What's it like to work with F3?
Our relationship with our clients makes all the difference when defending you against an allegation or successfully pursuing your claim. Knowing our clients as well as we do – the players, how decisions were made, and how we arrived at this point – gives you a clear advantage as we pursue your goals in a dispute.
What can F3 solve for you?
If a conflict can be advantageously resolved out of court through arbitration, mediation, or other alternative to trial, we are the highly skilled advocates you want on your team. When we prepare a case, however, we do so with the assumption it will be tried and never hesitate to take your case to court when that solution is clearly best.
“F3 Law’s litigation services are focused on delivering effective and efficient legal representation to clients facing complex and high-stakes disputes, from initial case assessment and strategy development to trial and appeals, while always striving to achieve the best possible outcome for our clients.”
Shiva Stein, Partner
From employment law to construction defects, from personal injury to board elections, and from school security to Open Records Act compliance and so much more, school operations and both extremely complex and highly controlled by federal and state law, agency regulations, and local mandates. It’s no surprise education institutions find themselves enmeshed in a tremendous variety of disputes. At F3, we are trial lawyers and much more, regularly representing school districts, county offices of education, community colleges, universities, and school administrators throughout California in all aspects of civil disputes. We’re there to help from pre-litigation through trial in state or federal court, in mediation and arbitration, and before federal and state administrative agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the California Civil Rights Department (formerly DFEH), the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, the Office for Civil Rights, and others. Because F3 is a full-service education law firm with a scope that encompasses all that school districts and colleges do, when clients need to defend against an allegation or occasionally pursue a claim as plaintiff, they turn to F3, the firm that knows more about schools and the law than just about anyone.
We also know our clients – the people, their goals, the origins of their disputes, and much more – so applying cookie-cutter solutions is never how we work. Law firms without our clarity of focus often simply get it wrong. For example, a school district client sued by class action plaintiffs engaged a standard insurance defense firm through its carrier and reached a settlement. The district is now struggling to implement the settlement to which it should never have agreed. Standard insurance defense lawyers rarely understand schools as we do. Clients appreciate that we understand not only the complexities and challenges they deal with, but the day-to-day working of schools and colleges. Many of our attorneys have previously served their communities as educators, as members of school boards, and even as in-house counsel. Today we often serve as de facto in-house attorneys, handling all of a school’s legal needs – including training and counseling on best practices—with the client advantage of having a full-service, yet education-only, firm supporting them.
