoid phone calls with counsel, for fear of seeing multiple entries for "telephone consultations" on the next bill.

We prefer a different approach: fee for service. We discuss with you the various steps that your matter may require, and tell you the cost for each step. You then can make your decisions with intelligence, without fear of surprise -- and without extra charges just for talking with your attorneys along the way.

A More Effective Approach to Litigation

Many law firms, especially very large ones, promise their litigation clients "lean staffing" of cases, to address well-founded fears of compounded hourly fees running amok. Because we prefer not to bill by the hour, but rather for the service provided, we take the opposite approach. Our aim in litigation is to obtain the desired result for our clients as quickly as possible, through the appropriate and unstinting application of concentrated legal pressure. Often that means having multiple attorneys working on the same case every day until that result is achieved, if that is what is needed to get the job done. We have found that in using this approach, we often run circles around the so-called "lean staffing" of mega-firms. With our Indian subsidiary, we now can provide massive, high-quality, low-cost litigation support, 24 hours a day.

If and when a case goes to trial, it is also important that your advocates be trial lawyers, not paper lawyers. The demands of a trial are often harrowing for a client. As the old saying goes, sometimes a bad settlement can be better than a good trial. Sadly, however, trials often result because one side hardens its position, based on a perception that its adversary will avoid trial. Such a perception may arise because the adversary's lawyers are known to be prohibitively expensive, or have a reputation for being paper litigators, rather than experienced trial attorneys. By contrast, we boast about our reasonable fees, and having handled multiple, high-profile trials in various courts, we are known by our adversaries to be willing to go the distance for our clients. This lessens the chances that an opportunity for an appropriate settlement will be missed.