Albert Sonntag’s Legal Blog

“I cannot fiddle, but I can build a great empire from a little city.” (Themistocles)

It is truly amazing how our Long Beach office, the California branch of the prestigious firm of Smith & Garg of Houston, has developed and flourished in the course of three short weeks. The relentless work of Brian Smith and Mark Wright, with the cooperation of the three associate attorneys, John, Angela and myself, who have also been practicing law in the interim, as well as of Melissa Nevarez at the front desk, and the ever surprising and witty Thuong Pham, who is putting together our software programs and was instrumental in hooking up the computers, all this effort is now blossoming into the vertiginous dynamic of a fully functioning firm.

Not three weeks ago, upon my first arrival at what would evolve into being the office, we had two or three desks scattered about in rooms without carpeting and without electricity. The contrast is quite remarkable. We are now contacting support professionals and presenting ourselves as an established Long Beach law firm, which indeed we are. Our retainer agreements, correspondence and business cards are spreading into the community, even as our presence in cyberspace continues to increase and dazzle.

What causes such Faustian energy? Leaving aside such facile answers as, one could say, Brian’s soy milk cappuccinos, I would venture to say that it is the will to serve a public, to conquer a particular market, to better establish and secure an enterprise. I am not given to facile optimism, yet I cannot but see that we have a great future ahead of us. It perhaps could be said of us, what the great Athenian general Themistocles said of himself in the fifth century BCE: “I cannot fiddle, but I can build a great empire from a little city.” Here, we do not fiddle, but we shall build a great firm out of small beginnings in our Long Beach office.