Santa Clarita Home to Dozens of Law Specialties

It’s becoming less common for lawyers to do it all, as the law business becomes more and more specialized each year.

Stephen C. Yeazell, a law professor at UCLA, said decades ago the legal field was mostly comprised of general sole practitioners. The legal specialization trend started about 20 to 30 years ago and he sees no reason for the trend to reverse anytime soon, as laws become more and more complex for each area and law schools continue to allow you to specialize your law school education through electives and extracurriculars.

Yeazell compared it to the medical field, where general practitioners “did everything but maybe brain surgery, but now there’s a whole series of sub-specialties.” 

Now, lawyers are typically in firms of two to eight, Yeazell said, and firms market themselves in one of two ways.

“Everyone does one thing and they do it really well as a team,” Yeazell said, “or (each lawyer) has a specialization.” 

Many lawyers took different roads to get to their specialties today. Some have done the same work since graduating law school and some are practicing in a field they never even thought of until they landed a job in a particular firm.

The State of California officially recognizes 11 specializations, in which lawyers in the state can pass an exam and fulfill criteria to be formally “specialized.” But for the most part, attorneys cultivate their niches informally by taking the same kinds of cases over and over and staying up-to-date in specific fields through continued education.

The Santa Clarita Valley Bar Association organizes local law firms into 41 specializations in its online directory. Brian Koegle, an employment law attorney from Poole & Shaffery in Santa Clarita, helped implement the specialty directory on the bar’s website when he was president for the 2009-10 year because of how many people would call him with an issue unrelated to employment law.

“In the public, there is a perception that if you’re an attorney you can do everything from contract law to family law to estate planning,” Koegle said. “You have the cocktail party attorneys that will opine about everything but most of us will admit readily … that it’s tough to be the jack of all trades. It’s just not the nature of the business anymore.”

While many lawyers will refer these clients to buddies from law school or lawyers they frequently see in the courtroom, the SCV Bar Association was created to help facilitate a local referral network so that firms could send clients to other attorneys in the valley they knew – and respected – professionally and socially.
“We take care of our own,” Koegle said. “If you could have lunch or a cocktail with someone and get to know their practice, then you want to see those people succeed.”

Some of the larger law fields found in the SCV include:

Civil Litigation

Aime Katambwe started his law career as a clerk for a firm that handled personal injury cases for Farmer’s Insurance, but he has since moved to representing the plaintiffs.

Although his primary field as a sole practitioner in Santa Clarita is immigration law, Katambwe keeps busy with personal injury cases that come out of his immigration clients, who refer him to a friend or family member or have personal civil issues of their own.

In the 12 years of practicing law, Katambwe has seen insurance companies more willing to take small claims to court.
“It used to be that insurance companies would settle those cases early on and be done with them,” he said. “Now the threats of trial do not even faze them at all.”

With this evolution, Katambwe and other personal injury attorneys have to more often determine whether the plaintiff’s damages are worth taking to court.

“The cost benefits analysis does not favor taking those cases,” he said.

While civil litigation is a fairly broad term to mean non-criminal lawsuits, most attorneys in the field start to take the same kinds of cases as they get better at analyzing the odds of winning such suits.

“The whole idea is to get a case, to be able to evaluate it,” said Scott Cox, a sole practitioner in Valencia. “You don’t know what 12 people are going to do in the box but once you try enough cases you get a good feel for jurisdictions.”

For Cox, his practice – first with a large firm, then as a partner, and now working alone – has evolved to taking primarily cases on auto and property insurance, land disputes, breaches of contract, and lease disputes. His scope narrowed because of “word getting around, if you get good results in trial.”

Unlike Katambwe’s experience, in the 24 years Cox has practiced, he has seen a greater emphasis on mediation as an alternative to a suit, because cases have to have a mediation session before going to court anyway. So oftentimes mediation up front is the cheaper, efficient alternative, he said.

“I ask the client, ‘What is it you want and what are you willing to accept?’” he said. “And a lot of times that road does lead to mediation."

Even with a greater emphasis on mediation, civil trials take longer than they did 20 years ago, Cox said, averaging between a year and two-and-a-half years. Between that and being a sole practitioner, he now takes on fewer cases at one time than he used to.

“No attorney wants to turn down a case but if I feel like I am so busy that I can’t give that client the attention it deserves I won’t take it,” he said.

Employment Law

The employment law field has evolved in the past few decades, said Darla Cunningham, who began practicing 25 years ago and now has the Law Offices of Darla Cunningham in Valencia.

When she first started taking employment law cases — she only does employment law now — there were a lot of discrimination and sexual harassment cases.

“Lately it’s kind of morphed into regulatory matters,” Cunningham said, “and particularly in the last years it has been wage and hour issues.”

Cunningham has continued with the field because of the opportunities to interface with people.

“You have to kind of understand what might be the underlying conflict that was surfaced,” she said, “and a lot of times I am able to help resolve a problem.”

In California in particular, the employment and labor statutes and regulations grow and change every year, creating more opportunities for employers to need legal advice.

“It’s an area where a good solid business person who uses their common sense can still end up in trouble,” Cunningham said.

Dave Hamilton, another employment and labor attorney in Valencia, has seen about two dozen clients move out of California or shut down because of the tangled web of state regulations regarding labor.

“It just gets increasingly complex and – from my point of view – is fairly pointless and very damaging,” he said.

Like Cunningham, the majority of Hamilton’s cases in the ´90s had to do with sexual harassment. Now, he’s seeing more hour and wages as well as cases on family leave and disability discrimination issues. Hamilton represents management 90 percent of the time, and said most labor attorneys tend to stick to representing just employers or just employees.

“You could be arguing what the law is for one thing and walking in the next day arguing the opposite,” Hamilton said, “and I don’t want to be in that position.”

Both Cunningham and Hamilton lived in Santa Clarita before finally moving their firm closer to home (Hamilton works in a home office).

“This is where my home is,” Cunningham said. “As you just get to know the community you get tied to it.”

Hamilton said 70 percent of his clients are in the SCV now, and he can easily run to their office to work in-person. But his larger cases are out-of-state clients where all he needs is his fax machine, computer and phone.

“Why rent out office space?” he said.

Family Law

Like many law students, Philip Wasserman wanted to work in the district attorney’s office after graduation, but he took an unexpected route into family law.

“What I find interesting are the stories,” he said. “Every case is different and you do have a chance to help families. There is a certain satisfaction that you get from that.”

Wasserman started practicing law in Santa Clarita in 1997 and moved here a year later.

“I think people are more comfortable with an attorney who’s local,” he said.”It’s easier, perhaps, to get an appointment because they don’t have to drive as far. It’s also more affordable.”

Wasserman focuses mainly on divorce, paternity, child custody, visitation, child support, spousal support and property division. He said the field has evolved away from litigation with a newer focus on trying mediation first.

As a subset of the civil litigation field, family law has similarly seen an increase in mediation tactics.

“When I came here in 1997 there was little if any mediation going on here,” he said. “Everybody was litigating and I think people were not educated to the benefits of mediation to settle their divorce or disputes in family law.”

Now, more families are willing to start with mediation to try to solve the issues, Wasserman said, before moving to litigation.

Every year, there are new state statutes pertaining to family law that can really change how proceedings go, Wasserman said.

“It’s a very fluid area of law and you have to keep up with it,” Wasserman said. “You really have to do it full-time.”

Both Wasserman and Amy Oliver, a partner in Gharibian & Oliver family law firm, cited a brand new state statute that allows children over the age of 14 to provide testimony in custody cases, which adds a completely new and major dynamic.

“We don’t really know what it’s going to look like it but it’s a huge change for law,” said Oliver, who was raised in Santa Clarita and decided to come back home to practice law when she began as a family law attorney in 2006.

As a psychology undergrad, Oliver knew from the beginning she wanted to go into family law.

“I’ve always just been more interested in people and relationships than I was in, say, real estate or contracts,” Oliver said, “So I saw family law to be a really good fit.”

Nearly 100 percent of Oliver’s clients are from the SCV.

“You can do a lot over phone,” she said, “but for something as personal as family law (clients) really like to sit down with you face to face before a hearing rather than just talking over the phone or emails.”