Referrals & Special Investigations

Cases that arrive from other lawyers. Whistleblower and retaliation matters. Liability theories with no settled template, where the question of who is answerable has not been decided in that context before. Cross-border matters. And cases that turn on a single evidence event — a document set, a recovered device, a preservation failure — rather than on a disputed account of what happened.

The common feature is not subject matter. It is that the case does not sort neatly into a practice area, and that the work of deciding what it actually is comes before the work of running it.

Most referral relationships fail quietly and for unglamorous reasons. The arrangement was never written down. The referring lawyer stopped hearing anything and had no standing to ask. Fee division was left until the end, when positions had hardened and there was a number on the table to argue about.

Naming this as a category rather than burying it in a footer is the point. It says the firm treats attorney referrals as a channel it runs deliberately, not as incoming work it tolerates — and it puts the terms in the open before anyone has a reason to be sensitive about them.

It also gives the other thirteen categories somewhere to send a matter. A case that does not fit one of them is not thereby a case nobody should look at.

Two things get decided at the start. What role the referring attorney keeps — active co-counsel or an outright referral — and how fees divide under the rules of the jurisdiction where the case will be brought. Both go in writing before the matter moves.

Client consent is part of that, not an afterthought to it. A fee division between firms requires the client to be informed and to agree, and the rules governing it are the rules of the forum, not of the referring lawyer's home state.

What a referring attorney should expect afterwards is contact that does not depend on chasing it. The single most common complaint about referral relationships is silence, and it is entirely avoidable.

Some matters are not yet cases. A pattern across several incidents, a document set that suggests something broader than the file it arrived in, a corporate structure that appears designed to make responsibility hard to locate.

That work is investigative before it is adversarial — establishing whether there is a case at all, who it would be against and where it would be brought. It is worth doing separately rather than folding into a claim already filed, because the answer sometimes is that there is no case, and that answer is more useful early than late.